III.

FOCUS INTERPRETATION

METAPHORIC POSSIBILITY
AS FIRSTNESS

As suggested in chapter 1, the similarity between the two (or more) things related to each other by a genuine poetic metaphor is a creative discovery, not a creation, by the poet. The juxtaposition of the opposed and parallel objects is but the linguistic actualization—a dynamic bringing into sharp existential focus—of the real and positive character the two things share. The similarity takes its distinctive nature, in Peircean terms, from the nature of real possibility, not from the merely verbal mechanism which calls attention to it. While the poet’s metaphorical perception is highly imaginative, the perceived similarity is not imaginary. It is real. Peirce wrote:

Existence, then, is a special mode of reality, which, whatever other characteristics it possesses, has that of being absolutely determinate. Reality, in its turn, is a special mode of being, the characteristic of which is that things that are real are whatever they really are, independently of any assertion about them. (CP 6.349)

I will argue that metaphoric similarity, at least in the case of its best examples in poetry, is real before it “exists” in the mind of the reader, in the linguistic construct of the metaphor, or in the mind of the poet.

Why does this matter for the study of poetic metaphor? There are several important implications of Peirce’s philosophical realism for a semeiotic of figurative language. First, it implies that not just any fiat of fancy that brings two contrary objects together in an anomalous connection, however imaginative, can qualify as poetic metaphor. Second, it suggests that the choice of the metaphoric “vehicle”—the icon whose quality, relation of parts, or representative character is necessarily what it is by virtue of the quality, parts, or character of its object—is not by any means a totally free choice or a “stylistic option”; rather, it is (broadly) constrained by aesthetic purity and accuracy. Thus the peculiar invented or created circumstances of a poetic metaphor ought to be evaluated not entirely on their novelty, cleverness, or even their contextual aptness but also (importantly) on the pointedness with which they instantiate metaphoric truth.

Real similarity is the first postulate of metaphoric truth. Consider a preliminary illustration from John Keats’s poem, “Epistle to My Brother George.” It is an appropriate example for considering what the primary substance of the poetic vision is, because that question is a primary topic of the poem. Keats wonders aloud whether the poet might not see more, when he looks up at the evening sky, than “the dark silent blue/ With all its diamonds trembling through and through?” (11. 57-58). The question has answered itself: The poet has already seen, instead of ordinary stars, “trembling diamonds,” a striking metaphor which captures, or at least closely approaches, something of a “primal” reality not only of the stars but of all energy and life as well.

If we place the disparate objects of the metaphor side by side and consider the nature of their similarities, we may begin to see what status these similarities really hold. As I read the metaphor, it contains two distinct though interlocking comparisons: [stars]-to-diamonds, and trembling-to-[sparkling]. Stars are the literal topic or primary object of the first comparison, as evident from the context (the poet looking up at the evening sky). We expect him to see stars as he gazes at the “dark silent blue,” but he replaces this object in the “frame” with diamonds, the first tension-directed “focus” in the metaphorical complex. I therefore understand diamonds to be an icon for the object stars. The similarity between stars and diamonds is very simple, of course, as shown in figure 3.1.

Figure 3.1

We might of course specify more detail about the shared quality of sparkling (such as noting the oscillating crystalline aspect of the luminosity) but it is not necessary to do so; these details merely analyze what sparkling means. Indeed, a shared “Quality” in the Peircean sense ought to be thought of as “monadically” as possible (CP 1.424).

Now another reader of the metaphor might have chosen a different similarity; for instance, “high value,” relating the height of the stars, or their literary symbolism of “aspiration,” to the diamonds’ monetary value. In poetic metaphor, many readings of similarity (seen as dynamic interpretants) are possible; this is not to say, however, that all such readings are equally productive (or that all dynamic interpretants will survive the process of “natural selection” in the evolution towards a final interpretant). In this case, “high value” seems to be an acceptable similarity condition if we consider only the connection between stars and diamonds; Keats’s poet/speaker no doubt cherished the stars as other men do diamonds. However, the “value” connection arises from convention (an example of Peircean Thirdness) and thus leads us astray from our pursuit of the immediate Quality of the image (a Peircean Firstness). My point is only that the conventional association of “high value,” while quite valid when viewed as an additional (analogical) “resonance” or “overlay” in the metaphor, is not the primary qualitative ground of the figure—sparkling (or the like) is the ground, for it is not only the most immediate sensory connection between stars and diamonds, but it also furnishes a solid foundation from which to make the next (and far more interesting) interpretive “leap” in the metaphor, the leap by which “trembling” is tied in. In other words, once sparkling or the like is established as the similarity between stars and diamonds, sparkling then becomes an object in itself, a literal topic, for further representation by a second icon—trembling.

What I have in mind here, as a two-level process by which we may interpret the metaphor, might be clarified by reference to Peirce’s notion of “prescisive” versus “hypostatic” abstraction. (See Scott 1985: 204-207; Zeman 1982.) Peirce wrote:

The most ordinary fact or perception, such as “it is light,” involves prescisive abstraction, or prescission. But hypostatic abstraction, the abstraction which transforms “it is light” into “there is light here,” . . . is a very special mode of thought. It consists in taking a feature of a percept or percepts (after it has already been prescinded from the other elements of the percept) . . . , and in conceiving this fact to consist in the relation between the subject of that judgment and another subject. (CP 4.235)

As Scott explicates it, prescisive abstraction is “the operation by which we pay attention to one feature of a percept without regard for whatever other elements the percept may have.” But hypostatic abstraction “is the logical step which takes over after the operation of prescission has been performed” (1985: 204). By prescisive abstraction, we isolate an attribute in an object or objects, and by hypostatic abstraction we then consider that attribute as a substantive, an object in itself, upon which further mental operations or experiments can then be performed (see also CP 2.364).

As I read it, the Keats metaphor encourages us to use both abstractive processes in a complementary way. First, the mental juxtaposition of stars and diamonds encourages us to prescind the feature “they twinkle” from the other features of stars and the feature “they glitter” from the other features of diamonds. Of course we might have prescinded other features, too (such as “they are high” and “they are valuable”), but I am suggesting that the immediacy of the sensory or imaginal features brings them forward first (for me). Besides, in prescinding these imaginal features, we find encouraging grounds for going further: By hypostatic abstraction we then get “There is sparkling (or the like) here.” The twinkle/glitter similarity has become a substantive upon which further experiments can be performed. One such experiment would surely be to consider how the substantive sparkling (as a literal object in itself) might be further signified by the icon trembling. In Peirce’s terms, the results from the first (prescisive) judgment become the (hypostatically abstract) subject matter for yet another judgment in relation to a new predication—trembling. This reading is schematized in figure 3.2.

Figure 3.2

Keats’s introduction of “trembling through and through” is what drives the interpretation of this otherwise mild metaphor onward (or upward) to an exceedingly abstract, nearly primal reality. Specifically, the interpreter’s task, as I see it, is to discover what further character is shared by the sparkling of a luminous crystalline object and the trembling of some animate organism (the predicate trembling implies an animate subject). Now note that if “high value” or the like were chosen as the first ground, it would furnish no hypostatic object for experimentation with the second icon, trembling—how could trembling be like “high value” in any salient respect? (Perhaps there is some respect, but it is not clear to me.) Thus sparkling or the like must be the First qualitative ground of the trope, for sparkling and trembling present an immediate and salient (though perhaps unconscious) shared character.

In whatever way we choose to verbalize this character represented in figure 3.2 as a waveform (~)—say, “rapid oscillating motion” or “structured energetic vibration”—it is clear that it is not at all the peculiar invented property of this metaphor. Its most obvious token today is an energy wave, a recursive sine function whose “motion” is structured in alternating peaks and valleys. It characterizes light, the atomic vibrations of a crystal, nuclear radiation, radio signals, brain waves, and nerve impulses. In brief, it is in all that “shines” or “quivers.” Abstracted hypostatically on its own, it recalls Aristotle’s pronouncement (Metaphysics, Book θ): “Being is the active principle.” Keats’s simple metaphor thus drives us to experience, if not to contemplate, a pervasive reality of nature as a Firstness, a “total unanalyzed impression of it,” as Peirce described the Firstness of the aesthetic experience (MS 310: 12).

While it is of course unnecessary for a reader to consciously intellectualize this fact in order to understand and enjoy the metaphor sensitively, I believe that any sensitive and careful reader would feel at least a subliminal moment of “converging significance,” to borrow an expression from Northrop Frye (1957:117-118), and of certitude in the figure. As a conscious analyst, I cannot explain these feelings of significance and certitude except by reference to the manifest reality of ~, and the Firstness of that reality, which unites the metaphor’s otherwise disparate elements.

I call it Firstness despite the fact that, to some students of Peirce, it may appear that I am taking great liberties with Peirce’s notion of Firstness by treating the overarching character of Keats’s trembling star-diamonds as an instance of such. After all, energy and force and motion and counter-motion, which are the actual phenomena linking these figurative elements together, would be for Peirce examples of Secondness, not of Firstness (CP 1.304, 1.322). But I hasten to add that for Peirce there were different “modes” of Firstness (CP 2.277)—“First Firstness,” and (thus implied) second and third Firstness in the context of Peirce’s system. I believe that the ~ of this metaphor is an instance of second Firstness. This very representation of it, as a kind of “frozen” or “hypostatically abstracted” instant of motion, is—like the second part of Keats’s metaphor itself—precisely a diagram, the second and dyadic form of the “modes of Firstness” Peirce attributes to the Hypoicons (CP 2.277). This notion has already been developed in chapter 2; for the present, suffice it to say that at least approaches a condition of Firstness, that of a primal reality abstracted from its accidents in time and space, a pervasive trait which is nonetheless pointedly unique, an isolatable trait sui generis. I say that the Keats metaphor “approaches” such a condition because the ultimate stuff of the poetic similarity is positive possibility. The difficulty in so arguing from the Keats metaphor is that Keats has made the ultimate stuff of his metaphor more than a possibility; he has actualized it (linguistically) in a strikingly concrete way.

Peirce’s description of Firstness acknowledges and accommodates the difficulty in discussing Quality (as an instance of Firstness) from examples of embodied quality:

Firstness is the mode of being which consists in its subject’s being positively such as it is regardless of aught else. That can only be a possibility. For as long as things do not act upon one another there is no sense or meaning in saying that they have any being, unless it be that they are such in themselves that they may perhaps come into relation with others. The mode of being a redness, before anything was yet red, was nevertheless a positive qualitative possibility. And redness in itself, even if it be embodied, is something positive and sui generis. (CP 1.25, emphasis added)

Thus we may say that the possibility or the principle of this distinctive wavelike motion (~) is a positive reality on the order of Firstness before its actual embodiment in such diverse phenomena as light and neuro-muscular energy. As scientists discover it empirically in such diverse phenomena, Keats discovers it metaphorically. It is that sense of discovery that testifies to the reality of the thing discovered, the thing that is/was real prior to its physical or linguistic embodiment. In other words, Keats (perhaps without knowing so, consciously) got it right.

In saying that he “got it right,” I do not mean to credit Keats (much as I would like to) with having made a “scientific” discovery ahead of his time. The form of his “hypothesis” is not technical and explicit, as it would need to be in order to gain scientific verification; rather, it is metaphorical and implicit. My point is simply that the same reality can be the object of either kind of hypothesis, scientific or metaphorical, and that what makes the scientific hypothesis prove successful is an indispensable part (though not the whole) of what makes a metaphorical connection “poetic”—its approximation to reality. As Peirce said in his speech, “The Place of Our Age in the History of Civilization” (CB 12: 13), “the true poet is the true prophet,” and “that which was poetically divined shall be scientifically known.”

What I would really like to attribute to poets like Keats, then, is this “divining power” of their metaphors. The metaphors are not scientific models, but I believe they are formulated by a similar if not exactly the same process that Peirce called “Retroduction . . . the spontaneous conjectures of instinctive reason” (CB 1166: 104). While this “Retroduction” (sometimes called “Abduction” or “Hypothesis”) is by no means infallible and must—in the method of science, at least—be followed by careful Deductive elaboration and Inductive testing, Retroduction is the mode of inquiry responsible for all advances of knowledge or new discoveries, be they “scientific” or otherwise. In the same passage referred to above, Peirce went on to speak of this “instinctive reason” as a “magical faculty” by which the mind, more likely than not, is attuned to reality. This is not a mystical notion, but a common sense one, though the faculty Peirce was talking about could be exercised in many different modes of “divining,” including both scientific and artistic:

Animals of all races rise far above the general level of their intelligence in those performances that are their proper function, such as flying and nest-building for ordinary birds; and what is man’s proper function if not to embody general ideas in art-creations, in utilities, and above all in theoretical cognition? To give the lie to his own consciousness of divining the reasons of phenomena would be as silly in a man as it would be in a fledgling bird to refuse to trust to its wings and leave the nest, because the poor little thing had read Babinet, and judged aerostation to be impossible on hydrodynamical grounds. (CB 1166: 104)

Keats’s metaphor of star-diamonds “trembling through and through” certainly cannot qualify as what Peirce called a “theoretical cognition” (it would be absurd to say his metaphor contains a “wave theory” of electromagnetic phenomena). But I believe it does “embody the general idea” in another form: that of an “art-creation.” With this little metaphor, Keats indeed “trusted his wings,” and “rose above the general level” of his own knowledge, perhaps, to make a discovery.

Perhaps my notion of “discovery” in metaphor can be clarified by comparing and contrasting it with a well-known view, that of Max Black in his influential book Models and Metaphors (1962).

Black describes three ways of looking at metaphor: the substitution view, the comparison view, and the interaction view (25-47). The substitution view holds that a metaphorical expression is used in place of (is substituted for) some equivalent literal expression. For instance, “Richard is a lion” would be seen merely as a substitute for “Richard is brave” or some other such paraphrase. The comparison view holds that metaphor is the presentation of an implied or underlying similarity and is literally expressible as a simile. For instance, “Richard is a lion” would mean simply “Richard is like a lion (in being brave, etc.).” Thus the comparison view is really only a special case of the substitution view, as Black points out, in that the comparison view treats metaphor as a mere shortcut substitute for simile.

Black rejects both these views in favor of the interaction theory, which he attributes to I. A. Richards (1936, 1938). This theory holds that the meaning of metaphor is neither that of a literal comparison nor that of a literal substitute of any kind. Rather, the meaning of metaphor is “produced” when our thoughts about the two things in the metaphor are “active together” or “interact.”

The overall theory of metaphor I have proposed in chapter 1 on Peircean grounds is sympathetic with that of Richards and Black in saying that “meaning” involves “interaction”; while this is not peculiar to metaphor, I believe Richards and Black are right to call special attention to it in metaphor, which does involve an unusually powerful semantic index (its “tension,” as I will argue further in chapter 5). A complete Peircean account of metaphor ought to treat it as the complex and semantically creative sign it is, a blending of iconic similarity, indexical interaction, and symbolic generality with all the growth potential thus implied. According to Peirce, any “sufficiently complete” symbol includes an index, just as any sufficiently complete index includes an icon (NEM 4: 256); in my view, poetic metaphor is an example par excellence of the “complete symbol” as Peirce would have it. For this reason, I consider it a gross oversimplification of metaphor, especially of poetic metaphor, to reduce it to a comparison, that is, to treat it as a pure icon. As Ransdell (1979: 55), Anderson (1984a: 97-98), and others make clear, an “iconic sign” is not a pure icon, but a more complex sign embodying a (dominant) icon proper. When Peirce treated the iconic aspect of metaphor, as we have seen in chapter 2, he was careful to make this distinction, calling the metaphor a hypoicon (CP 2.276-277). If the substitution or comparison theory does indeed hold that metaphor “consists in” the presentation of a similarity as Black says it does (35), then I believe he is absolutely correct in rejecting that view.

However, to say that metaphor does not “consist in” comparison and should therefore not be “reduced to” similarity is not at all to say, as Black seems to imply, that we ought to eliminate comparison from the account of interactive metaphor, or to deny that a genuine poetic metaphor depends on objectively real similarity. That would be to eliminate, from the symbolic/indexical complex of the metaphor, its critical iconic core, an important catalyst of its interactive magic. (I will shortly show exactly how this interactive magic of metaphor is vitiated by doubtful iconic underpinnings in the metaphorical index.)

Because in Peirce’s opinion the similarity between the icon and its object is objectively real, one of the great values of the icon in his theory is that it can be manipulated to reveal other possible but otherwise hidden properties of its object (CP 4.530; CB 296: 182; CB 1128: 492-493). For this reason, it is “a great distinguishing property of the icon,” Peirce said, to reveal “unexpected truth” (CP 2.279). In his “Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism,” Peirce wrote that Icons “have more to do with the living character of truth than have either Symbols or Indices” (CB 1128: 496; CP 4.531). The object of the icon need not be an actually existent thing in Peirce’s view—in fact, it may be a “pure fiction as to its existence” (496), an important qualification which makes his formulation of the icon all the more relevant to literary study. Thus a Peircean “aesthetic” of poetic metaphor should not be a purely “representational” or “mimetic” aesthetic like those criticized by Kaelin (1982). Nevertheless, I hasten to add, as Peirce did: “But there is one assurance that the Icon does afford in the highest degree. Namely, that which is displayed before the mind’s gaze,—the Form of the Icon, which is also its object,—must be logically possible” (CB 1128: 496; CP 4.531, emphasis GSP’s). The necessary logical (semeiotic) possibility of the iconic object, and not its mere existence in physical nature, is the essence of its reality as far as the poet is concerned. Peirce wrote:

Of the three Universes of Experience familiar to us all, the first comprises all mere Ideas, those airy nothings to which the mind of poet, pure mathematician, or another might give local habitation and a name within the mind. Their very airy-nothingness, the fact that their Being consists in mere capability of getting thought, not in anybody’s Actually thinking them, saves their Reality. (CB 1166: 91, emphasis CSP’s)

The poetic icon/object Idea is therefore real, in Peirce’s view, even before it is an actual thought in someone’s mind. In fact, Peirce explicitly argued in the 1906 “Prolegomena,” as we have just seen, that all icons are reducible to antecedent forms in their objects (see also Ransdell 1979). This clearly grounds iconicity in reality and shows that the correct Peircean view of metaphor is to think of its similarity condition as a creative discovery, not as a mere invention, by both poet and reader.

Now Black understands this character of the icon as conceived by Peirce, for he quotes Peirce’s definition of the Icon (CP 2.247) in his discussion of models (Black 1962: 221). But Black seems to reserve objective iconicity for models (238), and so (by default) would apparently reject Peirce’s treatment of metaphors as iconic signs (CP 2.277). Despite his praise of a “memorable metaphor” as one which can “enable us to see a new subject matter in a new way” (236-237), Black distinguishes models from metaphors on the grounds that “a metaphor operates largely with commonplace implications” (239, emphasis Black’s). Thus the “new way” in which a “memorable metaphor” helps us to “see a new subject matter” apparently has nothing to do, in Black’s opinion, with any salient objective reality. It is just here that I depart sharply from Black.

It is also just here that Black departs from Richards, I might add. Black chastises Richards for the “lapse” of saying that the “common characteristics” of the two terms in the metaphor constitute “the ground of the metaphor” (Black 1962: 39). Richards is closer to the truth, Black argues, when he says that the reader is “forced to ‘connect’ the two ideas” (but “forced” is Black’s term). What is meant by this “forced connection”? For Black it apparently means, in part, the subjective (or cultural) imposition of a provisional relationship. For instance, Black warns against the “temptation to think of similarities as ‘objectively given,’” suggesting instead that metaphor often evokes “some imputed connection” (emphasis mine). In such cases, which presumably Black would consider the more complex and interesting cases (45), he thinks it is more accurate “to say that the metaphor creates the similarity than to say that it formulates some similarity antecedently existing” (37).

Black’s intent, I believe, is to emphasize the value of fresh poetic metaphor and to avoid a theory of metaphor based exclusively on prefabricated, moribund “reach-me-downs” (43); with that intent I am entirely sympathetic. But I believe that Black has misplaced the (crucial) distinction between trivial and arresting metaphor: It is not, as he implies, the antecedence of a metaphor’s similarity condition which trivializes it; that condition is merely its iconic foundation in reality. Reality need not be dull or commonplace or trivial. And metaphoric truth need not be a truism. What trivializes a metaphor is the antecedence (better, the redundancy) of a particular linguistic actualization of the metaphorical reality, as in hackneyed cases. But more important, a new metaphor can be trivial, too; one cause of this is the very characteristic that Black mistakenly attributes to the interesting cases—a “forcing of connections.” Far from making it truly “creative” in a poetic sense, a metaphor’s ad hoc imposition of an alleged “similarity” that has little or no objective reality outside the metaphor itself is a prime factor in making that metaphor seem “contrived.” Conversely, it is exactly the sense of a deep antecedent reality about a poetic metaphorical resemblance which quickly follows the surprise of its discovery to give assurance of its substantive value.

My position is not that the metaphor’s value is limited to that antecedent reality, but rather that its value—which does indeed include the creation of new configurations of meaning—is rooted in the possibility of it, a permanent field supporting the growth of the trope throughout its life cycle and abiding after its death to foster countless new tropes. The poetic metaphor is “creative” not in creating its own ground but in making something of it, thereby revealing new things about it. If it “forces” us to do anything, it forces us to notice and appreciate, perhaps to cultivate further, rich iconic ground whose fertility might otherwise have been overlooked entirely or neglected as unremarkable.

Does this matter? What difference does it make if we say, with Black, that the arresting metaphor “forces” the reader to invent or impose similarity instead of maintaining, as I do, that the poetic metaphor naturally “reveals” an antecedent reality which it then imaginatively expands upon? Walker Percy (1975) has given an excellent answer:

It is the cognitive dimension of metaphor which is usually overlooked, because cognition is apt to be identified with conceptual and discursive knowing. Likeness and difference are canons of discursive thought, but analogy, the mode of poetic knowing, is also cognitive. Failure to recognize the discovering power of analogy can only eventuate in a noncognitive psychologistic theory of metaphor. There is no knowing, there is no Namer and Hearer, there is no world held in common; there is only an interior “transaction of contexts” in which psychological processes interact to the reader’s titillation. (77)

Although I think Peirce would not accept Percy’s implied distinction between “likeness” and “analogy,” or the reduction of all metaphor to mere analogy (see chapter 2), Percy’s well-placed criticism of the anti-cognitive “psychologistic” view of metaphor strongly reminds me of Peirce’s attack in The Monist on James Mills’s nominalistic view of similarity (reprinted in Ketner and Cook 1975: 35-36).

Mr. Percy, in turn, might well disapprove the “discursive” tone of much in my argument—and I certainly do not wish to exclude intuition or feeling from metaphorical cognition. While avoiding a “logocentric” view of metaphorical “knowing,” I wish only to deny (emphatically) that there is anything at all relativistic about the premise or irrational about the manner of that “knowing”: Our intimations of similarity in poetic metaphor are reasonable because that similarity is real. My goal in this chapter’s emphasis, then, is identical with Mr. Percy’s: “The essence of metaphorical truth and the almost impossible task of the poet is, it seems me, to name unmistakably and yet to name by such a gentle analogy that the thing beheld by both of us may be truly formulated for what it is” (73). The icon (within its often violent index) is “gentle” because it is perfectly natural, not imposed; and it gives the feeling of “naming unmistakably” because it is revealingly accurate. Peirce would surely caution against the prescriptive use of my approach, for he urged Lady Welby that her “extreme insistence on accuracy of metaphor . . . might well be tempered” (PW 11). Still, I believe he would approve my appropriation of his words—on the clarity of aesthetic beauty in general—as a description of poetic metaphor in particular. After expressing doubts that there is “any such quality” as “esthetic badness,” Peirce wrote:

Of course, some will say that there is no such Quality as beauty either,—that it is a name given to whatever we love to contemplate regardless of any reasons for liking it, that what one man finds to his taste is not to the taste of another, and that de gustibus non est disputandum Probably the majority of people regard that maxim as having no other possible meaning than that there is no valid standard of taste, and nothing per se beautiful. Yet there is equally no disputing whether the sun is bright and hot, although even the physicist will allow the reality of radiant energy. It is not a question to dispute about; but the reason is that it is selfevident; and perhaps the same thing may be true of beauty. (MS 310: 8-9)

Now what part does the metaphorical icon play in the beautiful (poetic) metaphor? It is certainly not the whole. Peirce went on in the same manuscript to say,

the esthetic Quality appears to me to be the total unanalyzable impression of a reasonableness that has expressed itself in a creation. It is a pure Feeling but a feeling that is the impress of a Reasonableness that Creates. It is the Firstness that truly belongs to a Thirdness in its achievement of Secondness. (MS 310: 13)

I would apply this superb notion of beauty to the poetic metaphor as follows: Such a metaphor is a Firstness (a real and positive possibility) that belongs to a Thirdness (acquires symbolic power, generality, and growth for the mind of poet and reader) through its achievement of Secondness (forceful indexical interaction between the metaphor’s juxtaposed elements). In other words, we cannot talk about the beauty of the metaphor without talking about its truth, and that discussion must begin (though it must not end) with the question of reality as represented by the metaphorical icon.

As a further illustration of what this means, consider how it might affect our interpretation of a metaphor Black uses to talk about metaphor. As my own reliance on expository metaphor would indicate, I agree with Black that there is “no quarrel with the use of metaphors (if they are good ones) in talking about metaphor,” but that we must take care not to be “misled by the adventitious charms of our favorites.” Black then gives his favorite: “Let us try, for instance, to think of a metaphor as a filter” (39).

After illustrating this concept with the metaphor “Man is a wolf” (which I will examine shortly), Black then offers this extension of his “filter” analogy:

Suppose I look at the night sky though a piece of heavily smoked glass on which certain lines have been left clear. Then I shall see only the stars that can be made to lie on the lines previously prepared upon the screen, and the stars I do see will be seen as organized by the screen’s structure. We can think of metaphor as such a screen and the system of “associated commonplaces” of the focal word as the network of lines upon the screen. We can say that the principal subject is “seen through” the metaphorical expression—or, if we prefer, that the principal subject is “projected upon” the field of the subsidiary subject. (41)

Now suppose you discover such a piece of smoked glass inserted like a “lens filter” in some sort of “telescope” device that someone has mounted on a tripod and pointed at the heavens. Curious what it may be, you look through the device at the night sky. Of course the stars you see will lie in a pattern delineated by the clear lines in the smoked glass, but so what? What would you then think of this pattern? Would it interest you at all to find out what the significance of it might be?

Someone might well answer, “I already know the ‘significance,’ as you say, in the pleasure of just looking at the stars in this new way.” So be it. But if you wish to know anything else about it, I believe you must begin (though this is only a beginning) with the question whether the pattern of stars you see when you look through the glass corresponds in any way (exactly or approximately) to any objective pattern of stars in the sky, or whether the apparent configuration of stars is purely the function (fiction? figment?) of the smoked-glass pattern.

For instance, suppose the design in the glass consists of a clear circle with a clear spot roughly in the center, and when you look through it at the sky, you see a rough circle of stars with a big star in the center. Among the many possibilities are at least these two extremes: (1) The circle of stars you see with a big star in the center actually form some sort of star system, say, a “star burst” in which hundreds of smaller stars have actually sprayed out at roughly equal distances from their mother star, like a Roman candle fireball that went off eons ago, hitherto unnoticed among the profusion of other slow-motion cosmic fireworks. (2) The stars in the circle pattern are actually only members of a much more generalized chaos of stars, or of a star system very unlike the design in your lens filter; the fact that you happen to see them as forming a circle around a center is simply because your device has superimposed that appearance, and you might just as well get roughly the same appearance by pointing the device at any random group of stars in any sector of the sky.

We need not go into the kinds of experiments you would have to perform in order to investigate these possibilities further. My purpose is simply to inquire what is implied by Black’s “filter” metaphor-about-metaphor. Specifically, what are our presumptions about metaphor? Do we presume that this lens filter of metaphor, on account of its very character as “poetic,” is bound to superimpose, upon the object(s) in its focus, certain constructions that are ultimately nothing more than the playful and titillating configurations of the poet’s mind? Or is it possible, just possible, that these configurations of the poet’s mind (playful or not) might actually enhance real and really important properties of the object(s)? These presuppositions about reality are crucial in our approach to metaphor. What would your suspicions be about the smoked-glass lens you found pointed at the stars?

Black, I believe, would be quick to point out that our suspicions about this little “telescope” would be conditioned by the setting in which we first found it. For instance, how would your suspicions about the smoked-glass pattern differ, depending on whether you found the device in an astronomer’s observatory or under the skylight in the studio of an artist?

Provided that the setting was the scientist’s observatory, even Black might suspect that the smoked-glass pattern was designed to reveal or enhance some antecedent pattern of stars. In other words, especially if he found “systematic complexity” (239) in the design, he might test it out as a model. The test would try to determine whether or not the design was

isomorphic with its domain of application. So there is a rational basis for using the model. In stretching the language by which the model is described in such a way as to fit the new domain, we pin our hopes upon the existence of a common structure in both fields. If the hope is fulfilled, there will have been an objective ground for the analogical transfer. (238)

On the other hand, if Black found the device in the artist’s studio, and if the pattern in the smoked glass was sufficiently “brief” (238) and used “commonplace” markings or shapes in it (239), I presume that he would suspect it to be something closer to a metaphor. That would presumably make it the kind of “filter” which superimposes its own invented or subjective configurations upon whatever is viewed through it.

Now my intention is not to belittle the distinction between scientific models and poetic metaphors, but to raise certain questions about where Black draws this distinction. Why should the “complexity” of the scientific model give it a more “rational basis” than the metaphor? Does this mean that the conceptual basis of metaphor is irrational? Why should the greater “brevity” of the metaphor, let alone the fact that its vocabulary of signs is drawn from the great common and collective experience of humanity, make it any less likely to have an “objective ground” than a model? Does this mean that a long statement about uncommon things is more likely to be true?

No one is asking to have poetic metaphors tested in a laboratory, but in respect to the “pinning of hopes” for an “isomorphism” between reality and the signs in which we understand it, aren’t we all, in one sense—scientists no less than poets—“seeing through a glass darkly”? To be sure, the “proverbial knowledge” which Black says is the “only” sort we need to make and interpret metaphors (239) is eminently fallible, full of misconceptions, and not (as far as we know) to be equated with the state of knowledge in contemporary science. But what if Black were wrong about “proverbial knowledge” being the only thing we use to make and interpret metaphor? What if there is something more than “proverbial knowledge” that goes into a good metaphor? And what if this “something more” were what Peirce called “the spontaneous conjectures of instinctive reason,” that same abductive faculty of original insight which accounts, not only for the universal ideas embodied in all “art-creations,” but for every major advance of science as well? (See CB 1165: 104.)

In other words, what if—in that artist’s studio late one night—while you were looking at the stars through a particularly arresting design in one of the artist’s smoked-glass etchings, you saw . . . in just that one particular sector of the heavens . . . !

And this does not even address the possibility that a distinctive though neverbefore-noticed pattern of stars shining in perfect alignment through an extremely ornate etching in glass might itself be part of an ingenious icon whose object is a real feeling, perhaps of some more universal order yet.

The example of metaphor Black uses to show how his filter works does not indicate that he has considered such a possibility. Though the “Man is a wolf” metaphor is hardly worth it, Black gives a detailed account of how the trope sends the reader off to search his knowledge of wolves—not so much the dictionary knowledge of wolf as its “system of associated commonplaces” (40), or what Eco calls the “encyclopedia” (1984: chapter 3)—in order to find out what the wolf-metaphor may be construed to say about Man. All this wolf knowledge (and Black is careful to note how it may differ from culture to culture) then serves as a “filter” or cognitive screen through which the interpreter views Man. Black concludes, “The wolf-metaphor suppresses some details, emphasizes others—in short, organizes our view of man” (41, emphasis Black’s).

For me, this wolf-metaphor does nothing of the sort. It does not affect my view of anything at all, let alone bring about the rather profound effect of “organizing my view of man.” In fairness to Black, he used this example in order to keep his explanation of metaphor simple, but that is just the problem with his explanation: Interesting, arresting metaphors simply do not put forth such vapid generalities as “Man is a wolf.” Rather, they put forth claims which are usually much more specific and always much more substantive as to the possible character and connection of the objects they juxtapose; such hypotheses, although metaphorical, can actually be accepted for their revealing insights or rejected for their dangerous distortions. (Perhaps Black would agree, but then I should have to ask: Insights into what, or distortions of what?) Once a metaphor’s basic iconic ground has been accepted, as a feasible and substantive hypothesis at least, then I agree it really does begin to “organize” our views, as Black says. I would go further: If the new extensions and configurations of meaning which result from this organization tend to confirm and deepen our understanding of the metaphor’s iconic ground, then we have more than a merely engaging metaphor; we have one which is “poetic” in the finest sense, the sense in which poetry can shape not only our views but perhaps even the quality and conduct of our lives—the highest grade of clarity an idea can achieve, as Peirce would have it (see W 3: 266).

In sum, no trope can seriously hope to “organize our view” of a thing unless it advances an honest and significant proposal about what the organization of that thing really is. Although it is theoretically possible, in actual practice we simply do not pick just any two concepts and start “interacting” them. From immediate to final interpretant, the meaning of poetic metaphor reacts to a substantive icon.

Consider Shakespeare’s wolf-icon in Ulysses’ famous speech from Troilus and Cressida (I.iii. 119-124). Ulysses pictures what will happen in society when rational law and order are overthrown:

Here, it is not just anything or everything about Man and Wolf which the reader is left to consider and “force” together in some culturally or subjectively arbitrary way. No, at the core of the metaphor is rather a specific and substantive hypothesis of real similarity: When a whole society of creatures refuses to be ruled by any law or principle higher than its own appetites, then appetite itself becomes a “universal wolf”; being “universal” (finding nothing but other vestiges of its own wolfishness everywhere it turns in society), it must perforce become a “universal prey” and “last eat up himself.” Here is no fanciful werewolf, but the real beastliness of man: the unbridled appetite of the animal for power, that feeds upon itself and perpetually threatens the human species with self-annihilation. True, no literal paraphrase can substitute for the dramatic effect Shakespeare achieves by “superimposing the filter” of this cannibal/wolf icon upon this particular aspect of human nature, but the spectacle we thus behold, the part that comes through the filter, if you will, we ought to recognize as an all-too-real human capacity for savagery. We must not think for a moment that it is some figment of Shakespeare’s imagination, an illusion in smoked glass, else we are bound to miss part of what endows this passage with lasting significance. Although the truth of this significance may be a very “old” truth, Shakespeare’s metaphor crystallizes it and revitalizes it in such a way that it strikes us with the force of an important revelation or discovery: It is a Firstness that truly belongs to a Thirdness in its achievement of Secondness.

Two objections naturally arise at this point to this treatment of metaphoric similarity as an instance of Peircean Firstness, however: (1) If a First is “such as it is regardless of aught else,” as Peirce said, how can a “similarity” qualify as such? Isn’t a similarity a relation between two or more things? (For a thorough discussion of a similar problem, see Vaught 1986). (2) Further, if something like redness is a First Quality, how can a poet’s perception of such Quality be accorded the status of “discovery”? Shall we congratulate a poet for having discovered something like redness in two objects? Isn’t the whole notion trivial?

Let us consider the second of these objections first. It is true that redness and other such qualities are Peirce’s most frequently selected examples of Quality. Redness in fact is an excellent example, given Peirce’s pedagogical purposes, for at least two reasons. First, it is a simple sense quality and is therefore easily thought of monadically by his readers. Second, it is a well-known quality, one that has long ago been “discovered” and fully codified in both our linguistic and extra-linguistic cultures. But these same two reasons make redness an unfair counterexample to my thesis of “discovery” in poetic metaphor.

Besides the ordinary sense qualities which predominate in Peirce’s didactic passages on Quality, his notion of Firstness includes much more, as Shapiro has pointed out (1983: 29). Associated with Firstness are also the characteristics of freshness, life, freedom, immediacy, feeling, vivacity, independence (CP1.302-303, 1.357, 6.32). When such general characteristics of the category of Firstness are considered, I believe Peirce would agree that there is an infinitude of other qualities which have not even been embodied in actuality, let alone been discovered. Few of these are actually apprehensible to our simple senses, for Peirce describes them as “embracing endless varieties,” of which all we know “are but minute fragments” (NEM 4: 332).

For my purposes, the best evidence of this is the fact that when a poetic metaphor discovers a new similarity, we can hardly find a name for it, though we can immediately feel both its rightness and its reality. Consider this example from Alaskan poet Tom Sexton’s “A December Walk” (1985: 11. 1-3):

Though I never before have imagined the intricate lattice of frozen breath (from spoken words on a very cold day) as floating in “syllabic nets of frost,” the trope—despite its originality—immediately strikes me as sensorially correct and qualitatively unified. It gives an instantaneous feeling of composing a general yet distinctive whole. And this it achieves despite the notable facts that it is composed of radically disparate elements, that it appeals to a hybrid of several senses (ocular, tactile, auditory), and that it is “analyzable” (only partly and unsatisfactorily, please note) as consisting of a variety of features—“connectedness,” “delicacy,” “intricacy,” and so forth. No one of these features adequately names the gestalt-like character of the whole.

Likewise, it is possible to “analyze” an ordinary and well-known quality like redness, when we really think of a particular instance of it, as having a certain luminosity, vividness, hue, saturation, and so forth. It is also possible to think of red in relation to other colors (in sharp contrast with green, for instance), or even synaesthetically across other senses (especially tactile). And yet redness is a monadic Quality which is distinctively what it is “regardless of aught else.” The point of calling it “independent” and “monadic” is not to say that it has, or can have, no relation to anything else, or that it is impossible to describe its individual features. Rather, its “monadic independence” is in the fact that we need not analyze it or contrast it to anything else in order to think of an instance of it and hold it in mind. Even naming it, let alone describing it, seems almost unnecessary or futile, for such mental manipulations of the Quality do not facilitate our primary and immediate feeling for its predominating wholeness and unity.

However, unlike redness, the similarity brought home by Sexton’s metaphor above cannot be labeled with any satisfactory single name I can think of. The metaphor discovers a new possibility, one which has not previously been codified linguistically, but one which is nevertheless palpably real and sui generis. Nothing about such a “discovery” is trivial. It is one of the principal ways in which good poetry expands the mind beyond the known, thereby making room for other associations beyond the initial similarity discovered. In the Sexton metaphor, for instance, it is the compelling sense of discovery (of the primary similarity in the words-to-nets connection) which causes the mind to seize upon the trope, turning it over and over to see what further secrets it may yield. The result perhaps is the faintest echo of an unspoken narrative text beyond the primary (implicit) analogy. That is, perhaps beyond the fully “crystallized” connection of words/syllables to a network/lattice in the frosty air is the further hint of the sort of “nets” which are used to “capture” things, “syllabic nets,” which might be used to try to “capture thoughts.” If this association is pursued, especially as we realize that what “floats” captured in these nets of frost is not literally “words” but the frozen breath left behind by the words, then a poignant evanescence arises from the figure, a feeling of words that escape the breath, and of thoughts which (all the more so) cannot be captured in those words. Quite effectively, we are left (like the “us” in the poem?) staring at the empty “nets” of mere “syllables” in the frozen air.

Thus one discovery of a new and salient similarity invites the search for other possibilities, or at least provokes that sense of the ineffable, the feeling that “more is there, if only it could be discovered.”

But what of the more ordinary sense qualities where poetic metaphor is concerned? Perhaps it is fair to say that the “discovery” of an already discovered quality like redness in metaphor is an even greater challenge for the poet, for in this case it must be a significant re-discovery in order to deserve our attention and increase our understanding. When poetic metaphor achieves this, the felt force of the gestalt is often doubled, as the surprise of discovery is immediately followed and fortified by a powerful sense of having just remembered—or perhaps of having just really noticed for the first time—something very important but long forgotten or ignored.

I find an instance of this in a stanza from Bink Noll’s “Lunch on Omaha Beach” (Gordon 1973: 82-83). The speaker in the poem recounts a picnic he had on the D-Day beach, years after the famous invasion of 1944. In the first five stanzas, the speaker laments the fact that the ugly signs of war have been cleaned up. To prevent our forgetting the horrors of war, he says, the bodies should have been left right where they fell in the sand, not “conveyed” away from sight and “deposited” in tidy government graveyards. Then comes stanza six:

Now the blood-wine metaphor is not new; what is striking about Noll’s presentation of the metaphor, it seems to me, is his re-discovery of the Quality of redness upon which the connection (in part) is predicated. Of course we are already aware that blood and wine are “red” liquids, but there is a tendency to think of the blood-wine color similarity as an arbitrary or conventional (Eucharistic) conception. After all, the “redness” of a cut finger—a rather clear case of red—is not much like the color of “red” Bordeaux, which is rather more purple than red. Just as “white” is a conventional name for wine that is optically clear or yellow, so “red” has always seemed a rather arbitrary label for richer, darker wines.

However, on first seeing Noll’s “last Bordeaux” poured out in libation upon the beach, we see a real and salient connection between the color of red wine and that of human blood, not of the bright little drop of blood on a pricked finger, but of the dark stain spreading out on the white sand around a fallen soldier. This blood, we see, really is the color of Noll’s last Bordeaux, and the color matters—if we enter the spirit of the poem, we now feel we ought to see exactly what human blood on the beach looks like. Thus the old blood-wine metaphor, with all its many other ancient resonances, is made compellingly vivid and “new” again, by means of the poet’s rediscovery of an ordinary sense quality, a Quality sui generis. While the context of the poem is what uncovers this connection, there is nothing arbitrary about the quality of it, nor is it the peculiar provision of Noll’s metaphor; the metaphor simply recaptures an old, forgotten, but very poignant truth.

The commonness and simplicity of Peircean sense qualities, therefore, in no way preclude the sense of discovery they present to us in truly poetic metaphor; on the contrary, the “obviousness” of the qualities is often the very attribute of them which the metaphor turns to powerful advantage. When a quality has already been codified and conventionalized in language or in culture or in literature, the good metaphor’s function is not just to “trade upon” that convention, but to revitalize it by turning it over to expose its underlying and motivating ground in the original qualities (which, because of human limits, are often simple sense qualities). Among the many factors which distinguish the most successful poetic metaphors, then, this surely is one: The pathways of their often sinuous complexity keep leading back (through Thirdness and Secondness) to an original Firstness, an antecedent possibility.

Now what of the first objection to my “discovery” thesis, the objection that metaphoric similarity cannot be granted the status of Firstness since a similarity is a relation between two or more things? Shapiro’s explanation of Firstness is helpful and accords with what we have already observed about prescisive and hypostatic abstraction as a means of discovering Firstness:

Although an indefinite aggregate of individual things may resemble one another through a common trait or quality, and may be contrasted with all individuals devoid of this same trait or quality, the trait or quality can be abstracted from the things which have it or lack it, i.e., be isolated and considered in itself apart from the individual things which share or fail to share it. . . . Firstness is the possibility that some quality may be abstracted or isolated, which would then render it fit to be considered as a unity without parts or elements, without explanatory antecedents or causal consequents. It is the independence of Firstness that allows Peirce to associate it most closely with ideas of freedom, spontaneity, and originality. (Shapiro 1983: 30)

What makes Noll’s blood-wine metaphor “original,” whereby it seems “spontaneous” despite its long cultural and literary tradition, is in part its re-discovery of a distinctly independent quality of redness. Admittedly, in the interpretation of this particular metaphor (as opposed to the Keats metaphor I have discussed) there is no apparent value in thinking of this redness (hypostatically) in the abstract, apart from its blood-wine embodiment. My insistence that this redness can be thought of independently of its embodiment is motivated only by the necessity of considering what phenomenological and ontological status metaphoric similarity actually holds. Not every “abstraction,” as we will see, holds such a positive iconic status—of which status merely one test is the question of whether it can be held in mind independently of the set of objects from which it is abstracted. The question is not whether the quality would ever have come into mind without the objects which embody it, but simply whether it can be thought of independently of them. If it cannot be thought of independently, we must assume that it is merely a “nominal” construct, a provisional fabrication which has no positive status. But if it can be so thought of, we have one evidence (self-evidence, not infallible but hardly dubitable) of its positive character.

Truly poetic metaphor is distinguishable from the “contrived” variety on this very basis (among others of course). In what sometimes presents itself as “poetic metaphor” (but is not, by my account), there is no sense of a genuine discovery; in such cases, as we will see, the invention and interpretation of similarity may be intelligible and even clever, but it is still subjective, fabricated, provisional, often fanciful. Conversely, in the most successful poetic metaphor, the “invention” is the uncovering of salience, and the interpretation is the discovery of Firstness. It often makes us wonder why we had not thought of it before—implying that we could have, if only we had been as accurately perceptive as the poet.

Thus, although the semantic opposition between the terms of a good metaphor is most often (with good reason—chapter 5) held responsible for its “originality,” the similarity condition between the terms is also an important part of the metaphor’s “spontaneity and originality”—and this because (in the best examples) it is a Peircean Firstness, which precedes the metaphor’s linguistic embodiment of it in a Secondness. To solve this apparent paradox, we have only to distinguish between the act of perceiving and the independent Firstness of the thing perceived. Positive Possibles or potentials, which I suggest are the ultimate ground of the most “original” metaphoric similarities, were for Peirce clearly objective, independent, and real. Because I agree with that, I consider it a mistake to think of poetic similarity as a Hegelian synthesis (which corresponds to Peirce’s Thirdness, not Firstness; see PW 28). It may well be that poets use something like a Hegelian dialectic to arrive at the perception of unity they are always finding in diversity (though I rather suspect that their insights are spontaneous and immediate); it may well be that none of us can arrive at a new notion of Firstness except through Secondness and Thirdness (as we have already seen from the exercise of prescisive and hypostatic abstraction in the Keats metaphor). But what we finally see, in poetic similarity, is not the means but the (immediate) end, not the spectacle of a poet’s mind at work, struggling to synthesize some clever connection for an incongruous set of entities, but a compellingly self-evident Firstness.

Though poetic metaphor is certainly responsible for the creation (not just the discovery) of many new configurations of meaning, the most immediate pleasure and satisfaction it affords, I believe, arises from a “harmony” between the mind and the clear Firstness of a precedent iconic reality the poet has suddenly struck upon. Peirce’s description of the icon itself seems to fit this notion (CP 2.299):

The Icon has no dynamical connection with the object it represents; it simply happens that its qualities resemble those of that object, and excite analogous sensations in the mind for which it is a likeness. But it really stands unconnected with them.

Surely this excitation of “analogous sensations in the mind” is part of the instant pleasure of poetic metaphor. To be sure, the metaphoric icon would not excite these sensations (regardless of any inherent potential it may have to do so) without the inventiveness of the poet in juxtaposing the icon with its object. Of course the interpreter’s mind must also have a structure which is sympathetic to this iconicity in order to experience it; there must be an isomorphism between the mind and the similarity condition. The mind thus creatively discovers and experiences the iconic resemblance, but the mind does not create the distinctive character of it. In what I have described as “degenerate” poetic metaphor in chapter 2, at least, it often “simply happens” that the icon resembles its object in certain respects and that these excite the mind; the icon itself is “unconnected with them,” meaning both the iconic object and the mind. The first power of the metaphoric connection is therefore its independent (and I believe natural) similarity, not its humanness—except that humanity has “a natural bent in accordance with nature’s,” an axiom upon which rests all our hope of understanding nature, as Peirce said (CP 6.477).

Ironically, though, the naturalness of the metaphorical icon to the mind may make it seem that a poet has not discovered anything unique in finding a similarity between two things. Besides, even the set of possible Qualities is infinite (NEM 4: 332). And so it may seem that “anything goes” when we consider the possibilities for metaphor. Doubtless this is true, in one sense. In arguing for the distinctiveness of poetic metaphor, I do not intend to prescribe its limits; I wish only to describe part of its special character. While it must be allowed that “anything goes” as far as metaphor is concerned, it is not in fact the case that any and every possibility is equally likely to suggest itself to the poetic mind in metaphorical thought. On the contrary, metaphorical thought—not in spite of but because of its extreme sensitivity to suggestion—is more likely to apprehend certain kinds of possibility, namely those which are the most universal but intensely real. This may have been what poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti had in mind when he defined the poet as “the super realist,” a notion that cuts squarely against the grain of popular misconceptions about poetry (Perrine, 1983: 526).

But how can these things be? How can there be different kinds of possibility? How can some of them be more “intensely real” than others? Is a possibility not just a possibility? Is reality not all one fabric? Certainly not for Peirce. He taught that there were degrees or grades of reality (CP 1.175; W 1: 500-501) and had worked out an extremely elaborate and imaginative theory not just of being but of becoming (see MSS940-942, which most likely form a single unit). The rather esoteric details of this need not concern us here; for its relevance to the possibility of poetic metaphor, the important point is that ideas, viewed as possibilities, have their own potential-and in varying degrees-to exert a causative influence on both existence and mind (“causative” in the sense of a final rather than efficient cause; for an extensive treatment of final causation, see Short 1981a, Shapiro 1985b, and discussion in my chapter 7). This notion, in Peirce’s words, involves the admittedly

extreme position that every general idea has more or less power of working itself out into fact; some more so, some less so. Some ideas, the harder and more mechanical ones, actualize themselves first in the macrocosm; and the mind of man receives them by submitting to the teachings of nature. Other ideas, the more spiritual and moral ones, actualize themselves first in the human heart, and pass to the material world through the agency of man. (CP 2.149)

These ideas, whether through nature or via the original imagination, present themselves to us, according to Peirce, in at least three degrees of persistence: the merely interrogative, the more or less plausible, and the “irresistible”(CB 1166: 104; W 3: 317-319). While not even an “irresistible belief” should be considered infallible, this persistence of a possibility is one portent of its degree of reality: “The reality of things consists in their persistent forcing themselves upon our recognition. If a thing has no such persistence, it is a mere dream. Reality, then, is persistence, is regularity” (CP 1.175). Peirce described abduction, in part, as “a surrender to the insistence of an idea” (MS 442: 2). He also extended his notion of gradience in reality to the similarity conditions of metaphor and analogy, as for example when he contrasted two metaphorical assertions of his own making, the one presenting a “real but slight resemblance,” and the other, a “great analogy” (W 1: 497; see chapter 2 for detailed discussion of the “great analogy").

Without making any more detailed claims than these as to what Peirce’s view might have been, I wish to present my own taxonomy of possibility in order to illustrate how such distinctions can be made and what they might mean for a theory of metaphor. My views have been heavily influenced by Peirce (in addition to the passages already cited, see CP 1.218, 1.487, 1.531, 2.538, 3.527, 4.573, 6.371; PW 24, 81); but I simply cannot affirm that Peirce would agree with the details of my proposal. Furthermore, my hypothesis concerns only the general tendency among possibilities to fall into several kinds; that is, it proposes distinctions but not disjunctions between the kinds, which I believe constitute a continuum. This continuum, however, does seem to me to “cut itself at its own joints,” so to speak. The simple scheme I have in mind is given in figure 3.3.

Figure 3.3

It might at first seem absurd to classify a paradox such as a square circle as a “kind of possibility,” since it seems, to the ordinary conception, a clear impossibility. But “seems” is a big word. In some other dimension or possible world, a geometric shape might very well be literally described as being both circular and square at the same instant. The very fact that we call it an “impossibility” under ordinary conceptions of time and Euclidean space means that at least some predication of possibility is applicable to it.

On the other hand, a square baseball, as silly as the notion may sound, is of a different order of possibility. So far as I know, no such thing as a square baseball has ever been thought of before, let alone been produced, but we see immediately that it could be. Someone might object that a baseball is by definition a spherical object, but I believe that without ever having mentioned the notion to you before, I could draw a picture for which you would be unable to find a better or more precise (albeit figural) description than “square baseball” (unless it might be “cubic baseball”; but since I invented it, I will call it “square”!). The least that may be said of it, then, is that—unlike the square circle—the square baseball involves no contradiction with what we think is possible; still, as we have no positive reason to expect or predict the actual existence of it, I call it a negative possibility

Perhaps it is a bit unfair to use an ordinary (round) baseball as an example of what I hypothesize to be the next higher order of possibility—namely, positive possibility—since baseballs are already known to exist in actuality. But imagine, if you will, a group of ordinary people who have neither seen, heard of, nor thought of a baseball at any time in their lives. Go one step further and suppose that they have no knowledge whatever of any sport or game involving the use of a ball. Now describe to them the game of baseball in every detail except one: Omit any reference to the size, shape, or constitution of the ball itself. Ask them, instead, to collaborate and to “design” some “entity” with which this game might be played. Provide them a rule book and ample statistics from past games, supply them with a major-league baseball field to use as a laboratory, let them take all the time they need, and give them any materials or equipment they request—except a baseball, of course, or any other kind of ball.

What would these people “invent”? Admittedly, it would most likely not be exactly a baseball as we know it. Most of us would be very surprised (even if there were physicists and engineers among the group of inventors) if they came up with a ball weighing just over five ounces, measuring between 2.86 and 2.94 inches in diameter, composed of cork, yarn, rubber, and covered in cowhide sewn together with “216 slightly raised red cotton stitches.” This loving blueprint of the current ball by baseball essayist Roger Angell, however, suggests that he might not be surprised in the least if our “inventors” offered something rather close to the contemporary specifications; for if the present ball “were a fraction of an inch larger or smaller, a few centigrams heavier or lighter,” Angell writes, “the game of baseball would be utterly different” (Eschholz and Rosa, 1978: 46-47).

While anyone except such an articulate idealist of the sport would be surprised if the “new” ball were that close to the original, I think most of us would be equally surprised if the new ball were as light as a ping-pong ball, or as large as a basketball, or as soft as a bean bag, or as “square” as Rubik’s cube. This is all I mean by saying that a baseball is an example of positive possibility. Its general but essential character is motivated.

Perhaps I have unfairly loaded the scenario by giving my group of “inventors” the rules of the game in advance. Imagine instead, then, a future world like our own with one exception: All knowledge or memory of the game of baseball has been erased, perhaps through systematic suppression by some alien power. Perhaps even cricket and any other game like baseball have been utterly forgotten and expunged from recorded history. Go a step further and imagine that all sports and contests of any kind involving the use of a ball have been strictly suppressed for centuries (by unwritten law so as to avoid even a reference to such things) and that this “re-programming” of humanity has been so successful that no member of the species for several generations has had to be “isolated under suspicion of playing ball” with any object whatsoever (not even with a rock or tin can).

Under this scenario, is there any reason to predict that human beings, once given their freedom again, would “re-invent” any games involving the use of some sort of ball? Probably so, I think. But if they did, would any of these games resemble the current game of baseball in any remarkable way? Perhaps so, perhaps not. If a similar game did evolve, would it make use of an object that might provoke anyone from our century to exclaim, “Why, that thing they are tossing around is essentially a baseball!” Surely this would be far too much for even the most radical baseball idealist to hope for. The baseball in current use is only one version of a possibility. Given human nature and the laws of physics, a baseball fills this niche in actuality rather neatly (at least more positively than my “square” version would). For all that, there is nothing “irresistible” about it (with apologies to Roger Angell).

Apply the above scenario to the idea of a circle, however, and perhaps you will see why I use it as an example of the highest order of possibility. Any “alien power” which wished to eradicate all tokens of the circle from our world would naturally have a much harder time of it. How might this be accomplished? Not only baseballs and all other balls, but all geometry books and others showing circles would have to be burnt. All art and architecture and mechanical devices exhibiting shapes close to circular would have to be destroyed. People would have to be prevented somehow from observing natural shapes like the moon or water droplets or concentric ripples in a pond. Genetic engineering would even have to be performed on the species to suppress undesirable anatomical traits suggesting roundness or curvature (like the iris of the eye).

Even supposing all this could actually be achieved, and a new generation of people arose who had neither seen a reasonably good example of a circle nor heard the concept discussed, would it then surprise you if some youngster, doodling on a paper, were to draw a rough circle, stop to reflect upon the shape of it, replicate the doodle again and again with improving results, and then run to show the work to a parent? I suspect that youngster would do so with all the excitement of a Kepler having just hypothesized the elliptical orbit of Mars. Even supposing that the child’s discovery were suppressed, would it surprise you if it were to happen again with a different child or adult? I would rather be surprised if this, or something like it, failed to happen. That is what I mean by an irresistible possibility.

How would this hypothesis on the nature of possibility apply to metaphor? Keeping in mind that the hypothesis intends only to emphasize major loci in a graded continuum of possibility, my claim is that poetic metaphors present an immediately anomalous character like that suggested by possibility kinds 1 and 2 (paradoxical and negative), but that the metaphors then open up, or turn around, to reveal, within these anomalies, a set of previously hidden but very potent, sometimes irresistible connections which are possibilities of kinds 3 and 4. While as possibilities these poetic similarities are vague, they possess a peculiar capability (in the case of kind 3) or near inevitability (in the case of kind 4) for being actualized—as I would say, “discovered”—in poetic metaphor.

The words of Peirce, however, best describe what it is I wish to say about this sort of “poetic” idea. In speaking of the evolution of a real idea, Peirce wrote: “the idea does not belong to the soul; it is the soul that belongs to the idea. The soul does for the idea just what the cellulose does for the beauty of the rose; that is to say, it affords it opportunity” (CP 1.216).

But here an important qualification on my use of the term “poetic” suggests itself: In order for a metaphor to be merely effective, it is not at all necessary that it yield this powerful sense I am trying to describe of an idea in possession of a soul. On the contrary, a metaphor may be “effective” in giving nothing more than the character of the speaker’s soul in possession of some idea. Good metaphors whose primary focus is on the idea-possessing soul, I call “dramatic or expressive”; only those are “poetic,” in my use of the term, whose primary focus falls rather upon an idea (motivated thought or feeling) so compelling that it subordinates the poet’s (and the reader’s) idiosyncrasies of mind and character to itself. To a certain extent, this usage of the term “poetic” is arbitrary, since either kind of metaphor may be used to great advantage in poetry, but I wish to distinguish sharply between the dramatic uses of metaphor (serving a purpose in specific context) and what I see as poetic metaphor’s real epistemic, even prophetic power (significance in but beyond specific context).

For instance, consider the metaphor “The Mona Lisa is a wart!” (borrowed from Earl Mac Cormac’s illuminating chapter on “Metaphor and Truth,” 1985: 220). It seems to me that this metaphor might be rhetorically effective. It expresses the speaker’s state of mind rather well; in fact, in a dramatic or literary context, it would intrigue me to know what sort of character (outspoken critic? bitter artist? demented cynic?) might invent such a trope. But does the metaphor furnish us with any significance which we may carry with us beyond such an immediate context? If we allow that the wart acts like a “filter,” does it “organize” our view of anything we look at through it—the Mona Lisa, for instance—or does the filter merely succeed in making a dramatic spectacle of itself, thereby organizing our view of its designer? Granting that the latter effect may indeed be the actual rhetorical purpose of the trope, the question still remains why it would be so hard-pressed to achieve the former purpose. The answer seems inescapable: No “interactive magic” occurs here because the possibility of any salient (positive or irresistible) similarity between the Mona Lisa and a wart is too far-fetched, given our present conceptions, to be seriously entertained. There is of course a possibility of a substantive resemblance, to which we may be blinded by our admiration of the painting or by our unreasonable prejudice against warts, but this is only a “negative” possibility (kind 2), one which we admit as a possibility only because we wish to remain open to some future revelation. In the meantime, however, there is no such revelation here; if the metaphor is memorable at all, we will probably remember it only as having come from a particular source or dramatic context.

Two final examples may serve. First, suppose we are confronted with the anomaly (and, perhaps, metaphor), “The number 19 is an elephant” (from a suggestion of Paul Henle, 1958). In all likelihood, we could make no sense of it—out of context.

However, suppose we give it a context. Suppose I tell you that something like it comes from a poem by my niece. She has just learned to count as high as twenty but has not yet realized that this qualifies her to keep on counting practically forever. Still, being the bright young lady that she is, she has written a “poem” on numbers to celebrate her having reached the pinnacle of twenty. The poem begins:

1 is fun

2 is too

3 is the key

4 is the door

and proceeds in like fashion to the penultimate and final lines:

19 is elephantine

And 20 is aplenty!

We can find much to praise in this “poem” (Peirce, I think, would especially like the third line). The metaphor of 19 and the elephant, now in context, is completely intelligible. Knowing as we do that the author of the poem is a young child who has just mastered her numbers up to twenty, we guess what she has in mind: 19, as numbers go, is huge like an elephant (as animals go). Beyond the intelligibility of the comparison, it is also quite clever for a child. It is graphically expressive of her thought, and (especially in view of the rhythmical and rhetorical “setup” it provides for the following and final line) it is an effective stylistic ornament. There is a spark of metaphorical and poetical sensibility and creativity that any caring adult would want to nurture in this child. In fact, considering only the power of metaphor to express thought vividly and attractively (to open a window into the speaker’s mind and supply “window dressing” in the same instant, we might say), this child’s metaphor is as fine a figure as any to be found in poetry.

Is it, then, for all that, what we really mean by “poetry” and genuinely “poetic” metaphor?

Perhaps we should consider this question in the same context already described. In that context, how should we respond to this poem? What response from adults would be considered “cooperative” and satisfying to the child? Most likely (along with some sincere praise and some encouragement to keep trying), a little laughter. Even the child would intuit, I think, that this metaphor ought not be taken too seriously. As adults, we certainly ought to recognize it as child’s play; it is playing with language, as indeed mature poets do, but to significantly different effects. This metaphor is memorable, if at all, only because of its context (not just the context of the poem, but the context of the child); while poetic metaphor is also richly integrated with its own context, its memorability is not limited to such, in part because of its iconic power to reveal otherwise hidden truths about its object, not just about its subject (creator).

My notion of poetic metaphor does not preclude the possibility that the object of a poetic icon may be in the subject (creator or reader); but if the object of a metaphor is in the subject, one further question I wish to ask is whether the object is only in the subject. Consider, for instance, this poem by Emily Dickinson (1896):

Here, as I read it, Dickinson’s “So huge, so hopeless to conceive” is iconic (“huge” = conceptually overwhelming) of the object Death. More precisely, the metaphor depicts her feeling about two “events” of death (the deaths of her two most dearly loved ones). This feeling must have been deep in her soul. But it was not only in her soul; it is in ours, too, if we truly understand it, and not because we must condescend to imagine what it felt like for her. Rather, I think it is because we know that our souls, no less than hers, are in it, for “it” is universal. Although the metaphor is indexically mild, its iconic power is grounded in a persistent metaiconic possibility which is something like spatial magnitude ≅ sublimity (more at chapter 6).

Now it is interesting to speculate that my niece’s 19-elephantine metaphor may be an early intuitive attempt at the same or a similar metaicon. In fact, considered in that connection as an abductive hypothesis about her numbers, it presents quite a feasible metaphorical diagram of her thought and feeling:

19 / numbers :: elephant / animals

The “feasibility” of a diagram as hypothesis does not depend on the external “truth” of the object (here the object would be the hugeness of 19, which we know is not externally true as numbers go); rather, it serves its purpose as a hypothesis by iconizing an idea in a logical form which may be considered further (“tested,” if you will). In this case, however, we can predict that the hypothesis will not be confirmed by the further testing—at least not as a true analogical form of the metaiconic type magnitude ≅ sublimity, simply because my niece will soon reject the object 19 / numbers as a good example of magnitude or sublimity. The elephant-icon crystallizes a real connection to an object in the child’s mind; but that object—the hugeness of 19—is only in her mind (except as we “condescend” to imagine what it feels like to her). Her metaphorical analogy is thus complete and sufficient in itself as a clear but two-part diagram of what it might be like for any child to learn numbers up to 20. Given the narrow context of the child’s experience, the metaphor must be said to embody something of a “positive” possibility, but the idiosyncrasy of the context militates against granting it even that much. There is certainly nothing “irresistible” about it, nothing like a grounding in that “third Firstness” of a metaiconic typology towards which poetic metaphors (even those which we cannot at the present call more than “positive”) characteristically tend to gravitate. In other words, my niece’s idea is not one which, by itself, is “destined to be conserved” (CB 776: 601)—except as a record of her childhood (and that is valuable enough). The child’s “soul” is certainly in possession of this idea, but I think we can safely predict that she will outgrow it; it is simply not a large enough idea to possess her.

Let us hope, however, that the child does not in the process outgrow the gift of metaphor, for the elephant-icon has served an important role in helping her to crystallize her own feeling about numbers and magnitude, thereby paving the way for the progress of her ideas towards greater maturity and the goal of metaphoric truth.

Because that goal is vague and ideal, the question of what is true—metaphorically or otherwise—must always be given only a provisional answer. Perhaps what now seems to us the most self-evident and irresistible belief (that Death is too huge to conceive, for instance) may someday be proved as childish as thinking that the number 19 is just one number less than as high as we will ever count. Further, there is a very real and important sense in which it is the function of metaphor, especially of poetic metaphor, to pose the question of what is true, to ask it in a new way, rather than to answer it in any absolute or final way.

Still, the terms of that question, as poetic metaphor puts it to us, are full of real possibility worthy of a lifetime of deepening consideration. The discovery of this possibility is thus not the whole conclusion of the matter, as we will see; it is only the premise of poetic metaphor, the allowing condition of salient similarity upon which the figural argument proceeds with confidence into totally new configurations of meaning. The source of that confidence is the Firstness, the manifest reality, of poetic metaphor’s ground in a precedent possibility. We may be in error for believing that this ground is real; but we cannot proceed without believing it. We may disagree about which metaphors express the truth, but that is part of the reason we will disagree about which ones are “poetic.”

The examples of poetic metaphor discussed so far, with the exception of one, are based on iconic possibilities of kind 3, I believe: positive possibility. The one exception (the blood-wine metaphor) is grounded upon the more powerful kind 4, irresistible possibility. The further distinction between these two types, with special emphasis upon the latter, is the focus of chapter 4.