WEEK 4 FICTION
M. 09/12. Chapter 5. Symbol and Figurative Language: read this chapter's introductory material (208-13). Edwige Danticat. "A Wall of Fire Rising" (239-49).
W. 09/14. Chapter 6. Theme: read this chapter's introductory material (251-54). Stephen Crane. "The Open Boat" (255-71). Gabriel Garcia Marquez. "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" (271-76).
Metonymy: metonumía, verb metonomazo, to change the name. (metá can mean "other"). Involves using a word to refer us, often very realistically, to another word with which it already has relations or associations. Also defined as consisting in "the use of a single characteristic or name of an object to identify an entire object or related object."
Examples: "redneck" for rural white southerner or backwoodsman who spends all day working in the sun; "The Streets of San Francisco" (an old tv show about urban crime); "the crown" to refer to the monarchy; the smart aleck Sawyer on Lost calls Kate "freckles" because she reminds him of a wholesome midwesterner or innocent cowgirl, and he calls the Iraqi ex-interrogator Said Jarrah "Captain Falafel" (why?); blueberry pie and black coffee at seat 52 stiffed us on the bill again! Metonymy can also be described as a rhetorical device whereby you characterize a thing by referring to what surrounds it and is associated with it: "the suits are even now deciding our fate."
Synecdoche: συνεκδοχή, synekdokhe, "a receiving together or jointly." A species of metonymy in which the part refers to the whole, or the whole to the part, or the species for the genus, the material for the thing made, etc.: Agamemnon and Menelaus set out with a thousand sail for Troy; the captain barked "All hands on deck!" How about Marcus Andronicus in Shakespeare's TA?
Titus Andronicus, the people of Rome …
Send thee by me, their tribune and their trust,
This palliament of white and spotless hue;
And name thee in election for the empire …:
Be candidatus then, and put it on,
And help to set a head on headless Rome.
General Titus responds metonymically, "Give me a staff of honour for mine age, / But not a sceptre to control the world."
Other examples: D.C. for "US. Federal Gov." A hundred head of cattle stole my Rolex, but the police captured them and made them give it back.
Metaphor: verb meta-fero, to carry from one place to another, to transfer; to change, alter. Noun metaforá (a carrying from one place to another; a transferring to one word the sense of another). Understanding one thing in terms of another. Metaphor doesn't refer to something on the same level so much as it helps us understand something difficult at a different level. If a poet describes his lover as "a red, red rose," the idea is that we can then use our sense of what the simple thing "rose" means to us to understand the ineffable qualities of the poet's lover, help us grasp the intense or even intoxicating effect she has on him.
Examples: "I am a rock, I am an island. And a rock feels no pain; and an island never cries." Simon & Garfunkel. Best metaphor illustration ever:
She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love.
A Violet by a mossy stone
Half-hidden from the Eye!
---Fair, as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky!
She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her Grave, and, Oh!
The difference to me. (Lyrical Ballads, 1800)
Metaphor is often parsed in terms of tenor and vehicle: Seamus Cooney offers a fine example from Hopkins: "Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee ..."
Two metaphors here. (1) Tenor: the abstract emotion despair. Vehicle: a dead carcass. (2) Tenor: the "I", the speaker. Vehicle: a bird of prey or an animal (like a hyena) that feeds on carrion. Often, the vehicle is something tactile, concrete, that conveys us to the more ephemeral or difficult thing, as in "my love is a red rose.
Allegory: allos-agoreuo, allegoreo, to imply other than what is said. an extended simile or metaphor or, generally an extended association between a literal and an abstract thing. If you start with an association between a lion and the abstract quality "courage," you can spin it out into a story about the lion that might tell us something about courage. Spin it out long enough and you get something like Spenser's Faerie Queene or Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, in which a man's physical journey is likened to the pilgrimage of the soul to salvation or damnation. Romantic poet STC shows a bit of disdain for this sort of thing – the "fancy" works with fixities and definites, with fixed associations or relations, and does nothing vital to them: you leave a fanciful allegory without your world view getting shaken up or your relationship to the terms fundamentally altered. Not so, says STC, when we deal with metaphor.
Symbol: symbolon, a sign or mark to infer a thing by (verb symballo, to bring together) the editors define this well. Add to this STC's theory that symbol isn't just a device but an integral, primal mode of perception and speech: when Jesus says, "the eye is the light of the body," he speaks symbolically, and to speak symbolically, says STC, is to employ language that "participates in the reality that it renders intelligible." Here, the eye is a material and inseparable part of the body, but at the same time, it's also a spiritual vehicle. Indissolubly so, which alters our conception of the body. But in general, symbolic language is language that goes beyond the literal, beyond the information-function of everyday language. Often, it's essentially poetic in that such utterance or writing turns back upon the medium and upon our most basic ideas and associations, changing them, confronting us with their inadequacy and isolation or incoherence. "Make it new," as the saying goes in both the Romantic and Modernist movements.
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Symbol: Danticat Story. Guy's attempt to fly the balloon is a peaceful act of rebellion against capital, against class differences, against his position as a poor Haitian subject to the ascendancy of relative outsiders. The balloon behind the sugar mill symbolizes liberation from this Haitian man's history-saturated rootedness to the land, and a promise of personal autonomy: a new relationship to the land. Yet he falls back to that land and it crushes him – does he really escape? To Assad the balloon was just sport – he did not need it to serve as a symbol; Guy, however, does need it for that reason.
Group Question. How do you interpret the balloon's symbolic value? What does it suggest about the protagonist Guy, and about his circumstances as a poor man trying to get by in Haiti? What parts of the text lead you in the direction you've gone?
Theme: L. thema "a subject, thesis," from Gk. thema "a proposition, subject, deposit," lit. "something set down," from root of tithenai "put down, place," from PIE base *dhe- "to put, to do" (http://www.etymonline.com/)
Theme: Crane Story. Closeness, community are to a large extent comforting illusions. The men must confront their fate alone. Nature's indifference – something to be borne, faced up to. The fact of death a subject of reflection, the "struggle for survival." If we take the story to be realistic, philosophical reflection still goes on even in the midst of disaster: questions of ultimate value don't go away; perhaps they become even more insistent. The correspondent (note the generality of "a man" formulations) shows that to be so. So it's reasonable to suggest that a theme here is how essential such questions are to human beings, even when you think they would be preoccupied by mere survival instincts.
Group Question. What do you take to be the key idea or ideas explored in Crane's story? What parts of the text lead you to read it that way? You could concentrate on the varying attitudes of the characters (captain, oiler, cook, correspondent) and see what emerges from comparison, or you could consider the narrator of the story – what main insights flow from concentrating on him?
Theme: Garcia-Marquez Story. My impressionistic reading. We want what's familiar, habitual, routine; at same time we want novelty, miracles, significance. A genuine miracle or visitation from the metaphysical realm here causes quite a stir amongst ordinary mortals, who don't know how to fit it into their lives. Dostoyevsky and the Grand Inquisitor questioning Jesus. Maybe we need the metaphysical to stay metaphysical, or it loses its purpose for us. (Benjamin's messiah entering through any moment of time, pure possibility.) The stubborn, standoffish angel gets too close to the villagers, and they can't easily fit him into their lives. You could also bring in metacritical questions about representation if you like – many authors have faced the problem of representing the unrepresentable, from the Bible onward.
Group Question. What is the upshot of this strange story? Why does the angel cause so much perplexity and consternation?
• Metonymy and metaphor also have fundamentally different functions. Metonymy is about referring: a method of naming or identifying something by mentioning something else which is a component part or symbolically linked. In contrast, metaphor is about understanding and interpretation: it is a means to understand or explain one phenomenon by describing it in terms of another." (Murray Knowles and Rosamund Moon, Introducing Metaphor. Routledge, 2006)
http://grammar.about.com/od/mo/g/metonymy.htm
• "If metaphor works by transposing qualities from one plane of reality to another, metonymy works by associating meanings within the same plane. . . . The representation of reality inevitably involves a metonym: we choose a part of 'reality' to stand for the whole. The urban settings of television crime serials are metonyms--a photographed street is not meant to stand for the street itself, but as a metonym of a particular type of city life--inner-city squalor, suburban respectability, or city-centre sophistication."
(John Fiske, Introduction to Communication Studies, 2nd ed. Routledge, 1992) http://grammar.about.com/od/mo/g/metonymy.htm
