The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [126]
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.
Translating Metaphor
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:
Metaphors, like epithets, must be fitting, which means that they must fairly correspond to the thing signified: failing this, their inappropriateness will be conspicuous: the want of harmony between two things is emphasized by their being placed side by side … And if you wish to pay a compliment, you must take your metaphor from something better in the same line; if to disparage, something worse. To illustrate my meaning: … somebody calls actors hangers-on of Dionysus, but they call themselves artists: each of these terms is a metaphor, the one intended to throw dirt at the actor, the other to dignify him. And pirates now call themselves purveyors. We can thus call a crime a mistake, or a mistake a crime.13
“Metaphor is the dreamwork of language,” wrote the philosopher Donald Davidson, “and, like all dreamwork, its interpretation reflects as much on the interpreter