Topical Guide 849
Topical Guide 849
Mark Dorset
Rhetorical Devices: Direct Address or Personal Address
At Home with the Glynns, Chapter 31:
it contained a section in which I address you directly, Reader, and Albertine doesn’t like it when I address you directly, even though Longinus, in his enumeration of the sources of the sublime, pointed out that all passages that use the device, “by their direct personal form of address, bring the hearer right into the middle of the action being described,” and adds that, because the writer seems to be “addressing, not the whole audience, but a single member of it,” such passages affect that one hearer, or reader, “more profoundly.”
Longinus, On the Sublime, XXVI (translated by H. L. Havell):
Equally dramatic is the interchange of persons, often making a reader fancy himself to be moving in the midst of the perils described—
“Unwearied, thou wouldst deem, with toil unspent,
They met in war; so furiously they fought.”
and that line in Aratus—
“Beware that month to tempt the surging sea.”
In the same way Herodotus: “Passing from the city of Elephantine you will sail upwards until you reach a level plain. You cross this region, and there entering another ship you will sail on for two days, and so reach a great city, whose name is Meroe.” Observe how he takes us, as it were, by the hand, and leads us in spirit through these places, making us no longer readers, but spectators. Such a direct personal address always has the effect of placing the reader in the midst of the scene of action. And by pointing your words to the individual reader, instead of to the readers generally, as in the line
“Thou had’st not known for whom Tydides fought,”
and thus exciting him by an appeal to himself, you will rouse interest, and fix attention, and make him a partaker in the action of the book.
[BTW: Note that Longinus himself uses direct personal form of address in the passage I’ve quoted. —MD]
See also:
Rhetorical Devices: Direct Address or Personal Address TG 397; Maieutics (“Midwifery” Responding to a Question with a Question) TG 597
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