Climax (Gradation)

Climax (4) is an arrangement of sentences which secures a gradual increase in significance, importance, or emotional tension in the utterance:

"It was a lovely city, a beautiful city, a fair city, a veritable gem of a city."

"No barrier wall, no river deep and wide, No horrid crags, nor mountains dark and tall Rise like the rocks that part Hispania's land from Gaul."

A gradual increase in significance may be maintained in three ways: logical, emotional and quantitative.

Logical climax is based on the relative importance of the component parts. This relative importance may be evaluated both objec­tively and subjectively, the author's attitude towards the objects or phenomena in question being disclosed.

Emotional cIimax is based on the relative emotional ten­sion produced by words with emotive meaning.

Emotional climax based on synonymous strings of words with emotive meaning will cause semantic differences in these words — such is the linguistic nature of stylistic synonyms but emotive meaning will be the prevailing one.

Emotional climax is mainly found in sentences, in longer syntactical units.

"He was pleased when the child began to adventure across floors on hands and knees; he was gratified, when she managed the trick of balancing herself on two legs; he was delighted when she first said ‘tata'; and he was rejoiced when she recognized him and smiled at him."

Quantitative climax is an evident increase in the volume of the corresponding concepts:

"They looked at hundreds of houses; they climbed thousands of stairs; they inspected innumerable kitchens."

Here the climax is achieved by simple numerical increase.

"Little by little, bit by bit, and day by day, and year by year the bar­on got the worst of some disputed question."

Here the climax is materialized by concepts of measure and time:

The indispensable constituents of climax are:

a) the distributional constituent: close proximity of the component parts arranged in increasing order of importance or significance;

b) the syntactical pattern; parallel constructions with possible lexical repetition;

c) the connotative constituent: the explanatory context which helps the reader to grasp the gradation, as no.. ever once in all his life, nobody ever, nobody, No beggars (Dickens); deep and wide, horrid, dark and tall (Byron); veritable (gem of a city).

Climax is a means by which the author discloses his world outlook, his evaluation of objective facts and phenomena. The concrete stylistic function of this device is to show the relative importance of things as seen by the author or to impress upon the reader the significance of the things described by suggested comparison or to depict phenomena dy­namically.

There is a device which is called anticlimax.

The final idea which the reader expects to be the culminating one, as in climax, is trifling or farcical. There is a sudden drop from the lofty or serious to the ridiculous.

10.5. Antithesis

In order to characterize a thing or phenomenon it may be necessary to find points of sharp contrast, that is, to set one against the other: "A saint abroad, and a devil at home."

"Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven." Any opposition will be based on the contrasting features as 'saint'— 'devil', 'reign' — 'serve', 'hell' — 'heaven'.

Many word-combinations are built up by means of contrasting pairs, as up and dawn, inside and out, from top to bottom and the like. 'Stylistic opposition antithe s i s is based on relative opposition which arises out of the context through the expansion of objectively contrasting pairs, as in: "Youth is lovely, age is lonely, Youth is fiery, age is frosty". Antith­esis (5) is moulded in parallel construction. The difference between antithesis and contrast. Contrast is a literary device based on logical opposition between the phenomena set one against another.

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