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The Function of Metaphor
Ron Bontekoe
Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 20, No. 4, 1987. Published by The Pennsylvania
State University Press, University Park and London.
209
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210 RON BONTEKOE
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THE FUNCTIONOF METAPHOR 21 1
which he calls the vehicle. Neither the tnor nor the vehicle carries
with it, merely by virtue of being composed of words, an unalter-
able meaning of its own; but each of them does carry with it a
sries of associations tying it in our mind to the sort of context that
this word or phrase has previously appeared in. Thus what occurs
when the tnor and vehicle are brought together is an irruption of
one context upon another. Metaphor, as Richards defines it, is
what results from the interaction of thse two contexts.
In this interaction, however, something more and something
other is said than could hve been said without recourse to meta-
phor. In order to understand why this is th case, we must recog-
nize that meanings, insofar as they pre-exist their own embodiment
in discourse, hve the potential to lie outside the boundaries of
what is expressible by means of words used in their customary
fashion. There are, in other words, semantic lacunae- meanings
for which there are, as yet, no words. If we consider again our
"sunset of life" example, it is clear that "last years" only roughly
approximates the intended meaning of "sunset." What this meta-
phor conveys, after all, is not only th idea of an ending, but also,
and more importantly, th idea of fullness, of naturai completion.
In the sunset of life there is an appropriateness to the approach of
death that parallels the appropriateness of the coming on of night
at th end of a day. By th transference of th word "sunset" from
its ordinary context to a context relating to the subject of human
life, its connotations of due completion are put to work in a new
way, what Ricoeur calls "a commerce between thoughts"3has oc-
curred, and a meaning which could not hve been effectively or
elegantly stated by means of words used in their customary fashion
has nonetheless achieved expression.
Because in many instances metaphor provides a more precise
way of saying something than plain speech affords, certain critics,
among them T. E. Hulme and J. Middleton Murray early in this
Century, and Philip Wheelwright more recently, hve concluded
that the purpose of poetic metaphor is to provide th most accurate
possible description of the real nature of things. In Metaphor and
Reality Wheelwright explains:
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212 RONBONTEKOE
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THE FUNCTIONOF METAPHOR 213
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214 RON BONTEKOE
"feel of things," and the reader who would insist upon reading "is
like" for "is"in every metaphor he encounters must be cramped by a
most unpoetic fear of getting his facts wrong.
Following Heidegger, Ricoeur laments the effects that the tech-
nological viewpoint has had upon modern man's sense of belong-
ing to the world, and he sees in metaphor's concentration on "the
textural feel of things" at the expense of the "actual things-of-
feeling"9 a way of counterbalancing those effects. "Poetic dis-
course brings to language a pre-objective world in which we find
ourselves already rooted but in which we also project our inner-
most possibilities." Metaphor promises to be the means by which
we may "dismantle the reign of objects in order to let be, and to
allow to be uttered, our primordial belonging to a world which we
inhabit, that is to say, which at once prcdes us and receives the
imprint of our work."10The quality which uniquely fits metaphor
for this task is its fusion of the powers of discovery and cration.
(In every metaphor there is both a creative leap and a discovery of
the resemblance without which that leap would be meaningless.)
This fusion of powers enables us, through metaphor, both to do
justice to the nature of the world in which we find ourselves and
yet creatively to establish our own relationship to that world. Fi-
nally, while the technological viewpoint reduces all things to a
standing reserve waiting for our use,11thus deadening our sense of
their value, metaphor, as lively expression, "is that which ex-
presses existence as alive,"12thus guaranteeing for us the value of
the world and ensuring that we belong to it, and not it to us.
The sweeping altrations in man's relationship to his world
which Ricoeur feels metaphor has the power to bring about are, of
course, not going to be effected by the occasionai use of metaphor
in everyday speech. What is needed is for man to adopt a meta-
phoric case of mind- to think and communicate like a poet. Here,
however, it seems to me that we encounter a gap in Ricoeur's
treatment of metaphor. He has not seriously enough considered
the implications of the fact that metaphor is only one aspect of
poetic discourse. If we are to think like poets, we must first recog-
nize that the poet not only produces metaphor, but he uses and
subordinates it in order to arrive at what is of final interest to him,
the compie ted poem.
What is it precisely that the poet is attempting to do in the
writing of a poem? Until we hve an answer to this question it
seems to me that we cannot possibly expect to arrive at an ade-
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THE FUNCTIONOF METAPHOR 215
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216 RON BONTEKOE
The reason why description is not part of the poet's task is because
description is the characteristic activity of scientists.18Thus if the
poet engages in description, he is drawn away from the interface
where it is his duty, as poet, to remain. Reality, as Whalley sees it,
"is immersion or relationship, [and] for a person, relationship is
feeling."19The poet is the man whose contemplative nature com-
pels him to sustain- through th medium of highly organized
language- his richest states of feeling until they are fully devel-
oped and they have discovered themselves to him in all of their
complexity.
How is this accomplished? Whalley, following the lead of T. S.
Eliot,20 suggests that poetry should be understood as a kind of
music- a music, however, primarily of meanings rather than of
sounds. In his essay on "Hamlet," Eliot argues that
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THE FUNCTIONOF METAPHOR 217
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218 RONBONTEKOE
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THE FUNCTIONOF METAPHOR 219
And yet there can be no doubt that within the context of "Pru-
frock" this metaphor works. As Whalley points out (and hre
again we find Richards making a comparable claim),30 "in Poetic
the most outrageous inconsistencies can be the most characteristic,
and often secure the most powerful effects. In Poetic there is only
one test: it must 'work', it must 'fit'; every lment must drop
inevitably and finally into place to fulfill a purpose which is not
fully known until it is fulfilled."31Hre again poetry demonstrates
its affinity to music, where one chord follows another because it is
called for, not by a need accurately to represent the thing, but by
the nature of our emotional response to various patterns in sound.
Poetry, like music, is finally inaccessible to logic. To see ratio-
nally why a particular metaphor should or should not work in a
poem is no guarantee that it will or will not. And precisely because
metaphor is a nonlogical phenomenon, Whalley argues,32the at-
tempt to analyze it in terms of an "A is/is not " schema will
necessarily prove fruitless. But why is this? Is it not possible that
metaphor may be, in some respects, nonlogical and yet still be
illuminated by Ricoeur's schema? I think not. Consider, for exam-
ple, the difficulties encountered when we attempt to analyze in this
way the most problematic (which is to say the most antilogical)
type of metaphor, the Oxymoron.
Life is death.
The "is" hre, as in all metaphors, is itself to be understood meta-
phorically according to Ricoeur. What this involves is a rcognition
of a tension between the declared Statement "life is death" and the
implicitly understood "life is not death." This seems reasonable,
but it is important to bear in mind that this tension between the
declared is and the implicit is not is meant to account for metaphor,
and not to incorporate it. In other words, as Ricoeur sees it, the
metaphor is constituted by the declared affirmation, the implied
ngation and the tension maintained between them. If the meta-
phor is composed (in part) by an affirmation and a ngation, how-
ever, neither the declared is nor the implied is not can itself be
meant metaphorically without rendering the account of metaphor
circular.
Bearing this in mind, let us return to our example. We have, of
course, no difficulty in accepting literally the implied "life is not
death." Is it possible, however, to take the declared "life is death"
in anything other than a metaphorical sense? What could we mean
by this if we intended it to be taken non-figuratively? That, all
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220 RON BONTEKOE
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THE FUNCTIONOF METAPHOR 22 1
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222 RON BONTEKOE
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THE FUNCTIONOF METAPHOR 223
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224 RON BONTEKOE
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THE FUNCTION OF METAPHOR 225
Department of Philosophy
University of Toronto
Notes
After this article was accepted for publication hre, it appeared (with our permis-
sion) in Information/Communication 6 (Phonetics Laboratory Working Papers),
Toronto, 1986- ED.
1. Aristotle, The Basic Works of Aristotle, d. Richard McKeon (New York:
Random House, 1941), 1457b 6-7.
2. Ibid., 1459a 5.
3. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto: Univer-
sitv of Toronto Press, 1977), 80.
4. Philip Wheelwright, Metaphor and Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press. 1962), 46.
5. Ibid., 172.
6. Ibid., 166-67.
7. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 249.
8. Ibid., 247-48.
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226 RON BONTEKOE
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