Chapter 26: Change of Person

Similarly, the change of person makes for a sense of involvement in the struggle and often gives the audience the opinion that it is embroiled in the middle of the dangers:

You would say that they were unwearied, untired Opposing these in war, so eagerly they battled.

And Aratus says:

May you never plunge into the sea in this month.

2. And Herodotus somewhere says:

From the city of Elephantine you will sail upstream, and then you will come to a smooth plain. Having crossed the plain, embarking again in another ship, you will sail for two days; then you will come to a great city named Meroe.

Do you see, fellow-pupil, how he takes your soul and leads it through these places, turning the sense of hearing into the sense of sight? All such addresses, fixed on the persons themselves, put the audience right into the action as it is worked on. 3. And whenever you do not talk to all of the audience, but to one person only—You would not know on which side the son of Tydeus stood—you will make him more emotionally stirred and at the same time more attentive and more full of a sense of the struggle, waking him up by these personal addresses.

Commentary

change of person: specifically, the use of the colloquial second person; it is rarer in Greek than in Latin or English, and hence would be more startling-—as Longinus says at the end of the chapter; it “wakes up” the audience.

A good specimen of the colloquial—and even vulgar—use of the device occurs in the graveyard scene in Hamlet (V.i):

Hamlet: How long will a man lie i’ the earth ere he rot?

I. Clown: I’ faith, if a’ be not rot­ ten before a’ die-as we have many pocky corses that will scarce hold the laying in-a’ will last you some eight year or nine year. A tanner will last you nine year.

It is almost a mannerism in Sterne, as this passage from ch. I of Tristram Shandy shows:

Had they duly weighed and con­ sidered all this, and proceeded accordingly,-! am verily per­ suaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me.-Believe me, good folks, this is not so inconsid­ erable a thing as many of you may think it;-you have all, I dare say, heard of the animal spirits, as how they are transfused from father to son, etc., etc.-and a great deal to that purpose:-Well, you may take my word….

Ch. 3 of Moby Dick displays the device in all its forms-even more than Lon­ ginus discusses in this and the next chapter:

Entering the gable-ended Spouter Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry with old­ fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some con­ demned old craft. On one side hung a very large oil-painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal cross-lights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could in any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose.

Here we have a mixture of persons in “you” and “one” as well as a mixture of tenses.

you would say… battled: the quotation is from Iliad 15.697-98. Longinus has chosen his quotation well to show how the audience becomes strained and in­ volved: the moment when Homer breaks into this dramatic second person occurs at the height of the battle for the Greek ships; a few lines later, at the beginning of Book 16, Patroclus comes weeping to Achilles, and the turning point of the poem is reached.

Aratus: see ch. 10, n. on Aratus. The quotation is from his poem Pheno­ mena (287).

Herodotus somewhere says: the passage is both abridged and turned from the Ionic to the Attic dialect. It comes from Herodotus 2.29; note how tranquil this scene is in comparison with the passage from Homer.

worked on: the Greek word gives us our English derivative “energy.” Aristotle (Rhetoric I411b2·ff.) discusses devi­ ces for “working on” things so as to place them “before the eyes” of the audience: to do so requires that the pic­ ture presented must be in action, and metaphors may be classified as “work­ ing” and “non-working.” Trypho, in his book On Tropes (Spengel III.199) defines such “energy” as bringing the thought before the reader’s sight. Pre­ sumably Longinus had the technical sense in mind when he used the word in this particular context.

talk: the word-which means “chat­ ter” in earlier Greek-is used to refer to personal conversation, the sort of “chatty” tone always struck by the use of the second person. A man may use a chatty tone before an audience of more than one, but his aim is to make the audience feel what we call “informal,” as if the speaker were addressing each one personally.

You would not know… Tydeus stood: Iliad 5.85. The line seems alfirst only to repeat the point made earlier, but of course Longin us could assume a know­ ledge of context. Homer is describing a high point in the aristeia of Diomedes, the son of Tydeus. So involved is he in the raging battle-lines that you cannot discern which side he is fighting on. It is the blurring of the space between speaker and audience, the involvement, which Longinus wishes to stress, and his quotation is designed to take the reader back to the first quotation, also from Homer, and the point made there­ what we call “audience-participation.” Thornton Wilder has used the device extensively in his play Our Town, in which the stage manager speaks both to the audience and to the characters in the play.