Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [133]
In metaphors, the thought connection between the vehicle (rose) and the tenor (my love) is left unstated. But for our purposes, the clearer and more explicit simile will do. It is the nature of the resemblance between the speaker’s “love” and roses that we are invited to infer.
What are the characteristics of red roses—especially red red (very red) roses—that might be relevant in this piece of thinking by analogy? Well, most people find roses to be beautiful. Most people associate red with passion. In fact, science can now measure the body’s response to different colors. Red produces excitement. Red can even make the pulse rate go up. Roses are also complicated flowers. Their shape is convoluted. Roses are thought of as female. Rose petals are fragile. Many roses have thorns. So, the simile is actually a piece of thinking about love and about women.
It is not a very deep piece of thinking, and probably many women would prefer that the thorn part not be made too prominent. In fact, a reader would have to decide in the context of other language in the poem whether thorniness, as a characteristic of some roses, is significant and ought to be considered. The point is that the simile does make an argument about women that could be stated overtly, analyzed, and evaluated. The implication that women, like roses, might have thorns—and thus be hard to “pick,” defending them from male intruders, and so forth is part of the argument.
Here is the procedure for exploring and decoding the logic of metaphor—what we have to do, more or less automatically, to understand the thinking that the metaphor suggests.
Step 1: Isolate the vehicle—the language in the metaphor that states one side of the analogy.
Step 2: Articulate the characteristics of the vehicle, its defining traits.
Step 3: Select the characteristics of the vehicle that seem most significant in context.
Step 4: Use these significant characteristics of the vehicle to prompt interpretive leaps to what the metaphor communicates. Make the implicit explicit.
Notice how, in the rose example, our recasting of the original simile has made explicit the implicit meanings inside the figurative language. This recasting is a useful act of thinking, one that makes evident the thought process that a metaphor sets in motion.
What such recasting reveals is not only that metaphors do, in fact, make claims, but that they are remarkably efficient at doing so. A metaphor can say a lot in a little by compressing a complex amalgam of thought and feeling into a single image.
What objections might remain to thinking that figurative language has an implicit logic and is a way of thinking and making arguments? People who pride themselves on being logical thinkers and place great value on rationality are inclined to think of metaphorical language as imprecise and too little available to any systematic way of arriving at meaning that all who encounter the metaphor might share. This is a reasonable objection, but one that can be answered in the terms that we introduced in our discussion of Practical Reasoning above.
As we argue at some length in Chapter 6, Making Interpretations Plausible, certainty and single right answers are very rarely available, especially when our evidence consists of words. Even in areas, however, where it is not possible to prove beyond a doubt that one statement of meaning is truer and more accurate than another, people will usually accept some reasoning from evidence as better—truer to the meaning of the words in context—than others. The meaning-making process is social and consensual. To put a Rogerian slant on this point, understanding figurative logic involves careful listening to language, an openness to multiple possibilities, and it also requires empathy—much like what is required of us in understanding people’s arguments in everyday life.
Skepticism about the logic and usefulness of metaphorical