PREFACE

As late as 1984, when I enrolled in Michael Shapiro’s summer seminar, “Semiotic Perspectives on Linguistics and Verbal Art,” the term semeiosis was entirely new to me. Before that summer, I had barely heard the name of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), whose general theory of signs (semeiotic, following his preferred spelling as noted by Fisch, 1978: 32) has endowed the word semeiosis with far-reaching significance for a growing body of scholars in various disciplines. To the many contemporary disciples of Peirce who have devoted the greater part of their lifetimes to the careful study of his thought, it must seem presumptuous for a newcomer, offering his first effort in the field, to entitle it The Semeiosis of Anything At All, let alone of Poetic Metaphor.

Despite its title, however, this book does not pretend either to present the total picture of Peirce’s semeiotic or to exhaust its manifold relevance to the study of metaphor. It cannot claim even to treat everything Peirce may have written directly on the topic of metaphor. The reason it cannot make that claim is worth noting for those unfamiliar with the magnitude of Peirce’s work: Despite the eight volumes of his Collected Papers, the four volumes of his New Elements of Mathematics, the three volumes now available of the projected twenty volumes of (selected) chronological Writings, plus several other collections, not to mention the surprising quantity of material Peirce published during his own lifetime (as amplified by Kenneth Ketner in the 1986 Comprehensive Bibliography, i-iii, and requiring over 150 accompanying microfiche to reproduce, the equivalent of some twenty-four volumes)—despite this multitude of published materials, much of what Peirce wrote still remains in the form of unpublished manuscripts. The editors of the Peirce Edition Project estimate that a complete printing of the manuscripts Peirce left unpublished at his death would require an additional eighty volumes (W 1: xi). My sampling of this huge body of material, particularly of the unpublished manuscripts and of those earlier publications available on fiche, has been “selective” at best.

Add to the prolixity of Peirce’s writing his inter-disciplinary (sometimes downright digressive, though always seminal) grafting and crosspollinating of subject matter, and you will have some idea of what one is up against in asking to know Peirce’s thoughts on any single topic. Peirce was almost as likely to say something profound about metaphor, for instance, while lecturing on mathematical or chemical notation as he was after having promised to talk about his favorite poets.

Thus my objective is not to present the final word on Peirce’s conception of metaphor (which would be a rather “Un-Peircean” thing to try in any event), but to present my own rediscovery of metaphor from the fresh perspective of a Peircean semeiotic.

After all, the principal benefit to me in my own encounter with Peirce has been a reawakening of fascination with figurative language. For several years before Shapiro’s seminar, my interest in this subject had lain dormant, abandoned along with my earlier efforts to understand some of the more ineffable dimensions of metaphor (its creativity, for instance) from the limited perspective of a Chomskian grammar, which is bound to make metaphor appear as “deviant” (albeit in a non-pejorative sense). Nor is it my purpose here to engage in “transformational grammar bashing,” as seems fashionable in some circles these days, for I have come to believe that no merely linguistic theory can do justice to metaphor, and that, above all else, is the revelation to me of Peirce’s semeiotic.

This Peircean perspective, in short, was for me like a powerful telescope, trained on metaphor. Weary of studying moon dust under a Chomskian microscope, I wanted at last to see the moon. (Given these circumstances, what astronomer would not forgive a few undisciplined excesses committed by a pupil newly converted from mineralogy?)

In any case, readers who desire a greater facility with the sophisticated instrumentation of Peirce’s “telescope” itself will have to be referred to other sources. To some extent, I will have to hope that my reader is already familiar with helpful works like the following: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Charles S. Peirce by James Feibleman (1970); Sight, Sound, and Sense edited by Thomas Sebeok (1978; see especially Max Fisch’s “Peirce’s General Theory of Signs,” 31-70); The Sense of Grammar: Language as Semeiotic, by Michael Shapiro (1983), as well as his other works with Marianne Shapiro having to do with tropes, collected in Figuration in Verbal Art (1988); most recently (1985), Christopher Hookway’s Peirce; and of course the previous volumes in this Peirce Studies Series (Peirce’s Conception of God by Donna Orange, 1984, number two in this series, has been particularly helpful and stimulating to me).

If the Peirce literature is ponderous, whole libraries might be devoted to the literature on metaphor. Early in the present undertaking, I recalled (and resolved to avoid) the feelings of utter helplessness I had experienced in the mid-1970s when, preparing a dissertation on the subject, I tried to tackle just the literature surveyed in Warren Shibles’s 1971 Metaphor: An Annotated Bibliography and History. Without Shibles’s help, the task would have been hopeless for me then and, quite frankly, is hopeless for me now, especially in view of the tremendous output on the subject in the last twenty-five years. There is, however, more help available: In the final section of her Metaphor Reexamined (1984), Liselotte Gumpel offers what amounts to an encyclopedia of the work on metaphor since Aristotle. Although it is unduly polemical for my taste, her compendium is even in that respect entirely representative of the vast body of scholarship it surveys. Her book also brings Peirce’s semeiotic to bear on metaphor, as does the work of Umberto Eco on the subject (1979, 1984), although in both cases these uses of Peirce are somewhat at odds with my own.

On that point, I want to make it clear that there will be no systematic attempt in this study to align it with or against other theories of metaphor, or even to take account of what all the other theories are. If, as Peirce’s version of Pragmaticism holds, a Final Opinion is the consensus we approach in the fullness of time after sufficient consideration shall have been given to a question by a society of inquirers, then with respect to the question of metaphor, we are hardly ready for any “final summations.” Furthermore, I believe that metaphor is so fundamental a cognitive operation (see for example Earl Mac Cormac’s A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor, 1985) that descriptions of metaphor are bound to differ as radically as do the ways in which we think about thinking. I see little practical advantage, then, at least given my admittedly narrow objectives, for attempting any discussion that resembles a “penultimate statement” of the current state of scholarship on the subject before attempting to make another advance into the territories. I think most serious students of metaphor have known all along that they could make little more than a “foray” into this field. At least I strongly feel that way about my own work, so I will notice the work of others only when, in stumbling across the trails they have already blazed, I find the going easier in that direction for a while, or else find the reasons clearer for going in a different direction.

Certainly, though, there would have been no going anywhere at all without the help of many friends. This study was made possible by grants from the University of Alaska Anchorage and the National Endowment for the Humanities (Summer Seminar for College Teachers, Princeton University, 1984). I wish to thank both universities and especially the Endowment for their support, as well as the other members of the Seminar for their stimulation, criticism, and advice.

A special thanks goes to Gloria Collins, my graduate assistant under a University of Alaska Faculty Development Grant in 1985. Her suggestions about style (oh that sharp red pencil!), her independent research discoveries, and the stimulating dialogue she brought to the project have all been extremely valuable to me in revising this work.

At Indiana University Press, Mary Jane Gormley’s careful and sensitive editing reached far beyond style to the substance of this book, and her artwork captured the spirit of Peirce for me.

I am grateful to Tom Short, Ken Ketner, and Michael Shapiro for reading my work in progress and offering insightful criticism, encouragement, and constructive suggestions for its improvement, particularly in the area of its Peirce content. Neither they, nor Peirce, would agree with everything in my final version, and none of them should be held responsible for whatever errors are sure to be in it.

Ken Ketner deserves my additional gratitude for his infinite patience but vigorous “devil’s advocacy” as my editor and editor of Peirce Studies. He made available to me the facilities and resources of the Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism, of which he is the director, at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, as well as the hospitality of his home during my Peirce manuscript research.

Most of all, I am deeply thankful to Michael Shapiro, who brought me to Peirce. His writings about Peirce, and his ongoing efforts to found a Peircean linguistics, made Peirce accessible to me. His own work with metaphor, in collaboration with Marianne Shapiro, inspired this study and stimulated every development in its growth. Right up to my submission deadline, Michael was responding to my queries with provocative insights and suggestions. He changed my approach to literature and linguistics; he changed my approach to my students of literature and linguistics—by showing me, in his own example, how one can become a great teacher by exhibiting the openness and enthusiasm and curiosity of a serious student.

Finally, thanks to the Department of Philosophy, Harvard University, and the Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism, Texas Tech University, for permission to quote from the Peirce manuscripts.