kazm.cdr


Metafiguration

In one of my previous articles on the subject, titled“Microtropes, macrotropes, metatropes” (2004), I
proposed a triple subdivision of semantic stylistic devices
according to the level of language at which they operate and
according to their functional scope (the range of the text
which is their domain in the logical sense). Thus microtropes
(small figures), the semantic figures of traditional poetics and
rhetoric, operate within phrases or, at most, sentences.
Macrotropes (big figures), in turn, organize sequences of
sentences, usually fragments of larger texts or even entire
shorter texts (e.g. lyric poems). Their prototypical instances
are extended (Homeric) similes and extended metaphors. The
concept of macrotropes originates in the distinction drawn by

Roman Jakobson (1956) between the metaphoric and metonymic modes that structure
various discourses. At the third level of description, metatropes (large figures) are
perceived as those which structure and construe entire discourses as if from the outside.
The idea goes back to Hayden White’s (1973, 1978) tropological tetrad consisting of
metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony. However, in the light of the suggestions
scattered across postmodernist literary criticism (Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, Geoffrey
Hartman, James Hillis Miller), I have proposed to extend this list. In the discussion
which follows below it is worth remembering that metatropes are figures of the second
order, active within the discourse whose subject is another discourse and that they are
not overtly present in the text, like their more limited relatives – micro- and macrotropes.

The idea of applying stylistic figures to the holistic analysis of discourse is
traceable, in contemporary poetics, to Jakobson’s influential article “Two aspects of
language and two types of linguistic disturbances” (1956). The two dominant
dimensions of language, according to the author, are the metaphoric mode (based on
similarity and choice) and the metonymic mode (based on contiguity and actual
presence). Metaphor and metonymy were thus promoted to the rank of super-devices
useful in structuring various, very broadly understood discourses, not only on the
linguistic but also on the artistic level (to mention only painting or cinematographic art).

The Jakobsonian distinction between two opposing aspects of thought and of
linguistic expression (metaphoric and metonymic) was very aptly applied by David
Lodge to the analysis of modernist literature in his well-known study The Modes of
Modern Writing (1977). Of real import are Lodge’s observations that prose whose
general macrostructure turns out to be, e. g., metonymic may contain a considerable
number of metaphors at the level of the stylistic microstructure (and vice versa), which
corroborates my belief that the distinction between the micro- and macrostylistic levels
(overt) on the one hand and the metastylistic level (covert) on the other, is fully justified.
Lodge demonstrates, importantly, that a macrometaphoric or macrometonymic text does
not have to be literary at all and that it may contain no microfigures whatsoever, thus

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El bieta 
Chrzanowska-Kluczewska



being simply non-figurative at the lowest level. It should be stressed that what Jakobson
and Lodge describe in terms of macrofiguration, already bears in itself the potential for
metafiguration, for a hidden text-forming stylistic and rhetorical dimension.

In what concerns the scope of stylistic figures, sometimes referred to as the
tropological space (Foucault, 1966; White, 1978), the suggestions have been voiced to
the effect that a given metafigure may impose its organization on: 1) a whole literary
work, including longer narrative forms, 2) the entire genre (prose, lyric poetry or drama),
3) the whole style of the epoch (Classicism vs. Romanticism, Romanticism vs. Realism,
Naturalism vs. Modernism, etc.). Lodge (1977: 109) projects this distinction onto an
even wider area: in his view the poetic/literary is homologous with the metaphoric mode,
while the non-literary is an analogue of metonymy.

A metatrope, in accordance with its etymology, should be understood as a ‘self-
aware’ and ‘reflexive’ figure, viz. a figure that distances itself in relation to a particular
text, a figure capable of ‘talking about itself’, about the figures in the lower domains,
about the language whose part it is but which it can transcend in its own way. White
(1973, 1978), the meritorious creator of tropics for historical and historiographic
discourse, maintains that tropes may in fact cease to be figures proper and change into
large  textual  models, reaching in substance the status of rhetorical  modalities.

The tropological duet of Jakobson’s  and Lodge’s seems, however, to be too modest.
As a result, White has extended the list to include four basic  tropes (master-ttropes
according to Kenneth Burke’s terminology), which – in the light of our taxonomy – are
nothing else but four  chief  metatropes.
These are:
1) metaphor – the trope of similarity; the iconic trope
2) metonymy – the trope of the objective though accidental contiguity; the indexical

trope
3) synecdoche – the trope of essentiality, salience, of particularity or of generality
4) irony – the trope of exchanging truth for falsehood; according to White, the

opposite of metaphor and the figure superordinate in relation to the remaining
master tropes. For White irony is the figure  of  distance, displayed not only by the
speaker in relation to himself/herself or in relation to reality, but the figure in which
discourse distances itself from itself (thus a metatrope par excellence).

The idea of these four leading tropes originates (as admitted by White) not only from
contemporary poetics (K. Burke, N. Frye, R. Jakobson). The intertextual roots of White’s
tropics reach back to Giambattista Vico’s La Scienza nuova (1725, 1730). Both Burke
and Vico drew, in turn, from classical tropics, thus the distant source of the concept of
metafiguration can be perceived in Aristotle’s poetics.
Is White’s great foursome exhaustive as the list of models that underlie all discourses?
The answer seems to be negative and the suggestions as to a possible broadening of the
set of what I dub metatropes (metafigures)* appear in the vast modern criticism of the
poststructuralist and deconstructionist current. And though much could be said against
deconstruction as the Derridian philosophical (or rather philosophical-literary) system,
researchers in the fields of literary semantics, stylistics or poetics cannot afford to pass

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by those writings indifferently, recognizing that their focus is rhetoric and a profoundly
understood tropics of natural language. Let us then give below a cursory overview of
other candidates for metatropes.
5) Antithesis, the game of oppositeness and antinomy, in Barthes’s opinion

(1970/1999: 52) is the “best known among rhetorical figures”. An exemplary model
of antitheticality is one of the so-called “Lucy Poems” by William Wordsworth:

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears.
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthy years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks and stones, and trees.

The pivot of the semantic construction is here a representation of the opposition
between life and death. What is of particular interest, however, is the fact that this
oppositeness is not explicitly signalled at either the micro- or the macrostylistic level,
which lack antonymous pairs of lexemes. Hence, it is an excellent instance of the
stylistic device functioning at a higher, implicit level, namely at the level of metatropes.
The metatropological opposites, which are not overtly given in the text, but remain
hidden at a higher level of interpretation, require an obvious effort on the part of the
reader and invite him/her to participate in the game in which multiple senses can be
generated freely, though not endlessly. Hillis Miller (1986) mentions over twenty such
concealed opposites (apart from the basic contrast between the living and the dead girl)
which lie covertly at what I propose to call the metatropological, second-order level of
interpretation.
6) Inversion is another large figure invoked by Barthes and claimed to be ubiquitous

in, e. g., Marcel Proust’s prose. Barthes defines inversion as a technique by which
we unite two contrasting states in the same object and, consequently, transform the
appearance into its opposite. Hence this form of discourse is founded on
equivocation, whose essence has been epitomized in the Shakespearian “Fair is foul
and foul is fair” (Macbeth).

7) Chiasmus (which should not be confused here with a classical figure of syntactic
inversion) is a broadly understood ‘reversal’. Following de Man (1979a) and Hillis
Miller (1986), we can claim that it is grounded on the transformation of concepts
into their own contraries, that is on the transposition of particular elements, as a
result of which meanings of words change into sets of contradictory senses. 
The discriminating reader will have noticed that both inversion and chiasmus are
akin to antithesis, though the arrangement of antinomies/contradictions is different
within each of the figures mentioned.

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8) Catachresis (abusio), a semantic abuse/misuse  (in traditional stylistics a metaphor
based on a shocking association), in White’s opinion is a foundation of a peculiar
rhetoric present in Michel Foucault’s writings, who was much in its favour. White
maintains that this unusually capacious metatrope sanctions the whole bundle of
figures based on various kinds of logical and semantic transgression, such as:
paradox, oxymoron, hysteron-proteron, metalepsis, prolepsis, antonomasia, etc.

9) Paronomasia, in a metafigurative sense (suggested by de Man, 1982) of inexact
imitation, not solely in the basic phonetic sense of partial homophony, is in effect
the metatrope of incomplete, unsuccessful mimesis, an abortive or
straightforwardly impossible imitation of reality.

10) Euphemism, in the metafigurative sense called also euphemia (Hartman, 1985), can
be defined as the large figure of toning  down,  lessening and mitigating. It is present,
for instance, in the above-quoted “Slumber” by Wordsworth, who – through the
mouth of the poetic persona - assumes such a euphemic distance in relation to the
subject of the demise of the beloved. In my opinion a natural relative of euphemia
is the general discourse strategy discussed in 11).

11) Suppression,  passing  over  (aposiopesis,  paralepsis),  insinuation belongs,
undoubtedly, to principal rhetorical figures. Indeed, it far exceeds the frames of
particular literary creations, being – in fact – one of fundamental dimensions of
discourse, not necessarily limited to literature. It is indissolubly connected not only
with the pragmatic category of politeness, but also with one of the defining features
of human language: prevarication, running along the scale from patent falsehood
through half-truths to truth concealed.

12) Exaggeration, something like meta-hhyperbole, was taken by Maxim Gorky to
function as a fundamental law of artistic creation in general. Exaggeration is clearly
present in visual arts and in music, hence it can be claimed to act as a cultural, not
only linguistic metatrope.

13) Anomaly  is understood here not in the narrow sense of the conflict of semantic
features between particular lexemes but rather as a very broadly conceived
strangeness. According to Hillis Miller (1986), it is an “inexhaustible” property of
any literary text, due to the fact that our “Western” languages oscillate between
being concurrently logical and illogical, or even outright anti-logical. Anomaly
defined in this way displays strong connections with the category of
defamiliarization,  deautomatization or estrangement (cf. Shklovsky’s ostranienije).
Although the device named ‘estrangement’, a metatrope that tries to counteract
boredom lurking around us, is a spiritus movens of linguistic creations and of the
entire culture, on the other pole of linguistic practice it is counterbalanced (as
pointed out by White) by the contrary technique in which we apply figuration in
order to ‘familiarize’, ‘domesticate’ or ‘render normal’ the strangeness present in
the surrounding extralinguistic reality.

14) Allegory in traditional stylistics consists in creating a more fully elaborated image or
symbolic narration whose implication is either moralizing or referring in a general
way to la condition humaine. In de Man’s and Hillis Miller’s considerations it obtains,

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however, the rank of second-order narration, thus of a metatrope which is a narration
about another discourse and stylistic figures couched in it. Already the title itself of a
well-known study by de Man Allegories of Reading (1979b) implies that for him
allegory constituted the basic way of signification and of interpretation at the same
time. It appears, then, that this deconstructionist allegory is an instance of the second-
order symbolization, the symbol of lesser symbols, in a word: a metasymbol.

The enumeration of large figures of discourse has, for the time being, been
exhausted. Yet the list of metatropes is evidently an open one, contrary to the set of small
figures of traditional stylistics and rhetoric, which – albeit running in hundreds – is
already closed. Further investigations of language, literature and non-literary discourse
(in its most comprehensive, cultural aspect) will certainly add to it new ideas or reassess
old conceptions and the taxonomy postulated above.

In all probability, at least an important figure of simile should find its place among
serious candidates for metatropes. And although simile has been eclipsed by the all-
powerful metaphor, of which it is a foundation, its importance and independent status in
structuring several artistic and non-artistic texts cannot be denied. Seda Gasparyan’s
(2000) comprehensive treatment of this unduly neglected trope speaks strongly in favour
of its role in metafiguration.

An important query raised in this connection concerns the number of metatropes. I
strongly believe that their set, though open at the present stage of research, is not infinite.
What is more, it should be kept within reasonable limits and include only important
figures. In Chrzanowska-Kluczewska (2004) I point to the fact that a number of poetic
and prose works (be it in the English or any other literature) are constructed around
figures that are not necessarily semantic ones, in other words, not genuine tropes (to
mention only phonetic,  morphological or structural stylistic devices). But even if we
allow the level of macrofiguration to be enlarged to accommodate those other poetic
techniques, we should be very careful about extrapolating them onto the metafigurative
level. If we want metatropes to possess a truly explanatory power, their list – for
methodological reasons – should not be unduly extended.

Metatropes seem to be an inherent feature of human language, possibly universal.
Yet, it is worth realizing that they are primarily the figures of thought, originally
cognitive and conceptual and only derivatively linguistic. This claim is a reflection of
my personal belief that there is nothing in the human language that has not existed prior
to it in the human mind. White and Derrida (1977) went even further in their opinion that
metatropes, by their very nature, are pre-cognitive and pre-conceptual, which boils down
to saying that figurativeness (not necessarily reduced to metaphor) lies at the core of
language and cognition and that it is archetypal and primary.

Notes:
* I do not draw here a traditional distinction between figures and tropes but use the

terms metafigure and metatrope interchangeably (in fact, the concept of figure is
more encompassing than that of trope, since stylistic figures can be subdivided into

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phonetic, morphological, syntactic, graphic and semantic ones, with only the last
group qualifying as genuine tropes).

References:
1. Barthes R. S / Z. Warszawa, Wydawnictwo KR, 1970/1999.
2. Chrzanowska-Kluczewska E. Microtropes, macrotropes, metatropes. // Arbeiten

aus  Anglistik und Amerikanistik. Band 29. 2004, 65-80.
3. Derrida J. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1977.
4. Foucault M. Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris:

Gallimard, 1966.
5. Gasparyan S. K. Figura sravnienija w funkcjonalnom osviestchenii. Yerevan:

Izdatielstvo Yerevanskogo Universiteta, 2000.
6. Hartman G. Easy Pieces. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
7. Hillis Miller J. On edge: The crossways of contemporary criticism. M. Eaves and

M. Fischer (eds.). Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism. Ithaca and New York:
Cornell University Press, 1986.

8. Jakobson R. Two aspects of language and two types of linguistic disturbances. // R.
Jakobson and M. Halle (eds.). Fundamentals of Language. The Hague: Mouton, 1956.

9. Lodge D. The Modes of Modern Writing. Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology
of Modern Literature. London: Edward Arnold, 1977.

10. de Man P. Autobiography as Defacement. // Modern Language Notes 94, 1979a,
919-930.

11. de Man P. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke,
and Proust. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979b.

12. de Man P. The Resistance to Theory. Yale French Studies 63 (1982).
13. Vico G. La Scienza nuova. Milan: Mondadori, 1725, 1730/1967.
14. White H. Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe.

Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1973.
15. White H. Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore and

London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1978.

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