Metaphor in literature

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Metaphor in literature
Peter Stockwell
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Whispering lunar incantations Dissolve the floors
of memory (T.S. Eliot)
The sky was the colour of television, tuned to a
dead channel (William Gibson)
No man is an island (John Donne)
Juliet is the sun (William Shakespeare)
I sing the body electric (Walt Whitman)
Animal Farm (George Orwell)
Nymphomation (Jeff Noon)
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Some older views of metaphor
Metaphor is giving the thing a name that belongs
to something else All such arts are fanciful
and meant to charm the hearer. Nobody uses fine
language when teaching geometry Aristotle,
Rhetoric III. 1404a
Metaphor possesses an untranslateableness in
words of the same language without injury to the
meaning The poet diffuses a tone and spirit of
unity, that belnds, and (as it were) fuses, each
into each, by that synthetic and magical power,
to which we have exclusively appropriated the
name of imagination. This power reveals
itself in the balance or reconciliation of
opposite or discordant qualities of sameness,
with difference of the general, with the
concrete the idea, with the image the
individual, with the representative the sense of
novelty and freshness, with old and familiar
objects Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, p.524
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An early linguistic model of metaphor (based on
selectional restrictions)
The man is a shark
animate animate mammal - mammal male
/ - male human - human definite -
definite language ability - language
ability aggressive vicious
cunning carnivorous gills marine
habitat
Consider Hes not a shark No man is an
island He strode in a swarm of fireflies
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IT WAS A PLEASURE TO BURN It was a special
pleasure to see things eaten, to see things
blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in
his fists, with this great python spitting its
venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood
pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands
of some amazing conductor playing all the
symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down
the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With
his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid
head, and his eyes all orange flame with the
thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter
and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that
burned the evening sky red and yellow and black.
He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted
above all, like the old joke, to shove a
marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the
flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch
and lawn of the house. While the books went up in
sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned
dark with burning. Montag grinned the fierce
grin of all men singed and driven back by
flame. He knew that when he returned to the
firehouse, he might wink at himself, a minstrel
man, burnt-corked, in the mirror. Later, going to
sleep, he would feel the fiery smile still
gripped by his face muscles, in the dark. It
never went away, that smile, it never ever went
away, as long as he remembered. Ray Bradbury,
Fahrenheit 451
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IT WAS A PLEASURE TO BURN It was a special
pleasure to see things eaten, to see things
blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in
his fists, with this great python spitting its
venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood
pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands
of some amazing conductor playing all the
symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down
the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With
his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid
head, and his eyes all orange flame with the
thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter
and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that
burned the evening sky red and yellow and black.
He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted
above all, like the old joke, to shove a
marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the
flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch
and lawn of the house. While the books went up in
sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned
dark with burning. Montag grinned the fierce
grin of all men singed and driven back by
flame. He knew that when he returned to the
firehouse, he might wink at himself, a minstrel
man, burnt-corked, in the mirror. Later, going to
sleep, he would feel the fiery smile still
gripped by his face muscles, in the dark. It
never went away, that smile, it never ever went
away, as long as he remembered. Ray Bradbury,
Fahrenheit 451
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Metaphor
Isomorphism
lexical blends, compounds, premodifiers (cyborg
, mere-stape, pigeon-winged books)
grammatical metaphor (the door dilated,
whispering lunar incantations dissolve the
floors of memory, Patience soon replied)
similes, comparisons, analogies (like a
virgin, dead as a doornail)
allegories, fables, fiction (The Fairy Queen,
Aesop, The Russia House)
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Isomorphism mapping between domains
source
target
source concrete, familiar, given
target abstract, unfamiliar, new
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Juliet is the sun target source
The sky was the colour of television target sour
ce
No man is an island target source
Even the men swimming below the surface turned
into gleaming chimeras (target), like exploding
pulses of ideation in a neuronic jungle
(source) J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World
source
target
source concrete, familiar, given
target abstract, unfamiliar, new
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LIFE IS A JOURNEY
I dont know where Im heading This was his
career path Faced with the decision, she didnt
know which way to turn Her future was clearly
mapped out Looking behind him, he had overcome
many obstacles Congratulations on your new
arrival He has passed away
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LIFE restructured as A JOURNEY
TIME IS A BOOK
? selection of mapped elements - interpretation
? selection of mapped elements - textuality
Well, we think that time passes, flows past
us but what if it is we who move forward, from
past to future, always discovering the new? It
would be a little like reading a book, you see.
The book is all there, all at once, between its
covers. But if you want to read the story and
understand it, you must begin with the first
page, and go forward, always in order. So the
universe would be a very great book, and we would
be very small readers. Ursula Le Guin, The
Dispossessed
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Most of the world's great cities have grown
haphazardly, little by little, in response to the
needs of the moment...The evolution of a city is
like the evolution of the brain it develops from
a small center and slowly grows and changes,
leaving many old parts still functioning... The
brain must function during the renovation. That
is why the brainstem is surrounded by the
R-complex, then the limbic system and finally the
cerebral cortex... In New York City, the
arrangement of many of the major streets dates to
the seventeenth century, the stock exchange to
the eighteenth century, the waterworks to the
nineteenth, the electrical power system to the
twentieth... In the seventeenth century you
travelled between Brooklyn and Manhattan across
the East River by ferry. In the nineteenth
century, the technology became available to
construct a suspension bridge across the river.
It was built precisely at the point of the ferry
terminal... This use and restructuring of
previous systems for new purposes is very much
like the pattern of biological evolution. (Carl
Sagan, Cosmos)
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The Linguistic Realisation of Metaphor
THE BRAIN IS A CITY
simile, analogy and extended metaphor copula
constructions apposition and parallelism parti
tive and genitive expressions premodification c
ompounds and lexical blends grammatical
metaphor sentence metaphor allegory and
fiction
The brain is like a city. The brain is a
city. The brain, that teeming city. In the
streets of my mind. The urban brain.
Mindscape. The city sleeps. This is the
nerve-centre of the body.
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Structure-mapping
expressive metaphor explanatory metaphor
Our dried voices, when Like a ball on a cosmic
pool, We whisper together Discovery had bounced
off the Are quiet and meaningless gravitational
field of Jupiter, As wind in dry grass gaining
speed in the process. Or rats feet over broken
glass In our dry cellar Arthur C. Clarke,
2001 T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men A Space
Odyssey
richness clarity
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Gaunt This royal throne of kings, this
scepterd isle, This earth of majesty, this seat
of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This
fortress built by Nature for herself Against
infection and the hand of war, This happy breed
of men, this little world, This precious stone
set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the
office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a
house, Against the envy of less happier
lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm,
this England, This nurse, this teeming womb of
royal kings, Feard by their breed and famous by
their birth, Renowned for their deeds as far from
home, For Christian service and true
chivalry, As is the sepulchre in stubborn
Jewry Of the worlds ransom, blessed Marys
Son This land of such dear souls, this dear,
dear land, Dear for her reputation through the
world, Is now leasd out,I die pronouncing
it, Like to a tenement, or pelting
farm England, bound in with the triumphant
sea, Whose rocky shore beats back the envious
siege Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with
shame, With inky blots, and rotten parchment
bonds That England, that was wont to conquer
others, Hath made a shameful conquest of
itself. (Richard II, II.i)
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The three of them played cautiously, circling
like boxers in the first rounds of a fight,
testing each other with jabs and head-feints,
gradually settling into the feel of the ring He
was hoping for an early blowout, a massacre, but
in the first two hours Pozzi merely held his own,
winning about a third of the pots and making
little if any headway any number of times he was
forced to fold after betting on the initial three
or fours cards of a hand, occasionally using his
bad luck to bluff out a victory Fortunately the
bets were rather low in the beginning and that
helped keep the damage to a minimum Nashe could
see the other two begin to sag, as if their wills
were buckling, visibly giving way to the attack
one look at the table was enough to tell Nashe
that everything had changed, that tremendous
battles had been fought in his absence they
seemed to have him on the run, pushing hard to
break his confidence, to crush him once and for
all he was turning into a corpse before Nashes
eyes Pozzi had been given an emergency
transfusion, but that did not mean he was going
to live. He would pull through the present
crisis, perhaps, but the long-term prospects were
still cloudy, touch-and-go at best. Nashe had
done everything he could, however, and that in
itself was a consolation, even a point of pride.
But he also knew that the blood bank was
exhausted Nashe assumed he was dead the hand
was alive and well If Pozzi won, he would be off
and running again Nashe could not help feeling a
bit let down. Not so much for the king, perhaps,
but for the absence of another heart. Heart
failure, he said to himself. Paul Auster, The
Music of Chance
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The three of them played cautiously, circling
like boxers in the first rounds of a fight,
testing each other with jabs and head-feints,
gradually settling into the feel of the ring He
was hoping for an early blowout, a massacre, but
in the first two hours Pozzi merely held his own,
winning about a third of the pots and making
little if any headway any number of times he was
forced to fold after betting on the initial three
or fours cards of a hand, occasionally using his
bad luck to bluff out a victory Fortunately the
bets were rather low in the beginning and that
helped keep the damage to a minimum Nashe could
see the other two begin to sag, as if their wills
were buckling, visibly giving way to the attack
one look at the table was enough to tell Nashe
that everything had changed, that tremendous
battles had been fought in his absence they
seemed to have him on the run, pushing hard to
break his confidence, to crush him once and for
all he was turning into a corpse before Nashes
eyes Pozzi had been given an emergency
transfusion, but that did not mean he was going
to live. He would pull through the present
crisis, perhaps, but the long-term prospects were
still cloudy, touch-and-go at best. Nashe had
done everything he could, however, and that in
itself was a consolation, even a point of pride.
But he also knew that the blood bank was
exhausted Nashe assumed he was dead the hand
was alive and well If Pozzi won, he would be off
and running again Nashe could not help feeling a
bit let down. Not so much for the king, perhaps,
but for the absence of another heart. Heart
failure, he said to himself. Paul Auster, The
Music of Chance
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Conceptual metaphor
ANGER IS A DANGEROUS ANIMAL ANGER IS
HEAT ANGER IS HOT LIQUID IN A CONTAINER ARGUMENT
IS A JOURNEY LOVE IS WAR ARGUMENT IS WAR WAR
IS A FAIRY TALE COMMUNICATION IS SENDING DEATH
IS DEPARTURE IDEAS ARE PLANTS LIFE IS A
DAY THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS TIME IS
MONEY UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING WORDS ARE
COINS WORLD IS THEATRE GOOD IS UP THE COUNTRY
IS A HOUSEHOLD
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Book Ends Baked the day she suddenly dropped
dead we chew it slowly that last apple
pie Shocked into sleeplessness youre scared of
bed. We never could talk much, and now dont
try. Youre like book ends, the pair of you,
shed say, Hog that grate, say nothing, sit,
sleep, stare... The scholar me, you, worn out
on poor pay, only our silence made us seem a
pair. Not as good for staring in, blue gas, too
regular each bud, each yellow spike. At night
you need my company to pass and she not here to
tell us were alike! Your lifes all shattered
into smithereens. Back in our silences and
sullen looks, for all the Scotch we drink, whats
still betweens not the thirty years or so, but
books, books, books. Tony Harrison
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They had a house of crystal pillars on the planet
Mars by the edge of an empty sea, and every
morning you could see Mrs K eating the golden
fruits that grew from the crystal walls, or
cleaning the house with handfuls of magnetic dust
which, taking all dirt with it, blew away on the
hot wind. Afternoons, when the fossil sea was
warm and motionless, and the wine trees stood
stiff in the yard, and the little distant Martian
bone town was all enclosed, and no one drifted
out their doors, you could see Mr K himself in
his room, reading from a metal book with raised
hieroglyphs over which he brushed his hand, as
one might play a harp. And from the book, as his
fingers stroked, a voice sang, a soft ancient
voice, which told tales of when the sea was red
steam on the shore and ancient men had carried
clouds of metal insects and electric spiders into
battle. Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
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The Cage In the waking night The forests have
stopped growing The shells are listening The
shadows in the pool turn grey The pearls dissolve
in the shadow And I return to you Your face is
marked upon the clockface My hands are beneath
your hair And if the time you mark sets free the
birds And if they fly away towards the forest The
hour will no longer be ours Ours is the ornate
birdcage The brimming cup of water The preface to
the book And all the clocks are ticking All the
dark rooms are moving All the airs nerves are
bare. Once flown The feathered hour will not
return And I shall have gone away David Gascoyne
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Follow the Teaching link on my website Peter
Stockwell from www.nottingham.ac.uk/english