AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Oratory and Conversation

As I wrestle with the last bits of tomorrow’s sermon, I suspect that part of the reason I preach as I do comes from having been brought up with a positive regard for oratory, for formal (in the sense of “deliberate,” not necessarily “stuffy”) public discourse. The literary influences on my childhood harked back to the nineteenth century at the most recent; I voluntarily memorized soliloquies, poems, ingesting snippets of Great Speeches and literary commonplaces as the intellectual vitamin pills of thought’s childhood and adolescence. I enjoy spontaneous conversation, and I admire preachers (and other public speakers) who can bring the vitality of conversation into effective speech. That’s not my style, though; on the occasion of speaking to a willing assembly about a topic of moment, my heart comes to expression by way of deliberation, selection, refining.

This discovery engenders some frustration, though, as I live in a non-oratorical culture; perhaps it’s even an anti-oratorical culture. The friendly casualness of conversation so dominates the field of public expression that I see hardly any evidence of oratorical consciousness around me — and I live in a public-discourse-saturated setting. What has banished oratory from the agora?

Perhaps (and I’m talking through my historical hat, here, so the true rhetorical scholars should weigh in to correct me) the weight of oratory grew so burdensome that a thorough-going conversationalism served as a forceful corrective to portentous, stupefying speechifying. Perhaps a cultural shift toward celebrating vernacular expression, democratizing public expression, undermined the notion that one might ever aspire to a different pitch. Perhaps the admirable examples of conversational public speaking combined with the regrettable examples of burdensome oratory to give the impression that conversation was ipso facto preferable, and oratory oppressively artificial.

Whatever the reasons, I — perhaps defensively — believe that public discourse benefits tremendously from a harmonious coexistence of conversation and oratory. Absent oratorical consciousness, public expression rarely attains the richness that painstaking deliberation can lend to discourse (and I suspect I’m not alone in wishing that our political leaders and critics devoted more deliberation to their discourse, and I know I’m not alone in wishing that the church’s leaders devoted more deliberation to their discourse). While oratorical speech doesn’t guarantee thoughtfulness or excellent composition, it offers the opportunity for these benefits in a way that conversational speech tends not to.

Where both oratory and spontaneity flourish, speakers of either temperament, either capacity have an open path toward expression in their strongest expository mode, raising the stakes of vividness (for oratory) and profundity (for conversation). Everyone benefits, perhaps except those who want to participate in public discourse without the wisdom or brilliance that command an appreciative audience, or those mediocre speakers for whom “spontaneity” masks their superficiality. . . .

Posted by AKMA at January 3, 2004 03:40 PM | TrackBack