Texts:
•
Simile [one thing compared to another]:
my Luve's like a red, red, rose
[Robert Burns]
Metaphor [one thing described as another]:
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
– Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
[William Wordsworth]
Metonymy [part or attribute used for whole]:
You can’t fight City Hall
The pen is mightier than the sword
Synecdoche [part used for whole]:
50 head of cattle
Mouths to feed
Hands to the pump
•
In one of his lectures on poetry, the great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges comments that the Chinese metaphor for "everything" is "the 10,000 things." He goes on to speculate that if one took every one of these 10,000 things, and compared to every other one in the list, one would arrive at a grand total of 99, 990, 000 possible metaphors in the world. (Jorge Luis Borges,
This Craft of Verse: The Complete Norton Lectures delivered at Harvard University. 1967. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000.)
That might seem a bit fanciful, but I think the point he's making is that the idea of comparing one thing to another thing, either through
metaphor or
simile, is one of the oldest poetic techniques known to man.
The other main branch on the tree of rhetorical figures up above is
metonymy, which is the idea of taking one part of something to stand in for the whole: your wheels for your car, your threads for your suit, etc.
Metonymy, then, invents nothing: it simply condenses and simplifies the things we see around us. Metaphor, on the other hand, tries to set two different things (one present, one imaginary) side by side in your mind.
If you're interested in following up on the technicalities of this, you might want to read the extract below. For the moment, though, it's perhaps more important for us to see how these devices operate in some of the poems above.
•
Two Types of Aphasia
... The development of a discourse may take place along two different semantic lines: one topic may lead to another either through their similarity or through their contiguity. The metaphoric way would be the most appropriate term for the first case and the metonymic way for the second, since they find their most condensed expression in metaphor and metonymy respectively. In aphasia one or the other of these two processes is restricted or totally blocked - an effect which makes the study of aphasia particularly illuminating for the linguist. In normal verbal behavior both processes are continually operative, but careful observation will reveal that under the influence of a cultural pattern, personality, and verbal style, preference is given to one of the two processes over the other.
In verbal art the interaction of these two elements is especially pronounced. Rich material for the study of this relationship is to be found in verse patterns which require a compulsory parallelism between adjacent lines, for example in Biblical poetry or in the Finnic and, to some extent, the Russian oral tradition. This provides an objective criterion of what in the given speech community acts as a correspondence. Since on any verbal level - morphemic, lexical, syntactic, and phraseological - either of these two relations (similarity and contiguity) can appear - and each in either of two aspects [substitutive and predicative], an impressive range of possible configurations is created. Either of the two gravitational poles may prevail. In Russian lyrical songs, for example, metaphoric constructions predominate, while in the heroic epics the metonymic way is preponderant.
Roman Jakobson, an influential linguist and literary critic argues here that the two predominant types of aphasia -
similarity and
contiguity disorder - can be equated with the two major subdivisions of figurative language:
metaphor and
metonymy.
For Jakobson, then:
- similarity disorder = selecting the wrong vocabulary items from pre-existing categories, substituting "fork" for "knife", "table" for "lamp," and so on.
- contiguity disorder = failing to to combine words into a grammatical sentence, which leads to a tendency to confuse words with their approximate functions, and thus to the substitution (say) of "spyglass" with "microscope", or "fire" for "gaslight."
The two skills involved, the
selection and
combination of words and structures, are equated by him (respectively) with the poetic devices of
metaphor and
metonymy.
In the case of
metaphor, one is selecting and substituting items not normally continuous with one another.
In the case of
metonymy, one is combining things which naturally cohere, the part standing in for the whole.
In genre terms, Jakobson equates metonymy with the
representative intentions of the epic or the realist novel: a part of a fictional world standing for its whole.
Similarly, he equates metaphor with lyric poetry, since the principle of asserting or pointing out the similarity of two alien or unrelated things is fundamental to its
unificatory intentions.
Metaphor, as a device, might then be said to line up with Poetry, Romanticism, and (in anthropological terms) magical thinking (as seen in
Homeopathy, for example).
Metonymy can be similarly associated with Prose, Realism and medical ideas of
Contagion or
Contamination.
[see further David Lodge, ed. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader (London: Longman, 1988), pp.57-61.]
