Hypallage and the Literalization of Metaphors in a Dickens Text

Abstract

One of reasons for famously inimitable quality of Dickens's style is its oscillation between literal and figurative uses of vocabulary. Dickens's texts are monuments to idiom of his times--shape-shifting monuments in which figurative language often turns into fabula details and sometimes seems to generate fabula events. this paper, I shall focus on one specific figure of speech, namely hypallage, metaphor's neighbor, which shares some features of metonymy and enthymeme. I shall discuss local effects of this figure and its possible connection with fabula events. Greek meaning of hypallage is interchange, exchange; most common example is her beauty's face. Cyclops episode of Ulysses, Joyce provides us with hypallage as word play: when Joe Hynes offers narrator a drink, saying Could you make a hole in another pint? answer is Could a swim duck? (405). According to Walter Shandy in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, love can hardly be discussed without this quaint trope: You can scarce, said [my father], combine two ideas together upon it [love], brother Toby, without an hypallage--What's that? cried my uncle Toby. cart before horse, replied my father-- --And what is to do there? cried my uncle Toby-- Nothing, quoth my father, but to get in--or let it alone. Tristram Shandy, VIII.xiii.501 Walter uses idiom the cart before horse as an image-bearing example of exchange or inversion; Toby hears it literally, reviving metaphor and personifying cart as he. his rejoinder, Walter extends metaphor by cancelling Toby's personification, reinterpreting as a human subject faced with one of radical absurdities of human condition and having to consider taking a plunge and getting trapped in container. (1) This is where Dickens must have gone to school for use of extended metaphors. Yet Dickensian hypallage is not same as Walter Shandy's. Rather, it belongs to more narrowly defined but also more broadly used variety of this trope, namely epithet transfer, in which inversion takes shape of attribution of a quality to wrong exponent. (2) Unlike Irish-bull transpositions, such as Could a swim duck?, epithet transfer is akin to metaphor in that it moves a feature from one object to another. Yet unlike metaphor, epithet transfer does not involve a substitution of a noun for a noun-adjective phrase, as in he is a lion instead of he is a very brave person. Instead, it transfers adjective from an unnamed noun or pronoun to a non-metaphorical noun. Here are some examples of epithet-transfer hypallage in poetry, before and after Dickens. Tintern Abbey, recollecting his unhappy five years between his two visits to river Wye, Wordsworth's speaker places himself In lonely / Amid din of towns and cities. Lonely rooms is a hypallage: it is lyrical hero who felt lonely--the were no hermitage but spaces of precarious separation from urban din. This epithet shift has a metonymic force rooted in contiguity: compressing two inputs, an alienating indoor space and lover of nature who inhabits it, conceptual blend (see Fauconnier and Turner, esp. pp. 113-37) suggests that loneliness, solitude, an almost Platonic reality, was extended over (and perhaps also forced into) Procrustean container of unloved lodgings. It is in and from that setting that speaker had his escapes into memories of landscapes of earlier days and into moments of recreated joy in which aesthetic, psychological, and mystical became interfused. Mental escape is less valorized in another poem of nostalgia, Thomas Hardy's The Self-Unseeing, where speaker revisits his childhood home. first stanza is as follows: Here is ancient floor, Footworn and hollowed and thin, Here was former door Where dead feet walked in. …