The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [135]
An author who treats a conventionalized figure of speech as if it were a description of actuality is unmetaphoring that figure. Shakespeare’s quietly making the garden enclosed of virginal love the locus of Romeo’s second exchange with Juliet or his transforming a standard prop in the tableaux of noble melancholy into the specific skull of a dead friend [in Hamlet] are examples of the sort I mean.39
Remetaphoring is, for Colie, in part a reminder by the poet that culture and literary tradition think through figures—not the “conceptual” figures of Lakoff and Turner but literary figures, the language “bequeathed” from poet to poet.40
“The best in this kind are but shadows,” Theseus says to Hippolyta before they sit down to watch the play, explaining his forbearance with imperfect or unschooled performers, and in the play’s epilogue, Puck will remind the audience that the actors they have been watching, as well as the denizens of fairyland, are “shadows,” too. The fact that Theseus is a fiction—that these speculations on the power and limits of the imagination are spoken by a literary character imagined by a poet/playwright about whom much has been written and imagined—may gesture further toward the work of art as a mise en abyme: the frame within a frame, the dream within a dream, the play within a play, the door that opens only onto another door. Which is the figure and which is the ground? Which is the metaphor and which is the concept? Theseus may smile at the idea of a bush (mis)taken for a bear, but then he has not seen what the audience has seen: the “translated” Bottom, whose metaphorical status (“man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream”) is as powerful as his disconcertingly hybrid presence, half man, half beast (“methought I was—and methought I had”). Onstage Bottom is a walking and dreaming catachresis, a man with an ass’s head. Would we call such an onstage representation “literal”? It is certainly an example of creative “unmetaphoring.” The effect is to make the audience see something of the transformative—and dangerous—effect of figurative language.
Neither Theseus nor Hippolyta grasp the dimensions of this power, which is wielded in their play by the other royal pair, Oberon and Titania, the king and queen of fairies. Bottom’s metaphorical identity as an ass is violently unmetaphored by Oberon so that his estranged queen will awaken to find herself in love with a monster. Titania seems perfectly content in this erotic space of fantasy—it is her husband who decides to “pity” her “dotage” and to restore her to ordinary sight (“My Oberon, what visions I have seen,” she later reports. “Methought I was enamoured of an ass”). The wish and the unwish are both accomplished by the string-pulling Oberon, leaving Bottom unmoved and unscathed, ready to perform his part in yet another play, where yet another hybrid monster (a timorous amateur actor in a lion suit) menaces a young woman. As her histrionic lover, Bottom draws his sword and kills himself, to the amusement, rather than the horror, of the onstage audience watching the play:
BOTTOM [as Pyramus]: Now die, die, die, die, die.
DEMETRIUS: No die, but an ace for him; for he is but one.
LYSANDER: Less than an ace, man; for he is dead, he is nothing.
THESEUS: With the help of a surgeon he might yet recover, and prove an ass.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.295–299
Ace and ass were pronounced the same in Shakespeare’s time. Each was a “low” entity—the ass in the animal kingdom, the ace, the smallest number, so that Demetrius’s pun on “die” (the singular of “dice” as well as a familiar Renaissance pun on sexual climax) trivializes both Bottom’s language and the “death of Pyramus.” These joking spectators have not encountered the transformed figure of Bottom as an ass, but—uncannily—they rename him as one. In other words, their joke unwittingly re-creates the metaphor, the “vision” of Bottom-is-an-ass. They don’t know what they know. Their language speaks through them to us. But Lysander and Demetrius are themselves dramatic characters, literary