Metaphor and language, poetry and prose, and why I couldn't fall asleep last night (Dwight!).
I had a conversation a while ago that went like this.
ME: My students [SAT prep kids] had trouble, when asked to replace the word "height" in the phrase "height of the tomato season" with a non-metaphorical term that meant the same thing. They couldn't even come up with something like "best part."
DWIGHT: I don't think there is a word that means what height means in that sentence.
- end of conversation -
This is the sort of thing that sits in my subconscious and festers for weeks, until at some unpropitious time it pops out and causes me to lose hours of sleep. The reason it bugged me so much is that I have endured for the last 6+ years a barrage of off-hand and backhanded comments to the effect that what a poem says cannot be said in any other way than the way it is expressed in the poem. But I've had enough, I'm mad as hell [not really], and I'm not taking it any more.
I'm going to focus, not on poems, but on the most emblematic of poetic devices, the metaphor. A metaphor works by identifying object A with something it is not (object B) for the purpose of drawing a comparison between A and B to illumine something common in A with B. "Then God said ...." It's a metaphor. We don't mean that God is speaking, but something else (what else in this example is hard to pin down). In other words, metaphorical speech depends on univocal speech. I can only eat like a pig because pigs actually eat in a certain way (like pigs).
In univocal speech (in which the meaning conveyed by the words used is actually what they mean generally, not simply what they happen to mean in this context) what is expressed is of various kinds, corresponding to the different grammatical moods: indicative, imperative, subjunctive, optative. There may be others, but that's not important. For the moment I which to focus on the indicative mood.
In the indicative mood, univocal speech expresses a state of affairs -- it signifies that the world is or is not in such and such a way. In the duality of speech there is the one intending something (the speaker) and one being intended (what is spoken about). In reflexive speech, these are the same. In either case, what is intended is an object which has a nature, has qualities of some sort, and can be grasped as it is in speech. If there were something about it, considered simply as an object, which our speech lacked the ability to express, we could invent a word for it. Thus, in principle, I see no reason why the [natural] world, considered objectively, cannot be completely accounted for by univocal speech.
So, what then does metaphor add to speech? I argue that it ads nothing on the side of the intended object, but adds on the side of the intending subject. When I say that Sarah Palin is a bulldog with lipstick, I have not captured the reality more accurately than if I say she is a tenacious and no-nonsense woman. But what I have done is invested the situation with humor and pleasure. What changes is not the content of what I am saying, but my relation to that content.
Put another way: the translation of a poem to prose looses nothing objective -- nothing regarding the state of the world. What is lost is personal: the crafted relation of the reader to that state of affairs.
What do you think?
ME: My students [SAT prep kids] had trouble, when asked to replace the word "height" in the phrase "height of the tomato season" with a non-metaphorical term that meant the same thing. They couldn't even come up with something like "best part."
DWIGHT: I don't think there is a word that means what height means in that sentence.
- end of conversation -
This is the sort of thing that sits in my subconscious and festers for weeks, until at some unpropitious time it pops out and causes me to lose hours of sleep. The reason it bugged me so much is that I have endured for the last 6+ years a barrage of off-hand and backhanded comments to the effect that what a poem says cannot be said in any other way than the way it is expressed in the poem. But I've had enough, I'm mad as hell [not really], and I'm not taking it any more.
I'm going to focus, not on poems, but on the most emblematic of poetic devices, the metaphor. A metaphor works by identifying object A with something it is not (object B) for the purpose of drawing a comparison between A and B to illumine something common in A with B. "Then God said ...." It's a metaphor. We don't mean that God is speaking, but something else (what else in this example is hard to pin down). In other words, metaphorical speech depends on univocal speech. I can only eat like a pig because pigs actually eat in a certain way (like pigs).
In univocal speech (in which the meaning conveyed by the words used is actually what they mean generally, not simply what they happen to mean in this context) what is expressed is of various kinds, corresponding to the different grammatical moods: indicative, imperative, subjunctive, optative. There may be others, but that's not important. For the moment I which to focus on the indicative mood.
In the indicative mood, univocal speech expresses a state of affairs -- it signifies that the world is or is not in such and such a way. In the duality of speech there is the one intending something (the speaker) and one being intended (what is spoken about). In reflexive speech, these are the same. In either case, what is intended is an object which has a nature, has qualities of some sort, and can be grasped as it is in speech. If there were something about it, considered simply as an object, which our speech lacked the ability to express, we could invent a word for it. Thus, in principle, I see no reason why the [natural] world, considered objectively, cannot be completely accounted for by univocal speech.
So, what then does metaphor add to speech? I argue that it ads nothing on the side of the intended object, but adds on the side of the intending subject. When I say that Sarah Palin is a bulldog with lipstick, I have not captured the reality more accurately than if I say she is a tenacious and no-nonsense woman. But what I have done is invested the situation with humor and pleasure. What changes is not the content of what I am saying, but my relation to that content.
Put another way: the translation of a poem to prose looses nothing objective -- nothing regarding the state of the world. What is lost is personal: the crafted relation of the reader to that state of affairs.
What do you think?
posted by Whiskey at 9:03 AM
4 Comments:
Gee: sorry about the sleep. Sorry, also, that you're wrong about this, Mike: a metaphor, whatever the mood, does not only elucidate the relation of speaking subject to bespoken object. It also tells something about the object's relation to other objects, and this interrelation is a great part of how we understand the objects spoken of. So a pitbull is named by a metaphor, in which the dog is yoked to the notion of "pit" and "bull," each of which lends something--and not just something extra, but essentially true--to one's notion of the dog. I could go into all of the ways in which "pitbull" presents something different to our minds than a more prosaic description of the animal by height, weight, nasal and labial structure, etc., but I won't--that'd be tiresome.
Perhaps you'll rejoin that, after the first few uses, either name--which ever we have acclimated ourselves to using--will denominate the same thing, and we'll move quickly from the word/s to a mental image of the thing itself, so they really do the same job. To which I respond that it's still different: even if my response to the metaphor becomes more and more prosaic, the former word will still strike each newcomer as different and more dynamic than the other.
More to follow
My response to this got a bit long for a comment section, so please see the gracklog.
I have endured for the last 6+ years a barrage of off-hand and backhanded comments to the effect that what a poem says cannot be said in any other way than the way it is expressed in the poem.
I take it, then, that the originators of the comments agree that it is impossible--not difficult, impossible--to explain what a poem says? Because, according to this, if the explanation uses different words than the poem, it will be saying something different.
Dwight: Your argument does not show that Mike is wrong. It simply says that using metaphors makes for shorter and more convenient speech than not using metaphors. For if the metaphor is useful because it tells us something about the "object's relation to other objects," then this relation can simply be added to the prose description intended to replace the metaphor. "Pitbull" may present something different to the mind than "a more prosaic description of the animal by height, weight, nasal and labial structure," but that simply means that the "something different" needs to be added to the prosaic description, upon which addition it will then present everything to the mind that "pitbull" does.
Regarding the word's striking each newcomer as "different and more dynamic," that seems to me to be the kind of difference that Mike conceded to metaphor, i.e. not a difference in what is actually signified.
Take this for what it's worth--$0.02.
Sorry, I just saw that Amos already made the same point about the pitbull (though I still disagree with his comments about poetry).
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