GRGR(5): sources on metaphor and allegory

[rj]

These are some possible sources, can't really vouch for them being what
you're after, I'm afraid:

LODGE, David. The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy and the
Typology of Modern Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977.

QUILLIGAN, Maureen. The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979.

RICOUER, Paul. The Rule of Metaphor. London: Routledge, 1986.

I remember coming across the notion (in Lodge, above, but in a few other
places as well) that it is metonymy (transmutatio) rather than metaphor
(translatio) which is the typifying rhetorical trope in postmodern
fiction, particularly in Pynchon. I did read up on Roman Jakobson and
Morris Halle's studies in aphasic disturbances and the metaphoric and
metonymic poles at one stage, but it's all Greek to me now. (Maybe
Jakobson and Halle. Fundamentals of Language. The Hague: Mouton, 1956;
or try Jakobson. 'Linguistics and Poetics'. In Selected Writings III.
The Hague: Mouton, 1981.)

I think with the "controlling metaphor" idea you're getting into
symbolism, aren't you? I always think of the V-trope in V., which
transcends all the traditional categories in its recurrent
manifestations. The proliferation of 'V' images in fact serves to
illustrate the general modus operandi recommended in and by the
narrative — to its characters and the reader both — the tactic of
'approach and avoid', and which, along with the novel's especial maxim,
to "keep cool, but care", comprises the sum of practical knowledge the
text conveys for the astute stencilographer. The Crying of Lot 49 is a
lament, a "crying", for innocent times lost; its form is an enigma, the
'Trystero symbol", oxymoronic, "a muted posthorn", an interwoven puzzle
like some Möbius strip; and its coda is Oedipa's eternal
(ontological/aesthetic) question: "Shall I project a world?" GR is the
rocket-banana, as you note, all g-forces and parabolic arcs, zones and
counterzones of existence and experience where "creative paranoia"
demonstrates that "everything is connected". And, Mason & Dixon is a
moiré of transits and latitudes and parallaxes which insist that there
is often something more valuable and worthwhile beneath and beyond the
measurable surfaces of things, its postmodern paean borrowed from
Lyotard, a reinvigoration of the subjunctive mood in English language
and literature, the trope of what "will have been done."

Pynchon's a very 'literary' writer in terms of intertextual allusions,
but he uses a full swag of literary forms as well as everything else he
draws on, I think. I'm not sure if there's a rhetorical scheme or figure
which approximates to the circularity, balance and symmetry in the
section introducing Katje -- chiasmus is about as close as I can come,
but it's not quite that, nor even a postmodern mutation of it (although
he does use this one later on with Dumbo and the feather and the
soldier's Lucky medal.) I agree with Paul that this particular episode
"reaches the heights": vintage Pynchon.

best