The History of the Metaphor

[Johnny Marr]

I should have explained, for the benefit of potentially confused readers,
Bragg is a member of the House of Lords, which explains the reference in the
first paragraph.

On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 11:12 AM, Johnny Marr <marrja at gmail.com> wrote:

> Bragg's accompanying email, which he writes as a follow-up to the programme
> every week (and it's very much his own effort, far too idiosyncratic to be
> ghostwritten) includes a briefing on the post-recording discussions, and the
> inevitable regrets over what else they could have inbcluded. From last week:
>
>  Hello
> What I really wanted to say at the end of the Today programme trail, as I
> handed back to James Naughtie, was, “all the world’s a studio and every man
> in it merely a microphone”.  Tom Morris, the producer, came up with a much
> more elegant “Time’s wingèd chariot” quotation.  Nevertheless, I think that
> “all the world’s a studio” might have raised a laugh.
> There was something of the anthology of the world’s best quotations about
> the programme which I relished.  So, it seems, from the members of their
> Lordships’ House whom I bumped into when I whipped down there, did others.
> An unusual rush of complimentary remarks led by Lord Winston, he of medical
> and television fame, who said he could have wished it to go on forever.
> There were the usual, let us not say moans, but sad sighs after the
> programme that this was not said and that was not said and the other was not
> said.  It’s what it is.  We do a conversation which lasts for forty-five
> minutes and types up into about eight and a half thousand words.  Not a
> book.  Not a lecture.  A form of its own.  Nevertheless, I
> too, like Steve Connor, was sorry we did not get in a lot of more
> commonplace metaphors.  He spoke of somebody being “as much good as a
> chocolate teapot”, or “as an ashtray on a motorbike”.  And there was a great
> deal of discussion about Richard II and the way that he turned the whole of
> his dungeon life at the end of the play into metaphors of the mind.
> One of the fascinating things about ancient history is that the evidence is
> so patchy.  Nowadays, if you want to know what happened a few years ago, the
> evidence is a deluge.  You need some sort of ark.  Everything, it seems, is
> recorded and in several ways, from several different points of view.  Back
> then, we had little splotches, little blobs.  The great plays of Aeschylus,
> for example, were requested by Alexandria from the Greeks.  They said no but
> were eventually persuaded on a surety of much gold.  So the plays of
> Aeschylus went to Alexandria who then refused to return them and paid off
> the gold instead, thinking they were worth that price.  Alexandria then
> burned down and we have scarcely any plays of
> Aeschylus left to us.  I still think that in the as yet unexcavated holiday
> home of a literate Greek nobleman there will be the full works of Aeschylus
> and of the other Greek dramatists available.  Just as I hope that in some
> Tudor country manor, someone who entertained Shakespeare will have jotted
> down notes about the man and give us secure information about what most nags
> people; and that is the early years, the time when he may or may not have
> been an actor and came to London and wrote the sonnets and then achieved
> instant success on the stage.
> There are still people who doubt whether Shakespeare existed.  They should
> go to Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon.  He built a wonderful
> monument to himself in that church.  He is buried in front of the altar, as
> are his wife and children.  A friend of his lies in stone beside him.  There
> is a copy of the King James Bible which he would probably have read from,
> being an eminent gentleman of Stratford by that time.
> There was also a comment, I think, that science dispensed or tended to
> dissolve metaphors.  I just thought it brings in new ones.  Black holes is a
> prime example.
> I seem to be wandering around all over the place.  At the moment the
> pre-Christmas production rush has already started and you dart around the
> West End from meeting to meeting.  The best way, of course, is to dart
> (pathetic attempt at a metaphor; time to be gone).
> Best wishes
> Melvyn Bragg
>
> PS: The last time I met B S Johnson, the novelist, was outside White City,
> the BBC headquarters in the west of London.  He was in a severely agitated
> mood and I wish I’d taken much more notice of it.  But what he wanted to
> tell me, very, very forcefully, was that nothing was “like” anything else.
> That there were no metaphors, there were no similes.  Each thing was the
> thing it was and nothing else.
>
>   On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 1:17 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>  Thank you for this.....kept me procrastinating the rest of the
>> day........
>>
>> From it, I put together this: Extended metaphors in some writers, like
>> TRP, tend toward thematic allegory.....
>>
>> I missed only Aristpt;e's quote that metaphor-making is the sign of a
>> writer's genius................
>>
>>  ------------------------------
>> *From:* Johnny Marr <marrja at gmail.com>
>> *To:* Robert Mahnke <rpmahnke at gmail.com>
>> *Cc:* P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> *Sent:* Tue, November 30, 2010 3:47:57 PM
>> *Subject:* The History of the Metaphor
>>
>> http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl
>>
>> Not sure whether you can listen to this outside of Britain, but for anyone
>> who can access it and hasn't already done so this is a superb edition of In
>> Our Time (one of the very best radio programmes in the English language, as
>> far as I'm concerned) on the history of metaphor, how it developed from
>> Homer through to Shakespeare, the 18the century repudiation of it as
>> illusive and insubstantial, and the reinvention and revitalisation under
>> Dickens and the modernists. Enjoy.
>>
>>
>
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