Similes, Puns and Counterfactuals in Literary Narrative

Visible Figures

Jennifer Riddle Harding

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317401926
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

In this study, Jennifer Riddle Harding presents a cognitive analysis of three figures of speech that have readily identifiable forms: similes, puns, and counterfactuals. Harding argues that when deployed in literary narrative, these forms have narrative functions—such as the depiction of conscious experiences, allegorical meanings, and alternative plots—uniquely developed by these more visible figures of speech. Metaphors, by contrast, are often "invisible" in the formal structure of a text. With a solid cognitive grounding, Harding's approach emphasizes the relationship between figurative forms and narrative effects. Harding demonstrates the literary functions of previously neglected figures of speech, and the potential for a unified approach to a topic that crosses cognitive disciplines. Her work has implications for the rhetorical approach to figures of speech, for cognitive disciplines, and for the studies of literature, rhetoric, and narrative.

1
Introduction to Similes, Puns, and Counterfactuals in Literary Narrative

Since the publication of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By in 1980, discussions of figurative language in literary narrative have focused almost exclusively on metaphor. Jonathan Culler has called metaphor the “figure of figures, a figure for figurality” (1981: 189), whereas Barbara Dancygier and Eve Sweetser have labeled metaphor the “star” figure (2014: 2). And rightly so, for metaphoric structures and their interpretation represent one of the most stunning achievements of language and the human mind. Yet other impressive figurative forms like simile have been swallowed in the metaphoric din.¹ Although many books and articles have been published on metaphor in literature (e.g. Lakoff and Turner’s More Than Cool Reason in 1989, Steen’s Understanding Metaphor in Literature in 1995, Fludernik’s collection Beyond Cognitive Metaphor Theory in 2014), none has been devoted specifically to other figurative forms and their literary effects. To fill this void, this book examines similes, puns, and counterfactuals—three figures of speech that have resonant functions in literary narrative overlooked in the larger dialogue.

That last statement deserves to be unpacked because to most readers, it is probably not a self-evident truth that similes, puns, and counterfactuals are that important in literary narrative. Aren’t similes just a weaker form of metaphor? Aren’t puns just a disparaged form of light humor? And aren’t counterfactuals a topic that should concern only psychologists? No, no, and no. This book will counter all of these prevailing assumptions about these figures of speech, and argue for the importance of each of these figures in literature.

It may not seem obvious that similes are under-regarded because they are often taught and studied in conjunction with metaphor. But as cognitive approaches to metaphor have come to dominate the discussion in recent years, similes have been mostly overlooked or treated as an attenuated form of metaphoric expression. As I describe more elaborately later in the book, there are recent exceptions in the fields of psychology and linguistics, as new studies have demonstrated situations in which there are noticeable differences in the processing of metaphors and similes. With this book, I extend this effort to identify the distinctive aspects of similes generated by a family of forms that prompt comparative processing, although my goals are ultimately literary. Understanding the nature of similes is important for literary theorists especially because literary narrative is often replete with suggestive similes—they are a stylistic feature some authors use extremely well, and contribute to the pleasure of reading texts of all kinds. Consider this tour-de-force simile from William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, describing the destiny of one Southern family in the two decades before the Civil War:

the destiny of Sutpen’s family for twenty years now had been like a lake welling from quiet springs into a quiet valley and spreading, rising, almost imperceptibly and in which four members of it floated in sunny suspension, felt the first subterranean movement toward the outlet, the gorge which would be the land’s catastrophe too, and the four peaceful swimmers turning suddenly to face one another, not yet with alarm or distrust but just alert, feeling the dark set, none of them yet at that point where man looks about at his companions in disaster and thinks When will I stop trying to save them and save only myself? and not even aware that that point was approaching.

This elaborate simile that compresses present and future, peace and hysteria, the fate of one family and the fate of the whole South—all based on an asserted similarity between swimming in a lake and living in the two decades before the Civil War—is a meaningful comparison with an almost indescribable beauty.

As this example demonstrates, similes are significant not just in poetry, as might be readily assumed, but also in literary narrative. Authors choose to use them in texts that use metaphors as well; clearly, authors are choosing similes at particular textual moments for particular reasons, and achieving the utmost artistry with the simile form. Although contributions have been made in several different disciplines, as of yet, scholars haven’t begun to do justice to the art of the simile. To take a step in this direction, this book outlines the forms similes take, and describes the contributions similes can make to literary narrative. The goal is to present a rare thorough treatment of the simile as a literary figure in its own right, with a particular focus on narrative applications.

Puns do not have the same problem of being overlooked—as will be discussed in depth in the second section of this book, puns have been the subject of many articles, chapters, and entire books, both popular and scholarly, dedicated to explaining forms and uses. Indeed, the pun has its devotees. Yet examinations of puns thus far have presented a confusing array of classification systems, systems that fail to describe either the overarching effects of puns or to explain what makes each type of pun interesting and special. Continuing the cognitive approach of the first section on similes, the second section of this book examines puns as figures of speech that are interpretable because of an impressive set of underlying cognitive processes: there are remarkable cognitive feats at work in both producing and understanding puns. The cognitive processes needed for interpretation relates to the type of pun used in the discourse, which is why an overarching cognitive definition of the pun that both distinguishes and unifies pun types is sorely needed. The pun section presents just such a definition—a new unified cognitive definition of puns—and then discusses and examines pun types in light of this definition.

Counterfactuals, like puns, have hardly been overlooked. In fact, this book draws on and responds to an excellent book about counterfactuals in narrative by Hilary Dannenberg—Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction (2008)—in which Dannenberg examines “counterfactuality” as a type of branching plot structure. In other disciplines, including psychology and history, counterfactuals have been considered a type of thought experiment or mental simulation about “what might have been.” What is missing is an examination of the counterfactual as a figure of speech—indeed, many scholars might not recognize the “counter-factual” as a type of figure of speech at all. Here I fill this gap by examining and describing the counterfactual as a family of forms that can be used to present alternative scenarios for figurative purposes. I use the labels invented scenarios, moot scenarios, and hypothetical future scenarios to differentiate three kinds of counterfactuals with different logical structures. Generally speaking, counterfactuals serve figurative purposes by supporting creativity, evaluation, and causation.

In each section, after presenting a cognitive account of one of these three figures of speech and discussing its roles and associated effects in literary narrative, I provide a reading of a single short story to demonstrate the utility of the approach. As in Dan Shen’s Style and Rhetoric of Short Narrative Fiction (2014), only short stories are examined in these readings, and this is an intentional choice, although my reasons are different from Shen’s and are motivated by the role figurative language plays in short fiction as compared to longer narratives. The distinctive features of short fiction have been previously recognized by scholars (e.g. Winther et al. 2011; Copland 2014). Short stories deploy all the techniques of longer narratives, but with an economy that is similar to poetry, enhancing the narrative importance of specific words and phrases. I selected stories by Bret Harte, Ernest Hemingway, and John Updike for examination because they are excellent demonstrations of the artistic use of the particular figure of speech under examination in that section. Not every work of literature relies on these figures of speech in the same way, or at all: there are some stories and novels that do not feature puns, similes, or counterfactuals. Yet there are some stories that particularly rely on them—stories in which the core meaning is dependent on a particular form of figurative expression, including these stories by Harte, Hemingway, and Updike. Because the motivating selection criterion was the primacy of the figure of speech to the meaning of the story, this book ends up examining three short stories by white American men writing in the late 19th century, early 20th century, and late 20th century, respectively. If I had chosen the stories for other reasons, I would have selected a more diverse sampling. As demonstrated by the more diverse range of examples in other chapters, there is certainly no group, era, or tradition that has a lock on these figures of speech.

In my readings of these stories, this book departs from the approach some authors have taken in treating literary texts as “illustrations” (Shen 2014) or “case studies” (Popova 2015) that demonstrate certain theoretical ideas. My approach is somewhat different in that I attempt to present full critical readings of these stories, readings that could stand on their own. These fuller critical readings highlight my interdisciplinary approach because I have brought to each story what I thought the story demanded to achieve a full critical analysis, not just to illustrate the figure of speech under discussion. In the case of Updike’s “Transaction,” the examination of simile is developed with an emphasis on narrative theory and the depiction of consciousness that fits the nature of that story. In the case of Harte’s “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” an examination of punning is developed with an emphasis on American history and the depiction of a particular era and culture that is key to understanding that story. And in the case of Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” the examination of counterfactuals is developed with an emphasis on the psychology of life review and regret that is the key to understanding that story. In each case, a full understanding of the workings of a particular figure of speech is an absolutely essential component—the key component—of this fuller reading of the story.

Theoretical Positioning and Global Issues

Rhetorical analysis of similes and puns hearkens back to Aristotle, who originally described the poetic and rhetorical effects of simile and metaphor, paronomasia, symbolic names, and other techniques that are the focus of this book. The specific histories of research on the figures of speech in this book—similes, puns, and counterfactuals—will be examined in turn in their respective sections. This study likewise contributes to a long tradition of closely examining language in literary texts (e.g. Leech and Short 1981 and countless others in the fields of poetics and stylistics), and to consideration of how meaning in narrative arises from the progressive combination of words, grammatical units, and sentences into structures and concepts (e.g. Herman 2004; Dancygier 2011; Toolan 2016).

What makes a specific use of language “figurative”? In their book Figurative Language (2014), linguists Barbara Dancygier and Eve Sweetser acknowledge that “there appears to be a circular reasoning loop involved in many speakers’ assessments: on the one hand they feel that figurative language is special or artistic, and on the other hand they feel that the fact of something’s being an everyday usage is in itself evidence that the usage is not figurative” (3). Because of this circularity, they note that conventionality and novelty are not useful parameters for distinguishing between literal and figurative—figurative language is often used in everyday conversation. Instead, they propose that an approximate meaning of figurative would involve “a usage motivated by a metaphoric or metonymic relationship to some other usage, a usage which might be labeled literal” (4). They note that “figurative language usages appear to be pervasive in all languages” (8), that “figurative language is viewpointed,” and that figurative uses are motivated to “serve human purposes” (9). Dancygier and Sweetser call attention to dimensions of figurativity that will be further explored in this book: relations encoded in figurative usages, viewpoint, and the rhetorical purposes that figures of speech can serve. And although literary narrative is the main focus of this book, none of the figures analyzed in this book are limited to literature, or to narrative.

Dancygier and Sweetser also note that figures of speech include conceptual blends (82) and irony (186)—these are techniques that can be realized in many different ways grammatically and linguistically. In this study, the figurative usages examined have associated linguistic and grammatical structures, albeit not a single recognizable form. Rather, similes, puns, and counterfactuals are each expressed through a family of forms. In the tradition of the construction-grammar approach (e.g. Goldberg 1995), these figurative forms may be thought of as constructions (e.g. Israel, Harding, and Tobin 2004; Harding 2007; Dancygier and Sweetser 2014; Cuenca 2015). The label “construction” applies best to simile, often prompted by standard forms such as “as X as” and “X like Y,” and counterfactuals, often prompted by standard forms such as conditional sentences (Lewis 1973; Fauconnier 1994). Yet these forms alone do not prompt figurative meanings. For example, many of the forms used to express similes are also used to express literal comparisons (Israel et al. 2004), so that the sentence “he’s as tall as a house” uses the same form as “he’s as tall as his mother.” The recognizable form contributes to the interpretation when other factors, such as the conceptual distance between figure and source in a simile, also support a figurative meaning. Although puns are made up of words, which are themselves lexical constructions (Dancygier and Sweetser 2014: 129), the predictive value of the form is not always useful in prompting the figurative meaning. A word always has a form-meaning pairing—the context-relevant definition of the word—but the secondary relevance of the word that makes it a pun is not determined by the form of the word itself, but by aspects of context. In similes, puns, and counterfactuals, a family of formal structures contributes to figurative meanings but only with the support of context.

Although figurativity involves more than the formal structures of these figures of speech, one focus of this book is on the visibility of similes, puns, and counterfactuals in language and literature, and formal structures have been linked to visibility. In a discussion of metaphor in science fiction, Peter Stockwell (2000), inspired by the previous work of Brooke-Rose (1958) and Goatly (1997), describes a scale of visibility for metaphoric expression. In Stockwell’s framework, similes are one of the most visible types of metaphor because the source and target are represented directly by “linguistic tokens” (171), whereas invisible forms of metaphor require inference by the reader when the source and target are not “mentioned and available” (173). My study loosely adopts and extends Stockwell’s approach by using visibility as a way to describe conspicuity, or noticeability, of certain figures of speech in certain contexts. As Stockwell notes, fixed and predictable grammatical structures make similes more detectable than metaphors in language and literature. This book posits, in agreement with Stockwell, that similes are more noticeable in texts than metaphors because of their structural tags, or as Stockwell labels them, linguistic tokens. The general concept of visibility is not limited here just to simile and metaphor, but to other figures of speech as well: when are other figures like puns and counterfactuals similarly visible or invisible? This study furthers the discussion of visibility by considering not just the conspicuity of a certain figure based on its linguistic form, but the ways that writers and speakers use tactics to make a figure more noticeable.

Puns are not linked to certain structures like similes, but are instead often realized as a second relevance of a word that already has one relevant meaning in context. In this sense, some puns can be grammatically invisible and may go unnoticed by readers—a characteristic of puns previously noted by Brooke-Rose (1958: 34). Less visible puns may be made more conspicuous, nonetheless, by a system of textual markers, including italics and repetition in written contexts, or by gestures, tone, or the strangely misleading phrase “no pun intended” that highlight the presence of puns in spoken settings. Counterfactuals are more like similes—specific grammatical forms are used to indicate that a scenario is “counterfactual” from the speaker’s perspective. When counterfactuals are used for figurative purposes like evaluation, they become more noticeable as distinct elements of discourse with enhanced semantic and pragmatic significance. Counterfactual scenarios may also be elaborated with additional structure, repeated, or modified, making them more visible as figurative components of the discourse.

Gerard Steen has argued that the “deliberateness” of rhetorical use is what distinguishes simile forms from metaphor (2008: 225), calling attention to the fact that a listener or reader may assess a figure of speech in part based on whether he or she believes it was used on purpose by a specific individual. To draw conclusions about deliberateness, a reader must first notice a figure of speech. When reading a work of literature, readers may encounter figures of speech that are noticeable because of their structures: similes have more visibility than metaphor, for example. Figures of speech may be made more noticeable, furthermore, when they are exceptionally moving or apt. In many cases, literary figures far surpass what the average person could produce in spontaneous discourse, making them inherently conspicuous. Authors may also repeat, elaborate, or otherwise emphasize figures of speech. When similes, puns, and counterfactuals appear in texts, they are likely to be foregrounded elements because of noticeable formal structures, impressive aptness, an author’s intentional manipulation of visibility, or some combination of these factors. The conspicuity of these figurative forms calls attention to the presence of a literary-minded author in the construction of a text, a linguistically gifted person who has deliberately arranged words and phrases in particular ways for particular reasons. When a figure of speech is more visible, the creator of that figure of speech likewise becomes more visible, in a manner of speaking, because of this enhanced sense of “deliberateness.” Figurative language, especially figurative language that is highly visible, foregrounds the nature of the text as a deliberate production, and thus calls attention to the deliberate choices of a writer.

So far, though, I’ve side-stepped the thorny discussion of whether the figures of speech belong to the narrator, author, and/or an “implied author” as first posited by Wayne Booth (1983). In a sense, the reader does not encounter the voice of an author or implied author because all textual language represents the voices of characters and/or narrators—in one sense, then, figures of speech always represent the language of either a character or narrator, or some blend of these. But readers also understand that some creative force—whether called author or implied author—is understood as the deliberate source of all textual choices. James Phelan sees the implied author as “a streamlined version of the real author, an actual or purported subset of the real author’s capacities, traits, attitudes, beliefs, values, and other properties” (2005...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction to Similes, Puns, and Counterfactuals in Literary Narrative
• 2 Similes
• 3 Drunken Eloquence: Similes in John Updike’s “Transaction”
• 4 Puns
• 5 Very Punny: Puns in Bret Harte’s “The Luck of Roaring Camp”
• 6 Counterfactuals
• 7 Complex Regrets: Counterfactuals in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix
• Works Cited
• Index