To many critics, however, the freeing-up of meaning had come to the end of the road, and it was time to start the journey back to consensus. I remember a particularly impassioned plea from George Steiner in the Times Literary Supplement in 1985 entitled ‘A New Meaning of Meaning’, in which he noted that meaninglessness worked better as an idea than a practical reality, and, although it was fun while it lasted, our holiday from meaning was becoming wearisome. Steiner was not alone in his impatience, and so, by the end of the twentieth century, the pendulum we noted back on page 10 had reached the furthest point on its trajectory and was beginning to swing back where it had come from.[1]
So, we’ve travelled from one end of our meaning line to the other in a little over three thousand words to the point where meaning, having been all but blown to bits, is set to make a comeback. But although we may have completed the journey, our arrival doesn’t mean that we’ve covered the entire waterfront. All we’ve done so far is to define the possible extremes of the subject. We’ve all the middle bit to fill in now, which is where the real business of meaning takes place - the tension and the interplay between form and formlessness, between suggestion and statement that keeps meaning fermenting, and our interest levels up.
But before we go down that road, a subject to ponder next time you’re in the pub: a recent newspaper article I read suggested that organized religion has nowhere left to go - it’s now, to quote its writer Don Cupitt “fully developed”. It will cease to surprise us with any substantial new advances, but will gradually dilute and decay over time the more we alter it to suit our needs. As we continue this process of accommodation, and the edges are smoothed and the corners knocked off, familiarity will not so much breed contempt, as a routine complacency. This point of view doesn’t just represent the death of the absolute, but a seeping of energy away from the subject to the point where it’s so successfully internalized and understood, there are no longer battles to be fought or ground left to conquer.
And so in literature. Stylistically, we’ve explored the furthest reaches of both form and formlessness (or Meaning and Significance as I’m calling them) - so is our conception of meaning going to keep oscillating between these two opposites every few generations as we re-rehearse the same arguments and warm over the same underlying ideas? Or will both the creation and analysis of literature break out of this cycle and charge off into new, hitherto undreamed of dimensions?
I would have to follow the example of Morrissey, who, when he posed the leading question “Does the Body Rule the Mind or the Mind Rule the Body?”, answered it with masterly inconclusion “I dunno”. But it would be sad to think, to quote another genius lyricist, Mike Stoller, “Is That All There Is?”
Mine’s a pint.
Big Theme #7: Metaphor: The Individual and the Archetype
[at the Sermon on the Mount]
Man 1: “What was that [Jesus said]?”
Man 2: “I dunno”
Man 3: “I think it was ‘Blessed are the cheesemakers’”
Woman: “Oh, really! What’s so special about the cheesemakers?”
Husband: “Well, obviously it’s not meant to be taken literally; it refers to any manufacturer of dairy products.”
Monty Python, ‘Life of Brian’
“Begin with an individual, and before you know it, you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created - nothing.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘The Rich Boy”
When Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969, NASA (who’s sent it there) received an official complaint from, of all people, the League of Iraqi Storytellers. The gist of their protest was simple - they were being robbed of their livelihood. How so?
Well, the fact that the Moon had been proved to exist, and was made of rock, and that it had been walked on, robbed it of its potential to be a metaphor. We now had conclusive proof, for example, that it wasn’t composed of green cheese. So what the storytellers were saying is that Neil Armstong and Buzz Aldrin had stopped them lying about the Moon. How could it be a beacon for lovers any more? It was just another a lump of rock spinning through the galaxy - all the poetry had been stripped from it. The lunar conquest may have been one small step for a man, but it represented a giant leap backwards for art.
Of all the Big Themes, this is probably the biggest because it deals, in part anyway, with man’s enduring need to use metaphor, and this is a subject notorious for flying off in all sorts of directions. And really, the title I’ve given the section only hints at the enormous variety of related themes it manages to cover. Cue Meaning Line:
Meaning-----------------------------------------------------------------Significance
One Many
Macrocosm Microcosm
General Particular
Universal Specific
Reality Myth
Really, any of these pairs would do.
Metaphor, to quote Aristotle’s definition, is “the application to one thing of a name belonging to another thing”, so for example, “all the world’s a stage” (or to quote Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell “the world is just a great big onion”).
Of course the world is neither, but both are interesting conceits; the former suggests that humans are just actors following a predetermined script from birth to death, the second that life is a vale of tears occasioned by the onion’s fumes. Both have made connections between a quality inherent in the original subject (the world) and that same aspect reflected in the second object. So there is a transference of meaning from one to the other - and that’s the definition of metaphor, a ‘carrying across’. Simple.
Well, not exactly. Metaphor is one of the most important contents of a writer’s toolbox, and yet it’s one of those literary terms that’s used almost indiscriminately to suggest any kind of organizing principle behind meaning. Sometimes it has to double as a synonym for symbol, simile, image or even myth and allegory. Now although these structures are all closely related, they in fact perform very different functions using very different areas of our brains, so if you think I’m being a pedantic old git by insisting that we separate them out, I’m really not.
So let’s start by asking why writers use metaphor, which is pretty simple really. First, it stops their writing being boring. In a legal document, you identify your terms at the start and then use those terms consistently throughout, thus minimizing the possibility of misunderstanding. Writers of literature aren’t bound by this constraint, and if they were, it would make for pretty dull reading - even assuming they wanted to try and be this boring. Just dig out your house insurance and compare it with ‘Kubla Khan’. Or better still, get your hands on a BBC contract. I was once producing a serialization for ‘A Book at Bedtime’ on Radio 4, and the necessary contract thudded on the mat one morning. Normally I would just sign the thing and bung it back, but it seemed thicker than usual, so I decided to check it out. Sure enough it had been rewritten. As well as the usual pound of flesh, it demanded that ‘The BBC has the right to transmit the programme using any electronic means currently invented or yet to be invented; throughout the universe or any universes yet to be discovered’.
I refrained from pointing out that, linguistically speaking, there can’t be more than one universe since this anoraky observation would probably fall on deaf ears, and the picture it painted of a bunch of aliens listening to Radio 4 picking over the finer points of ‘The Great Gatsby’ had already given me a good laugh. But talk about covering your arse.
Anyway, artists don’t have to go to these inordinate lengths to make their meaning clear. So why use a word or phrase twice when a metaphor will do? It’s all about variety and richness of expression. Metaphors also serve to illustrate different or surprising facets of the object in focus. If, for example, like Ken Dodd in the song of the same name, you were to remark that ‘Love Is Like a Violin’, you would then go on to show how the two resemble one another. If you made that comparison in a court of law, you’d probably be had up for contempt. Or sectioned.
Basically, there are two organizational principles associated with the metaphor, which we’ll peruse briefly before moving on to a more detailed examination: first, there’s the ‘transference’ we’ve just looked at, which forms a kind of creative tension within the metaphor between the original object and what it’s being projected onto. And so when we’re figuring out why the writer has used a particular metaphor, what we need to bear in mind is how loose or strong the dialectical association is between the two. If it’s weak, something transitory or evanescent is being hinted at, and the original subject retains its individual identity as the text moves forward. If, however, a more involved relationship is implied (which the writer might signal by the repeated use of the same metaphor, or by developing that original relationship using a series of linked metaphors), the importance of the message implied by the metaphor grows at the expense of its original inspiration. So the original subject becomes more of a vehicle for meaning than simply existing for its own sake - it loses some of its individuality the more explicitly the message is communicated.
The second organizational principle works outside the metaphor. When I was at primary school, it was quite common for bored pupils to write imaginary letters addressed to:
Mr Anthony Aloysius St. John Hancock,
23, Railway Cuttings,
East Cheam,
nr. Epsom
Surrey,
England,
United Kingdom,
Northern Hemisphere,
The World,
The Earth,
The Galaxy,
The Universe
Infinity etc etc
So it is with the metaphor - how far will its meaning (or significance for that matter) resonate outside itself? How much, for example, was Bobby Moore
A man
A footballer
The captain of West Ham
The captain of England
The best footballer ever
The best sportsman ever
The best human ever
A god
God
Each new level ups Bobby Moore’s ante, his resonance, a bit like the concentric ripples that grow outwards from a pebble tossed in a still body of water. And as with our first principle of organization, which would simply establish the link between Bobby Moore and football, as we gradually move away from Bobby Moore the man, we begin to focus instead on the ‘Bobby Moore-ness’ of Bobby Moore (the qualities that make Bobby Moore what we perceive him to be); then Bobby Moore the embodiment of all that’s best in football, and then by extension, in man, since all footballers are human (please resist the urge to comment further). It’s an awesome responsibility the lad’s been given, and by the time the ripples reach the edge of the pond he’d most likely to be unrecognizable even to his wife and kids. Drained of his humanity, he would cease to be Bobby Moore and become an icon instead.
Quite how far down the list you think it’s appropriate to travel depends on your sense of proportion, which in turn is governed by your appreciation of the worth of Bobby Moore (and we know that only Eric Clapton made it all the way to God). And this second principle is what happens when a metaphor turns into a symbol, of which more later in this section.
So, to briefly go over these broad brushstrokes: there are two principles that govern the way meaning is organized by the use of metaphor. One that exists within the metaphor that establishes the information carried by the metaphor, and one that propels the information of the metaphor outwards. For the moment, you’ll have to take my word that there are conflicting energies at work within these two principles that either pull the metaphor and its contents in the direction of Meaning, or towards Significance, which will determine where each metaphor will sit on our Meaning Line. And each metaphor must be examined on its own merits, since no two are absolutely alike.
If all this seems a bit cloudy for the moment, don’t worry; now that we’ve laid the groundwork, we need to travel back to the Year Zero of how meaning is organized and start the journey afresh. We will destroy to rebuild – and if that sounds a tad melodramatic there’s a good reason for approaching the subject in this way.
So, we’ve travelled from one end of our meaning line to the other in a little over three thousand words to the point where meaning, having been all but blown to bits, is set to make a comeback. But although we may have completed the journey, our arrival doesn’t mean that we’ve covered the entire waterfront. All we’ve done so far is to define the possible extremes of the subject. We’ve all the middle bit to fill in now, which is where the real business of meaning takes place - the tension and the interplay between form and formlessness, between suggestion and statement that keeps meaning fermenting, and our interest levels up.
But before we go down that road, a subject to ponder next time you’re in the pub: a recent newspaper article I read suggested that organized religion has nowhere left to go - it’s now, to quote its writer Don Cupitt “fully developed”. It will cease to surprise us with any substantial new advances, but will gradually dilute and decay over time the more we alter it to suit our needs. As we continue this process of accommodation, and the edges are smoothed and the corners knocked off, familiarity will not so much breed contempt, as a routine complacency. This point of view doesn’t just represent the death of the absolute, but a seeping of energy away from the subject to the point where it’s so successfully internalized and understood, there are no longer battles to be fought or ground left to conquer.
And so in literature. Stylistically, we’ve explored the furthest reaches of both form and formlessness (or Meaning and Significance as I’m calling them) - so is our conception of meaning going to keep oscillating between these two opposites every few generations as we re-rehearse the same arguments and warm over the same underlying ideas? Or will both the creation and analysis of literature break out of this cycle and charge off into new, hitherto undreamed of dimensions?
I would have to follow the example of Morrissey, who, when he posed the leading question “Does the Body Rule the Mind or the Mind Rule the Body?”, answered it with masterly inconclusion “I dunno”. But it would be sad to think, to quote another genius lyricist, Mike Stoller, “Is That All There Is?”
Mine’s a pint.
Big Theme #7: Metaphor: The Individual and the Archetype
[at the Sermon on the Mount]
Man 1: “What was that [Jesus said]?”
Man 2: “I dunno”
Man 3: “I think it was ‘Blessed are the cheesemakers’”
Woman: “Oh, really! What’s so special about the cheesemakers?”
Husband: “Well, obviously it’s not meant to be taken literally; it refers to any manufacturer of dairy products.”
Monty Python, ‘Life of Brian’
“Begin with an individual, and before you know it, you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created - nothing.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘The Rich Boy”
When Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969, NASA (who’s sent it there) received an official complaint from, of all people, the League of Iraqi Storytellers. The gist of their protest was simple - they were being robbed of their livelihood. How so?
Well, the fact that the Moon had been proved to exist, and was made of rock, and that it had been walked on, robbed it of its potential to be a metaphor. We now had conclusive proof, for example, that it wasn’t composed of green cheese. So what the storytellers were saying is that Neil Armstong and Buzz Aldrin had stopped them lying about the Moon. How could it be a beacon for lovers any more? It was just another a lump of rock spinning through the galaxy - all the poetry had been stripped from it. The lunar conquest may have been one small step for a man, but it represented a giant leap backwards for art.
Of all the Big Themes, this is probably the biggest because it deals, in part anyway, with man’s enduring need to use metaphor, and this is a subject notorious for flying off in all sorts of directions. And really, the title I’ve given the section only hints at the enormous variety of related themes it manages to cover. Cue Meaning Line:
Meaning-----------------------------------------------------------------Significance
One Many
Macrocosm Microcosm
General Particular
Universal Specific
Reality Myth
Really, any of these pairs would do.
Metaphor, to quote Aristotle’s definition, is “the application to one thing of a name belonging to another thing”, so for example, “all the world’s a stage” (or to quote Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell “the world is just a great big onion”).
Of course the world is neither, but both are interesting conceits; the former suggests that humans are just actors following a predetermined script from birth to death, the second that life is a vale of tears occasioned by the onion’s fumes. Both have made connections between a quality inherent in the original subject (the world) and that same aspect reflected in the second object. So there is a transference of meaning from one to the other - and that’s the definition of metaphor, a ‘carrying across’. Simple.
Well, not exactly. Metaphor is one of the most important contents of a writer’s toolbox, and yet it’s one of those literary terms that’s used almost indiscriminately to suggest any kind of organizing principle behind meaning. Sometimes it has to double as a synonym for symbol, simile, image or even myth and allegory. Now although these structures are all closely related, they in fact perform very different functions using very different areas of our brains, so if you think I’m being a pedantic old git by insisting that we separate them out, I’m really not.
So let’s start by asking why writers use metaphor, which is pretty simple really. First, it stops their writing being boring. In a legal document, you identify your terms at the start and then use those terms consistently throughout, thus minimizing the possibility of misunderstanding. Writers of literature aren’t bound by this constraint, and if they were, it would make for pretty dull reading - even assuming they wanted to try and be this boring. Just dig out your house insurance and compare it with ‘Kubla Khan’. Or better still, get your hands on a BBC contract. I was once producing a serialization for ‘A Book at Bedtime’ on Radio 4, and the necessary contract thudded on the mat one morning. Normally I would just sign the thing and bung it back, but it seemed thicker than usual, so I decided to check it out. Sure enough it had been rewritten. As well as the usual pound of flesh, it demanded that ‘The BBC has the right to transmit the programme using any electronic means currently invented or yet to be invented; throughout the universe or any universes yet to be discovered’.
I refrained from pointing out that, linguistically speaking, there can’t be more than one universe since this anoraky observation would probably fall on deaf ears, and the picture it painted of a bunch of aliens listening to Radio 4 picking over the finer points of ‘The Great Gatsby’ had already given me a good laugh. But talk about covering your arse.
Anyway, artists don’t have to go to these inordinate lengths to make their meaning clear. So why use a word or phrase twice when a metaphor will do? It’s all about variety and richness of expression. Metaphors also serve to illustrate different or surprising facets of the object in focus. If, for example, like Ken Dodd in the song of the same name, you were to remark that ‘Love Is Like a Violin’, you would then go on to show how the two resemble one another. If you made that comparison in a court of law, you’d probably be had up for contempt. Or sectioned.
Basically, there are two organizational principles associated with the metaphor, which we’ll peruse briefly before moving on to a more detailed examination: first, there’s the ‘transference’ we’ve just looked at, which forms a kind of creative tension within the metaphor between the original object and what it’s being projected onto. And so when we’re figuring out why the writer has used a particular metaphor, what we need to bear in mind is how loose or strong the dialectical association is between the two. If it’s weak, something transitory or evanescent is being hinted at, and the original subject retains its individual identity as the text moves forward. If, however, a more involved relationship is implied (which the writer might signal by the repeated use of the same metaphor, or by developing that original relationship using a series of linked metaphors), the importance of the message implied by the metaphor grows at the expense of its original inspiration. So the original subject becomes more of a vehicle for meaning than simply existing for its own sake - it loses some of its individuality the more explicitly the message is communicated.
The second organizational principle works outside the metaphor. When I was at primary school, it was quite common for bored pupils to write imaginary letters addressed to:
Mr Anthony Aloysius St. John Hancock,
23, Railway Cuttings,
East Cheam,
nr. Epsom
Surrey,
England,
United Kingdom,
Northern Hemisphere,
The World,
The Earth,
The Galaxy,
The Universe
Infinity etc etc
So it is with the metaphor - how far will its meaning (or significance for that matter) resonate outside itself? How much, for example, was Bobby Moore
A man
A footballer
The captain of West Ham
The captain of England
The best footballer ever
The best sportsman ever
The best human ever
A god
God
Each new level ups Bobby Moore’s ante, his resonance, a bit like the concentric ripples that grow outwards from a pebble tossed in a still body of water. And as with our first principle of organization, which would simply establish the link between Bobby Moore and football, as we gradually move away from Bobby Moore the man, we begin to focus instead on the ‘Bobby Moore-ness’ of Bobby Moore (the qualities that make Bobby Moore what we perceive him to be); then Bobby Moore the embodiment of all that’s best in football, and then by extension, in man, since all footballers are human (please resist the urge to comment further). It’s an awesome responsibility the lad’s been given, and by the time the ripples reach the edge of the pond he’d most likely to be unrecognizable even to his wife and kids. Drained of his humanity, he would cease to be Bobby Moore and become an icon instead.
Quite how far down the list you think it’s appropriate to travel depends on your sense of proportion, which in turn is governed by your appreciation of the worth of Bobby Moore (and we know that only Eric Clapton made it all the way to God). And this second principle is what happens when a metaphor turns into a symbol, of which more later in this section.
So, to briefly go over these broad brushstrokes: there are two principles that govern the way meaning is organized by the use of metaphor. One that exists within the metaphor that establishes the information carried by the metaphor, and one that propels the information of the metaphor outwards. For the moment, you’ll have to take my word that there are conflicting energies at work within these two principles that either pull the metaphor and its contents in the direction of Meaning, or towards Significance, which will determine where each metaphor will sit on our Meaning Line. And each metaphor must be examined on its own merits, since no two are absolutely alike.
If all this seems a bit cloudy for the moment, don’t worry; now that we’ve laid the groundwork, we need to travel back to the Year Zero of how meaning is organized and start the journey afresh. We will destroy to rebuild – and if that sounds a tad melodramatic there’s a good reason for approaching the subject in this way.
