tropism

tropism /TROH-pizm/. noun. The movement of an organism in reaction to some stimulus. Instinctual tendencies.

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As an educator (and aren’t we all teachers, really?), resilience is an inescapable topic, popping up everywhere I look in the form of words like tenacity, perseverance and grit. And rightly so given the myriad challenges learners face culturally and financially. But I’ve noticed that the overwhelming narrative of resilience is one focused on resistance when, in reality, the concept is as much about elasticity as it is strength. To be resilient is not just to resist, but to know when and how to acquiesce in order to rebound. Resilience is about bending but not breaking, turning away from in order to be ready to turn back toward or, as the term du jour has it, lean in to.

Exploring resilience brought me to this week’s word: tropism. Biologically, tropism is the movement of an organism in reaction to some stimulus, such as a flower turning toward the sun. More broadly, tropism refers to our more or less instinctual tendencies, inclinations and impulses and is used this way by many verbally virtuosic writers. Philip K. Dick, for example, loved the word and it can be found in most of his novels, such as in Ubik, where he—in a display of his own characteristically ominous tropism—writes:

He would soon be leaving a trail behind him, bits of crumbled cloth. A trail of debris leading to a hotel room and yearned-for isolation. His last labored actions governed by a tropism. An orientation urging him toward death, decay and nonbeing. A dismal alchemy controlled him: culminating in the grave.

The word tropism comes to us as an abstraction from earlier scientific words such as heliotropism (that previously mentioned turning toward the sun) and geotropism (growth in the direction of gravity). These were based on the Greek word tropos (turning). Digging a little deeper, the Greek was based on the Proto-Indo-European trep-, which is part of words today as various as contrive, entropy and troubador!

The concept of tropism abounds in the world of literature of as well.

When Wordsworth writes of the golden daffodils:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

And then of himself:

And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

He is totally writing a poem of intertwining in which the flowers and his heart dance in a tropic relationship with one another.

Reading Wordsworth is not without its pain and pleasure, but grizzled veterans of the postmodernist civil wars of the 80s and 90s, readers and writers alike, will recognize—and perhaps feel traumatized by—the related word trope. In those dismal days of Derrida, trope evolved from referring to a simple figure of speech to a knowing, beret-tipping reference to a kind of recurring storytelling or figurative shorthand found in all kinds of fictions and entertainments, exhaustively documented by desperate grad students. While the Derrideans have mostly faded away, the force of the trope has remained strong, obsessively cataloged on sites like TVTropes.org, who once defined them in a delightfully clear way as:

devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations.

Finally, if all that isn’t enough for you to add tropism and its family to your verbal brood, note that it is found in Robert Bly’s (not that Robert Bly’s) book The Words You Should Know to Sound Smart. What more convincing could you need?

Links & Meanders

Notes & Quotes

The directorial attitude when hideousness occurs seems to range between clinical neutrality and an almost voyeuristic ogling. It’s not an accident that Frank Booth, Bobby Peru, and Leland /“Bob” steal the show in Lynch’s last three films, that there is almost a tropism about our pull toward these characters, because Lynch’s camera is obsessed with them, loves them; they are his movies’ heart.

—from “David Lynch Keeps His Head”
—found in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

Together he and Natalie left the medical office, going back down the narrow stairs and out into the strong sun, which he suddenly turned to as if in a kind of tropism, his face lifted. “I’m okay!” he said. “I’m really okay!”

—Meg Wolitzer
—from Surrender, Dorothy

It was a very hot afternoon; we spent it dozing in hammocks in front of the door of our room. And then suddenly, with the compelling force of a tropism, curiosity made me turn my head towards the forest.

—Simone De Beauvoir
—from The Mandarins

If diaries often alert us to the fact that they might be written at the same time of day and in the same mood—if they confess their partiality—the normal variety of a correspondence, the stylistic heliotropism as different friends are addressed differently, half-assure us that we have been shown the full extent of the writer’s character.

—Julian Barnes
—from “Tail-Flaying”
—found in Something to Declare

Plants in this part of the country, baffled by the sun, seek and hide from it all at once, suffering a kind of conflicted heliotropism in which the branches of a dry fissured oak, for instance, grow up and out, turn back, go down, curl and twist, writhing so much that, even still, they seem in motion, snaking like the hair of a Gorgon.

—Charles D’Ambrosio
—from “One More Paradise”
—found in Loitering: New and Collected Essays

He would soon be leaving a trail behind him, bits of crumbled cloth. A trail of debris leading to a hotel room and yearned-for isolation. His last labored actions governed by a tropism. An orientation urging him toward death, decay and nonbeing. A dismal alchemy controlled him: culminating in the grave.

Though I was careful to set Dale Carnegie and Mrs. Margate on top of Wellek-and-Warren on the corner of my desk next to the typewriter, I did not do well the rest of that day.

Wednesday was the same. And again Mr. Haroulian slid silently out, circling and circling the narrow space in which I toiled and failed, toiled and failed. Again he looked into my wastebasket—that wild surf, all those ruined and wrinkled forms, those smudged and spoiled and torn tropisms of my despair.

—Cynthia Ozick
—from “How I Got Fired from My Summer Job”
—found in Quarrel & Quandary: Essays