Communicating with Metaphors, page 16

The Importance of Metaphors, continued

Every story, narrative, poem, or exposition presents one or more metaphors. The more powerful the writing, the better and more apt is the overarching metaphor.

Religious works can be taken literally, viewed anthropologically, or seen as metaphors for the relationship of humanity to the universe.

As a side note here, these broad thematic metaphors can be implicit or explicit. For example, the metaphor in Catch-22 is pretty plain to see, and fairly explicit. But in many cases you really have to dig to understand the broad conceptual metaphors. The best approach is to ask yourself the question: “What is this author really saying or trying to say?”

Also mostly metaphors: commercials and advertisements, particularly on television. These implicit metaphors mostly conflate a purchase with a lifestyle or a becoming. Take the case of a car commercial. The vehicle, so to speak, of the metaphor is the car the advertiser wants you to buy. The tenor of the metaphor is lifestyle you will have, the attractive members of the opposite sex you will attract, and the glamorous person you will become if you only own the car. The ground of the metaphor is the imaginative projection of you buying the car.

Modern readers tend to gag, and lose tolerance, when they encounter a broad explicit metaphor, particularly if the metaphor is used within an overly schematic structure.

Every time you read a story and say to yourself, “There but for the grace of God go I!” or, “How sad! How wonderful!” at least part of your response is due to the effective use by the author of a broad metaphor. If you finish reading a “How to” book and feel that, by gum, you really do know how to do it, then at least part of your confidence is a response to effective employment of metaphors in the broadest sense.

As you read the rest of this chapter, work through the “Stretch Your Brain” excercises at its end, and employ metaphors in your own writing, I urge you to consider the metaphor in its broadest possible sense, and not merely as a rhetorical device.

After all, a mind’s reach should exceed its grasp, or else what is a metaphor?

Continued next page

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