Floating an Issue of Tropes

Abstract

With Kellner's Inflatable Trope as Narrative Theory: Structure or Allegory? [Diacritics, 11, No. 1 (1981), 14-28], controversy about nature and number of tropes might appropriately end. The rhetorical studies of past three decades have prepared ground for appropriation that Kellner concludes: a return of tropes to their proper meaning by refraction of their varied colors through Kant's Principles of Pure Understanding to reveal white of their literal source, and discovery that the order in which tropes present themselves in fourfold succession of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony strictly and logically entailed [p. 17]. The latter claim is modified in penultimate paragraph of Kellner's essay: the nature of these successive changes from one trope to next seems unmediated, catastrophically sudden and discontinuous [p. 27]. To explain inherent logic of radical discontinuity, we shall need an account of inter-tropesa catastrophe theory; but since phrase is an oxymoron, and both words (as Kellner notes) stem from separate roots meaning 'turn,' we have reinstated, at outer edge of explanatory system, very indeterminacy and figuration that were eliminated when tropes were reduced to a logical succession. That an analysis of tropes must end in such an ironic ricorso is something that Kellner knows. irony of rhetoric, Maria Ruegg remarks, that subordination of rhetoric ultimately depends on a rhetorical gesture; and effectiveness of that gesture has little to do with its epistemological qualifications, but much more with its power to persuade reader that such a of rhetoric is legitimate. The of rhetoric ultimately rests on a rhetoric of mastery [Metaphor and Metonymy, Glyph 6 (1979), p. 155]. In Jakobson, Kenneth Burke, and Hayden White, strategy is same: rather than condemning false colors of figures, rhetor inflates their importance, as Kellner notes, but at same time substitutes for polytropic suppleness of their traditional definitions a reductive schematism that makes them predictable displacements of literal usage. With this founding act of appropriation, problem of figuration is expelled from field being discussed and becomes an occulted tool in discourse used for its cultivation. For any analysis of tropes that would escape ensnarement in its subject, this is indeed only strategy available; hence its repetition. Si