Lecture
Almost every word has its own meaning. Yet we often use words not in their own sense but figuratively. This happens in everyday life (the sun rises; the rain drums on the roof), and it occurs even more often in literary works. Thus, already in the opening lines of Pushkin's «October 19» (1825) — «The forest sheds its crimson raiment,/Frost silvers the withered field» — of nine linguistic units only three appear in their literal sense. It is no accident that A.A. Potebnya held: «...poetry is always allegory»1. The scholar distinguished figurativeness «in the broad sense of the word,» which he took to include the problem of the poetic image, from figurativeness «in the narrow sense» — as «transference (metaphoricity)»2. Words used in a figurative sense are called tropes (from Gr. tropos — a turn, a turn of phrase).
The doctrine of tropes took shape in ancient poetics and rhetoric3. Aristotle already divided words into common and rare ones, including «transferred» words. He called the latter metaphors: «this is an alien name transferred from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or by analogy»4. Later, in literary scholarship, each variety of trope (all of which Aristotle called metaphor) received its own name (which is what will be discussed below). However, both in ancient stylistics and in modern literary studies, emphasis is placed on the well-established property of tropes — to mute, and at times even to destroy, the basic meaning of a word. As B.V. Tomashevsky emphasized, «usually, at the expense of this destruction of the literal meaning, its secondary features come to the fore in perception»1. V.P. Grigoriev points to the «transformations of language occurring in tropes, consisting in the transfer of a traditional designation into a different subject area»2. V.I. Korolkov, writing in connection with tropes, spoke of «an "unusual" (from the standpoint of ancient theorists) semasiologically two-plane use of a word, in which its sound realizes two meanings at once — the allegorical and the literal»3.
Tropes can be regarded as a form of the author's presence in the text, as «overt ways of modeling the world»4. Their properties are studied in the branch of theoretical poetics that B.V. Tomashevsky and V.M. Zhirmunsky called poetic semantics5. Sometimes tropes are classed among the devices of minor figurativeness. D.S. Likhachev treats them within the «poetics of literary devices»6.
Among literary theorists there is no unanimity as to what counts as a trope. Everyone recognizes metaphor and metonymy as tropes. Other varieties of trope — even such traditional ones as epithet, simile, synecdoche, periphrasis (sometimes written — periphrase), — are called into question. There is no unanimity regarding personification, symbol, allegory, oxymoron (another spelling occurs — oxymoron). Also classed among the tropes is irony (here we mean the rhetorical-stylistic device, not the aesthetic category).
Tropes are a property not only of poetry but also of prose. Let us recall the description of the blizzard from Pushkin's «The Captain's Daughter»: «The wind howled, a snowstorm arose. In an instant the dark sky merged with the sea of snow. Everything vanished». Further on, Pushkin, narrating from the perspective of the main character, Petrusha Grinev, seems to apologize for the metaphoricity of his prose, for the device of personification: «The wind howled with such fierce expressiveness that it seemed alive...» Almost a hundred years later A. Bely turns in his prose to poetic figurativeness without any reservation whatsoever. Figurativeness becomes the stylistic dominant of his prose: «Through my room the outer world distinctly pushed its way in — that is, what had fallen away from me and on which dreams flitted, sticking like wallpaper to the concealed rooms; and through them, from the corners, there flowed a current of gloomy life...» («Kotik Letaev»). Here every word is a trope. In this Bely is a disciple of Gogol, who held: «A novel, though written in prose, can nonetheless be a poetic creation»5.
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