When
tackling the project of devising a new literary theory, particularly one, if I
say so myself, as bold and revolutionary as the one I am proposing, it is
necessary to engage with the problem of metaphor at some point. This is
obligatory. Literary texts, and I include films in this category, are built
entirely out of metaphors, out of signs and symbols, out of rhetorical tropes.
One cannot understand stories without understanding metaphors. Consequently,
one requires a good theory of figurative language to make headway. Multiple
theories of metaphor vie for supremacy in the critical ball-park but the one I
shall employ here is the simplest: a metaphor is built out of two parts, a
tenor and vehicle. “*The tenor is the subject to which attributes are ascribed.
The vehicle is the object whose attributes are borrowed.” (Wikipedia). An
example of a metaphor is the line from Romeo and Juliet, “What light through yonder window
breaks! It is the East and Juliet is the sun.” Juliet is the tenor and the sun
is the vehicle; the attributes ‘Juliet’ borrows from ‘the sun’ are brilliance
and importance. She is the centre of Romeo’s solar system.
The issue
with literary texts is that we are frequently presented with vehicles without
tenors. It is the job of interpretation to determine the meaning hidden beneath
the filigreed surface. Consider the following poem, “The Rose” by William
Blake.
Oh
Rose, thou art sick!
The
invisible worm,
That
flies in the night
In
the howling storm,
Has
sought out the bed
Of
crimson joy
And
his dark secret love
Does
thy life destroy.
Now, if
one wanted, one could view this poem literally as concerning a flower infested
by a parasite. But this simple interpretation seems to diminish the poem
somehow. Maybe it has a Freudian subtext? Perhaps The Rose is ‘really’ about sexually
transmitted diseases – certainly it seems to be equating love with death. There
is no way to know for sure.
And this
is the problem with literary criticism – there is never any way to know for
sure. This does not stop scholars from making the attempt. The typical move of
interpretation is not from the abstract to the particular but from the
particular to the abstract. Othello is about jealousy; Macbeth is about ambition. The great
modern traditions of literary criticism –psychoanalytic, Marxist, structuralist
(in the Levi-Strauss school), post-colonial, etc – are based on grand abstract
schemas of society and psychology, totalizing meta-narratives. Hamlet simply must be depicting the Oedipal
complex because, in the end, everything is Oedipal (we know this because Freud
said so); The Metamorphesis by Kafka simply must be a Marxist parable
because all real literature is concerned with economic relationships and class
struggle. The advantage of these sweeping theories of everything is that, when
faced with a text that obviously must mean more than it says, one can use them
as a kind of Enigma machine to decipher the secret message that must be hidden
behind it. They are keys to the semiotics of literature.
Included
in the Bible that I keep in the hall is The Song of Soloman. This book is quite simply a
beautifully romantic and sensual love-poem addressed by a young woman to her
paramour– how it ended up in the Old Testament is a mystery to me. It must have
mystified the Church Fathers as well because each chapter begins with an
exegetical note explaining the proper, religious interpretation of the
narrative. The woman is a metaphor for the Church and her beloved a metaphor
for Christ. Consider this passage from the fifth chapter:
3. I
sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh,
saying, Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is
filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of night.
4. I have
put off my coat; how shall I put it on? I have washed my feet; how shall I
defile them?
5. I rose
up to open to my beloved; and my hand dropped with myrrh, and my fingers with
sweet smelling myth, upon the handles of the lock.
6. I
opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone: my
soul failed when he spake: I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him
but he gave no answer.
This
chapter begins with the explanatory gloss: “”1. Christ awaketh the church with
his calling. 2. The church having a taste of Christ’s love is sick of love”.
The exegesis is a tortuous example of the power of the Christian
meta-narrative: everything in the Bible, including in the Old Testament, must
be made to revolve around Christ because Christ, in the end, is the centre of
everything.
The whole
history of literary interpretation is founded on a surface-depth model of
culture and society. Literary texts are cloaked messengers bearing, in
encrypted form to be sure, the profoundest truths about life, love, death and
morality. How can we carry out literary interpretation if we abandon our belief
in depth? How seek out hidden truths when we no longer believe in truth? In the
Preamble to this blog, which contains my most important ideas, I made two
statements that may now seem contradictory. The first of these was: “The
characters, locales, actions and other components of a literary text have double
functions: as particular concrete instances and as representatives of more
abstract ideas.” The other statement was, “In the realm of the soul, there is
no truth – only what people believe.” How can we pursue literary interpretation
and look for the abstract idea concealed behind the metaphor if we lack some
notion of Truth as guarantor? How can I argue, as I did in the previous
posting, that the monstrous dogs in Ghostbusters are symbols for the libido if I am
unsure that Freud really had it right? It seems we have reached an impasse.
There are
two possible ways to resolve this dilemma, different but perhaps complimentary.
The first is to admit that the interpretations of literary texts, like the
literary texts themselves, are essentially rhetorical. They do not disclose the
meanings hidden in poems and stories; rather they are arguments in favour of
particular world-views. They are exercises in persuasion (perhaps even in
propaganda). This first solution seems cynical but is probably realistic. The second
possible solution involves some residual faith in the notion of Truth. When
decoding a metaphor in which the vehicle is present but the tenor unknown, we
can look for contextual clues, in the text itself or in the outside culture. We
do not need to appeal to transcendental apodictic meta-narratives revealed,
perhaps, via special revelation to justify our interpretation. Literary texts
are not produced out of a vacuum; they emerge from a culture and speak back to
it, sometimes changing it. And the culture is the sum total of the texts that
comprise it.
For some reason, the color of the text is screwed up but I don't know how to change it. I hope this doesn't ruin your reading experience.
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