C is for Chiasmus
Chiasmus. (chi AS mus)
This one's a wild one, awkwardly similar to antimetabole, but different in subtle and important ways.
In his helpful handlist, Richard Lanham tells us chiasmus is "the ABBA pattern of mirror inversion," and so it looks like the same schematic approach as antimetabole. Lanham even provides similar examples, this one from advertising: "The question isn't whether Grape Nuts are good enough for you, it's whether you are good enough for Grape Nuts."
Another biting one from Samuel Johnson: "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.
Where things get murky, as Jeanne Fahnestock points out in her important Rhetorical Figures in Science, is where chiasmus differs from antimetabole. She rightly notes a chiasmus "abandons the constraint of repeating the same words in the second colon yet retains a pattern of inversion." What she means is that where the antimetabole depends on repeated terms, the chiasmus can play fast and loose with the actual term as long as the sense is repeated. So we have an example like this:
Napoleon was defeated by a Russian winter
and the snows of Leningrad destroyed Hitler
There's no actual repetition, but we can see the basic pattern clear enough, where "Russian winter" and "snow" function as a single semantic idea and "Napoleon" and "Hitler" function as a single semantic idea. Fahnestock points out we could express this as "invader:Russian Winter / Russian Winter:invader."
An easy way to remember the difference is to think of repeated, inverted, ideas, instead of repeated, inverted terms.
Fun fact: the name chiasmus derives from the Greek letter chi, which looks like X. The shape of the letter iconically represents the criss-crossing of the ideas the scheme captures.
Fun fact 2: chiasmus is a common hermeneutical tool for Biblical scholarship (though it uses a notion of a "pivotal centre" not found in ancient rhetorical use of chiasmus.) An example of such use with a pivotal term comes from Jeremiah 2:27-28, and I borrow John Breck's demonstration of how this works (using indentation to demonstrate the structure around the pivotal term).
- In the time of their trouble they say,
2. "Arise and save us!"
3. But where are your gods that you made for yourself?
2. Let them arise, if they can save you, - In the time of your trouble.
I can see how this schematic is helpful, but if I'm honest, I much prefer the rhetorical use of the term, where looser restrictions on terminology allows for more variations on the theme.
Let's give ol' Billy S. the final word here, with a sublime chiasmus hidden in the midst:
But O, what damned minutes tells he o'er
Who dotes, yet doubts; suspects, yet strong loves.
—Shakespeare, Othello 3.3
