Metaphor and Reality
Philip Ellis Wheelwright
Language: English
Pages: 194
ISBN: B0006AXP10
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The sole excuse which a man can have for writing," says Rémy de Gourmont, "is to unveil for others the sort of world which mirrors itself in his individual glass." No doubt if we cared to quibble we could point to other and lesser excuses for writing, such as are assumed by makers of directories, committee reports, and literary excitants or sedatives. What the eminent critic had in mind, however, was the kind of writing which, whatever its particular incentives and aims, reveals the accents of a man speaking to fellow men. To speak forth honestly is to report the world as it is beheld (however precariously) in one's own perspective.
Things have contexts, but only a person has perspectives. The essential excuse for writing, then, is to unveil as best one can some perspective that has not already become ordered into a public map. The present book is concerned with the kind of writing that is radically perspectival. All writing, to be sure, is perspectival in the most general sense; for even the most banal cliché or the most plainly factual report is formulated from a certain standpoint, and represents a certain trend of associations and expectations. The difference is not between the perspectival and the universal; for every universal, at least every humanly intelligible universal, is perspectivally conceived. No, the difference is between perspectives that have become standardized and perspectives that are freshly born and individual.
The latter are perspectives in the making, rather than perspectives already publicly established; it is with them that the following pages are concerned.
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of taking the couplet. And yet, while the imagery in the couplet is conspicuously diaphoric, does it not perhaps carry an overtone of epiphor as well? Visual awarenesses of the colors and textures of the external world do vary, and possibly for some readers there may seem to be a slight degree of antecedent similarity in the contrast. It could be argued that the juxtaposition is tinged, faintly and subtly, with T W O W A Y S OF METAPHOR 83 a suggested comparison. Moreover, both the diaphoric
is somehow copied after a nobler model or is following out some original divine command. These ingredients overlap, their individual working is not always evident, and no doubt the list could be extended. As a matter of fact there must be added the sheer love of story-telling, which produces the fanciful elaborations which are a large part of any developed myth. But of course fanciful stories by themselves do not constitute myth. What distinguishes a myth from a folk-tale is indicated by the
Buddha's spirit into the maternal womb in the form of a baby elephant. Orthodox Christians will accept the first of these tales as historically true and dismiss the second as false and fanciful; positivists will dismiss both narratives alike. Now clearly, there is an observable analogy between the two narrative traditions. Both of them deal with miraculous events attending the birth of a uniquely exalted spiritual teacher. It is possible therefore, and it may be enlightening, to adopt a
l p a r t o f t h e m a i n s t o r y ; i t h a s a n adventitious look, as if it m i g h t h a v e b e e n a l a t e r accretion. Miiller has proposed the hypothesis that the Greeks may Kronos, with the word for time, have confused the name chronos. of the god, T h e letters K a n d X ( g u t t u r a l c h ) are fairly close t o g e t h e r in G r e e k ; a n d i t is e v i d e n t f r o m P l a t o ' s e t y m o l o g i c a l s p e c u l a t i o n s in t h e Cratylus h o w
(London, 1878), pp. 191-192. 11. Both of the two passages personifying the relation between sky and earth are quoted by Athenaeus in The Deipnosophists, Bk. XIII, Chap. 73. The former passage is from The Danaids, a lost play by Aeschylus, and is numbered Fragment 25 in the Loeb Classical Library edition of Aeschylus, Vol. II; it is Fragment 44 in Nauck, Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta. The latter passage is from an unspecified lost play by Euripides; Aristotle employs it in indirect discourse in