Third Monday Musing: Metaphor

The dove-tailed world

By Eric Meub

Hugh Kenner, in The Poetry of Ezra Pound, gives us a formula for metaphor:

A/B : C/D

Metaphor, says Kenner, “affirms that four things (not two) are so related that A is to B as C is to D. When we say ‘The ship ploughed the waves’, we aren’t calling a ship a plough. We are intuitively perceiving the similarity in two dissimilar actions: ‘The ship does to the waves what a plough does to the ground.’” This gives us:

A/B : C/D : ship/waves : plough/ground

Aristotle, in his Poetics, rated metaphor highest among the poetic gifts:

The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity of dis-similars.

For the next two-thousand years of western literature, metaphor continued to reign as one of the hallmarks of poetic craft.
    But over the past century, metaphor has achieved a novel status as it has shown itself capable of important new functions. Ezra Pound used metaphor to order the sequence and internal workings of his Cantos, and to set up hierarchies of values. He extended the variable in the above formula to include more than just ships and ploughs. Instead he inserted a series of cultural artifacts – letters from the postbags of Sigismundo Malatesta or Thomas Jefferson, snatches of Greek or Neo-Platonic philosophy, extracts from Provençal canzone, lines of Chinese characters from the Analects or Histories, or recollections of other artists and writers he had known, such as Ford Maddox Ford and Henry James.

    In the early Cantos, these building blocks are presented at leisure, but in the later work, the reader is granted little more than a referential tag, so that the flow of overlapping concepts can move with unimpeded swiftness. Kenner illuminates how, in this high-speed slideshow, each Canto consists of “an extended metaphor with no room for metaphoric expressions in the details.” The irritating thing about Pound, of course, is that he expected readers to get his references in exactly the way he meant them. There has likely been only one acceptable reader of his work over all these years, and that has been Pound himself.
    Nonetheless, Pound experts will delight in demonstrating that, in two dozen lines of a late canto, we find a formula like this:

A/B : C/D : E/F : G/H : I/J : K/L …

In Canto 83 for instance, the referenced pairs consist of A, water as the philosophical source of all being and as a fertilizing agent, which is related to B, the intellectual fertilization demonstrated in certain Italian bas-reliefs (giving us the first pair A/B); then C, the medieval concept of light as an accidental manifestation of fire is related to D, the generative moral and social principles of the Renaissance Platonists (the second pair C/D); and thus continuing the associations, reference by reference, intellectual plane by plane, to reach ever higher orders of contemplation. Quite frankly, I’ve always found it impossible to follow any of it without a guidebook, the fault of an education that excluded Greek and Latin. But as Kenner describes the process, it unfolds as a source of profound illumination:

Light comes from juxtaposition: one might pursue the analogies provided by the chain reactions of the modern physicist.

    This is a method that Kenner and Pound refer to as “ideogramic,” since Pound discovered something like metaphor (or he thought he did) in the construction of some of the Chinese characters – what Pound called “ideograms.” The method thus justifies the seemingly straight quotations from letters and history books. The Cantos in their entirety can be read as a pursuit of Aristotle’s “similarity of dis-similars.” This is heady stuff, requiring hyperbolic intellect, encyclopedic perspectives of reference, and a fairly fluent familiarity with six or seven language groups. Why should we care?

Pound’s use of metaphor, though fascinating, is mainly important for setting the stage for more engaging explorations. In a caveat to the above discussion, Kenner makes this aside: “The astute reader will have sensed metaphysical implications here which we have not space to go into.” It seems that space has since been found by many poets of Pound’s and later eras, among them Richard Wilbur.
    Wilbur began his poetic career about the time of the publication of Pound’s most condensed and virtuoso ideogramic experiments: The Pisan Cantos. Wilbur brought the uses and understanding of metaphor to new heights. As Adam Kirsch describes it in The Modern Element,

The condition of metaphor is the capacity of things to be likened to one another; and for Wilbur, as for Emerson, this very capacity suggests that all things share the same essential nature.

For Wilbur, metaphor was the window to the transcendental quality of all things. “I think that all poets are sending religious messages,” he says,

because poetry is, in such great part, the comparison of one thing to another; or the saying, as in metaphor, that one thing is another. And to insist, as all poets do, that all things are related to each other, comparable to each other, is to go toward making an assertion of the unity of all things.

His view is Eastern, abstract, non-relational. He refers to this as a faith in “the dove-tailed world.”

It requires, of course, the female brain to bring this back to earth – three female brains to be precise. Literary theorist Bonnie Craig builds upon the work of philosopher/critic Julia Kristeva in exploring the work of Isabel Allende. In the third chapter of Rewriting American Identity in the Fiction and Memoirs of Isabel Allende, Craig provides a thorough summary of the uses and implications of contemporary metaphor.
    Having discussed, in a previous chapter, the historical and political underpinnings of Allende’s move to California and subsequent application for US citizenship, Craig reviews Allende’s more relational perspectives of cultural and geographic belonging, especially her emotional attachment to her husband Willy. In short, we get to read of love, that one new thing created out of two. But we are hindered at once by the inadequacy of language, which is, according to Kristeva “immediately allusive when one would like it to be most straight-forward; it is a flight of metaphors— it is literature.” Metaphor, to Kristeva, is illuminating; it is “a journey toward the visible.” Just as a ship discovers something of its essence in being likened to a plough, “the object of love is a metaphor for the subject.” And just as the metaphor of ship and plough creates a fuller (one could say more poetic) meaning than either referent contained alone, Craig notes that “a lover and a beloved, two subjects, create a third type of meaning and subjectivity through the act of loving each other.” Love and metaphor; metaphor and love. It’s not a connection I had ever imagined, and it reminded me of Bertrand Russell’s search for a logical syntax in which everything could be recorded.

    But love and metaphors are bound by more than structural coincidences. Kristeva claims that by articulating love, love is created, and love can only be articulated through metaphor. While this doesn’t seem to leave much room for unspoken love (the kind so valued, say, by the male of the species in his most caricatured mode), the insights gained from trying to describe love are indeed of a different nature than the muter version. I myself can neither talk nor write about love without the use of metaphor. Go on: try it yourself. But Kristeva’s point is not merely that love is described, but that it is enacted in this fashion. Love is essentially a creative act.
    Because metaphor (the language of love) requires imagination, “if a person’s ability to imagine is hindered, so too is the person’s ability to love.” I couldn’t help thinking of the opposite stereotype of the lonely artist in his or her garret. But then I recalled the loves of Yeats, and Keats, and Pound himself with his wife and mistress. As Craig concludes, this means that “a person who loves behaves like an artist.” Further, because of the metaphoric nature of love, “who we are as persons is often defined by those we choose to love, and therefore that love results in a dissolution of the prior self.” The ship is a plough making furrows on the sea; the plough, for it own part, sails the field.

Craig’s book, as its title indicates, is about Isabel Allende, and the discussion eventually gets back to the famous author and her conception of national belonging. Since, 1, by experiencing love, “a person lets go of imagined notions of individual subjectivity and instead sees subjectivity as relational,” and since, 2, by writing in literary forms that include metaphor, an author finds her literary subjectivity relational as well, then 3, it should come as no surprise that a metaphorical writer and impassioned lover like Allende should benefit from a relational superfluity that ultimately overflows into her sense of national identity. Just as referenced objects fuse in the process of poetic metaphor, so can elements of culture or nationhood. In Allende’s case, as in many others, it is language that provokes the link: the Spanglish spoken between Allende and Willy “requires a restructuring of identity where the difference of the other is incorporated into the difference of the self.” This fusion of speech— a linguistic metaphor— parallels the fusion of love. The personal identity, along with the cultural and national, becomes collective.
    Craig shows us that Allende herself “draws an analogy between the process of writing and the process of loving.” She quotes Allende in The Sum of Our Days:

To throw myself into another book is as grave as falling in love… With each one, as with a new love, I wonder whether I will have the strength to write it.

There is, as Craig reminds us, “no fixed model of writing just as there is no fixed model of loving.” Both acts are creative, but they are mutually thwarted when engaged in tandem, since “words both allow for the articulation of love and yet can hinder its articulation.” The description of love is never truly controlled by either party, since the love belongs to both. Words must ultimately gain a life of their own: the third identity of the metaphor, which is also the third identity of the loving couple.
    But writing, Craig contends, does not just mimic love, rather “writing becomes a model for the love relationship: a form of creation, renewal, and a translation of desires and feelings into the enactment.” The inter-subjectivity of the act of writing (along with cross-cultural loving) colors every relational aspect of Allende’s life. She surrounds herself not with a family, but with her tribe. She challenges the American Dream’s dogma of individual freedom as reflecting in fact a cult of “alienation and loneliness.” And she regards national and cultural belonging, not as a static product, but as a relational process: “A country, like a husband, is always open to improvement.” She could just as easily have said “like a book.”

At one point in her encapsulation, Craig evokes a sister art: “A helpful analogy to thinking about the experience of metaphors and the experience of love is music, where we are always ‘in’ music…” We are always in music because of its temporal dependence. We can freeze a film and focus on one image; we can ponder a line of dramatic dialogue. Music, however, cannot be frozen; it cannot be contemplated apart from its enfolding in time. We either dive into it or we remain deaf to its enchantments. Unlike the non-temporal arts, music requires a commitment of time, of attention, and of acceptance as we take in this new thing that escorts us from the present moment to a future moment. Like metaphors and love, music is a tangible connector.
    “Music is then the knowledge of that which relates to love in harmony and system,” said Plato. That quote heads the Atlantis section of Hart Crane’s The Bridge. Crane was the most metaphorical of poets, and the most hungry for love. His poetry is, according to critic Harold Bloom, the antidote to Eliot and Pound, and the successor to Whitman. In The Bridge Crane creates an anthem for America, with the Brooklyn Bridge as its altar, harp, arc of freedom, vault of bird-flight, settler’s lariat, sounding organ, and lifted arms of a mourning Madonna in a pietà of broken love. What is a bridge, after all, but a metaphor for metaphor? It is, as such, the hopeful symbol of every kind of human union.

Emerson claimed that all words began as metaphors. The term itself illumines this process: meta- (shared, together) plus -phor (to bear, carry, bring forth). One imagines acolytes bringing gifts, the interlock of wooden joinery holding up a load, or the intertwining fingers of lovers’ hands clasped in affection. Metaphor can be a potent literary tool, as well as a symbol of metaphysical unity. But thanks to Craig and Allende, we are reminded that its influences can be concrete and loving as well, no less profound for being practical.
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Copyright © 2014 by Eric Meub

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