P P: B ' D: Roblems of Araphrase Ottom S Ream

Problems of Paraphrase: Bottoms Dream
The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication
Vol. 3: A Figure of Speech
August 2008 pages 1-46
DAVID HILLS Stanford University
say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, mans hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called Bottoms Dream, because it hath no bottom. . . . A Midsummer Nights Dream, IV , i, 204-215. And we speake wysdome among them that are perfecte: not the wysdome of this world, neither of the chiefest of this world which come to nought. But we speake of the wysdome of God, which is hid, in a mysterie, to wit, that secret wisdome, which God ordeyned before the world, vnto our glorie. Which wysdome none of the heads of this world knewe; for had they knowen it, they wolde not have crucied the Lord of glorie. But we preache as it is written, Things which eye hath not sene, and eare hath not heard, neither haue entred into mans mynde, which things God hath prepared for them that loue hym. But God hath opened them unto us by his Sprite, for the Spirite searcheth all things, yea, the bottom of Goddes secretes. For what man knoweth the things of a man: saue the sprite of a man which is with him? euen so the things of God knoeth no man but the Spirite of God. I Corinthians 2, as rendered in the Geneva New Testament of 15571
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PROBLEMS
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PARAPHRASE: B OTTOM S D REAM
ABSTRACT: Philosophers and critics alike often contend that metaphors cannot or should not be paraphrased, ever. Yet a simple and decisive empirical argument The Horses Mouth Argument sufces to show that many metaphors can be paraphrased without violating the spirit in which they were put forward in the rst place. This argument leaves us with urgent unanswered questions about the role of paraphrase in a more inclusive division of exegetical labor, about the tension between its notorious openendedness and its claim to restate something already stated, and about the relation between the content of a paraphrase and the content (or contents) of the metaphor the paraphrase purports to explain. But it leaves us in a position to state such questions more clearly and hopefully than we could before. To Stanley Cavell
PARAPHRASE AND METAPHORS BOTTOMLESSNESS
Gods my life! Stolen hence, and left me asleep? I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was there is no man can tell what. Methought I was and methought I had but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to
In A Midsummer Nights Dream, a weaver named Nick Bottom takes to the woods with several of his fellow craftsmen to rehearse the fractured version of Pyramis and Thisbe they hope to perform at the wedding of Theseus, Duke of Athens, to the conquered Amazon Queen Hippolyta. While awaiting his cue, Bottom is transformed, translated as Peter Quince rather nicely puts it, turned into an ass from the neck up, by the intervention of Robin Goodfellow, a.k.a. Puck, servant to Oberon, king of the fairies. Oberon has been feuding with his queen Titania, and at his command Puck squeezes into her eyes as she sleeps a juice with the power to make her fall desperately in love with the
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rst living creature she sees when she awakens. As things fall out, this creature proves to be the translated Bottom. So Bottom was in fact wide awake throughout his so-called dream, wherein he proves more convincing in his involuntary role of ass than he will ever be in his voluntary role of Pyramus. What Ive quoted are words Bottom speaks to himself when he awakens from a subsequent dreamless sleep with his old head restored to him, full of confused and fragmentary memories of what befell him in the woods the previous night. Bottom quickly concludes that this dream of his wont admit of explanation or exposition Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream but that it needs and deserves a ballad instead, a ballad he proposes to commission from his friend Peter Quince, as if such a marvelous work of unconscious art deserved a more consciously composed companion work to preserve, extend, and celebrate its wonders. He associates these conclusions of his about the proper response to his vision with its bottomlessness, a feature we might try to understand in two very different ways. (a) First Possibility: A bottom is the wooden core to the skein of wool that Nick Bottom would routinely employ in his day job as weaver. If this is the sort of bottom that Bottoms dream lacks, the sensible-sounding effort to reach a simple solid core at the center of his vision by patiently unwinding the twisted and colorful spectacle at its manifest surface would leave one with nothing but a tangle of discarded yarn. In this specic sense, Bottoms vision would be baseless, empty, vain however precious we may nd it if we dont ask it to mean anything. (b) Second Possibility: A vision we can get to the bottom of (with Gods help) is the divine mystery or secret of human salvation declared by St. Paul in the well-known passage from 1 Corinthians that Nick Bottom echoes (and mangles) in his speech. God opens this secret to us by his spirit in a manner that bypasses messy appeals to human eyes or ears or reasonings or imaginings. Deep as it is, we may plumb this secret to its very bottom once and for all by merely opening our hearts to it or so Paul assures us. Now however wonderful Bottoms vision may be, it is utterly unlike the divine vision of which Paul speaks. For one thing, its content is vividly and memorably profane. For another, it depends richly
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but strangely on the standard human cognitive faculties Paul professes to do without. Richly, since Bottoms vision is an affair of the eyes and ears and hands and tongue, not or not merely an affair of the heart. Strangely, since Bottoms vision confounds the standard roles of standard cognitive faculties to puzzling and striking effect; it is a vision wherein we must do our best to hear with our eyes, see with our ears, taste with our hands, conceive with our tongues, and report with our hearts. (Poems require just these stunts of us on a regular basis.) If we wish to see further into such a vision it isnt the sort of thing we ever could see all the way into we must conjure it back and contrive to re-enter it. Attempting to pack its gist into inevitably inadequate expository language wont really help. To understand it is to reinhabit it. Take your pick: no bottom because no foundation, [or] no bottom because unfathomably profound, as Harold F. Brooks puts it in the introduction to his edition of the play.2 The manifest content of Bottoms dream, approximately and in part, is that Bottom is (or recently was) an ass. So issues about the proper treatment of Bottoms waking vision inevitably call to mind the corresponding issues about the proper treatment of the verbally managed waking visions known as metaphors: should we expound them, or should we conjure them back by writing ballads in their honor? Can we expound Bottoms dream (by expounding its manifest content) or its companion metaphor Bottom is an ass (by expounding its literal meaning so as to disclose some metaphorical content or truth condition) without making asses of ourselves in the process? Or does the inherent bottomlessness of dream and metaphor alike preclude anything of the sort? At the beginning of one of the nest philosophical essays on metaphor, Davidson says: Metaphor is the dreamwork of language, and like all dreamwork, its interpretation reects as much on the interpreter as on the originator. The interpretation of dreams requires collaboration between a dreamer and a waker, even if they be the same person; and the act of interpretation is itself a work of the imagination. So too understanding a metaphor
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is as much a creative endeavor as making a metaphor, and as little guided by rules.3 I agree a metaphor is like a dream, in that its interpretation is a creative enterprise and a collaborative one. I even agree with Davidsons companion contention that a metaphor is like a joke, in that we must relish it and appreciate it in order to understand it. Yet I take the interpretation of metaphors to be guided by rules, albeit rules of a special and difcult-to-elicit kind, offering a special and difcult-to-elicit kind of guidance. This is linked with my sense that despite everything Davidson says to the contrary, a proper interpretation of a metaphor can take the form of an exposition or paraphrase neednt take the form of anything remotely like a ballad. As for bottomlessness, Ill have more to say about that shortly.
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Moreover, if I could not provide an explanation of this form, that is a very good reason, a perfect reason, for supposing that I do not know what it means. Metaphors are paraphrasable. He takes paraphrasability to differentiate metaphors from stretches of fully literal prose (on the one hand) and uses of language possessing various other kinds of poetic ambition and interest (on the other). A footnote Cavell added when he reprinted the piece claries this claim somewhat: I should have made it more explicit that throughout this essay I am using paraphrase to name solely that specic form of account which suits metaphors (marked, for example, by its concluding sense of and so on.) So when I say that stretches of literal prose cannot be paraphrased, I mean to imply the specication . . . in that way. Cavell goes on: Two points now emerge: (1) The and so on which ends my example of paraphrase is signicant. It registers what William Empson called the pregnancy of metaphors, the burgeoning of meaning in them. [This helps to differentiate metaphors from the corresponding similes.] If you say Juliet is like the sun, . . . the drive of it leads me to expect you to continue by saying in what denite respects they are like (similes are just a little bit pregnant); and, in complement I wait for you to tell me what you mean, to deliver your meaning, so to speak. It is not up to me to nd as much as I can in your words. The over-reading of metaphors so often complained of, no doubt justly, is a hazard they must run for their high interest. (2) To give the paraphrase, to understand the metaphor, I must understand the ordinary or dictionary meanings of the words it contains, and understand that they are not there being used in their ordinary way, that the meanings they invite are not to be found opposite them in a dictionary. In this respect the words in metaphors function as they do in idioms [fall at on ones
One thing we sometimes do in order to demonstrate that we understand a particular metaphor or to indicate how we understand it is paraphrase the metaphor in question. In a famous passage from his extraordinary early essay Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,4 Stanley Cavell writes: Now suppose I am asked what someone means who says, Juliet is the sun. . . . I may say something like: Romeo means that Juliet is the warmth of his world; that his day begins with her; that only in her nourishment can he grow. And his declaration suggests that the moon, which other lovers use as an emblem of their love, is merely her reected light, and dead in comparison; and so on. In a word, I paraphrase it. Asked in the same spirit what someone means who says a work is the death mask of its conception,5 I may say something like: Benjamin means that a work (of prose) is the enduring yet lifeless trace of the idea that produced it; a permanent reminder, in fact a souvenir, of that idea; and so on. Cavell continues:
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face, a thorn in ones side, a bee in ones bonnet, a y in ones ointment, etc.]. But while how one is to understand a particular idiom is something that can be given once and for all, how one is to understand a particular metaphor is something subject to open-ended exploration. And while a languages stock of available idioms is nite and can be mastered, perhaps must be mastered, one idiom at a time, its stock of available metaphors is innite and can be mastered only on terms that prepare us in advance to cope with novel and unprecedented instances. (It follows that although our understanding of an idiom like bite the bullet is in no way diminished by ignorance of its origins in the grim realities of battleeld surgery in days before anesthesia, our understanding of a metaphor like The cowslips tall her pensioners be is diminished at least somewhat by any shakiness in our sense of what it took in Elizabethan days to be a pensioner, literally speaking.) Both these differences between idioms and metaphors contribute to a sense that while we can confer or display mastery of an idiom by telling how it is to be understood offering a non-idiomatic word or expression we take to be synonymous with the idiom, taken idiomatically we can confer or display mastery of a metaphor only by explaining how it is to be understood, implicitly relating what we propose to make of it to the standing pre-metaphorical powers of the words and constructions from which it is composed. Apparently Cavell takes paraphrases to be in the business of explaining to us, not merely telling us, how metaphors are to be understood.6 There are two apparent obstacles to accepting this suggestion as it stands. First, its often claimed that metaphors are intrinsically unparaphrasable that efforts to reformulate metaphors in more nearly literal language are (a) bound to fail or at least (b) bound to violate the real spirit and interest of the language they purport to explain. On (a), paraphrasing a metaphor is something that simply cant be done. On (b), perhaps you can do it, at least sometimes, but doing it would always be a bad idea. Even attempting to paraphrase a metaphor betrays either (a) a misunderstanding or (b) a lack of appreciation of the very language youre presumably out to understand and out to appreciate. Its often hinted that the unparaphrasability of metaphors follows from the
fact that metaphor is a poetic use of language. Second, even if paraphrase is both possible and appropriate where metaphor is concerned, in what way does paraphrase take on the job of explaining to us, rather than merely telling us, how a given metaphor is to be understood? Cavells ambitions for the notion as they come out in his contrast between metaphor and idiom appear to require that a paraphrase do more than provide a synonymous form of words, yet it can actually appear to do somewhat less, since it looks for all the world like a partial restatement of what the metaphor itself already stated. The words and so on suggest as much. To make headway on these difcult issues, we need to consider how Cavell came to insist on the essential paraphrasability of metaphors in the rst place.
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Paraphrase and its Latin ancestor paraphrasis are terms that have long been employed for a wide range of modes of elaborative restatement in a wide variety of media. What gets counted as restatement varies as a function of what gets counted as statement in the rst place. Some forms of paraphrase aim to re-express the plain sense or main gist of an original that is difcult to take in as it stands for one reason or another: think of a lawyers paraphrase of an obscure statute, a preachers paraphrase of a cryptic Scriptural passage, or the paraphrase of the naked female form (simplifying the original in some respects, complicating it in others) afforded by a Cranach nude.7 Others aim to adapt a readily comprehended original to a medium that by its nature forbids kinds of terseness the original exhibits or invites kinds of complication the original lacks: think of a polyphonic paraphrase by Palestrina of a bit of late medieval plainsong or an orchestral paraphrase by Liszt of a Verdi aria.
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An especially important form of elaborative restatement occurs from time to time as a literary text is translated from one natural language into another. In the theory and practice of translation, paraphrase is ofVol. 3: A Figure of Speech
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ten contrasted with word-by-word or literal rendering on the one hand and independent creation masquerading as translation on the other. In regard to translation [Dryden] sought to trace a via media between the word-for-word approach demanded by purists among divines and grammarians, and the wild idiosyncrasies displayed in Cowleys Pindarique Odes of 1656. Drydens sensibility, both as theoretician and translator, was persuaded that neither could lead to the right solution. No less than the classic poet, the modern translator must stand at the clear, urbane center. He dened as metaphrase the process of converting an author word for word, line by line, from one tongue to another. The adverse example was Ben Jonsons translation of Horaces Art of Poetry published in 1640. Both Jonsons results and common sense demonstrated that literalism was self-defeating. No one can translate both verbally [i.e., word by word, word for word] and well. Drydens simile retains its charm: Tis much like dancing on ropes with fettered legs: a man may shun to fall by using caution; but gracefulness of motion is not to be expected: and when we have said the best of it, tis but a foolish task; for no sober man would put himself into danger for the applause of escaping without breaking his neck. At the opposite extreme we nd imitation where the translator (if now he has not lost that name) assumes the liberty not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion. Here the cautionary example is Cowleys extravagant transformation of Pindar and Horace. . . Dryden will have none of it. The imitator is no better, and often worse, than the composer who appropriates his theme from another and produces his own variations. This may well turn up scintillating stuff and it will show the translator to virtuoso advantage, but it is the greatest wrong which can be done to the memory and reputation of the dead.8 By the way it mingles the characteristic look of its subject with the characteristic look of charcoal on paper, a life drawing makes its status
as a rendering of an absent original immediately evident to the onlooker; only by doing so can the drawing bear honest witness to the subject and the subjects own looks in what is after all an alien medium. By the way it mingles the characteristic sound of an original poets creative speech with the characteristic sound of expository commentary, a paraphrastic translation makes its status as a rendering in English of a Latin original immediately evident to the reader; only by doing so can it bear honest witness to the nature of that original in what is after all a foreign tongue. In either case, accurate rendering may call for an accumulation of partial equivalents, each with its characteristic strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes the best way to depict a single contour is by superimposing several distinct and individually unsatisfactory stabs at depicting it, several distinct and individually unsatisfactory lines, with the result that what we see on the page may be more tangled than the scene it depicts. Sometimes the best way to translate a compact Latin phrase is by juxtaposing several different and individually unsatisfactory stabs at translating it, several distinct and individually unsatisfactory English phrases, with the result that what we read on the page may be looser and more longwinded than the Latin it renders. Because it exploits the distinctive resources of a particular natural language in especially strenuous ways, guration is especially resistant to word-by-word rendering in a second language, hence especially likely to undergo explanatory elaboration at the hands of a conscientious translator. Here is Dryden again: I thought . . . to keep as near my author as I could, without losing all his graces, the most eminent of which are in the beauty of his words; and those words [i.e., the words that can be numbered among a particular writers distinctive graces] are always gurative. Such of these as would retain their elegance in our tongue, I have endeavoured to graff on it; but most of them are of necessity to be lost, because they will not shine in any but their own.9
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But suppose you believe falsely, in my opinion10 that a fully successful work of art needs to make optimal use of the materials available
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to it, with the result that any change whatsoever in the nished work would detract from its power or signicance in some way or other. Suppose you also believe again in my opinion falsely that paraphrases, translations, and rewordings more generally put themselves forward as potential surrogates or substitutes for the language they propose to explain. Then youll be ready to contend with Robert Frost that poetry is what is lost in translation,11 or as Coleridge famously put it back in 1817: In poetry, in which every line, every phrase, may pass the ordeal of deliberation and deliberate choice, it is possible, and barely possible, to attain the ultimatum which I have ventured to propose as the infallible test of a blameless style, namely its untranslateableness in words of the same language without injury to the meaning. Be it observed, however, that I include in the meaning of a word not only its correspondent object, but likewise all the associations which it recalls. For language is framed to convey not the object alone, but likewise the character, mood and intentions of the person who is representing it.12 The form of translation Coleridges argument most immediately targets is translation from English back into English, translation of allegedly fancy English into allegedly plain English, translation from metaphorese into literalese being a special case of this. Coleridge pursues his argument one step further, in a manner characteristic of Romanticism and of later thought heavily indebted to Romanticism. If meaning is whatever translation preserves insofar as translation is successful, and if poetry is a use of language that attains untranslatableness in words of the same language insofar as it is successful, then the more successful a poem becomes, the more relevant every detail of its wording becomes to what we properly include in its meaning, hence the more that meaning outruns any routine descriptive truth-condition settled in a recursive rule-governed fashion by the syntax and semantics of the words and constructions from which the poem is composed. At this point, two further inferences become tempting.
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On the one hand, if you are sufciently impressed by the fact that ancient rhetoric and modern criticism alike dene metaphor as a special and specially indirect way of putting something, an indirect way of expressing a meaning that could be expressed in a more direct and literal way instead, youll be inclined to conclude that there cant really be any metaphors in the rst place or that if some metaphors do exist, they arent to be found where one might most expect to nd them, in successful poetry. Such was the conclusion Croce was prepared to draw in his 1901 Estetica: To take a simple example [of the emptiness of traditional rhetorical notions], there is the commonest denition of metaphor as a word used in place of the literally correct one. And why give oneself the trouble of substituting a different word in place of the literally correct one and taking the longer and worse way when the shorter and better is known to us? Perhaps because, as it is commonly said, the literal word, in certain cases, is not as expressive as the supposed nonliteral or metaphorical word? But if this is the case, the metaphor just is in this event the literal word; and which is usually called literal, if it were used in this case, would be less expressive, and therefore wholly improper.13
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On the other hand, if you consider it beyond dispute that metaphor is one of the most basic forms poetry takes, one of the most basic units poetry comes in, youll be inclined to think: (a) That when ancient rhetoric and modern criticism dene metaphor as a specially indirect way of putting something, they must be mischaracterizing what metaphor really is mischaracterizing what is really going on in their own examples of metaphor. (b) That the more successful a poem is, the less possible it will be to restate what it or its constituent metaphors manage to mean in
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more literal terms. (c) That efforts to paraphrase a poem or its constituent metaphors are a distraction from our true task of grasping the poems meaning, a task not clearly distinct from that of understanding the poems total effect on us as we read it. Such was the conclusion the New Critic Cleanth Brooks was prepared to draw in the forties, in a chapter of The Well-Wrought Urn called The Heresy of Paraphrase. Brooks speaks there of the resistance which any good poem puts up against all efforts to paraphrase it, and continues: We can very properly use paraphrases as pointers and as shorthand references provided that we know what we are doing. But it is highly important that we know what we are doing and that we see plainly that the paraphrase is not the real core of meaning which constitutes the essence of the poem. . . Let the reader try to formulate a proposition that will say what the poem says. As his proposition approaches adequacy, he will nd, not only that it has increased greatly in length, but that it has begun to ll itself up with reservations and qualications and most signicant of all the formulator will nd that he has himself begun to fall back upon metaphors of his own in his attempt to indicate what the poem says. In sum, his proposition, as it approaches adequacy, ceases to be a proposition. . . The truth is that all such formulations [of the statement made by a poem] lead away from the center of a poem not toward it; that the prose sense of the poem is not a rack on which the stuff of the poem is hung; that it does not represent the inner structure or essential structure or the real structure of the poem. . . We must not mistake them for the internal and essential structure of the building itself. . . 14
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where one wants to break in and insist on a few very familiar facts. Whatever distinctive structures and distinctive designs on their readers poems may possess, poems are still made out of language a medium designed for the formulation of determinate propositions and the presentation of determinate arguments. So whatever else the assessment of poetry may ultimately involve, there must be some place in it for judgments about the truth of particular determinate propositions and the cogency of particular determinate arguments. And even if poetry involves distinctively poetic way of embodying propositions and arguments in words, those ways will incorporate and build on the more routine prosaic ways of accomplishing such tasks studied by various branches of linguistics: syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and the rest. One especially emphatic expression of this sort of impatience with Coleridges children comes in the work of Brookss regular sparring partner, Yvor Winters.15 Winters takes susceptibility to paraphrase to be a hallmark of something he calls reason in poetry. Good poems (and by implication, good metaphors as well) always admit of paraphrase. And the propositions a good paraphrase represents a poem as expressing are always rationally respectable propositions propositions worth pondering with care, no matter how patently false or patently incredible they may be or may become, once we have pondered them. The rational framework of a poem should bear inspection, and paraphrase lays bare this framework, opening it to rational inspection. If that framework proves to be trivial and inconsecutive, this betrays a hidden triviality, a hidden inconsecutiveness, in a poem we might otherwise be inclined to admire.16 The resistance to paraphrase we encounter in various modes of modernist writing imagism, symbolism, surrealism, and the rest is real enough, but it involves an understandable but regrettable ight from intelligibility, a surrender to unreason or irresponsibility, a misconceived attempt to express the modern worlds looseness by writing loosely or to express its disintegration by allowing ones own writing to disintegrate.
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One reaches a point in reviewing such Coleridge-inspired declarations

This strange cluster of heartfelt claims and counterclaims about rational cores and essential structures has all the earmarks of a philoVol. 3: A Figure of Speech
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sophical dispute, and Cavells doctrine that metaphors are essentially paraphrasable is an effort to condense this cloud of philosophy into a drop of grammar. Against Brooks, Cavell maintains that metaphors not only are but must be paraphrasable. When I indulge in metaphor I always could express what I want to say about my metaphors primary subject in some other way instead, without even mentioning my metaphors secondary subject. Indeed such re-expression of what I want to say is always a way, perhaps sometimes the best way, of explaining the language I offered the rst time around. Paraphrase neednt strike us as distracting us from or violating the spirit of the language it purports to explain, once we see that it isnt competing with that language at that languages own game and doesnt purport to be an effective general purpose surrogate for that language, any more than a careful dictionary denition of the word cat claims to be an effective general purpose surrogate for the short, sweet, effectively irreplaceable word it expounds. As for Winters, Cavell concedes that a considerable amount of modern poetry really does resist or even defy paraphrase in unprecedented ways. He concludes from this that a considerable amount of modern poetry consists of legitimate nonliteral uses of language that shouldnt be counted as metaphors. Modern poetrys resistance to paraphrase doesnt represent a ight from intelligibility; it represents a ight from old ways of making ourselves intelligible to new ways of doing so, ways better adapted to the difcult times in which we live. The novel forms of poetic language on offer in challenging modern poetry are touchstones of intimacy demanded by the unprecedented obstacles to intimate communication that poets confront in the modern world. (Cavell cites Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens in this connection; early Auden would do just as well.) Putting what such an intimacy-demanding, intimacy-testing, intimacy-developing deployment of language says in some other way is out of the question, since it isnt straightforwardly in the business of saying anything in the rst place. Such deployments of language have their own ways of being intelligible, and there will be modes of explanation appropriate to displaying their intelligibility, modes of explanation very different from paraphrase. An example of such a touchstone of intimacy from outside poetry proper may make all this a bit clearer. In an essay on Wittgenstein
called Secondary Sense, Cora Diamond reports: I once stood on a ledge behind a waterfall, where all I could hear was water thundering down, all I could see in front of me was thousands of gallons hurtling down. The experience I had I could only describe by saying something like Now I know what down means!17 Of course her experience behind the waterfall didnt literally teach Diamond the meaning of the word down something she had obviously mastered long before. Nor does Diamonds remark metaphorically liken her experience behind the waterfall to an earlier experience of learning a word along lines we might explain by paraphrasing her remark the way Cavell paraphrased Romeos. She isnt so much describing her experience behind the waterfall as letting that experience express itself in words it proves capable of eliciting from her. Arguably Diamonds remark is a mild philosophers joke, turning on a professional philosophers instinctive feel for bad old theories to the effect that word meanings are ideas, that ideas are faint copies of vivid impressions, etc. But the best way of explaining Diamonds remark to someone puzzled by it wont involve painstakingly anatomizing the logic of the mild little joke at its heart. (Never explain a joke at least, never admit that youre explaining it!) Instead it will consist in putting the reader in a position to imagine wanting to utter Diamonds own words from Diamonds own motives herself. That is what Diamond herself does or tries to do in the passage I just quoted.
CAVEATS 10.
If one wants to side with Cavell on the essential paraphrasability of metaphors, there are several hedges against misunderstanding one had better issue right away. First, to say that paraphrase is always possible isnt to say it will always be welcome or called for. In many contexts, paraphrasers are party-poopers, spoiling the fun of others by explicitly spelling out what can and should and often must go without saying. Here is Marianne
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Moore on the subject: The following principles . . . are aids to composition by which I try, myself, to be guided: if a long sentence with dependent clauses seems obscure, one can break it into shorter units by imagining what phrases it would fall into as conversation; in the second place, expanded explanation tends to spoil the lions leap an awkwardness which is surely brought home to one in conversation; and in the third place, we must be as clear as our natural reticence allows us to be.18 After all, metaphors themselves often function as touchstones of intimacy, and intimacy can tolerate only so much giving and taking of explanations.19 Here is Frost on the subject: Revelation We make ourselves a place apart Behind light words that tease and out, But oh, the agitated heart Till someone really nd us out. Tis pity if the case require (Or so we say) that in the end We speak the literal to inspire The understanding of a friend. But so with all, from babes that play At hide-and-seek to God afar, So all who hide too well away Must speak and tell us where they are.20 Second, Cavell may go too far when he contends that the ability to paraphrase metaphors and related forms of literary language is a criterion or perhaps the criterion of understanding such language, in Wittgensteins proprietary sense of the term criterion. On the one hand, a paraphrase might succeed as restatement while betraying in its wording a profound misunderstanding of the spirit of the language it purports to explain. Consider the strange plight of someone who with straight face offers:
Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must inevitably be taken into account. as a paraphrase of these familiar words from Ecclesiastes: I returned and I saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, not the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all.21 Such a listener has paraphrased (restated) correctly, at least up to a point, yet he wouldnt have paraphrased as he did if he had understood the spirit of the language he was paraphrasing, and unless he understands that languages spirit, he doesnt understand it. On the other hand, when Cavell says, If I could not provide an explanation of this form, that is a very good reason, a perfect reason, for supposing that I do not know what it [Romeos metaphor] means [my emphasis], he seems not to allow for the fact that paraphrase is a sophisticated general pedagogical skill and some of us appear to get the hang of metaphor (and of many particular metaphors) without ever getting the hang of it. Third, although metaphors may be essentially paraphrasable, paraphrasable utterances neednt be metaphorical. Many literal uses of language invite the same sort of open-ended, approximative, reformulative explanation that metaphors do. In The Philadelphia Story,22 Tracy Lord (Katherine Hepburn) has occasion to exclaim of a yacht called the True Love, on which she spent her rst honeymoon, My she was yare! Yare is a technical term, a nautical term, a term of high praise. Tracys new anc George Kittredge asks her what it means, and she says: Tracy: [Under her breath and as if to herself:] What does it mean? [Then out loud and as if to George:] Oh, easy to handle, quick to the helm, fast, bright everything a boat should be until she develops dry rot. This last by way of rueful comment on Tracys rst marriage, on Tracy herself, or both. By then she is beginning to change the subject from
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sailboats to something else. Near the end of the lm Tracy promises to be yare herself. I take this promise to be an instance of metaphor: there are metaphorical promises, metaphorical commands, metaphorical questions, etc., not just metaphorical statements. But Tracys original use of the term yare wasnt metaphorical at all, and this is the use she undertakes to explain to George and to us. One can almost hear the understood and so on as Hepburns voice drops off in the patented Hepburn manner after the word bright. Fourth, Cavells quip about similes being only a little bit pregnant should be taken with a grain of salt. One sees what he means: a great many effective similes are pretty well exhausted by the compact explanation their author promptly and explicitly supplies. Bacons essays are loaded with such stuff: Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set. Of Beauty Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid. Of Praise Money is like muck, not good except it be spread. Of Seditions and Troubles But similes can also be as designedly bottomless, as designedly resistant to exhaustive explication, as their metaphorical counterparts: One walking a fall meadow nds on all sides The Queen-Annes lace lying like lilies on water. Richard Wilbur, The Beautiful Changes Although afiction cometh not forth of the dust, neither doth trouble spring out of the ground; Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks y upward. Job 5:6-7 They [The members of a crowd hopelessly waiting for an endlessly delayed train] were like ruins in the wet, places that is where life has been, palaces, abbeys, cathedrals, throne rooms, pantries, cast aside and tumbled down with no immediate life and with what used to be in them lost rather than hidden now the roof has fallen in. Henry Green23
Stupidity, delusion, selshness and lust Torment our bodies and possess our minds And we sustain our affable remorse The way a beggar nourishes his lice. Baudelaire, Au Lecteur24 Sometimes in the afternoon sky a white moon would creep up like a little cloud, furtive, without display, suggesting an actress who does not have to come on for a while, and so goes in front in her ordinary clothes to watch the rest of the company for a moment, but keeps in the background, not wishing to attract attention to herself. Proust25 Ideas in poetry should constitute a shifting, unutterable subtext to be glimpsed through spangles, like the houses of Parliament seen upside down in the Thames. James Merrill26 Last and by no means least, we mustnt fall into thinking of paraphrase as translation, even approximate and partial translation, into literalese. As Brooks himself points out and as Cavells own paraphrase of Romeos metaphor already illustrates, good paraphrases of interesting metaphors regularly resort to Brooks would say fall back on additional metaphors of their own; their value as explanations would be seriously diminished if we were to deprive them of this important resource.
THE VINDICATION OF PARAPHRASE, OR THE HORSES MOUTH 11.
The frequently voiced conviction that paraphrase is always heretical always either (a) impossible or at least (b) a bad idea is that rare thing, a widely held philosophical thesis we can refute once and for all on a straightforwardly empirical basis. For very often, and in the widest possible variety of styles and periods, we nd intelligent and rhetorically skillful speakers arranging to accompany their very own metaphors with their very own paraphrases. In the bulk of such cases the
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paraphrase follows or mostly follows the metaphor being paraphrased, but occasionally it gets underway rst. Perhaps the single most familiar instance of this phenomenon call it authorized paraphrase comes from Pascals Penses: Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water, sufces to kill him. But if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.27 Man is but a reed. . . but he is a thinking reed. That much is metaphor. The rest, I contend, is paraphrase paraphrase from the horses mouth, as it were Pascals own paraphrase of Pascals own metaphorical utterance. (The paraphrase contains additional metaphor, of course, but by now this should come as no surprise.) Pascal is not alone; for some reason, thinking in summary terms about humanity or human nature as such makes the impulse to paraphrase ones own metaphors especially hard to resist: Man is the most consummate of all mimics in the animal world; none but himself can draw or model; none comes near him in the scope, variety, and exactness of vocal imitation; none is such a master of gesture; while he seems to be impelled thus to imitate for the sheer pleasure of it. And there is no such another emotional chameleon. By a purely reex operation of the mind, we take the hue of passion of those who are about us, or, it may be, the complementary colour. . . T.H. Huxley28 Man, at his best, remains a sort of one-lunged animal, never completely rounded and perfect, as a cockroach, say, is perfect. If he shows one valuable quality, it is almost unheard of for him to show any other. Give him a head, and he lacks a heart. Give him a heart of a gallon capacity, and his head holds scarcely a pint. H.L. Mencken29 Difcult to realize that the past was once the present, and that, transferred to it, one would be just the same little worm
as to-day, unimportant, parasitic, nervous, occupied with tries, unable to go anywhere or alter anything, friendly only with the obscure, and only at ease with the dead; [while up on the heights the gures and forces who make History would contend in their habitual fashion, with incomprehensible noises or in ominous quiet.] E.M. Forster30 Ive italicized the main metaphor in each passage; in each case the rest of the passage (apart from the Forster material Ive sequestered in brackets) is paraphrase, straight from the mouth of the relevant horse. If authorized paraphrase is especially common in prose musings on what it is to be human, it is common enough in other subject matters and even in other genres. We nd it in psychology: Habit is thus the enormous ywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. William James31 In economics: Of all those expensive and uncertain projects, however, which bring bankruptcy upon the greater part of the people who engage in them, there is none perhaps more ruinous than the search after new silver and gold mines. It is perhaps the most disadvantageous lottery in the world, or the one in which the gain of those who draw the prizes bears the least proportion to the loss of those who draw the blanks: for though the prizes are few and the blanks many, the common price of a ticket is the whole fortune of a very rich man. Projects of mining, instead of replacing the capital employed in them, together with the ordinary prots of stock, commonly absorb both capital and prot. They are the projects, therefore, to which of all others a prudent lawgiver, who desired to increase the capital of his nation, would least choose to give any extraordinary encouragement, or to turn towards
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them a greater share of that capital than that would go to them of its own accord. . . Adam Smith32 In metaphysics: There is also no way of explaining how a monad can be altered or changed internally by some other creature, since one cannot transpose anything in it, nor can one conceive of any internal motion that can be excited, directed, augmented, or diminished within it, as can be done in composites, where there can be change among the parts. The monads have no windows through which something could enter or leave. Accidents cannot be detached, nor can they go about outside of substances, as the sensible species of the Scholastics once did. Thus, neither substance nor accident can enter a monad from without. Leibniz33 In the reections of painters: In the old days pictures went forward toward completion by stages. Every day brought something new. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture then I destroy it. In the end, though, nothing is lostthe red I took away from one place turns up somewhere else. It would be interesting to preserve, photographically, not the stages, but the metamorphoses of a picture. Possibly one might then discover the path followed by the brain in materializing a dream. But there is one very odd thing to notice that basically a picture doesnt change, that the rst vision remains almost intact, in spite of appearances. I often ponder on a light and a dark when I have put them into a picture; I try hard to break them up by interpolating a color that will produce a different effect. When the work is photographed, I note that what I put in to correct my rst vision has disappeared, and that, after all, the photographic image corresponds with my rst vision before the transformation I insisted on. Picasso34 In the last few examples authorized paraphrase eventually gives way to other, more diffuse ways of explaining oneself and justifying ones assertions, but its hard to locate the transitions precisely.
Lest one think that authorized paraphrase is inherently prosy or prosaic, its worth recalling that Grices main example of metaphor hailed from a jaunty old pop standard that was fully prepared to paraphrase itself: Youre the cream in my coffee, Youre the salt in my stew, You will always be My necessity, Id be lost without you. . . 35 In certain rare but memorable instances a metaphor comes at the end of a passage, serving to sum up a stretch of text we understand in retrospect as paraphrasing its own conclusion. Heres an especially studied and spectacular instance: Florizel: What you do Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet, Ild have you do it ever. When you sing, Ild have you buy and sell so, so give alms, Pray so, and for the ordring of your affairs, To sing them too. When you do dance, I wish you A wave o the sea, that you might ever do Nothing but that, move still, still so, And own no other function. Each your doing, So singular in each particular, Crowns what you are doing in the present deeds, That all your acts are queens. The Winters Tale IV , iv, 135-45. To charge that paraphrase is always either (a) impossible or (b) uncalled for is to accuse each and every one of these authors of either (a) attempting the impossible or (b) responding in a manifestly inappropriate manner to his own words. When an accusation becomes this sweeping, it discredits itself.
BETWEEN I.E. AND ETC. 12.
We can vindicate paraphrase in this manner while remaining profoundly

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puzzled about what it really is, how it really works, and what it really accomplishes. When rst introducing Cavells views, I contrasted telling how to understand a piece of language with explaining how to do so. To tell another how to understand some words, it sufces to offer him some exact or approximate equivalent of the words he nds unintelligible. To explain to another how to understand some words, I need to put him in a position to dope them out for himself by showing him how they come to mean whatever it is they do mean. Now according to Cavell, the meaning and content of an idiom can simply be told, but the meaning and content of a metaphor are things that must be explained. In the case of metaphor, he suggests, this explaining appropriately takes the form of a paraphrase. But even if a paraphrase isnt a surrogate, it certainly looks like some kind of equivalent: a mere telling of what words manage to mean, rather than an explaining of how they manage to mean it. We can restate the puzzle by looking at a couple of familiar Latin abbreviations: i.e. (id est, that is) and etc. (et cetera). The i.e. with which paraphrase so often begins suggests that what we are offering when we offer a paraphrase is some kind of equivalent for the language were explaining, even if its only a partial and approximate equivalent a word or phrase or sentence with nearly enough the same meaning and content as the word or phrase or sentence were out to render more accessible. When the metaphor in question is a declarative sentence like Juliet is the sun, the equivalent in question takes the form of a (partial and approximate) restatement. When the metaphor in question is only a part of a sentence, a single word or phrase or clause, the equivalent in question takes the form of a (partial and approximate) reformulation. So: i.e. suggests that understanding a metaphor is a kind of knowledge that a matter of knowing or seeing that the metaphorically presented meaning and content are (more or less) thus and such. The etc. with which it so often closes, on the other hand, suggests that understanding a given metaphor is a kind of knowledge how, a grasp of a procedure, a skill or knack for letting the metaphor inspire thoughts that will prove to be worth thinking, a skill or knack that might be exercised in any number of different ways on any number of different
occasions. We can attempt to display that skill or knack to one of our teachers or convey it to one of our pupils by exemplifying its exercise in our own conduct, much as we might attempt to display or convey the ability to add whole numbers by doing particular sums on a blackboard. But if were simply exemplifying such a skill or knack in paraphrasing a metaphor as we do, the language we produce wont be equivalent to the language were trying to explain any more than a particular worked sum would be equivalent to a general formula, algorithm, or procedure for adding whole numbers.
13.
These puzzles become deeper and more concrete when we recall the structure of mainstream accounts of meaning in modern analytic philosophy. Such accounts are: (a) compositional, in that they regard the meanings and contents of complex linguistic items (sentences, clauses, phrases) as determined by the meanings and contents borne by their smallest individually signicant parts individual words and the manner in which these words are strung together. (b) truth-based, in that they regard a content for an indicative sentence as given by the specication of a truth condition for that sentence a way for the sentence to come out true or instead, false. (c) communication-centered, in that they take language to be a medium wherein we communicate our thoughts to others by enabling them to infer the intentions with which we are speaking from the words we utter and their arrangement. Keeping all this in mind, what happens if we try to think of a paraphrase as an effort to capture in more nearly literal terms (or at least, less ambitiously metaphorical terms) the meaning and content already accruing to a metaphorical utterance? Talk of metaphorical meaning got going in the heyday of behaviorism and logical empiricism, a philosophical moment marked by a crippling confusion of meaning and import, signication and signicance,
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what language means and how language matters. The suspicion thus arises that metaphoric meaning so-called is really a kind of import, not a kind of meaning in the sense pertinent to semantics. The suspicion arises that paraphrase (so-called) is really getting at why a metaphor matters, not at what it (semantically) means. Tolerable paraphrases of one and the same metaphor often proceed along very different lines: Cavell: Juliet is the warmth of [Romeos] world; his day begins with her; only in her nourishment can he grow, etc. Ted Cohen: Juliet is the brightest thing [Romeo] knows, everything else is lit by her presence; [he is] inevitably drawn to her although [he] knows this to be dangerous, etc. Lynne Tirrell: Juliet is warm; she is bright and dazzling; she is the center of Romeos world [?], etc. Yours Truly: I understand by Romeos words that Juliet is worthy to be and about to become the source of whatever emotional comfort, whatever vitality, whatever clarity his life will contain from here on out.. . . etc. 36 Confronted with such an embarrassment of explanatory riches, some will be tempted to conclude that a paraphrase (so-called) of Juliet is the sun consists of things that merely make for the truth of Juliet is the sun taken metaphorically, not of things that are absolutely required for it. Genuine truth conditions are not just sufcient but necessary for the truth of the thing whose truth conditions they are. So to take this line would be to deny that paraphrase gives metaphorical truth conditions, hence to give up the idea that paraphrase is a mode of restatement, approximate or otherwise. Insist that paraphrase is open-ended and approximate restatement, the verbal counterpart of successive rational approximations to a possibly irrational number, and you confront further problems, only one of which is making disciplined formal sense of approximate equivalence, approximate truth, and kindred notions in the rst place: (a) The multiplicity of acceptable nonsynonymous paraphrases of the same metaphor suggests that if paraphrases really gave metaphorical meanings or contents, metaphors would be much more ambiguous than we ordinarily suppose them to be.
(b) The fact that paraphrases are often stubbornly open-ended suggests that if paraphrases really gave metaphorical meanings or contents, metaphors would seldom be more than partially and imperfectly understood, hence much less comprehensively intelligible than we ordinarily suppose them to be. (c) What can plausibly turn up in a paraphrase of Juliet is the sun vastly outruns anything Romeo was plausibly in a position to intend by his words, hence it can vastly outrun anything Romeos words as used by Romeo plausibly could have meant. The thought that what our words mean is a matter of what we inferably intend to accomplish by means of them seems to be under threat hereabouts. The approximate restatement view of paraphrase may therefore seem to involve us in a rejection of Grice: a rejection of communication-centered, inferable-intention accounts of speaker meaning. (d) Truth conditions owe much of their prominence in modern semantic thinking to the thought that it doesnt take inarticulate tact of any kind to work out the truth condition for a novel utterance; it can always be predicted from the syntax of the utterance and meanings already permanently associated with its constituent words and constructions. Yet it takes plenty of inarticulate tact to accurately paraphrase a metaphor like Romeos. The approximate restatement view of paraphrase may therefore seem to involve us in a rejection of Frege, Tarski, and Carnap: a rejection of the compositionality of verbal meaning and verbal content.
14.
Heres one additional worry; so far as I know it came into the literature with Donald Davidson. Romeos words certainly havent ceased to mean what they ordinarily literally mean. Someone who didnt grasp the ordinary literal meaning of these words would thereby fail to understand Romeos utterance. So if a paraphrase is to give a truth conditional content for an utterance, it must be a second such content; metaphors must be designedly twofold in their meaning, in something of the way puns are. Yet special cases aside, metaphors certainly dont feel designedly
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twofold, dont feel like puns or deliberate equivocations.37

ENEMIES OF PARAPHRASE 15.
Suppose youre persuaded by the concise vindication of paraphrase offered by the Horses Mouth argument. There may still be much to learn from hearing the enemies of paraphrase press their case. Id like to take up two of these enemies here.
16.
First up is Donald Davidson, pressing a worry very different from the one I just now set aside: When we try to say what a metaphor means, we soon realize there is no end to what we want to mention. If someone draws his nger along a coastline on a map, or mentions the beauty and deftness of a line in a Picasso etching, how many things are drawn to your attention? You might list a great many, but you could not nish because the idea of nishing would have no clear application. How many facts are conveyed by a photograph? None, an innity, or one great unstatable fact? Bad question. A picture is not worth a thousand words, or any other number. Words are the wrong currency to exchange for a picture.38 Davidson appears to be suggesting that metaphors are like pictures in that an artifact of either kind brings to mind or commends to our attention an endless abundance of distinct propositions about the thing or things it takes as its subject, without thereby vouching for the truth of any particular portion of the abundance it serves up. Such artifacts are both richer and poorer than any literal verbal statement: richer in suggestiveness, poorer in outright commitment. It is therefore always a mistake to exchange a picture for a literal verbal statement or a literal verbal statement for a picture, since the two sorts of representation arent in the same line of representational work in the rst place. We
should never send either to do the job of the other. The same goes, Davidson appears to think, for the relationship between a metaphor and any of the literal discursive statements it may move us to consider and eventually endorse. If we had a valid objection to paraphrasis along these Davidsonian lines, wed have a parallel and equally valid objection to ecphrasis. Yet the effort to put into literal words some of the most salient portions of a pictures pictorial content is a venerable and eminently respectable rhetorical exercise with a perennial appeal to those who hope to use either their eyes or their words to the fullest. Theres a varied and extensive body of ecphrastic poetry, for instance, some of it remarkably faithful to selected aspects of the depicted content of the pictorial works to which it speaks.39 Distinct descriptively correct ecphrases of a single work can differ spectacularly in content, organization, and emphasis.40 And in the case of ecphrasis, the fact that the idea of nishing lacks clear application in no way entails that the idea of starting is in the same boat. In any case, it seems hard to deny that paintings and photographs and metaphors can falsify their subjects, actively misrepresent them in various particular respects. This wouldnt be possible if they were solely in the business of offering suggestions or solely in the business of calling things to our attention.
17.
There are deeper issues here as well, issues this compact reply to Davidson admittedly leaves untouched. If we decide to think in terms of metaphorical truth and falsity in the rst place, it seems overwhelmingly natural to regard metaphorical truth as something that comes in degrees and respects, with the result that a given metaphor can be true to a certain degree and false otherwise, true up to a certain point and false thereafter, true in certain respects but false in others. In fact, one might suspect that metaphors always fall short of being completely true, always fall short of being true without qualication, even at their truest. After all, its been plausibly maintained that if pushed too far and relied on too blindly, even the best metaphor eventually breaks down on us. If we decide to think of a paraphrase as some kind of literal reVol. 3: A Figure of Speech
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statement of an original metaphorical statement, well want to concede that in most cases the restatement is only partial or approximate: the original metaphor and any paraphrase of it we can actually offer are at best approximately equivalent, equivalent up to a certain point and nonequivalent thereafter. Its often said that propositions are equivalent just in case some further proposition to the effect that they come to the same thing is true. If thats right, a statement to the effect that the metaphor and its paraphrase come to the same thing would itself be true only up to a point and false thereafter. Yet according to the most entrenched accounts of what it is for a sentence or a belief to be true or instead, false those built into standard deductive logic, standard truth-conditional semantics, standard forms of probability and decision theory a potential truth-value bearer is always just plain true, just plain false, or just plain devoid of truthvalue one way or the other. According to these standard theories, truth simply isnt a thing that comes in degrees and respects. To be sure, there are nonstandard theories according to which truth does come in degrees and respects, theories designed to deal with vagueness and kindred phenomena. But they are too new, too ill-understood, and too controversial for students of metaphor to employ them with much condence. All of which might lead us to suspect that metaphorical truth (so-called) is a misleadingly described worthiness to be relied upon on all fours with the truth of a true love, a true friend, or a true test for the presence of some chemical substance. Whatever else they may be in addition, the concrete truth-bearers standard theories concern themselves with human verbal performances (preeminently written and spoken sentence utterances) and human mental states (preeminently beliefs) are representations we humans deploy in the course of our ongoing efforts to register and cope with the complex nature of the world around us and within us. Utterances and beliefs constitute but two of many representational media we deploy in the course of these efforts. The others include pictures, maps, diagrams, mental images, conventional signals, and the repertoire of naturally meaningful gestures, postures, and facial expressions that gure in face-to-face human interaction at all times and places. We may tend to reserve the word true for utterances and the like on the one hand and beliefs and the like on the other. Still, in calling an utterance
or belief true, we ascribe to it some kind of descriptive accuracy. In calling it false, we ascribe to it some kind of descriptive inaccuracy. And in the various other representational media just mentioned, descriptive accuracy plainly isnt an all-or-nothing affair, plainly does comes in degrees and respects. Indeed, in some of these other media, notably the medium of pictures, it is often the case that descriptive accuracy in certain respects comes at the price of descriptive inaccuracy in certain others. Future theorizing about truth confronts a difcult three-way choice. We might decide that utterances and beliefs differ from other familiar representational media in that for them and them alone, descriptive accuracy is an all-or-nothing affair, in which case we need a non-obvious account of why certain particular representational media utterances and beliefs are special in this extremely striking respect. We might decide that while descriptive accuracy is a matter of degrees and respects even when it comes to utterances and beliefs, truth isnt, in which case we need non-obvious accounts of (a) how descriptive accuracy and truth differ from one another and (b) why they are intimately related despite being so profoundly different. Finally, we might decide that our entrenched theories about truth and truth-bearers in logic, semantics, etc. need non-obvious revisions that will permit truth itself to come in degrees and respects after all. Well have our work cut out for us, whichever choice we eventually make. But for all we know so far, the correct choice could be the last one.
18.
Next up is the American philosopher-novelist William H. Gass. Like Davidson, Gass is eager to afrm the cognitive value and interest of metaphors, yet eager to deny that the value or interest of any metaphor derives from the value or interest of any truth the metaphor manages to formulate: If metaphor is a sign of genius, as Aristotle argued, it is because, by means of metaphor, the artist is able to organize whole areas of human thought and feeling, and to organize them concretely, giving his model the quality of sensuous display. But I do not wish to suggest, by the comVol. 3: A Figure of Speech
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parisons with science that I have made, that the value of metaphor lies in its truth, or in its power to produce those brilliant ashes of dogmatic light which I believe are called insights among the critics who pursue literature because they prefer philosophy but will not submit to the rigorous discipline of systematic thought.41 According to Gass, metaphor is both a process of inference and a form of presentation or display, whereby we are introduced to or brought vicariously face-to-face with the metaphors primary subject.42 Metaphor confounds traditional distinctions between the immediate and the mediated, since it is by inferring things about the primary subject that we are enabled and induced to come face to face with it in our imaginations. And we infer things about the primary subject by inferring things from . . . whatever it is the primary subject is metaphorically said to be, the secondary subject. Gass offers by way of example this famous exchange between Hamlet and Horatio on the windy battlements, as they await the reappearance of the Ghost (I, iv, 1-2): Hamlet: The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold. Horatio: It is a nipping and an eager air. He says of this likening of (cold) air to a (eager and nippy) dog that it: has qualities both of proof and of meeting. It seems to present us with the cold rather than name it, and it seems to argue the cold rather than be it.43 I read this as follows. The metaphor Hamlet and Horatio jointly elaborate in this passage has the quality of a meeting, presents us with the cold instead of naming it, in that the cold Hamlet and Horatio feel isnt so much named or described as conjured up in the mind of the listener. A properly attentive audience to a properly sensitive recital of these lines understands them by imaginatively encountering the cold of which they speak shivering a little, perhaps, as it does so. The metaphor argues the cold instead of being it, in that (a) The presence of cold in this passage isnt due to anything cold in or about the passage itself theres nothing chilly about the passages diction, for instance. The presence of cold is an entirely vicarious presence.
(b) We listeners get from the language of the passage to this cold by an active process of inference from things the air is explicitly said to do (bite shrewdly) and to be (nipping, eager). What inferences do we make? Gass offers a few possibilities: The air bites, therefore the air is alive. The air bites shrewdly, therefore the air is wise. It is eager, so it feels. These deductions, upon the information that it nips, and the immediate conclusion that it nips as dogs nip, give us the very dog of the air itself.44 Gass holds that metaphor involves a process of inference or argument, initiated by the speaker, continued by the listener, and managed so as to induce the listener to vicariously experience one thing (here, a certain kind and degree of bitter and windy cold) by getting him to infer and thereby conjure up for himself a second thing (here, a clever nipping dog) a process which calls on the listener to be as passively active or actively passive as a well-behaved participant in a well-run sance. Horatio takes the air bites shrewdly and infers from it such conclusions as that the air must be a dog, that it must be clever, excited, eager, nippy, and underfoot (since it has just bitten Hamlet), etc. And in inferring such a dog, Horatio conjures it up; the sonorous language with which he announces his conclusions help to turn his ratiocinations into conjurations. It is but a small further step from feeling the dog of the air at his ankles to receiving an imaginary nip from this imaginary dog. And in shuddering at this imaginary bite Horatio feels with fresh keenness the bitter and windy cold that Hamlet and he have just now been likening to an imaginary dog. In following Horatios words and participating in his inferences and conjurations, we playgoers sitting in warm theater seats may likewise shiver in the cold a cold which for us is just as imaginary as the dog of the air itself. How does any of this bear on the possibility and propriety of paraphrase? If we regard Hamlet as having said in a spirit of metaphor, The air bites shrewdly, we might be tempted to regard the subsequent words It is very cold as Hamlets own paraphrase of Hamlets own metaphor, an authorized paraphrase in my sense. We might be tempted to regard Horatios It is a nipping and an eager air as Horatios attempt to do the same thing namely, paraphrase Hamlets original metaphor.
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(Cavell indulges in further metaphor when paraphrasing Romeo; why shouldnt Horatio do the same when paraphrasing Hamlet?) To which I can imagine Gass responding with three objections: (a) If he is right about what Hamlets language is up to conjuring up a dog, with an eye to eliciting a shiver or shudder well see that stating had nothing to do with it, hence that restating is out of the question. (b) As for Hamlets It is very cold, it is idle, useless, an airpocket of artlessness in the midst of high verbal art, a aw in the passage it purports to clarify, a momentary failure on Hamlets part (or Shakespeares) to remember what hes really about. (c) As for Horatios It is a nipping and an eager air, it works all right, it even works as art. But it functions not as an explication of Hamlets metaphor but as a called-for and deliberately elicited extension of it. Although Horatio may display his understanding of Hamlets verbal gesture (and promote its intended effects on Horatio himself) by extending it as he does, this is a matter of displaying his understanding of an invitation by accepting it, not a matter of displaying his understanding of a statement by rewording it. More generally, one can allow that responses like Cavells to the metaphors of others are often appropriate, even allow that the ability to produce such responses is criterial for metaphorical understanding, without allowing that these responses are properly viewed as paraphrases of the language to which they respond. What should we make of all this? Gass is atly and revealingly wrong when he deems It is very cold a aw in Hamlets speech. In general one can and often must step outside ones own metaphors to comment on their operation, and one can do so without ceasing to be both useful and artful. Our own examples of authorized paraphrase illustrate this point abundantly. He is also wrong if he supposes that metaphor is invariably or even characteristically engaged in the particular conjuring trick he notices here. Even if metaphor always involves the eliciting of imaginings by means of inferences, the imaginings in question neednt and sometimes cant take the form of sensuously explicit mental images of the things
we are supposed to imagine. Consider the traditional metaphor, popular among philosophers and theologians over many generations, that so fascinated Borges: The universe is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.45 Put that in your pipe and visualize it. Nevertheless, Gass effectively reminds us that metaphor is a region of our life with language where explication and extension, expounding and ballad-writing, bleed into each other in a manner that may leave us uncertain which thing were doing at any given point, and this is something an adequate theory of metaphor should endeavor to understand.
METAPHOR AND PARAPHRASE: FOUR CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES 19.
The vindication of paraphrase doesnt solve or even dissolve any standing philosophical problems all by itself, yet it makes the notion of paraphrase more freely available to us for the purpose of articulating our philosophical options. In particular, it encourages us to view recent accounts of metaphor as falling into four basic types. (a) Comparativist Accounts (Amos Tversky, Robert Fogelin, Susan Haack)46 maintain with Quintillian and Cicero that a metaphor is tantamount to an elliptically presented gurative comparison or simile, true i.e., guratively true just in case its primary subject resembles its secondary subject closely enough in respects made newly salient by the making of this very comparison, false otherwise. Paraphrase is an effort to state more or less completely the real or supposed sources or grounds of this real or supposed resemblance: (i) in the case of a (guratively) true metaphor, what it is about the primary subject that in fact makes it resemble the secondary subject closely enough in relevant respects, given what the secondary subject is actually like; (ii) in the case of a (guratively) false metaphor, what is it about the primary subject that the speaker would have us think makes it resemble the secondary one closely enough in relevant respects,
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given what the speaker would have us believe about the secondary subject. (b) Semantic Twist or Black Market Accounts (I.A. Richards, Max Black, Monroe Beardsley, Samuel Levinson, Eva Feder Kittay, Harold Skulsky, latter day relevance theorists)47 maintain that a sentence we construe as a metaphor has acquired a distinctively metaphorical meaning or at least, a distinctively metaphorical truth condition or content. This new meaning or content supplants an old one associated with contextually salient literal construals of the sentences various constituent words and phrases. It differs from the old one only in contributions associated with constituent words or phrases that are used or best taken metaphorically, the focal expression or expressions that serve to introduce the metaphors secondary subject or subjects. The contributions associated with the other constituent words or phrases, the framing expressions that speak only of the metaphors primary subject or subjects, remain unchanged from the old (literal) meaning or truth condition to the new (metaphorical) one. Metaphoric reinterpretation takes place because the sentences old literal meaning or truth condition would be improper or incongruous or pointless in some sense or other, at least in the actual context of utterance. There is therefore some sort of incongruous relationship, some sort of disharmony or clash or tension, between the unrevised meanings or contents for the focal expressions and the unrevised meanings or contents for the framing expressions. The focal meanings or contents undergo an adjustment that sufces to resolve or relieve this tension in some manner. (Semantic twist theories differ in how they conceive the mechanisms at work in this process of semantic adjustment.) Paraphrase is an effort to re-express the new metaphorically determined sentence meaning or content in more literal or at least, less ambitiously metaphorical terms. (c) Pragmatic Twist Accounts (Grice, John Searle, A.P . Martinich, early relevance theorists)48 maintain that when we indulge in metaphor, we use words and phrases with their standard literal meanings to say (put into words) one thing, but we are taken to mean roughly, we are taken as intending to communicate or acknowledge or otherwise indicate something wholly distinct from what we have literally and straightforwardly said. To put it another way, our sentence as used by us
means one thing, we in using it mean or are taken to mean something else. (Both things being propositional in character.) Metaphor therefore counts as a genre of deliberate overt conversational suggestion, akin to such well-studied modes of suggestion as conversational implicature and indirect speech acts. Paraphrase is an effort to get at what is metaphorically suggested by putting it (or some part of it, or some approximation to it) directly into words, thereby explicitly blurting out (more or less fully and more or less accurately) what was previously only suggested. (d) Brute Force Accounts (Donald Davidson, David E. Cooper, Richard Rorty, Roger M. White, James Guetti)49 maintain that in metaphor, no words have gone missing and neither words nor speakers have been induced to mean anything out of the ordinary. Instead, an utterance that would otherwise be idle or pointless produces what Richard Moran calls a framing effect50 : listeners are induced to view or consider or experience the primary subject (or subjects) in a certain fresh and special light, the light afforded by juxtaposition with the secondary subject (or subjects). What makes a remark metaphorical is the fact that it induces the framing effect together, perhaps, with the specic syntactic strategy it employs for this purpose. Paraphrase (so-called) is an effort to offer a salient and suggestive sample of the real or apparent truths about the primary subject(s) the framing effect induces us to notice, think about, or dwell upon.
WHY THERE IS NEED AND ROOM FOR A FIFTH APPROACH TO METAPHOR 20.
Twist theorists are correct when they insist (in opposition to brute forcers) that a sentence metaphor presents us with a more or less determinate thought, a more or less determinate proposition, by distinctively metaphorical means. They are correct when they insist that we give alternative, more nearly literal expression to such a thought when we paraphrase the metaphor that presents it. Twist theorists are also correct when they insist (in opposition to comparativists) that a metaphorically presented thought concerns itself solely with a metaphors primary
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subject or subjects, not with any real or putative likenesses between primary subjects and secondary ones. Nevertheless, twist-theoretic accounts of how metaphorical presentation works are open to serious objections. In the last of the great grand operas of the Western tradition, the one in which nobody sings a note, Alfred Hitchcocks Vertigo,51 a private detective named Scottie (James Stewart) falls in love with the woman he knows as Madeleine (Kim Novak), wife to one Gavin Elster. Madeleine appears to return Scotties love. She then appears to fall to her death in an event (half accident, half suicide) for which he bitterly and all too plausibly blames himself. Time passes, and Scottie meets a woman who calls herself Judy, a woman to whom he feels drawn by her uncanny resemblance to his lost love Madeleine, a woman who is prepared to love him, a woman he promises to love in return if she lets him make her over in Madeleines image. Eventually Judy allows Scottie to do this strange and terrible thing, biting back the humiliation and disgust she feels at each step in her prolonged transformation. The results of the makeover are utterly stunning, and for good reason. For the Madeleine Scottie knew and loved back then and the Judy he more or less knows and more or less loves now are in fact one and the same woman, a woman who plotted with Elster to help him cover up his murder of Elsters actual wife Elsters Madeleine, if you will by means of her own staged death in the role of Scotties Madeleine. So Scotties Madeleine, the only Madeleine Scottie ever met, never really existed yet nevertheless really did return his love and still returns it I really mean, I suppose, that Judy really did and still does return Scotties love. Its hard to describe a hallucination this baroque without buying into it at least a little. Anyway, it turns out Judy has held onto an ornate old-fashioned necklace she had occasion to wear in her role as Madeleine. Eventually she decides to wear it again in her new (third) identity as the madeover Judy. Scottie recognizes it. In recognizing it, he recognizes her. And in recognizing her, he reconstructs what has actually happened to each of them at Gavin Elsters hands. In the climactic encounter, back at the scene of the fake fall, he says to Judy: Scottie: Did he give you anything? Judy: Some money.
Scottie: And the necklace. Carlottas necklace. There was where you made your mistake, Judy. You shouldnt keep souvenirs of a killing. You shouldnt have been... You shouldnt have been that sentimental. [Stewarts voice breaks in the patented Stewart manner on the word sentimental.] I loved you so, Madeleine. On an entirely acceptable, entirely pertinent literal interpretation of Scotties utterance, the souvenir Judy shouldnt have kept is the necklace; on a more metaphorical interpretation of the same utterance, its Scottie himself. I want to suggest that Scottie and Judy and those of us who are privileged to overhear them in fact construe the utterance both ways. It is an instance of what I like to call a twice-apt metaphor. It presents us or confronts us with two different thoughts, embodies two different complaints, simultaneously, in something of the way a pun might. Taken literally, the utterance is an explanation of how Judy was found out and a complaint about how Judy has treated herself. Its reckless to keep an object that connects you so directly to a crime in which you are implicated, and its unhealthy to even want to renew ones memories of such a crime and ones role in it with the help of souvenirs. This is more than enough to make Scotties utterance fully and richly signicant under the circumstances, and more than enough to account for his specic choice of words. Taken metaphorically, the utterance is an eerily appropriate complaint about how Judy has treated and is continuing to treat Scottie. Paraphrase: You shouldnt renew your connection to another person (me) in a way that turns him (me) into a cooped-up, immobilized bit of private property, simply for the sake of his capacity to help you recall a stretch of the past that both of you would be better off trying to forget. (Of course, a parallel complaint could be lodged with even greater justice by Judy against Scottie, and I suppose that all concerned realize this further fact in pretty short order.) There are four points Id like to draw from this example. First, twist theorists favor a satiscing picture of how interpretation works, a picture on which we are to settle for the rst interpretation we hit on that strikes us as good enough. On such a picture, the correct interpretation to assign a successful utterance is that offered by the simVol. 3: A Figure of Speech
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plest and most accessible interpretive hypothesis that would (if true) adequately motivate, and hence adequately explain, the production of these particular words under these particular circumstances. But in the case at hand, the simpler interpretive hypothesis that takes Scotties words literally and leaves it at that already adequately motivates his utterance of these words, and such an hypothesis can hardly be less accessible than the richer one bringing in metaphor to punlike effect, since the more complicated hypothesis is based squarely on and squarely incorporates within itself that simpler hypothesis. More generally, a satiscing picture is at odds with the fact that many ambitious metaphors are such that we should try to make as much sense of them as we plausibly can, attribute to them as much signicance as we plausibly can, even at the risk of embroiling ourselves in fruitless searches for more signicance than an utterances production has given us positive reason to expect. (Critics are speculative intelligences; they invest a great deal of time and energy in digging what turn out to be empty holes in the ground. Thats why they deserve the big bucks when one of their wells comes in.) Second, Grice taught us that language use is a matter of communication, of getting things across by manifesting our intention to get them across, with the result that correctly interpreting a successful utterance is a matter of working out what the speaker inferably intends his audience to make of his words. Yet the metaphoric construal Scotties utterance promptly and in my opinion rightly suggests to all concerned takes Scottie himself by surprise, with the result that the extra construal he feels called on to assign his own words in retrospect the extra construal Judy and the rest of us likewise feel called on to assign them comes as a nasty shock even to him. (Thats why he must grope for a moment before coming up with the word sentimental: he needs that moment to catch up with his own ongoing reinterpretation of his own previous words. What other word does the word sentimental replace? Reckless? Selsh?) More generally, the doctrine that the correct interpretation of a successful utterance is a matter of working out what a speaker inferably intends to accomplish by means of his words is at odds with the fact that we regularly resort to metaphor as a means of improvisatory experimental thinking out loud, wherein we actively hope to be taken by surprise by how our own words are best taken.
Third: we need to ask ourselves how Scottie and the rest of us actually hit on this supplementary metaphoric understanding of his words. The picture I want us to try on for size runs as follows. Scotties utterance occurs in a specially charged atmosphere. Two people who need each other desperately but have done each other appalling damage are searching for some understanding of who they are and what they have done that will offer them a way forward or failing that, an understanding that will show them to be denitively trapped. They are ready to think out loud, ready to brainstorm, even if they arent actively doing so yet. In this special atmosphere, charged with a special set of cognitive and emotional concerns, Scotties utterance naturally gets reacted to as something he didnt intend for it to be in advance, a piece of brainstorming. And when reacted to as a bit of brainstorming, it spontaneously cues and elicits a certain familiar kind of rule-governed imaginative play, a pickup game of make believe, with the result, perhaps, that all concerned nd themselves momentarily picturing Scottie himself, miniaturized and immobile, tucked into a jewelry box on Judys dresser.52 This eeting bit of make believe triggers in turn a metaphoric reconstrual of the utterance that triggered it in the rst place in a manner we might hope to understand in more general terms. Fourth: Make believe is a form of play, and play is something we are used to engaging in for the fun of it, for the sake of the pleasure or delight that engaging in it affords us or at least, promises to afford us. Indeed, play is a form of activity that owes its momentum and coherence and public intelligibility to the way players actions are elicited by and interpreted in light of their sense up to a point, their shared sense of what it would be the most fun to do next and what sense it would be the most fun to make of what they have done already. If this is right, well need to nd a sense in which an audiences sense of fun up to a point, its shared sense of fun informs and regulates what it spontaneously makes of utterances like Scotties. Well need to nd a place for pleasure on this scene of pain.53
Notes
1 Quoted and helpfully discussed in Thomas B. Stroup, Bottoms Name and His Epiphany, Shakespeare Quarterly 29:1 (Winter 1978), 79-82. 2 A Midsummer Nights Dream, The Arden Shakespeare, 2nd series (London: Methuen,
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1979), cxvii. 3 What Metaphors Mean (1978), in his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 245-64. Quotation is from 245. 4 In his Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1969), 73-96. My quotations all come from 78-9. 5 Das Werk ist die Totenmaske der Konzeption. Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstrae (1928), reprinted in Schriften, v. 1 (Frankfurt a. M: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1955), 515-81. The quotation is from 538. 6 Cavells suggestions about the paraphrasability of metaphor have roots in Wittgensteins discussion of something he called secondary sense. See Philosophical Investigations 2, xi, especially p. 216, and Cora Diamond, Secondary Sense in her The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1991), 22542. 7 The British painter Graham Sutherland was fond of this way of talking about representational painting; Cranachs way with the female nude is one of Sutherlands own examples of painterly paraphrase, garnered from a piece in the New Statesman (14 May 1965) and reported by the online OED. 8 After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 3rd ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 267-9. Steiners quotations here are from Drydens 1680 preface to Ovids Epistles, Translated by Several Hands. In the twentieth century Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell knowingly and spectacularly deed Drydens second set of strictures on many occasions; Lowell even called the fruits of his deance imitations. 9 Preface to Translations from Virgil (1697), quoted in Steiner, 269. 10 On the power and falsity of this idea in aesthetics generally and the improvised, makeshift, often downright ramshackle nature of real artistic achievement, see Meyer Schapiro, On Perfection, Coherence, and Unity of Form and Content, in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, Selected Papers, Volume 4 (New York: George Braziller, 1994), 33-50; and the discussion of myth, art, and bricolage in Claude LviStrauss, The Savage Mind, trans. anon. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 1-33. 11 Youve heard me say perhaps too often that poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation. That little poem [Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening] means just what it says and it says what it means, nothing less but nothing more. Quoted by Louis Untermeyer in Robert Frost: A Backward Look, a 1964 Lecture at the Library of Congress (Washington: Library of Congress Reference Department, 1964), 18. This from the guy who told us in The Constant Symbol that poetry is [always] metaphor, saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another, the pleasure of ulteriority! See Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, ed. Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1995), 786. Perhaps a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. 12 Biographia Literaria (London: Everyman, 1975), chap. 22, 263. See also chap. 1, 12. 13 Benedetto Croce, The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and of the Linguistic in General [Part 1], trans. Colin Lyas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 76-7. 14 The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947), 196-9, 203-4, 207. 15 An especially inuential early Winters essay, and the one Cavell himself principally
relies upon, is The Experimental School in American Poetry, originally published in 1937, reprinted in In Defense of Reason (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1947). 16 As proves to be the case, Winters thinks, with Highway since you my chief Parnassus be, Sonnet 92 of Sidneys Astrophil and Stella. See Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1967), 31. The paraphrase is hilariously reductive, but Winters immediately comments: I do not offer this paraphrase as an equivalent of the poem (in this respect I am far more hesitant than that modern master of paraphrase, Mr. Cleanth Brooks); nor do I offer it in levity. For evidence that Winters did regard Brooks as a master of paraphrase, hence as rather frequently and wonderfully guilty of what he, Brooks, considered heresy, see Forms of Discovery, 75. 17 Secondary Sense, 233. Diamond invites us to compare her experience with a similar one reported by John Ruskin, Modern Painters vol 2, Appendix 1. 18 Feeling and Precision, in The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, ed. Patricia C. Willis (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986), 396-402. Quotation from 396. 19 A recurrent theme in Ted Cohens work. See especially Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy, Critical Inquiry 5 (1), 1978, 3-12; and Some Philosophy, in Two Parts, in Pursuits of Reason: Essays in Honor of Stanley Cavell, ed. Ted Cohen, Paul Guyer, and Hilary Putnam (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1993), 385-401. 20 Robert Frost, Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, 27-8. 21 William Strunk and E.B. White, The Elements of Style, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 67. 22 MGM 1940. Directed by George Cukor; written by Donald Ogden Stewart and Waldo Salt, based on the play of the same name by Philip Barry; produced by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. 23 Party Going, in Loving; Living; Party Going (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1993), 495. 24 Les Fleurs du Mal: The Complete Text of the Flowers of Evil, trans. Richard Howard (New York: David R. Godine, 1983), 5 25 Swanns Way, trans. C.K. Scott-Moncrieff and Terence Killmartin (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1997), 173. 26 James Merrill, The Education of the Poet, Collected Prose, ed. J.D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 9-18. The quotation is from 12. 27 Pense 347 in the Brunschvicq numbering, trans. W.F. Trotter (New York: Dutton, 1958), 97: Lhomme nest quun roseau, le plus faible de la nature ; mais cest un roseau pensant. Il ne faut pas que lunivers entier sarme pour lcraser : une vapeur, une goutte deau, suft pour le tuer. Mais, quand lunivers lcraserait, lhomme serait encore plus noble que ce qui le tue, puisquil sait quil meurt, et lavantage que lunivers a sur lui, lunivers nen sait rien. 28 Evolution and Ethics: Prolegomena, Collected Essays, v. 9 (New York: Appleton, 1894), 1-41. Quotation is from 28. 29 The Good Man, from The Smart Set (1923), reprinted in Alastair Cooke, The Vintage Mencken (New York: Vintage Press, 1955), 126-7. Quotation is from 126. 30 The Consolations of History, in Abinger Harvest (1936). Reprinted in v. 10 of The Abinger Edition of E.M. Forster, ed. Elizabeth Heine (London: Andr Deutsch Limited, 1996), 159-62. Quotation is from 159. 31 Principles of Psychology, authorized ed., v. 1 (New York: Henry Holt & Company,
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1890), 121. 32 Wealth of Nations (1776) IV , 7, 1. 33 Monadology, 7, in Philosophical Essays, trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1989), 213-14. 34 Conversation with Christian Zervos, Cahiers dArt, 1935, in Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views, ed. Dore Ashston (New York: Da Capo Press, 1988), 7-13. Quotation is from 7. 35 Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown, and Roy Henderson, Youre the Cream in My Coffee (DeSylva, Brown, & Henderson, Inc.: 1928), quoted in Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball, Reading Lyrics (New York: Pantheon, 2000), 187. 36 Cohen, Notes on Metaphor, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 34 (1975-76), 249-59, esp. 250. Tirrell, Reductive and Nonreductive Simile Theories of Metaphor, Journal of Philosophy 66 (1991), 337-58, esp. 341; Hills, Aptness and Truth in Verbal Metaphor, Philosophical Topics 25:1 (Spring 1997), 117-53. 37 What Metaphors Mean, 249-50. 38 Ibid., 263. 39 An excellent overview of ecphrastic poetry in English is John Hollander, The Gazers Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 40 Cf. the contrasting accounts of Brueghels Hunters in the Snow offered in poems by Walter de la Mare, John Berryman, and William Carlos Williams discussed in Hollander, 243-8. 41 In Terms of the Toenail: Fiction and the Figures of Life, in his Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York: Vintage, 1972), 55-78. The quotation is from 68. 42 Ibid., 63. 43 Ibid., 64-5. 44 Ibid., 61. 45 Jorge Luis Borges, The Fearful Sphere of Pascal, trans. Anthony Kerrigan, in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, augmented edition, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964), 189-92. 46 Amos Tversky, Features of Similarity, Psychological Review 84 (1977): 327-52; Robert J. Fogelin, Figuratively Speaking (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988); Susan Haack, Dry Truth and Real Knowledge: Epistemologies of Metaphor and Metaphors of Epistemology, in Approaches to Metaphor, ed. Jaakko Hintikka (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994) 1-22. 47 I.A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936); Max Black, Metaphor, in his Models and Metaphors (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1962), 25-47; Monroe C. Beardsley, The Metaphorical Twist, in his The Aesthetic Point of View: Selected Essays, ed. Michael J. Wreen and Donald M. Callen. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1982), 263-80; Samuel R.Levinson, The Semantics of Metaphor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); Eva Feder Kittay, Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Harold Skulsky, Language Recreated: Seventeenth Century Metaphorists and the Act of Metaphor (Athens, Georgia and London: University of Georgia Press, 1992); Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber, Truthfulness and Relevance, Mind 111 (2002), 583-632; Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, A Deationary Account of Metaphor, in Raymond W. Gibbs, ed., The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought (forthcoming); Robyn Carston, Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication (Malden, Massachusetts and
Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 320-75. 48 H. Paul Grice, Logic and Conversation, in his Studies in the Ways of Words, (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1989), esp. 24-40; John R. Searle, Metaphor, in his Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 76-116; A.P . Martinich, "A Theory for Metaphor," Journal of Literary Semantics 13 (1984), 35-54; Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition, 2nd ed. (Oxford and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1995); Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Loose Talk, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 86 (1985-6): 153-71. 49 For Donald Davidson see What Metaphors Mean and Locating Literary Language, in Literary Theory after Davidson, ed. Reed Way Dasenbruck. (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993). See also David E. Cooper, Metaphor (Oxford and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell, 1986); Richard Rorty, Unfamiliar Noises I: Hesse and Davidson on Metaphor, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol. 61 (1987): 283-96; Roger M. White, The Structure of Metaphor: The Way the Language of Metaphor Works (Oxford and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1996); James Guetti, Gambling with Language: Metaphor, chap. 4 of his Wittgenstein and the Grammar of Literary Experience (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 122-46. 50 Richard Moran, Seeing and Believing: Metaphor, Image, and Force, Critical Inquiry 16 (1989), 87-112. 51 Paramount, 1958. Produced and Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Written by Samuel A. Taylor and Alec Coppel, based on the novel . . . dEntre les Morts (Among the Dead) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Score by Bernard Herrmann. 52 For general discussion of make believe and its rules, see Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1990), esp. 10-69, 138-87. For some hints about make believes relevance to the interpetation of metaphor, see Waltons Metaphor and Prop Oriented Make-Believe, European Journal of Philosophy 1:1 (1993): 39-57. My project is a set of footnotes to Waltons work. 53 For further discussion of many of these matters along lines I nd broadly congenial, see Jerrold Levinson, Whos Afraid of a Paraphrase? Theoria 67 (2001), 7-23.

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Problems of Paraphrase: Bottoms Dream

The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

Vol. 3: A Figure of Speech

August 2008 pages 1-46

DAVID HILLS Stanford University

PARAPHRASE: B OTTOM S D REAM

Problems of Paraphrase: Bottoms Dream

Problems of Paraphrase: Bottoms Dream

Problems of Paraphrase: Bottoms Dream

Problems of Paraphrase: Bottoms Dream

Problems of Paraphrase: Bottoms Dream

Problems of Paraphrase: Bottoms Dream

One reaches a point in reviewing such Coleridge-inspired declarations

Problems of Paraphrase: Bottoms Dream

Problems of Paraphrase: Bottoms Dream

Problems of Paraphrase: Bottoms Dream

Problems of Paraphrase: Bottoms Dream

Problems of Paraphrase: Bottoms Dream

We can vindicate paraphrase in this manner while remaining profoundly

Problems of Paraphrase: Bottoms Dream

Problems of Paraphrase: Bottoms Dream

Problems of Paraphrase: Bottoms Dream

twofold, dont feel like puns or deliberate equivocations.37

Problems of Paraphrase: Bottoms Dream

Problems of Paraphrase: Bottoms Dream

Problems of Paraphrase: Bottoms Dream

Problems of Paraphrase: Bottoms Dream

Problems of Paraphrase: Bottoms Dream

Problems of Paraphrase: Bottoms Dream

Vol. 3: A Figure of Speech

Problems of Paraphrase: Bottoms Dream

Vol. 3: A Figure of Speech

Problems of Paraphrase: Bottoms Dream

Vol. 3: A Figure of Speech

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