Form of a Bifurcation

In Every Force Evolves a Form there is an essay on the painter Balthus, an essay structured as a series of aphoristic paragraphs. In one of those paragraphs, Guy Davenport draws what could be characterized as a distinction between experience and description. He affixes labels to both sides of the distinction and places the subject of the essay in one of the camps:

Where in Greek writing you always find a running account of all the senses in intimate contact with the world, in Latin you find instead a pedantry accustomed to substituting some rhetorical convention for honest and immediate perception. Balthus has Greek wholeness.

Ironic that Davenport is accomplishing the comparison through a trope sketched via a rhetorical dichotomy — a very Latin move.

And so for day 538
03.06.2008