The Use and Abuse of Literature

by Marjorie Garber

  In the preface to his book The Literary Mind Turner makes a set of claims about the centrality of literary thinking that might be considered compatible with the argument I’m making here. He sets out three “principles of mind,” which he calls story, projection, and parable, and makes a case for considering them fundamental to all thinking, not just the specialized processes and practices that are often called literary.

  Story is a basic principle of mind. Most of our experience, our knowledge, and our thinking is organized as stories. The mental scope of story is magnified by projection—one story helps us make sense of another. The projection of one story onto another is parable, a basic cognitive principle …

  “In this book,” he continues, “I explore technical details of the brain sciences and the mind sciences that cast light on our use of parable … I explore the possibility that language is not the source of parable but instead its complex product.”

  In itself, this is not a surprising idea. Narratologists from Vladimir Propp to Tzvetan Todorov to Gerard Genette have made claims for the role of story and fable. As early as the 1920s, Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale distinguished between fabula (the content of the story) and sujet (the form that the telling of the tale imposes on that content).10 In the late sixties, when ideas about the scientific (or social scientific) basis of literature provided an impetus for literary theorists, some of this work became important in the anthropological and critical practice known as structuralism. Man as the fiction-making animal was a favorite trope of the mid-twentieth century, in disciplines from literary studies to anthropology. Thus, for example, an innovative course, “Man and His Fictions”—otherwise known as Literature X—was the starting point of the new literature major at Yale in the 1970s. Subsequently, the diverse set of literary critical practices generally described under the rubric of post-structuralism challenged the belief in a stable set of significations, or meanings, across cultures, and in the concept of the universal category of “man.”

  These are just the kinds of claims that are again being made under the rubric of brain science and cognition rather than the human sciences or social sciences. The wheel has come full circle. Cognitive science’s holistic assertions about the brain and basic principles of mind, as appealing as they may be, make the literary mind a repository of narrative fictions, without acknowledging that words and rhetorical forms are themselves unstable, producing alternative and often antithetical narratives of their own. It’s precisely the tendency to think in stories or parables that often leads to underreading, by presuming that the outcome is already shaped by the narrative form—that “one story helps us make sense of another.” (Not to mention the diversity of interpretation that may attend upon such stories and parables, as any rigorous study of biblical scholarship will attest.) Linking one cultural metaphor to another, rather than paying close attention to individual words, tropes, figures of speech, and rhetorical inflections, makes literature into a kind of master code or anthology of expectable moves. Turner’s assertion in the preface, that “the literary mind is the fundamental mind,” may seem like a compliment to literature, rescuing it from what he describes as “the common view—firmly in place for two and a half millennia—[that] sees the everyday mind as unliterary and the literary mind as optional.” But in fact this sweeping claim sweeps the literary away.

  Translating Metaphor

  Let’s return for a moment to the idea of metaphor, a word that means carrying across, or transporting. As several theorists and philosophers note, this is the same etymological meaning as translation, also a carrying (trans) across. The conveyances that in American English are called moving vans (and in British English, removal trucks) are in modern Greece marked with the word metaphora, indicating their function—much to the delight of observers from the philosopher Paul Ricoeur to the biologist Stephen Jay Gould.11 It was the critic I. A. Richards (in his Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1936) who invented the terms vehicle and tenor for the two parts of a metaphor, the “literal subject” and the figurative connection. I enclose the word “literal” in quotation marks here, at the risk of irritating the reader, because it is the argument of many literary theorists that all language is figurative. Perhaps it would be better to call this the referent, although that term, too, has become critically loaded. In a phrase like My love is like a red, red rose, or (to use a less poetic figure) life is a bitch, the vehicles are love and life, and the tenors (holding the referents) rose and bitch.

  “Metaphor is the transference of a term from one thing to another,” as Aristotle explained in the Poetics, “whether from genus to species, species to genus, species to species, or by analogy.”12 And he expands on this concept in Rhetoric:

  Metaphors, like epithets, must be fitting, which means that they must fairly correspond to the thing signified: failing this, their inappropriateness will be conspicuous: the want of harmony between two things is emphasized by their being placed side by side … And if you wish to pay a compliment, you must take your metaphor from something better in the same line; if to disparage, something worse. To illustrate my meaning: … somebody calls actors hangers-on of Dionysus, but they call themselves artists: each of these terms is a metaphor, the one intended to throw dirt at the actor, the other to dignify him. And pirates now call themselves purveyors. We can thus call a crime a mistake, or a mistake a crime.13

  “Metaphor is the dreamwork of language,” wrote the philosopher Donald Davidson, “and, like all dreamwork, its interpretation reflects as much on the interpreter as on the originator. The interpretation of dreams requires collaboration between a dreamer and a waker, even if they be the same person; and the act of interpretation is itself a work of the imagination. So too understanding a metaphor is as much a creative endeavour as making a metaphor, and as little guided by rules.”14

  As Aristotle suggested, we can “call a crime a mistake, or a mistake a crime.” Understanding a metaphor is as much a creative endeavor as making one, and neither is guided by rules. This is a different notion of metaphor from the conceptual belief that seems to imply a common cultural unconscious. It implies that metaphors are made rather than found, and that they are not only modes of translation and transference, but also of transgression: they step across boundaries (“from genus to species, from species to genus”); they can be complimentary or disparaging; they do not articulate or obey rules, except perhaps the rule of compulsory disobedience. Metaphors are a kind of intentional or motivated solecism: a mistake or a crime elevated to a position of rhetorical power.

  When the literary critic Paul de Man approached the question of metaphor’s constitutive transgressiveness via the route of epistemology, he did so with characteristic rigor, beginning with his opening salvo: “Metaphors, tropes, and figural language in general have been a perennial problem and, at times, a recognized source of embarrassment for philosophical discourse and, by extension, for all discursive uses of language including historiography and literary analysis.” Try as one might, it is impossible to free oneself from figural language. Moreover, “we have no way of defining, of policing, the boundaries that separate the name of one entity from another: tropes are not just travelers, they tend to be smugglers and probably smugglers of stolen goods at that. What makes matters even worse is that there is no way of finding out whether they do so with criminal intent or not.”15

  De Man is not talking about Aristotle but, rather, the “use and abuse of words” as this topic is discussed in John Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding.” Nonetheless, his language echoes some of the key terms we have just noted in Aristotle’s Rhetoric: pirates as purveyors, crime as mistake and mistake as crime. And the use and abuse phrase will recur several times, not merely as a grace note but as what can gradually be seen as the core of the problem, for Locke in particular but also for metaphor in general:

  Once the reflection on the figurality of language is started, there is no telling where it may lead. Yet there is no way not to raise the question i
f there is to be any understanding. The use and abuse of language cannot be separated from one another.16

  Moreover, as de Man goes on, “Abuse of language is, of course, itself the name of a trope: catachresis.” Locke had chastised those who made what he regarded as a category error, as well as an error in understanding. “He that thinks the name centaur stands for some real being, imposes on himself and mistakes words for things.’ ”17 But a word is a thing. All words are figures, and a horse or a man is no less a figure than a centaur. As de Man will argue “the condemnation, by Locke’s own argument, now takes all of language for its target, for at no point in the demonstration can the empirical entity be sheltered from tropological defiguration.” Catachresis (etymologically, misuse or perversion, a term “Englished” in George Puttenham’s sixteenth-century treatise as “the Figure of Abuse”) is not a violation of rhetoric, but itself resides within rhetoric.

  Catachresis became an important topic for certain literary theorists in the late twentieth century precisely because it provided a third way of looking at the idea of figure, one that challenged the binary of use and abuse. “On the one hand,” wrote Andrzej Warminski, “catachresis is clearly a transfer from one realm (often the human body) to another and thus is definitely a figurative use of language. To give a ‘face’ to a mountain or a ‘head’ to cabbage or lettuce is clearly a figure. On the other hand, since this figurative (ab)use does not take the place of an already existent, established literal use but rather replaces the lack of the literal, the lack of the proper expression, it is not just figurative; it can often become the proper, the only way to say the x of a mountain. But it would be a mistake to call it ‘literal.’ ”18 The classical example here is the “leg” of a table, where “leg” is a figure of speech, but does not replace or substitute for any other word.

  This “uncanny doubleness” of catachresis, putting in question “the relation between literal and figurative, proper and transferred,” suggests that it may be a “conceptual” mistake to think of metaphors as concepts prior to their occurrence in language. “The leg of a table” is not a concept but a poem naturalized into ordinary language.

  Affecting Metaphysics

  I will return briefly at the end of this chapter to the “mixed mode” figures (like the centaurs to which John Locke took such exception), since they appear importantly, and indeed as instructive “figures of abuse,” in one of Shakespeare’s best-loved plays. But rather than pursue this question in Locke or in philosophy, I’d like to bring it home to literature, and to metaphors and figures in poetry, by citing one of the most famous critical attacks on figures of speech (especially metaphors and/or catachreses) in the annals of English criticism, Dr. Samuel Johnson’s critique of those writers who—because of the attack—would come to be known in the history of English studies as “the metaphysical poets.” Here is Johnson’s opinion of the style of this school, poets like Abraham Cowley, John Cleveland, and John Donne.

  The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

  And:

  Their attempts were always analytic; they broke every image into fragments; and could no more represent, by their slender conceits and laboured particularities, the prospects of nature, or the scenes of life, than he who dissects a sunbeam with a prism can exhibit the wide effulgence of a summer noon.19

  The term metaphysical, which refers to the branch of philosophy concerned with questions of being and knowing, was suggested in John Dryden’s complaint about Donne, “He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love.”20 Whether the comparisons favored by Donne from the new science are really metaphysical, or in fact intensely material and physical (lovers as “stiff twin compasses,” tears compared to a globe full of continents, specific and arcane medical knowledge), it is clear that they irritated Dr. Johnson and offended his belief that “great thoughts are always general.”21 “Who but Donne would have thought that a good man is a telescope?” he asks, citing these lines:

  Though God be our true glass through which we see

  All, since the being of all things is he,

  Yet are the trunks, which do to us derive

  Things in proportion fit, by perspective

  Deeds of good men; for by their living here,

  Virtues, indeed remote, seem to be near.

  Likewise, he declares that “their fictions were often violent and unnatural,” giving as his example a passage from Abraham Cowley’s “Bathing in the River”:

  The fish around her crowded, as they do

  To the false light that treacherous fishes show,

  And all with as much ease might taken be,

  As she at first took me:

  For ne’er did light so clear

  Among the waves appear

  Though every night the sun himself set there.22

  Whether or not the reader concurs with Dr. Johnson about the effect and value of these passages, I think it is probable that it would not do them—or Johnson—justice to describe them as conceptual metaphors in the cognitive style: the “Man Is a Telescope” metaphor, or the “Beloved Is a Bioluminescent Fish” metaphor. Johnson’s criticisms were not unmixed with praise, as in this judicious, if slightly grudging sentiment: “Yet great labour, directed by great abilities, is never wholly lost: if they frequently threw away their wit upon false conceits, they likewise sometimes struck out unexpected truth; if their conceits were far-fetched, they were often worth the carriage. To write on their plan, it was at least necessary to read and think.”23

  T. S. Eliot endorsed this view, with equal eloquence and considerably more enthusiasm in his essay on “The Metaphysical Poets.” Seeking to distinguish between “the intellectual poet” of the seventeenth century and “the reflective poet” of the nineteenth, Eliot had recourse to some cognitive metaphors of his own. Here is his famous account of the difference between Donne and a Victorian writer like Tennyson or Browning:

  Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.24

  Of the poets called metaphysical, he writes, in a sentence from the same essay that seems half-consciously to echo Johnson on the necessity to read and think, “they were, at best, engaged in the task of trying to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling.”25 He draws some comparisons between French poetry and poetry in English, and returns to the physical body and the senses:

  Those who object to the “artificiality” of Milton or Dryden sometimes tell us to “look into our hearts and write.” But that is not looking deep enough; Racine or Donne looked into a good deal more than the heart. One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts.26

  Is T. S. Eliot, then, a cognitive theorist avant la lettre? Does his invocation of the cerebral cortex and the nervous system suggest that he finds in Donne’s work some hardwired connections or some metaphors to live by? I think his argument points in the reverse direction, toward the mind of the poet, not the poetry of the mind. Here is a passage from the essay in which he tries to explain how these poets use rhetorical figures in their work:

  Donne
, and often Cowley, employ a device which is sometimes considered characteristically “metaphysical”; the elaboration (contrasted with condensation) of a figure of speech to the farthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it. Thus Cowley develops the commonplace comparison of the world to a chess-board through long stanzas (To Destiny), and Donne, with more grace, in A Valediction [Forbidding Mourning], the comparison of two lovers to a pair of compasses. But elsewhere we find, instead of the mere explication of the content of a comparison, a development by rapid association of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader.

  On a round ball

  A workman that hath copies by, can lay

  An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia,

  And quickly make that, which was nothing, All,

  So doth each teare,

  Which thee doth weare,

  A globe, yea, world by that impression grow,

  Till thy tears mixt with mine doe overflow

  This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so.

  Here we find at least two connexions which are not implicit in the first figure, but are forced upon it by the poet; from the geographer’s glove to the tear, and the tear to the deluge. On the other hand, some of Donne’s most successful and characteristic effects are secured by brief words and sudden contrasts:

  A bracelet of bright hair about the bone.

  where the most powerful effect is produced by the sudden contrast of associations of “bright hair” and of “bone.” This telescoping of images and multiplied associations is characteristic of the phrase of the dramatists of the period which Donne knew; not to mention Shakespeare, it is frequent in Middleton, Webster, and Tourneur, and is one of the sources of the vitality of their language.27

  Eliot’s interest is certainly in cognition, but it is the cognition of the poet and the reader. Notice his attention to a “development by rapid association of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader.” In this analysis, the reader does not exhibit the necessary agility because he or she has assimilated a conceptual metaphor like “Tears Are Globes” (or perhaps “The World Is Made of Tears”—needless to say both of these “concepts” are my fabrications, unauthorized and unsanctioned). Moreover, while “a bracelet of bright hair about the bone” could connect to any one of the thirteen metaphors about death listed in Lakoff and Turner’s field guide to poetic metaphor (“Death Is a Devourer,” “Death Is an Adversary,” “Death Is a Reaper,” “Death Is Darkness,” etc.), its power lies precisely in eluding any such familiar conceptual categorization. It is not banal. It shocks with its unexpectedness, its precision, its physicality, its mise-en-scène, its alliterative B’s that lead inexorably from bracelet to bone, its single adjective (bright) that seems at first to offer relief from the starkness of image and syntax but actually makes the verbal bridge between bracelet and bone. Historical research and cultural context—of a kind that is notable by its absence in Lakoff and Turner—would remind the reader that keepsakes made of woven or braided hair were common love tokens, so this macabre image is also, disturbingly, commonplace. Which is not to say that it is remotely ordinary.