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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hypotyposis | 5/6 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotyposis | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T15:41:29.493054+00:00 | kb-cron |
It was during the horror of a deep night, My mother Jezebel before me showed up, As on the day of her pompously adorned death. His misfortunes had not brought down his pride, Even she still had that borrowed glow, Of which she took care to paint & adorn her face, To repair the irreparable outrage of years. Tremble, she said to me, girl worthy of me, The cruel God of the Jews also prevails over you. I pity you for falling into his formidable hands, My daughter! As she finished these appalling words, His shadow towards my bed seemed to be dropping, And I held out my hands to kiss him; But all I found was a horrible mixture Of bruised bones and flesh dragged through the mire, Tatters full of blood, & dreadful limbs,
That devouring dogs were fighting among themselves
=== In the novel ===
In the novel and in particular in the literary movements like realism and naturalism, the hypotyposes are common. Developing over many sentences, they allow to accentuate the effect of reality, an aesthetic ambition of these literary movements. The description of the alembic by Émile Zola in L'Assommoir, of the mine in Germinal; the descriptive stretches of Gustave Flaubert or Joris-Karl Huysmans, of Honoré de Balzac finally form types of hypotyposes anchored in the natural course of the narrative. Émile Zola in his Carnets ethnographiques (Ethnographic Notebooks) makes a topography of the caves of Lourdes: "[in the baths of the cave of Lourdes] there was everything, threads of blood, scraps of skin, scabs, pieces of lint and bandage, a dreadful consummate of all the evils, all the wounds, all the rottenness. It seemed a veritable culture of poisonous germs, an essence of the most dreadful contagions, and the miracle should be that one emerged alive from this human slime." Stendhal in particular knows not only how to constitute hypotyposes, but also how to play on their referential scope. In La Chartreuse de Parme (1839), Fabrice the hero contemplates the battle of Waterloo, which the author presents in great military detail and precise description: "a ploughed land that was stirred up in a singular way. The bottom of the furrows was full of water, and the very wet earth that formed the crest of these furrows flew in small black fragments thrown three or four feet high". Stendhal then presents his character as asking a passing soldier "but is this a real battle?", thereby criticizing the literary attempt to portray everything in a spectacular way, at the risk of no longer being able to identify the fictional from the real.
In the 20th century, Alain Robbe-Grillet in Les Gommes uses modern hypotypositions to describe a tomato in an exhaustive way. Marguerite Duras' Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein is considered a hypotyposis on the scale of an entire novel. Annie Ernaux, who claims in La Place a "flat writing", devoid of any literary art, to "immerse herself in the vision and the limits of the world of [her] father" of peasant origin, uses the hypotyposis abundantly to "make the image of the father appear" in an "ethnological" writing, where the details are always chosen according to their social significance:
"I will gather the words, the gestures, the tastes of my father, the highlights of his life, all the objective signs of an existence that I also shared." Surrealism also, by means of the splitting up of objects into fugitive details, has updated the hypotyposis while maintaining the classical use of scenographic tableaux, inherited notably from Lautréamont and his Les Chants de Maldoror. As a return to its phantasmatic and hallucinatory origin, the poets of modernity, with the use of drugs and practices of writing based on the de-construction, as Henri Michaux establishes hypotyposes delivered of any space of reference:
Suddenly, but first preceded by a word in vanguard... Hymalayas suddenly appear... While I am still looking at these extraordinary mountains, here is that...
Plowshares and again the big scythes that mow the nothingness from top to bottom... Paul Claudel composes mystical and pantheistic hypotyposes. The passage known as Place Monge in Claude Simon's novel Le Jardin des Plantes presents an original hypotyposis inspired by cinematographic techniques.
=== In poetry === Charles Baudelaire but also Arthur Rimbaud in his Illuminations animates their poems by hypotyposes establishing contemplative effects for this one. Baudelaire uses them to give substance to synesthesia, which he calls "correspondences". The Japanese haikus are also fast hypotyposes.
Victor Hugo in his romantic poems uses many emphatic hypotyposes, signs of his energetic writing:
The child was shot twice in the head. The house was clean, humble, peaceful, honest; A blessed branch was seen on a portrait. An old grandmother was there crying. We undressed him in silence. His mouth, Pale, opened; death drowned his fierce eye; Her arms seemed to be hanging down, asking for support. He had a boxwood top in his pocket. You could stick a finger in the holes of his wounds. Have you seen the blackberry bleeding in the hedges? His skull was open like wood splitting. The grandmother watched the child undress, Saying: – How white it is! bring the lamp closer.
God! her poor hair is stuck on her temple!