I begin with an absolutely arbitrary and unwarranted assertion, namely, that given a distinction between metaphor and metonymy, the tendency to make metaphors is characteristic of the modern attitude, while the tendency to see metonymies is characteristic of the traditional attitude. Any traditional ambience that becomes a cosmos does so because it has been structured into a field for the perception of metonymies, has been organized, we might say, by the metonymizing process. Modernization (or disenchantment) is then the transformation of metonymies into metaphors; to modernize is to de-metonymize, to metaphorize. To re-traditionalize is to demetaphorize, to re-metonymize. The traditional...

Metaphorais a Greek term precipitated from the verbmetapherein, to carry something from one place to another—a sense acknowledged early in the twentieth century when I. A. Richards gave the name “vehicle” to the predicating term of a metaphor.¹ But the initial context of vehiculation is more pragmatic than poetic.Metaphereinmeans—switching now from Greekmetato Latintrans—“to transfer” (as of property) or “to transport” (as in the hauling of goods).² Transferred to thetechnéandlogosof rhetorical discourse, the noun means “transfer of a word to a new sense.”

The rhetorical meaning of...

My way of formulating the contrast between metaphor and metonymy is indebted to various linguistic, structuralist, and semiotic discussions for some, but not all, of its elements. I have selectively synthesized certain aspects that characteristically emerge in those discussions and rejected others, so as to shift the emphasis of the distinction toward my focus on the problematics of culture change. Ever since Roman Jakobson placed the opposition between metaphor and metonymy at the foundations of language use, the terms have been subject to continuous definitional torquing and distension.¹ And although the privileged status of these tropes has been accepted or...

InAllegories of Reading, Paul de Man examines Nietzsche’s method of submitting “the epistemological authority of perception,” language, and logic to a radically skeptical critique. Although Nietzsche was not the first to propose “that the paradigmatic structure of language is rhetorical rather than representational,” he affirmed more categorically than his predecessors that “the misrepresentation of reality … [that he finds] systematically repeated throughout the tradition is … rooted in the rhetorical structure of language”: “The trope is not a derived, marginal, or aberrant form of language but the linguistic paradigm par excellence. The figurative structure is not one linguistic mode...

My account of metaphor and metonymy in the preceding chapters suggests that if the difference between them is fluid, if it is weak in purely structural terms, it can be strengthened by contextualization. But a more serious problem confronts the effort to keep metaphor and metonymy apart. I’ve called them two fundamental tropes, or figures, and this means that I have already taken for granted a prior distinction: the distinction between the literal (or proper) and the figurative uses of language.

In this distinction, metonymy is a detour from literal usage that ultimately returns to it. Metonymy aspires only to...

Nietzsche is fundamentally concerned with the circuitous and deceptive character of our relations to things, and with the transcendence of actuality to our representations of it at the level of the signifier. But to a semiotician, the distinction between linguistic activity and extralinguistic reality is naive, and so I turn to Umberto Eco’s more doggedly semiotic approach to this distinction inA Theory of Semiotics. Eco divides semiotics into two parts: the theory of codes or signification and the theory of sign-production or language use.Codedesignates the system of rules that “generate signs as concrete occurrences in communicative intercourse.”¹...

The text is a short poem by Robert Frost entitled “The Rose Family”:

The rose is a rose,

And was always a rose.

But the theory now goes

That the apple’s a rose,

And the pear is, and so’s

The plum, I suppose.

The dear only knows

What will next prove a rose.

You, of course, are a rose—

But were always a rose.

This is an adventure in conspicuous redundancy: ten lines with a single rhyme and with the same end word in six of those lines. The first line alludes to and varies Gertrude Stein’s mischievous tautology, substituting...

Some of my previous remarks may suggest that our basic human impulse to metonymize or demetaphorize attained to its most triumphant moment in the Christian culture of the High Middle Ages. There if anywhere the unconscious and mechanical prejudices of language and perception were most fully reinforced by the flowering of a highly sophisticated and articulate cultural consciousness fashioned in the same mode and shaped by the same prejudices. But this is just what needs to be questioned.

Coming back to the Middle Ages from our standpoint beyond the End of Western Metaphysics, we discover something very different, and the...

The time is the late Middle Ages. The texts that follow illustrate the kinds of historical constraint that impose themselves on the characterization and valuation of our two rhetorical figures. The first passage, a famous anonymous jingle, states in popular form the theory of fourfold interpretation that guides much symbolic practice during the Christian Middle Ages, and the second passage is an equally famous but sophisticated justification of the theory:

1. Littera gesta docet

quid credas, allegoria

moralia, quid ages,

quod tendas, anagogia.

(The letter teaches deeds; the allegory, what you should believe; the moral [or tropological level] what you should...

The following is a passage from Hugh of St. Victor’s treatise,On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith. Born in Saxony in 1096, Hugh spent most of his life in Paris, and when he died in 1141 he had been the successful head of the monastery school of St. Victor for eight years.

Et ut mihi videtur eodem prorsus temporis momento quo visibiliter et corporaliter divisa est lux a tenebris; invisibiliter quoque boni angeli discreti sunt a malis illis in tenebras peccati cadentibus: et istis ad lucem justitiae conversis illuminatisque a luce, ut lux essent et non tenebrae.Sic enim...

The passage occurs in act 1, scene 3 of Shakespeare’sTroilus and Cressida. Agamemnon and Nestor have been trying to shore up the courage of the other Greek leaders with the argument that their inability to take Troy after seven years derives from Jove’s wish to test their constancy. Ulysses begs them to let him air his own view of the matter, and this leads to the following exchange:

Agamemnon. Speak, Prince of Ithaca; and be’t of less expect

That matter needless, of importless burden,

Divide thy lips than we are confident,

When rank Thersites opes his mastic jaws,

We...