Does anyone have any idea if there is a term to describe the technique that many Gothic authors use, especially Mary Shelley with the character of Victor Frankenstein, where the speaker claims that "there are no words to express the pain I felt that night", or "nobody can understand the agony I went through". Something along the lines of paralipsis or apophasis or ennoia (?) but I wasn't sure that these quite fit.

A lecturer once made it our weekly assignment to discover this term but I didn't return for the answer and have regretted it ever since!

You could go hunting in the Sylva Rhetoricae.

No amount of pondering can capture the real answer but will throw in 'unspeakable hyperbole' just for effect.

Not quite rhetorical, but how about ineffable and nescient agony?

Here is an article that delves deeply into that literary 'mechanism', without allowing Aramis to glean a compact term for it, other than perhaps 'negation': http://www.english.upenn.edu/Projects/knarf/Articles/kincaid.html

> Waiving as inadmissible, crude, and certainly unpublishable the possibility that Mary Shelley simply didn't have very many words at her disposal and was thus stymied...

heh, a nice example of paralipsis squared!

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You could go hunting in the Sylva Rhetoricae.

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Did not look at it last time here; that site is outstanding! Thanks for posting it.