Figure of speech. Having listened to Stephen's
parable of the plums, Myles Crawford asks, "But what do you
call it?" Professor MacHugh proceeds to mull a possible title:
"— Call it, wait, the professor said, opening his long
lips wide to reflect. Call it, let me see. Call it: deus
nobis haec otia fecit." The professor's slowness to
advance a solution displays the rhetorical device of aporia,
an expression of doubt.
Aporia (ah-PO-ree-uh, from Greek aporos = without a
passage) is a blockage in the train of thought, an impasse. In
philosophical usage an aporia is a seemingly unsolvable
puzzle, an inability to see a logically consistent way
forward. The concept was important in ancient Greek
philosophy: Plato's earlier, more Socratic dialogues are often
called "aporetic" because they end in someone's recognition
that he does not know what he thought he knew. In the 20th
century Jacques Derrida used the term to name the process of
encountering disabling contradictions in a thought process or
textual structure.
The meaning of the term is different in rhetorical theory,
being concerned more with the orator's presentation of his
thoughts to an audience. The Romans knew it also as dubitatio,
because the goal of the device was to create an
impression of doubt. Gideon Burton (rhetoric.byu.edu) defines
aporia as "Deliberating with oneself as though in doubt over
some matter; asking oneself (or rhetorically asking one's
hearers) what is the best or appropriate way to approach
something." The doubt may very well be feigned, as George
Puttenham suggests in The Arte of English Poesie:
"oftentimes we will seeme to cast perils, and make doubt of
things when by a plaine manner of speech wee might affirme or
deny him." In The Mystery of Rhetoric Unveiled (1657),
John Smith writes that "Aporia is a figure whereby the Speaker
sheweth that he doubteth, either where to begin for the
multitude of matters, or what to do or say in some strange or
ambiguous thing; and doth as it were argue the case with
himself."
Professor MacHugh does exactly this. Whether he is calling
attention to himself or genuinely uncertain probably cannot be
known, but the latter explanation seems more likely given the
Latin title he eventually comes up with: "deus nobis
haec otia fecit" ("A god has made this leisure
for us"). In these words from line 6 of Virgil's first
Eclogue, two shepherds "under the canopy of a spreading beech"
contrast the pastoral tranquility of the countryside with the
turmoil elsewhere: "such unrest is there on all sides in the
land." MacHugh applies Virgil's words to the happy leisure of
two old women eating plums on the top of Nelson's tower, freed
from the trials of everyday life. When he says, "Call it,
wait.... Call it, let me see. Call it," he apparently is
combing his impressive mental storehouse of ancient works of
literature to retrieve a remembered line.
When used strategically to suggest doubt that the speaker
does not really feel, aporia is close kin to "rhetorical
questions" like anacoenosis.
