The mobile army of illusion - Meaning and Metaphor
Reach into your toolbox of writing aids and pull out a metaphor
Along
with all the other 7 and a bit billion other inhabitants of the planet, you’ve
gazed up at clouds on a summer’s day in seen faces and animals, lions and
dragons and strange landscapes, castles and mountains. You’ve experienced the same thing when you’ve
looked into the glowing coals of a fire.
That’s because we are programmed to make out faces and animals against a
confusing background of clutter. We need
to be able to distinguish friend from foe, or the attacker hiding in the
shadows. Sometimes this mechanism gets
slightly confused and we see faces where there are none but it is a capacity to
associate shapes or outlines with other images that we call metaphor. Metaphor is our way of letting one thing
stand for another and thereby create a trail of allusion and association. As I said in the last chapter, language tends
to be iconic – that is the sounds we make are arbitrarily associated with
particular meanings. But metaphor seems to provide a short circuit between idea
and idea. We live in a world of symbols and rituals. Everything we do and say has hidden
meaning. Everything implies something
else. We seldom unpick the metaphors and we can generally get the association
without having to understand an otherwise illogical connection. In fact, a
study of patients with localised brain damage has shown that there are areas of
the brain specifically devoted to the understanding and interpretation of
metaphor. “Vilayanur Ramachandran and his colleagues at the University of
California at San Diego were intrigued by four patients who were mentally
lucid, fluent in English and highly intelligent, but could not understand
proverbs. When one of the patients was asked to explain the adage "all
that glitters is not gold", for instance, he completely missed the
metaphorical angle, replying that people should be careful when buying
jewellery. All the patients had damage to part of the brain called the left
angular gyrus. This lies at the intersection of the brain's temporal, parietal
and occipital lobes, which process tactile, auditory and visual information
respectively. The findings were presented at a meeting of the Cognitive
Neuroscience Society this week in New York.” (From issue 2495 of New Scientist
magazine, 16 April 2005, page 18)
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms
– in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and
embellished poetically, rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm,
canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has
forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without
sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as
metal, no longer as coins.2
Says Frederick Nietszche In this
early essay, ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’,
Douglas
Ayling glosses this by saying each contextual occurrence generates appropriate
semantic resonances from within the words.
In other words, our use of a particular
word or phrase reaches down into our brain and pulls out a rats’ nest of
related ideas and congruences. So the meaning of that word becomes, not a
single point of truth, but a fuzzy ball of associations. The picture that this confused, tangled
image, provides is sometimes clearer than the word or phrase itself. It offers some sort of ranging point around
which our meaning revolves. Clarity
comes because that ball of associations may contain associations that are
similar in the listener. They may not be
entirely the same but there are enough points of similarity to provide a
correspondence and thus a complex or difficult idea can be passed between us.
Metaphor
is central to our use of language and to our understanding of the world. Metaphor is sometimes more often associated
in the mind of the writer with poetry rather than playwriting. But a moment’s
thought will crush this. A playwright needs to play with the possibilities of
the language to convey complex ideas and most of that will be through
metaphor. We can indeed argue that
theatre itself is a metaphor for life and the resonances of the words in the
empty space should echo out into the real world and stay in the mind of the
listener for ever.
Think
logically but let that logic be flexible.
Our fuzzy, imprecise language enables us to access our fuzzy,
probabilistic thinking. Not only are
there more avenues of the brain explored by wider, looser speaking but also
better, more accurate conclusions are drawn from it.
Perhaps
for a playwright the message must be, if you want to make specific points, the
dialogue you use needs to be fuzzy and non-specific.
Metaphor can be novel and shocking or jaded
and banal and even so common in usage as to no longer even have the status of
metaphor. By the idea of “resonance”
(itself a metaphor) is one of the great tools of the creative writer. For the playwright, the correct selection of le mot juste is the means whereby inner
dialogue can be aligned with the actual spoken text. Choice of metaphor indicates a pathway of
thought, unconscious or conscious that reveals more than the character’s
dialogue reveals. For the audience they
will pass unnoticed but a trail of such metaphor choices will lead us to divine
instinctively more about the character than at first sight. So bear in mind
when choosing a metaphor, it will reveal a great deal about your own fund of
ideas and associations but we really need it to do that job for your
characters. Ask yourself, what does that
particular metaphor tell us about their back story and hinterland of ideas.
