Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

10.2 Analysing metaphors
Unit 10 Metaphor and figurative language
Section 3 Attributing meaning

Metaphor is by far the most important and interesting of the various kinds of figurative language, especially to students of literature. A great deal of scholarly and theoretical analysis has been devoted to metaphor (some of which is mentioned in the further reading for this unit). Thus the bulk of the rest of this unit will be devoted to examining various aspects of metaphor and to presenting ways of reading metaphor.

10.2.1 Metaphor and inferencing

One account of the way we understand figurative language is that we do it through the same kind of inferencing process that we employ when trying to identify authorial intention (see Unit 14, Authorship and intention). Inferenc- ing is a process of assigning a meaning to uses of language by making educated guesses based on evidence from the text and other sources. Deciphering figurative language involves ’reading between the lines’ to discover what the author is ’really’ saying.

Most users of the language will be able to make sense of the statement that figurative language is an ’umbrella term’. But how do we do this? Most of the time we make sense of figurative uses of language without paying attention to how we do so. Often, we are able to do this because we have heard or read the figurative usage before. However, although there must be a moment when we hear a figure for the first time, we seem able for the most part to understand new figures without conscious effort. Yet, as with most things that we do unconsciously or without effort, when we try to analyse what we do it suddenly seems difficult or strange. Nonetheless, it is important and useful to analyse the process that we follow in understanding a metaphor.

In the case of ’figurative language is an umbrella term’, we can break down the process of understanding into several stages. First, we notice that the literal meaning cannot be true. Second, we assume that the phrase must have a potentially true meaning and that we are required to invent or infer a non-literal meaning that is plausible for the sentence. Third, we set about trying to infer that plausible non-literal meaning. (Plausibility depends on a number of factors: the meaning must be capable of being true, it must fit with the rest of the text, and it must have some relation to what is actually said - the non-literal meaning must have some relation to the literal meaning.) In the case we are looking at, we ask what aspects of ’umbrella’ might apply in the context: what features or uses of an umbrella might be relevant in the phrase we are trying to understand? Keeping out the rain does not seem relevant to what is being said about the term ’figurative language’. What is possibly relevant is the idea that an umbrella (especially a large one) can cover more than one person. The notion of covering more than one thing appears to fit, since we also said earlier that figurative language is ’a general term for a range of different non-literal uses of language’.

All speakers of the same language should decode the same literal meaning from the same text, but they might differ in the non-literal meaning that they infer from a text. This has several consequences for non-literal meanings. First, a range of non-literal meanings might all be plausible for the same text; sometimes these meanings are compatible with one another, and sometimes they are not. Sometimes the non-literal meaning is very easy to derive and sometimes quite difficult, perhaps because it is only weakly evidenced by the text or because the text can be interpreted in more than one non-literal way. Metaphor - and figurative language more generally - thus generates a degree of indeterminacy in a text, which might be an important part of that text’s aesthetic effect. The attempt to interpret figurative language, then, is simply a particular case of the general problem of trying to determine authorial intention through inferencing: it leads not to certainty but to various degrees of uncertainty.

10.2.2 Metaphors as different parts of speech

The process of inferencing just described can be aided by the recognition that metaphors may be formed by different parts of speech and that the inferred meaning of a metaphor needs to be the same part(s) of speech as the metaphorical word or phrase itself. This is because metaphor generally works through a process of substitution, or of comparison, of like with like. In the example ’figurative language is an umbrella term’, ’umbrella’ could be said to be substituting for other possible words that would make better literal sense: ’general’, ’all-encompassing’ and so on. This substitutive relation is emphasized by the fact that ’umbrella’, ’general’ and ’all-encompassing’ would all function in the sentence as adjectives (that is, they modify the noun ’term’). ’Umbrella’, of course, is normally a noun, as in the following sentence: ’We need to develop a nuclear umbrella to defend the world against asteroid collision.’ In this case, the metaphorical ’umbrella’ could be substituted by a noun phrase such as ’defensive system’.

In the phrase addressed to Spring in Blake’s ’To Spring’ (1783), ’let our winds / Kiss thy perfumed garments’ (9-10), the metaphor is made up of three different parts of speech. In the context, the verb phrase ’kiss thy perfumed garments’ seems to mean something like ’blow lightly over the fragrant flowers (of spring)’. Within this metaphor, ’kiss’ (verb) could be replaced by ’blow lightly’ (verb phrase), ’perfumed’ (adjective) could be replaced by ’fragranced’ (or some similarly plausible adjective for the smell of flowers), and ’garments’ (noun) could be replaced by ’flowers’ (noun).

10.2.3 Tenor, vehicle, ground

The recognition that metaphor involves the substitution of equivalent parts of speech is an important step in the analysis of metaphors. It helps us to understand the inferencing process described above, and it also helps us to understand and use an influential method of analysing metaphors developed by the literary critic and philosopher I.A. Richards. Richards’s analysis of metaphor involves identifying the different components of metaphor - which he called tenor, vehicle and ground. (Sharp readers - to use a metaphor - will notice that both ’vehicle’ and ’ground’ are themselves metaphors.) The word or phrase in a sentence that cannot be taken literally in the context is called the vehicle. The meaning that is implied, or referred to, by the vehicle is called the tenor. To work out the ground of the metaphor we need to identify what vehicle and tenor have in common (their ’common ground’) and filter out those aspects of the vehicle that do not relate to the tenor. In the case of ’Figurative language is an umbrella term’, the ground that links vehicle (’umbrella’) and tenor (’general’) are that both cover more than one thing. The ground of the metaphor is thus something like ’cover all’.

10.2.4 Explicit and implicit metaphors

Another distinction that helps us to understand and analyse metaphors is that between explicit and implicit metaphors. In an explicit metaphor, both vehicle and tenor are specified and present in the text. For example, in the statement ’the M1 motorway is the artery of England’, the tenor is ’M1 motorway’, the vehicle is ’artery’, and the ground is the similarity between motorway and an

artery. In an implicit metaphor, by contrast, while the vehicle is present in the text, the tenor has to be inferred (following processes described above). Thus in ’figurative language is an umbrella term’, the vehicle is ’umbrella’ while the tenor (general, all-encompassing) is merely implied and has to be inferred.

10.2.5 Classifying metaphors: concretive, animistic, humanizing

Another important strategy for analysing and understanding a metaphor is to compare vehicle and tenor in order to identify what kind of transference of meaning or connotations goes on between them (see Leech, 1969). A concretive metaphor uses a concrete term to talk about an abstract thing. Common examples include ’the burden of responsibility’ and ’every cloud has a silver lining’. Religious discourse often uses concretive metaphors to make abstract ideas more vivid: heaven is frequently referred to as if it were a place or a building - ’In my Father’s house there are many mansions.’ An animistic metaphor uses a term usually associated with animate things (living creatures) to talk about an inanimate thing. Common examples include the ’leg of a table’ and ’stinging rain’. A humanizing metaphor or anthropomorphic metaphor (sometimes called personification) uses a term usually associated with human beings to talk about a non-human thing. Common examples include the ’hands’ of a clock and the kettle’s ’sad song’. Humanizing metaphor is connected with the pathetic fallacy (the idea that the world reflects or participates in one’s emotions): ’the kettle’s sad song’ might thus be used as a way of indicating a character’s mood by implicitly describing how he or she perceives the kettle’s sound.

These are not the only kinds of transfers that can be used to form metaphors. Consider the phrase ’the nightclubs are full of sharks’. Given that it is unlikely that this will be true, we infer that the statement means that the men (and/or women) in the nightclubs behave in predatory ways like sharks. In other words, human beings are metaphorically described as a kind of animal. In the statement ’the dog flew at the intruder’s throat’, the dog’s action is described as if it were the action of a bird (hence we get an animal-animal transference). In general, though, metaphors tend to represent abstract things - ideas, emotions, thoughts, feelings, etc. - in physical ways (as objects) or to represent things or events in the world in ways that reveal how we think or feel about them. In these ways, metaphors (and figures in general) make thoughts and feelings more vivid or more tangible - they give a ’figure’ to thoughts and feelings or transfer connotations to ideas that allow us to see those ideas in new ways. This is why metaphors in particular can be found in abundance in poetry and other forms of literature.

10.2.6 Extended metaphor

When a piece of language uses several vehicles from the same area of thought (or semantic field) it is called an extended metaphor. Extended metaphor is a

common literary device, especially in poetry. In the last two stanzas of her poem ’The Unequal Fetters’ (1713), Anne Finch develops an extended metaphor to suggest that marriage (’Hymen’) is a set of ’unequal fetters’ (chains or bonds) for men and women and that, as a consequence, she intends to avoid it:

Free as Nature’s first intention

Was to make us, I’ll be found

Nor by subtle Man’s invention

Yield to be in fetters bound

By one that walks a freer round.

Marriage does but slightly tie men

Whilst close prisoners we remain

They the larger slaves of Hymen

Still are begging love again

At the full length of all their chain.

10.2.7 Mixed metaphor

Books on ’good style’ used to condemn the use of mixed metaphor (the combination of two or more metaphors whose vehicles come from different and incongruous areas or semantic fields) because they can have unintentionally ludicrous effects. For precisely this reason, corny jokes often exploit mixed metaphor. However, Abrams (1993) claims that mixed metaphor can have interesting effects in literature (he refers to the ’To be or not to be’ speech from Hamlet, III, i, 56-9). Mixed metaphor also has powerful effects in the opening lines of the following sonnet, ’To the Pupils of the Hindu College’, by Henry L. Derozio (1809-31):

Expanding like the petals of young flowers

I watch the gentle opening of your minds,

And the sweet loosening of the spell that binds

Your intellectual energies and powers

That stretch (like young birds in soft summer hours)

Their wings to try their strength.

Here, the effect of education on the pupils’ minds is figured as an expanding of flower petals, as an opening (a dead metaphor), as the release from a spell, and as the stretching of fledglings’ wings in order to get ready for first flight. Yet this is not such an incongruent mixing of metaphors as that in Hamlet’s speech. While these metaphors figure the pupils’ minds as flowers, as a box or room to be opened, as someone under a spell, and as young birds, all these metaphors have a ’common ground’ that could be labelled as growth, release, flight or escape.

10.2.8 Vital metaphors and dead metaphors

New metaphors are constantly being developed whenever a new area of experience or thought needs new descriptive terms. Gradually, however, metaphors become over-familiar and cease to be recognized as metaphors at all. When this happens, they lose their power to confront us with their effects as metaphors. Everyday language is full of such terms. A speaker of English would not normally be conscious of producing two (very different) metaphors in claiming that ’things are looking up for the team since the landslide victory last week’. Yet both ’things are looking up’ and ’landslide’ have to be understood as metaphors since they cannot be taken literally in the context. Words and phrases that are metaphorical, but cease to be regarded as metaphors, are called dead metaphors (notice, incidentally, that the phrase ’dead metaphor’ is itself a dead metaphor).

Dead metaphors tend to reproduce commonplace thoughts and do not require much imagination to be understood. By contrast, vitally new metaphors force us out of established ways of thinking. As Wallace Stevens puts it, ’Reality is a cliche from which we escape by metaphor’. An original metaphor that draws attention to itself as a metaphor can make demands on our powers of creative interpretation. Each time such challenging metaphors are produced, the way language maps the world is altered. Domains that the language usually keeps separate are momentarily fused, and new meanings are brought into existence.