Chiasmus

Chiasmus is the ABBA form of inversion, and may occur, depending on which source you rely on, at the level of the sentence, the passage, or the work. He walked down the road, and down the road walked he. The example in some dictionaries of "he went to the country and to the town went she" is chiasmus because it follows the ABBA form, not in its choice of words but in its structural elements.

At the level of the passage, chiasmus is clearly a rhetorical figure, which may or may not be ornamental (see Nanny, "Chiasmus in Literature: Ornament or Function?," in Word and Image 4.1 (1988): 51-59). At the level of the passage,viewing structures as chiastic may depend on literal arrangement, symbolic arrangement (in the sense of narrative "balance"), or a combination of both. At any rate, when considered in any sense beyond the literal figure, chiasmus can be a useful structure for describing relations of balance, especially those involving inversion (see Arteaga, "Tricks of GenderXing," _Stanford Humanities Review_ 3.1 (1993): 112-26). See Lanham, _A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms_, 2E (Berkeley: U of CA P,: 33-34; see also Antimetabole and Commutatio in the same volume;

Quinn, in _Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase_ (Layton, UT:Peregrine Smith, 1982): 95, 102, links chiasmus to epanados, with chiasmus "at the level of passage"; epanados is a sentence organized "spatially around a center." Quinn cites Num. 15: 35 and John 5:8 as examples of chiastic formulations, and adds that Abraham's story in Genesis, Ruth, Hamlet, and The Tempest, Tartuffe, and The Iliad, are all organized chiastically; Quinn also claims for chiasmus a relation to the palindrome, but, while I personally see this as an obvious connection, it is not universally accepted;

In Hawthorne, _A Glossary of Literary Theory_ (NY: Edward Arnold, 1992): chiasmus is illustrated through the familiar example of the last sentence of Joyce's "The Dead," a passage in which the structural symmetry of the sentence recalls the structural symmetry of the story and of the entire cycle of stories; Norrman, in _The Insecure World of Henry James's Fiction: Intensity and Ambiguity_ (London: Macmillan, 1982) and _Samuel Butler and the Meaning of Chiasmus_ (London: Macmillan, 1986), reads chiastic structures as keys to understanding the fiction of these two authors and also the authors themselves;

For two examples of plain-language use of chiasmus in a sentence of criticism, _Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics_ (NY: Verso, 1994): 80; and Montrose, "Professing the Renaissance:the Poetics and Politics of Culture," in Veeser, ed. _The New Historicism_(NY: Routledge, 1989): The post-structuralist orientation to history now emerging in literary studies may be characterized chiastically, as a reciprocal concern with the historicity of texts and the textuality of history.

Finally, who but Doctor Johnson would provide a chiasmus useful for both meditation on the figure and for figurations of scholarship itself: Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good. (Lanham, _Handlist_= 33).

Peter Sands, English Binghamton University (SUNY)