Farnsworth's Classical English Rhetoric. Ward Farnsworth
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are suited to the expression of certain sorts of ideas or feelings, but sound strange otherwise; some fit well into certain kinds of writing and speech, but have little or no place in others; some things that can be done with figures are rarely useful at all, yet are indispensable once or twice in a lifetime. (One wants to be ready.) Examples, if they are to teach all these things, must be not only apt but extensive. Seeing just a few examples invites direct imitation of them, which tends to be clumsy. Immersion in many examples allows them to do their work by way of a subtler process of influence, with a gentler and happier effect on the resulting style.
As a practical matter this approach to the study of figures means spending a great deal of time in the company of writers who know the devices intimately and have good taste. This book performs the necessary introductions. It contains more than a thousand illustrations drawn from British, Irish, and American oratory and literature. The right first question about any pattern for the arrangement of words, and the question asked in each chapter of this book, is what use masters of the language have made of it: how Lincoln put it to work, or Churchill, or Burke, or the American founding fathers; or Dickens and Melville, or Shaw and Chesterton, or the Irish orators Henry Grattan and Richard Lalor Sheil – but the reader will see. The masters of the rhetorical figure in English include many storied writers and talkers, but also others less well known. Making your own first acquaintance with them is part of the fun of studying their craft.
Most of the examples here are from English prose rather than verse. They start around 1600, the age of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, and end around 1950. The largest share are from the nineteenth century and the latter part of the eighteenth. This selection reflects one of the chief purposes of the book, which is to help recover a rhetorical tradition in English that is less familiar because it is outside of living memory and is fast becoming more distant as a cultural and stylistic matter. (Thus the word classical in the title.) The better authors and statesmen of those earlier periods studied rhetoric more closely than it tends to be studied today, and the English of their times was more hospitable to its charms. We may not want to talk now quite as people did in earlier times; in some respects we are indeed forbidden to talk that way by our culture. But the ablest of the older writers still make the best teachers of rhetoric.
Last, a few notes on what this book does not do. It does not come close to discussing every known rhetorical figure. It just covers the eighteen or so that, in my judgment, are of most practical value. Metaphor and simile are omitted here, too, not because they are unimportant but because they are too important; they are large enough topics to require separate treatment of their own. The book also avoids anything translated into English from other languages, with the exception of the King James Bible and passing mention of some famous French examples. The details that give a rhetorical figure its entire sound tend not to come through in translation, and in any event the use of rhetorical figures in English is extensive enough to support treatment by itself and important enough to need it. For this reason, too, the book pays relatively slight attention to classical origins of the devices it considers. In each case I do give the name for the device derived from Ancient Greek (or, occasionally, from Latin); those labels, however strange they may sound at first, end up being highly convenient if you spend much time with this subject. But the chapter titles also identify the devices with English words that are more likely to be clear, and in some chapters I also offer, near the start, a familiar example or two of the use of the figure in relatively recent times. More generally the book spends little time on details of taxonomy. There are hundreds of names for all the rhetorical figures that have ever been identified, and arguments about which names apply to which figures, and then more distinctions to draw between figures of speech and figures of thought, between schemes and tropes, and on and on. I do not disparage those distinctions, but this book is not about them. The reader unhappy with the book’s insouciance on these points, or who just would like to pursue taxonomy in more detail, has plenty of recourse, some examples of which will be mentioned in the bibliographical notes.
I have various acknowledgements to make. I wish to thank my rhetoric students and research assistants at the Boston University law school who read and commented on parts of the manuscript, helped find examples for it, or both: Graham Foster, Susan Frauenhoffer, Salem Fussell, Sarah McCabe, Wells Miller, Nadia Oussayef, Joanna Rauh, Kevin Teng, Brian Vito, and Dustin Guzior. Daniel Norland was especially helpful early in the life of the project. Emily Tucker was especially helpful with suggestions toward the end of it. I am grateful as well to Marlowe Bergendoff, Brian Brooks, Daniel Cantor, Janet Farnsworth, Ted Frank, David R. Godine, Lisa Hills, Kelly Klaus, Christopher Kylin, Gary Lawson, Adam Long, Christopher Roberts, James Sanders, David Seipp, Ted Skillman, Jack Taylor, and John Thornton for their helpful comments and encouragement; and thanks in particular to Andrew Kull, a especially reliable supplier of each of those good things. Carl W. Scarbrough lent his consummate skill to the design of the book. Jon Barlow and the late Patrick Flaherty were friends to the subject matter and to my enthusiasm for it.
Boston, April 2010
Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric
I • REPETITION OF WORDS AND PHRASES.
1. Simple Repetition of Words and Phrases: EPIZEUXIS, EPIMONE, etc.
Repetition is one of the most important general ideas in rhetoric, and later chapters consider a wide range of ways in which it can be used: repetition of words and phrases at the beginning or end of successive sentences or clauses, or repetition of sentence structure, of conjunctions, and so forth. But the most basic use of the principle, and our subject here, is the simple repetition of words per se for the sake of emphasis, drama, or beauty. The best-known line from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – The horror! The horror! – is an example of one scheme from this family: EPIMONE (e-pi-mo-nee), or the repetition of phrases. The same device also figures prominently in the most celebrated speech in French history, Charles de Gaulle’s Appeal of 18 June. France had just fallen to the Nazis, and de Gaulle was speaking to the people of his country by radio from London:
Car la France n’est pas seule! Elle n’est pas seule! Elle n’est pas seule!
(For France is not alone! She is not alone! She is not alone!) The speech is generally credited as the formal start of the French Resistance.
Repetition can create memorable effects in still simpler forms. Consider a pair of utterances made within two years of each other in the middle of the twentieth century. One is a famous line from the movie Casablanca: Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine. Another is an enduring moment from a speech of Winston Churchill’s praising the pilots who had fended off German air strikes during the Battle of Britain: Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. Both of these quotations are remembered well today, and both of them owe much of their fame to the same rhetorical device: the use of the same word repeatedly, with other words between each repetition – a figure known as CONDUPLICATIO (con-du-pli-cat-ee-oh), or, especially when there are just a few other words between the repeated ones, DIACOPE (di-ac-o-pee).
Let us turn to a more systematic look at the uses of repeated words.
1. Epizeuxis. Our first device, EPIZEUXIS (e-pi-zeux-is), is the repetition of words consecutively. The simple and classic form repeats a word thrice: a verbal pounding of the table.
Reputation, reputation, reputation! Oh, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial. My reputation, Iago, my reputation!
Othello, 2, 3
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.
Thoreau, Walden (1854)
Like the Draconian laws, this bill had blood! blood! – felony! felony! felony! in every period and in every sentence.
Grattan, speech in the Irish Parliament (1787)
[U]pon all that has been hitherto written on the subject of opium, whether by travellers in Turkey (who may plead their privilege of lying as an old immemorial right), or by professors