A Few Words On Metaphor

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main (John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions)

I have started with the quotation from John Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. I think it is the most famous phrase that people associate with the poet. When reading this sentence or while listening to it we do not need to think about it too much to understand its meaning. Everyone, I guess, understands that the Dean of St Paul’s wrote these words not meaning literally that a man is a piece of land, soil or some beautiful island near Europe. We unconsciously understand these words metaphorically.

What is a metaphor and how to decipher it?

Oxford English Dictionary describes metaphor as ‘a figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is transferred to an object or action different from, but analogous to, that to which it is literally applicable.’ The words resemble those expressed by Aristotle in Poetics some few thousand years ago. For the Greek philosopher a metaphor is ‘the application [to something] of a name belonging to something else, either from the genus to the species, or from the species to the genus, or from a species to [another] species, or according to analogy.’

For many centuries after Aristotle expressed his views, the linguists and rhetoricians followed the path. The major breakthrough came with the early twentieth century and modernism. I. A. Richards in 1936 in Philosophy of Rhetoric introduced the terms tenor for the subject and vehicle for the metaphorical term itself and started the interaction theory of metaphor. In 1954 Max Black continued (although disagreeing with Richards) and proposed to look at metaphor in relation to focus and frame, the interaction between the word written or spoken metaphorically and the frame of the sentence that it exists in. Metaphor does not belong to syntax or grammar, but to semantics. To understand the expression that uses metaphor the reader / listener has to look at the relation between the words in the phrase or sentence that they were uttered within.

If it is not possible to deduce the meaning of the metaphor within the sentence, the meaning can be attained when the unit of metaphor is attributed to the surrounding grammatical structures. To gather the meaning of metaphor it is in many instances necessary to obtain the speaker’s intention in relation to the historical and cultural background that formed the speaker or the reader.

Sometimes it is not possible to know what the author had in mind when (s)he spoke / wrote the words. The cognitive school of linguistics proposes to map the words of the metaphor within the source and target domains. It leads to deducing metaphors in relation to the cognitive aspects of human existence, i. e. spatial relations (up/down), and conceptual metaphor (concept: LIFE IS JOURNEY). The cognitive linguistics blurs the boundaries between the literal and figurative language. It also proposes to include as a form of metaphor other figures of speech, such as simile and metonymy.

Whatever the school or theory we accept as best describing the concept of metaphor, one thing is certain. People instinctively understand metaphors. We may differ in understanding particular metaphors or have difficulties in resolving the puzzle that the poet or our interlocutor just presented us with. Nevertheless, the beauty of language, be it poetry or spoken language, is that it can be understood in different ways thanks to metaphor.

 

 

The sleep of a labouring man is sweet

‘Thou passest out of the world, as a hand passes out of a bason, or a body out of a bath, where the water may be fouler for thy having washed in it, else the water retains no impression of thy hand or body; so the world may be the worse for thy having liv’d in it, else the world retains no marks of thy having been there.’ (Donne, A Sermon Preached at Whitehall. 29 February 1627)

What do we live for? What lasting impressions do we leave throughout our lives? Is it worth carrying-on and trying to develop ourselves? These are the questions that every one of us have asked. And these are the questions that Donne’s sermon tries to answer. Based on the reading from Acts 7.60 the preacher ponders on the meaning and purpose of life. For him, ‘every man is bound to be something, to take some calling upon him (…), every man is bound to do seriously and scedulously, and sincerely the duties of that calling’ and to perform those duties in a best possible way, ‘every man shall do well to propose to himself some person, some pattern, some example whom he will follow and imitate in that calling.’

Firstly, then, to live our lives in full we have to have a passion for something. Secondly, whether it is writing, music, poetry, dance, acting, accountancy, law, medicine, we have to be dedicated to it. Donne preaches: ‘He that stands in a place and does not the duty of that place, is but a statue in that place; and but a statue without an inscription; Posterity shall not know him, nor read who he was.(…) The person must actuate it self, dilate, extend and propagate it self according to the dimensions of the place, by filling it in the execution of the duties of it.’ Thirdly, one to leave a lasting legacy must, according to Donne, aspire to be somebody, ‘be like somebody, propose some good example in thy calling and profession to imitate.’

To follow Donne’s guidance and to live a happy life which, as Horace famously wrote, exegi monumentum aere perennius, one must do what he loves, and do it with all his best abilities so others may follow his example. As the preacher quotes: ‘dulcis somnus operanti, The sleepe of a labouring man is sweete. To him that laboureth in his calling, even this sleepe of Death is welcome.’

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Donne, John, A Sermon Preached at  Whitehall. 29 February 1627. http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/JohnDonne&CISOPTR=3245&REC=5

‘in the womb we are taught cruelty’

In many of his sermons Donne talks about death, the most famous of them being ‘Deaths’ Duel’. There, the preacher states that even the very moment of birth is an ‘exitus á morte, an issue from death, for in our mother’s womb we are dead, so as that we do not know that we live’. Idiosyncratically for Donne the terror of the womb is greater than the terror of the tomb. The position in which the foetus finds itself in mother’s womb is much more vulnerable than the position of a dead person in relation to the prospect of salvation and deliverance from death. Donne argues that the mother’s womb for an unborn child would be as close to it as a grave, ‘or so putrid a prison, (…) if we stayed in it beyond our time, or died there before our time’. Unlike a dead person in the grave, whose carcass becomes nourishment for worms, the dead child in the womb is ‘a murderer, nay, a parricide’ of its mother, ‘her that gave us our first life, our life of vegetation’. In his peculiar way Donne mixes Latin phrases with the ‘vulgarity’ of English words to make his stance and to emphasise the dangers of not-living. He compares the dead-like state of the unborn to the Pharisees when paraphrasing Christ’s words from Mark 8.18: ‘In the womb we have eyes and see not, ears and hear not’. Nevertheless, his main concern is the danger of a prenatal or a postnatal death of an unbaptized baby. The promise of salvation for a Christian soul lies in the sacrament of baptism and therefore an unborn child is deprived of the prospect of achieving eternal life. While in the womb the foetus exists in a state between life and death; as Donne explains in the sermon: ‘There in the womb we are fitted for works of darkness, all the while deprived of light; and there in the womb we are taught cruelty, by being fed with blood, and may be damned, though we be never born’.

Although the moment of birth is an exitus á morte and brings the prospect of salvation, it is only another stage in the cycle of deaths in what Donne regards as life. To read more of that, check out John Donne, 1631,’ Death’s Duel’.

Farewell, my lovely

I have recently read two novels for my study: Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely. The first point is that they are quite interesting in spite that they are crime fiction, and the second that they are similar. I’ d rather concentrate on the second point and I’ll try to point out why I think they are so similar.

They were written in 1930 and 1940 in America by two American writers. They belong to the genre called hard-boiled crime fiction. When you read them you don’t concentrate on the murder or other crime that has been committed but on the action. The plot in both of them is simple. Someone is murdered and a detective (private eye) tries to solve the mystery. Doing that he (because a detective has to be a white, tough guy) is involved in a series of strange and dangerous actions. He might be shot, beaten and seduced by a woman. A woman. Not an ordinary one but by a femme fatal – a very beautiful, sexy and dangerous.

The action takes place on the dirty streets of a big American city. You meet there guys from an underworld as well as some posh people. It doesn’t matter who’s who, they are all corrupted. When you read these books you can imagine these lively cities that don’t sleep where round the corner hides some guy with a gun. The books are written as they were a script for a Hollywood film with Bruce Willis as a privet eye on his quest for justice. Die Hard?

I want to come back to a femme fatal character because it is fascinating. Below you can find some contemporary example of her in a pop world. This is No doubt’s video for their cover version of Talk Talk’s It’s my life. Enjoy :).