Life Sentences (38 page)

The syntax of the most modest metaphor (and what makes a metaphor modest, one might ask?) is [(subject) {copula} (predicate)]: Penelope’s suitors are leeches. Determining what happens when a predicate modifies or attaches itself or couples with a subject is most difficult. Aristotle believed that (1) an identity is asserted (Sophocles is the author of
Antigone
), or (2) the class the subject belongs to is included in the class the predicate defines (tragedies are plays), or (3) the subject is said to be a member of the predicate’s community (Sophocles is a playwright). In these cases, however, it is important to observe that, although the predicate is presumed to be
about
the subject (Sophocles is the author of
Antigone
), in two of them it is the subject that is the subordinate entity, either as a member of a class, or as a class included in a class. The subject syntactically finds its way to the predicate. Sophocles aspires, he knocks, he is admitted, but the class of playwrights remains indifferent. For Plato, on the other hand, a proposition asserts that the two forms that make up the subject and predicate meld or blend the way the ingredients of sauces or stews do, and the predicate becomes a property of its subject. Aristotle’s interpretation is called extensional (because of its spatial treatment of classes and the verb
to be
), while Plato’s is called intentional (for no reason I have ever understood). Another example: for Aristotle, when the schoolhouse is made red, the schoolhouse enters the class of red things, and predicates made of adjectives become nouns (red things); while for Plato the schoolhouse gets
painted by that property so that a compound noun subject is formed, namely redschoolhouse, no doubt in honor of the German language that would arrive one day.

What about those suitors? They are making merry. They are bleeding the blood bank. So the leech becomes their predicate. But now it does not modify its subject in any ordinary way. Only in Kafka could they really become leeches. The literal account that lurks near Telemachus’s figure of speech would say that Penelope’s suitors are greedy guests; they are guys seeking to marry money; they are lotharios looking to get lucky with a lovely and languishing widow. Because Penelope’s suitors are greedy guests, and greedy guests are costly to feed, Penelope’s suitors are costly to feed. But notice something that Aristotle did not. He regarded universal affirmative propositions as having the form: all S is P, but we now know that these seemingly confident assertions are hypothetical and have a different structure: if
x
is a suitor, then
x
is a greedy guest. But only if.

The modification that a metaphor makes is far-reaching, reciprocal, and complex. The predicate of a metaphor may be interpreted as a lens through which the subject is observed. The predicate is a historically ragged system of meanings that are used to interpenetrate a similarly unkempt collection of concepts kept like house pets by the subject term. That is why many other metaphors are engendered by the parental one. When Odysseus eyes a little island near where the Cyclops lives that is uninhabited and ripe for development, he says, “No mean spot, it could bear you any crop you like in season. The water-meadows along the low foaming shore run soft and moist, and your vines would never flag.” Homer does not say: these swamps are meadows, or even meadows of water, according to Robert Fagles, but water-meadows. What a lovely thought. I have seen such quiet stretches in a shallow lake where flocks of ducks light and delve over the terrain like grackles in a field of grain.

If we don’t have a word for these soothing patches of resting water, perhaps a metaphor can supply them. This is certainly a function Aristotle finds appropriate. Such a metaphor divides one kind
of water from another. It suddenly sees a certain stretch as pasture the way, in the mountains, tableland sometimes appears between peaks. But it does so violently, melting soil into moisture, reclaiming a length of lake for the land. Yet we can let this new name claim its referent by pointing to the way swamp grass grows up through the water until the surface disappears. Here hippos might wade or buffalo browse.

The legitimacy of the image is demonstrated by carrying it to lengths, but this exfoliation also “explains” it, leaves the image without a shred of mystery, unpacks its bag and tosses the contents on a bed, as I did by explaining that old age was like fine wine because its contents were rich. However, Homer’s favorite images are often developed prior to their application. For instance, when the suitors are being slaughtered,

Metaphors announce themselves by being rowdy and by violating rules, either of syntax, as in E. E. Cummings’s line “anyone lived in a pretty how town,” or of semantics, by being manifestly false to fact, like, “I have a million dishes to do,” or logically out of whack, such as Andrew Marvell’s famous line, “annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade,” or Homer’s phrase, just mentioned, “lusting for fresh salt sea,” if indeed it is Homer’s and not the translator’s; and, finally, pragmatically, by committing breaches of custom or decorum, for instance, the man who tips his tie instead of his hat in the presence of ladies, or the man who brushed his teeth with
motor oil. Simply not done. Often it is only the context that lets us know why. “His teeth glistened so agreeably, he must have brushed his teeth with motor oil.”

Sometimes, the vacation that metaphor takes from normality is set up by the poet himself, who reuses some earlier lines. Homer is fond of this trick. In the
Iliad
he tells us how a hurled spear, missing its mark, struck the ground: “… it was buried in the earth, and the butt of the weapon quivered; then mighty Ares took away its force.” Our own eyes have no doubt verified this effect. But at another time the implement does not miss: “The spear was fixed in his heart, which in its palpitation made the butt of the weapon, also, quiver; then mighty Ares took away its force.” G. S. Kirk, who cites this passage, does not approve, calling the image “artistically rather absurd,” but we have read Kafka by now and may love the reversal of cause and effect. On another occasion, when so impaled by the pitiless bronze, the victim’s eyes fall out. Stricken warriors regularly fall from the “well-wrought chariot” and their horses scatter. The death of combatants in movie Westerns is similarly standardized as they solemnly clutch their chests and slowly topple from stagecoach or rooftop to the mattress below. Then suddenly, Homer will have one of the slain fall headfirst into some soft sand so his legs and feet show and the horses trample over them. If this happened in the movies, it would be regarded as a form of slapstick, a visual joke, and very funny. Image B becomes a metaphor for image A.

Comparisons are commonly literal. “George is taller than Paul.” “George is as easily riled as Steve.” “Her hand was like ice”; that is: both were cold. But look what can happen when a bit of warmth is applied. “Her hand was like ice and melted in mine.” Simile signals—words like
like
and
as
and
as if
—can themselves be used metaphorically. “His words were like cannon shots and scattered the populace.” When Aristotle analyzes imagery he does so in the same way he translates Greek sentences for the syllogism. “Her hand was a member of the class of icy things.” “Icy things are included in the class of things that melt.” Therefore, “Her hand was a member of
the class of things that melt.” The predicate must always be the name of a class.

What a metaphor does, I think, is make a model; it makes a model the way the sciences often do; its construction resembles the pattern so ably outlined by Stephen Toulmin in his little book
The Philosophy of Science
. Let us begin with some examples from that arena.

Imagine a lone and leafy tree in the middle of a glade. The bright sun beats down upon it the way the Sungod hammered the netted fish. Beneath the tree, however, there is a cool pool of shade, the silhouette of the oak whose height seems so striking we grow curious about it. But unless a little bird tells us, we can only guess how tall it’s grown. Can Odysseus, the wise and crafty one, help us out? Under his direction we gather a lot of empirical data, particularly the length of the silhouette. That shadow suggests to us that if we thought of the sun’s rays as straight lines, as corpuscular beams, we might be able to understand our phenomenon in terms of Euclidean geometry, for we now have, to assist us, our disheveled empirical data on the one hand, and an abstract system of great power, coherence, and rationality on the other. The trick is to get the data into the demonstrator, which the principle of the rectilinear propagation of light will do for us. It was once taken to be a law, but it is now understood more commonly as a rule of representation.

If the ground contains the length of the tree’s shadow, seen as a line, and the path of the light another, then a measure of the angle of its fall will allow us to construct a triangle whose perpendicular will be the height of the tree. What we must remember is that it was Euclid who gave us this knowledge, for we know quite a lot about right triangles, and so much less about the heights of trees. Our perceptions have been made to work within a system; they are now related to one another in a significant way; and the mind has made of the tree and its shadow in the glade an abstraction—a model—and if experience counts for anything, we know that models are always far prettier than the clothes they wear.

Let us move for a moment to another example. When Galileo presented the formula “distance equals velocity times the time,” he
performed a similar model-making action, for the law emerges from a diagram. On an x-axis, he marked out the velocity of his object on a unitary scale, and on a y-axis he did the same for time. These he saw as the sides of a rectangle whose area he could calculate very simply. Again, by representing data as lengths of a line, measured visual observations could be squeezed into Euclid. Let a point be an object, let the point’s moving path be a line, its movement that line’s length. Does the rectangle formed resemble its phenomena? Not in the least, apparently.

Suppose the world were a model. It would embody the Forms but would not resemble them. Its mimesis would be beyond copy in its subtlety. Its structure would be quantitatively graspable by the mind, its appearance appreciated mostly by the senses.

What happens when a model swallows another model? The same thing that occurs when one metaphor engulfs another. If Galileo made the practice and observations of kinetics into the science of mechanics, Descartes elevated everything by transforming geometry into algebra, and with that amazing move making calculus possible. Now, in what ways do metaphors manage similar operations?

One of the most mesmerizing though repellent images in the
Odyssey
occurs after Odysseus has slain the suitors like baby seals. The women who serviced Penelope’s beaux, while they were waiting to find the favor of his wife are made to scrub the bloody gut-strewn halls and carry corpses out into the courtyard to prop them against the colonnade the way, in our West, bandits were propped on boards to have their lifeless faces photographed. The earthen floors were scraped clean with spades by the herdsman of Telemachus, and the dirt taken outside by the same condemned women, who were then herded into a cul-de-sac and hanged in a line—on a line—by this son and heir of our hero.

That last pause before “not for long” has been much admired.

What is crucial to the success of this Homeric image is its implicit time line. Here is a case where the scope of a metaphor must extend to an elapsed text, not merely to the passages that shall come after. If we start the import of the conceit at the moment it appears in its verses, then it will not seem accurate or appropriate to the women’s fate, because these are victims of Telemachus’s rage and are dragged into the snare, driven there; they have not innocently fluttered into this hangman’s hands. After they had scrubbed blood from furniture and walls, and carried corpses to a courtyard, they were not expecting the gift of a cozy thicket-protected nest. Nor, for that matter, were these nooses rigged in advance of their arrival. But long before, in the beginning of this adventure, they had flown into the arms of the suitors and enjoyed there much petting and great favor. And one can readily imagine how often Telemachus had pondered their punishment, possibly planning—among others—just this painful payback. In short, the scope of this metaphor extends for the length of the ladies’ stay at the palace, and must do so or it will not work for a careful listener. To give it sense, we must carry the idea of innocence back to a time when there was some—when the arms of the suitors seemed safe.