The Use and Abuse of Literature (37 page)

These are just the kinds of claims that are again being made under the rubric of brain science and cognition rather than the human sciences or social sciences. The wheel has come full circle. Cognitive science’s holistic assertions about the brain and basic principles of mind, as appealing as they may be, make the literary mind a repository of narrative fictions, without acknowledging that words and rhetorical forms are themselves unstable, producing alternative and often antithetical narratives of their own. It’s precisely the tendency to think in stories or parables that often leads to underreading, by presuming that the outcome is already shaped
by the narrative form—that “one story helps us make sense of another.” (Not to mention the diversity of interpretation that may attend upon such stories and parables, as any rigorous study of biblical scholarship will attest.) Linking one cultural metaphor to another, rather than paying close attention to individual words, tropes, figures of speech, and rhetorical inflections, makes literature into a kind of master code or anthology of expectable moves. Turner’s assertion in the preface, that “the literary mind is the fundamental mind,” may seem like a compliment to literature, rescuing it from what he describes as “the common view—firmly in place for two and a half millennia—[that] sees the everyday mind as unliterary and the literary mind as optional.” But in fact this sweeping claim sweeps the literary away.

Let’s return for a moment to the idea of metaphor, a word that means
carrying across
, or transporting. As several theorists and philosophers note, this is the same etymological meaning as
translation
, also a carrying (
trans
) across. The conveyances that in American English are called moving vans (and in British English, removal trucks) are in modern Greece marked with the word
metaphora
, indicating their function—much to the delight of observers from the philosopher Paul Ricoeur to the biologist Stephen Jay Gould.
¹¹
It was the critic I. A. Richards (in his
Philosophy of Rhetoric
, 1936) who invented the terms
vehicle
and
tenor
for the two parts of a metaphor, the “literal subject” and the figurative connection. I enclose the word “literal” in quotation marks here, at the risk of irritating the reader, because it is the argument of many literary theorists that all language is figurative. Perhaps it would be better to call this the
referent
, although that term, too, has become critically loaded. In a phrase like
My love is like a red, red rose
, or (to use a less poetic figure)
life is a bitch
, the vehicles are
love
and
life
, and the tenors (holding the referents)
rose
and
bitch
.

“Metaphor is the transference of a term from one thing to another,”
as Aristotle explained in the
Poetics
, “whether from genus to species, species to genus, species to species, or by analogy.”
¹²
And he expands on this concept in
Rhetoric:

“Metaphor is the dreamwork of language,” wrote the philosopher Donald Davidson, “and, like all dreamwork, its interpretation reflects as much on the interpreter as on the originator. The interpretation of dreams requires collaboration between a dreamer and a waker, even if they be the same person; and the act of interpretation is itself a work of the imagination. So too understanding a metaphor is as much a creative endeavour as making a metaphor, and as little guided by rules.”
¹⁴

As Aristotle suggested, we can “call a crime a mistake, or a mistake a crime.” Understanding a metaphor is as much a creative endeavor as making one, and neither is guided by rules. This is a different notion of metaphor from the conceptual belief that seems to imply a common cultural unconscious. It implies that metaphors are made rather than found, and that they are not only modes of translation and transference, but also of transgression: they step across boundaries (“from genus to species, from species to genus”); they can be complimentary or disparaging; they do not articulate or obey rules, except perhaps the rule of compulsory disobedience. Metaphors are a kind of intentional or motivated solecism: a mistake or a crime elevated to a position of rhetorical power.

When the literary critic Paul de Man approached the question of metaphor’s constitutive transgressiveness via the route of epistemology,
he did so with characteristic rigor, beginning with his opening salvo: “Metaphors, tropes, and figural language in general have been a perennial problem and, at times, a recognized source of embarrassment for philosophical discourse and, by extension, for all discursive uses of language including historiography and literary analysis.” Try as one might, it is impossible to free oneself from figural language. Moreover, “we have no way of defining, of policing, the boundaries that separate the name of one entity from another: tropes are not just travelers, they tend to be smugglers and probably smugglers of stolen goods at that. What makes matters even worse is that there is no way of finding out whether they do so with criminal intent or not.”
¹⁵

De Man is not talking about Aristotle but, rather, the “use and abuse of words” as this topic is discussed in John Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” Nonetheless, his language echoes some of the key terms we have just noted in Aristotle’s
Rhetoric:
pirates as purveyors, crime as mistake and mistake as crime. And the
use and abuse
phrase will recur several times, not merely as a grace note but as what can gradually be seen as the core of the problem, for Locke in particular but also for metaphor in general:

Moreover, as de Man goes on, “Abuse of language is, of course, itself the name of a trope: catachresis.” Locke had chastised those who made what he regarded as a category error, as well as an error in understanding. “He that thinks the name
centaur
stands for some real being, imposes on himself and mistakes words for things.’ ”
¹⁷
But a word
is
a thing. All words are figures, and a
horse
or a
man
is no less a figure than a centaur. As de Man will argue “the condemnation, by Locke’s own argument, now takes all of language for its target, for at no point in the demonstration can the empirical entity be sheltered from tropological defiguration.”
Catachresis
(etymologically, misuse or perversion, a term “Englished” in George
Puttenham’s sixteenth-century treatise as “the Figure of Abuse”) is not a violation of rhetoric, but itself resides
within
rhetoric.

Catachresis became an important topic for certain literary theorists in the late twentieth century precisely because it provided a third way of looking at the idea of figure, one that challenged the binary of use and abuse. “On the one hand,” wrote Andrzej Warminski, “catachresis is clearly a transfer from one realm (often the human body) to another and thus is definitely a figurative use of language. To give a ‘face’ to a mountain or a ‘head’ to cabbage or lettuce is clearly a figure. On the other hand, since this figurative (ab)use does not take the place of an already existent, established literal use but rather replaces the lack of the literal, the lack of the proper expression, it is not just figurative; it can often become the proper, the only way to say the
x
of a mountain. But it would be a mistake to call it ‘literal.’ ”
¹⁸
The classical example here is the “leg” of a table, where “leg” is a figure of speech, but does not replace or substitute for any other word.

This “uncanny doubleness” of catachresis, putting in question “the relation between literal and figurative, proper and transferred,” suggests that it may be a “conceptual” mistake to think of metaphors as concepts prior to their occurrence in language. “The leg of a table” is not a concept but a poem naturalized into ordinary language.

I will return briefly at the end of this chapter to the “mixed mode” figures (like the centaurs to which John Locke took such exception), since they appear importantly, and indeed as instructive “figures of abuse,” in one of Shakespeare’s best-loved plays. But rather than pursue this question in Locke or in philosophy, I’d like to bring it home to literature, and to metaphors and figures in poetry, by citing one of the most famous critical attacks on figures of speech (especially metaphors and/or catachreses) in the annals of English criticism, Dr. Samuel Johnson’s critique of those writers who—because of the attack—would come to be known in the history of English studies as “the metaphysical poets.”
Here is Johnson’s opinion of the style of this school, poets like Abraham Cowley, John Cleveland, and John Donne.

And:

The term
metaphysical
, which refers to the branch of philosophy concerned with questions of being and knowing, was suggested in John Dryden’s complaint about Donne, “He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love.”
²⁰
Whether the comparisons favored by Donne from the new science are really metaphysical, or in fact intensely material and physical (lovers as “stiff twin compasses,” tears compared to a globe full of continents, specific and arcane medical knowledge), it is clear that they irritated Dr. Johnson and offended his belief that “great thoughts are always general.”
²¹
“Who but Donne would have thought that a good man is a telescope?” he asks, citing these lines:

Likewise, he declares that “their fictions were often violent and unnatural,” giving as his example a passage from Abraham Cowley’s “Bathing in the River”:

Whether or not the reader concurs with Dr. Johnson about the effect and value of these passages, I think it is probable that it would not do them—or Johnson—justice to describe them as conceptual metaphors in the cognitive style: the “Man Is a Telescope” metaphor, or the “Beloved Is a Bioluminescent Fish” metaphor. Johnson’s criticisms were not unmixed with praise, as in this judicious, if slightly grudging sentiment: “Yet great labour, directed by great abilities, is never wholly lost: if they frequently threw away their wit upon false conceits, they likewise sometimes struck out unexpected truth; if their conceits were far-fetched, they were often worth the carriage. To write on their plan, it was at least necessary to read and think.”
²³

T. S. Eliot endorsed this view, with equal eloquence and considerably more enthusiasm in his essay on “The Metaphysical Poets.” Seeking to distinguish between “the intellectual poet” of the seventeenth century and “the reflective poet” of the nineteenth, Eliot had recourse to some cognitive metaphors of his own. Here is his famous account of the difference between Donne and a Victorian writer like Tennyson or Browning:

Of the poets called
metaphysical
, he writes, in a sentence from the same essay that seems half-consciously to echo Johnson on the necessity to read and think, “they were, at best, engaged in the task of trying to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling.”
²⁵
He draws some comparisons between French poetry and poetry in English, and returns to the physical body and the senses: