Cipher (literature)
A cipher (French for "digit, password, secret sign") is a special style figure in literature. Ciphers are words that are encoded symbols in a text in a context with mostly complex meanings. Ciphers can be found not only in individual texts, but also in the entire work of an author, in a school of thought, a time or a discourse . They are mostly pictorial and can be distinguished from other stylistic figures such as allegory , catachresis , metonymy , onomatopoeia , oxymoron , pars pro toto , personification , symbol , synaesthesia , synecdoche and topos .
Ciphers in more modern literature
The cipher is a stylistic figure of modern poetry . Here it is a form of the symbol , a secret sign with an encrypted meaning, mostly author-related.
Examples:
- "Black Milk of the Morning" ( Paul Celan : Death Fugue )
- "Blue piano" ( Else Lasker-Schüler : My blue piano )
- "Animal Eye" ( Gottfried Benn )
Simple, mostly figurative words or word combinations take on a meaning that is independent of their original meaning , which the author assigns to them. The meaning must be deduced from the context and often makes it understandable (cf. hermeneutic circle ).
One example is the “flight” for Oskar Loerke's poetry process, understood as a departure into the unknown, the infinite .
Ciphers in the Hebrew Bible and Poetic Literature
The Hebrew Bible is a model for this literary technique . It tells of the history of Israel in an understandable way, but the God , around whom everything revolves, she designates with the letters YHWH in order to fundamentally differentiate him from all things that can be represented, understood and named. So YHWH is neither a word nor a substitute for a name, but a cipher for something that is beyond human imagination.
The term cipher was naturalized in the middle of the 20th century for poetic condensation, the riddle of which is either not solved at all or by an unexpected, wonderful illumination .
Literature examples
This is followed by works that, along with other rhetorical figures, mainly use ciphers:
- Hamlet ( Shakespeare )