human dog metaphors (1)

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Lars wrote:

Ahem, well,
there´s something I´d like to add to my earlier post
regarding the dogs
being metaphors for humans:

"[...]the stolen dogs sleep, , scratch, recall shadowy
smells of humans
who may have loved them [...]" (GR78.14)
"The dogs, engineered and lethal, watch you from the woods."

(GR83.16)

Probably this has been mentioned earlier, but those dogs
sure have a lot
in common with the simple enlisted men (if not whole
populations) in
this war.
Surely, those now lethal men can only dimly remember a time
that was
filled with now alien emotions and experiences, like love
and simple
tenderness. And, like the dogs, they were conditioned (or
engineered) to
become what they are by machiavellian masters who´s
motivations and
machinations were far beyond the grasps of those victimized
"creatures".

Also, am I the only one who´s reminded of Günter Grass´s
"Dog Years",
when reading all those dog-metaphors?
Makes me remember, why I prefer cats.
    Lars
Oh, and btw, Doug: why pigs?


%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

And any fool knows a dog needs a home,
A shelter from pigs on the wing.
  --Animals

Oh, and btw, Grass’s Cat and Mouse and Diary of a Snail are
Fantastic

Migration as Metaphor

Like many people who have lost a city, he has found it in
his luggage, packed in an old tin box. Kundera’s Prauge,
Joyce’s Dublin, Grass’s Danzig: exiles, refugees, migrants
have carried many cities in their bedrolls in this century
of wandering. And let nobody underestimate the obstinacy of
such writers; they will not tolerate the Gdansking of their
past
. Migration also offers us the richest metaphor of our
age. The very word metaphor, with its roots in the Greek
words for bearing across, describes a sort of migration, the

migration of ideas into images. Migrants—borne-across
humans—are metaphorical beings in their very essence; and
migration, seen as a metaphor, is everywhere around us. We
all cross frontiers; in that sense, we are all migrant
peoples.
 --Salman Rushdie, Introduction to “Gunter Grass On Writing
And Politics 1967-1983”

Metaphor is a fascinating subject. I have an on going debate

with a linguist about the use of computer metaphors in the
study of language and the mind. My argument is that the
human mind functions more like the human digestive system
than a computer. I also argue that the computer (a
machine—emphasizing specialization and automatism) is in
fact, in many respects, inferior to the hammer (a
tool---emphasizing flexibility and skill), but that is
another matter. How metaphor functions is another
fascinating subject and one that linguists are currently
committing much of their seemingly inexhaustible research
resources to, as they seek to solve “Plato’s Problem,”
“Descartes’ Problem,” and all the other problems that
research dollars are attracted to. Perhaps English and
Philosophy departments in universities ought to consider
themselves a “behavioral science,” if only to prevent their
being eliminated altogether. If they decide to do this,
perhaps Noam Chomsky will serve as advisor. In his Preface
to the First Edition of Language and Mind, Chomsky cautions:

Given the state of research into the history of linguistics,

even the attempt to evaluate past contributions must be
regarded as highly tentative. Modern linguistics shares the
delusion—the accurate term, I believe—that modern
“behavioral sciences” have in some essential respect
achieved a transition from “speculation” to “science” and
that earlier work can be safely assigned to the
antiquarians. Obviously any rational person will favor
rigorous analysis and careful experiment; but to a
considerable degree, I feel, the “behavioral sciences” are
merely mimicking the surface features of the natural
sciences; much of their scientific character has been
achieved by a restriction of subject matter and a
concentration on rather peripheral issues.

There are two principles of language that linguists have
identified that are applicable to an examination of
metaphor. The first, is Ferdinand de Saussure’s
“arbitrariness of the sign,” the absolute conventional
pairing of sound and meaning. The word “dog” does not look
like a dog, walk like a dog, or bark like a dog (although
Pynchon’s LED may take issue), but it means “dog.” The
second principle of language “is captured in a phrase from
Wilhelm Von Humboldt that presaged Chomsky: language ‘makes
infinite use of finite media.’ We know the difference
between the forgettable Dog Bites Man and the news worthy
Man Bites Dog because of the order in which Dog, Man, and
Bites are combined.” This is what linguists call generative
grammar. See Pinker’s The Language Instinct 83-89

 In any event, metaphor is, in the broadest sense,
“figurative language”, or “figure of speech” that actually
substitutes one thing for another. In its simple form, for
example,  “Terrance is a cockroach on a wedding cake,” the
reader can easily make the translation from the figurative
to the literal. However, this simple form of metaphor is
complicated by a plethora of factors and it is not my
purpose to explain them. I simply want to note the use of
dog metaphors in Pynchon, Grass, and Melville and provide
some personal observations.
Note: For an interesting look at the complex use of metaphor

in narrative satire, See Frank Palmeri’s ‘Satire In
Narrative,’ Petronius, Swift, Gibbon, Melville, and Pynchon,

(1990).