Interspersed among the chapters in Richard A. Lanham's book, Analyzing Prose, is an argument about the visual dimensions of rhetorical style in writing that has a bearing on the ways in which we can value the Oulipian snowball as a form of visual rhetoric. His argument develops out of his claim that writing is supposed to be transparent. We are supposed to look through it, not at it. We are not supposed to notice the words on the page, since the goal of prose is to communicate facts and conceptual reasoning in as efficient, clear, and sincere a manner as is possible. Lanham writes,

[O]nly ideas matter, not the words that convey them. Words linger in the air only as a temporary contrivance for transferring ideas from mind to mind. To look at them, rather than through them to the ideas beneath, is to indulge ourselves in harmless antiquarian diddling or, still worse, treat ordinary language like poetry" (1).

But this attitude toward prose has always been countered by a tendency to "build back into literate culture the powers of oral expression which literacy by its very nature abjures" (xi).

The counter-tendency, which Lanham calls an alphabetic counterculture, is an attempt to recapture the power of oral expression related to voice, rhythm, and other “behaviors” to which speakers have access in oral communication. It is this rich, inviting dynamic that writers endeavor to recreate with the help of stylistic features, which, Lanham strongly suggests, are visual in nature.

Lanham's argument is divided between two levels. The first level is typographical and includes conspicuous examples of this "counterculture" that are representative of every major period in western culture, from Simias of Rhodes' technopaegnia in the fourth century BCE to Kenneth Burke's twentieth-century "flowerishes"; from the tradition of the illuminated manuscripts in the medieval period to Laurence Sterne's eighteenth-century novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. In the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it is found in a wide range of avant-garde writing from works by Dada to the electronic technotexts about which N. Katherine Hayles writes in her book, Writing Machines.

The second level is discursive and includes prose patterns like the period, and a wide range of classical schemes related to parallelism, balance, and antithesis. This is the level at which Lanham's argument is most relevant, because he argues that these stylistic patterns and schemes represent a “vertical visual” dimension of meaning.

Lanham’s claim is based on his method of charting the stylistic patterns in prose writing. Throughout his book, Lanham has developed numerous images, diagrams, and other forms of line art to help illustrate the implicit stylistic pattern in prose passages. As Lanham describes his process, “We have been, in each case, converting the linear text into an image” (97). Toward the end of his chapter titled “Styles Seen,” Lanham speculates that his images may represent more than a useful analytical technique for studying style: “doesn’t the technique work just because there is imagistic information already in the prose, information which is suppressed by customary prose presentation?” (97). Lanham is not willing to offer a definitive answer to his question, but his preoccupation with the “vertical visual” dimension in prose implies that he’s merely waiting for right form of proof. Meanwhile, in the following excerpt, Lanham presents his strongest call for associating stylistic patterns with a visual dimension of meaning in both speech and writing:

The rhetorical tradition has always recognized patterns—chiasmus, for example—which have been called figures of shape, just as figures of sound like alliteration have always been acknowledged. Might we argue that, in wider and more frequent ways, prose styles call upon our powers of visual understanding” without seeming to?

Even if Lanham doesn’t have the proof for which he’s waiting, the answer to his question appears to be an emphatic yes.

Based on Lanham’s argument, Oulipian snowballs can be studied as a form of visual rhetoric. In my estimation, snowballs de longueur visually represent schemes of amplification, such as climax. Silva Rhetorica defines a climax as “the arrangement of words, phrases, or clauses in an order of increasing importance, often in parallel structure.” If this definition is extended to a visual form of rhetoric, the increasing length of each successive line can be interpreted as a visual depiction of “increasing importance."

Related to climax, Fitzpatrick-O’Dinn’s snowball fondante is a visual representation of a period. Lanham explains that the periodic style is one in which the meaning of the discourse is postponed or suspended until the end. The period is traditionally associated with the sentence, but Lanham expands its application to much longer texts. Lanham explains, “it doesn’t matter if the period stretches over one sentence or several. The main thing is the suspension, both of syntax and sense, until the end” (50). In Fitzpatrick-O’Dinn’s poem, the funneling down of the length of the lines related to the narrator’s characteristics contributes to a climactic end, and the single word ends the suspense that was building. The poem appears to conform to the characteristics of the period, albeit visually.

In addition to these two examples are several more, which I will present in the conclusion.