Excerpts from "Recovering Hyperbole"

Hyperbole is one of the most effective ways of trying to express the often confounding and inexpressible positions that characterize the liti- gious discussions of impossibility and the struggle with transcendence and immanence, the conceptual (re)articulation of subjectivity, and the destabilization of systems of knowledge and economy. It is employed when language or thought must transcend epistemological and ontological boundaries in order to describe the magnitude of an extraordinary perspec- tive or situation. It stretches language to its breaking point and responds in abundance, in copia. Hyperbole is more than a stylistic figure of speech. It is a “sophisticated, discursive figure of thought” ( Johnson 2010, 44), an “inordinate movement and a violent impulsion” (Webb 1993a, 18), that can be a generator of thought and meaning (Stanivukovic 2007), a men- tal phenomenon (Holmqvist and Pluciennik 2008), a propelling toward transcendence from an immanent exigency (Simpson 2009), a tool of philosophical and religious inquiry (Ettenhuber 2007) as well as an argumentative form (Ricoeur 1992; Schlueter 1994; Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 2003).
Hyperbole is not simply the “overreacher” or “lowd lyer” (Sidney 2010; Puttenham 2007), and it is not merely a distortion or an obvious exaggeration. More often than is typically recognized, hyperbole is necessary for communicating grand and complex ideas, and it can be, as Hayden White says of other tropes, a “mode of comprehension” (1990, 3). It dramatically holds the real and the ideal in irresolvable tension and reveals the impossible distance between the ineptitude and the infinite multiplicity of language to describe that which is indescribable. 
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Approaching hyperbole is a difficult task, since it is and was so often dis- missed as an obvious, offensive, and simplistic trope offering little to no theoretical insights. To use one of Quintilian’s examples, “As he [Antony] vomited, he filled his lap and the whole platform with gobbets of food” (2001, 8.6.68). For many, there is no more to hyperbole than this type of obvi- ous exaggeration, which is confirmed by its contentious history. Aristotle, for example, considers hyperbole “adolescent,” describing it as an aspect of metaphor in On Rhetoric, and he offers a significant critique of various types of excess in the Nicomachean Ethics. Demetrius regards it as being oftentimes “frigid,” that is, indecorous (1995, 427), though he does highlight its utility for expressing the impossible. Although Pseudo-Longinus favors hyperbole—he places it in the elevated style, characterizing it as a useful trope for putting a “strain on the facts” and transporting one’s audience to the sublime through intense pathos—he asserts that it may easily be “ruined by overshooting the mark” (1995, 285, 281). Hyperbole was often considered bombastic, associated only with epideictic rhetoric (where it functions quite well), and was aligned with excessive stylistic vices of the sophists.1 Indeed, hyperbole was often accused of cacozelia, or “perverse affectation,” which results from insincerity or poor judgment and is “the worst faults of all eloquence” (Quintilian 8.3.56). 
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What I am suggesting is that it is the less obvious, nuanced hyperboles that are significant and that deserve further critical attention, for example, philosophical, discursive, prophetic, ironic, or polemical hyperboles. What I show in discussing some of these types of hyperbole is that hyperbole can and does operate as more than just a simplistic, intentional, and common- place exaggeration. According to Jean-Pierre Mileur, Paul de Man “sug- gests, variously, that hyperbole is the trope of tropes, the trope that governs the formation of tropes, the trope that governs the transformation of tropes into texts or, most important, that hyperbole is the (non)trope that exceeds the limits of all tropologies, the situation out of and against which tropes arise and are generalized into texts, the shape of our being-in-the-world, not reducible to rhetorical terms” (1986, 125). Mileur’s more extreme claims about de Man’s thought regarding hyperbole as a (non)trope or as irreduc- ible to rhetorical terms notwithstanding, what Mileur may be driving at in this audacious, perhaps exaggerated, statement is the significance that hyperbole has as a movement within discourse and in relation to the inter- pretation of meaning. It is a figure of thought that can highlight the limits of figuration and representation (Bloom 2003), operate as a vehicle for the sublime (Marvick 1986), destabilize norms and conventions, and encourage active reflection on “the different ways in which meaning is constructed and communicated” (Ettenhuber 2007, 210).

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Philosophy & Rhetoric 45, no. 4 (2012) : 406-428