Metaphor and Memory

by Cynthia Ozick

  *Latter-day scholarship avers that Elimelech is a run-of-the-mill name in pre-Israelite Canaan, “and is the one name in the Ruth story that seems incapable of being explained as having a symbolic meaning pertinent to the narrative” (Edward F. Campbell, Jr., Ruth, The Anchor Bible, p. 52). The rabbis, however, are above all metaphor-seekers and symbolists.

  *The rabbis’ notion of Elimelech as a man of substance is no help to his widow. She has not been provided for; we see her as helpless and impoverished.

  *Boaz and Naomi talk like older people. Their speeches contain archaic morphology and syntax. Perhaps the most delightful indication of this is the one instance when an archaic form is put into Ruth’s mouth, at 2:21—where she is quoting Boaz! (Edward F. Campbell, Jr., Ruth, The Anchor Bible, p. 17)

  Metaphor and Memory

  Not long ago I was invited to read some tale of mine before an assembly of physicians. I was invited not because I knew anything about disease or medicine or physiology, but precisely because I knew nothing at all. And the doctors, on their side, were not much concerned with tales or their tellers, unless the writer were to come to them with an interesting complaint. But a writer standing there in dull good health, reading aloud from a page, with not so much as a toothache or a common cold or even a mild rash, with no visible malady other than word-besottedness, could hardly serve. To the lives of doctors, given over as they are to the hard sad heavy push against mortality—what salve or balm or use might a word-besotted scribbler be? For a writer to turn up among doctors without a rash was rash indeed.

  These doctors, however, had a visionary captain, or viceroy, or prince, who had read his Emerson. Emerson in “The American Scholar” noted what he called the “amputation” of society, each trade and profession “ridden by the routine of. . . . craft”: “The priest becomes a form; the attorney a statute-book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope of the ship.” And the doctor a CAT scan.

  In response, the captain of the doctors formulates an Emersonian idea: an idea of interpenetration: of cutting through the dividing membrane: of peopling one cell with two temperaments. He will set the writer down among the doctors, the fabulist among the healers. The purpose of the experiment will be to increase the doctors’ capacity to imagine. The doctors, explains their captain, too often do not presume a connection of vulnerability between the catastrophe that besets the patient and the susceptibility of the doctors’ own flesh: the doctors do not conceive of themselves as equally mortal, equally open to fortune’s disasters. The writer, an imaginer by trade, will suggest a course of connecting, of entering into the tremulous spirit of the helpless, the fearful, the apart. In short, the writer will demonstrate the contagion of passion and compassion that is known in medicine as “empathy,” and in art as insight.

  This, then, is the plan. The writer, though ignorant of every scientific punctilio, will command the leap into the Other.* That is how tales are made.

  Yet the writer is cautious, even frightened. Here among the doctors, the redemptive ardor of literature begins to take on a vanity. How frivolous it seems, how trivial—vanity of vanities! The doctors are absorbed by blood and bone; each one, alone in his judgment, walks the fragile bridge between the salvation into life and the morbid slide toward death. The writer is as innocent as a privileged child before all this, a sybarite of libraries, a voluptuary of print. The doctors, by contrast, are soaked in the disinfectant fetor of hospitals, where the broken and the moribund swarm in their cold white beds. What gall, to suppose that a dreamer of tales can bring news of the human predicament to the doctors on their dread rounds!

  All the same, I had my obligation; I had been summoned to tell the doctors a story, to speak out of the enlarging lung of chronicle. And so, not suspecting what would come of it, I began to read out a narrative about a sexually active faraway planet where the birth of children is no longer welcome, and finally, for prurient technological reasons, no longer possible. The most refined intellectuals on that planet are those least willing to bear children—not only because children interfere with the tidiness of any planet, but also because the intellectuals have discovered that children interrupt: they interrupt careers, journeys, vacations, appointments, games, erotic attachments, telephone calls, self-development, education, meditation, and other enlightened, useful, and joyous pursuits. A number of children manage to get born in any case, illicitly and improbably, and I wish I could tell you how these children turned out, and what happened to that sophisticated though unlucky planet afterward; my intent, however, is not to disclose the destiny of the children, but rather the behavior of the doctors. Perhaps it is enough to mention that in my story everything ended in barbarism and savagery.

  Now you can hear even from this truncated, raw, bare-bones, tablet-sized account that the story I had chosen to present to the doctors was part parable, part satire, outfitted in drollery and ribaldry, in deepest imitative tertiary debt to the history of literary forms—Kafka, Swift, Chaucer; drenched, above all, in metaphor. The tale of a lascivious planet too earnestly self-important to tolerate children could only have been directed against artifice and malice, sophistry and self-indulgence; it could only have pressed for fruitfulness and health, sanity and generosity, bloom and—especially—continuity. My story, I thought, was a contrivance that declared itself on the side of life; and therefore, presumably, on the side of the doctors themselves. In the lovely lists of parable, how light the lance, how economical, how sudden! To be able to unfold artifice and malice and self-indulgence, fruitfulness, health, sanity, generosity, bloom, continuity—and never once the need to drag these blatant carcasses of heavy nouns across the greensward! The power and charm of fable are in the force of its automatic metaphorical engine, and in bringing metaphor to the doctors, surely I was obeying their captain, and opening the inmost valve of the imagining heart?

  But among the doctors something was rumbling just then—a stirring, a murmuring, an angry collective hiss. The doctors, their captain included, were not simply discontent; they were all at once ranked before me as a white-coated captious tribe, excited, resentful, bewildered, belligerent. They accused me of obscurantism, of having mean-spiritedly resolved to perplex. They wanted—they demanded—the principles of ordinary telling. They wanted—this is what they wanted—plain speech. They were appalled by metaphor (the shock of metaphor), by fable, image, echo, irony, satire, obliqueness, double meaning, the call to interpret, the call to penetrate, the call to comment and diagnose. They were stung by what they instantly named “ambiguity.” They protested, they repudiated, the writer’s instruments and devices as arcane, specialist, oracular, technical. Before the use of the metaphor they felt themselves stripped and defenseless: they complained that the examining tables had been turned on them; that their reasoning authority had fallen away; that they stood before the parable as a naked laity; that I had sickened them.

  And so I had. I had sickened the doctors—or at least the intrusion of metaphorical thinking had.

  Now the argument may be urged that physicians are themselves abundantly given to metaphorical speech and thought; that they live every hour under the raucous wing of the Angel of Death and Crippling, whose devastating imagery they cannot deny, and whose symbols they read cell by cell, X-ray by X-ray; that ambiguity and interpretation are ineluctably in the grain of their tasks; that all medical literature, however hidden in obscure vocabularies in abstruse journals, is, case after case, a literature of redemption through parable: new cases remember past cases. And, finally, that no cast of mind is more surrendered to the figurative than the namers of organs: the color-bearing circular diaphragm of the eye, that flower of the mind’s eye called iris after the rainbow goddess; the palisades cells and the goblet cells; the pancreatic islets of Langerhans, the imagination’s archipelago.

  But dismiss all this. Say that the doctors have rejected metaphor as not of their realm—as inimical to their gravity. They do it because they have one certainty: they know that, whatever else
they may be, they are serious men and women. They may be too frail, as their captain proposed, to enter into psychological twinship with the even frailer souls of the sick; but the struggle to heal, the will to repair the shattered, the will to redeem and make whole—this is what we mean when we speak of lives lived under the conscientious pressure of our moral nature. And metaphor, what is metaphor? Frivolity. Triviality. Lightness of mind. Irrational immateriality. Baubles. To talk in metaphor to serious men and women, indeed to talk of metaphor to serious men and women, is to disengage oneself from the great necessary bond of community: it is to disengage oneself from the capacity to put humanity before pleasure, clear judgment before sensation, useful acts before the allure of words. It is to cut oneself off from the heat of human pity—and all for the sake of a figure of speech.

  If the doctors think this way—if a great many other serious men and women think this way—it may be, first, because they associate metaphor with writers and artists of every sort, and, second, because they associate writers and artists with what we always call “inspiration.” It isn’t only that doctors like to keep away from inspiration on grounds of science and empiricism and predictability. Nor is it, for serious people, mainly a matter of valuing stability over spontaneity, or responsibility over elation. Something there is in inspiration that hints of wildness—a wildness even beyond the quick unearned streak of “knowing” that brings resolution without warning. Serious people are used to feeling an at-homeness in their minds. Inspiration is an intruder, a kidnapper of reason, a burglar who shoots the watchdogs dead. Inspiration chases off sentries and censors and monitors. Inspiration instigates reckless cliff-walking; it sweeps its quarry to the edge of unfamiliar abysses. Inspiration is the secret sharer who flies out of pandemonium.

  All these characteristics do suggest that inspiration is allied to the stuff of metaphor. Isn’t metaphor the poetry-making faculty itself? And where does the poetry-making faculty derive from, if not from inspiration? It is in fact a truism to equate poetry and inspiration, metaphor and inspiration. Though truisms are sometimes at least partly true, my purpose is to tell something else about metaphor. I mean to persuade the doctors that metaphor belongs less to inspiration than it does to memory and pity. I want to argue that metaphor is one of the chief agents of our moral nature, and that the more serious we are in life, the less we can do without it.

  Begin, then, with the history of inspiration. Inspiration is one of those ideas that can, without objection, claim a clear history; but never the history of poetry. Its genesis is in natural religion, or, rather, in the religion of nature. To come to Emerson again: in an essay rather unsuitably called “History”—it might more accurately have been named “Anti-History,” since it annihilates the distinction between Then and Now—Emerson recounts a picturesque conversation with “a lady with whom I was riding in a forest [who] said to me that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if the genii who inhabit them suspended their deeds until the wayfarer had passed onward; a thought which poetry has celebrated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on the approach of human feet.” Now that is a very pretty story, but only because in Emerson’s day the woods around Concord were safe, and the civilization of genii and fairies long finished. Inspiration may end in daydream or fancy, but it sets out in terror. For us Pan is all poetry, a charming faun with a flute; among the Greeks he caused panic. Fairies and all the other spirits of natural religion were once malevolent powers profoundly feared. Devout Athenians on the third day of the important Anthesterion festival took the ceremony of frightening away the spirits as a somber religious duty. Emerson, reading history as benign nature, reads natural religion as a sublime illumination—“The idiot, the Indian, the child and the unschooled farmer’s boy,” he announces, “stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary”— whereas for its historical adherents, its flesh-and-blood congregants, the religion of nature was mainly panic, dread, and desperate appeasement of the uncanny. Poetry, including Emersonian poetizing, seeps in only after two millennia have exhausted and silenced the fairies; only after the great god Pan is indisputably, unexaggeratedly, dead. In natural religion there are no metaphors; the genii are there; the poetry is not yet born.

  The genii are there, potent and ubiquitous. They are in the birds and in the beasts, in the brooks, in the muttering oaks—the majestic Zeus himself got his start as a god who spoke out of the oak tree. Divinity lives even in a notched stick. In natural religion, there is nothing that is not an organ of omen, divination, enthusiasm. But when we reflect on this “enthusiasm”—a Greek locution, en theos, the god within—there is one instance of it so celebrated that it comes to mind before all others. The syllables themselves have turned into the full sweetness of poetry: the Oracle at Delphi; the sound of it is as beautiful as “nightingale.” The cult of the Eleusinian Mysteries remains a secret, a speculation, to this day; we know only that there was immersion in a river, that sacred cakes were eaten, a sacred potion drunk, and the birth of a holy infant proclaimed. The exalting ritual performed by the initiates, shrouded all through antiquity, had no public scribe or record-keeper. The events at Eleusis continue inscrutable. But about what went on at the shrine of Apollo at Delphi almost everything has been disclosed. We can still follow its process, and there is nothing metaphoric in any of it.

  Apollo was a latecomer to Delphi. Earthquake-prone, the place had once belonged to Gaea, the earth-goddess, and the shrine was built over a gorge, or pit; a sort of saucer in the ground, within sight of the mountains of Parnassus. Excavations have uncovered no crack or opening of any kind in the floor of the saucer, but a certain gas was said to issue from a hole in the earth: the narcotic stench of decomposition—below lay the carcass of the terrible python Apollo slew. An underground stream flowed there, prophetic waters called Kassotis; these too had narcotic properties. The agent of divination—the enthusiast, the sibyl possessed by the god—was at first, apparently, a young virgin. Then the rules were changed, no one seems to know why, and now the votary had to be a respectable, often married, woman of at least fifty—she was, however, required to dress up as a maiden. This was the Pythoness, or Pythia, Apollo’s oracle, the incarnation of everything we mean, in our own civilization and language, by inspiration.

  Her method was to induce frenzy. She chewed the leaves of a narcotic plant, drank from the narcotic spring, breathed in the narcotic vapor. A number of attending priests, called the Holy Ones, members of important local families, waited until she seemed on the brink of seizure, and then led her to a tripod, the seat of the god’s speaking. These notables already had in hand the question the god was to treat. The answer came, in the moment of possession, from the mouth of the sibyl either as howls or as murmurs— cascades of gibberish flooded the shrine. Here is how the Swedish novelist Par Lagerkvist imagines the moment of possession:

  It was he! He! It was he who filled me, I felt it, I knew it! He was rilling me, he was annihilating me and filling me utterly with himself, with his happiness, his joy, his rapture. Ah, it was wonderful to feel his spirit, his inspiration coming upon me—to be his, his alone, to be possessed by god. . . .

  But the feeling mounted and mounted; it was still full of delight and joy but it was too violent, too overpowering, it broke all bounds—it broke me, hurt me, it was immeasurable, demented—and I felt my body beginning to writhe, to writhe in agony and torment; being tossed to and fro and strangled, as if I were to be suffocated. But I was not suffocated, and instead I began to hiss forth dreadful, anguished sounds, utterly strange to me, and my lips moved without my will; it was not I who was doing this. And I heard shrieks, loud shrieks; I didn’t understand them, they were quite unintelligible, yet it was I who uttered them. They issued from my gaping mouth, though they were not mine. It was not myself at all, I was no longer I, I was his, his alone; it was terrible, terrible and nothing else!

  How long it went on I don’t know. I had no sense of time while it
was happening. Nor do I know how I afterwards got out of the holy of holies or what happened next; who helped me and took care of me. I awoke in the house next to the temple where I lived during this time, and they said I had lain in a deep sleep of utter exhaustion. And they told me that the priests were much pleased with me.

  That, of course, is the drama of fiction. The priestly role was more intellectual, and certainly political, and lends itself less to theatrical reconstruction. When the Pythia’s vatic fit was over, the priests had to take up the task of interpretation. It is conceivable that their interpretations were composed in advance, since the questioner’s predicament had been submitted in advance, and often in writing. Being both human and bureaucratic, the priests now and then accepted a bribe in exchange for a politically favorable interpretation. Still, they were without doubt men of no small gifts; they were in fact devoted to their ingenious versifying, and would sometimes set their interpretations in the meter of Homer or Hesiod, or else in succinctly ambiguous prose that, no matter what the future brought, was always on the mark. The replies of the oracle were famously broad, ranging from family-court matters to statecraft. The priests, like most priests everywhere, were conservative: when much of Greece seemed ready to give up the practice of human sacrifice, the Delphic Oracle had nothing to say against it, and the priests continued to approve it.* There were some liberal decisions nonetheless: the occasional manumission of slaves, for instance. Delphi, the fount of inspiration, was in essence the seat of pragmatism. Santayana, recalling that Plato too identifies madness with inspiration, and acknowledging that the “aboriginal madness” of the oracle could produce “faith, humility, courage, conformity,” yet marvels that “the most intelligent and temperate of nations submitted, in the most crucial matters, to the inspiration of idiots.”