Play with your words

I mentioned I would occasionally digress into the simple fun of playing with language. Rhetoric and literary devices are the toys and gadgets of communication. I would be remiss not to bring them up from time to time.

Knowing tropes and devices are the way to play with language. It’s true that there are rules to writing—it is frequently taught how rigid poetry’s formulas and boundaries are, yet those rules are clearly flouted. The rules, however, are important to learn so that when you break them, they are “broken” with precision and purpose, making all your choices credible.

Today’s Interlude includes a few lines from my play adaptation of the Grimm classic, Rumpelstiltskin. This conversation between Rumpelstiltskin and Derdra (the miller’s daughter) contains my favorite literary device: the antimetabole. George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie refers to it as “the Counterchange” (217) not to be confused with a chiasmus. A chiasmus, according to Silva Rhetoricae is “Repetition of ideas in inverted order. Repetition of grammatical structures in inverted order.” An antimetabole is a mirror sentence. By using the same words in reverse order, two contrasting meanings are exposed (www.literarydevices.net). To me, the inversion uses one meaning against the other, against itself. I find this extra clever. Perhaps my general love of villainous characters is why I find this particular device tickles me so much.

ACT 1.4. 156-172

RUM: Post your nuptial merge,

I’ll return to collect.

For now, work off credit.

DER: You’d do that for me?

RUM: Can I trust a future fee?

DER: (aside) He offers the world as Lech did before. 160

I thought I was saved—set sweet Jascha free.

Alone, again, to choose how best to die.

Nay, not even choose, merely bear their lies.

He forces trust, thinks Hope wrung.

I’ve no life to risk, risk no life but mine, 165

A pitiful thing.

Free credit’s worth any future penalty.

RUM: I await your answer.

Are we agreed?

DER: Agreed sir, now savior. Whatever in my future, 170

In exchange for my immediate reprieve,

I willingly share and will not grieve.

http://rhetoric.byu.edu/

https://literarydevices.net/antimetabole/

https://www.litcharts.com/literary-devices-and-terms/antimetabole

https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=vqwUAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&pg=GBS.PA3#v=onepage&q=chiasmus&f=false (antimetabole on page 217).

Thumbnail image illustrated by Stephanie Bengston for my play, A Lamentable Tale Named Rumpelstiltskin