The Centrality of the Trivial: Grammar as a Liberal Art (Explorations in the Art of Grammar Series #6)

The Centrality of the Trivial: Grammar as a Liberal Art (Explorations in the Art of Grammar Series #6)[1]

By Anthony G. Cirilla

It has often been debated whether grammar is useful when studied “out of context,” though I have my suspicion that few who teach grammar actually envision their project in the classroom as ideally contextless. What would that mean? In absolute terms, the closest one can get to being out of context is being dead, in keeping with the words of Solomon: “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest” (Ecclesiastes 9:10). Arguably, there will be no grammar, or composition, or parsing in the grave, though some of my Advanced Grammar students might contend that sentence diagramming awaits those who find themselves in the less unpleasant domain of the afterlife.

Teaching grammar out of context would involve something like the presentation of the discipline as a grab-bag of labels: knowing names for parts of speech, syntactic constructions, and categories of phrases and clauses as ends in themselves without a clear sense of why knowing those labels are useful for thinking about language. Certainly, this kind of grammatical education happened before the problem was raised and even happens now, but I doubt it is ever really on purpose. I do not believe that the deeply held goal of a grammarian is for her students to be able to identify “whom” as a pronoun in the dative case for its own sake. Somewhere in the motive for teaching that information, even if she may not spell it out for her students or even herself, is the belief that this knowledge can help to create some kind of metacognitive awareness, in the minds of her students, concerning why sometimes language behaves strangely. Furthermore, although a student who can use “whom” correctly is more desirable than a student who can label it correctly, it also seems that the two skills cannot be entirely separated. Somewhere along the way, the intuition seems to suggest, learning to recognize and identify mechanics of grammar would lead to improved language usage, or at least to a more careful and intentional employment of the specific strategies a student takes in communication.

The course I teach at College of the Ozarks, Advanced Grammar, is an attempt to explore and affirm that intuition, and the primary way I seek to do this is by envisioning grammar as a liberal art. The context in which grammar is taught here is thus specifically the traditional liberal arts conception of the trivium: in other words, the proper context of grammar is her sister arts, logic and rhetoric. The course is broken down into four components: the philosophy of grammar, the mechanics of grammar, the logic of grammar, and the rhetoric of grammar. Students come into the course already having taken Comp I and often Comp II (here called American Rhetoric), and they have probably taken other writing-related courses as well. So the students enrolled often have sophisticated ideas about grammar, often beyond what they themselves realize. The aim of the course is to facilitate a higher order contemplation of what grammar is, how it informs their understanding of human nature, and how it can be used as an interpretive skill for bringing meaning out of texts. What follows is a brief tour of how this course trains students to think about grammar, and to see grammar as a vital tool for interpretation rather than an inert system of taxonomizing parts of speech – though that skill is part of the picture.

In the first part of the class, we read Miriam Joseph’s chapters from “The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric.” In the first chapter, “The Liberal Arts,” Joseph explains the arts this way: “Logic is the art of thinking; grammar, the art of inventing symbols and combining them to express thought; and rhetoric, the art of communicating thought from one mind to another, the adaptation of language to circumstance” (3). Although these distinctions have an important disciplinarian function, students also recognize that in a fundamental sense the three arts cannot be separable. After all, without the skill of inventing symbols and combining them to express thought (grammar), there can be no thinking about anything, and if there can be no thinking about anything, then there could be no communicating from one mind to another. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric abstract from each other for the end of developing the particular virtues of each discipline, but ultimately no worthy sentence exists without all three dimensions of the arts of language. To say, “God is love,” is to speak grammatically – it is to identify the subject noun with the predicate nominative through the assertion of the verb. But it is also to make a claim about metaphysics, about a theistic vision of the world, and so as thoroughly logical as it is grammatical, whatever one happens to believe about the content of the assertion. For that matter, naturally, to say, “God is love,” has an impact on the audience that hears it.

In fact, the 17th century Bishop of Salisbury, Martin Fotherby, contended that the Trivium is, as he terms it, an adumbration of the Trinity:

“There is λόγος (logos), Verbum: and that is Grammer. There is λόγος, Ratio, and that is Logick. And there is λόγος, Oratio: and that is Rhetorick. […] For, as in the Trinitie, the Father doth beget the Sonne, and they two produce the Holy Ghost: so, in this other Trinitie, λογος, Ratio, doth beget λογος, Verbum; and they two produce out of them, an other third λόγος, which is Oratio.”[2]

As it would be best to avoid asserting any undetected Trinitarian heresies hidden here, I don’t intend to press on this point as a perfect comparison, but it can be applied even more directly to the concerns of the most basic grammatical unit: the sentence. If a sentence fails in one dimension of the trivium, it fails in them all: analyzing a sentence from the perspective of any one of the trivial arts is a distinct process, but ultimately not separable from the sentence’s singular reality. One could say that there is an analog between the Trinity as three and God as one and the Trivium as three and the Sentence as one: loosely speaking, akin to how three persons are perfectly unified in one God, the three arts of language are perfectly unified in a single sentence, if it is crafted properly. To discuss God the Father and the Holy Spirit would be necessary in any Bible study of Christ. To study rhetoric and logic in a grammar class, in a kindred if not identical way, is not to add foreign content or even a related discipline’s content to grammar, but is to recognize that at its core grammar is already a discipline concerned with how symbols require the truthfulness of logic and the effectiveness of persuasion. That approach is the best context for the study of grammar I can envision.

In the second chapter of The Trivium, entitled “The Nature and Function of Language,” Joseph makes clear the need to grasp how language, and therefore the study of grammar, is itself the result of a sophisticated dynamic of psychological and conceptual operations. To form the deceptively simple unit that we refer to as a “word,” we must have a rich system of seeking patterns in our senses – we need to see the specific piece of sense data we are trying to think about when we first learn words, forming “percepts” from the senses which our imaginations then abstract further to make phantasms, patterns we can hold in our minds even when the sense data is not immediately present. Then we place over these precepts and phantasms, once we achieve the miracle of conscious cognition, concepts which we use as terms for those things. So we come to actual words—words like chair, love, sandwich, confectionary oven, confusion, dance, and politics. The incredible, overwhelming complexity of the sensory and imaginative world finds immense relief in the organizing power of words, and we do them a disservice to merely think of the words we have chosen as arbitrary sounds imposed over an objective reality. Think of the incredibly complicated dynamic involved in recognizing that the weight over the heart, the sense of loss in the imagination, the concept of grief in the mind, all combine to produce the word “sad” —a word that collects a great deal of sophisticated experience and so aids us in shepherding feelings of chaos and fears of the void that threaten us in the face of saddening experiences. “I am sad,” we can now say, and the power this gives us in organizing the world is anything but, in the usual sense of the word, trivial.

Along with Joseph’s conceptual framework of grammar as a liberal art which helps us to refine this life-organizing potential in language, we also read selections from Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Philology and Mercury, which provides a mythic approach to the liberal arts in general and grammar in specific. Jospeh writes, “What is false when taken literally in the purely logical dimension may be true when understood imaginatively or figuratively in the psychological dimension” (33), and it is this psychological dimension of truth which the myth of the union between Mercury (Eloquence) and Philology (Love of Learning) provides. Martianus opens his book saying, “Sacred principle of unity amongst the gods, on you I call; you are said to grace weddings with your song… You bind the warring seeds of the world with secret bonds and encourage the union of opposites by your sacred embrace” (3). This principle of unity is nothing less than the idea of the university, as well as primary and secondary education—the disciplines taught in college and high school alike appear to have vastly different interests. But the reality is that an English department’s concern that students understand the interpretation of texts is not unrelated to the history department’s desire that students be able to bring context to the human condition, or the desire in the sciences that students be able to arrange empirical knowledge of that human condition in a comprehensible way that makes informed living possible. Dinosaur that I am, I still believe in the idea that the general education program is a liberal arts curriculum—that it does, or at least should, help students to develop virtues which must be isolated in specific ways in classrooms to be improved there, but also should then further their ability to more freely learn and flourish in other classrooms. However, this principle of unity among the disciplines must be modeled at home, so to speak, and in that sense by underscoring the unity between grammar, logic, and rhetoric, all arts proper to the humanities in general and to English in particular, I can show how we use literature to marry eloquence to the love of learning in our specific contexts. Ideally, this pursuit of intellectual unity can then be brought further afield, between the arts of the trivium and the quadrivium and beyond.

But let’s bring it back to grammar per se, so that I can illustrate more specifically what I mean. In the Marriage, Lady Grammar has this to say about her art: “My duty in the early stages was to read and write correctly; but now there is the added duty of understanding and criticizing knowledgeably. These two aspects seem to me to be shared with the philosophers and the critics” (67). The first two functions have to do with understanding the mechanics of grammar, and correctly discerning them in literature the student encounters and producing them in one’s own writing. The second pair, philosophizing and criticizing, is where Lady Grammar understands her art as intersecting with the trivium—the logical claims of a given story also have rhetorical impact, which the literary critic interprets. Logic is already necessary in the art of grammar in understanding the mechanics of a definition—for example, to understand that a dog is a species of mammal is a grammatical distillation of logical concepts about animals. But a more mature awareness of how logic inhabits a given story is required when characters make truth claims which then have an impact on the audience’s emotional states, which likewise wades directly into the territory of rhetoric. So, students in my Advanced Grammar class are required to produce three projects across three units analyzing the same story: how the mechanics of grammar, the logic of grammar, and rhetorical grammar all emerge as a unified system of meaning-making in a short story.

Of course, I do not have time to do that completely here, so a shorter example will have to suffice. This poem by Kenneth Koch will serve as our example:

PERMANENTLY
by Kenneth Koch

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.

Each Sentence says one thing — for example,
“Although it was a dark rainy day when the Adjective walked by, I shall remember the pure and sweet expression on her face until the day I perish from the green, effective earth.”
Or, “Will you please close the window, Andrew?”
Or, for example, “Thank you, the pink pot of flowers on the window sill has changed color recently to a light yellow, due to the heat from the boiler factory which exists nearby.”

In the springtime the Sentences and the Nouns lay silently on the grass.
A lonely Conjunction here and there would call, “And! But!”
But the Adjective did not emerge.

As the adjective is lost in the sentence,
So I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat—
You have enchanted me with a single kiss
Which can never be undone
Until the destruction of language.

Having learned the mechanics of grammar, students will immediately see the joke: the nouns act like things, which is what nouns are – and the adjectives impact the nouns by modifying them, exactly as adjectives do. Only after Verbs are introduced do the sentences gain psychological sensitivity—lazy verbs like “were” and “walked” make the first stanza comparatively dull once “shall remember,” “please close,” and “has changed color recently” have appeared. Sensitivity to grammatical choices will bring to the student’s awareness the fact that, in the last stanza, the adjective “lost” becomes a state of being for nouns: “sentence, eyes, ears, nose, and throat,” a trading of place between nouns and adjectives which sets up grammatically the logical bombast of the final statement: “You have enchanted me with a single kiss/Which can never be undone/Until the destruction of language.” Throughout, the poem illustrates that the parts of speech are indeed profound sites of rhetoric rather than inert labels, and the persona’s claim— that a kiss can be as permanent as a word—uses language to say what cannot be reduced to language, which is, of course, precisely the function of poetic speech. And poetic speech, I would say, is nothing less than the dynamic harmony of communication that fully inhabits the arts of the trivium, into which castle Grammar holds the key.

In assignments analyzing works such as this one, students interact with the sentence as the core unit of speech, for the reasons best explained by Kellogg and Reed, the villainous inventors of sentence diagramming as we know it. They write, “Through the study of the sentence we not only arrive at an intelligent knowledge of the parts of speech and a correct use of grammatical forms, but we discover the laws of discourse in general. In the sentence the student should find the law of unity, of continuity, of proportion, of order. All good writing consists of good sentences properly joined. Since the sentence is the foundation or unit of discourse, it is all-important that the pupil should know the sentence.”[3] By studying the sentence as the fundamental grammatical structure, students see how grammar lives in logic and has its being in rhetoric, and how the study and production of truthful and beautiful speech can never be divorced from grammar as a liberal art.