human dog metaphors (3)

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Thanks to Terrance for providing stimuli. Some response:

1) Could I please have an actual example of a dog-metaphor in the narrower
sense of the word - something like "a dog is a wedding-cake on the moon"?
Lars proposed an - I believe tenable - analogy between the state of Vanya's
consciousness and the condition of the human mind during wartime. But I
cannot really see "all those dog-metaphors" he also spoke about (which is
not to say that they aren't there, I just don't have the time to re-read the
relevant passages, and perhaps I just don't remember the metaphors, Lars?).

2) File under nitpicking: Ferdinand de Saussure's "arbitrariness of the
sign" does not refer to "the absolute conventional pairing of sound and
meaning", as you wrote, but to the absolute conventional pairing of the two
parts of a sign: the signifier (a sound-image, or its graphic equivalent)
and the signified (concept or meaning). Both are phenomena of the psyche:
"signifier" does not refer to an actual sound, "signified" does not refer to
a real dog. Saussure was neither interested in actual speech (parole) nor in
the real objects people speak about. And I'd like to add that I find his
idea of arbitrariness highly debatable, because I believe that there are
much more words of onomatopoetical origin in language than Saussure's theory
would allow for. This is speculation, yes.

3) You quote Johnson saying about Shakespeare that his words flew "like sap
from a tree." This is very interesting for me. Where in Johnson can I find
this statement? 

4) The stuff you quoted about Melville and Pynchon was quite interesting.
But what about the highly significant explicit statements on metaphor
Pynchon's narrators put forward:

"Living as he does much of the time in a world of metaphor, the poet is
always acutely conscious that metaphor has no value apart from its function;
that it is a device, an artifice. So that while others may look on the laws
of physics as legislation and God as a human form with beard measured in
light-years and nebulae for sandals, Fausto's kind are alone with the task
of living in a universe of things which simply are, and cloaking that innate
mindlessness with comfortable and pious metaphor so that the 'practical'
half of humanity may continue in the Great Lie, confident that their
machines, dwellings, streets and weather share the same human motives,
personal traits and fits of contrariness as they." (V., 326. I think, this
is absolutely brilliant, by the way.)

"The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where
you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost." (Somewhere in The Crying of Lot 49)

The first quote implies that literature has the function of supporting the
natural activity of the human mind: to create analogies and thus paranoia,
when, in fact, things simply are. The poet, whose most important tool is
metaphor, is a liar and he, or she, has "been at this for centuries".   

The second quote implies that is a matter of your relative position whether
you perceive metaphor as a lie or a truth: Inside the metaphor, the system,
the set of analogies, believing in it, you're safe, and the metaphor is a
thrust at truth. Outside, isolated, "in a universe of things which simply
are", you must perceive metaphor as a lie, as it creates meaning where none
exists. Ties in with several central themes of Pynchon, of course. 



Thomas

			
                   		
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