may be viewed as a language that we use to interpret and explain things to ourselves as well as to others. This book outlines an elementary vocabulary and grammar of one dialect of that language. The result may be useful to those who wish to improve their fluency in order to better communicate, but also to those who enjoy the language for its own sake. For rhetorical purposes – in other words, as a way of speaking to an audience – the noticeable use of metaphor must be sparing to be effective, and is wholly unsuitable for some occasions. But as a tool for thought and a subject for study, metaphor is available and interesting nearly all the time.
A metaphor can make unfamiliar things familiar, invisible things visible, and complicated things easier to understand. It can, as Aristotle said, give life to lifeless things. It can produce amusement by putting a subject into unexpected company. It can create feeling by borrowing it from the source to which the subject is compared. It can make a point riveting and memorable by the beauty of the comparison’s fit. It can make an insult or a compliment immortal. It can attract attention by the element of surprise. And it can do all this with wondrous economy, invoking a mass of imagery and meaning in a sentence or a single word.
A metaphor can serve as an aid to persuasion. A claim made by metaphor is not an immediate appeal to reason; it is an appeal to intuition, inviting the reader to directly perceive a similarity and its truth. Sometimes the appeal is implied rather than explicit, as when the comparison is woven into the choice of words rather than declared openly – and it may then be more effective for its subtlety. Decisions are made, and arguments won and lost, in the imagination and heart as often as in the mind, so the skilled practitioner of rhetoric uses comparisons to engage all those faculties. In The Scaffolding of Rhetoric (1897), Churchill spoke of the resulting power of analogy, by which he meant to include metaphor:
In spite of the arguments of the cynic the influence exercised over the human mind by apt analogies is and has always been immense. Whether they translate an established truth into simple language or whether they adventurously aspire to reveal the unknown, they are among the most formidable weapons of the rhetorician. The effect upon the most cultivated audience is electrical.
Lincoln likewise understood the levers of human decision and action, and left none of them unattended. He thus attacked slavery and the threat of secession not just with reason but with a metaphor borrowed from scripture: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
These benefits of metaphor might be compared to other alternatives to the literal use of words. The author of a scientific argument in prose may pause to offer a mathematical model. The model is an alternative way to state a point; it simplifies and convinces. A metaphor can do the same (it, too, states an equation); and while it cannot prove a claim in the way that a mathematical model can, it may do more to persuade. Or put aside equations and think about the ways that literal language may be combined with pictures to express an idea. It is natural to imagine a spectrum: at one end is a photograph or painting, then a movie with words, then perhaps a graphic novel (fewer pictures, more words), then a book with periodic illustrations, then unadorned text. Metaphor can be viewed as belonging on this spectrum, too, but its placement is hard to pin down. It uses words but creates pictures. It can have features associated with any of the other items – the beauty of a painting, the drama of a short film, the clarity of a line drawing, the humor of a cartoon. Yet a metaphor is less conspicuous than any of those devices, and can be more powerful, because it masquerades as text.
Metaphors can serve deeper ends. Many important subjects cannot be described literally, at least not well. States of mind are like this, as are the sources and effects of language and other arts and many elements of spiritual life. They don’t just require pictures in order to be understood. They require comparisons, because they cannot be depicted literally in images or in words. A subject tends to defeat literal description when it is inaccessible to the senses; our words for what we can see are more extensive and refined than our words for what is intangible. Other truths and observations cannot be captured through a literal use of words simply because words and reality aren’t coextensive. The range and subtlety and feeling of what we wish to say outruns the labels that our language provides for the purpose. Comparisons free us from those limits. They allow a writer to use words not as labels to name a thing but as links that attach it to what we have known or seen or can imagine. The link summons pictures and other associations in the reader’s mind and rallies them to the descriptive purpose. A metaphor may, in short, express something that otherwise cannot quite be said or shown, and provide a way to understand it – possibly the only way.
Metaphors may serve, finally, as repositories of wisdom. Not always; many successful ones are merely picturesque, or useful, or funny. As we shall see, however, the finest creators of metaphor tend also to be the keenest students of humanity and of nature; that is much of why their metaphors are so fine. Metaphors also expose resemblances, and may suggest deeper affinities, between subjects that seem unrelated, the perception of which is another talent of the wise. The connoisseur of comparisons tends to see everything as a reminder or example of something else, and notices how particular things epitomize general ones: the military elephants of yore, for the harm that friends may do to their allies (ch. 3); the eye, on account of how it dilates and contracts (ch. 6); old Phalaris, because he turned the tables, and they were turned on him (ch. 10); fire, for countless features of its action and the behavior of people in response to it (passim). This book is partly a catalogue of such archetypes, as identified by those who have seen and stated them best.
Having said enough about the value of metaphor, let me now say what this book means to do with the subject. It is, first, a study of where figurative comparisons come from and what effects they have. The sources of effective metaphor are infinite in detail but not in type. Metaphors are built from families of material that may be examined distinctly – animals, nature, architecture, and other sources we will explore. The effects of metaphor are likewise various in their nuances but capable of being ordered. Sometimes metaphors make their subjects visible; sometimes they simplify; sometimes they are drawn for the sake of caricature. And some of those purposes are more readily served by one kind of metaphor than another, depending in turn on the subject in question. This book explores some patterns that have run between all these points in the work of talented writers: how materials from source X have been used to describe family of subjects Y and accomplish purpose Z.
Second, this book hopes to provide a better and different collection of comparisons than has yet been available to the student of them. Good metaphors are not usually the result of calculation and planning; they are made intuitively, just as they are consumed, and often well up from sources that seem half-conscious (as perhaps they are; we dream in metaphors). The process of educating the intuition and imagination is best carried out with light doses of theory and long immersion in examples. The book thus supplies illustrations in heaping quantities. It puts related cases near each other to invite comparisons of comparisons, to inspire the eye, and to suggest, in a short space, the range of uses that a given metaphorical idea may have.
Third, I have emphasized the utility of metaphor but the attractions of the subject can be simpler. Metaphors allow an indirect or sideways approach to many matters of philosophical or psychological interest; they also can teach a certain way of appreciating the world. But even when they do not offer those advantages, they can be delightful in themselves – a wholesome source of insight and entertainment that need not be further justified. The book may serve as a museum for those with a taste for such pleasures: a partial OED of metaphor, if you are the kind who approaches the OED to browse. That is a chief aim of this project and the most likely way it may be enjoyed. In the event that its pedagogical aims go unfulfilled or aren’t shared by the reader, they still serve as an excuse for spending time with the examples, which are fun and interesting to think about.
Readers who wish to get on with the substance can skip to the first chapter, with an admonition that the book is better approached arbitrarily
