Life Sentences (37 page)

Let us look at that move of species to genus again. This occurs when a species is made to do the work of (or stand for) its genus. “Odysseus did many noble deeds.” “Oh? how many?” “A lot—thousands.” Why wouldn’t you just stay with “Odysseus did many”? I am forced into the hyperbole because I am afraid that my hearer may think, “Ah, sixteen,” when I want him to understand that it was really quite a few. However silently said or quietly read, hyperbole is a shout. So precision is inappropriate. The shouter has no time to count: “Odysseus did sixty-six noble deeds.” Moreover, the speaker has feelings about this information, as one who shouts usually does. “Charlie must have eaten a hundred of those peach pies!” Only the context will tell us whether the speaker approves of this voraciousness (the word
noble
supplies the judgment in Odysseus’s case) or is revolted or simply amazed.

Species do not simply float around inside their genus like mist in a cloud. There are hierarchies, especially among the holier-than-thou: God the Father, the Holy Ghost, Archangels, angels, saints, and so on; there are onions: sweet spring yellow, white and hot, garlics, scallions, shallots, leeks, and bulb, Bermudas, Walla Walla, Maui, Spanish, and Vidalia. The country of classification is complex and not always harmonious, so the choice of what species shall be asked to stand in for the genus is crucial. The genus
Many
has as many classes as a university. If we want to say that the truth is an onion, have we a preference for the scallion, the Vidalia, or the leek? Is the truth long, thin, pale, green for much of its length, or round as the world? Perhaps it is merely irritating to the eye. The greatly inflated list is another kind of hyperbole, a consequence of structure rather than single word choice. Not only were there too many onions in the
onion sentence, they were there higgledy-piggledy because different kinds of classifications were resorted to, not just different onions.

The relation of species to genus is nothing like that of part to whole. Your clothes are not a part of your luggage the way the bag’s straps are, but they may be packed in your luggage to be pawed by customs or wrinkled by jouncing. Although a species of cat is “in” a genus, it cannot be chased by the pack called
dogs
up either an ideal or a real tree. Aristotle thinks of his analytical orders as we think of classes. These are conceptual spaces, usually represented as round, where other such circles are included and where, ultimately, individuals are put. Definitions determine the membership of a class the way golfers are admitted to the country club, so that when Homer says that the nurse “found Odysseus in the thick of slaughtered corpses, splattered with bloody filth like a lion that’s devoured some ox of the field and lopes home, covered with blood, his chest streaked, both jaws glistening, dripping red—” he suddenly removes his hero from the human sphere where he was, and puts him in one made of wildlife. He does something else. He makes the slaughter more grievous but more tolerable, because Odysseus has become an animal, and one can expect no less than such relish and such ravening from a lion.

If our King Richard is a lion, he is as brave as the beast is considered to be by those who enjoy careless clichés, because the lion’s fellow creatures know how lazy the snoozy fellow is, and how he prefers to prey upon the weak—ancient antelope and coltish zebras. If Richard is a lion, will he hunt like them? Will he have a pride? Will he wait until his wife has made the kill and then feast? Will its mane be Richard’s beard, and will he run around on four feet? Metaphors have both depth and scope. They are as deep as their context allows us to take them. If the suitors are leeches, has the palace been built in a swamp where leeches lurk? The depth of a metaphor depends upon the number of other metaphors that are implicitly present. “Odysseus did a thousand noble deeds” doesn’t have many offspring, although the sentence itself has two images—the
hyperbolic number of deeds and, possibly, one other, regarding their “nobility.” If Odysseus is not a noble himself, then his noble deeds are metaphorical (he did as nobles do, which might not be noble at all by our lights); but if he is one, then the phrase is somewhat redundant. When the writer extends his metaphor into a conceit (which is the name for such a device) he makes some of the implicit images manifest. For instance, if Telemachus were to complain that the suitors continue to bleed his household white while growing fat and black themselves, he would be developing and deepening his original image. He is saying: they are leeches. I really mean it. And there is a bit of hyperbole in that, because he can’t really mean it.

For how long shall the suitors remain under the mantle of this metaphor? Till the next page? Next book? The remaining epic? Scientific laws have scopes; that is, they have an area of application: Boyle’s law pertains to the behavior of gases; Darwin’s theories have life only in the land of the living and not in the dirt and rock of that land; there is no Oedipus complex for chickens, though there may be one for the cock of the walk. King Richard may be a lion in the fray, but back home he is no fiercer than the baby Jesus. Shakespeare sometimes uses an image to help him organize an entire play. His metaphors are usually both deep and wide.
Finnegans Wake
is ruled by one trope.

So metaphors have depth (or offspring), scope (or extent of application), and a structure, something Aristotle is trying to unearth (if they are buried), disclose or reveal (if they are hidden), lay bare (if they are clothed), or reaffirm (if they have been challenged), stress (if they have been ignored), or reinforce (if they have been weakened). Enough of multiple choice; however, if a writer is to be read seriously she must choose her imagery wisely. Is the structure of a metaphor basically sentential: A is B? And how does it place itself among other meanings: Does it go there secretly? Dressed? Is it buried? Asserted? Proclaimed? Is it fixed like a post, a floorboard, or a roof?

When a part is asked to serve as a whole, or a whole is made to
behave as a part, the justification for the move is often obvious, and indeed a literal statement can easily be mistaken for such a figure; for instance, “Achilles’ blade killed many men.” Since Achilles can wield his sword only by its handle, if he killed those men then his weapon was the instrument, but it is factually the case that only the blade bore the deadly edge, and it was that edge that did them in. Similarly, events that are causally linked to one another can be considered to form “wholes,” and frequently one cause is chosen to bear entire responsibility. A bullet killed President Kennedy, a rifle shot him, and Oswald murdered him, so if I say that the bullet murdered Kennedy I am speaking metaphorically. Bullets don’t lay plans. If I believe that Cubans plotted the Kennedy assassination, I may insist that the Bay of Pigs killed him. To these niceties one is tempted to say, So what? But whether the blade alone did it (having been given magical powers by one of the interfering gods) or Achilles did them in on his own makes a big difference. When the writing is good, to “So what?” there is always an answer.

Aristotle devotes more space to the proportional metaphor (which is a similitude expressed as a ratio) than he does to any other of metaphor’s many kinds. Every one of these ratios will generate more metaphors, but they will generate them differently than Richard’s lionheartedness or Odysseus’s dripping jaws. Aristotle’s first example is, once again, puzzling. “The cup is to Dionysus what the shield is to Ares; one may then speak of the cup as the shield of Dionysus, or of the shield as the cup of Ares.” Is the ratio possible because the cup is what Dionysus, god of the grape, drinks from, and the shield is what Ares, the god of war, fights with; or is it because cup and grape are icons for these deities, and serve for them as heraldic signs; or is it that Dionysus defends himself from the world by getting drunk while Ares simply holds up his shield and cowers behind it? Similarly, we might say: “The elephant is the Republicans’ donkey.”

His second example is famous because it is famous. “Or again,” Aristotle says, “old age is to life as evening is to the day; one may then speak of the evening as the day’s old age, or of old age as the evening
of life or the sunset of life.” This is described as an analogy, but most analogies are literal. “The financial problems that the Smiths are having are analogous to [resemble, are of the same sort] as those the Browns are suffering.” Aristotle’s “old age is to life as evening is to day” is metaphorical because the comparison falls between two different but structurally similar temporal divisions. More such divisions can be readily provided. The proportion is a veritable machine of metaphor. I shall crank out a brief assortment.

1. Evening is the old age of day.
   
2. Old age is the evening of life.
   
3. In the evening of life one remembers the morning with a melancholy fondness.
   
4. These evening eyes no longer see so sharply.
   
5. The day is weary of its work and longs for sleep.
   
6. This symphony is the high noon of Beethoven’s achievement.
   
7. We are in the teatime of this age, and familiar with its doddering.
   
8. Spring is the youth of the year and all its flowers are in school studying how to bloom.
   
9. For this regime it is almost midnight and the ravens sit silent in their trees.
   
10. Who shall care for me; my spring is past, my afternoons a memory, and even evening, to reach its night, must use a cane.
    

But we don’t need my list when we have T. S. Eliot’s famous example:

Proportional thinking began with Plato’s
Republic
. The tripartite division of the soul (the corresponding states of knowledge, opinion,
and ignorance, of childhood, youth, and age, the three classes of citizens and their functions in the state, justice as the harmony of both soul and citizen) gives form to his utopia the way the similarly triune composition of the syllogism provides its dynamic, or, much later, supports the architecture of Kant’s philosophy, and supplies the Hegelian dialectic with its force. We shouldn’t forget, either, Plato’s metaphysical trinity: Being, Non-Being, and Becoming, or his famous assertion that the Idea of the Good is the sun of the spiritual world, a proportion based on light as intelligibility. According to Plato’s remarkable conjecture, our world is a work of art that embodies universal laws. Its qualitative expression imitates those laws, so those laws are, as they appear here, metaphorical.

Occasionally, Aristotle suggests, metaphors are required to provide new names where old ones are lacking. “At times,” he says,

So when the problem set for the student is: if
x
is to sunlight as sowing is to seed, what must
x
be? then the proportional machine will promptly provide the answer: the sun’s rays. It may be worth noting that the theory of light required will have to be corpuscular. But the proportion must be real. “Think of it this way,” Aristotle suggests in the
Rhetoric
, “as a purple cloak is to youth, so to old age is—what? The same garment is obviously unsuitable.” Perhaps we shouldn’t speak of metaphors as being true or false, but some proportions are sound while others are obscure, forced, or skewed. We might rescue this one by associating colors with seasons (from green to gold or gray) and assign green to youth and gray to octogenarians.

A few paragraphs later, Aristotle upgrades metaphor from its place as a rhetorical and poetic trope to that of an important empirical
talent. In the
Rhetoric
he describes metaphor, in addition, as “lucid, pleasing, and strange.” This is well-trodden ground but it remains a minefield. The tradition has it that Aristotle said that the wise use of metaphor was a sign of genius; but it is probably safer to follow Grube’s more restrained version: “The right use of metaphors is a sign of inborn talent and cannot be learned from anyone else; it comes from the ability to observe similarities in things.” It was this ability that broke apart the referents of holophrastic language and is a characteristic of the analytic mind. In an animistic world a bard reciting a historic chronicle might be said to be
oldling
, while a boy saying his sums might be described as
digitmittering
, these words concealing from view any similarities between them—that of reciting from memory, for instance. When these wholes are seen as having parts that are different from one another—the agent, the action, the object of the action, or the qualities of each—then some of these elements can be collected and classified. The American butcher carves his chickens into pieces. He then places all the drumsticks in one cellopack and all the thighs and breasts in another. Plato has told us to carve reality at the joints, but the European butcher cuts his meat differently than we do, suggesting that he has his own principle of division. Nor does he understand why anyone would want to buy twelve chicken legs without thighs. Moreover, with the right sort of kitchen shears we can cut as we please. Nevertheless, to divide, sort, compare, recombine: these are the steps we must take to realize the Aristotelean universal. I shall try to show how metaphors perform them.

But we go forward in the face of Plato’s opposition. He argues that without a prior principle of division no analysis can be made, and without a definition no similarities can be perceived.

Aristotle’s preference for the proportional metaphor may actually hide what Aristotle valued in them. It was not, I would suggest, their meanings that entranced him, even when they were self-explanatory, such as “old age is like fine wine; its bottle may be dusty but its contents rich”; nor was it these metaphors’ structural proportionality
by itself, though that is what gives them their name, but the perception of parallel periods of natural change, sometimes three or four of these, often as many as seven stages (birth through death, dawn till darkest night, planting to harvest or to frost, the ebb and tug of the tide, the full and slivered moon, the needy, gleeful, then sorry phases of love). In the example calling upon the sun’s rays, the structure is built of an action (casting, sowing) and the corpuscular makeup of the sun’s rays. But these proportional metaphors actually are promoting a cyclical view of history, or, at least, a dialectical one, and therein lies their importance.