In fictional discourse, however, the figures are foregrounded on the surface of the text where their figurality seems to call attention to itself But as Paul de Man and other critics have pointed out, nonfictional discourse is no less tropological or allegorical than literary discourse This is apparently why Paul de Man has tided one of his books Allegories of Reading If the basic structure of language is figurative, then not only does imaginative literature rely on figurative language, but so does criticism (one form of nonfiction) itself Therefore, critical writing, since it is a figure of another figure, is allegory In fact, so pervasive has this idea become in poststructuralist theory that allegory has taken on the signification of trope of tropes, the master trope that stands for tropology in general (Van Dyke 27-29) It is easy enough to give examples of troping across the text from literary theory and practice For example, Roman Jakobson 's claim that the develop ment of a discourse takes place essentially through similarity (metaphor) or contiguity (synecdoche) is one approach to tropological structure that literary critics have used to describe the organization of literary texts In his essay, "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances/' Jakobson maintains that metaphoric constructions dominate in lyric poetry, whereas metonymic constructions predominate in epic poetry Metaphoric constructions characterize the romantic novel, and metonymic structures dominate the realistic novel (91 -92) In The Modes of Modern Writing, David Lodge explores the distinction between the metaphoric and metonymic poles in the twentieth-century English novel For example, Lodge describes the opening of EM Forster's A Passage to India as metonymic in structure, connecting topics on the basis of contiguity, not similarity" (98-99) In contrast, he describes the opening of Dickens' Bleak House as metaphorical writing, with the images and figures of the mud and the fog taking on symbolic significance (100) This content downloaded from 2074613145 on Wed, 27 Apr 2016 06:33:15 UTC All use subject to http://aboutjstororg/terms 104 Journal of Advanced Composition In Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye makes a direct connection between trope and genre in the first essay on the theory of modes In this essay, Frye characterizes types of fiction "by the hero's power of action" (33) This results in five modes: myth, romance, high mimetic, low mimetic, and ironic Each of these modes is dominated by a particular trope Myth, for example, "is an art of implicit metaphorical identity" (136) When myth is displaced into romance, however, its metaphorical structure is replaced "by some form of simile, analogy, significant association, incidental accompany ing imagery, and the like" (137) Frye does not make connections between trope and genre for all modes, but we can envision a sequence of tropological structures for each of the modes ranging from metaphor, to simile, to metonymy, to synecdoche, to irony Tropes in Nonliterary Texts I have said that it is easy to give examples of troping across the text from literary theory and practice However, it is not as easy to give examples from composition theory and practice because in composition studies we have unconsciously set up binary oppositions between plain language and orna mental language, between literature and nonliterature, between literary discourse and figurative discourse, between literary discourse and composi tion If we deconstruct these oppositions, however, we find that the four master tropes are not only basic strategies for producing meaning and making connections and associations across literary texts, but are also basic strategies for organizing all kinds of texts In this respect, the tropes can function much like the classical topoi The work of Hayden White offers interesting possibilities for making the transition from literary to nonliterary texts in developing a tropological theory of arrangement In such books as Metahistory and Tropics of Discourse, White uses the Vichean scheme of the four master tropes to describe the rhetorical operations that can occur at various organization levels in a historical text In his theoretical studies, White's aim is to deconstruct objectivist approaches to history Historians tell their students to go out and find the facts and then * 'write them up," he complains But there are no facts out there to be written up The past is not' 'given "; it is' 'constituted'' by the historian In the writing of history, there is interpretation from the very beginning What the historian actually does, White maintains, is to take a chronicle of events and "turn it into history'' by emplotting it as a story of a certain kind To do this, historians make use of four kinds of pregeneric plot structures that Northrop Frye identifies in Anatomy of Criticism as romance, tragedy, comedy, and satire When readers following a story perceive it to be a story of a certain kind, they experience the effect of having the story explained to them But before the historian emplots these events as a story of a certain kind, he or she must "prefigure" them and "constitute" them as an object of This content downloaded from 2074613145 on Wed, 27 Apr 2016 06:33:15 UTC All use subject to http://aboutjstororg/terms Tropics of Arrangement 105 thought This is done by means of the four master tropes These tropes constitute the "latent" or "deep structure" of the text Like the topoi of classical rhetoric and the methods of development of composition theory, the tropes describe "relationships" among events in the world of experience They also describe textual relationships As the historian seeks to understand the relationships that obtain between parts and parts, and parts and wholes, in the historical field, he or she must necessarily use tropes because tropes represent the power of the imagination to grasp the world figuratively The tropes lead to modes of emplotment and to other strategies of interpretation Each trope corresponds to a particular mode of emplotment, so that the dominant trope in a historical romance would be metaphorical identification, metonymic displacement in tragedy, synecdochic integration in comedy, and ironic detachment and reflexivity in satire But tropes do not only constitute the deep structure of literary and historical texts; they also constitute the figural and organizational structure of all discourse Following Hayden White's suggestion for dividing historical texts into dominant tropological modes, we can divide nonfictional texts into meta phoric, metonymic, synecdochic, and ironic modes This kind of division suggests that just as it is possible to organize a nonfictional essay using a particular method of development (for example, comparison/contrast, divi sion into parts, cause and effect), it may also be possible to organize an essay using a dominant tropological mode (for instance, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony) For example, if a writer sets out to write an essay and stresses the similarities that bind the elements of experience together, he or she would be working in the metaphoric mode If a writer moves from one element of experience to another, that is, from part to part, he or she would be working in the metonymic mode If a writer tries to make sense of experience by trying to understand the nature of the parts and the whole that make it up, he or she would be working in the synecdochic mode Finally, if a writer takes a reflective stance toward experience or toward the other tropological views of experience, he or she would be working in the ironic mode In brief, to organize a text tropologically, a writer would move from a metaphorical identification of units of experience, to their metonymic displacement, to a synecdochic representation of their part/whole or genus/species relations, to an ironic awareness of the disparity between what is stated and what is intended

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Tropics of Arrangement: A Theory of "Dispositio.".

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