What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.82
This remarkable paragraph is often assumed by hasty readers—especially those who associate it with deconstruction and thus, by a series of leaps, with nihilism—to be a rejection of the idea of truth rather than a genealogy of truth’s maturity. In fact, we could read the passage as “the biography of truth.” One of its lineal relations is Francis Bacon’s “Truth is the daughter of time, not authority.” Nietzsche’s essay doesn’t say that there is no such thing as truth, but that what is true may change over time, depending upon the intellectual and cultural framework. “Truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are.” Human beings, Nietzsche claims, “lie unconsciously” in this way, and “precisely because of this unconsciousness, precisely because of this forgetting, they arrive at the feeling of truth.”83
Enough About Me
The art of biography, for all the reasons we’ve noted, seems to be at an interesting crossroads. We have entered a time when books about the lives of writers sometimes elect to take the form of memoirs, describing the author’s experience of reading. Consider two striking cases in point, both about Marcel Proust (and both published in 1997): Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel, and Phyllis Rose, The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time. Rose is a biographer by profession, the author of well-received books on Victorian marriages and on the black jazz performer Josephine Baker. De Botton is a fiction writer and cultural critic. Like his book’s title, his chapter headings read, cleverly, like the titles of self-help books: “How to Suffer Successfully”; “How to Express Your Emotions”; “How to Be Happy in Love.” If not Proust Lite, or even Proust Without Tears, this is Proust Without the Eggheads. And, to a certain extent, Proust Without the Proust.
Like the famous Bette Midler line, “But enough about me. What do you think of me?,” these snapshots of readers watching themselves reading—or living—are engaging on first bounce. In a review of Rose’s memoir, Victor Brombert remarks that despite the presence of Proust’s name in the title, “he plays a minimal role” in the book, and observes that this decision may have discouraged readers not familiar with Proust’s work and frustrated those who were.84 (Brombert’s review begins by recalling André Malraux’s comment in Anti-Memoirs: “What do I care about what only I care about?”)
Michiko Kakutani described de Botton’s book as “quirky” but possessed of a “certain genial charm,” and she noted that its author had “hit upon a formula for talking about art and highbrow concerns in a deliberately lowbrow way.”85 De Botton went on to “expand upon that formula” with The Consolations of Philosophy, finding helpful hints in the works of philosophers like Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, and Socrates. The book begat a television program in England, where its author was metamorphosed into a philosophical advice-giving figure known as Dr. Love. This is presumably one of the uses of literature, after a fashion. How-to is definitely use; whether these adapted sound bites from Montaigne (or Proust) retain their tang as literature or have crossed over into the soothing realm of banality is another question.
Perhaps inevitably, Pierre Bayard’s book on how not to read a book (How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read)86 focuses, at the outset, on Proust, an author Bayard is proud not to have read, and who—as he hastens to tell us—Paul Valéry also hadn’t read and made much of not reading. Bayard gets lots of mileage in this short book by citing long passages from writers who discuss not reading. Whether he himself has read these books (or skimmed them, or heard of them, to use two of his book’s chosen designations) is unclear and, in the long (or short) run, unimportant. What does seem at least fleetingly important is that such a book can not only be published but gain a fandom of sorts. Its most praised section, on the anthropologist Laura Bohannan’s retelling of the plot of Hamlet to an African tribe, is a familiar story based upon a well-known essay, retold here as if there were no history of discussions of this famous incident.87 Bayard’s book is not a book about reading, and it is not a book about not reading, and it is not even a book about the social pretense (and pretension) of “having read.” It is a book about the theme of not reading as located in a few idiosyncratically chosen texts.
The back cover of How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read asks which of a group of great books the reader has ever talked about without reading: Moby-Dick, Ulysses, Heart of Darkness, Invisible Man, A Room of One’s Own, Being and Nothingness, In Cold Blood, The Scarlet Letter, The Man Without Qualities, Lolita, Jane Eyre, The Sun Also Rises. But of this list, Bayard discusses only one, Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. This slim volume is full of long block quotations, separated by passages of plot summary for those who haven’t read what Bayard hasn’t read, and occasional in-your-face bromides. If he weren’t French and telegenic, he would never have gotten away with it.
Taken together, de Botton’s book on Proust as a self-help manual and Bayard’s book about the theme of not reading may say something about the cachet of French cultural essayists in the American market, or about the defensive self-congratulation of American anti-intellectualism (here validated by a generation of French “intellectuals” who write in a style distinctly different from the “difficult” Derrida, Lacan, or Foucault) or about what it means to be “after the humanities” in the most negative sense. To the extent that the books discuss the use of literature, that use is turned, however wittily, into a social function rather than an intellectual or aesthetic one. As such, books like these are symptomatic. They are the “On Bullshit” of literary life.
A third book we might put on the shelf of books about repurposing the reading of great books is Stuart Kelly’s The Book of Lost Books, subtitled, in that explanatory way to which we have become accustomed in subtitles of late, An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You’ll Never Read.88 Kelly is not French, and his book even has an index, albeit a brief one. In a series of short chapters (typically three to five pages), he identifies, historicizes, and speculates about lost books by famous writers, from Anonymous and Homer to Sylvia Plath and Georges Perec. For some reason, the most recent authors are listed by their full formal names (Dylan Marlais Thomas, William Seward Burroughs, Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV), making them sound vaguely parodic. And not all of the lost works are equally persuasive; Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Won is a constant source of speculation, Lowell’s notional epic on the crusades less so. Basically, the book is literary gossip. It’s probably unfair to quote from the jacket flap—which the author almost surely didn’t write—but the cascade of adverbs and adjectives is indicative: “In compulsively readable fashion, Stuart Kelly reveals details about tantalizing vanished works by the famous, the acclaimed, and the influential, from the time of cave drawings to the late twentieth century. Here are the true stories behind stories, poems, and plays that now exist only in imagination.”
Why do I classify this book with How to Talk and the Proust books? Because all are para-literary, alluding to literature obliquely. None requires that the reader actually have a firsthand encounter with the great works on which they are propped. In the case of Kelly’s book, all the works are conveniently unavailable, objects of speculation rather than contemplation. For Bayard, reading is not only unnecessary but sometimes counterproductive; for de Botton, Proust becomes a sophisticated advice giver, a Dr. Marcel to rival television’s Dr. Phil. Decades after the culture wars worried about whether college students were being taught the right stuff, these books suggest that you can have a literary experience without having to bother to experience l
iterature, and that it’s stylish—even cool—to do so.
EIGHT
Mixed Metaphors
There was a time when Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, written by the first Regius Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Edinburgh and initially published in 1783, was the most popular and widely taught language text in Britain and the United States. Blair’s lectures, on topics like Taste, the Sublime in Writing, Metaphor, the History of Eloquence, the Nature of Poetry, Dramatic Poetry, and Versification, contained extended discussions of major works in English literature. The lectures were intended, Blair explained, for those who sought professional employment in composition and public speaking, and also for those who simply wanted to improve their taste so that they could judge works of literature for themselves. But Blair also suggested that his course of study could be of assistance in fashionable society:
In an age when works of genius and literature are so frequently the subjects of discourse, when every one erects himself into a judge, and when we can hardly mingle in polite society without bearing some share in such discussions; studies of this kind, it is not to be doubted, will appear to derive part of their importance from the use to which they may be applied in furnishing materials for those fashionable topics of discourse, and thereby enabling us to support a proper rank in social life.1
Reading “works of genius and literature” was to provide the aspiring socialite with “fashionable topics of discourse.” So one use to which literature could be put, for the polite society of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was the achievement, and maintenance, of a proper social place or rank. This was not Blair’s preferred application of his precepts and examples—he would have preferred something “of solid and intrinsical use, independent, of appearance and show”—but he readily acknowledged that the eighteenth-century equivalent of “walking to and fro, talking of Michelangelo” could have positive social and intellectual results.
It’s worth noting that eloquence in the current political climate is often as much distrusted as it is admired. As we’ve noted, in the 2008 presidential race, the word eloquent went from a term of praise to an epithet in a campaign minute, as rivals to Barack Obama—both in his own party and in the opposition—deployed it against the eventual winner. “I admire so much Senator Obama’s eloquence,” said his Republican opponent, John McCain, before turning to a perceived difference between words and actions. Twice in the same debate, McCain used “the eloquence of Senator Obama” as a preface to a put-down, a practice that had been earlier used by several conservative broadcasters and columnists, and even by Obama’s chief rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton. “It’s time to get real about how we actually win this election,” said Clinton at a campaign rally. “It’s time that we move from good words to good works, from sound bites to sound solutions.”2 This formulation, itself an eloquent model of tropes in action (anaphora, the beginning of consecutive sentences, clauses, or phrases with the same phrase or word; prosonomasia, a punning on words that resemble one another), is a typical and often successful debater’s move. In any case, we might wish to contrast such eloquent flights, even those that apparently speak ill of eloquence, with the full-blown collapse of syntax and figure, characteristic of such plain-spoken politicians as Sarah Palin and George W. Bush, that is taken to be unpretentious, honest, and authentic—the opposite of “sophistic,” “sophistical,” or sophisticated.3 Although these two politicians are Republicans, I should say at once that resistance to syntax or rhetorical style is an equal-opportunity failing (or success, depending upon your point of view).
The distrust of eloquence echoes the distrust of rhetoric expressed in classical times by those who excoriated the sophists, who were professional rhetoricians, because their eloquence was purchased for a price. We might compare this practice to that of a modern defense attorney or speechwriter or advertising copywriter, all of whom deploy language and rhetoric in the service of a professional task for which they are compensated. No one requires these professionals to believe in their products or their candidates or their client’s innocence, although sometimes the persuaders persuade themselves.
Today, however, discussion of the power of figurative language has moved away from literature and toward cognition theory and brain science. Cognitive psychologists and cognitive linguists seek to read through metaphor and other rhetorical figures to discover something about the functioning of the mind.
The Metaphor of Metaphor
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s book Metaphors We Live By (1980) focuses on metaphor’s “power to define reality.” In most cases, they argue, “what is at issue is not the truth or the falsity of a metaphor but the perceptions and inferences that follow from it.”4 Metaphor, according to Lakoff and Johnson, is an aspect of cognitive thinking, “pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action.”5 Metaphors We Live By offers examples like “Argument Is War,” “Time Is Money,” “Life Is a Journey,” and then, in a chapter called “Some Further Examples,” a list of concepts, each an umbrella topic under which actual metaphors could be grouped, such as “Theories Are Buildings” (sample metaphorical terms: foundation, buttress), “Ideas Are Food” (half-baked, fishy, can’t swallow), “Love Is Magic” (cast a spell, entranced, bewitching), and so on.6 Ideas, as Lakoff and Johnson would have it, can be not only food but also people, plants, products, commodities, money, cutting instruments, and fashions, while love can be magic, madness, war, a magnet, or a patient. In other words, language is figure. The notion that metaphor is not “just” language but also influences thought and action means that—as poets, linguists, philosophers, rhetoricians, and politicians have known for quite a while—what people say and how they say it affects, shapes, and directs understanding and response. But the phrase not just in language is indicative of a devaluation of the power and nature of words and rhetoric, and it contributes to the remanding of the literary to a secondary or tertiary role. This point is underscored in an afterword, where the supposed primacy of the conceptual is described under the heading “Persistent Fallacies”:
The single biggest obstacle to understanding our findings has been the refusal to recognize the conceptual nature of metaphor. The idea that metaphors are nothing but linguistic expressions—a mere matter of words—is such a common fallacy that it has kept many readers from even entertaining the idea that we think metaphorically.7
Notice the rhetoric of diminishment: “nothing but linguistic expressions”; “a mere matter of words.” Could we call this, following Lakoff and Johnson, the metaphor of “Language Is Negligible”?
“Life is a journey” and “time is money” are cultural clichés of the kind that we associate with the greeting-card industry. Actually most of the metaphors mentioned above or listed in Metaphors to Live By are often (and erroneously) called dead metaphors, which is to say, metaphors whose originality of expression has eroded over time so that we no longer encounter them as figurative (for example, the horsepower of an engine, or the foot of a page). Do readers who encounter the phrase half-baked ideas think, consciously or subliminally, of cookie dough? In short, the concept of metaphor becomes a metaphor in Lakoff and Johnson’s work. “Happy Is Up” (to use another of their examples, the one they call “the major metaphor in our culture”)8 is not a metaphor; it is a concept.
In subsequent books, George Lakoff pushes his claim about metaphor to encompass, for example, the political differences between progressives (who, he claims, cleave to a Nurturant Parent Model) and conservatives (who prefer a Strict Father Model). The index to Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think includes two columns of metaphors, with keywords capitalized in what had by that time become the author’s trademark style. These include the Moral Accounting metaphor, the Moral Action as Financial Transaction metaphor, the Moral Boundaries metaphor, the Moral Essence metaphor, the Moral Growth metaphor, the Morality as Empathy metaphor, and many other capitalized metaphors o
f the same kind. Thus the section on Moral Health includes the propositions “Morality Is Health” and “Immorality Is Disease.” Without question, these are powerful paradigms, but they are even more powerful when the figure precedes the ground or, to use the standard phrase about metaphors, the vehicle precedes the tenor.
The “X is Y” formulation irresistibly suggests the George Orwell of both 1984 and Animal Farm but these literary and critical examples, together with the ironies and interpretive dangers they present, are few and far between. Orwell is, however, mentioned as the inventor of Big Brother, the “nightmare head of state” whose title illustrates the pervasiveness of “the Nation as Family metaphor.”9 In fact George Orwell is the only literary author mentioned in Moral Politics, a book that cites Christine Todd Whitman but not Walt Whitman, William Bennett but not Arnold Bennett, Katherine Harris but not Joel Chandler Harris, Sandra Day O’Connor but not Flannery O’Connor. Lakoff and another collaborator, Mark Turner, did, however, address the question of metaphors in literature in a book called More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. With advanced degrees in both mathematics and English literature, Turner was well placed to participate in ongoing conversations about such cognitive topics as “conceptual blending,” “conceptual integration,” and “the mind as an autocatalytic vortex.” He would later write several influential books that combined literary study and neuroscience. What is especially notable may be that his own career has migrated from English studies to cognitive science, where his professorial appointment is located.
The Use and Abuse of Literature Page 27