INTRODUCTION

Metaphoric truth is the primary substance of the poetic imagination. A good metaphor is not merely a clever embellishment of the poet’s vision; it is often the only precise embodiment of that vision. Nor is metaphor a riddle to be solved, a semantic obstacle to be leapt over, before the poem’s meaning can be discovered; it is itself a solution, a leap, a meaning, and a discovery. As Robert Weiman has put it (1974: 149-150):

metaphor is neither an autonomous nor an ornamental aspect of poetry but forms the very core and center of that poetic statement by which man as a social animal imaginatively comprehends his relation to time and space and, above all, to the world around him.

Archibald MacLeish may have had the truth of tacit metaphor in mind when he wrote (“Ars Poetica”): “A poem should not mean/ But be.” Even those forms of poetry which, like the haiku, deliberately avoid “figurative language” in preference to literal imagery usually turn upon some sort of metaphorical suggestion. Consider this simple example:

The image, while literal in itself, is nonetheless suggestive of a correspondence to something beyond the rice paddy. It is thus part of a tacit metaphor, the other part or parts of which must be discovered by the reader. This is not to say that a reader must consciously stipulate what the other parts are—as, for instance, saying that the shoot of rice is a metaphor for “youth” and that the ice is a metaphor for “unyielding tradition” or “old age.” On the contrary, the “otherness” suggested by the image may—in fact should, in such cases—remain just that, a subliminal suggestion, an overtone of possible correspondences as opposed to an explicit correspondence.

This subliminal character of the “otherness” in poetic imagery often produces the sensation of enjoying an image “for its own sake alone.” However, to my mind at least, that is not a complete or satisfactory account of such imagery. Any image, graphically depicted, could be enjoyed for its own sake; but the images of a successful poem are not just any images, nor does their real power reside (despite the protestations of many successful poets) in the vividness of the images’ sensory detail. In the above example, for instance, the image is decidedly unvivid, even ambiguous: Is the rice shoot bending beneath a sheet of ice on the surface of the rice paddy water, or is it bowed by the weight of ice droplets attached to its stalk? We cannot say which. Nor do we need to say, for whatever interest the image holds for us lies not in its vividness but in its juxtapositions of opposites—the green tender shoot and the heavy inimical ice, the age-old situational irony of the struggle between contiguous seasons, winter and spring. It is precisely the tensions of such juxtapositions in haiku generally that invite the reader to feel, if not to intellectualize, a metaphorical correspondence.

Viewed in this way, metaphor is both an extension and a concentration of quite ordinary thought processes. I. A. Richards wrote (1938: 48-49):

Thinking is radically metaphoric. Linkage by analogy is its constituent law or principle, its causal nexus, since meaning only arises through the causal contexts by which a sign stands for (takes the place of) an instance of a sort. To think of anything is to take it as of a sort . . . and that “as” brings in (openly or in disguise) the analogy, the parallel, the metaphoric grapple or ground or grasp or draw by which the mind takes hold. It takes no hold if there is nothing for it to haul from, for its thinking is the haul, the attraction of likes.

To be sure, there are important differences between poetic metaphor and the analogical quality of ordinary cognition, but the differences—as I have argued elsewhere (1980: 4-20, 140-142)—are mainly differences of degree, not of kind. The poet possesses no process of perception, comparison, or abstraction not also available to the nonpoet (otherwise, how could the nonpoet understand poetry?). It is rather the poet’s radical extension (in degree) and compression (in time or space) of universal semeiotic functions which render the poetic imagination effectively extraordinary. The difference between ordinary analogical thought and poetic metaphor, to borrow Chomsky’s terms (1972; 1975), is a matter of performance (use of knowledge) rather than of competence (kind of knowledge).

I believe, however, that Chomsky’s notion of merely linguistic competence is not adequate to cover the full range of semeiosis in poetic metaphor; perhaps the difference is best stated in the terms of Charles Sanders Peirce: Everything in the universe is at least potentially a sign of something else (CP 5.448n). I would suggest that the poets among us are those who are most sensitive to this potentiality in general, and in particular to those possible sign/object correspondences which are rarely noticed by the rest of us until after the poets have uncovered or suggested them. Nevertheless, once revealed in an apt metaphor, such a rare poetic correspondence, albeit novel, typically strikes even the nonpoet as thoroughly natural and correct.

Whether or not this proposition is accurate, it is no trivial notion, for it implies that the aesthetics and semantics of poetic metaphor are not the exclusive nor privileged province of the literary scholar. Of course, many dimensions of poetry—those which obtain from cumulative literary history and tradition—are best handled by the trained litterateur, who is sensitive to the subtleties of genre, allusion, form, prosody, and so forth. Yet the dimension of poetic metaphor obtains not primarily from literary tradition but from a much larger, more fundamental, and more universal set of laws creating and governing the entire process of human semeiosis. I am suggesting that poetic metaphor is a radically concentrated microcosm of that universal and teleological process by which all signs are discovered and interpreted. It is thus best understood in relation to that larger universe of signs.

No one has gone further towards describing the laws, the plenitude, or the diversity of signs in the universe than has Charles Sanders Peirce. (See suggested readings in the preface.) His semeiotic presents a theory of meaning and interpretation that encompasses the literal macrocosm, wherein every entity, real or ideal, is potentially a sign, including the human entity. “When we think, then, we ourselves . . . appear as a sign,” wrote Peirce (CP 5.383). “Accordingly, . . . we ought to say that we are in thought and not that thoughts are in us” (CP 5.289 n. 1). Tom Short has pointed out, in a different connection, that the human mind in Peirce’s theory is but one example of universal semeiosis (1981b: 203). As my colleague in Alaska, J. J. Liszka, has put it, “Consciousness does not constitute semiotic processes; it is a synthesizer but a part of a more comprehensive synthesis” (1980: 303).

Peirce uncovers in this universal synthesis a rich profusion of possible sign types, one precisely distinguished from another (though they function together in actual signs) through varied and detailed perspectives: Symbols, Indices, Icons, Hypoicons, to name but a few which present an immediate suggestibility for metaphor study. Nor is this variegation of sign species a mere proliferation of terminology for its own impressive sake; at every level the distinctions are aligned in keeping with Peirce’s overarching phenomenology: the three Categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness which subsume, respectively, Possibility, Actuality, and Law. This phenomenology therefore parallels a sweeping ontology which spans and accommodates everything from Platonic idealities to social conventions. This it does without accepting the reality of anything and everything imaginable to the human fancy; quite to the contrary, Peirce’s theory of being develops a brand of philosophical realism which, combined with his pragmaticism and common-sensism, offers a major corrective to the abuses of extreme subjectivism and solipsism which too often characterize modern literary interpretation. Peirce explained to Lady Welby, “Each Sign must have its peculiar Interpretability before it gets any Interpreter” (PW 111, emphasis added).

Most important, however, is Peirce’s insistence that the interpretation of a sign’s meaning must not proceed on the simplistic notion that the “meaning” is, monistically, the sign’s object, or even merely a dualistic relation between the sign and its object, and least of all a dualistic function between the sign and its subject (signifier or interpreter). Rather, meaning for Peirce was a triadic relation between Sign, Object, and Interpretant, the latter being “the proper significate outcome of a sign” (CP 5.473). His notion of semeiosis is that it occurs in subtle stages which are organically receptive to a wide range of what Peirce called Dynamic Interpretants in their evolutionary tendency towards the ideal of a Final Interpretant in the indefinite future. As indicated in my preface, the description of how the full process of this semeiosis might be used to delineate an aesthetics, semantics, and hermeneutics of poetic metaphor is beyond the scope of this study. But a mere survey of names Peirce assigned to the kinds of interpretation (the Emotional, the Energetic, the Logical Interpretant) along with his stages of interpretation (the Immediate, the Dynamic, and the Final Interpretant)—each systematically related to the properties of the Sign/Object relation itself—ought to suggest the manifold possibilities of his theory for an organically holistic and rigorously analytical theory of poetic metaphor.

Intended as a preliminary step toward the development of such a theory of metaphor, this study applies only Peirce’s most famous trichotomy of sign types (the Symbol, the Index, and the Icon), as well as his seldom treated trichotomy of Hypoicons, to some frequently ignored semantic and aesthetic features of poetic metaphor. Though Peirce apparently wrote precious little about metaphor per se, the field of metaphor furnishes an especially rich domain in which to prospect with Peirce’s tools, for perhaps no other aspect of language and of creative literature arouses such interest in meaning and such controversy over the prerogatives of interpretation as does poetic metaphor.

My chief concerns, then, are these:

1. What is Peirce’s general conception of metaphor, and how might a Peircean semeiotic be used to clarify and amplify the essential defining conditions of metaphor?

2. In terms of these conditions, how might true metaphor be distinguished from false, and poetic from conversational?

3. How might these conditions, cast in a Peircean mold, be used to suggest the scope and range of possible interpretations of poetic metaphor?

4. How might an understanding of poetic semeiosis, especially in light of a Peircean metaphysics, enrich our appreciation of the special thematic and aesthetic functions of poetic metaphor within the meaning and art of a literary work as a whole?

5. How might a Peircean semeiotic of metaphor illuminate the process and result of growth in language, literature, meaning, and human cognition itself?

I begin in chapter 1 by sketching my own global definition of metaphor in light of the Peircean semeiotic. This “telescopic” view of metaphor as Peircean Symbol, Index, and Icon provides the general framework for the rest of the book. In chapter 2, the focus narrows to a “microscopic” inspection of metaphor’s Iconic character in particular, especially as given in Peirce’s Hypoicons. There I also take up Peirce’s other specific uses of the term “metaphor,” as well as some of his own most revealing figural conceptions of semeiotic, showing the evolution of his views on figurative language and suggesting some further extensions from that evolution. In chapter 3, I develop a doctrine of metaphorical possibility—again with main focus on the Icon—loosely based upon Peirce’s notion of Firstness and his philosophical realism. Chapter 4 shows how this reading of the Peircean Icon (as developed in chapters 2 and 3) applies to actual examples of poetic metaphor. In chapters 5 and 6, I turn to the Peircean Index, developing from it and from some leading suggestions in Peirce’s Theory of Being my notion of interactive “figural displacement” in poetic metaphor. Finally, chapter 7 explores what all of the above might suggest about the important place and function of metaphor in the growth of Symbols.