Farnsworth's Classical English Metaphor. Ward Farnsworth
writers and talkers appear often. We should seek to learn from the best, which means Johnson and Melville and various other distinguished faculty in the permanent college of rhetoric. But we will hear from many other brilliant observers as well, including some who may be less familiar. Another goal of this book, besides those already mentioned, is to call attention to the work of some writers whose genius for comparison is not sufficiently known.
In sum, this is mostly a book about the use of figurative comparisons in English prose (though we will make occasional allowances, such as verse from Shakespeare or examples from the King James translation of the Bible – and there is a little French on the cover because the picture is apt). And it is the prose of certain times and places. This choice of scope has meant the sacrifice of many other worthy sources. Cases of metaphorical achievement might easily be drawn from poetry, most obviously, or from other languages or eras, sometimes with different results. Metaphors help to define the cultures in which they are spoken. If the use of metaphor in our own time is chronicled someday, comparisons to plots and characters from movies, television shows, and sports will no doubt be prominent. But this book is long enough as it is, and in my judgment the sources treated here deserve examination of their own. In many respects they represent a golden age of rhetorical achievement.
There is an additional reason why older sources have an advantage for our purposes. Some of the traditions that we shall see depend on the author’s familiarity with animals, or nature, or mythology. Many people who use words in public live further from those subjects and know less about them than their counterparts did one or two hundred years ago. Their audiences know less about them, too, partly because they live different sorts of lives, partly because the aims of formal education have changed, and partly because writers want to reach a wider range of people than they once did. All this has caused some of the themes illustrated in this book to become endangered. Certain applications may even be considered extinct. To appreciate what those traditions made possible, it is well to seek instruction from writers who were on closest terms with them. We have to go back a bit.
The writers considered here also have something to teach about style. This book is less focused on phrasing than its predecessor was, but the success of a comparison still depends in significant part on the choice and order of the words used to state it. A metaphor tries to create a little event in the mind of the reader – a mental picture, a surprise, a new idea, or all these at once. Getting it right takes a sense of timing and a skill with the paintbrush that has become more scarce. Or so it seems to me; but even if what earlier writers knew about words was no better than what anyone knows today, and even if some features of their styles seem unavailable to us now, their knowledge and instincts were different, and the differences create a chance to learn.
Citations to Shakespeare in the text don’t mention his name. I am betting that readers will know who wrote Hamlet when they see it named, and so for his other plays. In any event, a citation to a source without an author is usually to Shakespeare or to the Bible.
2. The title of the book and some of the comments just made have used the word “metaphor” to refer to figurative comparisons in general. The word will bear that meaning but is also commonly used in a more specific way: a metaphor is a comparison, often implied, in which one thing is equated with another (“all the world’s a stage”), whereas a simile makes the comparison explicit by saying that one thing is like another or using similar language (“he doth bestride the narrow world/Like a Colossus”). The differences between metaphor and simile are discussed in Chapters 13 and 14, but most of the book presents those two kinds of comparisons side by side without fussing over the distinction between them. This may surprise readers who were taught in school to regard the difference between metaphor and simile as the most important point to know about comparisons. That distinction can have definite practical significance, but I do not regard it as the most important idea about our subject; it was a distinction largely ignored in ancient times. Starting with those last two chapters will do no harm, however, if that is where the curiosity of the reader lies; they could as easily have been at the start of the book as at the end. My own interest in the matters discussed there is unlimited, but then my patience for every division of this subject is greater than average.
Occasional comparisons in this book might be considered neither metaphors nor similes because they are not sufficiently figurative in character. A figurative comparison proposes a similarity or identity between two things that appear different in kind, such as a politician and a pig; a comparison of two pigs would not be figurative. We will not trouble ourselves much about that line between those categories here, or about other issues in the theory and philosophy of metaphor. There is a vast and excellent literature on those topics already, and the aim of this book is to do some things not yet done. Let us take as our topic the rhetorical use of comparisons, which typically will have a non-literal component, and be content also to learn from less figurative but effective cases as they may appear from time to time in the pages that follow.
3. Many metaphors are bound up in the etymology of individual words or idioms so common that their figurative character has been forgotten: “running late,” “catching a plane,” and so forth. We will not be concerned with this category, however worthwhile it may be. Some argue that most or all language is metaphorical at bottom, or that most understanding arises from metaphor – still more propositions that have received impressive treatment elsewhere and are outside our scope here. Nor is this book concerned with highly extended metaphors; there are examples from Moby-Dick but the whale is not among them. Our concern is with comparisons that are intermediate in scale – the kind put forward in nothing longer than a paragraph. This focus has its drawbacks. It can cause something less than the full context of a comparison to be presented. To see the entire significance of a metaphor, and to fully judge its fit, may take pages or chapters or a book, and here the sentence is our principal unit of measure. But sentences still provide much to consider, and confining ourselves to brief examples will let each of our subjects be seen from several angles in a short space.
4. I have in general abstained from commenting on individual illustrations. Explanations of metaphors, I have come to feel, are perilously similar to explanations of jokes. Indeed, the metaphor and the joke are cousins with similarities in their frequent use of surprise, in the collisions they create between things with different proportions and status, and in the ways that the truths they express, and the reactions they provoke, can be, as already noted, half-conscious and deceptively profound. Philosophers have noted other similarities as well, but here I am especially concerned with a practical one: a metaphor usually repays contemplation better than it repays analysis or (as in E. B. White’s remark) dissection. The first chapter and the introductions to the others in this book will therefore offer general claims and ideas. In most cases the selection and arrangement of the examples that follow must largely speak for themselves, perhaps with a few observations before or after each set.
5. The theory of this book has been stated but the execution of it is loose. Sometimes examples appear where consideration of them seems most convenient even if they are outside the strict topic of the chapter or heading; they may then be introduced with a “cf.” – meaning “compare (this related example).” This will give no trouble to the reader who understands the organization as just a means to an end: seeing and understanding the range of wonders that rhetorical artists have worked with comparisons. It is an unruly subject that calls for a flexible approach. Maybe a more fitting simile than a museum is a safari in which we will veer from the path as needed to get good views. Any order will do, or almost any: as noted earlier, the book really is not written to be read from front to back; it is meant to invite dedicated but arbitrary perusal (though the first chapter does provide some orientation for the rest). More important than the sequence is the pace, which is best kept leisurely. A well-conceived metaphor usually takes more time to appreciate than a literal sentence, and is worth it.
For comments, suggestions, examples, and good counsel, I wish to thank Kamela Bridges, Daniel Dickson-LaPrade, Bryan Garner, David Godine, David Greenwald, Andrew Kull, Richard Lanham, Michael Lusi, Susan Morse, Brian Perez-Daple, Christopher Ricks, Wayne Schiess, Thomas Stumpf, Jeffrey Walker, and the many rhetoric students, research assistants, and librarians over the years who have contributed to the book in