When I hear the term literary tropes, I still have traumatic flashbacks to my freshman year of college. I distinctly remember being handed a list of terms (that all sounded unsettlingly like diseases) and being told to memorize them. “Synecdoche, zeugma, syllepsis... Who named these? I’m never going to need to know this stuff.” As it turns out, I was wrong.

So wrong, in fact, that I find myself digging through old boxes of notes and desperately wishing I’d memorized better. What’s the big deal with literary tropes? First, we need to define that a literary trope is a figure of speech used for artistic effect. Similes, irony, and allegory are all tropes, but they’re only the tip of the iceberg. We use them all the time (see “tip of the iceberg,” “metaphor,” “trope”), but they rarely get labelled.

Many of the writers who walk among us rely on the tried-and-true power of tropes for dynamic writing. Kate DiCamillo is a children’s book author (Because of Winn-Dixie, The Tale of Despereaux) who uses tropes artfully. There is a precision and finesse to her words that we would often dub “resonance.” And it comes from her intentional, practical use of literary devices.

In her short book The Tiger Rising, DiCamillo uses coined clauses, layered meanings, and terms that echo to create resonance. Her example shows us why tropes really do matter, and why it’s worth the effort to learn them. We can enjoy a story without knowing these terms or why we like the language, but if we want to develop as readers and writers, we must understand the tools. (And if you haven’t read The Tiger Rising, you should; it’s a couple hours well spent.)

THE COINED CLAUSE: ABRACADABRA, I’M A NOUN

DiCamillo uses the method of taking a phrase (e.g., Joey had an egg of incredible size) and using the entire clause as a noun (Joey picked up the egg-of-incredible-size). As a literary trope, this is called anthimeria, and refers to using one part of speech as another. Its most common use is turning nouns to verbs (“I’m going to Google it”), but DiCamillo uses it broadly, turning phrases into nouns as well. Suddenly, the clause is less of an object and more like a character, an interactive and integral part of the story. DiCamillo uses this tactic when she refers over and over to Rob’s suitcase of not-thoughts.

She introduces the suitcase of not-thoughts in the first chapter.

Rob had a way of not-thinking about things. He imagined himself as a suitcase that was too full, like the one that he had packed when they left Jacksonville after the funeral. He made all his feelings go inside the suitcase; he stuffed them in tight and then sat on the suitcase and locked it shut. That was the way he not-thought about things. Sometimes it was hard to keep the suitcase shut.

Having set up her coined clause, DiCamillo refers back to it frequently. When Rob is tempted to wish on a star, she points out that, “In his suitcase of not-thoughts, there were also not-wishes. He kept the lid closed on them, too.” Halfway through the book, Rob catches himself looking in the suitcase, remembering happy times with his mother. “He shook his head and scolded himself for opening his suitcase. Just thinking about all the things that were gone now seemed to make the darkness darker.” The suitcase of not-thoughts and not-wishes exists as an extra character, a window to help us understand Rob and how he sees himself.

DiCamillo could have written, “Rob didn’t think about those things,” or “Rob wouldn’t let himself wish for that.” If she had, we would have understood her meaning. But the power of the coined clause  gives us something solid to hold onto. Instead of a negated action (didn’t think), we have a concrete noun, the non-thought. We can feel it, smell it, almost hear it if we are quiet enough. We know what a not-thought is, and we can passionately long for its release from the suitcase. DiCamillo uses a trope to give us a visual of what we hope for.

PAINTING LAYERS OF MEANING

At first glance, the title The Tiger Rising may seem out of place. A levitating tiger? Sounds a bit strange. As the story progresses, DiCamillo takes the word “rising” and develops its significance on several different planes until, at the close of the book, “Tiger Rising” seems the perfect encapsulation. DiCamillo draws on rhetorical tropes of repetition, such as commoratio. The idea behind these tropes is to take an idea (a very large egg) and refer continually back to it, but always in different terms or in a different sense (the egg the size of an elephant; gargantu-egg, the egg that sank the Titanic, was it an egg or a small island?). Ultimately, all these references create a fuller image of just how large the egg is or seems to be. This is what DiCamillo does with the word “rising,” layering the development of the term through the long line of the story.

It starts when Rob sees the tiger. “To Rob, it seemed as if the tiger was some magic trick, rising out of the mist.” Here, we have a literal, physical use of the term. The next time DiCamillo uses the word, she adds a layer of meaning.

“Sadness,” said Willie May, closing her eyes and nodding her head. “You keeping all that sadness down low, in your legs. You not letting it get up to your heart, where it belongs. You got to let that sadness rise on up.”

“Rising” is now a physical motion for the tiger and a psychological release for Rob. Later in the book, DiCamillo writes, “Rob felt a familiar loneliness rise up and drape its arm over his shoulder,” adding emotional pressure to the pile of reactions we associate with “rising.” Personified loneliness attains physical motion that echoes the perceived motion of the tiger. DiCamillo adds, “I would love to see this tiger rise on up out of this cage.” Now we have connotations of physical motion, psychological release, emotional pressure, and escape, all rolling around in our heads when we read the word “rising.”

As Rob’s internal conflict spirals, DiCamillo starts to bring the meanings together.

Rob thought about what Willie May had said about the tiger rising on up. It reminded him of what she had said about his sadness needing to rise up. And when he thought about the two things together, the tiger and his sadness, the truth circled over and above him and then came and landed lightly on his shoulder.

She takes a simple term and integrates it into an array of situations across the pages of her story. When the book closes, “the tiger rising” is a vivid picture for her audience, full of multifaceted and resonant meaning.

YOU GET A CAGE. YOU GET A CAGE. EVERYBODY GETS A CAGE.

DiCamillo makes her words echo in The Tiger Rising, putting the tropes of repetition to work again. She takes the word “cage,” applies it to the tiger, and we as an audience easily understand. Then she brings in a caged bird, and again, we readily recognize this reverberation of the first use. But just like she added layers to her terms, she ripples her words across the surface of her story until they touch every character.

“I know something that’s in a cage,” said Rob, pushing the words past the tightness in his throat.

Willie May nodded her head, but she wasn’t listening. She was looking past Rob, past the white sheet, past the laundry room, past the Kentucky Star.

“Who don’t?” she said finally. “Who don’t know something in a cage?”

Now the cage is not just for animals, but it exists in a conceptualized state where it can apply to anything. In this blanketing state, the word cage reverberates in our minds whenever we see a character trapped. And DiCamillo carefully shows us a number of trapped people. Rob brings Sistine to see the tiger in the cage, and [KS1] [CW2] she “rattle[s] the cage as if she were the one who was locked up.” Beauchamp shows himself as a coward, trapped by his fear.

As DiCamillo strings her story along, it becomes clear that all of her characters are in cages. Rob is in a cage of sadness, Sistine in a cage of anger, Willie May in a cage of helplessness, and on it goes.

PLAYING THE LONG GAME

DiCamillo creates powerful prose because she plays the long game with her literary tropes. “Not-thoughts,” “rising,” and “cages,” strike a chord on their own as strong words. But building upon themselves in layer after layer, echo after echo, they create a symphony. Masterpieces take forethought; to play the long game, you have to know what the game is before you start. And yes, I’m afraid this includes knowing your vocabulary.

When my father says, “They played a doubleheader,” I stare blankly at him. And when I say, “They performed on a proscenium,” he stares blankly at me. I couldn’t plan a baseball game any more than he could design a set, because we don’t know the necessary terms. To incorporate an overarching use of anaphora into my work, I need to know what anaphora is.

Playing the long game in rhetoric means knowing your literary tropes well enough to use them effectively. DiCamillo’s work in The Tiger Rising shows just how important this is. When your words echo and build and layer and ripple[i] out into the corners of your works, they do far more than just speak. They resonate.

[i] Fun fact! The use of conjunctions repeatedly when they aren’t really necessary is a trope called polysyndeton.