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Commentary
Jonathan Culler
stout vessel. The bark of a tree is its defence: that by which the tree is
defended from the weather, etc.
The bark of a dog is that by which we are defended by that animal.2
The nouns of our language are not arbitrary signs but metaphors, moti-
vated by a resemblance with a primitive arbitrary sign (bar). So once
again we are brought up short by a fundamental paradox: an ap-
proach which makes the proper use of language an arbitrary naming
deploys all its energy in showing that language as we know it is im-
proper, metaphorical, and, for that very reason, eminently natural
and rational. Along this road paradoxes and contradictions continue
to accumulate; if one cannot fight one's way through to a coherent
discourse the best strategy is to retreat and try another road.
II
The via rhetorica seems at first to offer firm ground: we are en-
joined to locate ourselves firmly within language and to study one
specific type of usage. In metaphor one name is replaced by another,
and the task of the student of metaphor, on this model, is to investigate
the types of replacement, the various relations between intended mean-
ing or tenor and expression or vehicle. The via rhetorica, which
Aristotle was only the first to explore, leads to a typology such as
Tzvetan Todorov offers. Among the relations between one verbal
form and another-between what is meant and what is said-meta-
phor comprises one group, as opposed to the relations of other figures,
such as synecdoche and metonymy. This approach, as Paul Ricoeur
notes, works best for the least interesting metaphors, those "raids
on the bestiary" where the sign replaced by the animal name is
ready to hand. Problems arise in the case of creative metaphors
where we find translation difficult, either because we know what object
the metaphor refers to but are uncertain about the precise grounds
of comparison (e.g., Shakespeare's "bare ruined choirs where late the
sweet birds sang"), or because we grasp the general tenor of the meta-
phor but are uncertain what it is replacing (e.g., Eliot's "I have heard
the mermaids singing, each to each"). In these cases it is not easy
to define the relevant relations between the initial object, the meta-
phorical expression, and the qualities ascribed to the object by that
expression; but this does not make them less metaphorical than the
2 Diversions of Purley (London, 1805), II, 182-83. Quoted by Hans Aarsleff,
The Study of Language in England, 1780-i860 (Princeton, 1967), pp. 63-64.
COMMENTARY 223
III
5 Ibid., p. 77-
6 Ibid., p. 2 16.
7 Ibid., p. 217. The French reads "comment . . . eit-on pu parvenir a retracer
ces idees?" which does not mean, pace Derrida's translator, to "trace these ideas
back to their origin." The ideas exist virtually in the mind and are traced,
recaptured, represented by the new sign.
COMMENTARY 225
I It is, however, important to point out, pace Weimann, that the error of
image-criticism was not excessive formalism and that indeed there is nothing
formalistic about it. To relate "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" to
methods of primitive warfare is immediately to reduce form to content without
even allowing the content of the speech to take shape. To prefer the content
implied by isolated words (the verbal material of the play) to the content of
words as organized by and in the dramatic structure is the most radical of
content-centered approaches and the furthest remove from a formalist approach
to metaphor. For an example of the latter see G'eoffrey Hartman, "The Voice of
the Shuttle," Beyond Formalism (New Haven, 1970).
12 Canonical metaphors, such as "George is a fox," do not have these exalted
poetic functions. Indeterminate metaphors, such as "I have heard the mermaids
singing each to each" may do so (only because they are not simple figures of re-
placement), but so may metonymies, synecdoches, and other stimuli to interpretive
displacement, if in their context they have the right kind of ambiguity.
COMMENTARY 229