Farnsworth’s Classical English
Rhetoric
By Ward
Farnsworth
(David R. Godine, 254 pages,
$26.95)
“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she
walks into mine.”
That’s Humphrey Bogart (Rick) in Casablanca, reacting
to Ingrid Bergman’s (Ilsa) appearance in his café, providing a good
one-sentence summary of the movie’s plot line, and demonstrating
what Ward Farnsworth, professor of law at Boston University and an
elegant writer, calls a rhetorical figure, in this case the
technique of repetition — also involving conduplicatio and
diacope, terms explained by Farnsworth as references to the number
of words between the repeated ones — used to heighten mood and
atmosphere.
Or this: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed
by so many to so few.”
Again, the rhetorical figure of repetition, used to
extraordinary effect by Winston Churchill, in his speech
immortalizing the outgunned RAF pilots who drove the Luftwaffe from
the English skies.
However, the Churchillian rhetoric, always inspiring, has its
downside. Rhetoric today tends to be the province of lawyers and
politicians. And most politicians, even the dimmest, understand
just what a powerful tool it can be — as do their put-upon
speechwriters, who are often expected to make their bosses sound
Churchillian (“Make me eloquent, Smedley”), even though, say, a
battle over federal funding for fig growers is something less than
the Battle of Britain.
“Rhetorical figures,” writes Farnsworth, “show up often…in a
lot of bad speech and writing. When used in contemporary political
speeches…figures often sound tinny — like clichés, or strained
efforts to make dull claims sound snappy. This is partly because
today’s politician tends to be a creature of very modest literacy
and wit who spoils what he touches.”
Farnsworth, whose profession is one of the few that still relies
on rhetoric to accomplish its ends, is intent on passing on some of
the best rhetorical techniques as used by literary master craftsmen
— repetition and variety, suspense and relief, concealment and
surprise, expectation and satisfaction or frustration.
In large part, he believes, we can learn from these craftsmen by
immersion in examples of their use of rhetorical figures. To this
end, he’s chosen writers and orators like Churchill and Burke,
Dickens and Melville, our founding fathers, Conan Doyle, Shaw and
Chesterton, to whom he’s especially partial (in fact, the
Chesterton Society might consider electing Farnsworth its president
by acclamation), as well as nearly forgotten figures such as the
Irish orators Henry Grattan and Richard Lalor Sheil.
A few examples, in no particular order, of the rhetorical
techniques Farnsworth selects. “Metanoia” is correcting oneself,
with the speaker seeming to change his mind about whatever has just
been said. Here’s Conan Doyle, in The Engineer’s Thumb
(1855): “And now, Doctor, perhaps you would kindly attend to my
thumb, or rather to the place where my thumb used to be.”
Another figure, “Praeteritio,” writes Farnsworth, occurs when
the speaker describes what he will not say, then says it. This is
Chesterton, from Manalive (1912): “The proceedings opened
with a speech from my colleague, of which I will say nothing. It
was deplorable.”
Or this from a speech by Abraham Lincoln, in 1858: “I will not
affirm that the Democratic party consider slavery morally, socially
and politically right, though their tendency to that view has, in
my opinion, been constant and unmistakable for the past five
years.”
“Chiasmus” occurs, Farnsworth writes, when “words or other
elements are repeated with their order reversed. A well known and
relatively modern example…is from John Kennedy: ask not what
your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your
country, a saying which apparently evolved from the earlier
appeal by Kennedy’s boarding school headmaster to consider not
what Choate does for you, but what you can do for Choate.”
“Every chiasmus amounts to an ABBA pattern. In this example
often attributed to Churchill, war fills the A role and
dishonor the B role: ‘You were given the choice between
war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.’”
And here’s Mark Twain, in Following the Equator (1897),
using “Litotes,” that is, not making an affirmative claim directly
but denying its opposite: “She was not quite what you would call
refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was
the kind of person that keeps a parrot.”
MOST OF THE EXAMPLES Farnsworth uses come from English prose.
“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.… The
better authors and statesmen of those earlier periods studied
rhetoric more closely than it tends to be studied today. We may not
want to talk now quite as people did in earlier times.… But the
ablest of the earlier writers still make the best teachers of
rhetoric.”
Given the dates and periods from which he picks his
rhetoricians, there’s an unhappy truth implicit in Farnsworth’s
selections. It was around 1600 that English became English, and it
was in the 18th, 19th, and the early 20th centuries that it was
perfected. By Farnsworth’s cut-off date, the 1950s, the overarching
structure of the language was largely completed, its elements taken
for granted, and from then on it increasingly became in
universities and other centers of learning a matter of trying to
maintain the structure, fight off decay, and attempt to restore
what was inevitably being lost.
English, we’re frequently told, is a living, evolving language,
and as evidence we’re shown various popular vulgarisms periodically
allowed into the language. But they are what they are, and the
language pretty much remains what it was in the 1950s and into the
1960s, when teachers of English largely abandoned their efforts to
teach basic composition, grammarians threw in their towels, and
rhetoricians, like classicists, teetered on the edge of
extinction.
It may not be possible to reverse the process. But Farnsworth is
on a scholarly rescue mission. “Rhetoric is a vast, old and
honorable discipline. It may be defined most broadly and simply as
the use of language to persuade or otherwise affect an audience.
The decline of rhetoric in our times is thus a much broader
phenomenon than any decline in familiarity with figures of
speech.”
“This selection,” he writes, “reflects one of the chief purposes
of the book, which is to help recover a rhetorical tradition in
English…that is fast becoming more distant as a cultural and
stylistic matter.”
Webster’s Third defines rhetoric as “the art of expressive
speech or discourse” or “the study of principles and rules of
composition formulated by ancient critics… and interpreted by
classical scholars for application to discourse in the
vernacular.”
Most of us who make our living with words and have at one time
or another taught courses in English composition probably wouldn’t
think of ourselves as classical scholars. But we’ve all wrestled
with applying those principles and rules to “discourse in the
vernacular.” And one of the central problems in American education
today is the widespread failure to make that application
successfully — or, in many cases, even to try.
For our colleges and universities, where things like rhetoric
were once taken seriously, the assignment of Mr. Farnsworth’s book
as required reading might just awaken some echoes of what used to
be a primary mission.
And who knows? In all this country, on all those campuses, in
all those college towns, where all those gin joints will never
close, there just might be a revival of interest in Farnsworth’s
“old and honorable discipline.”
