Topical Guide 858
Mark Dorset
Rhetorical Devices: Direct Address or Personal Address
At Home with the Glynns, Chapter 36:
“My daughters have begun a sort of attenuated striptease. You see that they’re down to these wispy bits of fabric already, and I don’t see how, if I’m to hold on to the students and complete the study, they can avoid having to pose—well, surely you know what I mean without my having to say it, so I can leave it unsaid—can’t I, Peter?”
There was something about the suddenness of this direct personal address that seemed to bring me right into the middle of the action that Andy was describing. It made what Andy was saying affect me more profoundly, and made me more attentive and full of active interest. I seemed to be right there in the class with the other students, ogling the girls in their wisps of cheesecloth.
Repeating my note from Topical Guide 849:
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, TG 849; Maieutics (“Midwifery” Responding to a Question with a Question) TG 597
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