There comes a point in each journey I take with my AP-bound students, when we ‘get’ to embrace (sometimes willing, sometimes not so forthcoming-ly) pre-modern poetry. To ‘brace’ the cold of the first impact, I arm us with a dictionary of poetic terms, put on a brave face, and in dire cases, bring licorice, and other enticing candy (sugar is, indeed, a poetic prerogative). So, we skim through the myriad of terms, tongue-twisters in their own right, talk a bit (or a lot) about their presence/entry within English literature; and we all hope, come, May that the multiple-choice section would grace us kindly with a handful of allusions, conceits, and the odd dramatic monologue.
Secretly, we hope (pray) that there will be no question targeted at our understanding of synecdoche. Yes, metonymy’s not-so-long-distant-cousin. The dictionary of poetic terms, quite usefully, and resourcefully, explains: ‘a term denoting a part of something used to refer to the whole thing’; what the Romans called ‘Pars Pro Toto’. It does seem simple enough, doesn’t it? And there are numerous examples to support this apparent transparency of meaning: a king is replaced by his crown, a maiden is replaced by her virginity, a dog by his bark, a flower by its petals. And so we trod on, armed with this realization: we now know of a subclass of a metaphor.
But then come the MC questions, and it all seems to lose ground. What we know, seems to be reduced to what we can produce, at a moment’s/minute’s notice. There is a timeframe: our knowledge of world poetry is reduced to 60 minutes and 55 MC questions (and the ‘when in doubt, choose c’ does not do the trick). How unfortunate, that while we are forced into a synecdoche we forget what it stands for.
There is that other meaning, too: I sort of save it for the second semester, when we are calmer, have taken a few practice tests, and (more or less) are bracing the cold with logos not pathos. Namely, the Romans (like the Greeks) saw synecdoche as a bi-lateral figure of speech: while most textbooks tend to drill towards the part-whole relationship, what they leave out is the whole-part relationship. That is, ‘Totum Pro Parte’ – a thing (‘a whole’) that stands/refers to a part of it. And how can it not, when one subsumes the other?
Hence, as a king is replaced by his crown, so can the very same king stand to represent his subjects. Or: in less regal terminology –
While walking through the streets of our capital, amazed at the state of the sidewalks, we are to be reminded that they stand to represent us (our dirt, our carelessness, our selfishness) as much as we stand to represent our body politic.
Yet: if all fails, do rent out Charlie Kaufman’s ‘Synecdoche, New York’. All should be revealed.
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