Tropes

Bill Long

I got into a big mess on "tropes" through an innocent enough mini-essay on my trophy, which I won at the recent National Senior Spelling Bee. As is my wont, my eye began to wander down the page of the OED, and it alighted on trope. I knew the word in its first (rhetorical) sense as "a figure of speech which consists in the use of a word or phrase in a sense other than that which is proper to it." That is, a trope is the use of figurative language to get across your meaning. Taking the cue from the Greek origin of the term, in "trophe" or "turning," I define trope simply as a "turn of phrase."

The Fun (or Chaos) Begins

But the rhetorical tradition in the West has bequeathed to us literally hundreds of terms that describe rhetorical devices a speaker might use to caress, manipulate or persuade an audience. My approach is to say that the basic rhetorical term is trope and that everything else is simply an attempt to refine that concept. But, not all agree. Actually, I think that no one agrees with me. For example, one of the leading works on rhetoric today, P.J. Corbett's Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student (OUP, 1971), isolates two basic words from which the streams of rhetorical terms flow: trope and scheme. The former is defined as a deviation from the ordinary and principal signification of a word, while the latter supposedly denotes a deviation from the ordinary pattern or arrangement of words. Prof. Gideon Burton, whose online rhetoric is very popular, has adopted this distinction. But, if you think real hard about it, the distinction is difficult to imagine much less apply. A trope then would be about different uses of words while a scheme would be about the arrangement of the words? Huh? Not only does the distinction not really make sense but it doesn't seem to be supported in the history of the Greek language. Scheme does have a rhetorical usage, but it isn't a major one. I am dissatisfied with the supposed distinction.

A Medieveal Rhetorician

So, where do I go for help? Where else but to Peter Ramus (1515-1572) a scholar who not only bequeathed a four-fold division of rhetorical devices to the West but was arguably the strongest influence on John Calvin in his discussions of the Eucharist, a central doctrinal divide between the Reformers and the Catholics (as well as the Reformers among themselves). He would divide figures of speech into four categories: metaphor, metonymy, synechdoche, irony. I think that if we look at the four words visually we can understand Ramus. Irony is where there is no overlap between the terms compared; metaphor is where there is some similarity; metonymy is where there is contiguity (to use Roman Jakobsen's terminology. Jakobsen is the post-modernist critic who would like to reduce language to metaphor and metonymy); and synechdoche is where one of the two terms contains the other. What a great visual feast.

Only thing is, I don't particularly like it. It seems, like the entire logical system of Ramus and other Renaissance logicians, a bit too artifical and rigid. Of course, the purpose of a classifier is to impose order on the world. In order to impose order, however, you sometimes have to place things on Procrustes' bed and either lengthen or lop off the legs. That is what I think happens with Ramus. You can spend many sleepless nights giving up some great pleasures while you try to figure out the difference between metonymy and synechdoche. If we simply were to return to the original meaning of metonymy, however, we would find that it means "to call by a new name," and is most frequently used by the Fifth Century B.C. historian Herodotus. Thus, it seems to be as broad a term as trope, but it just emphasizes the change of name while a trope emphasizes the change ("turning") of name.

My Answer (as Billy Graham used to say)

So here is what I propose to do. I will learn all the rhetorical terms, because they are usually pretty illuminative of human realities, but I will be hesitant to divide the world in ways that the teachers of rhetoric want me to divide the world. In my judgment all speech is rhetorical; all speech is metonymous or tropological, if by that we mean that all speech "changes the name" of the phenomenon we are trying to understand. We simply don't communicated unvarnished truth with pure terms to unsullied minds. The postmodernists and anyone who thinks about it for more than 18 seconds knows that this is true. So, let's not divide the world of language before we appreciate its unity as trope. To do otherwise kind of reminds me of the Berlin Conference in 1884-85 where the imperialist powers of the West divided Africa for their own possession. Let's get rid of the imperialist pretentions of the modern rhetoricians and return to the simplicity of trope. Then, in a second step, we might simply trace the history of the other terms. Now that will require some work. Maybe that is the reason why everyone wants to divide the world. Don't have to work quite as hard.