The Conceit is basically half way between a simile and a metaphor - the only thing that differentiates it from the latter is the air of wit or intellectual experimentation it brings with it, although this isn’t true in all cases. What does tend to happen within the conceit is the violent yoking together of apparently unconnected ideas and things so that the reader is startled out of his complacency and forced to think through its argument. It’s a bit like an intellectual version of the violet dog except that (eventually) it should all make sense.
Some of the best-known conceits occur in the group of writers who came to be known as ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, the undoubted doyen of whom was John Donne. And perhaps the best known of his conceits was the love/pair of compasses image that he posits in ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’, the last 3 stanzas of which are always worth quoting:
If they [our souls] be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th’ other do.
And though it in the centre sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begun.
There’s allsorts going on in here: love, sex, death, absence, longing and eventual reconciliation. It’s a beautifully compact yet expressive lyric, justly praised for both its tenderness and ingenuity. As we’ll see later, even TS Eliot got worked up about it, describing the poem as a perfect fusion between heart and mind that produced a quality of ‘sensuous thought’ rarely encountered in literature. And I’m not going to argue with that. (1)
The mental gymnastics that often accompanies the creation and interpretation of conceits reminds me of a wonderful Monty Python sketch in which Oscar Wilde, James McNeil Whistler and George Bernard Shaw are all trying to out-conceit each other in their flattery of the Prince of Wales. “Your Majesty,” announces Wilde in full brown-nosing mode, “is like a big jam doughnut with cream on the top.” The POW, not the brightest of creatures, misunderstands the simile, takes immediate offence and demands Wilde explain himself. He can’t, and claims that Whistler said it first. Quick as a flash, Whistler retorts, “What I meant, your Majesty, was that like a doughnut your arrival gives us pleasure, but your absence simply leaves us hungry for more.” The POW is delighted, but then Whistler, seeking revenge on Wilde, counters with, “Your Majesty is like a stream of bat’s piss - it was one of Wilde’s”. Wilde disclaims all knowledge and fingers GBS, who replies, “What I meant was that your Majesty shines out like a shaft of gold when all around is dark.” Amid the generally appreciative noises, he then lets rip; “Your Majesty is like a dose of clap - before you arrive is pleasure, but afterwards a pain in the balls. It was one of Wilde’s”. And so on. Brilliant when it’s done well, but quickly tiring when it isn’t, as in Shakespeare’s ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, where the torrent of conceits tumble over one another as Berowne and his troupe of young male scholars try to woo the far more sensible Princess Katherine and her female entourage. If you don’t appreciate the dazzling wit underlying this conceit, they seem to be saying, there’ll be another few dozen along in a minute. They merely succeed in making themselves look immature and ridiculous, as they test to destruction the principle that if you throw enough shit at the wall some of it may stick.
‘Wit’ in the time of Shaespeare, and even up to the 18th century was, as Eliot reminds us “something more serious than we usually mean today.” Far from being simply a jeu d’esprit, it was the bedrock of your literary reputation, certainly in the view of Doctor Johnson. Before the IQ test, wit was an index of your intelligence, of your powers of observation and synthesis. So in the world of the Conceit, economy and appropriateness is King.
d) The Metaphor
This needn’t detain us too long, since we’ve already touched on it at the beginning of this section.
The usual antonym for ‘metaphorical’ is ‘literal’. Whereas metaphor is a projection of meaning outside its original package, the literal approach keeps that meaning on a tight leash, confining it to a “natural and customary” usage, according to the OED. Whatever you’re describing remains resolutely itself - so no mucking about is permitted. Quite a watertight definition, yet one that is regularly confused by TV commentators.
I was once watching a live concert by ‘The Hardest Working Man in Show Business’, James Brown, and he was certainly earning this reputation - absolutely drenched in perspiration, he was grappling with the mike stand as if he were trying to teach a dance step to an enormous and unwieldy partner, wrenching it this way and that then resting, exhausted, before trying it all over again. At the end of the song, the TV voiceover announced, “James Brown is literally sweating buckets” - a nice trick if you can do it, and one guaranteed to break the ice at parties. Not even the self-proclaimed “Minister of the New New [sic] Super Heavy Funk” can literally sweat buckets, while practically anyone can metaphorically sweat them. A footballer is never literally over the moon, unless he happens to be an astronaut in his spare time, but he can complete that trajectory through the use of metaphor.
Back to literature: if a character proclaims, “Damn your black heart to Hell!” (as they frequently do in novels like ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’), he’s clearly using metaphor. Nobody’s heart is biologically black, unless it’s dead and rotting or has been singed somehow - hearts are usually a pinky reddy purple.
What the writer means is that the owner of the heart is a bad person, and we know this because most of us share the cultural conceit that black and evil are synonymous. Which takes me back to my alma mater and a charabanc trip to Stratford to see a performance of our ‘O’ Level set text.
In one of Trevor Nunn’s productions of ‘Macbeth’, he found the interplays of colour to be so central to the play’s meaning, he decided to stage two contrasting coronations: at Duncan’s enthronement which appeared as a sort of Prologue, the entire cast were dressed in white. At Macbeth’s later in the performance, everyone wore red. Visually striking, it was a simple yet effective way of indicating to us spotty fourteen year-olds the counterpoint between the themes of light/dark, good/evil, open/hidden and order/chaos (and others) that all spin off from Shakespeare’s sense of colour. So there’s an example of metaphor not only establishing a theme, but providing an underlying structure, as the play begins its journey from darkness into light culminating in the final battle between Macduff and Macbeth.
But then us lesser mortals regularly use colour metaphors, woven as they are into the fabric of our culture. Metaphorically, people can be green with envy; but if they’re literally green, they’re probably about to throw up. If someone’s literally blue, you wrap them in a blanket and call the emergency services; but if they’re metaphorically that colour, you’ll try and cheer them up. Back to white again - white is good; but it’s also pressed into service to represent innocence, cowardice (as in the white feathers sent to conscientious objectors), and even, in the early years of the 20th century, decency (“That’s very white of you, old man, ending your affair with my wife”).
So what does all this tell us about metaphor? Time for a list:
1) that the literal and metaphorical worlds can be very different places
2) that the metaphorical world contains more possibilities (a heart can be black)
3) that in literature, metaphorical meaning can stand in for its literal equivalent as a form of mnemonic or shorthand (there’s no need to keep telling your audience that Macbeth’s a baddie if you keep associating him with blackness)
4) that metaphor doesn’t just deal with surfaces, but essences
5) that the success of metaphor can be dependent on shared cultural assumptions, and most importantly, because it leads us into the next phase of the argument -
6) METAPHOR CAN BE BIGGER THAN ITS SUBJECT (Macbeth isn’t the only guy who’s bad)
What links these first four types of nodes is that their meaning can exist independently outside their original form, so there isn’t necessarily a large amount of cohesion within them - as such they conform to the first principle of meaning organization we looked at earlier in this section. The form is itself, and then it has meaning thrust upon it, or teased out of it by the metaphor, the adjective, the conceit or the simile. It really is easiest to think of it as a species of emotional attachment, with form and meaning being young free and single, playing fast and loose, delighting in experimentation, moving up and down our meaning line at will to suggest or state or hint or imply or allude or insinuate or assert or pronounce or proclaim. It’s all great fun for the writer with his violet dogs, rosy fingers, compasses and colour palette.
But then form and meaning contemplate settling down together and begin to talk of a more lasting relationship. And it all suddenly gets a lot more serious as we enter the realm of symbol and myth.
e) Symbol - symbols are all to do with perspective. At the end of the movie ‘Meninblack’ the charm that fits round a cat’s neck is shown to contain an entire galaxy, and we’re encouraged to think that our world is somehow superior to it simply because it’s larger.
But then, in what is the most inventive sequence of the film (which lasts a whole thirty seconds), the shot spins back out from the Earth’s atmosphere into space, through our galaxy and universe, to end up inside a tiny marble which is being tossed around by two aliens. So the Earth, in its turn, is seen as an insignificant speck in proportion to something a lot larger.
There’s plenty of fodder for philosophers in this image (and for Christians too - this one shot provoked a heated debate on an American website that vets films suitable for family viewing. First off, the only one who’s allowed to play around with Earth is God, and not aliens, so the director was accused of blasphemy. Second, marbles is a game of chance, so is the director saying that there’s no Divine Providence? And third, the Bible makes no mention of other universes, therefore there can’t be any. Recommendations on what action to take ranged from not allowing your offspring to watch this ‘disturbing’ film, to lynching anyone involved in it. And these people are presumably allowed to vote).
Anyway, for our purposes, all we need to take away from this is the I
dea that symbols aren’t simply ‘this =that’ sorts of metaphor, but something rather more involved. Like the schoolboy’s address, we’re looking at whole chains of meaning, from marbles to planets to universes to multiverses, from the microcosm to the macrocosm, all of which (and any points in between) can be implied through a simple, compact image - the symbol.
Footnotes:
1. see Eliot’s essay ‘Imperfect Critics’ for his exploration of this idea
Some of the best-known conceits occur in the group of writers who came to be known as ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, the undoubted doyen of whom was John Donne. And perhaps the best known of his conceits was the love/pair of compasses image that he posits in ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’, the last 3 stanzas of which are always worth quoting:
If they [our souls] be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th’ other do.
And though it in the centre sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begun.
There’s allsorts going on in here: love, sex, death, absence, longing and eventual reconciliation. It’s a beautifully compact yet expressive lyric, justly praised for both its tenderness and ingenuity. As we’ll see later, even TS Eliot got worked up about it, describing the poem as a perfect fusion between heart and mind that produced a quality of ‘sensuous thought’ rarely encountered in literature. And I’m not going to argue with that. (1)
The mental gymnastics that often accompanies the creation and interpretation of conceits reminds me of a wonderful Monty Python sketch in which Oscar Wilde, James McNeil Whistler and George Bernard Shaw are all trying to out-conceit each other in their flattery of the Prince of Wales. “Your Majesty,” announces Wilde in full brown-nosing mode, “is like a big jam doughnut with cream on the top.” The POW, not the brightest of creatures, misunderstands the simile, takes immediate offence and demands Wilde explain himself. He can’t, and claims that Whistler said it first. Quick as a flash, Whistler retorts, “What I meant, your Majesty, was that like a doughnut your arrival gives us pleasure, but your absence simply leaves us hungry for more.” The POW is delighted, but then Whistler, seeking revenge on Wilde, counters with, “Your Majesty is like a stream of bat’s piss - it was one of Wilde’s”. Wilde disclaims all knowledge and fingers GBS, who replies, “What I meant was that your Majesty shines out like a shaft of gold when all around is dark.” Amid the generally appreciative noises, he then lets rip; “Your Majesty is like a dose of clap - before you arrive is pleasure, but afterwards a pain in the balls. It was one of Wilde’s”. And so on. Brilliant when it’s done well, but quickly tiring when it isn’t, as in Shakespeare’s ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, where the torrent of conceits tumble over one another as Berowne and his troupe of young male scholars try to woo the far more sensible Princess Katherine and her female entourage. If you don’t appreciate the dazzling wit underlying this conceit, they seem to be saying, there’ll be another few dozen along in a minute. They merely succeed in making themselves look immature and ridiculous, as they test to destruction the principle that if you throw enough shit at the wall some of it may stick.
‘Wit’ in the time of Shaespeare, and even up to the 18th century was, as Eliot reminds us “something more serious than we usually mean today.” Far from being simply a jeu d’esprit, it was the bedrock of your literary reputation, certainly in the view of Doctor Johnson. Before the IQ test, wit was an index of your intelligence, of your powers of observation and synthesis. So in the world of the Conceit, economy and appropriateness is King.
d) The Metaphor
This needn’t detain us too long, since we’ve already touched on it at the beginning of this section.
The usual antonym for ‘metaphorical’ is ‘literal’. Whereas metaphor is a projection of meaning outside its original package, the literal approach keeps that meaning on a tight leash, confining it to a “natural and customary” usage, according to the OED. Whatever you’re describing remains resolutely itself - so no mucking about is permitted. Quite a watertight definition, yet one that is regularly confused by TV commentators.
I was once watching a live concert by ‘The Hardest Working Man in Show Business’, James Brown, and he was certainly earning this reputation - absolutely drenched in perspiration, he was grappling with the mike stand as if he were trying to teach a dance step to an enormous and unwieldy partner, wrenching it this way and that then resting, exhausted, before trying it all over again. At the end of the song, the TV voiceover announced, “James Brown is literally sweating buckets” - a nice trick if you can do it, and one guaranteed to break the ice at parties. Not even the self-proclaimed “Minister of the New New [sic] Super Heavy Funk” can literally sweat buckets, while practically anyone can metaphorically sweat them. A footballer is never literally over the moon, unless he happens to be an astronaut in his spare time, but he can complete that trajectory through the use of metaphor.
Back to literature: if a character proclaims, “Damn your black heart to Hell!” (as they frequently do in novels like ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’), he’s clearly using metaphor. Nobody’s heart is biologically black, unless it’s dead and rotting or has been singed somehow - hearts are usually a pinky reddy purple.
What the writer means is that the owner of the heart is a bad person, and we know this because most of us share the cultural conceit that black and evil are synonymous. Which takes me back to my alma mater and a charabanc trip to Stratford to see a performance of our ‘O’ Level set text.
In one of Trevor Nunn’s productions of ‘Macbeth’, he found the interplays of colour to be so central to the play’s meaning, he decided to stage two contrasting coronations: at Duncan’s enthronement which appeared as a sort of Prologue, the entire cast were dressed in white. At Macbeth’s later in the performance, everyone wore red. Visually striking, it was a simple yet effective way of indicating to us spotty fourteen year-olds the counterpoint between the themes of light/dark, good/evil, open/hidden and order/chaos (and others) that all spin off from Shakespeare’s sense of colour. So there’s an example of metaphor not only establishing a theme, but providing an underlying structure, as the play begins its journey from darkness into light culminating in the final battle between Macduff and Macbeth.
But then us lesser mortals regularly use colour metaphors, woven as they are into the fabric of our culture. Metaphorically, people can be green with envy; but if they’re literally green, they’re probably about to throw up. If someone’s literally blue, you wrap them in a blanket and call the emergency services; but if they’re metaphorically that colour, you’ll try and cheer them up. Back to white again - white is good; but it’s also pressed into service to represent innocence, cowardice (as in the white feathers sent to conscientious objectors), and even, in the early years of the 20th century, decency (“That’s very white of you, old man, ending your affair with my wife”).
So what does all this tell us about metaphor? Time for a list:
1) that the literal and metaphorical worlds can be very different places
2) that the metaphorical world contains more possibilities (a heart can be black)
3) that in literature, metaphorical meaning can stand in for its literal equivalent as a form of mnemonic or shorthand (there’s no need to keep telling your audience that Macbeth’s a baddie if you keep associating him with blackness)
4) that metaphor doesn’t just deal with surfaces, but essences
5) that the success of metaphor can be dependent on shared cultural assumptions, and most importantly, because it leads us into the next phase of the argument -
6) METAPHOR CAN BE BIGGER THAN ITS SUBJECT (Macbeth isn’t the only guy who’s bad)
What links these first four types of nodes is that their meaning can exist independently outside their original form, so there isn’t necessarily a large amount of cohesion within them - as such they conform to the first principle of meaning organization we looked at earlier in this section. The form is itself, and then it has meaning thrust upon it, or teased out of it by the metaphor, the adjective, the conceit or the simile. It really is easiest to think of it as a species of emotional attachment, with form and meaning being young free and single, playing fast and loose, delighting in experimentation, moving up and down our meaning line at will to suggest or state or hint or imply or allude or insinuate or assert or pronounce or proclaim. It’s all great fun for the writer with his violet dogs, rosy fingers, compasses and colour palette.
But then form and meaning contemplate settling down together and begin to talk of a more lasting relationship. And it all suddenly gets a lot more serious as we enter the realm of symbol and myth.
e) Symbol - symbols are all to do with perspective. At the end of the movie ‘Meninblack’ the charm that fits round a cat’s neck is shown to contain an entire galaxy, and we’re encouraged to think that our world is somehow superior to it simply because it’s larger.
But then, in what is the most inventive sequence of the film (which lasts a whole thirty seconds), the shot spins back out from the Earth’s atmosphere into space, through our galaxy and universe, to end up inside a tiny marble which is being tossed around by two aliens. So the Earth, in its turn, is seen as an insignificant speck in proportion to something a lot larger.
There’s plenty of fodder for philosophers in this image (and for Christians too - this one shot provoked a heated debate on an American website that vets films suitable for family viewing. First off, the only one who’s allowed to play around with Earth is God, and not aliens, so the director was accused of blasphemy. Second, marbles is a game of chance, so is the director saying that there’s no Divine Providence? And third, the Bible makes no mention of other universes, therefore there can’t be any. Recommendations on what action to take ranged from not allowing your offspring to watch this ‘disturbing’ film, to lynching anyone involved in it. And these people are presumably allowed to vote).
Anyway, for our purposes, all we need to take away from this is the I
dea that symbols aren’t simply ‘this =that’ sorts of metaphor, but something rather more involved. Like the schoolboy’s address, we’re looking at whole chains of meaning, from marbles to planets to universes to multiverses, from the microcosm to the macrocosm, all of which (and any points in between) can be implied through a simple, compact image - the symbol.
Footnotes:
1. see Eliot’s essay ‘Imperfect Critics’ for his exploration of this idea
