There is something magical about saying a thing is something that it obviously is not. Children know this instinctively. Calling a shoebox a castle, or a pencil a scepter, can elicit momentary raptures of delight in a child: not primarily for the functional reason that it allows him to immerse himself in an imaginary story, and certainly not because he thinks the shoebox is a castle, or the pencil is a scepter, but chiefly because it’s a thrill to think of something in a different way by calling it by another name.
Later, let’s say in preadolescence, he will discover the addictive pleasures of assigning inapposite words to people and things he wishes to injure or control. He calls his brother a rat, his school an asylum, his math teacher a cow. Not great instances of wit, to be sure, but in calling people and things by the wrong signifiers—by turning them into metaphors—he in some way transforms them.
Which is why metaphors are everywhere. Sometimes they clarify; more often they confuse. Sports commentators speak almost exclusively in metaphors. “Romero needs to step up. . . . After the injury last week, Rodgers is a huge question mark. . . . The Seahawks aren’t yet a dynasty.” I sometimes think the popular but widely hated phrase “it is what it is” was invented simply to provide a bit of relief from all these metaphors.
Some of the fiercest arguments in our politics revolve around metaphors: debt ceilings, glass ceilings, cooling effects, reset buttons, political footballs. Massive and largely deleterious governmental interventions have been carried out under the guise of metaphorical appellations: the War on Poverty, Head Start, No Child Left Behind, and many others. Indeed, it’s almost a safe assumption that any time you hear politicians or bureaucrats using a metaphor to describe what they want to do, they’re up to no good. The 2009 stimulus bill, remember, was supposed to “jump-start the economy.”
Good metaphors force you to think about the things they reference in fresh ways. There aren’t very many good ones, though. They’re mostly concocted for the purpose of coercing you into changing your opinion. They annoy and distract rather than illuminate.
Denis Donoghue takes a far more sanguine view of them. In Metaphor—a loose, at times digressive series of essays on a literary device that’s almost impossible to define with precision—he consistently downplays metaphors’ power to confuse. He includes a chapter on writers who’ve expressed apprehensions about the use of metaphors—Hannah Arendt, for instance, ridiculed the way psychoanalysis depends on the metaphor “peak of the iceberg” to conceptualize consciousness—but Donoghue backs away from any serious criticism of metaphors and the uses to which they’re put. He can only think of one metaphor that effectively deceived: President Clinton’s use of the phrase “move on.”
Donoghue’s tolerant view of metaphor robs this book, to my mind, of some of its power. Why, after all, have poets and novelists struggled to find the right metaphor, treating the device almost as a dangerous thing, if it doesn’t even have the power to mislead?
Donoghue’s definition is a disarmingly simple one: A metaphor is “the transfer of a word from its proper or ordinary position in a sentence or a phrase to a position alien to that or distant from it.” A number of critics have all but equated metaphor and simile—John Middleton Murry thought a metaphor was just a “compressed simile.” Donoghue rightly disagrees. Similes ask only that you observe likenesses; metaphors ask you to imagine.
Metaphors go wrong more easily than similes do: You can always say that two things bear some similarities and sound plausible; saying one thing is the other thing while still sounding plausible is far trickier. Yet a well-placed metaphor can grab your attention far more effectively than even the most powerful simile.
“In a simile,” writes Donoghue, “the things compared are not altered by the comparison,” whereas metaphors somehow change the things they reference. Drawing on I. A. Richards’s terms “tenor” (the thing or action needing explication) and “vehicle” (the thing or action whose qualities are borrowed), Donoghue suggests that “the minimal requirement in a metaphor is that the tenor is changed by the vehicle; not replaced by it or superseded but changed in quality or character by the new company it is made to keep.”
One could cite plenty of examples, but consider the greatest. If Jesus had said “This is like my body” and “This is like my blood,” Christians would have naturally assumed he was merely teaching his disciples some important principle or doctrine, as he had done on many previous occasions. But by saying “This is my body” and “This is my blood,” he was manifestly saying something far bigger. The more suggestive metaphorical wording gave rise to endless and oftentimes acrimonious disagreement, but no one in any Christian tradition thinks Jesus was merely drawing attention to similarities in order to get his point across. That is the power of metaphor.
Donoghue does not explain this point with great efficiency, and instead gets tangled up in a subject far too complex for a book as limited in scope and stylistically discursive as this one is—namely, the symbolic relationship between the Old and New Testaments in Christian theology. He seems to have relied on whatever books lay nearest to hand. Erich Auerbach’s once well-known essay on the metaphorical uses to which the New Testament puts the Old Testament, for example, has not improved with age; indeed, it’s shallow and frequently just wrong. When Auerbach writes that Paul’s epistles “are intended to strip the Old Testament of its normative character and show that it is merely a shadow of things to come”—lines quoted by Donoghue in an effort to move his argument forward—Auerbach has to ignore the many passages in which Paul quotes the Old Testament in order to urge his readers to live according to their normative standards. (In any case, the phrase “a shadow of things to come” was written by the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, not by Paul.)
Nor does Donoghue get any reliable help from John Henry Newman, who argued in A Grammar of Assent that Jesus, by declaring himself “Son of Man” and “Son of God”—terms “declaratory of the two natures of Emmanuel”—“separates Himself from the Jewish Dispensation, in which he was born, and inaugurates the New Covenant.” Newman has it precisely wrong: The term “Son of Man,” Jesus’ favorite self-designation, is drawn straight from the Old Testament and has nothing to do with his human nature.
The brilliance one expects from Donoghue is intermittently evident here. He upends linguist George Lakoff’s contention that by using bellicose metaphors for the idea of argument (e.g., “he attacked Smith’s assumptions”) people too often think of arguments as war and conduct themselves accordingly. Says Donoghue: “Wars end, if they do, in peace, sometimes with formal treaties. . . . [F]urther, if rhetoric is the art of persuasion, Jack may reach a point in the argument at which he says: ‘Jilly, I think you’re right, I’ll vote for Obama after all, with some misgiving.’ ”
Donoghue also composes a bracing takedown of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Keats, he says, crams three big unexplained metaphors into the first three lines—Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, / Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time, / Sylvan historian. . .—and gives away his argument by using the word “unravish’d” before the reader has any clue why a bride would be unravish’d. I am not sure I agree, but he makes a case.
Still, much of Metaphor is needlessly difficult to read. The chapters are discursive to the point of being aimless, and the author has an irritating tendency to assume his readers know as much as he does, which is a great deal. When he writes “Newman,” you just have to know that he means Cardinal John Henry, and quotations from French sources are usually not translated. The book is also haphazardly organized: Donoghue quotes a paragraph from a letter by Franz Kafka (the English translation, mercifully), then quotes the same paragraph a few pages later, with no indication that it’s been quoted before. The fourth chapter is titled “It ensures that nothing goes without a name,” but the words themselves, originally those of Quintilian, don’t appear until the sixth chapter.
That a writer as accomplished as Denis Donoghue could produce such a book on a topic about which he is so well-suited to write is deeply disappointing. But it is what it is.
Barton Swaim is the author of Scottish Men of Letters and the New Public Sphere: 1802-1834.
