F is for Fictio

FIC ti o. Latin for invention, but a rhetorical figure (trope) that attributes rational actions and speech to nonrational creatures.

Shakespeare's Iago puts the figure to work in Othello:
O beware, my lord, of jealousy!
It is the green-ey'd monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.  (3.3.165-67)

In a recent Sunday School lesson at our church, the conversation was on Proverbs 20:1, which uses fictio twice: "Wine is a mocker, strong drink a brawler" (E.S.V).  Study of several translations demonstrates certain strengths and weaknesses regarding poetic and rhetorical linguistics: the KJV reveals the struggles with translation by italicizing the verb form "to be" that creates the fictio - "Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging - while the New Living Translation, apparently uneasy with metaphor, changes things up and says "Wine produces mockers; alcohol leads to brawls." Just in case you don't know, those two lines of argumentation are not the same thing. So how are the translators trying to move you?  

A more common name, especially in literary studies, for this figure is personification, and it's easy to see how this can be employed argumentatively. How many advertisements have you experienced that bring to life non-rational or even inanimate objects so they can "demonstrate" how useful and powerful they are? The use of fictio invites and audience to endow non-rational creatures with non-rational qualities so it might consider those creatures in rational terms.

A similar figure in Greek is prosopopoeia (pro so po po EI a), which has a subtle difference: "an animal or inanimate object is represented as having human attributes and addressed or made to speak as if it were human" (Lanham). Here we have the inclusion of animals, arguably rational creatures, though not perfect analogues to humans.

Milton's Paradise Lost (which received criticism for how it's personification of Satan made it possible to read him sympathetically) offers a sublime example of both fictio and prosopopoeia: 
....Of he bow'd
His turret Crest, and sleek enamell'd Neck,
Fawning, and lick'd the ground whereon she trod.
His gentle dumb expression turn'd at length
The eye of Eve to mark his play; he glad
Of her attention gain'd with Serpent Tongue
Organic, or impulse of vocal Air,
His fraudulent temptation thus begun. . . .

So saying, her rash hand in evil hour
Forth reaching to the Fruid, she pluck'd, she eat:
Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat
Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe,
That all was lost (IX, 524-531, 780-784)

Endowing animals with human characteristics is a fiction, something invented and made up for some suasive purpose. Fictio and prosopopoeia are used synonymously with personification, and you'd probably be amused if you'd tune in to instances of it throughout your day to see how it's being used in attempts to move you.

They're both instances of what Kenneth Burke calls consubstantiality, a term of identification that highlights common ground between things. Loosely paraphrasing Burke: when I say that thing A has something in common with thing B, I am saying they are identified together or consubstantial with each other. And they don't have to actually have a thing in common. It's enough to imagine they have a thing in common. In so far as thing A believes it has something in common with thing B, they are identified together, consubstantial. (Dare I say this may concept may be an strong interpretive lens for the outcome of the most recent American election?)

A few other figures deserve the same paralipsis treatment some got yesterday. There aren't many classically names figures that start with "F," but good old George Puttenham wasn't going to let that get in the way of his own lexical work. He came up with some beauty English terms, such as False Semblant, which was his term of Allegory, the Fleering Frumpe, which was his term of Mycterismus, the Flitting Figure for Metastasis, Fonde Affectation for Cacozelia, Forrein Speech for Barbarismus, and Foule Speech for Cacemphaton. What a contribution! (You can look up those terms here.)

Be careful how you Fleer your Frumpe's today folks.