CONCLUSION
Reflections on the How and Why of
Rhetorical Poetics
257I
ROUND OFF this inquiry with a few reflections on the project of rhetori-
cal poetics. First, I return to a point I made in the preface about the ever-
evolving nature of the project by way of Henry James’s famous remarks in
the preface to Roderick Hudson about the difficulty of concluding. “Really,
universally,” James wrote, “relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite prob-
lem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle
within which they shall happily appear to do so” (Art of the Novel 5; emphasis
in original). For the rhetorical interpreter, really, universally, relations between
the somebodies who tell and the somebodies who listen, relations mediated by
the multiple resources of any individual narrative, are, if not infinite, then cer-
tainly too numerous to address in any one analysis. The rhetorical interpreter’s
exquisite problem is to fashion, by a logic of his own, a reading within which
those relations shall happily appear to be satisfactorily addressed. Similarly,
the rhetorical theorist’s exquisite problem is to shape an account that shall
happily appear to approach comprehensiveness, even as he remains cognizant
that the resources of narrative are themselves so plentiful and that the some-
bodies who tell continually find, in cooperation with the somebodies who
listen, both new resources and new uses for already existing ones.
These problems of interpretation and theory construction are exquisite
in part because they can never be completely solved. They are also exquisite
because they are not so intractable that they render progress impossible. For