The Double-down Trope in Rhetoric

  Here’s another from the bin. My memory tells me it is called “Mr. Valiant-is-Truth Enters Heaven:”  

When he understood it, he called for his friends, and told them of it. Then said he, I am going to my Father’s; and though with great difficulty I have got hither, yet now I do not regret me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage and my courage and skill to him that can get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness before me that I have fought His battle who will now be my rewarder. When the day that he must go hence was come, many accompanied him to the river-side, into which as he went, he said ‘Death, where is thy sting?’ And as he went down deeper, he said, ‘Grave, where is thy victory?’ So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.

John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress

Perhaps the word is “bracing.” Bracing, but also chilling: you’ve got to admire the focus and purpose and commitment, but I’m not sure I’d want this guy as my neighbor, and certainly not as District Attorney: it smacks a bit much of the 72 virgins.

But there is just a hint of ironic detachment there—so slight that I’m not sure whether Bunyan got it, or whether it is pure accident. “My courage and skill to him that can get it.” This has a frigid directiness that rises to the level of a rhetorical strategy. It makes me think of the in-your-face punchlines of so many old British (well, maybe Scotch-Irish) folk songs—the kind so cheerfully pillaged by Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and others. I’m thinking of:

It’s true my waist be slender,
My hands be white and small,
But it would not change my countenance
To see ten thousand fall.

Or

What care I of house and land?
What care I of money?
I’d rather sleep on the cold, cold ground
In the arms of my Gypsy Davy.

[It’s hardly an accident that the speakers in these two verses are women]. Anyway, my point is that this in-your-face “you talkin’ to me?” approach—call it the “double down” trope in rhetoric—suggests, and is calculated to suggest, just how volatile and unstable the reality is. I wonder if Bunyan saw it that way.