
17 Metonymy/ Metalepsis/ Synecdoche
If an architectural tradition can be thought of as a “language,” then analogies for its generative syntax might be found among the tropes or “figures of speech” of classical rhetoric, such as metaphor and metonymy. Metonymy is often defined as that trope whose tenor (or signified) is replaced by a vehicle (or signifier) extrinsically but not intrinsically or integrally associated with it. One of the most frequently cited examples, “the pen is mightier than the sword,” employs two metonyms, “pen” and “sword,” to suggest “ideas are stronger than physical force.”
Metalepsis (Gr.> meta- across + lambanein to take or exchange; L> transumptio to take from one to another, to make a copy,) was memorably, if enigmatically, defined by the late, literary critic, Harold Bloom in his “Map of Misreading,” as a “metonym of a metonym,” that is, the substitution of one metonym inside a second In the previous example, a metalepsis might be, “A feather is stronger than steel,” where “feather” is associated with a quill pen and “steel” with a sword’s blade. The meaning of a metalepsis therefore depends on knowledge of the implicit, (underlying or “dropped”) metonym, its “missing center” or middle term. In narratology, a metalepsis or discursive rupture is said to occur when a narrator enters into his narrative making it “unreliable,” notably in Nabokov’s Pale Fire or Pirandello’s Sei Personaggi.
A more pertinent example of a metonym in the present architectural context might be, “the White House said,” in place of, “the President said.” A vimana could similarly be read as a metonym for the god who inhabits and, indeed, emanates and emerges through it, hence, “Shiva’s House” for Shiva. A shrine aedicule could then be seen as functioning as a metonym for that aedes, (structure or vimana,) of which it is a replica and at the same time a constituent part, a sign combining both indexicality (derivation) and iconicity (resemblance.) When a second aedicule emerges inside such an aedicule, as in a split-gavaksha, a metalepsis occurs as one “spatial register” is superimposed on another. This “un-conceals” its metonymic descent or reduction from the force creating it and from the fullness (or, in this case, sunyata, emptiness) of its non-manifest source.
All signs (symbols, indices and icons, in Pierce’s semiology) bear a metonymic relationship to their signifieds, since a sign is by definition different from the thing it signifies. 1) Symbols – words, notations, an aniconic linga (Sans.> linga sign) – are associated with what they represent by convention or use; 2) indices – footprints, photographs, a jyotirlinga or svyambhulinga (a naturally occurring linga)by contiguity to their origin as its traces; 3) icons – pictographs, sculpture, a pancamukhalinga (a five-faced iconic linga,) by resemblance. In an emanative ontology, any manifestation could therefore be seen as an index or trace of its non-manifest origin and as the metonymic reduction of its presence to a mark pointing to its absence, like the empty wall shrines beneath the nasi cascades” of Karnata Dravida temples.
Synecdoche, a special case of metonymy, is a trope where a part replaces a whole or a whole is composed of similar parts: a common example is “The harbor was full of sails” in place of “The harbor was full of ships;” (a strained metonym for this would be, “The harbor was full of wakes.”) In architecture, a similar process might be observed when a Karnata Dravida superstructure is built out of shrine aedicules which are also aedicules of itself. Similarly, a Khmer “temple mountain’s” terraces are composed of projections of its central prasat around its terraces and contractions of it in the unitary “aedicules” (tiers, “talas”)above that prasat; hence,its “aedes” and aedicules are isomorphic or homologous.