APOLOG

In Heliodorus’ Aethiopica, Calasiris, an old priest, is narrating to Cnemon, another character, the circumstances of the meeting of the two young lovers of the romance (3, 1-2):

“When the procession and the consecration were concluded...” “But they have not been concluded, father,” interrupted Cnemon, “for your discourse has not yet made me a spectator, and I am completely overcome by eagerness to hear and see the festivity with my own eyes. But you evade me, like the man in the story who came after the party was over; you open your theater and shut it in the same instant.” “I have no wish to trouble you, Cnemon,” said Calasiris, “with matters extraneous to our subject. I was proceeding to the relevant parts of the story (τὰκαιώτερα).”

The unusual wording of Cnemon’s interruption calls attention to the productive aspect of discourse, the fact that language makes, not merely represents. If Milton provides our story of the epic simile with a certain closure, this closure is not a function of literary history as such so much as a function of what I have included as “relevant” (καιρός) to the story I have made. It may be objected that the history of the epic simile does not end with Milton, or that vast gaps have been left. These objections are based on some notion of what is essential to a good story (or a good history), on some idea of what is central and what is peripheral, on what is relevant and what is extraneous. Although these are not categories that one can easily eschew, nor would it be entirely desirable to do so, they should at least be recognized for the problems they are.

In fact, the previous pages have provided several possible ways to answer the objection that something essential has been left out, or something else has been given an uneven treatment. For example, I could answer in a Homeric manner by citing excellent authorities and precedents for limiting discussion in the way that I have; or I could answer in an Apollonian manner, and promise that subsequent installments will deal with other episodes of the simile; or I could take a Ciceronian view, and assert that the examples I give constitute a typology which exhausts all the possibilities, and that any anomalies are only apparent; or I could answer in a Vergilian manner that any similes which fall outside of the explanatory power of my scheme are not really similes at all; or I could give my personal reasons for choosing the ones that I have rather than others (Dante); or I could aver that human finitude has prevented me from accomplishing the impossible task of including every simile, and that I have, nevertheless, fought the good fight (Milton). But one of the main points of this book has been how various versions of epic totality are illusory. It has not been my intention to be complete, to master once and for all the subject of the epic simile, or even necessarily to be fair.

The term I would use for the above chapters is sequence of interpretants. The use of this term recognizes the fact that the authors Homer, Apollonius, Cicero, Vergil, Dante and Milton make up a series, a set of connected terms; but at the same time, it does not imply that this series constitutes a sequence of essential functions in some master narrative, whether economic, philosophical or anthropological. Although references to such narratives have been made at times, and indeed it is difficult to resist them, a semiotic analysis should give us something different than a mere recoding of clichés from literary history. My focus on the similes as indicative of a model of signification for various texts has been strategic in the sense that it implies a critique of the tendency of “essentialist” interpretative strategies to reify various factors of textual organization into a hierarchy of “levels” of narrative; for the simile is traditionally held to be a marginal and merely ornamental feature in such hierarchies. The epic simile, to cite another story, has been repressed since Aristotle’s valorization of plot as the “soul” of narrative. The preceding account of narrative semiotics in the epic tradition from Homer to Milton can no doubt be accused of repressing other things; but if semiotics is to take its place as one form of social practice, it is in the attempt “to demonstrate how much broader than most ideologies have recognized is the format of the semantic universe” (Eco, 298). I would like to conclude, therefore, with some summary notes about how I hope to have modified the communis opinio about similes.

The most commonsense notion of simile is that it allows us to say things that otherwise could not be said well or could not be said at all. At the heart of this notion is the sense that similes are productive. If one takes an instrumental and undialectical view of language, such as that underlying Aristotle’s Rhetoric, then this productive capacity is finding a novel means of expression for some as yet unnamed content, a process which can improve the persuasiveness of an argument with respect both to content (clarity) and to expression (urbanity). I have set out in this study with the assumption that similes have a much broader range of productive possibilities, an assumption which, as I have repeatedly asserted, rejects the instrumental view of language so closely linked to essentialist interpretive strategies. In my discussion of Homer, I said that shifts of discursive mode can be seen as indications of a problem or blockage for the proairetic mode, as places where for one reason or another it was no longer possible to let the action “speak for itself.” More generally, similes can be seen to be places where something is being done in a discourse, places where latently figurative language had to be replaced by patently figurative language.

This kind of shift can, of course, mean many things. It could be that a new content is being articulated for the first time, more or less in the manner that Aristotle describes, and that the simile does indeed produce clarity. It could also be the case that a simile is a smoke screen to cover up an infelicity in the continuity of a discourse: not to articulate new content, but to give the effect of the articulation of content. I would venture to say that there are few if any cases where either of these two functions is entirely absent. That is, similes always have an expressive component, and they are also always part of the glue that holds a discourse together; although, as the case of Paradise Lost shows, this hardly distinguishes similes from any other class of linguistic features. The story of the simile which has been given above is not so much the history of a form, as it is a series of examples of these two polar characteristics interacting in various texts, texts which are thereby trying to do certain things.

It might be tempting to see the simile in the Iliad as a sort of original and proper use of the simile in contrast to Homer’s more decadent predecessors; or, alternatively, to see the sequence from Homer on as a sort of progressive evolution of forms toward some more “modern” use of the simile. The semiotic notion of a sequence of interpretants does not rely on any such scheme of development. What is foregrounded by this notion is the artificial character of human language (as opposed to an account of its “nature”). That is, human language has no nature which can be cultivated or perverted; no origin to which it can be false or true; no overall goal that it can achieve or fail to achieve. Instead, it is a mixture of possibilities, functions and characteristics which are created, exploited and suppressed at various times by various people trying to exercise influence over their world. A semiotic analysis notes the way that certain incipient functions are more fully exploited later, the way certain functions disappear or are redirected elsewhere, and also the way wholly new and unrepeatable functions appear: all a consequence of innumerable pressures internal and external to language. That language, like other human institutions, is systemic is a fundamental premise of semiotics; another premise is that human systems such as language are heterogeneous, open-ended, incomplete and self-contradictory. This means that texts are always full of ambiguities and capable of numerous contradictory meanings; it means that texts are always in danger of falling apart. In all of the examples I have chosen, I have tried to show not only how similes help hold a text together, but also how they mark threadbare seams about to pop open. If in each case I have foregrounded this process of “fastening together” (καίρωσις) at the expense of the seduction of the narrative as a whole, I trust that there is some way in which my remarks will not be “irrelevant” (ἀπὸ καιροῦ).