Chapter 27: Shifts in Person

Furthermore, there are in fact times when the prose-writer, telling a tale about a person, is suddenly carried away and assumes the point of view of the person himself, and this species of figure isa kind of outburst of emotion:

And shouting loud Hector bid them
Toward the ships to speed, to leave alone bloody plunder.
“Whomever I shall see going off of his own volition, Death for him is what I have in mind.”

Now, then, though the poet has taken it upon himself to tell the tale, as is appropriate, he has set the abrupt threat, without showing it beforehand, suddenly in the animus of the chief. You see, it would have had a cold effect, if he had said parenthetically, “Hector said such and such”; but as it is, the transition in the passage has suddenly overtaken the author even as he is making his transition. 2. For this reason the use of this figure should have priority when the right moment is urgent and does not present the writer a chance to delay, but imposes on him the necessity of making his shift from person to person, as we see also in this passage from Hecataeus:

Ceyx, making a terrible fuss over this, straightway ordered the sons of Heracles to depart. “For I am unable to protect you. In order not to destroy yourselves and injure me, go away into some other country.”

3. Demosthenes, in his speech on Aristogeiton, has aroused emotion in another way by a rapid shift of persons. He says:

And will none of you be found to have anger and indignation at those violent things which this shameless beast, who—O most foul of all men, when your licentiousness is blocked not by bolts and gates, which some­ one might open up—

With his conception unfinished, he swiftly shifts, and, on account of his animus, almost tears apart the expression into two persons (“who—O most foul of all men”), and then, having seemed to turn away from his speech against Aristogeiton and to have left off, he has all the same, through his emotion, turned himself to it much more. 4. No differently does Penelope say:

Herald, why have those glorious wooers sent you here? To order each serving-maid of noble Odysseus
To leave her tasks and prepare a feast for them?
Would that they had not wooed me nor gathered elsewhere;
Would that on one last feast they’d banquet—you that often
Meet to devour the provender of others, never as infants Hearing from your fathers what sort of man was Odysseus.

Commentary

prose-writer: although Longinus quotes examples from poetry in the chapter, his use of the word “prose­ writer” suggests that he has in mind the primary aim of his work: to aid men in political life. Otherwise we must assume that the phrase “and poets” has dropped out of the text. Longin us is quite careful in his use of such terms. The combina­ tion “prose-writers and poets” appears four times (1.3, 9.15, 13.2, 40.2), and in each place Longinus wishes to make generalizations applicable to both kinds of authors. He uses the phrase “prose­ writers and public speakers” once (30.1), where he is discussing the use of diction, particularly “poetic” diction, in prose: since poetic diction is appropriate for poets, Longinus stresses its function in prose, as he indicates by adding the word for “public speakers.” He uses the word “prose-writers” alone three times: in 22.1 he is discussing hyperbaton, a device which poets are often driven into by the exigencies of meter, but which in prose-writers can only be deliberate; in 33.1 he is contrasting Lysias and Plato, Hyperides and Demosthenes—all prose­ writers. Consequently, the third use (here in ch. 27) is best taken as referring to prose-writers only.

tale: the word also refers to that part of a speech in which a “narrative” or “exposition” of the facts in a case is given; see ch. 25, n. on tale. Two of Longinus’ examples of the device dis­ cussed in this chapter come from Homer, who of course told “tales”; the closing quotation is from the Odyssey, which Longinus had said earlier was characterized by its narrative quality (9.13).

person: the same pun exists in English: a “person” may be a character in a tale or a technical term in grammar. Such shifts in person would be more notice­ able in Greek, which lacked the mechani­ cal warnings which English possesses in quotation marks. Readers of the King James version of the Bible will know how difficult it sometimes is to discern where the author is speaking and where the character in the narrative is being quoted.

Longinus distinguishes two kinds of shift in person. The first kind occurs when there is a narrator, who is relating a speech in indirect discourse; al a dra­ matic moment the narrator shifts sud­ denly from indirect lo direct discourse, as in this passage from Moby Dick (ch. 135):

But when Ahab cried out lo the steersman lo take new turns with the line, and lo hold it so; and commanded the crew to turn round on their seals, and tow the boat up lo the mark; the moment the treacherous line fell that dou­ ble strain and tug, it snapped in the empty air!

“What breaks in me? Some sinew cracks!—’tis whole again; oars! oars! Burst in upon him!”

The second kind of shift occurs when the narrator (or character within a nar­ ration), while speaking in the first per­ son lo another person, suddenly inter­ rupts himself and addresses a third person who is not present as if he were there. The device is to be distinguished— at least for Longinus—from “apostrophe,” a term the rhetorical handbooks are not consistent in defining. For Longinus an apostrophe is an oath (see ch. 16). The current device requires an actual shift in grammatical persons; in an apostrophe there need be only a shift in the individual being addressed while the grammatical person may remain the same:

Addison (Spectator 321) observed a fine example of the device in Milton (Paradise Lost 4.720-24):

Thus at their shady Lodge arriv’d, both stood,
Both turn’d, and under op’n sky ador’d
The God that made both Sky, Air, Earth, and Heav’n
Which they beheld, the moon’s resplendent Globe
And starry Pole: Thou also mad’st the Night… .

Addison says of this sudden shift in person:

…most of the modern heroic poets have imitated the ancients in be­ ginning a speech without premis­ ing that the person said thus or thus; but if is easy to imitate the ancients in the omission of two or three words, it requires judgment lo do it in such a manner as they shall not be missed, and that the speech may begin naturally with­ out them.

Milton uses the device very, very rarely. The “wild and whirling words” of Hamlet provide many examples of such shifts in person, as is appropriate lo his mercurial disposition and many roles and postures; e.g., in his soliloquy after conversing with the ghost (I.v):

Remember thee! Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
Thal youth and observation copied there;
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix’d with baser matter: yes, by Heaven!
0 most pernicious woman!
0 villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables—meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.
At least I’m sure it may be so in Denmark.
So, Uncle, there you are.

The device was extended radically by Dickens, in Bleak House, which is writ­ ten partly in the third person and partly in the first person; in the twentieth cen­ tury, authors like Virginia Woolf and Jean Paul Sartre have pushed its use to an extreme. The result has been a criti­ cal emphasis on what is called “point of view.”

And shouting loud…I’ve in mind: the quotation is from Iliad 15.346-49. Here Longinus illustrates the first kind of shift in person (see preceding note).

a cold effect: the word here does not carry any sense of the stylistic vice “fri­ gidity” (i.e., “false wit”); it is like the primary meaning of the verb “become cold” applied to Plato in 12.3, where Plato is said not “to grow cold” even if he does aim for “swelling” and “im­ pressiveness” (see ch. 12). English “wooden,” though metaphorically dif­ ferent, gets the point.

also: the word can equally mean “even,” and since few ancient critics think much of Hecataeus as an author, it may be that Longinus intends that sense here—especially since the quota­ tion is in support of what he has just observed, that there are special moments when the device is appropriate. “Even Hecataeus knew this.” To put Heca­ taeus “in the middle,” between those two great figures Homer and Demos­ thenes, is a kind of joke. For the trick of juxtaposing quotations amusingly, see below, n. on Penelope say.

Hecataeus was an historian, prede­ cessor of Herodotus; he flourished in the sixth century B.C., at a time when prose was in its infancy and walked in short steps. His work survives only in frag­ ments, of which the one Longinus quotes is #30. His style was apparently what we call “primer,” that is, extremely short sentences strung together without much subordination or sense of period­ ic structure. The passage which Longi­ nus quotes is typical of the fragments.

sons of Heracles: there is a textual problem here; Russell takes the phrase “of Heracles” as a gloss. After the death of Heracles, his sons fled to Trachis, where the king, Ceyx, under pressure from Heracles’ old enemy Eurystheus, refused to take them in.

He says: the quotation is from the speech Against Aristogeiton (25.27); even in antiquity it was suspected that the speech was not really by Demos­ thenes (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Demosthenes 57, expresses his doubts).

who—O most foul: Milton uses the same device as Demosthenes for Peter’s speech in Lycidas (119); the famous phrase there—”Blind mouths!”—is a direct apostrophe to the clergy, said partly in the persona of Peter, partly in the voice of Millon himself.

Penelope say: Odyssey 4.681 ff. Lon­ ginus carefully balances this Homeric quotation against that with which he opened the chapter: in the first quota­ tion the narrator (Homer) broke off his narration in indirect discourse to allow the character (Hector) to speak in his own persona; in the closing quotation, a character within the narration (Pene­ lope) breaks off her speech to the herald to apostrophize others. At the same time. that Penelope’s speech is in chiastic relationship with that of Hector, it also is a contrasting parallel to the passage just cited before Demosthenes: where Demosthenes switched from a plural second person to a singular, Penelope switches from a singular second person to a plural—and in each instance, the first party addressed is present, the second absent.

There is, in addition, a marvellously gentle wit in bracketing Penelope and Demosthenes—a collocation that can­ not occur often in criticism—just as there was in coupling Homer and Hecataeus in the first two quotations.