As a book-length masterpiece of parallel prose (piántǐwén 駢體文) composed in the times of its full blossoming, by a literary critic advocating for literary talent to be a major criterion in the course of official carriers, the Wénxīn diāolóng 文心雕龍 (Dragon carvings on the core of literature; ca 500 AD) may stand as a rare instance of integrated theory and practice. One of its fifty chapters being devoted to “Parallel phrasing” (“Lìcí” 麗辭XXXV), distinguishes sponte sua, a fortiori and appropriate though occasional instances of pairing and parallelism in early texts, before defining the rise of (artistic) parallel phrasing under the Han in terms of “intensified ornamentation” and “distinguished euphony”. Liú Xié’s 劉勰 (ca 465-521) rather straightforward taxonomy of parallelisms emphasises referential types (be they contrastive or converging). To which extent and profit may his normative views be confronted to his own practice throughout the Wénxīn diāolóng? My paper proposes limited and tentative answers to this self-imposing question, and argues that, far from being reducible to a “discourse machine” leading to inconsistencies (Owen, 2001), the effects generated by textual structures – alternation between parallel and separate phrases, parallel variations in enumerative catalogues, taxonomies or hierarchies –, do enhance the internal and implicit logics of Liú Xié’s argumentative and demonstrative discourse, which actually lie between its very lines and inter-textual references.