Naming a Figure of Speech

Readers of this blog will know that I’m fascinated by rhetorical figures, the figures of speech. I’ve written comments and even entire posts on tricolon, anaphora, antithesis, congeries, chiasmus, anadiplosis, polyptoton, epimone, palilogia, and several more. In the old days, from the time of the ancient Greeks down to the nineteenth century, the figures of speech were a standard part of the school curriculum; everyone who had a high school education knew the figures, or at least knew of them.

But rhetoric and the rhetorical figures have largely disappeared from our schools, and most people today know only a few of these terms—simile, for instance, and perhaps antithesis or alliteration or hyperbole. Literary historians often say that writers stopped using the figures sometime around 1750 or so. The realistic novel uses a plain transparent language that has no use for the figures—according to the historians. The historians, however, are wrong. The figures never entirely disappeared from the schools and they certainly didn’t disappear from writing, including the writing of novels.

Here, for instance, is a passage from Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” (I.6). Monsieur Manette has just been released from prison, where he has been unjustly held for eighteen years. His long incarceration has damaged his mind and his memory. His daughter, whom he has never seen, has come to Paris to take him to England. When he sees her, he seems dimly to recall his now-dead wife in this girl he does not know.

She says: “If you hear in my voice—I don’t know that it is so, but I hope it is—if you hear in my voice any resemblance to a voice that once was sweet music in your ears, weep for it, weep for it! If you touch, in touching my hair, anything that recalls a beloved head that lay on your breast when you were young and free, weep for it, weep for it! If, when I hint to you of a Home there is before us, where I will be true to you with all my duty and with all my faithful service, I bring back the remembrance of a Home long desolate, while your poor heart pined away, weep for it, weep for it!”

This passage is composed with at least five figures. First, it’s a tricolon. (For convenience I refer to definitions in Richard Lanham’s “A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms”.) Tricolon is a passage—of any length—which divides in a noticeable way into three parts. This is the “of the people, by the people, and for the people” figure. Here the tricolon is “If you hear my voice [. . .], weep for it”; “If you touch [. . .], weep for it”; “If, when I hint to you [. . .], weep for it”.  Tricolon is one of the most common figures, but it’s also very effective—that’s why it’s so common. Tricolon can be three words, three phrases, three clauses, three sentences, three paragraphs.

Tricolon is probably most effective when it is reinforced by some other figure, as this one is reinforced by anaphora. Anaphora occurs when successive phrases or clauses or sentences or paragraphs begin with the same words. In this passage each sentence begins with the words “If you”. Dickens likes anaphora, and it’s easy to find examples in his novels. There’s a good anaphora a few pages before this one (I.5), where the word “hunger” is the first word in seven successive sentences. In the present passage, the anaphora also creates grammatical parallelism, since all three sentences are conditionals.

All three sentences also end with the same words: “weep for it!” This figure, repeated endings, is called antistrophe or epistrophe or epiphora, take your pick. Moreover, in each sentence the last three words are repeated: “weep for it, weep for it!” This figure, “the emphatic repetition of a word or a short phrase with no words between”, is called epizeuxis. (A somewhat relaxed definition would allow a word or two in between.) So this passage uses the figures tricolon, anaphora, grammatical parallelism, epistrophe, and epizeuxis. The critics may not like this kind of writing; they may think that it’s excessive and melodramatic, but they can’t claim that isn’t there.

The rhetorical handbooks list something over 200 named rhetorical figures. This might seem like a lot, and I find that something like fifty of the named figures are enough for most purposes. I would, however, add a few to the list, figures that have never, to my knowledge, been named, but which occur often enough to deserve a name.

Here, for instance, is a passage from Katherine Anne Porter’s novel “Ship of Fools”: “At the top of the stairs they were almost overwhelmed from the back by the troupe of Spanish dancers, who simply went through, over and around them like a wave, a wave with elbows” (39). The figure here is the repetition of the word “wave”.

At first glance this might look like epizeuxis, “the emphatic repetition of a word with no other words between”, as we saw in the passage from “A Tale of Two Cities” above, with the epizeuxis of “weep for it, weep for it!” But these two figures are not quite the same. In the passage from Dickens, the repetition in “weep for it, weep for it” is just a repetition, while in the passage from Porter, the repetition is expanded: “a wave, a wave with elbows”. It would have been possible to write this sentence without the repetition: “At the top of the stairs they were almost overwhelmed from the back by the troupe of Spanish dancers, who simply went through, over and around them like a wave with elbows”. I think the repetition works well, however; it presents two ideas for one: first the dancers are like a wave, and then the wave rather surprisingly has elbows. The version without the repetition loses that doubled and surprising meaning.

Here’s another example, from the very beginning of Jane Smiley’s novel “A Thousand Acres”: “The T intersection of CR 686 perched on a little rise, a rise nearly as imperceptible as the bump in the center of an inexpensive plate”. And here’s another example, this one from Don DeLillo’s novel “White Noise”: “Our newspaper is delivered by a middle-aged Iranian driving a Nissan Sentra. Something about the car makes me uneasy—the car waiting with its headlights on, at dawn, as the man places the newspaper on the front steps. I tell myself I have reached an age, the age of unreliable menace.” There are actually two instances of the figure here: “the car” and “the car waiting with its headlights on”; and “an age, the age of unreliable menace”. In all these passages the repetition is explanatory, rather than emphatic, and so they don’t count simply as epizeuxis, of the sort we saw in the passage from “A Tale of Two Cities”.

So far as I know, there is no rhetorical term that exactly designates this figure, where a word is repeated and then explained. I propose to call this figure “explanatory epizeuxis”—that is, a repetition which provides an explanation.

Do we really need a name for this figure? Do we need names for any of the figures? You probably don’t need to know the term epizeuxis to feel the emotional force of “weep for it, weep for it” in the passage from “A Tale of Two Cities”; and you probably don’t need to know the term explanatory epizeuxis to understand “a wave, a wave with elbows” in “Ship of Fools”. Speaking just for myself, I do enjoy having names for the figures, not because the name in itself makes much difference, but because having a name in a way assigns a place in your brain (or in your notebook, which is just an externalization of your brain) where you can collect examples and think about them.

As it happens, explanatory epizeuxis is not at all rare. Henry James, for instance, uses it a lot, especially in his later style. Here’s an example from “The Wings of the Dove”: “There were many explanations, and they were all amusing—amusing, that is, in the line of sombre and brooding amusement cultivated by Kate in her actual high retreat” (51). And here’s another: “And yet where was misery, misery too beaten for blame and chalk-marked by fate like a ‘lot’ at a common auction, if not in these merciless signs of mere mean stale feelings?” (21). And another: “This in fact she fully recognized, and with it the degree to which she desired that the girl should lead her life, a life certain to be so much finer than that of anybody else” (81). And still another: “It had cleared perhaps to a view only too extensive—extensive, that is, in proportion to the signs of life presented” (93).

(If you complain that these passages don’t make much sense, I’m sympathetic. Meanings in later James are rarely complete within a sentence or even two or three sentences. Trust me, or trust James—with enough context the passages do mean something.)

Clearly James liked explanatory epizeuxis; I counted thirteen in the first eighty pages of “The Wings of the Dove”, before I gave up. James likes to say something and then explain it or qualify it some way. In later James, no word is ever the last word.