Story

Trope

Trope ... time has boiled reality down to a ball of ambiguous myth. Gary Indiana, Resel1lll1el1l, 11 COllledy ARGUMENT Patterned emotion-evocative imagery is worked into trope,] into layered relationships that were prefigured by the San rock painter's superimposing of God over the herd of eland. The oral tradition is never simply a spoken art; it is an enactment, an event, a ritual, a set of symbols ,2 a performance. Patterning of imagery is the most visible artistic activity, involving the blending of the contemporary world and the fanciful fabrication of the tradition; the combining of the images and their transformation into dramatic ritual results in tropes. When the realms of art and reality are brought into contact and that relationship is metaphorical , the audience has been involved in a mythic process. The storyteller takes an audience's routine experiences and, in a performance, links them to ancient, often fantastic, images from the art tradition.3 The combination renders contemporary experience emotionally comprehensible , and anchors the members of the audience in history. Trope implies transformation, from one set of images to another, but without giving up any of the original meanings or perceptions that an audience might have of them. Real world images may be cultural, historical , or personal; their blending with fantasy, the movement from one state of being to another, is mythic, and is coupled with a reenactment that is ritualistic. The drama of performance is an effort both to capture the ritual, graphic images of transformation, and, more important , to focus venerable emotions on contemporary change. Myth is not a tale; it is a process within a tale. It is related to stories of the gods because gods are creators and are thus involved in primal transitions. The shifts wrought by the gods have their parallels in those brought about by culture heroes, epic heroes, even tricksters and tale characters, and by the very nature of story which involves formal transformation . The audience may have moved from the place of the gods, but the tales and the shifting states stay stable; we remain in the presence of myth, which is always in transition. It is the dying and reborn god, the hero transforming his society; it is the tale character shifting 126 Copyrighted Material Trope 127 identities through the dramatization of a cultural rite of passage. But there is the transformation in the very formal characteristics of story as well, and this is what is most intensely experienced by the members of the audience. Myth is trope process, and because of that it is a narrative device, but it is more. Ancient images, condensed, symbolic, heavy with emotional potential, are embedded in the tradition; myth has the power to activate those motifs, to release and contain the intense feelings . Always in motion, myth is liberating, but its leap into the unknown is, in the oral tradition, seldom open-ended. It insists upon a return to origins, altered perhaps but ever cyclical, and for that reason it obviates history while depending on history for its images. Myth is the emotional, formal movement of the story: it is the activity that leads to trope. The purpose of trope, at the core of the mythic process, is to harness the emotions of the members of the audience, trapped as those emotions are in images of past and present, thereby divining paradoxes and resolving conflicts, and to move that audience into a new perception of reality, a formal experience. Talking about metaphor in a lecture at the Library of Congress in 1967, James Dickey spoke of "the most miraculous thing in the whole of existence ... : those pictures of the world inside one's head; pictures made of the real world, but pictures that one owns, that one infuses with one's own personality. They are fragments of the world that live, not with the world's life, but with ourS."4 "The metaphor," wrote Mortimer J. Adler, "in the narrow context of rhetoric is the name of a usage in which things are compared."s The metaphoric process, observed Gerald Prince, is intrinsic to narrative: "in a narrative sequence, the last situation or event constitutes a partial repetition of the first; in other words, there is a relation of similarity between the two. "6 Language evokes image.? Dickey argued, "The making of poetic metaphors is an intrinsic process: a continual process of transfiguring reality."8 The storyteller is in the process of planting the soul, the myth, into the realistic imagery...