Hypotyposis /ˌhaɪpətaɪˈpoʊsɪs/ (from the ancient Greek ὑποτύπωσις/hupotúpôsis, "sketch, model") is a figure of speech consisting of a realistic, animated, and striking description of the scene of which one wants to give an imagined representation and as if experienced at the moment of its expression. The speech of the nurse in the Prologue of Euripides' Medea, Racine's "dream of Athalie" in the play of the same name, Cicero's portrait of Clodius in his Pro Milone, or Émile Zola's description of the alembic in his novel L'Assommoir are examples of hypotyposes.
It can take the form of an enumeration of concrete details to such an extent that one can say that it crosses the conditions of form proper to a figure of speech. Indeed, the figure can easily go beyond the framework of the sentence to develop over several sentences or even several pages.
For the Latin orator Quintilian, hypotyposis is "the image of things, so well represented by the word that the listener believes he sees it rather than hears it". It allows the composition of vast poetic tableaux "giving to see" a scene as if the limits of the sentence no longer existed. A figure based on the , it has been, since the beginning of rhetoric, the preferred method for animating descriptions and striking the imagination of the interlocutor. It has several variants, depending on the object described. It is often confused with ekphrasis, which is a realistic and precise description of a work of art.
Definition of the figure
Etymology
The word "hypotyposis" comes from the ancient Greek τύπος/túpos (from which the word "type" is also descended), which refers to an "imprint in hollow or relief left by the striking of a die," specific to the vocabulary of typography. The hypotyposis, ὑποτύπωσις / hupotúpôsis, is thus a "draft, a model". Furetière sees the verb ὑποτυπόω/hupotupóô as the origin of the noun, which he paraphrases with the Latin phrase: "per figuram demonstro, designo" (i.e., "I represent, I make something see"). The seme kept in the definition of the figure is related to the spectacular side of the animation that it produces. By analogy with the matter to which it imprints a predetermined form, the imprint is indeed what marks the spirit and the imagination.
In the literal sense of the term, the hypotyposis "gives to see" (according to the Latin expression ut cerni videantur), it engraves in the reader's memory an image or an impression. The meaning of "tableau", which is used synonymously, is quite common, notably by César Chesneau Dumarsais who explains that "Hypotypose is a Greek word which means "image", "tableau"; it is when, in descriptions, one paints the facts of which one speaks as if what one says were actually before the eyes".
Definition and variants
A "figure of presence" for Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's Traité de l'argumentation, la nouvelle rhétorique, hypotyposis is, within a discourse (in writing but also to a certain extent in speech), the animated and vivid description of a subject, a scene, a real or fictitious character or an object of art. In Greek rhetoric, it is known as enargeia, or evidentia in Latin. For Jean-Jacques Robrieux, "hypotyposis (...) groups together the varied set of procedures that make a narrative or a description lively and realistic". The figure has had many names throughout history. The poet Nicolas Boileau called it "image", Fénelon "painting", Pierre Fontanier "tableau", Edmond de Goncourt "painted image" and Joachim du Bellay "energy".
By its ambition, hypotyposis is a key figure of mimesis because the author uses it to go beyond, or at least to give the illusion of, the classical narrative and descriptive framework, by giving the impression that the scene is real.
The prosopopeia
Prosopopoeia can concern a fictional, dead or abstract character who, unlike allegory [ref. needed], has the faculty of speech; it is a figure in its own right, despite its proximity to hypotyposis (according to Jean-Jacques Robrieux, it is, indeed, a form of it). The "prosopopeia of the laws" (Crito, 50 a-c) is one of the oldest examples. The term "prosopography" (ancient Greek prosopon and graphein, "face, figure, character and writing") is also often used, synonymously with that of "prosopopoeia", and designates the description of the external appearance of a person. Often confused with allegory when it concerns a mythical or abstract character (such as Death, for example), prosopography, unlike portrait and ethopoeia (see below), vividly describes the subject in his or her environment and in action, in a fleeting manner, as in this Baudelairian poem:
The topography Topography concerns the description of a place, real or imaginary. The object described in topography (ancient Greek topos, "the place in the sense of geographical location") is a picturesque or simply striking landscape. Its primary function is rhetorical: it takes place during the narratio (phase of the exposition of facts in oratory) where it allows situating the places and circumstances and thus allows to expose to all the places of the action or to revive their memory. The topography is very much used in the novel, to fix the scene as in this passage from the short story La Nuit by Guy de Maupassant:
The ethopoeia
Ethopoeia is also a variant of hypotyposis. It consists in painting characters or assemblies of characters by also painting their morals and passions. Less visual than the hypotyposis, it constitutes very often elements of a portrait, as with the moralists, since Les Caractères du philosophe Theophrastus, taken again by Jean de La Bruyère in 1688 in his Caractères de Theophrastus, traduits du grec, avec les Caractères ou les mœurs de ce siècle. For Marc Escola, La Bruyère's portraits achieve the excellence of ethopoeia, which he describes as "hermeneutics of the visible" as in the portrait of Drance, a character in the chapter Du Coeur of Les Caractères:
Diatyposis Diatyposis, from a Greek term meaning the action of shaping, of modelling, or evidentia in Latin, also known as "trait", consists of a "dynamic description of an animated scene that can give rise to an oratorical development", unlike hypotyposis which remains static.
Some authors sometimes define diatyposis as a short hypotyposis. However, contrary to hypotyposis, diatyposis is a short narrative embedded in a discourse that encompasses it. In other words, the diatyposis is a digression of the gaze or of the diegesis which focuses, for a time, no longer on the unfolding of the action but on a small visualizable scene. It is often introduced by the narrator himself, by means of another figure of speech, the epiphrase, as opposed to the hypotyposis which is self-sufficient and seems closed and autonomous from the rest of the discourse (although it is a figure of speech).
Michel Pougeoise's Dictionary of Rhetoric considers diatyposis as a form of reduced and condensed hypotyposis that is found especially in the narrative, in Homer's Iliad, for example:
A similar figure of speech: the ekphrasis Historically, the figure of ekphrasis, which allows to describe in an animated way a work of art, is first in rhetoric. Indeed, the term "hypotyposis" is only attested as early as 1555 under the entry "Hipotipose" in Jacques Peletier du Mans' work, l'Art poétique, whereas ekphrasis has been known since Greek antiquity. The ekphrasis is evoked by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in his Art rhétorique and in Sur la mimésis, but it is Aelius Theon who is the first, in the first century, to attempt a definition of it. He explains that this animated description, which he calls "ekphrasis", is "a discourse which presents in detail and puts before the eyes in an obvious way what it gives to know. There are descriptions of people, facts, places, and time (...) There are also descriptions of manner." In antiquity, ekphrasis is not limited to the evocation of works of art, but designates any vivid evocation capable of conjuring up images in the mind of the listener or the reader; it is only towards the end of the 19th century that the notion is used by scholars in a sense that restricts it to the description of works of art.
Two types of hypotyposes
In spite of its numerous variants with blurred contours, Bernard Dupriez, in his Gradus, proposes to distinguish two types of hypotyposes, a distinction also attested by Jean-Jacques Robrieux:
The "descriptive hypotyposis”
The figure then merges with simple description, as an enumeration of details, as following the gaze of the observer. Bernard Dupriez takes as an example the descriptive passage in Gustave Flaubert's L'Éducation sentimentale: "People were arriving out of breath; barrels, cables, baskets of laundry were obstructing traffic; the sailors were not responding to anyone; we were bumping into each other". The hypotyposis presses on the details, resulting in seeing the scene instead of simply reading it. These verses of Racine thus suggest, in three movements, all the sadness of the character of Junia and the love of Nero which is expressed here:
Often the hypotyposis is revealed by the interruption of the narrative or by the creation of a digression. It is recognizable by the development of the subject it wants to show, a development that is sometimes long and typographically marked. For Dupriez, schematization is the opposition of descriptive hypotyposis. Hypotyposis consists mainly of episodes in indirect discourse, often bordering on cliché when it summarizes the action too quickly or too succinctly.
In Et que dit ce silence?, Anne Surgers, Gilles Declercq, and Anne-Elisabeth Spica analyze the visual dimension of the figure, through three categories of hypotyposis: one that gives to see and feel, a second by empathy, and a third by the accentuation of the effect of presence, in literary texts, and in painting.
The "rhetorical hypotyposis"
The rhetorical use of hypotheticals is based on the idea that they are "a device for representing the idea". In rhetoric, the visual perception is indeed first and is always privileged because it allows to strike the mind of the listener or the public, because it is linked to memory, explains Frances Yates. It thus aims at an effect or an emotion on the reader. Metonymy and metaphor are thus the fundamental figures of style composing it. As part of the rhetorical arsenal available to the orator, it intervenes in the rhetorical part of the narratio and allows the elements of the described object to be seen. It also makes it possible to situate the action, by the topography, or to make the physical portrait of an individual, by means of the prosopography. The orator then seeks to move and touch the pathos of the listeners, to convince without resorting to a logical argumentation or to evidence.
Hypotyposis is also related to the part of the rhetorical system called memoria, memory. The ancient oratorical exercises (progymnasmata) consisted in particular in the making of hypotyposes, either of works of art, or of dialogues between two famous characters but whose meeting is fictitious, for the needs of the exercise. Hypotyposis (or ekphrasis, this second term being in use at the time) is based on the reuse of truism.
The confusion of hypotyposis with simple description
The theoretical and stylistic distinction between hypotyposis and conventional description remains unclear. Nevertheless, for many authors, such as Georges Molinié, the two figures are equivalent macrostructural processes. Molinié cites this verse by Victor Hugo as an illustration of the suggestive power of hypotyposis on the one hand, and its brevity on the other:
The collusion of the two figures is such that the Encyclopedia's article Hypotypose gives an example of allegory, citing Nicolas Boileau's lines in Le Lutrin:
Stylistics of hypotyposis
Literary uses of the figure