Rough Truth: Synecdoche and Interpretation in The Egoist

Abstract

IliII1)F ALL FORMS OF FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE, synecdoche, the application of a term for a part to its whole, bears the most problematic relation to literal truth and meaning. Metaphor and metonymy are both absolutely controlled by one of the terms of their comparisons: the tenor of a metaphor is always basic, the figurative meaning derived; and the principle of contiguity, the ready association that governs metonymy, insures that the literal term displaced by the figure will always be understood. Synecdoche, however, is wholesale substitution. Where metaphor relies on analogy and metonymy on association, synecdoche is more purely representational: the synecdochic term not only emphasizes certain attributes of the whole, as a vehicle does its tenor; it replaces that whole with a single attribute. A valid synecdoche adequately embodies the whole more readily than metaphor or metonymy does; an inadequate one, by replacing the whole with a nonrepresentative part, obscures the basic term thoroughly by completely replacing it. It is this synecdochic capacity for distortion that Nietzsche abhors in On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense. word, he says, immediately becomes a concept, inasmuch as it is not intended to serve as a reminder of the unique and wholly individualized original experience to which it owes its birth, but must at the same time fit innumerable . . . unequal cases. Every