On Metaphor and Interpretation

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.