YOU TALKIN’ TO ME?
*‘Loves and Cupids’ is also an instance of personification.
*I remind you of the figure of metaphor here only because it flocks, slightly, with metonymy (q.v.) – and because, like metonymy, it is understood by some historians of rhetoric to be a fundamental figure. The sexist mentioned in my paragraph on metonymy might call a woman ‘doll’ – which is a metaphorical usage. If metonymy works on contiguity (‘skirt’ is associated with woman), metaphor works on similarity or identity: ‘doll’ is a substitute for ‘woman’ – as well it might end up being if you go round talking like that.
*The clever clogses among you will note that this is also a fine instance of asyndeton. And isocolon. And climax.
*There’s a wonderful clip of the late Ian Richardson reading this bit on YouTube, incidentally: http://bit.ly/hellspeech
*‘What is else not to be overcome’ may sound confusing to modern ears. It unpacks as: ‘What does not being defeated [‘not to be overcome’] mean if not that [that your will, hate, courage and determination are intact]?’
† There are literary-critical and theological questions over whether it occurs to Satan that there’s the possibility of repentance, but we’ll skate over those here.
*The Liz Hurley remake is to be avoided at all costs.
*See how Cicero values real-world experience: this is rhetoric as tekhnē, as a practical skill.
*These were so named because he modelled them on Demosthenes’s attacks on Philip of Macedon.
*You could see less elegant versions of this sort of rhetorical manoeuvre, incidentally, taking place in the aftermath of the coalition’s invasion of Iraq. When the WMD, the original casus belli, failed to materialise, supporters of the war were to be heard retrospectively claiming the incident for a liberal intervention against tyranny, or talking up supposed links between Saddam and al-Qaeda.
†Some of them noticed, too. ‘The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dishwatery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States,’ reported the Chicago Times, adding: ‘It was to uphold this constitution, and the Union created by it, that our officers and soldiers gave their lives at Gettysburg. How dare he, then, standing on their graves, misstate the cause for which they died, and libel the statesmen who founded the government? They were men possessing too much self-respect to declare that negroes were their equals, or were entitled to equal privileges.’
*The original version was described by Clive James as sounding ‘like a cat sliding down a blackboard’.
*The bust was removed by his successor, Barack Obama.
*If you’re going to look really closely at it, you could note that Churchill uses the term ‘fail’ differently from Bush. Its position at the beginning of the list of terms suggests he’s using it in the sense of ‘failing strength’, rather than in the sense of failing to accomplish an objective. In Bush’s formulation ‘fail’ gets an additional torque from its connotative congruence with the previous terms – but where they describe the determination of America’s forces, it seems to talk about their effect in the world. Churchill’s rhetoric here is primarily about endurance; Bush’s about the implacable projection of force. Watch out, baddies.
†There are dissenting voices to this account of Churchill’s character, it should be said. His enthusiasm for using poison gas on restive colonials and his contemptuous dismissal of Gandhi count against him in the chivalrous and heroic stakes.
*Weiss Ferdl had a sense of humour about the Führer too. In the course of his cabaret act in Munich, he would produce a whole armful of framed portraits of the Nazi leadership and muse aloud: ‘I don’t know whether to hang them or put them up against the wall.’
*Churchill, though in a rather less alarming way, permitted himself the same sort of wink at the wings. After one particularly stirring speech he’s said to have muttered: ‘That got the sods, didn’t it?’
†A mistake other dictators never seem to learn from. Just look at Colonel Gaddafi. Ugh. Kim Jong-il, in his funny little jumpsuit, is probably as savvy as they get.
*You might also notice how quickly the code-grooming starts: Dr King is aligning his cause with the national cause ‘American’.
*King also includes a thinly coded call for restraint to the ‘marvellous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community’ (and, he doesn’t mention, threatened to split his own movement): doing nothing is wrong, but he warns too against ‘allow[ing] our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence’.
*Isaiah 40:4: ‘Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain’.
†Alvarez’s transcript here omits the line ‘With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.’ I’m not sure whether a printing or a transcription error is responsible.
*Drafts of the speech were various called ‘Normalcy, Never Again’ and ‘A Canceled Check’.
*I use the word in its theological sense: the Elect are those singled out by God.
*History is not quite so clear-cut on this. Though he eventually signed the Emancipation Proclamation, during the Civil War Lincoln wrote to the New York Tribune to say: ‘If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it.’ He was a pragmatist, and slavery wasn’t at the top of his list of priorities. For rhetorical purposes what matters, though, is that American posterity chooses to see him as unflinchingly anti-slavery on principle – just as it chooses to see the Civil War as having been fought against slavery and the Second World War as having been fought to save Jewish lives from the Holocaust.
*Another winning slogan, ‘I Like Ike’, scanned the same way. It occurs to me that Neil Kinnock, when he started goonishly bellowing, ‘We’re ALL RIGHT! We’re ALL RIGHT!’ at the 1992 Sheffield rally, may have been attempting to co-opt the molossus magic, but lost the election because of a weak first syllable.
*In America, current and former presidential speechwriters meet at the Judson Welliver Society.
*It’s said that Mrs Thatcher herself didn’t.
*As an appeal to authority, incidentally, the St Francis of Assisi reference is hard to beat. Or is it? The scholarly journalist Christopher Howse, writing in the Daily Telegraph, has the real story: ‘The words were put into Lady Thatcher’s mouth by Ronald Millar, her chief speechwriter. He probably thought the words had indeed first been uttered by St Francis of Assisi. In reality, they date back no earlier than 1912. They appeared in a pious French magazine called La Clochette, published by a group founded in 1901 by Father Esther Bouquerel, who perhaps wrote them. They were fastened on St Francis after being printed on the back of a picture of him in 1920.’
*As well as being a leader who didn’t know the meaning of surrender, it turns out she was also one who didn’t know the spelling of despair. The handwriting’s sketchy, but I’m pretty damn sure that’s an ‘i’.
*Interesting and apposite, this point about the force of sweeping away syntax: and not just because Noonan herself has the ugly habit of running two sentences together with a comma splice. As should by now be apparent, ungrammatical language (one-word sentences; hypallage; absent main verbs etc.) works fine in rhetoric. In his book Winning Arguments (Penguin, 2010), Jay Heinrichs argues persuasively that though George W. Bush is mocked for his verbal clumsiness, he is actually a highly effective orator. He uses emotive, ethos-laden code words ‘without the distraction of logic. He speaks in short sentences, repeating code phrases in effective, if irrational order.’ So when Bush says, ‘Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream’, Heinrichs argues, the fact that it’s nonsense is much less important than the fact that the audience hears ‘families … nation … wings … dream’.
*He is a cynical old soul, our hero. He also states that ‘men, for the most part, do commit crimes when they can’.
†Aristotle never came across rioting students or permanently alienated Emo kids, so his view of the young is a pretty rosy one.
*Brutus’s speech, which came before, is notably bossier. He reels out a whole string of imperatives: he demands silence, asserts his own honour and appears to imply that the audience needs to pay attention and raise its game a bit. The showy use of climax doesn’t help much either – and there’s something fishily circular in the idea that the audience should believe him for his honour, and respect his honour the better to, um, believe him. These are precisely the weaknesses Antony will use to skewer him – to the exact end that you should ‘awake their senses, that [they] may the better judge’, only not in the way Brutus was hoping.
Romans, countrymen, and lovers! hear me for my
cause, and be silent, that you may hear: believe me
for mine honour, and have respect to mine honour, that
you may believe: censure me in your wisdom, and
awake your senses, that you may the better judge.
*‘Mockney’, of course, is by no means unique to politicians as an ethos appeal. One old friend of mine, the daughter of a baronet, was mercilessly pilloried for appearing to talk to London cab drivers about ‘cheese mites’ – which was just her way of pronouncing what she understood to be a good-natured working-class greeting.
*Huge thanks to Private Eye’s Hilary Lowinger and Adam Macqueen for finding this cartoon for me in the archives.
*Polysyndeton – ‘of the … of the …’ – lends that resonant three-part phrase an extra afflatus, and has a slightly and deliberately biblical resonance.
*A useful point of comparison would be the opening of Adolf Hitler’s 1933 address to workers at the Siemens Dynamo Works in Berlin (see p. 169).
*Premise one.
†Premise two.
‡Ta-dah! Conclusion.
§There is some debate over whether to characterise an enthymeme as an ‘abridged syllogism’ (one in which there’s a hidden premise) or a ‘rhetorical syllogism’ (one in which the propositions are probabilistic rather than categorical), but after a careful survey of the scholarly literature, the phrase ‘half-arsed’ seems to me to split the difference satisfactorily.
*‘Elvis isn’t dead. He just went home’ – Agent K.
†This comparison has become so common in political rhetoric that it has taken on the status of a running joke. Godwin’s Law – an Internet commonplace – states that ‘As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.’
*I’m translating the original Greek somewhat freely here.
*Sometimes, though, you can use a commonplace associated with an audience-within-an-audience to win round the wider group. Where provincialism is associated with honesty, the formula ‘Back where I come from, we like to say …’ can play well to a national audience. Hence Sarah Palin’s election aside: ‘I had the privilege of living most of my life in a small town. I was just your average hockey mom and signed up for the PTA. I love those hockey moms. You know they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.’
†A painful-to-watch instance of this came when Piers Morgan was a guest on the topical TV comedy show Have I Got News for You? At one point, asked a straightforward question, he replied: ‘Is the answer “jam”?’ There was bemused silence. ‘I thought I’d say that because last week Eddie Izzard said that and you roared with laughter,’ he explained. ‘But people like him,’ said his fellow contestant and frequent antagonist Ian Hislop, to loud applause. Seething through the rest of the show, Morgan eventually snapped. ‘Don’t try the popularity line with me, Hislop,’ he said pettishly. ‘Why?’ asked Hislop. Morgan then made a fatal argumentum ad populum, or appeal to the audience: ‘Does anyone like him?’ he asked. ‘Does anyone here actually like him?’ The audience – Hislop being a regular team captain – roared back as one: ‘Yes!’
*Sir Max Hastings, when he edited the London newspaper the Evening Standard, was fond of saying that no day was so short that there wasn’t time to kick an old Harrovian when he’s down.
†This is also a prime instance of enargia – the skill of painting a mental picture so it comes indelibly to the inner eye of the audience. You see that skinny arm.
*This is the figure, called paromologia in the Greek, where you concede, or appear to concede, part of your opponent’s point. It turns what is often necessity to advantage, because it makes you look honest and scrupulous, takes the wind out of your opponent’s sails and allows you to shift the emphasis of the argument in a way finally favourable to you. It’s the equivalent of a tactical retreat, or of the judo fighter using an opponent’s momentum against him.
*Rap, usually; but sometimes shoot someone.
*You’ll notice that, like Steve Jobs, Eminem asserts that he’s telling the truth (‘for shizzle … this is the plot’) – a strategy which from an intellectual viewpoint might seem redundant but, sheep that audiences are, seldom goes wrong. Think of how many times you hear speakers say ‘to be frank’, or ‘honestly’.
† Compare the popularity of the late Kurt Cobain, who announced, ‘I hate myself and I want to die’ – and meant it – but whose audience was not expected to share his feelings.
*Cicero teased a lesser orator called Curio for having so faulty a memory that ‘at times when he had announced three points he would add a fourth or miss the third’. Contemporary audiences need only call to mind Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition sketch (‘Our chief weapon is surprise! Surprise and fear … fear and surprise … Our two weapons are fear and surprise … and ruthless efficiency … Our three weapons are fear, and surprise, and ruthless efficiency …’) for details of how this can prove an embarrassment.
*Anamnesis, incidentally, is the fancy term for recalling past events or sayings in a speech – whether ambling publicly down memory lane like Ronnie Corbett in his armchair and Justice Shallow in Henry IV, Part 2, or wondering: ‘Was it not Robert Lowell who said, “Memory is genius”?’
*Though a slave would never be tortured without the consent of his master. What do you think these people are: barbarians?
*A leaked memo to reporters from a managing editor at the right-wing TV station Fox News played on popular mistrust of government: ‘1) Please use the term “government-run health insurance” or, when brevity is a concern, “government option” whenever possible; 2) When it is necessary to use the term “public option” (which is, after all, firmly ensconced in the nation’s lexicon) use the qualifier “so-called” as in “the so-called public option”.’
*His case, notoriously, collapsed when he was discovered to have perjured himself – leading to Mr Aitken’s disgrace and a jail sentence.
*These are sometimes called Asiatic, Attic and Rhodian, hence ‘Atticism’ and ‘Asianism’: see Glossary.
*Do I really need to explain? ‘1337’ is a cute way of spelling ‘leet’, which is an abbreviation of ‘elite’. It means ‘jolly good’. ‘Haxxors’ are ‘hackers’: i.e. computer programmers. ‘W00t!’ is an all-purpose expression of excitement: i.e. ‘Hooray!’ ‘Pwned’ is a cute way of spelling ‘owned’ (probably a frequent mistype that has been whimsically adopted as orthodox), which is slang for ‘defeated conclusively’.
*There follows an illiberal analogy about transvestites: ‘The same kind of result would be produced as when men are disfigured with necklaces, pearls, and long robes, which are the ornaments of women, while a triumphal habit (than which nothing can be imagined to add greater majesty to men) is to women but an unbecoming encumbrance.’ Whatever floats your boat. His larger point holds.
*Nothing to do with the Pepsi Challenge. A colon (plural cola) is the fancy word for a clause.
†In Latin veni, vidi, vici is isocolonic; in English it’s a rising tricolon.
*Evading an issue by digression. You may have noticed it happening on the news. ‘Minister, did you or did you not tell a flat lie to the House of Commons?’ ‘Very interesting you should ask that question. The key issue here, I think we can all agree, is my campaign to save schools and hospitals …’
†Breaking off to address someone or something other than the audience. ‘Ye gods!’ is a simple example; it’s also seen when someone speaking at a funeral turns to address the departed. Earl Spencer, at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, began by addressing the audience but then continued: ‘Today is our chance to say thank you for the way you brightened our lives, even though God granted you but half a life.’
‡This describes the real or pretended sense of doubt or deliberation; of a speaker wrestling with himself on the spot. Hamlet is, as you’d expect, heaving with the stuff. ‘To be, or not to be …’ may be the most celebrated aporia in literary history.
§Sucking up to the audience, basically. You seldom go wrong with it.
¶An appeal to the crowd.
*That wasn’t a figure of speech – or wasn’t just a figure of speech. In mythology she gave birth to the nine Muses after nine consecutive nights of passion with Zeus.
†’The spirit of a place’ is how the phrase is usually translated.
*Quintilian’s version remarks drily that ‘the deities were not ungrateful to him’.
†The idea of memory as a wax tablet, incidentally, isn’t original to Cicero. It was first suggested by Plato in his Theaetetus. In his translation (Scribner, 1871) Benjamin Jowett paraphrases the relevant exchange as follows: ‘Let us suppose that every man has in his mind a block of wax of various qualities, the gift of Memory, the mother of the Muses; and on this he receives the seal or stamp of those sensations and perceptions which he wishes to remember. That which he succeeds in stamping is remembered and known by him as long as the impression lasts; but that, of which the impression is rubbed out or imperfectly made, is forgotten, and not known.’
*In July 2009 a paper by Amir Raz et al. in the neuropsychology journal Neurocase, ‘A Slice of Pi: An Exploratory Neuroimaging Study of Digit Encoding and Retrieval in a Superior Memorist’, described tests on a subject who had used the method of loci to memorise π to more than 216 decimal places. That’s 65,536 decimal places – but they only put him in the MRI scanner for the first 540 …
*Except, oddly enough, to people like the team at Pixar making computer-generated 3D movies. They use virtual cameras – imaginary cameras, essentially, made of maths; shooting imaginary characters, also made of maths – whose lens physics is faithful to the real world.
†There was a textual mare’s nest for scholars to unpick thanks to this: centuries of convention and scholarship rested on the medieval conviction that De Inventione and Ad Herennium were the First and Second Rhetorics of Tullius, and that you could therefore read across and synthesise them. Worse, because Cicero includes memory under ‘Prudence’ in De Inventione, and this gets picked up by Thomas Aquinas, who relates it to the cardinal Christian virtue of Prudence, mnemotechnics gets folded into a whole Christian moral schema – which leads some scholars to wonder whether Dante’s circles of Heaven and Hell were, in fact, memory palaces. All of this is a salutary lesson in the way tottering edifices of theology can be built on a small textual misunderstanding. Aquinas Christianised Ad Herennium, partly misunderstood it – misreading ‘solitude’ for ‘solicitude’, thus accidentally discovering a devotional aspect in it – and became the patron saint of medieval mnemotechnics.
*Here we seem to see the ‘solitude’/‘solicitude’ error in action. You weren’t to go somewhere quiet to memorise your lines; you had to love them. And yet there again, the Neurocase paper I cite above on the prodigious memoriser of π describes how the subject’s ‘self-report indicates that imagining affective situations and high emotional content is critical for successful recall’.
*This is what might be called the ‘Fight Club joke’, after the first and second rules of Fight Club in the film of the same name.
*Ha ha!
*Ha ha!
*Ha ha!
†Boom boom!
*This is, when you think about it, a bit like the theory that only twenty people bought the Velvet Underground’s first album, but that everyone who did started a band.
*The term ‘philippic’ – for the rhetorical equivalent of an air strike on a particular enemy – comes from Demosthenes.
*Classic Marxism always seems to me to embody this contradiction – or, looked at another way, to make naked use of compulsion as a rhetorical strategy. If Marxists had absolute faith in the doctrine of historical immanence and the inevitability of capitalism bringing about its own demise, they wouldn’t need to bother agitating for a revolution.
*Aristotle’s discussion of judicial rhetoric centres on the notion of adikia, or injustice, which he defines as ‘voluntary illegal harm’. He then divides the law into particular law (i.e. the written statutes of the state) and general law, which he defines as ‘those unwritten laws which are held to be agreed by all men’. The two are rolled up together in the special topics of justice and injustice.
*Vir bonus dicenti peritus (the phrase is ascribed to Cato by Quintilian in Institutes of Oratory, XII, 1).
†Dicere enim bene nemo potest, nisi qui prudenter intelligit (Cicero, Brutus, 23).
‡Here he appeals to one of the ‘topics’ Aristotle was to set out – templates governing the relationships between ideas. The inference is made that if in general the gods are stronger than mortals, the rule holds in this instance too.
*‘I know the color of his liver,’ Smith told his audience, ‘and it is whiter, if that could be, than the driven snow.’
*It’s of course worth acknowledging that, since it’s in the form of a song, figures of repetition like that are far more likely to crop up. All this is no more than to point to what should be apparent throughout these pages, which is that there’s often a very close coincidence between rhetoric and poetics. Verse or song form can steer you towards certain effects, like a bottom settling gratefully into a comfy chair.
*Though it stands in isolation here, Kyle’s futile yelp may be a little poignantly categorised as ekphonesis.
*It would be stretching a point to describe this as Asianism.
*Don’t answer that.
*This paragraph is a fine example of the sort of argument you find in rhetoric. As we shall see, Aristotle said that the way rhetoric works and the way logic works are fundamentally different. Logical arguments proceed by syllogisms: iron-clad chains of deduction that lead you infallibly from a premise to an inference without so much as a pee-break. The equivalent in the field of rhetoric is something called an enthymeme. Much more of this later, but it’s what you might understand as ‘fuzzy logic’: the affairs of the human world are not subject to the same black-and-white proofs as mathematical logic. In rhetoric, you may rest a ‘proof’ on what seems likely or reasonable. And here’s where there is room for manoeuvre. Google hits are a reasonable finger-to-the-wind measure of things. But they can be deceptive, too. I discovered this to my cost when in a Guardian article about the late Bill Hicks – complaining about the vocabulary of ‘naked religious devotion’ with which devotees describe him – I observed that ‘if you Google “Bill Hicks” and “prophet” you get 47,000-odd hits’. The online comment thread below – stuffed, I consoled myself, with tragic Hicks cultists – pointed out that if you Google ‘chicken’ and ‘creosote’ you get 503,000 hits, that if you Google ‘albumen’ and ‘sumptuous’ you get 9,750 results and that ‘disappointingly Sam Leith testicles returns only 3,870’.
*A man who once called his wife a ‘cunt’ in public.
†A woman who … oh, you know the drill. Insert your own examples.
‡ You don’t come third in the Miss Alaska pageant just by sitting there looking pretty.
*His pupil Isocrates lived to ninety-eight. Rhetoric is good for you.
*So named, supposedly, because it met on a big rock above Athens. Pagos means ‘big rock’.
†So named, supposedly, because it met in the sanctuary of the sun god, Apollo Heliaea.
*Institutio Oratoria, in Latin. It’s also sometimes translated as ‘Education of an Orator’.
†Some historical simplification has been necessary for reasons of space.
*Yes, a woman! And yes, a nun! Many of you will have despaired of coming across much of either in this volume, but there she is. Sister Miriam Joseph (1898–1982), born Agnes Lenore Rauh, was an American nun who trained as a journalist before she entered the novitiate. Most of her adult life was spent teaching in the English faculty of a Catholic university. Inspired by a lecture from a visiting professor from the University of Chicago on ‘The Metaphysical Basis of the Liberal Arts’, Sister Miriam attempted to reinstate the old-style trivium as a compulsory course for freshmen English students. She went on to write a PhD on the effect of formal rhetoric on Shakespeare’s language and remained an evangelist for the use of the trivium in education. She’s the author of The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric – Understanding the Nature and Function of Language (1937).
*Indeed, a version of it is one way you can search the absolutely invaluable online resource Silva Rhetoricae (http://rhetoric.byu.edu/), or ‘Forest of Rhetoric’. You can look up Greek, Latin and English names for the figures – and also browse by groups: figures ‘of Amplification’, ‘of Balance’, ‘of Overstatement’ and what have you. I can’t recommend this site, maintained by Dr Gideon Burton of Brigham Young University, too highly. Three cheers for the Mormons.
*That came to an end only when his wife happened to find her, and wrote to Puttenham crisply: ‘I haue in my custodie a damsell chosen by you as she confessethe for yor owne toothe.’
Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
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Copyright © Sam Leith, 2011
Frontispiece: ‘Rhetorick’ by Richard Blome,
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Introduction
Rhetoric Then and Now
THE FIVE PARTS OF RHETORIC
The First Part of Rhetoric: Invention
Ethos
Logos
Pathos
Champions of Rhetoric I: Satan – The Original Silver-tongued Devil
The Second Part of Rhetoric: Arrangement
Exordium
Narration
Division
Proof
Refutation
Peroration
Champions of Rhetoric II: Marcus Tullius Cicero – The Attack Dog of the Roman Forum
The Third Part of Rhetoric: Style
Decorum
Jokes
Sound Effects
Controlling the Tense
The Figures
Champions of Rhetoric III: Abraham Lincoln – ‘A few appropriate remarks’
The Fourth Part of Rhetoric: Memory
Champions of Rhetoric IV: Hitler and Churchill
The Fifth Part of Rhetoric: Delivery
THE THREE BRANCHES OF ORATORY
The First Branch of Oratory: Deliberative Rhetoric
Champions of Rhetoric V: Martin Luther King, Jr – Daydream Believer
The Second Branch of Oratory: Judicial Rhetoric
Champions of Rhetoric VI: Barack Obama – The Audacity of Trope
The Third Branch of Oratory: Epideictic Rhetoric
Champions of Rhetoric VII: The Unknown Speechwriter
Thus It Can Be Shown …
Appendix: Glossary and Key Concepts
Notes
Index
For Mum
Also by Sam Leith
FICTION
The Coincidence Engine
NON-FICTION
Dead Pets
Sod’s Law
LET ME START with a scene from The Simpsons:
MARGE: (sings) ‘How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?’
HOMER: Seven.
LISA: No, Dad, it’s a rhetorical question.
HOMER: OK, eight.
LISA: Dad, do you even know what ‘rhetorical’ means?
HOMER: Do I know what ‘rhetorical’ means?
It is not too much to say that on this little scene the whole premise of the book you hold in your hand hinges. Do you know what ‘rhetorical’ means? Because you should; and if Homer Simpson, one of the greatest Everyman figures of the late twentieth century, can make a joke about rhetoric, you can be assured that this is not a subject that needs to be intimidating.
So what is rhetoric? Rhetoric is, as simply defined as possible, the art of persuasion: the attempt by one human being to influence another in words. It is no more complicated than that. You are probably accustomed to thinking of rhetoric in terms of formal oratory: the sort of public speeches you see politicians make on television, CEOs make at AGMs and priests make on Sunday mornings in church. That is true, when it is at its most visible; that’s when rhetoric puts on a dinner jacket and polishes its dancing shoes. But that is only one part of a huge area that the term covers.
Rhetoric is a field of knowledge: that is, something susceptible to analysis and understanding in the same way poetry is. Just as people studying poetry talk about anapaests and caesuras and catalectic feet, people studying rhetoric have learned to recognise and name some of the ways in which rhetorical language behaves.
But rhetoric is also, and primarily, a practical skill: what one of its earliest and most important theorists, Aristotle, described as a tekhnē, which is the root of the words ‘technical’ and ‘technique’. In calling it that, he intended to contrast it with philosophy. Philosophy constitutes a set of methods for arriving at a disinterested understanding of the eternal truths of the world. Rhetoric is directed at a practical goal: it’s a means to an end.
Rhetoric is hustling, and our forefathers knew it. For fifteen centuries or so, the study of rhetoric was at the centre of Western education. To be able to recognise rhetorical techniques, and to have them at your command, was a central accomplishment of any educated man (they were men, then, mostly – sorry).
It was right that it should be so. The business of state had at its heart, as it still has, two institutions: the law courts and the machinery of government, to both of which the practice of rhetoric was central.
I won’t talk in detail, for the moment, about the tropes and figures that make up the rhetorician’s box of tricks. Lack of space prevents my explaining just yet how the mysterious Corax and Tisias cooked the whole thing up in Syracuse in the fifth century BC. I won’t dwell on the way that a mix-up long ago means that people talk about occupatio when they mean occultatio to describe the process of imparting information while pretending to be passing over it.
Let’s instead start with a broad view. I propose to take a leaf out of William Empson’s book. In the Introduction to his classic work of literary criticism, Seven Types of Ambiguity, Empson set out his terms: ‘Ambiguity, in ordinary speech, means something very pronounced, and as a rule witty or deceitful. I propose to use the word in an extended sense, and shall think relevant to my subject any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.’
Having announced that he planned to define ambiguity in ‘an extended sense’, he added in the next paragraph that ‘in a sufficiently extended sense any prose statement could be called ambiguous’. At a stroke, Empson had written himself the disciplinary equivalent of a blank cheque. And then off he went, bearded wacko that he was, to demonstrate that ‘the cat sat on the mat’ is a highly ambiguous statement.
I plan to use ‘rhetoric’ in an extended sense. By this I don’t just mean to award myself the maximum latitude to write about what interests me, though I do. I also mean that underlying the whole project of this book is, I hope, the awareness that practically any speech act can be understood, one way or another, as rhetorical – either in and of itself or in the context of its utterance.
Let me give an example of the latter. If I say, ‘Tony has a venereal disease and halitosis’, that is a statement of flat fact; or, at least, purports to be. But it can become more or less rhetorical depending on the context in which I utter it.
Context One: I am a GP’s receptionist, reading my employer the results of some clinical tests that have come back for a patient. Here, the phrase is as close to neutral as you will find. There may be a bit of an edge in ‘halitosis’, but I’m essentially conveying information without the urge to persuade. If it has the effect of persuading the doctor to take the afternoon off, that’s incidental. If, mind you, I were a highly unprofessional receptionist – and while delivering the diagnosis I clutched my throat and stuck out my tongue – we’d perhaps be straying into the region of epideictic rhetoric: the rhetoric of praise and insult.
Context Two: I am a prosecuting barrister in the family court, attempting to unseat the defendant’s claim that not only is he a virgin, but he was at a dental hygienist’s appointment at the time when he is alleged to have fathered a child by Miss X. In this context, I’m trying to persuade my audience of something about the past. This falls into the realm of judicial or forensic rhetoric: the sort of rhetoric most commonly found in the courtroom.
Context Three: I am Miss Y’s friend. We are in a nightclub. She’s wobbly on her heels. Now, after a baker’s dozen Bacardi Breezers, she is starting to make sheep’s eyes at Tony, the open-shirted smoothie throwing disco shapes at the other end of the bar. Fearing disaster, I offer a word to the wise. My aim is not to convey information, but to make going home with Tony seem like a less attractive prospect. (And, perhaps, going home with me like a more attractive one.) Again, I seek to persuade; and my concern is not with the past or with the present, but with the future. This is what’s called deliberative rhetoric – and if it’s useful in nightclubs it is even more useful in politics.
So much for Tony. So much, too, for the division of rhetoric into epideictic, judicial and deliberative – I’ll return to that presently. For the moment, the point I mean to make is that rhetoric means a whole lot more than formal, stand-upon-your-hind-legs oratory. It twines its tentacles into every corner of daily life and sprinkles its fairy dust into the most mundane of conversations. (Tentacles? Fairy dust? It is, as I suggested, a many-splendoured thing.)
Inasmuch as the twentieth century – aka The Century That Rhetoric Forgot – paid much attention to rhetoric, the subject having been colonised largely by speech theorists, structural linguists and literary critics, it was to point out just that: to note the intrinsic ‘rhetoricality’ of all language.
Literary theorists and philosophers, you see, were initially intoxicated by the idea that language was ambiguous. Then they grew suspicious that it might be ambiguous for a reason: that metaphorical and figurative language could be serving the interests of Power. Then they wondered if, perhaps, the very nature of language itself was to be metaphorical and figurative and – important word here – ‘unstable’.
Finally they concluded – to quote John Bender and David E. Wellbery, who offer a good example of the sort of high-sounding bosh they talk – that:
Rhetoricality … manifests the groundless, infinitely ramifying character of discourse in the modern world. For this reason, it allows for no explanatory metadiscourse that is not already itself rhetorical. Rhetoric is no longer the title of a doctrine and a practice, nor a form of cultural memory; it becomes instead something like the condition of our existence.1
Language, they decided, was Not To Be Trusted. But then, Aristotle could have told them that.
So in the context of this understanding, what I hope to do in this book is to provide a basic survey of the field: to trace how people have taught, practised and thought about rhetoric from its Attic origins to its twenty-first-century apotheosis. I shall tell the stories of some of the great figures in its history – the heroes and villains of the persuasive arts. Men like Cicero, Erasmus, Adolf Hitler and Gyles Brandreth. I’ll explain why George W. Bush wasn’t so much of a doofus as all that, and why Winston Churchill wasn’t always the great orator posterity remembers him as.
I shall attempt to equip you with a working knowledge of the technical vocabulary. A glossary at the back of the book will give definitions and examples of the various terms, though I’ll try to make clear, too, what each one means as it comes up in the text. More importantly, I hope to convey some understanding of the principles that underlie those terms. I’ll attempt to give a sense of how arguments prosper and founder; for the technical study of rhetoric is, at root, no more than a systematic way of doing that. Along the way I’ll look at some of the great and not so great speeches of this and other ages, and take you through some of the more interesting byways of the European mind.
By the end, in a word, you should get it. And even if you don’t become a rhetoric nerd, you will be able to watch the keynote speeches at Party Conference on the telly and be able to say more than, ‘What a preposterous lying oily-faced sack of testicles the Prime Minister is!’ You will add, with a sophisticated hoisting of one of your eyebrows, ‘Do you think he could go ten seconds without using another bloody anaphora? Anyone would think his copy of Lanham stopped at “A”.’
Rhetoric is language at play; language plus. It is what persuades and cajoles, inspires and bamboozles, thrills and misdirects. It causes criminals to be convicted and then frees those criminals on appeal. It causes governments to rise and fall, best men to be ever after shunned by their friends’ brides and perfectly sensible adults to march with steady purpose towards machine guns.
And it is made of stuff like, well, the paragraph above. It is made of linked pairs – ‘inspires and bamboozles’, ‘persuades and cajoles’. It is made of groups of three. It is made of repeated phrases. It is made, as often as not, of half-truths and fine-sounding meaninglessness, of false oppositions and abstract nouns and shaky inferences.
But it is also made of ringing truths and vital declarations. It is a way in which our shared assumptions and understandings are applied to new situations, and the language of history is channelled, revitalised and given fresh power in each successive age.
The technical language of rhetoric can seem forbidding. Auxesis, homioteleuton, paralipsis, mesozeugma … it looks to the casual reader like a glance across the labels of those miscellaneous firewaters you collected over half a decade’s holidays on the Greek islands and that now gathers dust in the back of your drinks cupboard.
These technical terms, like those drinks, are actually tremendous fun once you get started with them. You won’t soon forget a big night on the epicheireme. But they aren’t anything in themselves. They are simply a way of describing a set of tricks and turns that already exist; tricks that are being put into action all around us. And you might find that you speak more rhetoric than you think. Remember Molière’s bourgeois gentilhomme, who exclaims, ‘For more than forty years I’ve been speaking prose without knowing it!’
Your parents used rhetoric on you from the first moments of your life, and as soon as you were able to form words, you started using it right back at them. Your schoolmates, your workmates and your chat-partners in the dark back rooms of the Internet are using rhetoric. Your priests and your politicians, your continuity announcers and your commercial breaks are using rhetoric. You have been using rhetoric yourself, all your life.
After all, you know what a rhetorical question is, don’t you?* We’re all familiar with the way in which people ask questions to which they don’t expect an answer: ‘Am I talking to myself here?’, ‘Could this new jacket look any more cool?’ or ‘Why did I think having two children would be a good idea?’
That is, when you think about it, rather an abstruse way to use language. Why not just say, ‘Nobody’s listening to me’, ‘My new jacket looks very cool’ or ‘My life has been ruined by these screaming brats’? So embedded in everyday language is this strange flourish – this question aimed at nobody – that we scarcely notice it. In the very sentence I used to query the construction – that is, the one before last – I quite accidentally used it again.
And there it is: when we think we’re speaking plainly we’re in fact filling our every sentence with rhetorical trickery. All of us are rhetoricians by instinct and training.
So it is small wonder that those terms – used unconsciously; understood instinctively – stud our language to this day. When you hear that someone has delivered a ‘paean of praise’, a ‘panegyric’ or a ‘eulogy’ to something, you’re hearing terms from rhetoric.
Even Derek Zoolander – in the glorious film that bears his name, a male model of surpassing stupidity – knows his stuff. Almost. ‘A eugoogaliser: one who speaks at funerals,’ he tells a reporter he suspects of looking down on him. ‘Or did you think I’d be too stupid to know what a eugoogoly was?’
When you hear words like ‘parenthesis’, ‘apology’, ‘colon’, ‘comma’ or ‘period’; when someone talks about a ‘commonplace’ or ‘using a figure of speech’, you’re hearing terms from rhetoric. When you listen to the most bumbling tribute at a retirement party or the most inspiring half-time talk from a football coach, you are hearing rhetoric – and the basic ways in which it works have not changed a bit since Cicero saw off that treacherous fink Catiline.
What has changed is that, where for hundreds of years rhetoric was at the centre of Western education, it has now all but vanished as an area of study – divvied up like post-war Berlin between linguistics, psychology and literary criticism. Even in universities it is seen as a quaint and rather prissy minority interest.
So though rhetoric is all around us, we don’t see it. Indeed, it’s precisely because it’s all around us that we don’t see it. Explaining rhetoric to a human being is, or should be, like explaining water to a fish.
In the previous few paragraphs, I’ve used auxesis, antithesis, chiasmus, digressio, apostrophe, erotesis, epistrophe, hendiadys and argumentum ad populum. There’s even a bit of polysyndeton coming up. (Not to mention occultatio; prolepsis, I’ll be getting on to later.) And yet – at least I hope I’m safe in saying – it reads more or less like … well, English.
It isn’t an academic discipline, or the preserve of professional orators. It’s right here, right now, in your argument with the insurance company, your plea to the waitress for a table near the window or your entreaties to your jam-faced offspring to eat their damn greens.
Like the fish in its water, we can and do swim in it unthinkingly. But there is so much that you miss out on if you don’t stop to think about it. Understanding rhetoric makes you better able to appreciate its wonders and pleasures; it equips you better to use it yourself; and it equips you to see through the next smooth-talking rascal who wants to sell you double glazing.
But it’s more even than that. To think about rhetoric is to think about something central to the foundation of our politics, to the DNA of our culture and to the basic workings of the human mind.
We don’t use language to pass on information flatly and to no purpose. We exchange information because it does something for us, because it is either useful or delightful: it gets us out of trouble or into bed.
We use language to cajole and seduce, to impress and inspire, to endear and justify. Language happens because human beings are desiring machines; and what knits desire and language is rhetoric. To think about rhetoric – let’s go back to my poor, not-wishing-to-be-bothered-with-all-this fish for a minute – is to get that bit closer to being able to see the fishbowl.
And think, for a second, about what rhetoric – in its basic sense of one person trying to persuade another person of a truth or of an ideal – has achieved. What has rhetoric ever done for us? Well, it has brought about all of Western civilisation, for a start.
What is democracy but the idea that the art of persuasion should be formally enshrined at the centre of the political process? What is law but a way of giving words formal strength in the world, and what is the law court but a place where the art of persuasion gives shape to civil society? And what, in any society where one person or group exercises power over another – which is to say any society at all – is the instrument of that power but words?
Robert Mugabe and Kim Jong-il are not physically stronger than the people over whom they hold sway – Mugabe’s a doddery old thing, and even I wouldn’t have much trouble sticking the stack-heeled North Korean despot over my knee and giving him a good spanking – but they control the language. They position themselves – another central rhetorical idea – in a system of shared assumptions and shared fears.
When Shakespeare has his King Harry steal among the men before Agincourt and thunder his exhortations at the gates of Harfleur, we are to understand that what made the difference here was the effects of his words. That’s not poetic licence. Battles have been joined and averted, imperial powers seen off and half the globe colonised by rhetoric. Gandhi never picked up a sword. Karl Marx never used a gun.
‘WWJD?’ asks the acronymic evangelical bumper sticker. ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ We know what he did. He talked to people. That, and nothing else. He was crucified not because he bore arms against the Roman imperium, but because they didn’t like the way he was talking. The same goes for every religion of the book.
The thing is, the near invisibility of rhetoric as an object of study in the modern age has had an unfortunate and unanticipated effect on the way we view it. It is, where we notice it working on us, profoundly mistrusted.
In realist painting, fiction and film-making, it’s commonly said that you strive for ‘the art that conceals art’. You don’t want the viewer to be distracted by a pencil line you’ve failed to erase, or a too-intrusive author, or the display of a digital watch peeping through the fur at King Kong’s wrist.
Your poem may be a Petrarchan sonnet put together like a steel trap, but you’ll be admired more for it if it reads nearly like prose. This is, for the most part, the temper of the times.
So it is with oratory. We swallow the high style on certain occasions – at times of national grief or historic change – but on the whole we prefer things a bit low-key. This is a relatively recent development. For centuries people regarded oratory, be it in a sermon or in the law courts, as a form of entertainment in itself. Nowadays we warm less to speeches that seem too much like performances.
It’s a commonplace in the theatre that were most of us to see one of the greats of the eighteenth- or nineteenth-century stage deliver his Hamlet we would simply fall about laughing. It would seem implausibly stagy and histrionic. Even Laurence Olivier, to the eyes of today, looks like a colossal ham. Look at the film of his Othello. The camera zooms in, and – with his face covered in black shoe polish – he booms and grimaces and rolls his eyes like a cartoon minstrel having a fit.
This is not to disparage Olivier, necessarily. It is in part a shift from an age when acting meant being able to project both your voice and your gestures to the dimmest-eyed and deafest-eared spectator in the furthest corner of the auditorium; from an age before the intimacies of television and the wonders of amplified sound. But it is also a shift in style.