Is there anything stranger than the moment right before you speak in public, that teetery instance when utterance itself, quite apart from any information you hope to give, feels improbable? Come to think of it, there may be. There is a weirdness, too, that arrives between spoken words, when you realize that you can’t stop talking but aren’t sure how to continue. And then, there is that odd moment after the speech is finished when audience members approach the podium. Oh good, someone still wants to talk to me, you say to yourself. Oh no, I’ve just said all I came to say.
I teach courses where people are required to say things. Some of the students—all of them at some moment or another—would rather not comply. I see them there, on the first day of class, hollow-eyed as castaways, pulling out their textbook—O’Hair, Rubenstein, and Stewart’s A Pocketguide to Public Speaking—turning it over as you’d touch flotsam with a stick. The pages fall open to a discussion of how public speaking will help you “gain a vital life skill” and “learn practical and transferable knowledge” and “find new opportunities for engagement.” I imagine it feels like finding a dead fish on a deserted shoreline. If you get really hungry, you just might be able to eat it.
But it is such students who come to mind when I read books like Sam Leith’s Words Like Loaded Pistols: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama. I want to ask Mr. Leith what assistance his book offers lonely, anxious survivors of late modernity who yearn to do more artfully what they can’t stop doing and can’t stop fearing—speaking to others in public. Leith’s book, like the classical rhetorical tradition upon which he so educatedly draws, is blithely unconcerned about “Managing Speech Anxiety.” It’s not that the ancient Greeks and Romans knew nothing of stage fright: Isocrates, the 4th-century Greek rhetorician, was so shy of oratory that he wrote pamphlets instead. But for the ancients, the best way to deal with the riskiness of public talk was to dive right into the mutable world of surfaces, styles, and strategies that is communicative exchange. Leith’s artfully wry popularization of classical rhetoric follows suit.
I have a low-budget theory about stage fright. I think my students’ uneasiness is akin to the emotionally charged experience we sometimes have before great art. To speak to others is fearful and wonderful. Leith generally ignores this lustre in speaking, probably because his book hews closest not to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, not to his Rhetoric. And like Aristotle, Leith is a cheerful empiricist of everyday rhetoric. “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 kiddies to eat their damn veggies.” Even the rhetorical canons that take up two-thirds of the book’s discussion—invention disposition, style, delivery, and memory—come off as quite ordinary. “You think up what there is to say; you devise an order in which to say it; you light on the way in which you want to say it; you get all the aforementioned into your head; and then you take to your feet and let rip.” (Leave aside for a moment the question of whether anyone has ever designed a compelling speech by such a process.) The final third of the book discusses three familiar contexts for public speaking: deliberative discussion, forensic investigation, and ceremonial address. Every other chapter, Leith analyzes what made “Champions of Rhetoric” such as Cicero, Lincoln, Dr. King, and Obama so effective. (I wish he hadn’t called them “Champions,” a term which abstracts them from lived experience and sets them up for abstractly aesthetic admiration.)
When Leith’s rhetorical discussion works, it reveals the complex, covalent bonds that form whenever people speak and listen to each other. His analysis functions like ultraviolet light, revealing otherwise invisible fluorescent tethers among speakers and hearers and situations and texts. But Leith knows enough about the art of teaching communication to be careful: learning about rhetoric’s omnipresence can turn the Oblivious into the Suspicious. “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 (10). In the academy, such suspicion is industriously cultivated through post-structural analysis, which assumes that words are, as Leith summarizes, “Not To Be Trusted.” To which he adds, “But then, Aristotle could have told them that.”
(It’s probably too much to ask. But I can’t help wishing that Leith hadn’t lumped all scholars of language in one post-structuralist bin. In doing so, he overlooks the work of the past four decades by rhetoricians such as Michael Calvin McGee, Barbara Biesecker, Robert Hariman, Celeste Condit, and Debra Hawhe. Although they have taken seriously the findings of post-structuralism, they have sought to integrate them with Aristotelian theory as well in order to show how discourse shapes our experience of physical spaces, visual imagery, and music, not to mention the strange inadvertencies of emotion and embodiment that inevitably show up when we start talking to each other.)
Is it worthwhile to keep telling people what Aristotle could have told them? Sometimes I wonder if we aren’t all Aristotelians now, thanks to the plethora of public speaking textbooks, self-help speaking seminars, and motivational speeches, so many of which draw on the rationally focused, highly pragmatic, speaker-centered assumptions of classical rhetorical theory. But then, Leith’s discussion of rhetorical devices like anaphora and zeugma and epideictic goes into greater depths than most basic-course textbooks, helping us (as Richard Lanham says) to look at and not just through language, thereby sharpening critical awareness for language’s everyday consequentiality. “If language is the air,” says Leith, “rhetoric is weather.” This comparison is hyperbolic: language may seem as encompassing as air, but rhetoric is hardly so ungovernable as weather. Rhetoric is probably more like HVAC in a climate-controlled office. Examining it helps us note the conditions of everyday livability.
But what interests me—to return to my castaway students for a moment—is that the most full and even fearful thing about speech is not how to change its temperature, but that it is there at all. (As Bill Cosby asked decades ago, “Why is there air?”) And I’m glad to say that one way Leith helps us get at a certain mysteriousness in our rhetorical there-at-all-ness is through his ticklish sense of humor. This registers not just in sly parenthetical remarks and in stories about Winston Churchill bellowing away in a bathtub or Emperor Claudius getting the giggles in court, but more significantly in Leith’s awareness of humor’s role in serious address. After noting Dr. King’s whimsical reference to “every hill and molehill of Mississippi,” Leith writes:
The exhilarating quality of the “I Have a Dream” speech—delivered, let’s not forget, at a time when there wasn’t all that much for black Americans to be exhilarated about—comes out in its humor; and that in turn gives it force. Here is not just a statement of faith, but an enactment of it: so confident is Dr. King that his God and his people will see him right that he is able not just to stand up to the “vicious racists” of Alabama—he is able to laugh at them.
Leith’s rhetorical analysis has a shrewd eye for power management, but he also has an ear for whimsy. His book tacitly suggests that rhetoric is less like air conditioning in a close-windowed office than the artificial snow on a ski slope, enabling blustery, merry playfulness. It is too easy to see rhetoric as an unfortunate necessity in a fallen world; Leith himself praises Aristotle for seeing that “the world was compromised and imperfect.” But perhaps the cure for exaggerating our speech’s importance—or despairing of speech’s backstage trickiness or its onstage frights—is to see human exchange as an arena for venturesomeness. “Rhetoric,” as Leith reminds us, “is language at play—language plus.” His book has the good sense to cast rhetoric as a way to get in on something happily excessive in the world. But we speak, not simply to cast a bottled message into an impersonal ocean, but rather to surf the gulfstream of God’s speech. Maybe this, finally, is the greatest consolation for our anxious rhetorical beings: that God’s excessive speech does not need our completion, but does invite our resonation.
Craig E. Mattson is professor of communication arts at Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, Illinois. He thanks Aaron Kuecker for the gulfstream metaphor.
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