Metaphor

David Punter

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134461264
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Literature
• Sous-sujet: Literary Criticism

Metaphor is a central concept in literary studies, but it is also prevalent in everyday language and speech. Recent literary theories such as postmodernism and deconstruction have transformed the study of the text and revolutionized our thinking about metaphor.

In this fascinating volume, David Punter:

• establishes the classical background of the term from its philosophical roots to the religious and political tradition of metaphor in the East
• relates metaphor to the public realms of culture and politics and the way in which these influence the literary
• examines metaphor in relation to literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis and postcolonial studies
• illustrates his argument with specific examples from western and eastern literature and poetry.

This comprehensive and engaging book emphasizes the significance of metaphor to literary studies, as well as its relevance to cultural studies, linguistics and philosophy.

1
THE CLASSICAL PROBLEM

FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE

Let us now turn to the history of metaphor. Since at least the time of Aristotle, it would appear that Western literary, linguistic and critical traditions have been interested in the possibility of differentiating between literal and figurative language. Within that general process, attention has focused on establishing a system both on which to base this differentiation and within which to distinguish further between different types of the figurative. Within these extensive and complex traditions, it is possible to establish a continuing dialogue between different valuations of the figurative, and consequently between, on the one hand, views of metaphor as adornment or elaboration, and, on the other, metaphor as the basic structure of language, according to which representations offer ‘versions’ of referents and thus inevitably imply an ‘originary’ process of metaphorisation.

There is no better place to begin than with Aristotle, who is generally regarded as the first thinker to elaborate a theory of metaphor. In his Poetics (350 BC), Aristotle first characterises it as a sign of absolute linguistic mastery and, therefore, of a certain type of genius. As he says, ‘It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others, and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars’ (Aristotle 1909: 71). Far more important, though, is that Aristotle located the specific use of metaphor in poetry rather than in either of the other great divisions of discourse: rhetoric and logic. By doing so, he makes it clear that he does not regard metaphor as integral to language’s functioning; rather, it is a kind of decoration or ornament. It has the power to please, which is an exciting and perhaps, under some circumstances, a dangerous power; but it is in some sense an addition to the ‘normal’, by which we might infer ‘literal’, workings of language. Aristotle further defines metaphor as ‘giving the thing a name that belongs to something else; the transference being either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or on grounds of analogy’ (Aristotle 1909: 63). Behind this there lies the notion that every ‘thing’ in nature has its own ‘proper name’; metaphor constitutes a kind of infringement of this rule, whereby ‘names’ are conveyed from one thing to another. This may be done, as we have seen earlier, in the literal comparisons of simile; or there may be a certain ‘hidden-ness’ which is more typical of other processes of metaphor. At all events, the underlying intent, according to Aristotle, is to point out resemblances; these resemblances may move the reader or hearer beyond the ‘usual’ linguistic and rhetorical rules of clarity and decorum, but they are justified because the reader is, as it were, ‘brought up short’; he or she is in the presence of something unusual, something outside language’s normal ambit, and this can serve to deepen the reader’s experience, to bring a suddenly enriched apprehension of the world.

The actress Vivien Leigh once said of the dramatist and political thinker George Bernard Shaw: ‘Shaw is like a train. One just speaks the words and sits in one’s place. But Shakespeare is like bathing in the sea – one swims where one wants’ (quoted in Nicolson 1968: 297). Now this is what we might well recognise as the simplest form of metaphor – simile, where the comparison, the ‘transference’ (metapherein) between the two entities, is explicitly signalled by the word ‘like’ (or sometimes ‘as’). Some would say that this is the basic form of all metaphor; what causes metaphors which are not cast in the linguistic form of the simile to have greater power is precisely the omission of the ‘like’, an omission which brings the two compared entities far closer to each other in a way that challenges the reader or hearer to make sense of the assumed or alleged comparison rather than having it spelt out. The point here, however, is that the reader is expected to gain some additional understanding from the analogies presented. George Bernard Shaw is not, in fact, very much like a train; he was smaller, for a start, and had no engine. However, there is sufficient similarity for the reader to pause, to have the opportunity to recognise a new connection; to, as Aristotle put it, ‘get hold of something fresh’. The parallels here are to do with running tracks, with a certain lack of freedom, with inducing a certain passivity in the watcher, here equated with a passenger. William Shakespeare is, perhaps, also not much like the sea, although the array of metaphors which have been deployed to explain his pre-eminent position in drama and in the English national culture suggest an unceasing quest to find metaphors apt to convey the complexity, the freedom, the spaciousness of Shakespeare’s drama. Ben Jonson, for example, referred to him as ‘Sweet swan of Avon’ (Jonson 1975: 265); Samuel Johnson compared Corneille to Shakespeare ‘as a clipped hedge is to a forest’ (quoted in Piozzi 1925: 41); John Dryden referred to Shakespeare as the ‘very Janus of poets; he wears almost everywhere two faces; and you have scarce begun to admire the one, ere you despise the other’ (Dryden 1926: I, 172); Samuel Taylor Coleridge referred to him as ‘myriad-minded’ (Coleridge 1956: 175), and also said that ‘the body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind’ (Coleridge 1990: I, 468).

What this might suggest is that metaphor – and I am going to continue to suggest that ‘metaphorisation’, although perhaps a little clumsy, would be a better word – is not so much an occasional intrusion into ‘normal’ patterns of speech; rather, it constitutes a continuing process of ‘translation’. Where a concept, an idea, an emotion may be hard to grasp in language, then a metaphor, an offering of perceived resemblances, may enable us the better to ‘come to grips with’ the issue in hand. To follow Shakespeare obliquely through another twist, in 1941 we find George Orwell searching for adequate metaphors to describe the contemporary state of England:

England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare’s much-quoted passage, nor is it the inferno described by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons . . . A family with the wrong members in control.

(Orwell 1941: 35)

This passage can helpfully introduce us to two further features of metaphor. First, it is clear that here Orwell has a political intent: he means to divorce the imagery of England from, on the one hand, the smug overoptimism with which Shakespeare’s original image, whatever its intent, could be interpreted for a modern world; and probably more importantly, he wishes to divorce it, in time of war, from the antagonistic characterisation mounted by Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist, which itself, in the mind of Orwell or Goebbels, probably takes us back to Dante’s description of hell in his Inferno (early fourteenth century). Metaphor, in other words, is rarely if ever innocent; it has designs on us, as Aristotle and the other Greek philosophers of language indeed recognised. Second, Orwell’s comment reveals the way in which the complexity of metaphor often entails metaphors nesting, as it were, inside one another; the black sheep and the skeletons in the cupboard are themselves metaphors which Orwell brings to bear to sustain his ‘master-metaphor’ of the Victorian family as an image of the condition of England.

Already we are up against questions about metaphor as mere ‘ornamentation’; to sustain such an argument would imply that Shakespeare’s admirers and critics, or Orwell, could in some sense have ‘made their point’ in some other, more ‘literal’ way. But this is, to say the least, highly arguable. To move to a radically different field: when the Conservative Party came up in 1978 with the election slogan ‘Labour isn’t working’, the intention was to juxtapose two different ideas. The first, reinforced by the accompanying picture of a queue outside an unemployment office, was that under a Labour government unemployment was rife; the second was to imply that the Labour government was ‘not working’ in the sense that it was being ineffectual. But it is not easy to see how this slogan could have been expressed in any other form; certainly had such an attempt been made it would have been inordinately long and, perhaps more to the point, inordinately boring. Also, by spelling out the connection between the hidden statements, there would have been the danger of a certain subterfuge being exposed, of voters wondering whether the system of cause and effect proposed in the slogan really withstood closer scrutiny.

There is here a whole set of questions about latent and manifest meaning. The metaphor can be considered in some sense and under some circumstances to be a kind of sleight of hand by means of which meanings can be surreptitiously smuggled into an apparently innocent discourse. In this context, classical definitions of metaphor have tended to try to separate the material of the metaphor into two levels: the ‘tenor’, or the material which is supposed to be conveyed by the metaphor; and the ‘vehicle’, which is the term for the image doing the conveying. But in this particular slogan it is difficult, if not impossible, to provide such a hierarchical arrangement; the intention is to convey both ideas simultaneously, and to solder them together in the mind of the recipient. The use of metaphor, we might say, in the hands of politicians is nothing less than an attempt to rewire the brain, if only on a temporary basis; that this is also true of advertisers is perhaps too obvious to mention, although it is worth saying that Judith Williamson’s pioneering Decoding Advertisements (1978) remains a crucial book to read in this connection.

The view of metaphor not as ornamentation but as integral to language emerges at various points in Western literary history, but perhaps most decisively with the romantic poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Coleridge, for example, refers to what he calls the ‘two cardinal points of poetry’ as the following: ‘the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of the imagination’ (Coleridge 1956: 168). These two skills, or faculties, cannot be separated; they are integrally joined in a particular use of language. And for Coleridge, as well as for other romantics, this use of language was as essential to criticism as it was to poetry or any other type of writing. Consider, for example, his remarkable comment on the prose style of the great historian Edward Gibbon:

When I read a chapter in Gibbon I seem to be looking through a luminous haze or fog, figures come and go, I know not how or why, all larger than life or distorted or discoloured; nothing is real, vivid, true; all is scenical, and by candle light as it were.

(Coleridge 1990: I, 418–19)

This extraordinary description is clearly metaphorical. We do not suppose that when Coleridge read Gibbon he felt himself to be literally enveloped in a luminous haze, but we do suppose that in the very attempt to convey with the utmost clarity to his own readers his feelings when he read Gibbon he ineluctably found himself searching for a metaphor which would be not only the most apt but, precisely and using his own terms, the most vivid way of communicating his own experience. This is a paradoxical clarity since what Coleridge is attempting to convey here is a kind of essence of unclarity.

Elsewhere in Coleridge’s writing this use of metaphor is evident. Let us consider the opening to one of his best-known poems, ‘Kubla Khan’ (1798):

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round:

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

(Coleridge 1967: 297)

It appears obvious from the very first line of this poem that we are here in the presence of a metaphorical structure; we do not suppose that this ‘pleasure dome’ is, or was, in some sense literal, partly because, were it indeed to be merely so, it would be difficult to see how it could interest us one way or the other as to whether a long-dead Mongol emperor happened to indulge his passion and wealth in such an architectural construction. We might instead view the beginning of this poem as what we might call an ‘invitation to metaphorisation’; in other words, we expect, as perhaps we do with most poems, and often with other works of literature as well, there to be a metaphorical dimension, in this case to discover that this ‘pleasure-dome’ stands in for something else.

Coleridge famously claimed to have been interrupted in the writing of ‘Kubla Khan’ by the arrival of the infamous ‘person on business from Porlock’ (Coleridge 1967: 296), and so it has always been difficult to know whether the poem is in any sense a ‘whole’. And yet, as we contemplate it in the form available to us, we need also to acknowledge that that process of metaphorisation is not closed; we may feel ourselves here to be in the presence of metaphor, but precisely what that metaphor is may well remain opaque. A metaphor then, we might reasonably surmise, is not necessarily a matter of simple one-to-one equivalents (‘this stands in for that’), but neither is it a process of ornamentation of something that could have been more clearly said in another, simpler way; rather, in this case at least, as in the very different case of the party political slogan quoted above, it is the very substance of the discourse. A common error about metaphor is to suppose that it can be in some sense ‘unpacked’. When that unpacking takes place, what is left is rarely of value; it seems a paltry and colourless thing when compared with the metaphor itself.

In some ways this connects metaphor to the language of dream, and this is a connection we shall explore later; suffice here to say that it is obviously no accident that Coleridge subtitled ‘Kubla Khan’ ‘A Vision in a Dream’. It also places under scrutiny, as many philosophers of language from Max Black onwards have done, the whole question of meaning in relation to metaphor. Does a metaphor mean something more than, or different from, or in some sense beneath, what it appears to say; or is the meaning of a metaphor precisely what it does say? Joseph Conrad has a pertinent comment related to this issue in Heart of Darkness (1902), at the moment when the narrator is trying to describe Marlow’s manner of telling a story:

The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.

(Conrad 1983: 30)

This, I suggest, might itself be a useful metaphor for the concept of metaphor; that it may not be revealed by an ‘opening’ or unpacking, but rather that it gives off its own meaning in a way that is difficult of apprehension but integral to communication and understanding. It is perhaps also worth bearing in mind that, later, Marlow himself refers to the attempt to render events into language in Coleridgean, or even Freudian, terms as indistinguishable from dream. ‘Do you see the story?’ he asks. ‘Do you see anything?’

It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream – making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams.

(Conrad 1983: 57)

And then, a little later, he adds, in a famous line, ‘We live, as we dream – alone’.

It may seem as though we have moved a little way from metaphor here, but the point I am making is that as the view of language as predominantly metaphorical has gained ground, then this may be seen as an accompaniment to a re-examination of the whole question of the possibility of discourse delivering verifiable truths. This has come continuingly under question recently, not only in literature but also in the physical sciences, and what Conrad is here presciently recognising is that if all language is fundamentally metaphorical, then the meanings it enshrines cannot be re-expressed in any other way; they cannot be made clearer by some attempt to expunge metaphor from the linguistic register.

We might also wish to say that the critical discussion of metaphor has, since the romantic literary revolution, necessarily to an extent proceeded in the light of changes in literary, and perhaps especially poetic, practice. When we read, for example, a passage from the Augustan poet Alexander Pope it is not difficult to apprehend the concept of metaphor as ornamentation. There is a famously vitriolic episode in the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot (1734) where Pope attacks the character whom he chooses to name Sporus:

Let Sporus tremble – ‘What? that thing of silk,

Sporus, that mere white curd of Ass’s milk?

Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel?

Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?’

Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,

This painted child of dirt, that stinks and stings;

Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys,

Yet wit ne’er tastes, and beauty ne’er enjoys:

So well-bred spaniels civilly delight

In mumbling of the game they dare not bite.

Eternal smiles his emptiness betray,

As shallow streams run dimpling all the way.

Whether in florid impotence he speaks,

And, as the prompter breathes, the puppet squeaks;

Or at the ear of Eve, familiar Toad,

Half froth, half venom, spits himself abroad,

In puns, or politics, or tales, or lies,

Or spite, or smut, or rhymes, or blasphemies.

His wit all see-saw, between that and this,

Now high, now low, now Master up, now Miss,

And he himself one vile Antithesis.

...