American Indian Culture and Research Journal

With its roots in ancient rhetoric and medieval liturgy, the term trope now refers to a figure of speech that organizes a set of complex ideas into a kind of linguistic shorthand. A trope is thus a phrase or image that conveys more than its literal meaning. Those of us trained in the Western literary canon have learned to recognize a myriad of repeated tropes that underpin the major stories in that canon. For the purposes of the analysis to follow, two tropes are pertinent: the pastoral and the fortunate fall. The word pastoral comes out of the classical tradition and functions as a trope by conjuring up images of happy peasants peacefully herding their flocks in some bucolic countryside. But pastoral thereby also suggests itself as the antithesis of (or even refuge from) the ills of the crowded and hectic city. It is thus a kind of imaginative shorthand for an inherent tension between the urban and the rural. The second familiar trope comes from Christian sources. Originally, the fortunate fall referred to the idea that the sin of Adam and Eve—their disobedience to God, which resulted in the expulsion from Eden and the entry of death into the world—nonetheless set in motion a chain of events that ultimately led to the resurrection’s promise of salvation and eternal life. Over the centuries, moreover, the meaning of the trope expanded to connote any circumstance in which good eventually emanates from evil or error. Thus, as scholars trained in literary studies come to understand, literary artifacts—or imaginative texts of any kind—are inevitably structured by one or more of the tropes available within the reservoir of tropes that circulate in any culture. But as students of literature also understand, tropes are not universal.