On Classical Metaphor

On Classical Metaphor June 6, 2016

Metaphor has had a good run for the past several decades. Philosophers, linguists, and literary theorists have renounced the reductive “classical” understanding of metaphor that treated it as an expendable adornment of the literal. Instead, we have discovered that metaphor is inherent in language itself, and even sets the pathways of thought.

G. R. Boys-Stones wonders: “What is this classical understanding that is being rejected? Did ancient writers actually believe that metaphor was as secondary as we believe they did?” In his editorial introduction to Metaphor, Allegory, and the Classical Tradition, he provides evidence for a negative answer.

He writes, “If we look again at what the rhetoricians say, it quickly becomes clear that they did not have and did not claim to have a monopoly on theories of language use—indeed, they themselves encourage us to locate their contribution to the subject within a rather wider context of thought.” One indicator of this wider understanding is the connection they make between metaphor and allegory. Cicero wrote, “When there have been more metaphors in a continuous stream, another kind of speech clearly arises: and the Greeks call this kind ‘allegory’” (quoted, 2).

Allegory was certainly not mere adornment, a clever way of getting to something that could be expressed otherwise. Allegory’s primary setting in ancient thought is not in rhetoric but in philosophy. When we examine philosophical treatments of the subject, “we find that there is much more to be said about the subject than we might have been led to expect from the rhetoricians’ account, which makes allegory an ‘ornamental’ trope just like metaphor, of which it is listed as a species. For the philosophers might agree that allegory has an aesthetic appeal of its own; but they rarely argue that allegory is employed solely, or even mainly, for the sake of adornment. . . . the Platonist commentators on the ancient poets appear to have believed that allegory, far from adorning their meaning, was often the only means available for expressing what needed to be said” (3).

We have then to distinguish between what rhetoricians and philosophers said about metaphor: “as far as oratory at least is concerned, it becomes quite reasonable to think of the tropes as the verbal cosmetics he needs. No one ever claimed that this is the only function that the ‘tropes’ perform in language; but by and large it was simply not thought to be the job of the orator, as it might be the job of the poet or philosopher, to be saying things that can only be expressed in allegorical or (more generally) in metaphorical terms” (4). There was no single view of metaphor among the ancient rhetoricians, and, more importantly, rhetoricians aren’t the only ones who talked about metaphor and allegory.


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