Rhetoric: A Very Short Introduction by Richard Toye

Author:Richard Toye [Toye, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199651368
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2013-12-15T06:00:00+00:00

5. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize for my hesitation in rising just now, but I’d entirely failed while listening to the chairman’s flattering description of the next speaker to realize he was talking about me.’ Richard Hannay (played by Robert Donat) gets himself out of a tight spot in Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935)

Understandably enough, some people react negatively to what they see as over-interpretation of seemingly straightforward texts. Words just mean what they say, don’t they, so why bother to analyse them? But the example of Hannay’s address to the meeting easily shows us the futility of imagining that a given combination of words has a fixed meaning that can be extracted simply by reading the text—or even by breaking it down into the different parts of speech. The whole point about Hannay’s speech is that, on the page, it is fairly banal, yet it is both funny and moving if you know his situation. Useful though it is to identify the various appeals and technical devices that a speaker may deploy, these in themselves do not act as the keys to a mechanical code. The purpose of rhetorical analysis is not to ‘unlock’ a set of words to reveal a meaning that is innate or set in stone but rather—in part—to identify the social meanings of particular statements or symbols in given contexts. This may sound rather high-flown but we all have some experience of doing it. After all, ordinary viewers of the film have no trouble decoding the ironies with which Hitchcock presents them, or in seeing that Hannay’s words acquire meaning from the circumstances in which they are delivered.

The film scenario ostentatiously draws attention to Hannay’s double meanings, but ambiguity can be found in any complex text, and indeed in many simple ones. ‘Ambiguity’ was helpfully defined by the literary critic William Empson as ‘any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.’ However hard we strive for clarity, such nuances creep into our words unavoidably. In the face of this reality, there must always be room for interpretation (this is not to say that all interpretations are equally valid). We cannot, then, see rhetoric as an uncomplicated series of statements about the opinions of its authors—indeed no-one with natural scepticism of lawyers and politicians would think that it could. Nor, though, can we dismiss it as a mere surface phenomenon that overlies—or attempts to cover up—the ‘real beliefs’ that supposedly lie behind it. At one level, Hannay’s rhetoric is disingenuous (he is pretending to be a politician when he isn’t one) but at the same time it is an honest and heartfelt presentation of his world-view. It is a classic example of what Quentin Skinner calls ‘the various oblique strategies’ which a rhetor may ‘adopt in order to set out and at the same time to disguise what he means’. Rhetorical analysis demands sensitivity to such strategies. But we must not imagine that such an awareness will

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