Culler on Metaphor

CommentaryAuthor(s): Jonathan CullerReviewed work(s):Source: New Literary History, Vol. 6, No. 1, On Metaphor (Autumn, 1974), pp. 219-229Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468350 .Accessed: 27/03/2012 10:27

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Commentary

Jonathan Culler

T HERE SEEM ESSENTIALLY two ways of thinking about metaphor, which we might christen the via philosophica and the via rhetorica. The former locates metaphor in the gap between

sense and reference, in the process of thinking of an object as some-

thing. The latter situates metaphor in the space between one meaning and another, between the literal or "proper" verbal expression and its periphrastic substitute. And so whereas the former makes metaphor a necessary and pervasive feature of all language, which with its verbal detours gestures obliquely towards a world of objects, the latter makes it a special use of language which can be isolated and studied against the background of a nonmetaphoric use of language.

Stated thus, these positions appear alternatives: two definitions, each of which delimits a different domain and calls it metaphor. If this were indeed so, all would be well: one would choose a definition, give principled reasons for one's choice, and proceed happily with one's discussion. But in fact, as soon as one tries to justify one's choice one finds the object slipping away towards the other pole of definition. One continually catches oneself presupposing the position one had rejected; and one can only conclude from the unhappy throes of theory that the domain of metaphor is rent and distended by the paradoxical relation- ship between these two approaches. They must be kept distinct if one is to define a coherent object, but can they be kept distinct if one's own discourse is to remain coherent?

Both the importance and the resiliency of this problem are amply illustrated by the treatment it receives in Jacques Derrida's and F. E.

Sparshott's essays. Sparshott maintains in a footnote (n. 25) that the distinction between thinking of something as what it is and thinking of it as what it is not does not coincide with the distinction between the literal and the metaphorical, "which is a distinction between ways of using words." The via philosophica and the via rhetorica are different roads. It is striking that this claim should be relegated to a footnote, though it is, as he admits, the topic of his essay. It

220 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

cannot be made to emerge as the conclusion of a coherent argument, and indeed, his discussion elegantly explores the paradoxes that arise from the inevitable interplay of the two approaches. Jacques Derrida, on the other hand, argues that the two enterprises cannot be carried out separately. One cannot study metaphor as a use of language in the

philosophic text because metaphor implies a whole philosophic frame- work (of essence and accident, identity and difference) which prevents it from being a use of language in the text and makes it a condition of the language of the text. Yet when he tries to imagine a meta-

philosophic study that would subsume both approaches to metaphor, he offers as specimen Bachelard's work on the constitutive functions of metaphor in poetic and scientific discourse: a project which relies on the possibility of identifying, against a background of nonmetaphoric language, the metaphoric uses of language in a text. The pre- liminary arguments which led Derrida to Bachelard's method seem contradicted by the presuppositions of that method.

It may be, of course, that these two approaches engage us in a di- alectic whose synthesis we are as vet unable to imagine, but it might also be that the most salutary lesson we can learn from metaphor is how to live a conceptual contradiction, how happily to situate ourselves at the metaphoric nexus where incompatibles are said to be fused and yet not fused. Fortunately, the function of a commentator is not to produce a brilliant Hegelian sublation of the problems which exercise con- tributors but to comment. Let us briefly explore some of the implica- tions and difficulties of these two approaches.

I

The staple argument of the via philosophica is that abstract terms are metaphorical: "grasping" an argument involves metaphorical grasping just as a stormy countenance involves metaphorical storms. Indeed, this Lockean approach which locates "reality" in objects and sensations makes all conceptualization a metaphorical process: to think of a discrete particular under a heading is to think of it as something, and such thinking is of interest and value only because the "something" in question is other than the particular. The only nonmetaphoric language, it seems, would be logically proper names, and paradoxically, as Sparshott and others have pointed out, logically proper names are the one thing natural languages do not have. To call anything by a name in a natural language is to ascribe to it some properties, however valgue, and thus to bring it under some loose head-

COMMENTARY 22 I

ing. As soon as we begin to speak of a thing we engage in metaphor.1 Of course such an approach collapses a distinction which we

initially wished to make and obliges us to invent a new term if we would

distinguish calling my love a rose from calling that flower a rose. Still, this collapse might be justified by the conceptual gain, were it not for the fact that our conclusion contradicts our initial premise. We began by distinguishing between real grasping and metaphorical grasping, between a sign given its proper meaning and a sign given an extended or distended meaning, yet this distinction between two types of lin-

guistic usage was the instrument which led us to exclude from lan-

guage altogether the "proper," nonmetaphoric use of language. Our whole reflection was based on the notion of a "proper" use of signs, yet our conclusion, as Derrida notes, destroys any such notion.

What tempers this contradiction, makes it livable, is a temporal perspective: in any given state of a language we can distinguish between metaphorical and nonmetaphorical usage, but what is now seen as nonmetaphorical is metaphoric with respect to an earlier state of the language, and the proper usage of that state is in turn meta-

phorical with respect to a still earlier state. Derrida says that by reading "in a concept the hidden history of a metaphor we are giving a privi- leged position to diachrony at the expense of system," locating the truth of a sign in its origins rather than in its present function; but in fact this move is designed to tame time and its effects and by so doing to reduce the arbitrariness of signs. The metaphorical detour is an historical space, an ambiguous space of usure ("wear and tear" but also "usury" which adds value); but its ambiguities are motivated, deposits of a fundamental rationality which the synchronic state of a language may conceal. To call abstract terms metaphors is to say that they are not arbitrary names but motivated extensions or developments. And indeed, eighteenth-century etymological reasoning, which is only the most extreme version of this approach, shows that time is invoked not in the interests of historical accuracy but as a fiction which enables one to motivate signs. Consider an example from Horne Tooke's Diversions of Purley:

A bar in all its uses is a defence: that by which any thing is fortified, strengthened, or defended. A barn is a covered enclosure, in which the grain, etc. is protected or defended from the weather, from depredations, etc. A baron is an armed, defenceful, or powerful man. A barge is a strong boat. A bargain is a confirmed, strengthened agreement. . . . A bark is a

I In addition to Derrida's essay, see Paul de Man, "Theory of Metaphor in Rousseau's Second Discourse," Romanticism, ed. D. Thorburn and G. Hartman (Ithaca, 1973).


stout vessel. The bark of a tree is its defence: that by which the tree is defended from the weather, etc.

The bark of a dog is that by which we are defended by that animal.2

The nouns of our language are not arbitrary signs but metaphors, motivated by a resemblance with a primitive arbitrary sign (bar). So once

again we are brought up short by a fundamental paradox: an approach which makes the proper use of language an arbitrary naming deploys all its energy in showing that language as we know it is im-

proper, metaphorical, and, for that very reason, eminently natural and rational. Along this road paradoxes and contradictions continue to accumulate; if one cannot fight one's way through to a coherent discourse the best strategy is to retreat and try another road.

II

The via rhetorica seems at first to offer firm ground: we are en-

joined to locate ourselves firmly within language and to study one specific type of usage. In metaphor one name is replaced by another, and the task of the student of metaphor, on this model, is to investigate the types of replacement, the various relations between intended meaning or tenor and expression or vehicle. The via rhetorica, which Aristotle was only the first to explore, leads to a typology such as Tzvetan Todorov offers. Among the relations between one verbal form and another-between what is meant and what is said-metaphor comprises one group, as opposed to the relations of other figures, such as synecdoche and metonymy. This approach, as Paul Ricoeur notes, works best for the least interesting metaphors, those "raids on the bestiary" where the sign replaced by the animal name is ready to hand. Problems arise in the case of creative metaphors where we find translation difficult, either because we know what object the metaphor refers to but are uncertain about the precise grounds of comparison (e.g., Shakespeare's "bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang"), or because we grasp the general tenor of the metaphor but are uncertain what it is replacing (e.g., Eliot's "I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each"). In these cases it is not easy to define the relevant relations between the initial object, the metaphorical expression, and the qualities ascribed to the object by that expression; but this does not make them less metaphorical than the

2 Diversions of Purley (London, 1805), II, 182-83. Quoted by Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780-i860 (Princeton, 1967), pp. 63-64.

COMMENTARY 223

definable cases. On the contrary, precisely because of their typological indeterminacy they are rather better examples of the metaphorical function as practiced and valued in literature than are the pallid replacement figures which theorists discuss.

The difficulties of the via rhetorica are nicely illustrated by Pierre Fontanier's discussion of catachresis, whose salient moments Derrida cites. Espousing the traditional view of metaphor as replacement, Fontanier is led to exclude from the domain of figures proper those

tropes where he finds it difficult to speak of replacement. Catachresis occurs where "a sign already assigned to a first idea is also assigned to a new idea which had no expression." 3 Thus catachresis includes many expressions which to speakers of a language seem "le mot

propre," the only expression furnished by the language for the idea in

question. In this sense they are irreducibly different from figures of

replacement, but Fontanier argues that they are "determined by the same relations" as are rhetorical figures proper: "correspondence, connection, or resemblance between ideas; and they operate in the same way: as metonymy, synecdoche, or metaphor."4 Thus the notion of replacement, on which the whole typology of figures depends, seems to fall away as irrelevant when tropes not based on replacement are

placed in the same taxonomic categories. Metonymy, synecdoche, and metaphor are defined by the rhetorical approach in terms of replacement, but then tropes not involving replacement are brought under these three headings.

That is only the first contradiction. The definition of catachresis brings together the two phenomena which are excluded from figures of replacement: the "dead" metaphor or metonymy which in the language functions as a nonmetaphorical expression, though we can perceive its metaphoric origin, and the truly creative live metaphor which is not simply a substitute for another expression. In both cases a sign is used to express an idea for which no other expression exists, yet from the point of view of the function of tropes these two cases are irreducibly different, and a rhetorical approach to metaphor, sup- posedly predicated upon the suasive and expressive functions of language, ought to be able to define this difference, which after all is much more fundamental than the technical distinction between synecdoche and metonymy.

Third, the notion of catachresis brings together in a curious amalgam both the natural and the unnatural. The word "catachresis," Fontanier writes, "expresses very well their nature and use, since it signifies abuse,

3 Les Figures du discours (1821; rpt. Paris, 1968), p. 213. 4 Ibid., p. 214.


and the extension of meaning is a kind of abuse."5 One forces a word out of its proper sense into another sense, and this is not merely a poetic license which expires at the end of the poem but a true abuse of the word since, in the absence of another term which might succeed its temporary replacement, the word thus forced becomes the proper expression of the new idea. Yet precisely because there is no other

expression, the abuse becomes "natural." The wings of an army and of a building, the arms of the sea or a chair, the head of a nail or a head of lettuce, are "so many forced metaphors, although doubtless just and natural." ' And after another list he asks, "without these forced metaphors, these catachreses, how could we succeed in captur- ing and representing these ideas?" 7 The distinctions between the proper and improper, between tropes of replacement and of nonreplacement, and between the abusive and the natural, on which the rhetorical analysis of metaphor had seemed to depend, collapse in the attempt to deal with the varieties of metaphor. Moreover, the via rhetorica seems to have led us back to the imbroglio of word and object, of proper meanings with rhetorical origins, which led us to take it when retreat- ing from the via philosophica.

III

These problems may be insoluble, may be constitutive of the domain of metaphor, but it is at least worth inquiring whether we

might succeed in avoiding them by ignoring the concept of metaphor and approaching obliquely, from a different perspective, the phenomena usually discussed as metaphor. The typologists of the via rhetorica adopt the perspective of the writer or creator and thus beg the most interesting questions, for if one assumes first the presence of an idea to be expressed and then the selection of a metaphor to express it, one is dealing with cases where the expression is already defined as

,a metaphor and as the sign of a particular idea. The question of what makes something a metaphor and how it might signify is set aside as already resolved. If, on the other hand, we reverse the perspective and take, as Paul Ricoeur recommends, the point of view of the reader confronted with a written text (language cut off from an originating

5 Ibid., p. 77- 6 Ibid., p. 2 16.

7 Ibid., p. 217. The French reads "comment . . . eit-on pu parvenir a retracer ces idees?" which does not mean, pace Derrida's translator, to "trace these ideas back to their origin." The ideas exist virtually in the mind and are traced, recaptured, represented by the new sign.

COMMENTARY 225

intention), we may then ask what makes something a metaphor for the reader, and a rather more interesting series of problems arises.

Metaphor becomes a derived rather than primary phenomenon, the detritus of a particular interpretive operation, whose conditions and determinations are more interesting than the phenomenon itself.

The question of metaphor arises only when there is a problem in the text, a perception of incongruity. And therefore in the first instance the notion of metaphor depends on a series of models of vraisemblance and coherence which allow us to perceive a statement as incongruous or incoherent. Our models of appropriate discourse tell us that there is something wrong with Dylan Thomas' line, "And there this night I walk in the white giant's thigh," and that some kind of interpretive operation must be performed on it. But this conclusion depends in turn on conventions about the unity and

referentiality of literary works. If we were to take Thomas' poem as

referring to a world of utter fantasy, then we could read his assertion

quite literally; it would require no interpretation (though the fact that he is writing about this kind of fantasy world would need to be

interpreted). Or if our conventions of literature did not enjoin us to integrate this assertion with the rest of the poem, we might allow it to stand forth as an example of literal unintegrated fantasy.

No statement, in short, is metaphorical in itself. We make it meta-

phorical when we yield to the reality principle and strive to produce an accustomed intelligibility; when we assume the unity, the vraisemblance and the referentiality of the text. "Look, the morn in russet mantle clad!/Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill" becomes

metaphorical only because we take Hamlet as generally referring to a familiar world and because we assume a unity which would proscribe a moment of pure hallucinatory fantasy (Horatio is allowed to see

ghosts but not to see the morning walk or wear mantles; such are our

purely conventional interpretive constraints). Committing ourselves to

taming the strange, to bringing it wholly within our ken, we extract from the sequence what might "really" belong to dawn, label the

phrases "metaphor," and read the constructed detour as an index of wonder and poetic intensity.

That metaphor is not a primary element of literature but only the detritus of conventional interpretive operations is amply shown by our difficulties in identifying metaphor in the texts of surrealism or dadaism, where accustomed standards of unity and referentiality are questioned. Consider the beginning of John Ashbery's poem "They dream only of America":


They dream only of America To be lost among the thirteen million pillars of grass: "This honey is delicious Though it burns the throat." And hiding from darkness in barns They can be grownups now And the murderer's ashtray is more easily- The lake a lilac cube.

We cannot identify some phrases as metaphors because we have dif-

ficulty constructing an imagined world and deriving from it a level of vraisemblance which would indicate those incongruities to be reduced. Nor can we be sure which items should be allowed to stand free as unconnected fragments of another discourse and which should be reduced in the interests of unity. Any particular reading we offer would throw up some metaphors, depending on what we take literally and make a constituent of this world.8 These metaphors are the jetsam of interpretation: what cannot be integrated as such and is not allowed to stand apart but is raided for its content before being sloughed off as a poetic indicator.

In the perspective of a poetics, which focuses on the conventions and operations of reading, the conditions under which the reader produces metaphor are more vital components of literature than the operation of metaphorical interpretation, which is but a special and extremely limiting instance of interpretation.9 When we call something a metaphor, we invoke a traditional model of replacement which says that the reduction of the strange is easily accomplished, that we can replace what is said by what is meant, because we have discovered what propertNy the former and the latter share. We pass through the class of beautiful things from "red, red rose" to "my love," or through the class of sly creatures from the "fox" to "that man." When one comes upon this basis of metaphor in the context of a theory of reading one sees what a paltry thing it is and how minor a role it plays in our actual experience of literature. The incongruous phrases in a work which interest and exercise us are never naturalized by a simple metaphorical operation. If one seeks examples of metaphor in literature, clear cases prove extremely elusive (which is why theorists have frequent recourse to the bestiary), for most figures bring into play a variety of strategies of literary interpretation.

If we call Eliot's "I have heard the mermaid's singing, each to each"

8 For discussion see my Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca, 1974), pp. 169-70, and for metaphor generally, pp. 78-79, 85-90, 94, 178-83. 9 For this general perspective, see Structuralist Poetics, Chs. vi-viii.

COMMENTARY 227

a metaphor, we imply that we know what it stands for. But if we wish to linger in these chambers of the sea, we must discard the metaphoric model so as to perform other interpretive operations: balancing Donne's invocation of an impossibility ("Teach me to hear mermaids singing, or to keep of envy's stinging") against the assertion of an experience, weaving the delicate nostalgia of exclusion into the structure of values which must include the marine, the exotic, the different feminine milieux. The point is not, let us hasten to add, that the

phrase synthesizes all this as the acolytes of metaphoric fusion would have us believe. Rather, its incongruity, its initial invraisemblance, enjoins us to set to work, to explore, to split up the phrase which is in-

congruent per se into components which we can trace through the

poem, discovering how they are associated, transformed, opposed, and valued. The phrase is not a synthesis, a distillation of a meaning, but a stimulus to deconstruction, a nexus of semantic trails which we can follow in various directions.

Every sign, says C. S. Peirce, requires an interpretant, some explana- tion or argument which enables it to be used; and since that interpretant is itself another sign, it will require further interpretants in the form of yet other signs.'0 Interpretation is woven in a potentially infinite

process and it is only the thoroughly conventional metaphor which

precludes the developments natural to interpretation. If that man is a fox, he is sly and nothing more, but if he is a hippopotamus, or a tattered coat upon a stick, or a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas, the phrase gestures towards an open meaning, functions as a signifier which designates a space of signification. It

provides material which we can trace through the text, subjecting it to various developments, so as to fill up the space of meaning which it

designates, piling sign upon sign. Any interesting incongruity can call forth minor metaphoric, synecdochic, metonymic, and symbolic operations as we strive to release what Derrida calls its secret story: the developments to which it gives rise and which we organize, calling upon our models of unity and vraisemblance, into an extended naturali- zation of the phrase.

For a theory of reading, the interesting cases of so-called "metaphor" are, as Paul Ricoeur implies, occasions for the exercise of interpretation in its most general and complex forms. Nothing is gained by calling these moments of the text "metaphor." Indeed, much may be lost, since by bringing them under this heading we imply that there is substitution at work and thus commit ourselves to the notion of an

io Collected Papers (Cambridge, Mass., 1931-58), II, 136-37-


easily definable reduction of the strange. By identifying "metaphors" we trivialize the processes of interpretation.

Indeed, it will no doubt prove true that those who resist abandoning the term do so not from any love of identifying metaphors, nor even from a desire to discuss metaphors. Image-criticism has been fre-

quently attacked and its day seems to have passed. If it attempts a revival by studying, as Robert Weimann suggests, the tenor or ultimate meaning of metaphors rather than concentrating on vehicles, there would no longer be any reason for it to limit its objects to supposed metaphors." The resiliency of the term "metaphor," its continued presence in literary criticism, may derive rather, as Cyrus Hamlin's essay indicates, from the love critics bear not for metaphor but for the metaphoric, not for metaphors themselves but for the concept of the metaphor. If poetry attempts to fuse particulars without forgetting their particularity, if it seeks to lodge the eternal in the temporal or the transcendent in the empirical while suggesting the noble futility of this task, then what better name is there for the poetic than the metaphoric. Rejecting the notion of symbol as standing for an ultimate fusion which we believe impossible, Hamlin writes about the importance in Romantic aesthetics of the metaphoric, conceived as an ironic or self-conscious tension between unity and disparity, atemporality and temporality. He cites no actual metaphors in his discussion, and indeed there is no reason why he should, because this aspect or this function of poetry does not especially depend on poetic metaphors.'2 The metaphoric here is simply a name for a theory of literature-a theory which is, of course, that late blossom of Romantic aesthetics, the theory of the New Criticism. Scrapping the term "metaphor" would not harm such theories and would, on the contrary, force them to look more closely at the interpretive processes which produce a tension between unity and disparity and at the various textual indeterminacies which provoke such reading.

I It is, however, important to point out, pace Weimann, that the error of image-criticism was not excessive formalism and that indeed there is nothing formalistic about it. To relate "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" to methods of primitive warfare is immediately to reduce form to content without even allowing the content of the speech to take shape. To prefer the content implied by isolated words (the verbal material of the play) to the content of words as organized by and in the dramatic structure is the most radical of content-centered approaches and the furthest remove from a formalist approach to metaphor. For an example of the latter see G'eoffrey Hartman, "The Voice of the Shuttle," Beyond Formalism (New Haven, 1970). 12 Canonical metaphors, such as "George is a fox," do not have these exalted poetic functions. Indeterminate metaphors, such as "I have heard the mermaids singing each to each" may do so (only because they are not simple figures of replacement), but so may metonymies, synecdoches, and other stimuli to interpretive displacement, if in their context they have the right kind of ambiguity.

COMMENTARY 229

The change in perspective achieved by abandoning metaphor would also permit an elegant resolution of awkward problems raised by the rhetorical concept of metaphor. Speculating on "impossible metaphors," Todorov asks why it is that we cannot say "fork" for "knife," "door" for "window," "wolf" for "fox." To the rhetorician this is a difficult problem, since the first term is related to the second by resemblance, just as in the case of possible metaphors. But if we scrap this model and turn to the perspective of reading, the reasons become plain. "Fork" is never a metaphor for "knife" because we never encounter incongruous sentences containing the word "fork" where substituting the word "knife" would be a likely and satisfactory solu- tion. "I sharpened the blade of my fork" suggests simply an odd fork. "I stood at the bedroom door looking out through its upper pane into the street" implies an oddly designed house; and "the thin reddish- brown snout of the wolf" gives us an unusual wolf. We never make the first terms into metaphors for the second because the interpretive operations which would vield this result are never necessary. The rhetorical approach to metaphor simply throws up false problems which reading ignores.

If it is difficult to think coherently about metaphor or in terms of metaphor, it is perhaps because we have long tried to hold together through this notion two things which are fundamentally incompatible, and on whose very incompatibility the power of literature depends: the notion of a definable rhetorical operation in which I say X and mean Y and the open-ended violations of vraisemblance through which we are invited to explore, develop, and fill in a space of signification. Literature is of interest only because its signs do not simply replace other "proper" signs, or rather because its signs do, precisely, stand for something else, for the "other" in its possible developments, and thus are different from a meaning which they defer. Literature's power has been thought to lie in metaphor, but in fact it is precisely literature's resistance to metaphor, resistance to replacement operations, which is the source of this power.

To say that the notion of metaphor should be scrapped, that it is a positive hindrance to our understanding of reading because it conceals the complexities of interpretation, is an ungenerous conclusion to an issue on metaphor; but the best essays here presented point this way. They explore the paradoxes and impossibilities of the notion (some- times by illustrating its triviality), or else escape from it to the general problems of interpretation.

BRASENOSE COLLEGE, OXFORD

Article Contentsp. [219]p. 220p. 221p. 222p. 223p. 224p. 225p. 226p. 227p. 228p. 229

Issue Table of ContentsNew Literary History, Vol. 6, No. 1, On Metaphor (Autumn, 1974), pp. 1-231Front Matter [pp. 1-194]White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy [pp. 5-74]"As," or the Limits of Metaphor [pp. 75-94]Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics [pp. 95-110]On Linguistic Symbolism [pp. 111-134]Technological Metaphor and Social Control [pp. 135-147]Shakespeare and the Study of Metaphor [pp. 149-167]The Temporality of Selfhood: Metaphor and Romantic Poetry [pp. 169-193]DiscussionSeeing Metaphor as Caricature [pp. 195-209]Mind and Metaphor: A Commentary [pp. 211-217]Commentary [pp. 219-229]

Back Matter [pp. 230-231]

Culler on Metaphor

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