created the jacket and designed the text with his usual and consummate skill.
Austin, July 2015
Chapter One
Sources & Uses of Comparisons
This chapter will summarize some traditional uses and sources of metaphor and introduce patterns that run between those points. For the sake of overview, let us begin with the uses, or effects, of a figurative comparison. Perhaps no two metaphors are identical in their precise consequences. On a longer view, however, a metaphor usually serves one or more of these general purposes, examples of which will follow shortly:
Making an unfamiliar subject familiar by comparing it to what the audience knows better.
Throwing a familiar subject into a surprising perspective (in effect the opposite of the first purpose just mentioned).
Giving visible form to something inherently invisible, or otherwise making an abstraction available to the senses.
Caricaturing the subject by drawing a comparison that exaggerates some of its features, whether for the sake of ridicule or elevation.
Simplifying a complex subject.
Most good comparisons do more than one of these things, but on inspection one purpose or another often will seem paramount. Such an inspection typically is not conducted, of course; we rarely respond to a good metaphor by asking what function it serves. We admire the justice of the comparison, and find our perception and understanding improved by it, without pausing to notice how it worked. The workings vary considerably, though, and the student of our subject may find it instructive to think about them.
I described those purposes of metaphor as general. By “general” I mean to distinguish the consequences just listed – making a subject simpler, or more familiar, or more visible – from the specific and substantive comment the author means to make. To take a well-known example:
| Portia. The quality of mercy is not strain’d; It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath. | The Merchant of Venice, 4, 1 |
The comparison makes an intangible quality available to the senses. It also makes a claim about the nature of mercy. A comparison to a blizzard would have had similar general effects; it likewise would have made the subject available to the eyes, ears, and skin. But the specifics of what it said about mercy would have been different. The specific aims of metaphor – the particular things that their authors mean to say about their subjects – tend to be individual to each case; they do not lend themselves to systematic discussion. The general aims of metaphor, however, are limited and recurring, and can more productively be made the subject of analysis. And rather than referring vaguely to general and specific effects, it may be more exact to distinguish between the structural consequences of a comparison (shrinking the subject, making it visible, and so on) and the claim the author makes about its subject (the difference between the gentle rain and a blizzard).
Now turn to the material from which metaphors are made. Any metaphor or simile has two ends, or elements: the subject or “target” of it (the thing described) and the source (the thing invoked, to which the subject is compared). The sources from which comparisons are made can be considered as families: they generally may be taken from –
The animal kingdom.
Nature (apart from animals).
Human behavior, circumstances, and institutions.
Stories of various kinds, as from history, myth, or literature.
Man-made objects: machines, architecture, tools, etc.
Those categories might have been carved out differently; there is no reason in principle why animals might not be considered as part of nature, or why human behavior could not be considered part of the same family of material as mythology or literature that depicts it – or, for that matter, part of the animal kingdom. And each category could also be subdivided easily enough. But the divisions just sketched are convenient and tend to separate types of material that have produced different traditions and have been put to different use.
I have suggested that the uses of metaphors and the sources of metaphors are both infinite in detail but not in type; and that while any ordering of those types may be arbitrary in the end, we can draw some lines between them that are intuitive and functional. It remains to consider the interaction between those two sides of the inquiry: the ways in which writers combine the sources of comparisons and the uses of them. The resulting combinations might seem random at first glance, but with study it is possible to identify patterns, or traditions, to which those skilled in the art have returned, and to consider why. For caricaturing humans, the classic sources of material are animals and mythology and people in extreme circumstances; for giving visible form to an abstraction, nature and man-made things are more likely to serve; and we shall see other tendencies, many of them more specific.
The rest of this chapter provides an illustrated and more detailed outline of the themes just listed and claims just made. The chapters to come will then explore them more completely.
1. Uses of comparisons. To return to our first theme: the effects of comparisons vary in their specifics, but their typical and general goals are capable of summary.
a. Comparison to make the subject familiar. Achieving familiarity is a standard purpose of comparison. The speaker wants to describe a face, or an idea, or an experience that the reader hasn’t encountered directly (the subject of the comparison); so the speaker says that it resembles a source the reader has encountered or can imagine more easily. Telling others of a subject foreign to their experience can be done in literal terms, but the audience is more likely to be affected and enlightened if the thing is compared to what they know or can summon to mind.
| The using an elliptical mode of expression (such as he did not use to find in Guides to the English Tongue) jars him like coming suddenly to a step in a flight of stairs that you were not aware of. | Hazlitt, Mr. Gifford (1825) |
| The air of supreme respectability – that was a strange blank wall for his adventure to have brought him to break his nose against. | Henry James, The Ambassadors (1903) |
| I led him up the dark stairs, to prevent his knocking his head against anything, and really his damp cold hand felt so like a frog in mine, that I was tempted to drop it and run away. | Dickens, David Copperfield (1850) |
The experiences and feelings of the speaker are not known directly to the reader but are illustrated by things familiar: the feeling of a frog in the hand. But is it so familiar? Many people have never held a frog or broken their noses, yet the comparisons succeed anyway. They work because the feeling of a frog or a broken nose is familiar to the imagination even if not readily available to the memory (which may, after all, be considered a branch of the imagination). Many comparisons work this way. They make a subject familiar by likening it to a source that is easier to imagine even if the reader knows it no more directly.
b. Comparison for the sake of perspective. Increasing the familiarity of the thing described is often one aim of a metaphor or simile, but sometimes a comparison works the other way around: it throws a too-familiar subject into a surprising perspective, causing the reader to see it from a different point of view. It is taking the reader for a balloon ride, or looking at the subject through one end or the other of a telescope. The effect may be to shrink the significance of the subject, or to cause it to seem enlarged, or to otherwise let an old thing be seen anew. We might regard this as making a familiar subject unfamiliar. Some examples of comparisons that serve this perspective-giving purpose by making their human subjects, or certain features of them, seem small:
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As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods.They kill us
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