The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [127]
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:
Once the reflection on the figurality of language is started, there is no telling where it may lead. Yet there is no way not to raise the question if there is to be any understanding. The use and abuse of language cannot be separated from one another.16
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