The Four Master Tropes as Informing Principles

Abstract

In these days of one innovation after other in field of criticism, it is truly surprising that a brief chapter from a book written in 1945, Kenneth Burke's A Grammar of Motives,' can be so critically useful. I refer to metaphor, metonymy, synechdoche, and Burke begins in his seminal Master Tropes. And my primary concern with them here will be not with their purely figurative usage, but with their role in discovery and description of 'the truth' (p. 503). It is found in remainder of work that what Burke is referring to as the truth is use of these tropes as informing principles for complete works. Stated differently, it is Burke's belief, and ours, that reader participation in production of is goal of literature; formation of a degree of co-authorship that is achieved as readers flesh out an author's skeletal presentation, as with metaphor and synecdoche, or as they get it straight, as with metonymy and irony. This paper is intended to shed some light on genesis and razon d'etre for Four Master Tropes as Informing Principles, and readings in Kenneth Burke and Hayden White are admittedly material cause for article, but this is so only because they strike this writer as addressing themselves to more general questions of intrinsic nature of literary structures; an issue that is as old as Aristotle's Poetics. Starting with premise that literature is not on same order as other forms of verbal communication (Mukarovsky, Sklovsky) to degree that its meaning is never clear until readers participate in its production (Barthes, Iser, Naumann), this study deals with critical questions of unity (Fry), transformation (Todorov) and self-regulation (Culler), and it does so with conviction that literature's off-centeredness is directly attributable to its tropological discourse. Exceptional works that cannot be selfregulated without taking recourse in one or other of four master tropes form body of this article, but, believing that principle is a general one that obtains in all literature, a sampling of less familiar works is also included in exemplification of principle itself. Readers are encouraged to examine their own favorite works in this new light. This article's two charts are complementary. The Modal 'plot' Phases one is an attempt to answer more than two thousand-year question of literary unity, and while it does not directly address itself to works that display something less than this expectation, footnote eight and bibliography included (Prince) redresses this omission. The other chart, Literary Causes, is based on Scholastic claim that everything that is must have its contributing causes, so it follows that we are to benefit in probing a literary work for its constituent causes. The article concludes with question of irony, and it is specific about what this means with respect to literary constructions, but this is little different from initial part that pretends to show that everything, from simile to symbol, is in effect a metaphoric construction. Many are definitions offered for METAPHOR, but central to all of them is idea that one subject is seen in light of another either through a tacit or implicit comparison. Elaborating on bimembered nature of this trope, I. A. Richards calls first object tenor and second vehicle,2 but it should be immediately noted that what we actually see in text before us is always vehicle, while tenor is always that unmentioned object that is merely suggested by image given. Depending on nature of two objects and on type of relationship formed between them, result is called simile, metaphor, personification, allegory or symbol. When an identity is established between two unequal objects, usually by saying that they are like or similar to each other, a SIMILE results, and as beginning point in this paper it is a highly useful concept. Our thesis is that there always exists an implicit or explicit similarity among all literary works; an intertextuality that makes itself felt as result of extended reading experiences. For time being,