ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the relationship between a second-order trope and history. It then outlines some of the features of what classical rhetoric calls complex or mixed tropes. These forms are closest to the kind of trope and therefore provide people with an analogical means of describing or understanding what will be termed second-order tropes. It then explores The breaking of the vessels is entitled ‘Transumption’, and takes as its topic the attempt to link the trope of a trope to a ‘diachronic rhetoric’. Harold Bloom, wants to place his description within a tropological-psychic perspective, but translating it within the own scheme will pose no problem. These are eight in number, Antonomasia, Communication, Litotes, Euphemism, Catachresis, Hyperbole, Metalepsis and Allegory. The three first are simple tropes, and may all be referred to a Synecdoche. But the five last are of a mixed or complex nature, and not confined to any one of the primary tropes.
