From the Tree to the Labyrinth (12 page)

Aristotle declares that metaphors should be drawn from things that are not evident, just as in philosophy the sagacious mind recognizes, discovers, perceives
(theorein)
similarities between distant things (1412a 12). On the other hand, in 1405b he says that metaphors imply enigmas. When, apropos of the
asteia
(1410b 6 et seq.), he says that the poet calls old age
kalámen
or “a withered stalk,” he specifies that such a metaphor is productive of a knowledge
(gnosis)
through their common genus, inasmuch as both belong to the genus of things that have lost their bloom. Elegant enthymemes are those which help us learn in a new and rapid way and, in this as in other cases, the
verbum cognoscendi
used is
manthanein,
to learn. Those enthymemes are efficacious that are understood little by little as they are spoken and were previously unknown, or those we understand only at the end. In such cases we say that
gnosis gínetai
(“knowledge comes to be”). Moreover, the obvious metaphor, which is not at all striking, is rejected. When the metaphor makes us see things the opposite from the way we thought they were, it becomes evident that we have learned something, and our mind seems to say: “That’s the way it was, and I was mistaken about it.”

Metaphors, then, “put the thing before our eyes”
(to poiein to pragma pro ommaton).
This notion of “putting something before our eyes” is repeated several other times in the text, and Aristotle appears to insist on it with conviction: a metaphor is not a mere transfer but a transfer that is immediate in its evidence—but clearly unfamiliar, unexpected, thanks to which things are seen in action (1410b 34), or better, signified in action.

As for the many examples provided by the text, especially those that concern similes (1406b 20 et seq.), it is certainly difficult to say whether they may have sounded bold to the ears of Aristotle’s contemporaries, but all of them appear to be examples of original witticisms. The same can be said of the passage on the
asteia
(1411b 22). All the examples are provocative and so little used previously that they are attributed to a specific author. To call triremes
painted millstones
and taverns
the mess-rooms of Attica
is a fine way to show something in a new light.

But
what is it
that metaphor as a cognitive mechanism makes us see in a fresh light? Things themselves, or the way we were accustomed to seeing (and representing) things?

It appears that it is only in contemporary culture that we have realized that, in order to be understood, metaphors often require us to reorganize our categories. As Black (1979: 39–40) remarks, “some metaphors enable us to see aspects of reality that the metaphor production helps to constitute. But that is no longer surprising if one believes that the world is necessarily a world under a certain description—or a world seen from a certain perspective. Certain metaphors can create such a perspective.”
³⁵

Still, when Aristotle said that the invention of an effective metaphor “puts before our eyes” for the first time an unfamiliar relationship between two things, he meant that metaphor compels us to reorganize our knowledge and our opinions. Let us return to the
Rhetoric
(1405a) and the metaphor by which pirates are said to be
purveyors
or
suppliers.
Now, before the appearance of this metaphor there was nothing to associate an honest merchant who acquires, transports by ship, and resells his merchandise with a pirate who steals someone else’s merchandise. The astuteness of the metaphor consists in compelling us to identify a hierarchical organization of property that, on a lower level, distinguishes a violent action from a pacific one, but, on the higher level, lumps together genera and species of those who transport merchandise upon the sea. In this way the metaphor unexpectedly suggests a socially useful role for the pirate, at the same time leading us to suspect that there may be something not altogether above board about the transactions of the merchant. In this way, the categorical field becomes reorganized no longer on the basis of moral or legal considerations but on the basis of economic activity.

We have already remarked how, in seeking various explanations for the eclipse, Aristotle tried out various “ontologies” (and we are not going too far in using the term in the quintessentially modern sense we just recognized). Similarly, when, in
On the Parts of Animals,
he must decide, on the basis of empirical observations, which of the various biological phenomena are causes and which effects, Aristotle finds himself faced with the fact that ruminants (animals, that is, with four stomachs) have horns and lack upper incisors—with the embarrassing exception of the camel, which is a ruminant lacking upper incisors, but without horns.

Aristotle first proposes a definition whereby horned animals are animals which, since they have four stomachs—which makes internal rumination possible—have redirected the hard matter of the teeth into the formation of horns. In order to make the camel fit into this categorical organization, Aristotle must suppose that it did not need to redirect the hard matter into horns (because, being large, it had no need for further protection), but instead it deflected it to the gums and palate (
Figure 1.19
).

Figure 1.19

But why are ruminants the way they are? The fact that they are ruminants explains why they have horns, but having horns does not explain why they are ruminants. Faced with the need to define the category of ruminants, Aristotle puts forward the hypothesis that ruminants have deviated the hard matter from the mouth to the head for reasons of defense and have developed four stomachs as a consequence (
Figure 1.20
).

Figure 1.20

As we can readily see, these two definitions presuppose two different categorical organizations, in the first of which it is the fact of being a ruminant that determines the deviation of the incisors and makes possible the development of horns, in the other it is the deviation of the incisors for the purposes of defense that produced the four stomachs. The truth is that Aristotle, in suggesting a number of hypotheses regarding causes and effects, in no way attempts to construct pseudo-Porphyrian trees. He merely shows extreme flexibility in selecting as a genus what was previously a species and vice versa. In other words, he never tells us that the definition is based on an underlying ontological structure, rather what he does is to propose a methodology of division that makes an adequate definition possible. It is not the underlying tree that makes the definition possible, it is the definition that imposes an underlying tree, frequently ad hoc. But in his theory of metaphor Aristotle goes still further: he suggests that a creative and original use of language obliges us
to invent a new ontology
—and therefore, we might add, to enrich to some degree our encyclopedia.

Naturally, the new ontology is only valid as far as the comprehension of the creative text that imposes it is concerned. But we are entitled to suppose that, once the creative text has imposed a new ontology, however
local,
somehow or other it leaves a trace in our encyclopedia.

In my essay “The Semantics of Metaphor” (in Eco 1984c), a kind of reduced ontology was constructed, made up of all the expressions that appear in a certain section of Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake,
and an attempt was made to justify the various puns as passages among a series of phonetic, synecdochic, metonymic, or metaphoric associations.

The experiment was intended to demonstrate how, starting from whatever point of the textual universe one might chose as a sample, one could attain, by multiple and continuous pathways, as in a garden of forking paths, any other point.

In the schema presented in
Figure 1.21
,
³⁶
we may observe how the term
Neanderthal
evokes by phonetic association three other terms:
meander, Tal
(German for “valley”) and
tale
(“story,” in English), which combine to form the punning coinage cited in the book,
meandertale.
In the associative trajectory, however, intermediate nodes are created, provided by terms all of which appear in the text of
Finnegans Wake
and only there. At this point the associations may be phonetic or semantic in nature.

These interconnections demonstrate, moreover, how each term may become in its turn the archetype of an associative series that would lead us to identify, sooner or later, other associative chains. The whole diagram has a purely orientative value, in the sense that it reduces the associations numerically and dimensionally, but if we proceed from this ontology to Joyce’s text, we observe that all the associations registered by the network have been developed (in other words, we see how that ontology had its origin in the need to render explicit the associations that that text intended to provoke). Indeed, every association produces a pun that defines the book. The book is
a slipping beauty
(and hence a sleeping beauty who as she sleeps generates a series of
lapsus
through semantic slips, mindful of an error, etc.), a
jungfraud’s messonge-book
(where, to the associations already cited, that of
message
is added), a labyrinth (or
meandertale
) in which we find
a word as cunningly hidden in its maze of confused drapery as a fieldmouse in a nest of coloured ribbons
(the expression that gave rise to the schema, which naturally would have been clearer had the various circuits been colored differently). As a final synthesis, in the pages of the book the neologism
meanderthalltale
becomes the metaphorical stand-in for all that can be said about the book itself and which is said by the associative chains identified in the network.

Figure 1.21

In the associative sequences, semantic rather than phonetic in nature, the terms are associated through identity or similarity of properties (not real, but culturally
imputed
). If we reread the associative sequences we see that each of them could be constructed by referring to a “notional field” accepted in a given culture or to one of those typical linguistic
carrefours
or crossroads theorized by Trier, Matoré, and others. A survey of the notional fields acquired by a given culture would explain not only why
Freud
and
Fraud
may be connected, by phonetic similarity, but also
Freud-dream
and
Freud-Jung.

Let us consider, for example, the sequence generated by
Tal:
on the one hand it refers us to
space
and
place,
genera of which
Tal
is, so to speak, the species. But
space
in turn refers to
time
since the relationship between space and time is a typical relationship of complementarity. The relationship between time and the past and between time and the cycles
(corsi e ricorsi)
of Giambattista Vico arises from a more or less textbook contiguity.