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

10.3 Reading metaphor in literature
Unit 10 Metaphor and figurative language
Section 3 Attributing meaning

It is sometimes suggested that literature can be distinguished from non-literary discourse because literature uses language metaphorically, while non-literary discourse uses it literally. Yet this is clearly not the case, since all kinds of non- literary discourses (as we have seen) use figurative language. A more useful metaphor for thinking about how metaphor is used in different kinds of language is to imagine a spectrum of language types, ranging from discourses that consist mostly of literal usages and dead metaphors through to discourses that are highly conscious and highly innovative in their use of metaphor. Literature is generally at the highly conscious and highly innovative end of this spectrum, but we should be wary of thinking that only the vivid and strikingly new metaphors count in literature. Such metaphors are often important and require imaginative inferencing responses from the reader. Nonetheless, not all literary texts are necessarily trying to break new ground in their use of figurative language, or at least not all the time. Sometimes, indeed, it is the quieter, almost imperceptible metaphors - those we might easily fail to notice - that do a lot of important work in a literary text. To become good readers of literature, we need to be alert to the subtle metaphors as well as to those that shout in our face.

One of the effects of becoming alert to metaphor is that it suddenly seems as if metaphor is everywhere. However, while it is true that metaphor is everywhere, there is a danger that inexperienced readers will start seeing metaphors where there are none. To avoid this, a good rule of thumb (to use a metaphor) is to say ’if it can be read literally, then take it as literal - only read something as a metaphor if it can’t be taken literally’. While this is a good general rule, however, it is not failsafe. Sometimes a text may make use of the ambiguity that can arise when something can equally be taken as literal or as metaphorical. The power of the lyrics at the end of U2’s ’Bullet the Blue Sky’ (The Joshua Tree, 1987) comes from the way they make it possible for the phrase ’the arms of America’ to be both literal (weapons) and metaphorical (human, embracing arms) at the same time. Sometimes it might be possible to read something literally, but there are subtle hints elsewhere in the text that it needs to be read metaphorically. In other words, reading for metaphor sometimes has to take the whole text - or at least the immediately surrounding text - into context.