Metaphor Making Through the Body

Abstract

The thesis of this paper is that a sensitivity to the body is a helpful way of generating metaphor. By the body I mean the lived body, the body as we experience it. Generating metaphors refers to creating or producing metaphor as distinguished from comprehending already existing metaphor. The context in which I will discuss the genera tion of metaphor is that of conducting human science research, al though it might equally apply to writing poetry. As defined in a literary context, a metaphor is a statement which equates two apparently disparate phenomena-as, for example, a person is a fruit or love is a rose. A metaphor is a statement of the form "A is a B." The formal equation is of two entities so different that they do not share literal, that is, dictionary meaning, but do share nonhiteral, nondictionary, or figurative meaning. There is nothing of botany in the dictionary entry for love, yet love and rose share many attributes or structures or constitutive conditions-both are beautiful, both can be painful, both perhaps need to be tended and so forth, inexhaustively. The two explicit terms of the metaphor are called the subject (love) and the predicate (rose). The implicit shared nonliteral meanings are called the ground of the metaphor (e.g., beauty). Competing Accounts There are a number of competing accounts of how we comprehend metaphor. I will treat them selectively and sketchily to highlight some of the problems peculiar to an account of how to generate met aphor, our primary concern here. According to Richards (1936), the act of comprehending a metaphor involves a tension in the listener created by his or her noticing the literal incompatibility of the subject and the predicate. Hearing "a person is a fruit" pushes me, as it were, to attempt to make sense of that statement beyond the con fines of the dictionary meaning of person. However, I do not believe such tension is necessarily present, even in the comprehension of metaphor. Often we understand a metaphor without noticing the literal incompatibility, that is, without noticing that the meaning we gained is metaphoric. In any case, to generate a metaphor, in con trast to comprehending a metaphor, tension cannot be an initial step for we have only the subject and we seek a metaphoric predi cate. Subject and predicate have not yet been coupled to produce a tension.