I'm sorry, I'll say that again – the rhetorical trick of metanoia
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Version 0 of 1. Something alarming happened to Barack Obama on Thursday 5 June 2008. He was on the campaign trail addressing a town hall meeting in Bristol, Virginia, when in the midst of his customary rhetorical flow, he lost momentum and ground to an inarticulate halt. “Everybody knows that it makes no sense … that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma, they end up taking up a hospital bed, it costs … when … if you … they just gave … you gave up a hospital bed, it costs … when … if you … they just gave… you gave ‘em treatment early and they got … some treatment … and … er … a breathalyser … or an inhalator … not a breathalyser … [audience laughter] … I haven’t had much sleep in the last 48 hours or so.” The reason for his unexpected collapse wasn’t biological; it was technical – his teleprompter had let him down. The incident had his critics foaming at the mouth. In their view, it proved beyond doubt that Obama was a sham because without a script and teleprompter to support his eloquence, he was as wooden as Pinocchio. Their reaction is not surprising, but is it justified? Spontaneity is regarded as one of the hallmarks of a great public speaker; but if you scratch beneath the surface you often find that, in the words of Oscar Wilde, “spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art”. One of the most effective rhetorical devices for creating the illusion of spontaneity in a prepared speech is called metanoia (also known as correctio and epanorthosis) – from the Greek meaning to change one’s mind. Two months after Obama’s autocue mishap, his vice-presidential running mate Joe Biden raised a laugh when he used metanoia in his speech to the Democratic convention: “You know, folks, that’s the America that George Bush has left us. And that’s the America we’ll continue to get if George – excuse me, if John McCain is elected president of the United States of America. Freudian slip. Freudian slip.” Biden’s “Freudian slip” was about as off-the-cuff as a corporal’s salute, and his speedily retracted slur – that presidential hopeful McCain was a George W Bush clone – was simply a repetition of one of the themes of the 2008 Democratic election campaign. But once a thing is said, even if it is taken back immediately, it can’t be unsaid: the impression it makes on an audience remains, undiminished. By correcting himself in mid-flow, Biden created the impression that he was thinking on his feet – quite an achievement for a politician whose own teleprompter gaffs have been well documented. In his infamous Richmond lecture in Cambridge in 1962, the distinguished literary critic FR Leavis launched an intemperate and vicious personal attack on fellow Cambridge academic and scientist CP Snow: “Snow is, of course, a – no, I can’t say that; he isn’t; Snow thinks of himself as a novelist … ” By drawing attention to the missing word, “novelist”, Leavis’s metanoia intensified his attack on Snow. And by inviting his audience to fill in the gap, he made them feel to some extent complicit in his unfolding diatribe. No one was left in any doubt that, as far as Leavis was concerned, Snow’s literary output was beneath contempt: “As a novelist he doesn’t exist; he doesn’t begin to exist. He can’t be said to know what a novel is.” The controversy sparked by the viciousness of Leavis’s attack reverberates to this day. In his 2010 Tory conference speech, David Cameron used metanoia to heap misery on to an already bowed and bloodied Labour opposition: “Let’s start by being honest with ourselves. The mess this country is in – it’s not all because of Labour. Of course, they must take some of the blame. All right – they need to take a lot of the blame. Let me just get this off my chest … ” A disruption in a formal speech is unexpected; it keeps an audience on its toes because it mirrors the spontaneity of everyday conversation, enabling the speaker to come out with something, pause, and then revise it to make it stronger, milder or clearer. Finding fault with a speaker because of their dependence on notes, script and teleprompter betrays an ignorance of the mechanics of great oratory. The Gettysburg address is a mere 272 words long and takes less than three minutes to deliver, and yet there are five known copies of it in Lincoln’s own hand, one of which is the copy he read from on 19 November 1863. Winston Churchill dried up while giving a speech to the House of Commons in 1904. The experience shook him up so badly that from that day forward, he never gave a speech without using detailed notes. Speaking on the record demands careful consideration; every word matters, so it’s not a good time to busk. The appearance of spontaneity, though welcome, is an illusion that obscures its opposites: calculation, deliberation, and design. @MartinShovel http://www.creativityworks.net |