Tag Archives: elocutio

Anthypophora (an’-thi-po’-phor-a): A figure of reasoning in which one asks and then immediately answers one’s own questions (or raises and then settles imaginary objections). Reasoning aloud. Anthypophora sometimes takes the form of asking the audience or one’s adversary what can be said on a matter, and thus can involve both anacoenosis and apostrophe.

“You may wonder why I’m standing here with a paper bag pulled over my head. Well, surprise! I’m not going shopping!” This was the opening to my first lecture of the semester. It was an English literature course on the oddball writer/philosopher Vaslov “Swordfish” McNulty. He was famous for writing 300-page tomes about nothing. His final book “I Can’t Get a Grip,” won the 2015 Hefty Preface Award, for the longest and most obtuse “Introduction” to a work of fiction. McNulty’s Introduction to “Underpants Eclipsing” was 150 pages long and written in extended similes—like a train-track to nowhere, like a pothole in an invisible highway. Many thought it should’ve won the 2025 Hefty.

I pulled the bag off my head, but there was another bag underneath. It was a shopping bag I had purchased at Hannaford supermarket. It was ornately printed with flowers, a big red barn, and vegetables. Like the other bag, I had cut out eye holes in it.

I said “Underneath. We do not know anything until we know what’s underneath. What’s buried. What’s occluded. What’s covered. What’s underneath.” I ripped off the Hannaford bag. Underneath, I was wearing a balaclava like a thief, or murderer, or an ICE agent wears. I brandished my Swiss Army knife. The sudden unveiling shocked some of the students. One young man in the front row tucked his hands in his armpits and flapped his arms like a bird and mooed like a cow. Another young man started jogging in place. A young woman dumped her backpack out on the floor, stood up, and started stomping on the contents. Numerous other bizarre activities took place, until the entire class was weirding out.

A shoe flew by my head. I closed my Swiss Army knife, and I pulled the balaclava off. The commotion ceased immediately. The students stared, mouths hanging open, fear and weirdness were replaced by awe.

I had a Sufi winged heart tattooed on my forehead. I had a flying saucer on my right cheek and Cher on my left cheek. I had a target on my chin and a question mark on either eyelid. I said, “My face is an aggregate of hope and fear. It weighs the ambiguity of value on its own idiosyncratic scales. At once, it projects the dialectical tensions of idiocy and genius and fabricates a surface for posing wonder.”

Then, I tore off the tattoo mask and revealed my own face. The students groaned with disappointment and one or two even booed. I am a pasty-faced bookworm who never goes outside. My face is shiny and belies my Scandinavian heritage. My last name is Godson, and I take it seriously. I ask my students: “Can you take your masks off? No! You can’t. Without your mask you would have no face—nothing to save, nothing to lose. Nothing to punctuate your life with or register your placidity and anxiety. Like Swordfish, you would be drowning in a sea of non-sequiturs, and, more bluntly, bullshit.

This semester, you will wear bags over your heads to every class. You will not get to know each other. For all we know, a serial killer may sneak in with a desire to kill one of us, or all of us. But, we will learn to trust each other, like Swordfish’s protagonist trusted the hotel doorman to open the door for him and hold it open until he entered the hotel, a key moment in ‘Floating Frozen Turkeys,’ perhaps his most ambitious work. Spanning 9,142 pages, nobody has ever read it all the way through, cleverly protecting it from the back-stabbing insults of literary critics who nearly universally condemn Swordfish’s works as vile, tautological, trivial, vice-ridden, incomprehensible, insulting, liberal, ersatz, puerile, and makeshift. This semester, you will become the bags over your heads.”

The students seemed eager to proceed. I looked forward to the experiment. Yes, it was an experiment. The next class-meeting would be the beginning of my revolution in University teaching—I would win the State University at Cowbridge award for “Believable Instruction” and get tenure. I could marry the student I’ve been living with since her Freshman year. Things were looking up. Then I got the news. One of my students was trying on bags at Hannaford’s and was mistaken for a robber. He was shot 12 times by the newly hired bipolar security guard. Since I had required my students to wear bags over their heads, I was charged with conspiracy to commit robbery. I am serving a one-year sentence. During my trial I was known in the newspapers as “Professor Bag Man.”

The students staged a demonstration protesting my conviction and proclaiming my innocence. They all wore bags over their heads and chanted “We are the paper bags over our heads.” The demonstrations were ineffective. It rained and the bags turned into paper mush. No more bags, no more protest. That was it. Here I am. I have decorated my cell with paper bags. I am grateful to the prison authorities for allowing me to do so.

Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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