Hans Kellner

The Inflatable Trope as Narrative Theory: Structure or Allegory?

From all this it follows that all the tropes (and they are all reducible to the four types above discussed), which have hitherto been considered ingenious inventions of writers, were necessary modes of expression of all the first poetic nations, and had originally their full native propriety. But these expressions of the first nations later became figurative when, with the further development of the human mind, words were invented which signified abstract forms or genera comprising their species or relating parts with their wholes. And here begins the overthrow of two common errors of the grammarians: that prose speech is proper speech, and poetic speech improper; and that prose speech came first and afterward speech in verse. [Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. T. Bergin and M. Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell, 1970, 3d. ed. 1977), p. 90]