From Milton to McEwan: the beauty of metaphor
In a subtle, engrossing book, Denis Donoghue looks at why we describe one thing as another
There are those who regard the availability of metaphor as a blessing, an enhancement of the ranges of life. In one of the epigraphs to Denis Donoghue’s subtle and engrossing new book, the poet John Donne, with the faintest of apologies for a possible irreverence, calls his maker not only “a literall God” but also “a figurative, a metaphoricall God”.
Of course we are not to think of God himself as a metaphor, but we find in his words, Donne says, “such a height of figures, such voyages, such peregrinations to fetch remote and precious metaphors” that God seems to fly while every human author crawls. Voyages, fetch, remote, precious: the terms, here used positively, suggest the distance from humble, present reality that is deplored by the enemies of metaphor, from John Ruskin to Susan Sontag and beyond. How often do we use “far fetched” as a compliment?
Donoghue suggests that even Aristotle, who said “a command of metaphor” was “the mark of genius”, “felt queasy” about the process. Why is it, as George Eliot asks in The Mill on the Floss , “that we can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by saying it is something else?”
She is half-joking, in her rather earnest way, but the definition is basic and still current, and Donoghue uses it in much the same form if with quite a different tone. “On the face of it a metaphor . . . is bizarre. Why say that something is something else?”
More elaborately, and with ironic caution, he announces, “We are engaging in metaphor when we see, or think we see, or propose to see, one thing in the light of another.” Why is this a blessing or a worry, and do we have to take sides?
Not entirely. Or perhaps we do, but our decisions will depend on the case and the day. One question is whether we can manage without metaphor, whether the idea of dispensing with it is a delusion. We can certainly get along without metaphor some of the time – although “get along” would be an instance of how easily it returns. As Donoghue says, “ ‘The literal’ is rampant with metaphors, new and old.”
That is, if we can’t call things by their proper names because we are not Adam we can at least, to quote Eliot again, “call things by the same names as other people call them by”. But then some of these same names are going to be metaphors, and how long will it be before we ask a friend to pull herself together or conquer her fear?
“There are no dead metaphors,” Donoghue persuasively says, “only sleeping ones”, wittily conjuring up a tribe of such snoozers: the heart of the matter, in the fullness of time, the leg of the table, the heel of the hunt, comfort zone, brass tacks, the leaf of the book, picture of health, a wild goose chase, presence of mind, creature of habit, towering oaks, wolf in sheep’s clothing, Freudian slip, no-win situation, toxic assets, push comes to shove.
The case against metaphor here is no case at all, as these sleeping tropes are just doing the same work as their literal cousins, fuzzily referring to whatever these phrases usually refer to.
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