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Tropes
"Tropes are the dreams of speech."
Vladimir Nabokov, Ada
Whatever they are, tropes are certainly among the strangest of phenomena. They are like dreams, I guess, in the way they seem to come out of nowhere, jolt, disturb, and amaze us, and then fall away leaving only a residue or a trace of their impact. They can seem secondary to the primary business of a sentence, mere embellishments, gew-gaws painted on plain, honest words by poets, lovers, politicians and other suspicious characters. Similes, metaphors, personifications, and hyperboles are the tropes that, in particular, can seem like rhetorical hood ornaments.
And yet, tropes are so ever-present in language, so suited to our brains, that, like dreams, it is often hard to decide what is trope and what is not, or where a trope begins or even whether it has ended. And when a trope does fade away, its memory can be more significant than the message it helped to deliver.We may get caught up inside a trope without even knowing it. A game of baseball can become infused the vocabulary of bloody warfare. A student's progress over the course of a term can suddenly be cast as an expedition up the sheer side of a mountain. Tropes can be dangerous distorters of reality. They can also be organizing agents that sort our activities, synchronize our mutual understandings, or focus our thoughts.
And yet, tropes are so ever-present in language, so suited to our brains, that, like dreams, it is often hard to decide what is trope and what is not, or where a trope begins or even whether it has ended. And when a trope does fade away, its memory can be more significant than the message it helped to deliver.We may get caught up inside a trope without even knowing it. A game of baseball can become infused the vocabulary of bloody warfare. A student's progress over the course of a term can suddenly be cast as an expedition up the sheer side of a mountain. Tropes can be dangerous distorters of reality. They can also be organizing agents that sort our activities, synchronize our mutual understandings, or focus our thoughts.
A writer must deal in tropes. The long history of the study of rhetoric has been to a great extent the study of tropes. Following this link will lead you to a schematic treatment of the world of tropes, and an attempt to organize the major tropes and figures into a meaningful system. But there is one very important thing to bear in mind about tropes. They are called devices but they really don't work like anything else we would call a device. Because of their complex, schematic, and in some cases outright geometric configurations, then can seem like little plug-in that once we know what they look like we can add to our prose or poems to boost the voltage -- like adding capacitors to an electronic circuit. This is going about it backwards.
Tropes existed before their names. A syllepsis or a metaphor or a pun was a possible feature of your natural discourse way before you learned their names. They are like deja vu . No one needs the name of this creepy experience to know that it exists, and no one can force a deja vu to happen just by wishing it so. A conspiracy of activity in the brain suddenly produces a strange cohesive feeling that life is happening twice. Deja vu happens to us; we don't call it into being. So it is with a trope, whose presence in a sentence is just as singular and tectonic an occasion as a moment of deja vu is in a train of thought. But neither tropes or deja vu are things to be forced into being. You're best advised to just let them happen. They will. Their shapes are already laced into your imagination. On the other hand, I suppose it helps to know what they look like before hand. A casual study of tropes may help call them into action on your behalf when you write. So you can say: "Lookit! I just dropped an epanalepsis in that sentence, didn't I? Well, I couldn't be more pleased." "Whoa! There I go again. Litotes!" But don't imagine that you can fill a shaker with tropes and sprinkle it over your prose to make them more piquant. It doesn't work that way. They must sprout naturally from the places where they are needed. Again, like deja vu, these little beauties are deep, deep mysteries. Neither neurological science nor evolutionary biology has a clue as to what they are doing in our brains. They are the dreams of speech. And we mortals are the fields these dream creatures play in. |
Pedantic Note:The word trope springs from the Greek verb trepein (τρέπειν) "to turn, to change," and what is implied is that when a trope occurs in prose or poetry some aspect of the ordinary, untroped word or words employed has been changed -- either obviously (He was dogged by doubt. [metaphor]) or subtly (Give me a hand. [synecdoche]) or absurdly ("Onions! Awesome!"[hyperbole]). Rhetoricians and theorists over the centuries have focused on a sticky matter of terminology. Tropes are widely accepted to be a subcategory of what was known in Latin as figurae, or, now in English, as figures of speech. Figures of speech were variously seen to include tropes, in which meaning is somehow changed, and schemes, from the Greek noun skema ( σχήμα) "shape" in which the arrangement or configuration of sentences, words, or letters is altered in a way to add some rhetorical energy to the the ordinary or unschematized way the language might have happened. Schemes included such figures as anaphora (Who's in; who's out; who's inside-out?), alliteration (fit as a fiddle), chiasmus ("Fair is foul and foul is fair").
Hairsplitting, lily-gilding, and the cat-like meanderings of scholars over the same centuries has led to mild, collegial disagreement in which the line between the schemes and the tropes has blurred so hopelessly that it is now accepted to conflate the two categories as both being in essence tropic (something changes in both cases), which renders the former uniting term, figure of speech, unneeded, and makes "trope" the best candidate for survival. Not only is it monosyllabic, which is stylistically nice, trope is also an exclusively rhetorical word, unlike "figure" or "scheme,"which have other competing definitions, (e.g., "Her figure got him scheming"). I will thus use "trope" to refer to all figures of speech, be they formally classed as tropes or schemes. Pedantic Note within a Pedantic Note: One of the great modern rhetoricians (see The Experts), Richard A. Lanham, traces the broad authority of the trope/scheme distinction back to a surprisingly recent origin: "The body of opinion which makes trope a truly metaphorical change in a word's use, a change in meaning, and scheme a superficial or merely decorative change, really took hold in modern theorizing - so far as I can trace it . . ." and that leads him to observe that the recent emphasis on the distinction "might trouble modern students more than it has." Earlier, he had noted that "the placing of a word in a highly artificial pattern -- a Scheme -- usually involves some change in its meaning" thus attributing to schemes a trope-like quality. |