Metaphors, the Figurative, and the Literal

(Most of what follows comes from a composite of Northrope Frye's works on metaphor and the figurative; see the Religion Bibliography for a complete list of works)

Whenever we read anything, our minds are moving in two directions at once.  One direction is centripetal, where we establish a context our to the words read; the other is centrifugal, where we try to remember what the words mean in the world outside.  Sometimes the external meanings take on a structure parallel to the verbal structure, and when this happens we call the verbal structure descriptive or nonliterary.  Here the question of truth arises; the structure is true if it is a satisfactory counterpart to the external structure it is parallel to.  If there is no external counterpart, the structure is said to be literary or imaginative, existing for its own sake.

 Legend and saga develop into history; stories, sacred or secular, develop into literature; a mixture of practical knowledge and magic develops into science.

 A descriptive writer who aims at conveying some truth beyond his verbal structure avoids figures of speech, because all figuration emphasizes the centripetal aspect of words, and belongs either to the poetic or to the rhetorical categories.

 In short, the Bible is explicitly anti-referential in structure, and deliberately blocks off any world of presence behind itself.  How do we know that the Gospel is true?  Because, it fulfills the prophecies of the Old Testament.  But how do we know that the Old Testament prophecies are true?  Because, they are fulfilled by the Gospel.  As long as we assume a historical presence behind the Bible to which it points, the phrase "word of God," as applied both the Bible and the person of Christ, is only a dubious syllepsis.

 If there is one thing that biblical scholarship has established beyond reasonable doubt, it is that authorship, inspired or not, counts for very little in the Bible.  If the Bible is inspired in any sense, all the glossing and editing and splicing and conflating activities must be inspired too. 

 Poetic language is closely associated with rhetorical language, as both make extensive use of figures of speech.  The bible uses a language that is as poetic as it can be without actually becoming a poem.  But it is not a poem; it is written in a mode of rhetoric, though it is rhetoric of a special kind, called kerygma or "proclamation."  To a critic, however, myth means primarily mythos or narrative, more particularly the kind of self-contained narrative, which is meant by the English word story in contrast to history.  Such myth is the only possible vehicle of kerygma, and as every syllable of the Gospels is written in the language of myth, efforts to demythologize the Gospels would soon end by obliterating them. 

 The literal meaning of the Bible, then, must be a mythical and metaphorical meaning.  It is only when we are reading as we read poetry that we can take the word literal seriously, accepting everything given us without question.  There may be meanings beyond the literal, but that is where we start.

 It may be asked, "Why can't we have it both ways?  Why not a body of narrative and imagery that is also a definitive replica of truths beyond itself?"  The answer is that description is a subordinate function of words.  Even one word is a sign and not a thing: two or three words begin to form grammatical fictions like those of subject and predicate.  Because the Bible is deeply rooted in the nature of words, at a certain point of intensity, a choice must be made between figurative and descriptive language, and the Bible chooses figurative.

 In ordinary experience, we think of ourselves as subjective, and of everything else as objective.  We also tend to think of the objective as the center of reality and the subjective as the center of illusion.  The act of recalling is a far more vivid and intense experience than memory itself.  When Elizabethan critics used Horace's phrase about poetry as a "speaking picture," they implied that poetry gives us, not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of the summoned-up hallucination.

 Wherever there is love there is sexual symbolism, and the rhetoric of the Bible, which seeks out its reader, is traditionally a male rhetoric, all its readers, whether men or women, being symbolically female.  In secular literature, where the category is purely poetic, the sexual symbolism is reversed.

 A myth is primarily a mythos, a story, narrative, or plot, with a specific social function.  There arises a distinction between stories, which explain to their hearers something that those hearers need to know about the religion, history, law, or social system of their society, and less serious stories told primarily for amusement.  We may call the myth a verbal temenos, a circle drawn around a sacred or numinous area.  The less serious group become folktales.

 Pre-literary myth arises in a state of society in which there is not as yet a firm and consistent distinction between subject and object.  A statement that a subjective A is an objective B is a metaphor, and at the center of pre-literary myths are the gods, who, being partly personalities and partly associated with some department of nature, are ready-made metaphors.

 In Christianity a divine nature taking on a human form is a portentous miracle that can happen only once in history, but such a view is very remote from Homer.

 In the popular mind there is only one way in which words can express truth, and that is the truth of correspondence, where a body of words describes a set of external facts or events or propositions, and is said to be true if we find the correspondence of the words and what they describe satisfactory.

 The Bible is mythical rather than historical, because for its purposes myth is the only vehicle for what has traditionally been called revelation.  It is generally accepted that the opening words of the Gospel of John, "In the beginning was the Word," were intended to form a Christian commentary on at least the first of the two creation myths of the Bible.

 If the Word is the beginning, it is the end took the Omega as well as the Alpha, and what this principle indicates is that to receive the revelation of the Bible we must examine the total verbal structure of the Bible.  This implies a deliberate and conscious renouncing of what is called "literal" belief, which always means subordinating the Word to what the Word is alleged to describe.

 In Christian typology the souls of all human creatures, whether they are biologically men or women, are symbolically female, forming the body of the bride Jerusalem or the people of God.

 Once we "hear" a mythos or story being read, or read it ourselves in temporal sequence, we then make a gestalt or simultaneous apprehension of it which is usually described in a visual metaphor as an act of "seeing."  Having heard it, we see it, and then grasp its simultaneous meaning -- what Aristotle would call its dianoia.

Every work of literature makes an appeal to us to grasp its total meaning in a single act of apprehension, and it is a common device for a novel, let us say, to bear the title of some visual emblem which symbolizes that total apprehension -- such as D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow or Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.  It is because of the importance of this attempt at simultaneous understanding that the word structure, a spatial metaphor derived from architecture, has become so prominent in literary criticism.

 The visual "emblem" of the structure of the creative narratives would obviously be some form of axis mundi image, something that suggests the linking of all aspects of the creation in a single concept.  For the Priestly account the most natural form of axis mundi image would be the ladder, or staircase, of Jacob's great vision at Bethel, an image of which mountains and towers are predictable modulations.  For the Jahwist account the readiest image would be the world tree, or tree of life, that stretches from earth to heaven in so many mythologies.

 One of the most important facts in the history of religion is that in later thought the cosmological ladder is assumed to represent a structure of hierarchy, order, rank, and degree.  Two by-products of this ladder cosmos have been of particular importance in the history of thought: the great chain of being and the Ptolemaic universe.

 This hierarchical world consolidates into four main levels: the highest is that of heaven, in the sense of the presence of God, the next the paradisal home originally intended for man, the next the theologically "fallen" natural environment we live in now, and at the bottom is the demonic order.

 In the Middle Ages a quest of love, so closely approximating the regeneration of the soul in orthodox Christianity as to amount to a parody of it, was established as a central theme of literature.  But we are never far from the sense that the ultimate quest is not so much the sexual union of a man and a woman as the union of all human beings with the nature that forms their environment, a nature usually mythologized as a mother, in which the primitive metaphorical identity of the subjective and the objective has been reestablished.

The concept of a Chain of Being, a ladder with steps up or down, is one of authority, and one that maintains that authority.  When one revolts from authority, a special declaration is stated or written that severs all ties, that breaks that authority, and often implies or asserts that there are no authorities in the sense of a chain -- all are equal.  Under the hammer blows of the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, the ladder as a spatial metaphor for the axis mundi, and as a cosmic vision guaranteeing the birthright of established authority, finally disappeared.  The word climax, incidentally, comes from the Greek word for ladder.

 A myth has two aspects: it is part of a vision of the cosmos, constructed from human concern, and it is also very likely to be seized on by whatever establishment or pressure group is in power and expounded in their interest.

 Truth of correspondence is really a technique of measurement, where the standard or criterion of measurement is outside the verbal structure.  (It is quite intelligible to say that Marxism grew out of the myth of Prometheus, as Freudianism did out of the myth of Eros.)

Metaphor says that A is B: at the same time it suggests that nobody could be fool enough to believe that A really is B.  The word is really there to destroy the sense of an intervening space between the personal element A and the natural element B, and leads us into a world where subject and object can interpenetrate with one another, as freely as they did in Homer's day.

 Myth does not, like history, present a past even as past; it presents its as present.  But its present is not the unreal present of ordinary experience.

 The purpose of the class to this point is not to "interpret" scripture, nor is it to impose a belief or lack of belief in the Scriptures.  We are seeing that "truth" can have two different meanings: the truth of correspondence or the truth of coherence -- or literalness as opposed to an overall design of metaphorical meaning and importance.

 So too we are finding that a general, if condensed, sense of Biblical "fact" is part of our daily lives, whether believers or non-believers our culture is shaped by our responses to the stories that have been designated as sacred by many.  Such narratives have shaped our Western culture to the point that proving, disproving, or merely alluding to such narratives is unavoidable.  The creation myths, though many of us are not Orthodox Jews, describes our heritage as human beings as surely as if we, as a people, had to know and to acknowledge where we come from and why we suffer as we do -- the "Fall" thus describes for us why things happen to otherwise "innocent" people or those who at least remain passive within a world of sexuality and sin; the inexplicable has an origin.

 So too, the Gospel of John relates the events of the one true avatar of God, and as such it designates itself as authority for that which we must acknowledge for our salvation.  This Gospel in particular relates back to "fulfillment" since it opens with a gloss of creation.  Thus, it attempts to "prove" that Old Testament theology has basis in its design because it is fulfilled by the New.

 We have also seen that there is a narrative idea at work in the Scriptures that makes it ripe for "meaning"�because of the "gaps" in narrative technique, interpretation is left open; there is an absence of closure insofar as we may attribute daily relevance upon the works that comprise the Bible.  When we respond to literature, we often find the necessity of alluding to biblical images and thematic material as a point of reference and departure.  This relevance has shaped Western culture as no other force has.

 The more particular relevance of the Gospel of John is the acknowledgement or rejection of Jesus as the single avatar who has divine and -- so limited by God -- sanction within an eternal plan.

 We will soon see how this fulfillment impinges upon Western thought and artistic design, whether consciously or unconsciously, by the choices and anxiety which it raises upon our society and others with whom we share similar values and beliefs.