The Metonym: Rhetoric and Oral Tradition at the Crossroads

Metaphor is the glamor trope, getting all the attention in literary, linguistic, and philosophical circles (for instance, Lakoff and Johnson 1980). However, metonymy, the figure of association, may actually be the more important element to explain how human language and thought connect. The honoree of this Festschrift has demonstrated the centrality of metonymic referentiality to oral traditional aesthetics and noetics. Metonymy is also a concept in rhetorical studies, but generally has not been viewed as central to the rhetorical enterprise of persuasion. By adopting John Miles Foley’s work as a lens through which to view the rhetorical function of metonyms, this article demonstrates that perhaps metonymy is of much greater significance to rhetoric than previously thought.

The Metonym in Oral Tradition

Oral-formulaic theory, until the publication of Foley’s Immanent Art in 1991, seemed to portray the oral traditional artist not as an artist at all, but as a technician who put together ready-made structures—epithets, lines, type-scenes, and the like—into relatively standard packages. Because the conventions and quality of oral traditions appear so different from literary works, scholars struggled to understand how great works of literature such as the Iliad, Beowulf, or countless others birthed from oral traditions could have developed from such a process. Foley, instead of asking how such works came about in spite of their origins, turned the question around —could the conventions of oral traditions be the source of artistic power rather than a limitation to be mitigated? The answer is, of course, yes, and his scholarship identifies metonymy as the key to oral traditional art.

Foley defines metonymy as “a mode of signification wherein the part stands for the whole . . . a situation in which a text or version is enriched by an unspoken context that dwarfs the textual artifact” (1991:7). For example, the epithets in the Iliad or the Odyssey are not simply structural elements strung together, providing a one-to-one correspondence between word and object. Rather, they serve as a portal to a larger, complex meaning inherent in the tradition. For example, “‘grey-eyed Athena’ would serve as an approved traditional channel or pathway for summoning the Athena not just of this or that particular moment, but rather of all moments in the experience of audience and poet” (1995:5). In a traditional context, the epithet is not only a convenient metrical unit, but a metonymic shorthand that allows the poet and the audience to access a rich, complex signification inherent in their common experiences. The performance is not merely a passive event for the audience, but an opportunity for co-creation of meaning with the poet through the vehicle of the metonymic referent. The performance, in other words, is not only an aesthetic event, but a rhetorical event, as the performer, in a manner of speaking, persuades the listening audience to participate in and agree with his/her way of directing the communal experience.

The Metonym, Rhetorically Speaking

We can trace the rhetorical study of metonymy back to the ancient Greek rhetoricians, who considered it one of the major tropes. However, the ancients tended to define metonymy rather vaguely, depending on examples to communicate its meaning (Arata 2005:65). Metonymy, like most figures and tropes, was thought to be decorative, a feature of style enhancing the beauty of a speech but adding little to the content. More recently, rhetoric has recognized the cognitive function of metonymy, starting with the work of Kenneth Burke (1945:503), who identified metonymy as one of the four master tropes that play a role in discovering truth (along with metaphor, synecdoche, and irony). In other words, a metonym is not merely a literary embellishment, but represents the associative process that underlies much of how human beings access and create knowledge. As a persuasive tool, metonymy allows a rhetor to tap into shared associations with his or her audience.

The previous sentence is a useful, albeit reductive, definition of the Burkean concept of rhetorical identification. For Burke, “you persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your...