Floating an Issue of Tropes
Author(s): Wallace Martin
Source: Diacritics, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Spring, 1982), pp. 75-83
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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RESPONSE
FLOATING
OF
AN
ISSUE
TROPES
WALLACEMARTIN
This is a subject which has given rise to interminable disputes among the teachers of
literature, who have quarreled no less violently with the philosophers than among
themselves over the problem of the genera and species into which tropes may be
divided, their number and their correct classification.
- Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, XIII,v, trans. H. E. Butler (Loeb ed.)
With Kellner's "The Inflatable Trope as Narrative Theory: Structure or
Allegory?" [Diacritics, 11, No. 1 (1981), 14-28], controversy about the nature
and number of the tropes might appropriately end. The rhetorical studies of
the past three decades have prepared the ground for the appropriation that
Kellner concludes: a returnof the tropes to their proper meaning by refraction
of their varied colors through Kant's Principles of Pure Understanding to
reveal the white logic of their literal source, and the discovery that "the order
in which the tropes present themselves" in the fourfold succession of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony "is strictly and logically entailed" [p.
17]. The latter claim is modified in the penultimate paragraph of Kellner's
essay: "the nature of these successive changes" from one trope to the next
"seems unmediated, catastrophically sudden and discontinuous" [p. 27]. To
explain the "inherent logic" of radical discontinuity, we shall need an account
of "inter-tropes"- a "catastrophe theory"; but since the phrase is an oxymoron, and both words (as Kellner notes) "stem from separate roots meaning
'turn,'" we have reinstated, at the outer edge of the explanatory system, the
very indeterminacy and figuration that were eliminated when the tropes were
reduced to a logical succession.
That an analysis of tropes must end in such an ironic ricorso is something
that Kellner knows. "The irony of rhetoric," Maria Ruegg remarks, "is that the
subordination of rhetoric ultimately depends on a rhetorical gesture; and the
effectiveness of that gesture has little to do with its epistemological qualifications, but much more with its power to persuade the reader that such a
mastery of rhetoric is legitimate. The mastery of rhetoric ultimately rests on a
rhetoric of mastery" ["Metaphor and Metonymy," Glyph 6 (1979), p. 155]. In
Jakobson, Kenneth Burke, and Hayden White, the strategy is the same: rather
than condemning the false colors of the figures, the rhetor inflates their
importance, as Kellner notes, but at the same time substitutes for the polytropic suppleness of their traditional definitions a reductive schematism that
makes them predictable displacements of literal usage. With this founding
act of appropriation, the problem of figuration is expelled from the field being
discussed and becomes an occulted tool in the discourse used for its cultivation. For any analysis of tropes that would escape ensnarement in its subject,
this is indeed the only strategy available; hence its repetition.
Vol. 12 Pp. 75-83
DIACRITICS
0300-7162/82/0121-0075 $01.00 ? 1982 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
Si
When the distinctions between tropes, figures, and schemes no longer seem worth
sustaining and the first two parts of rhetoric (invention and disposition) are discarded, the
tropes must be pressed into service to account for both logical order and temporal succession. Ruegg's critique of the ways that Jakobson projects the paradigmatic axis of substitution onto the syntagmatic axis of contiguity might be applied, pari passu, to Kellner's
arguments concerning the "inherent narrativity" of tropes. But Kellner knows this too;
while perforce repeating all the mistakes in traditional treatments of the subject in the second part of his essay, he has listed unanswerable objections to them in the first part. In the
final turn of the last paragraph, he releases the tropes from his own schema so that they
can generate their own explanations. The use of tropes as a "philosopher's stone" so
ironically deprecated in the first part is dissolved by the discovery that they are a universal
solvent which not even the essay itself can contain.
Thus Kellner's analysis exposes itself as an ironic allegory in Paul de Man's mode - a
narrative of our (mis)understandingof the tropes [p. 28]. He leaves to the reader the inference that the conceptual revelations issuing from the etymologies that pepper the last two
paragraphs must be construed in light of an earlier quotation from Friedrich Schlegel:
"The best way not to be understood, or, rather, to be misunderstood, is to use words in
their original meanings, especially words from the ancient languages" [p. 16]. The elegantly staged aporia is not simply one expository method among others. It offers assurance
that the writer is not claiming the kind of mastery that vitiated earlier treatments of the
topic. In exchange for this sacrifice, he acquires the knowledge that he need not fear
mastery by others, since he has already acknowledged the validity of arguments that
could be used against his own. This strategy is scarcely a choice in our time; it imposes
itself on critics even when they wish to overcome it. As it becomes more common, two
problems involved in its use deserve attention: (1) The extent to which strategic considerations dictate the tactics of argument; the danger is that in the early stages of the dialectic,
anticipation of the aporia will warp the procedures used to attain it. (2) The relation of this
strategy to the situation of the text: whatever else they may be intended to explain,
Kellner's "inter-tropes"do not seem suitable to account for the practice of criticism as a
succession of texts mediated by contexts.
Kellner's essay offers exemplary ground for discussion of both problems, while at the
same time forcing anyone who might wish to discuss them to do so as a straight man [cf.
Andrzej Warminski, "A Question of an Other Order: Deflections of the Straight Man,"
Diacritics, 9, No. 4 (1979), pp. 70-78]. To argue that there are not in fact four master tropes
that succeed each other in the order he specifies is to repeat objections he has already
implied. Nevertheless, it is necessary to assume that Kellner does make historical and
epistemological claims about the tropes and to undertake engagement at this tactical
level, if only to display how the valorization of tradition, and rationalization of its conventions, contribute to this critical strategy. To question the strategy through reference to the
situation of the critical text is to step beyond the immediate context of argument to
tenuous inferences about some residue of meaning the critic may intend to deposit, or to
conjecture about sites over which he has no control. Yet it is precisely because the
strategy used by Kellner and others is (as I shall try to show) designed to exercise such control that the topic deserves more attention than it has received.
Kellner cites Vossius' CommentariorumRhetoricorum(1606) as evidence that the fourtrope sequence metaphor - metonymy - synecdoche - irony has been "customary" since
the Renaissance [p. 17]. The provenance of the custom is itself of interest; if it did not exist,
there would be no need to explain it. The reduction of the tropes to four is the work of
Ramus. Beginning from Quintilian's list of twelve in the Institutio Oratoria- the first three
of which were metaphor ("the commonest"), synecdoche, and metonymy-- Ramus
eliminated nine and added irony [Rhetoricae Distinctiones in Quintilianum; rpt. as Scholae
Rhetoricae, in Scholae in Liberales Artes (Hildesheim and New York: Olm, 1970), pp.
368-69]. In his discussion of the four, Ramus followed Quintilian's metaphor-synecdoche--metonymy order; in his preliminary naming of the four, however, the order is
metonymy, irony, metaphor, synecdoche. And it was the latter that his collaborator Talon
used in his Rhetorica. Why? For the same reason that Vossius, Burke, and Kellner use
different orderings - because of its inherent logic. Ramus's "natural method" involved
76
placing causes before effects. This principle is embodied in his list of the topics of logical
invention, which can be correlated with the order in which Talon (and Antoine Foclin, La
Rhetorique Francoise..., 1555) discusses the tropes. The first four topics are causes,
effects, subjects, and adjuncts (hence, metonymy); then opposites (irony), followed by
comparatives (metaphor); and finally, reasoning from names, divisions, and definitions,
corresponding to the whole - part and genus - species of synecdoche [W. S. Howell, Logic
and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), pp.
168-69].
Insofar as the listing of these four tropes as the principal ones became customary
during the five decades separating the first editions of Talon and Vossius, it did so through
the influence of Ramism. Vossius himself mentions three possible orders. The "natural"
one would be synecdoche, metonymy, metaphor, and irony, because it would yield the
sequence substitution of one thing for another, of features naturally related, of things that
resemble each other, and of contraries. When he lists them in the purported order of their
frequency, he follows Quintilian (as did Vico) in saying that metaphor is the commonest,
and follows the Ramists (as did most subsequent rhetoricians) in listing irony last. So long
as his precedents for naming metonymy second and synecdoche third remain unidentified, the "custom" of listing the tropes in this order would seem to have originated with
Vossius himself, as a result of the frequency with which he was cited in subsequent rhetorics [Catherine Magnien-Simonin, Poetique, 36 (1978), 497, note 7].
As a crucial figure in the modern history of the fourfold scheme, Vico is an ambiguous resource for his followers. The order in which he discusses the tropes- metaphor,
metonymy, synecdoche, and irony-does not correspond to what he considers the
sequence of their historical development. Burke, White, and Kellner, having failed to
notice the latter, adhere to the former. In view of the fact that White has discussed Vico's
order in some detail [Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1978), pp. 204-14], anyone who would dispute him must do so with trepidation, but with
the support of his former student Nancy Struever, who advocates the view here presented
["Vico, Valla, and the Logic of Humanist Inquiry," in Giambattista Vico's Science of
Humanity, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and D. P. Verene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1976), pp. 179-80].
Vico treats metaphor first because of all the tropes it is "the most luminous and
therefore the most necessary and frequent." The discussion of metonymy and synecdoche
is introduced as follows: "the first poets had to give names to things from the most particular and the most sensible ideas. Such ideas are the sources, respectively, of synecdoche and metonymy" [The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. T. Bergin and M.
Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell, 1977), par. 406; my italics]. After a brief treatment of metonymy and
its traditional definitions--agent for act, subject for form and accident, cause for
effect - he continues: "synecdoche developed into metaphor as particulars were elevated
into universals or parts united to make up their wholes" [par. 407]. Quite apart from the
fact that the order in which the two tropes are first named is the reverse of that in which
they are discussed (perhaps a trace of Quintilian, his favorite authority, lingers here), it is
apparent that Vico thought the two were temporally prior to metaphor.
Thus the correlation that White and Kellner make between metaphor, metonymy,
synecdoche and the ages of gods, heroes, and men is not the one that Vico had in mind;
the fact that they can effect such correlations is testimony to the indeterminacy in their
definitions of the tropes. ForVico, the age of the gods was that of metonymy: the substitution of "agent for act resulted from the fact that names for agents were commoner than
names for acts" [par. 406]. Lightning and thunder were to the first men of the gentile
nations a "great effect whose causes they did not know" [par. 379]; hence they imagined
the agent Jove as the cause in a double metonymy of cause for effect, and agent for act.
The age of heroes was that in which existent particulars-eg., men who "held themselves
to be sons of Jove"- were attached to universals, not just as parts of Jove, but as embodiments of the abstract attributes nobility and virtue [par. 917]. The third or human age is the
age of metaphor, which includes the previous two figures ratherthan giving rise to them. It
is the commonest trope of Vico's time because he was living in the human age. Metaphors
involving "likenesses taken from bodies to signify the operation of abstract minds must
diacritics / spring 1982
77
date from times when philosophies were taking shape" [par. 404]; this kind of abstraction
would not have been possible in the earlier epochs of metonymy and synecdoche.
The orders considered thus far are:
Quintilian
metaphor
synecdoche
metonymy
Ramus
Talon
metonymy
irony
metaphor
synecdoche
metaphor
synecdoche
metonymy
irony
Vossius
("natural")
synecdoche
metonymy
metaphor
irony
(expository)
metaphor
metonymy
synecdoche
irony
Vico
(chronological)
metonymy
synecdoche
metaphor
irony
It may appear obtuse of Renaissance rhetoricians not to have recognized the "inherent
logic," "inherent narrativity,"and historical sequence that Burke,White, and Kellner find
in only one of these orderings. The source of their difficulty lay in the fact that they
accepted the traditional definitions of the tropes. Like modern critics, they sought a
logical sequence of the four. By emphasizing one or another partial definition of each and
shuffling the order, they were able to rationalize various sequences. Modern theoreticians
display what would have seemed in the Renaissance a superstitious commitment to the
sequence itself, in the interests of preserving which they sacrifice the traditional definitions of the terms:
Trope
metaphor
metonymy
White
similarity/difference
(representation)
reduction (incorporeal part/whole
to corporeal)
(reduction)
Burke
perspective
synecdoche
representation
irony
dialectic (using all
terms)
part/quality of whole
(integrative)
negation of
affirmation
Kellner
whole-whole integrative
(synchronic substitution)
whole-part dispersive
(diachronic; causeeffect?)
part-whole integrative
whole-whole dispersive
White's definitions are closest to the traditional ones, with the addition of Burke's
"reduction - integration" to the metonymy - synecdoche pair. The logic of Burke'sorder
is strictly entailed by his novel definitions. His metonymy is a subclass of synecdoche; to
grasp the oddities of this not-quite-binaryopposition, one must understand that substitution of a quantity for a quality is metonymy, but the reverse is synecdoche [A Grammarof
Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), p. 509]. The twists that are
necessary in order to turn tropes into a logic are nowhere more apparent than in Kellner's
reduction of metaphor, not just to word-for-wordsubstitution involving two "wholes," but
to a wholeness intuited from the manifold and homogeneous (Kant's axioms of
intuition)- i.e., a "synthesis" that forms a whole.
Bloom is of course suigeneris; his disposition of the tropes would be misrepresented if
reduced to the fourfold scheme, and the following conflation of the structures suggested
in A Map of Misreadingand the last chapter of Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate
is at best a partial one:
tropes of limitation,
ethos, action
tropes of representation,
pathos, desire
irony (presence - absence)
synecdoche (part- whole)
metonymy
metaphor
hyperbole, litotes
metalepsis
(full - empty)
(inside - outside)
(high - low)
(early - late)
Underlying the ethos - pathos opposition is that of reduction and expansion, hinted at in
Burke's metonymy-synecdoche
pair, but in this case the fundamental opposition is
irony-synecdoche. (For Jakobson, of course, synecdoche and irony are subclasses of
metonymy.) For Bloom, the progression of poetry is just the opposite of the order
78
described by Kellner: from irony (clinamen) to synecdoche (tessera), metonymy, hyperbole -litotes, and then metaphor and metalepsis.
In view of the varied ways that the figures have been defined, the sequence
metaphor- metonymy - synecdoche - irony seems to be not a single schema revealing a
single order in a variety of texts, but rather a variety of schema that would ascribe various
orders to a single text. Furthermore,within any single analysis of the sequence such as
Kellner's, the real alchemy at work is not a transforming power of the four tropes, but the
writer's protean transformation of the tropes themselves, as their definitions are juggled to
preserve their sequence. The names of the four are not simply stretched to cover longer
portions of a text; they are used, as occasion demands, to designate either its literal content or its narrative form quite apart from content; either the use of a figure, or the use of
literal language (to say "a preposition entails an object" is thus metonymy); either
something present in the text, or something not there but presumably going on in a
character's mind. In the passage from Faust that he analyzes, Kellner calls "lm Anfang war
das Wort" a metaphor. He discovers metonymy not in the phrase that Faust substitutes for
this one ("lm Anfang war der Sinn"),nor in the four lines separating the two phrases, but in
the putative reasoning about cause and effect that must have led Faust from one to the
other. His reasoning was literal; but figuratively speaking, it was metonymic.
The general pattern underlying schematizations of the tropes is as follows: (1) They
are redefined so as to redistribute their functions in a rational typology. This step is
necessary because the traditional definitions overlap and (as anyone who has used them
knows) do not lend themselves to unequivocal application. (2) The typology is applied to
one or another linguistic, literary, or psychological domain to reveal a hitherto-unnoticed
pattern. Thus far, the procedure does not differ from that of identifying regularities on the
basis of logical differences in any other discipline. (3) However, because rhetoric and
literature are notoriously difficult to reduce to schematization, the analyst encounters difficulties. At this point, to save the schema, he must begin to use the names of the tropes
figuratively. The emergent characteristics of structure and meaning traditionally
associated with literature, and recognized by "interaction" theories of figuration such as
Max Black's, are necessarily excluded from the text by "substitution" theories. Users of the
latter find stable, repetitive patterns in texts, but only by installing figurative manipulation
in their theories.
But my obsessive concern with critical history, epistemology, and tactics of argument
runs counter to the broad, speculative scope of Kellner's article, and quite possibly leads
away from the point he is trying to make. The only innovation he claims is that of effecting
additional correlations within a system already authorized by Hayden White, who in his
turn had pieced together materials from Vico, Frye, Pepper, and Burke. To criticize
Kellner's synthesis is to disagree with this tradition. The quixotism of such a strategy in
disciplines that sanctify traditional terminology and respect its masterful exponents
became apparent to Kellner when he considered the status of White's Metahistory. In
order to understand the argument of "The Inflatable Trope," it is necessary to return to
Kellner's earlier article "A Bedrock of Order: Hayden White's Linguistic Humanism"
[Historyand Theory,19 Beiheft (1980), 1-29; hereafter cited as
just as Kellner, in tryBO]-ing to understand Metahistory, turned to White's earlier writings.
What Kellner sought was an interpretation of Metahistory "as a political event and its
writing as a political act" [BO, p. 1]. By reconstructing the background of the book, which
he referred to as its "unacknowledgments," he concluded that the major themes in
White's career had been "how a tradition elicits assent" and "a pronounced fixation upon
the force confronting the weight of tradition, human choice" [BO, pp. 3-4]. The latter,
which Kellner identified as "the existential center of Metahistory," was so artfully
implanted in its texture that readers might fail to recognize the book's message.
The epistemic and ontological choices forced on White by his desire to preserve
human freedom were radical ones. "Representation (argument from similarity) subsumes
explanation (argument from contiguity), which becomes a 'moment' of representation, an
attribute"; thus the "entire field of logical operations is undercut and subsumed by the
rhetorical structure which authorizes it" in White's system [BO, pp. 7-8]. In like manner,
vehicle subsumes tenor; fiction, non-fiction; art, science; and the philosophy of history,
diacritics / spring 1982
79
history proper [BO, p. 12]. "White asserts the freedom of the speaker, but leaves no basis
for a responsibility to the subject," making all choices matters of moral or aesthetic taste;
truth and reality are "unmasked as world choices, created and revealed through rhetoric"
[BO, pp. 14, 16]. Human freedom is thus preserved not only from psychological and sociopolitical determinisms (Freud and Marx) but even from the absurdity of the system
we can choose not to recognize its absurdist moment. In concluding, Kellner
itself--fora pessimistic assessment of the influence that Metahistory is likely to exercise:
presents
"on the one hand, the more canny historians will naturalize the elements of the quadruple
tetrad, and incorporate them without difficulty into the tradition of professional discourse;
on the other, the deconstructors will trope the turns and turn the tropes, unfolding their
texts until they have arrived at their nondestination" [BO, p. 27].
While conscious of the vacuity that would result from appropriations of White,
Kellner was also aware that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to oppose him directly.
By "drawing its hermeneutic wagons into a circle, Metahistory assumes the posture of a
'master-text.' [... . Any possible criticism of his text is already named and placed in the text
itself. A confrontation with Metahistory cannot begin from without because the book and
its theory claims to comprehend and neutralize any such assault before it is made" [BO, p.
2]. The acuity of Kellner's interpretation results in part from his search for a weak spot
through which White's system might be pried apart from the inside. White defends his
"aggressive move to turn historical thought from a logical to a rhetorical form" through "a
defensive entrenchment against any counter-movement from rhetoric to logic" [BO, p. 28].
An appeal to logic was precluded because White had deployed it as a mere superstructure
resting on figural foundations.
Ironically it was White himself who exposed the vulnerability of his system, and he
did so because he succumbed to three temptations: to co-opt a potential challenger,
systematize his own thought, and comment on history as distinct from historiography. In
"Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground" (first published in 1973 and collected in
Tropics of Discourse), White does not undertake serious discussion of the relationship
between Foucault's thesis in Les Mots et les choses and the evidence on which it is based.
By doing so, he would engage in writing history (inappropriatefor a metahistorian);and in
all likelihood he would end up disagreeing with Foucault. Therefore he accepts Foucault's
conclusions and points out that they provide evidence, in incohate form, for the analysis
carried out in Metahistory. Foucault cannot explain the rupturesand chronological succession whereby one episteme succeeds another; readers of White's book are in a position to
realize that the sequence involved is that of the four tropes. But to say this is to reduce the
dispersive taxonomy of Metahistory to one of its paradigms, and to imply that it applies to
history as well as to historiography.
The stage is thus set, and the tools and strategies provided, for subsumption of White.
If the four tropes are in fact the essence of his analysis, his three "modes" are either mere
attributes of the tropes or they are imperfectly realized categories in what might have
been a linguistic taxonomy. White himself provides a basis for this conjecture when he
writes that a "verbal model of the historical process [...] by virtue of its status as a
linguistic artifact, can be broken down into the levels of lexicon, grammar, syntax, and
semantic" [Metahistory (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. 274]. In order to overcome White, it is necessary only to accept what he says and argue that he has not realized
the implications of his analysis- the strategy White used against Foucault, one canonized
by de Man's essay on Derrida.
These considerations determine the strategy of Kellner's "A Bedrock of Order":"in
suggesting that White has not gone far enough, or, in my own view, that he has drawn back
from the consequences of his own work, this line of criticism delineates the path forward
rather than backward from Metahistory" [BO, p. 17]. Kellner calls attention to White's
acknowledgment, in his article on Foucault, that the four tropes can be correlated with a
sequence of historical stages." In Metahistory White backs away from this schematism but
cannot escape it" [BO, p. 18]. Why should he resist this obvious consequence of his
thought? "The determinism of the system seems to contradict the sense of human
freedom which I have suggested.. is White's primary goal in Metahistory" [BO, p. 20].
Kellner thus overcomes Metahistory by subsuming White's entire theory in what he
80
calls "Over-Tropes"-the actual succession of the four in time. Unable to oppose White's
rhetoric with logic, he has at least restored a relationship between words and events. The
only other "path forward" from White's system would be to set loose the lockstep but
arbitrary connections between the sixteen terms of his "safe tropology" (metonymy-tragedy- mechanist--radical, etc.) and let them associate freely with one another. "The
tropes can be 'turned' into each other within as well as from without the closed-cycle of
the system, creating a poetics of nonfiction prose discourse as heady and unstable as any.
[...] White's refusal of the 'absurdist moment' lurking within his system, asking questions
whose answers seem unimaginable, is a voluntarist rhetoric restraining a deconstructive
antilogic." Kellner also rejects this absurd path forward; it is the one pursued "in the
essays of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man," who "trope the turns and turn the
tropes ... until they have arrived at their nondestination" [BO, pp. 26-27].
That is, he rejects this path on this occasion. In doing so, he fails to draw his
hermeneutic wagons into a circle and "neutralize" an assault on his Over-Tropes "before
it is made." A forthright presentation of his position, coupled with a self-reflective indecisiveness about critical strategies, leaves his salients exposed. While rejecting deconstruction, he has used Derrida's "strategic bet" by "repeating what is implicit in the founding
concepts and in original problematics, by using against the edifice the instruments or the
stones available in the house" in order to overcome White [Derrida, "The Ends of Man,"
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 30 (1969), 56]. But the opening paragraphsof
his essay might well have led to an analysis based on the negative dialectics of the
Frankfurtschool, and his references to the writing of Metahistory as a "political act" and
the writing of history as a "moral act" are more vulnerable forms of engagement. The
unity of the essay resides not in its strategy but in tone and style: it is consistently ironic,
even to the point of scorn (as when Kellner turns the title of one of White's essays - "The
Absurdist Moment in Contemporary LiteraryTheory"- against him).
Such irony can be seen as evidence of frustration in the face of a critical situation in
which strategy has, for all practical purposes, become the content of criticism as wil! as
its form. While criticizing White's disregard of "the principle problems in the philosophy
of history since Collingwood," which is tantamount to "the refusal of discourse" [BO, p.
10], Kellner finds it necessary to repeat this move in refusing to argue against White's factual and theoretical claims. We are no longer concerned with history, historiography, or
the philosophy of history, but with something beyond them - metahistory; and something
beyond that- metametahistory or philosophy, where historians and critics grapple with
the most important issues of their disciplines: the theory of reference, the philosophy of
language, ontology, figuration, logic, epistemology. Even more basic than these is
strategy - invulnerability.
In order to make his argument invulnerable, Kellner had to repeat it, with a difference; "The Inflatable Trope" was the result. To the examples of the four-trope succession provided by White (Vico, Marx, Foucault), and the one he presented in his earlier
essay (the passage from Faust), he added The Magic Mountain. To reinstate the logic that
White had subsumed in tropology, he adduced Kant to show that the tropes are
themselves based on logic. Countless other changes proved necessary because the later
essay is addressed to literary critics, not historians, and Metahistory is no longer its subject.
I do not mean to imply that Kellner simply reworked his material to republish it; quite the
contrary. Comparison of the two essays reveals such a radical revision of strategy that one
might suspect Kellner of changing his mind. White is no longer a nihilistic voluntarist, but
simply one of Kellner's precursors. The earlier emphasis on ethics, politics, and facts has
been so completely effaced that one scarcely pauses to wonder if the writing of "The
Inflatable Trope" could be construed as a political act. To conclude his acceptance of
much that he recently opposed, Kellner quotes Paul de Man approvingly, turning the
tropes and troping the turns to deconstruct his own argument in the last paragraph.
Kellner's two essays present an exemplary contrast of old-style polemics and newstyle geniality in critical controversy. In place of the rhetoric of mastery, we have a dialectic of voluntary subjugation, in which submission to a master and imitation of his thought
become a means of exceeding him in self-consciousness. This strategy of agreement is not
simply one choice among a number of equally viable alternatives. If any lesson can be
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learned from critical polemics, it is that they are without issue or have consequences
unanticipated by the participants. There is only the "path forward";those not conscious of
its dialectic are likely to be left behind. Deliberate subjugation to modern masters does
not necessarily result from a desire to subvert mastery, or to attain it. Conscious that
deconstruction leads toward a "nondestination" and that "canny historians" will incorporate White's terminology in the tradition of professional discourse, Kellner knows better
than to oppose these developments through at attempt to exercise White's "freedom."
Recognition of inevitability can be an act of self-sacrifice.
But the self-consciousness that perfects this strategy in relation to precursors and
potential opponents (a cognitive rhetoric) is not sufficient to control the kind of displacement it may effect on the path forward (performative rhetoric). Having perfected the
reflexivity of his argument, Kellner is in a position to know that its cognitive rhetoric is
invulnerable. But what effect might it have? The importance attached to referentiality in
the first essay has been all but effaced by the concluding concessio of the second - a tactical expedient necessary to preclude deconstruction. Not only in his essays on Foucault
and Vico, but in a paper on Proust that he read recently, White accepts the historical/narrative succession of the tropes. Has his "voluntarist rhetoric restraining a deconstructive
antilogic" yielded to Kellner's logic; or has the rhetoric of the times subsumed both?
White and Kellner (among others) use what might be considered a deconstructive
strategy involving two movements: "a reversal of the traditional hierarchy between conceptual oppositions [in this case, logic - rhetoric, or literal - figurative] and a reinscription
of the newly privileged term" [Rodolphe Gasche, "Deconstruction as Criticism," Glyph 6
(1979), p. 192]. From Kellner's point of view, White not only reverses the traditional priority
of logic over rhetoric, but cancels the power of logic and fact to exert pressure on rhetoric,
or to serve as a basis of human choice. Kellner would rectify the balance by showing that
logic deserves a place alongside rhetoric, neither term remaining dominant. But their
arguments are not deconstructive, for reasons Gasche makes clear:
All conceptual dyads constitutive of the discourse of philosophy are "'disymmetrical and hierarchicalspaces that are traversedby forces and in whose closure
the repressed outside is at work." But the inferiorand derivative term of these nonhomogeneous oppositional spaces reprivileged through a reversal of the given
hierarchy is not yet the deconstructed term [ . .1 Although it uses the same name
as its negative image, the deconstructed term will never have been given in the
conceptual opposition it deconstructs. [Gasche, pp. 192-93, quoting Derrida, La
Dissemination, p. 11]
Redefinition of the "inferior and derivative term" is foreclosed in the strategy
employed by Kellner and White. The act of defining the tropes as rule-governed transformations of literal usage (substitution of whole for whole, etc.) frees them from subordination in the hierarchy by turning it into a binary opposition (literal vs. non-literal). Kellner
need not fear the disappearance of logic in Metahistory because it is installed at the heart
of the rhetoric; logic gains no further leverage from the installation of Kant's principles of
Pure Understanding, when these can be transformed without remainder into the four
tropes. Here, more effectively than in traditional philosophy, any "outside" or "otherness"
that figuration might bring to the surface in the process of closure is effaced. The convertibility of one set of terms into the other offers the prospect of an interminably circular
dialectic. Closure and conclusion are achieved through irony-as-parabasis:the writer
thematizes the relationship between inside and outside, either by denying that there is an
outside (White's choice, as represented by Kellner), or by stepping outside his theory to
interpret it as a product of his own act of reading, as an allegory (Kellner'schoice). Until a
few years ago, de Man's conception of textuality and reading could be analyzed along
similar lines [Gasche, pp. 206-09], and it is noteworthy that when referring to de Man,
White and Kellner tend to cite his earlier writings.
The deployment of a binary opposition that is subsumed in aporia, undecidability, or
the act of reading is often identified as a deconstructive strategy (J. Hillis Miller apparently
understands it as such); it is increasingly used as a means of containing or sublating
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deconstruction itself. The most ironic ricorso of current criticism is that the attempt to
neutralize deconstruction drives its opponents to extremes of self-reflexivity and
ideological analysis, thereby making deconstruction appear to be the only reasonable
means of exploring the text in relation to its contexts. The ways in which the rhetorical
strategies of current criticism tend to capture and control those who use them are
nowhere more evident than in the concluding sentences of Kellner's two articles. "A
Bedrock of Order" ends: "White's choice of tropology as a 'bedrock of order' ratherthan a
mise en ab^me is his own elective affinity. It will be interesting to see who will follow him
in this, and how they will manage to do so" [p. 29]. "The Inflatable Trope" ends: "Whether
it is an allegory of the conventions of language, or of the deep structures of reason, the
inflatable trope provides a narrative diagnostic which is distinctly alchemical" [p. 28].
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