Is there anything more engaging than a good old rhetorical question?
Is there any rhetorical tool as ubiquitous as the rhetorical question? Are you kidding? Is the Pope Catholic? Do bears defecate in arboreal settings? From Shakespeare to Michelle Obama, the rhetorical question, known in the trade as erotema, is always making its appearance in great speeches.
A rhetorical question is not, as is sometimes said, a question without an answer. The questioner has an answer — but one which they want you, the audience, to concoct in your own mind, or at least engage with possible answers.
Like imagery or anecdotes, the speechwriter uses the device to connect speaker to audience, to share a journey, to make you think. But crucially, rhetorical questions, like most rhetorical devices, are not there for decorative purposes or to make the writer look clever. Rhetoric is all about persuasion.
Take Mark Antony’s Friends Romans Countrymen speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. It is a masterclass in persuasion — winning a hostile crowd round, and reversing their position on the assassination of Julius Caesar and support for the conspirators by 180 degrees. It helps, of course, if the writer can construct both the speech and the audience reaction to it.
Mark Antony uses a range of devices, from self-effacement to props, but ends on a rhetorical question: here was a Caesar, when comes such another? Mark Antony is not asking for an answer (‘about half past three’) but making the Roman mob feel a keen sense of loss, and thus anger towards those who stabbed their leader to death.
This raises an important point about the use of rhetorical questions: only use them if you are sure you will get the answer you want. Shakespeare does not allow his speaker to ask the rhetorical question until he is sure the audience will answer in the right way — that’s why it’s the last thing he says, not the first.
Edward Heath famously themed his 1974 election campaign with the rhetorical question ‘Who Governs Britain?’ and the answer came back ‘not you’. The joke in Monty Python’s What have the Romans ever done for us? scene rests on the endless answers that the members of the Judean People’s Front (or was it the Popular Front of Judea?) come up with in answer to Reg’s rhetorical question. Many a politician has stood on a platform and had their rhetorical question answered by hecklers in ways they didn’t anticipate. Conservative candidate: Do we really want another Labour Government? Crowd: Yes we do.
You can build a section of a speech around a series of rhetorical questions, each leading from the last. People of a certain vintage can remember the Labour leader Neil Kinnock’s line ‘why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?’ in his 1987 Llandudno speech. Joe Biden remembers it. As the New York Times reported in September 1987:
‘Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, a Democratic hopeful, was particularly taken with it. So taken, in fact, that he lifted Mr. Kinnock’s closing speech with phrases, gestures and lyrical Welsh syntax intact for his own closing speech at a debate at the Iowa State Fair on Aug. 23 — without crediting Mr. Kinnock.’
Every poet is a thief, as Bono once taught us (although I’m pretty sure he stole that line).
But let’s look at what follows:
Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Why is my wife, Glenys, the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?
Was it because all our predecessors were ‘thick’? Did they lack talent — those people who could sing, and play, and recite and write poetry; those people who could make wonderful, beautiful things with their hands; those people who could dream dreams, see visions; those people who had such a sense of perception as to know in times so brutal, so oppressive, that they could win their way out of that by coming together?
Were those people not university material? Couldn’t they have knocked off all their A-levels in an afternoon?
But why didn’t they get it?
Was it because they were weak? Those people who could work eight hours underground and then come up and play football?
Weak? Those women who could survive eleven child bearings, were they weak? Those people who could stand with their backs and their legs straight and face the people who had control over their lives, the ones who owned their workplaces and tried to own them, and tell them, ‘No. I won’t take your orders.’ Were they weak?
Does anybody really think that they didn’t get what we had because they didn’t have the talent, or the strength, or the endurance, or the commitment?
I count 13 rhetorical questions in a row. By the time Kinnock answers his own questions, it doesn’t matter — his audience is boiling with righteous indignation and already knows the answer. This style of rhetorical question, making common cause between audience and speaker, is called anacoenosis.
Rhetorical questions can be short: Travis Bickle’s ‘You talking to me?’ in Taxi Driver (and the title of Sam Leith’s excellent book on rhetoric), or the film reviewer Barry Norman’s catchphrase ‘And why not?’ Or sarcastic ‘who knew?’ after an obvious statement. The very shortest rhetorical question available might be a simple ‘why?’.
They can be existential: ‘why do bad things happen to good people’? or ‘Where is the love?’ Or poetic ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ Or they can be used as simple resting points along the way. Ed Miliband is fond of pausing to ask ‘why do I say that?’ at suitable junctures in his speeches.
Don’t confuse rhetorical questions with actual questions. You can use hypophora in your writing — where you ask a question then answer it (‘Are we downhearted? No!’). Consider Falstaff’s ‘What is honour? A word’ in Henry IV Part I, or Beckett’s ‘let’s go/we can’t/why not?/we’re waiting for Godot’. These are questions, not rhetorical questions.
Perhaps any confusion would be lessened if there was a special mark of punctuation to tell us if the question is rhetorical? It would only work on the page, of course, not once the words became sound. Lynn Truss in her Eats, Shoots and Leaves tells us tantalisingly that in the 1580s a typesetter called Henry Dunham invented the rhetorical question mark. It was the same as the question mark we know and love (?) but pointing away from the end of the sentence not towards it. Alas, it has fallen into disuse.
Is it time to bring it back?
Paul Richards is a writer-for-hire.
