Please Stop Talking About Tropes

On antisemitism, narrative, and anxiety

There’s a word I can’t get away from lately. I hear it everywhere. It’s driving me insane.

That word is tropes. That’s a trope. What’s your favorite trope? I hate that trope. What’s the deal with this word?

I recently put the question to my friend Shosh, who was valiantly trying to write her PhD thesis. With immense patience, she let me interrupt her and considered my question. “There are two ways I see people use that word,” she said, “narrative tropes and antisemitic tropes.”

EXACTLY! I said.  If you’re not familiar with this phenomenon, then I envy you: people use the word tropes to talk, on the one hand, about narrative arts (mostly commercial, franchisey book series and movies) and, on the other hand, about antisemitism. Of course it crops up elsewhere, but it’s remarkably common, unusually frequent, in these two narrow discursive realms. That’s probably why it drives me so nuts. As a Jew and as a reader, I can’t get the fuck away.

What, exactly, ties together these two use cases? What’s going on in mainstream conversation about these two disparate topics to prompt this odd lexical overlap?

Shosh and I considered: what differentiates this word from its neighbors? To call something a trope, at least in much of its current usage, is like calling it a cliché—but in a way that naturalizes the cliché, that treats it as an independently existing neutral object in the world, rather than subverting, analyzing, or disrupting it. It’s like calling something a motif, but, again, in a way that naturalizes it—motif suggests some kind of intentional meaning-making on the part of the writer/speaker, but “trope” only indicates that they have repeated a note already sounded elsewhere. To call something a trope is like calling it a stereotype—but while a stereotype implies a stereotyper, a lying or misguided speaker perpetuating a falsehood, a trope does not. 

In other words, “tropes” are decontextualized. The current usage of this word suggests that the tropes simply exist, without history or context or intent to animate, legitimize, or motivate them. Like nations, they are imagined as eternal and natural entities rather than inventions. One gets the idea that if a trope fell in the forest with nobody there to hear it, it would still make a sound. If humans went extinct, the tropes would remain as robust as ever. This word, therefore, allows its users to speak about ideas while entirely eliding questions of context, intent, impact, perspective, or truth value. It treats notions as so many infinitely remixable bits. To speak of “tropes,” as many currently do, is like speaking of individual pieces on a chessboard without knowing or caring where the other pieces are, or whose turn it is.

Antisemitic Tropes:

Here’s what I mean. It is a longstanding stereotype that Jews are an insular and greedy group with outsize, nefarious power. This stereotype has obviously caused immense harm. Sometimes, when somebody points out that the state of Israel is making use of its relative wealth and power to abuse and ethnically cleanse Palestinians, for the benefit of Jewish Israelis, somebody else will respond that this is, in fact, an antisemitic trope.

Now, there is obviously a way to talk about Israel’s genocide in Gaza that is anti-Jewish. And, obviously, someone talking about “Jewish Supremacy” in a US or European context rather than an Israeli/Palestinian one would just be echoing neo-Nazi rhetoric.

But for reasons that I assume I don’t need to enumerate here, the context is entirely different. Talking about “Jewish Supremacy” in an Israeli context is not necessarily antisemitic—rather, it reflects a political reality.¹ To ignore that context is to worry about the position of the knight on the chessboard, without caring where the other pieces are. Sometimes, when a person notes that someone has used an antisemitic trope, what they mean is “that true thing you said sounds very vaguely like another untrue thing that someone else said once.” This is not a helpful, informative, or clarifying way to speak. 

We’ve seen this kind of decontextualized, inflexible notion of antisemitism most starkly in the absolutely bizarre behavior of Germany and its cultural institutions. In their efforts to make up for killing a majority of Europe’s Jews last century, Germany has adopted a bizarre, dogmatic, context-allergic stance on antisemitism. The Palestinian diaspora in Germany faces punishing limitations on political speech or even just cultural expression—public Palestinian life, or, god forbid, anti-Israel politics, are treated as antisemitism. If your definition of antisemitism means an oppressed diaspora population cannot protest the genocide of their own families, you might have, as they say, lost the plot. Meanwhile, Germany has also disproportionately punished and censored Jews for speech they deem antisemitic (see: the mess around Masha Gessen and the Hannah Arendt prize, for instance). If your definition of antisemitism means that Jews are forbidden from speaking freely, again, you have surely lost the plot. Or—to put it in literary terms— you have lost sight of plot, of the complexity and motion and cause-and-effect of historical narrative, and replaced it with trope: so many decontextualized free-floating motifs.

A digression. If you are Jewish, you probably first encountered the word tropes in Hebrew school, and with a meaning quite different from the one you’ll encounter in everyday conversation. In Jewish liturgy, “trope” is the system of notation indicating how a person should read out loud from the Torah and from various other religious texts. The tropes, which look like punctuation or accent marks, float above and below and around the words.

if you went to hebrew school, this was probably a stress factor in your life

For purposes of this essay, the important bit is this: the tropes are not actually in the Torah. They’re not part of the original text, and you have to practice and more or less memorize them from a separate copy of the text before you open the actual scroll. Shosh and I talked this over and then sat there for a while at our table, doodling little squiggles of Torah trope above and below fake lines of text. Then we’d jab our pens at the trope markings and say, increasingly pissed off, “People are mistaking the trope for the text!” In other words, people who speak about antisemitic tropes, without context, are mistaking the most surface-level expression of something—the outward signs of the thing—for the thing itself.

Narrative Tropes:

Quite frequently, I also see people talking about tropes in the context of books or movies. This is not entirely new. An academic might note that a book subverts a certain common trope. A reader might dismiss a book’s reliance on tropes, using the word to mean “cliche.” What does feel new is the use of “tropes” as a primary organizing way to read and buy narrative. E.g., “Can anyone recommend a book with a love triangle trope?” There’s even sometimes a suggestion of judgment: one’s preferred trope indicates one’s aesthetic and moral correctness. For instance: “How is your favorite trope age gap when slow burn is right there?”

Again, this is a kind of ripping-away of context. It’s quite different from talking about plot points. Plot, as I noted earlier, consists of moments in a trajectory, one leading to another. To speak of motifs is to speak of literary gestures with a specific effect and function within a given narrative. These tropes are instead treated as valuable or worthless, interesting or boring, on their own—regardless of the narrative in which they appear, or the style of the writer. Again, we’ve mistaken the trope for the text.

This reminds me a little of the structuralist folklorists who broke down the global folkloric tradition into a huge, but finite, number of remixable “functions” and “tale-types,” listed in great big indices. For instance: tale-type 510a, the blueprint for the Cinderella tale, is characterized by motifs like “B450. Helpful birds,” and “C761.3. Tabu: staying too long at ball.”

for instance

The structuralists’ goal was in a certain sense to decontextualize: strip away some of the historically-contingent and culturally-contingent specifics to get at the underlying similarities beneath. But they also allowed scholars to put these folktales in conversation with one another in order to understand why they were so similar. This German tale and this Moroccan tale, and even this English ballad, share a common skeleton—why? Different schools of thought responded, fruitfully, in their own ways. Because of underlying universal drives, the psychoanalytic critics said. Because of similar material conditions, said the Marxists. Because the tales shared a common ancestor, the field anthropologists might say. Though these indices decontextualized in one way, they also allowed for critical recontextualization.

What depresses me a little about the literary-tropes conversation is the way it seems to open up no avenues for newness, excitement, or criticism. It opens only avenues for consumption—essentially, these are advertising terms. If you like this book, you’ll like that book, because they share a certain surface-level characteristic. The unstated goal is to keep finding more and more and more of what you’ve already found, with every moment already named, categorized and tagged and caged like an animal in a zoo, or a piece on a chessboard.

Anxiety

What ties together these two discourses—antisemitic-trope-discourse and narrative-trope-discourse—is that they each betray a worldview driven by anxiety. A worldview driven by anxiety unfortunately tends to be myopic, judgmental, and lacking in perspective or clarity. It has made us obsessed with metaphorical and emotional “safety,” which is often a euphemism for comfort and familiarity.

The literary trope readers are anxious about discovering something new. We live in a cultural landscape increasingly propelled by algorithms, and this means that, often, we are used to simply seeing more of what we already like—having it essentially delivered to us, without effort on our part. This is why, if you do not actively work to diversify the music you listen to, Spotify will drive you into an algorithmic burrow, pushing the same songs, or songs that might as well be the same, over and over and over again. 

We are becoming afraid of entertainment that has not been vetted—of anything we don’t feel basically guaranteed to enjoy, or at least guaranteed to understand. We are accustomed to being ensconced in a certain algorithmic safety (even when it’s not specifically algorithmic, we tend to get a similar, more diffuse effect from other types of marketing: we are placed in a target demographic, focus-grouped, siloed by genre). If we do not feel that we are on solid and familiar ground, if we don’t feel that we know the book or film or show or song even before we begin to engage with it, we are afraid.

If the obsession with narrative tropes displays an obsessive seeking-out of the known, the obsession with antisemitic tropes is a mirror image, with devastating consequences: in this case people keep their eyes peeled for surface-level signs of the familiar but treat them with fear rather than desire.

The person who sees and fears “antisemitic tropes” in a sentence like “Israel grants power to Jews,” or who only sees dangerous blood libel in a statement like “Israel is killing children,” does so from a place of anxiety and confusion. It’s a kind of pavlovian, traumatized reaction. The problem is that—while anxiety can be a useful emotion for helping us stay alert to possible danger—an excessive, traumatized anxiety just makes us shallow and impulsive thinkers. It prevents us from looking, thinking, or analyzing. Anxiety means we respond, fight-or-flight, to whatever stimulus we encounter. There’s no time! That shadow on the cave wall looks kind of like a bear! That sentence about a country in the middle east sounds kind of like a different sentence about European antisemitism! Act, now! 

Another friend of mine, Anna, told me that she thinks the word “tropes” is essentially pseudointellectual. It sounds kind of fancy, so it’s a way to win an argument by making your point sound smarter and more complex than it is, obscuring obvious truths (killing civilians is bad) behind a veneer of scholarliness (it’s antisemitic to say that killing civilians is bad, for various erudite reasons you wouldn’t get). I think this is true, and is part and parcel of the anxiety issue. When a person is anxious, they often try to gain control. One way that people do that is to  become an expert—to try and gain mastery over their situation. Consider, for instance, the person who trawls the depths of WebMD with a stomachache and ends up convinced they have terminal cancer.

Calling something an antisemitic trope, identifying it from within a lengthy taxonomy of related tropes, lets you feel that you have expertise. Naming something makes you feel that you have power over it, that you know something others don’t, and so—without having to do the hard, destabilizing work of really thinking—you make yourself feel in-control and powerful and safe. But this doesn’t make you safe, and it doesn’t make you genuinely knowledgeable, any more than knowing the names of all the US presidents makes you an expert on American history. Any more than knowing the names of the chess pieces makes you a grandmaster. Any more than knowing how to read Torah trope when I was 13 made me a rabbi.

Actual knowledge, actual expertise, would not be soothing. It would involve grappling with the actual strangeness of this moment, with its historical anomalousness. It would mean tangling with the paradoxical, distressing fact that, in this specific moment, a certain group of Jews in a certain part of the world really do have a kind of nefarious and dangerous power. It would mean saying: yes, European antisemitism and empire caused this mess in the first place. And yes, some westerners do hate Israel with a singular glee that, frankly, does have to do with their disliking Jews. It does nobody any good to act like this isn’t true. And, even so, that does not make the cause of Palestinian liberation any less just: Israel is perpetrating a genocide. It’s not a “trope” to point out that another mass grave was found in Gaza this week, or that a new generation of children will grow up traumatized if they survive this moment. Real understanding, in other words, would involve a consideration of the context in which we are all living. We need a vocabulary that’s up to the task.

1. which is not to say that some people aren’t, like, ITCHING for a chance to use this phrase, lol