Reflections on Metaphor and Metonymy

Heracleitus on the Delphic oracle:
"It does not say and it does not hide, it intimates."

Does sense so stale that it must needs derange
The world to know it?
--"Praise in Summer", Richard Wilbur

The Art of Metonymy

• Richard Wilbur's "Praise in Summer":

   Obscurely yet most surely called to praise,
  As summer sometimes calls us all, I said
  The hills are heavens full of branching ways
  Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;
  I said the trees are mines in air,   I said
  See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!
  And then I wondered why this mad instead
  Perverts our praise to uncreation, why
  Such savor's in this wrenching things awry.
  Does sense so stale that it must needs derange
  The world to know it? To a praiseful eye
  Should it not be enough of fresh and strange
  That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay,
  And sparrows sweep the ceilings of our day?

  This is a sonnet specifically about the motive for metaphor, but the motive for metaphor is the motive for all figures of speech, all tropes.

  The Speaker in the poem feels called upon to praise the glories of summer. So he offers praise by making three statements that are whimsical and fantastic metaphors.

  First, "I said The hills are heavens full of branching ways Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;". Here's a statement that is made up of extended metaphors. The Speaker turns the world upside down and imagines the mole holes and tunnels under the ground as if they are a "series of branching ways in the sky(heavens) and the moles as birds flying in their tunnels. He also adds another metaphor--"star-nosed moles." The moles' noses are compared to the stars in the sky.

  The second statement: "I said the trees are mines in air." The speaker continues with the basic reversal of perception: To view the earth and what's under the surface as the heavens and now to view the heavens as the earth, with the trees now viewed as if they were mine shafts burrowing into the heavens.

  The third statement: "I said See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!" This statement completes the reversal of heaven and earth. The sparrows are compared to the moles. just as the moles are imagined as birds "flying" overhead the dead beneath the surface of the earth, so the sparrow's flying in the heavens is imagined as a mole burrowing in the sky.

  Now comes the great reversal. Wilbur has used the sonnet form with one of its common structures: 6 lines and then 8. Notice the first 6 lines consist of praising the summer by means of his series of metaphors. But now he shifts the focus in the last 8 lines. Just as the speaker's imagination is in full flight, doing figure eights with metaphors, he suddenly stops short and questions what's he's just done. He's questioning the reason for metaphor--this strange bending of the language. He does it by means of two questions:

  "And then I wondered why this mad instead
  Perverts our praise to uncreation, why
  Such savor's in this wrenching things awry."

  The Speaker suddenly wonders what is the motive for metaphor. "Why this mad instead/Perverts our praise to uncreation..." Metaphor is a "mad instead" that "Perverts" praise for the summer--trees and the sky and birds into "uncreation"--metaphorical expressions like "trees are mines in air, "star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead." These images are not part of nature--creation, but the fanciful products of the Speaker's imagination--"uncreation." It is a substitution of one thing for another. A mole for a bird, a mine shaft for a tree trunk. Why not just call a bird a bird and a spade a spade? Notice however, that even in the act of questioning metaphor, the speaker uses one: "Mad" instead is a metaphor comparing the replacement of one thing by another to a crazy person--a personifcation to boot.

  "why Such savor's in this wrenching things awry." The speaker asks another why question. Why is there such pleasure in making metaphor, in "this wrenching things awry." Again, in the act of questioning why there's "such savor's"--such pleasure--in the "mad instead," in turning the world upside down and viewing the heavens as if it were all the tunnels and burrows under the surface of the earth, and the underground as the heavens,--he can't escape using metaphorical language. The pleasure of metaphor is compared to "savor's"--a taste metaphor. The "mad instead" is a savory dish that brings pleasure to the palate. "Wrenching things awry" is also a metaphor, comparing metaphorical language to the act of twisting or bending some object out of shape. So he asks why do we get such pleasure in these language twisting games.

  The speaker ends his ruminating on the motives for metaphor by asking two rhetorical questions.

  Does sense so stale that it must needs derange
  The world to know it? To a praiseful eye
  Should it not be enough of fresh and strange
  That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay,
  And sparrows sweep the ceilings of our day?

  Now we're getting to the point. It's a lovely ironic statement. Here is the motive for metaphor. The answer to the first rhetorical question is yes. Exactly. Sense is so stale that "it must needs derrange the world to know it." In other words, ordinary perception is dull.

  And the speaker shows us how dull by asking, "To a praiseful eye/ Should it not be enough of fresh and strange/ That trees grow green... " The irony should be clear. There is nothing fresh and strange about saying "trees grow green." It's a dead, cliched statement without insight or excitement--hardly any kind of "Praise."

  An now the final irony. Even in the act of suggesting that we don't need the "mad instead" of metaphor--that it should be enough to talk straight and plain--to say a tree is green, he can't finish his thought without resorting to that same mad instead of metaphors: "and moles can course in clay, And sparrows sweep the ceilings of our day?

  Moles "coursing in clay" is a metaphor comparing moles moving in their tunnels to boats or cars navigating a course. The act of sparrows flying in the sky is compared to the act of sweeping a floor with a broom. But a further metaphor--the floor becomes the ceiling.

  So this poem, which attacks metaphor in favor of plain speech turns out to be a defense of metaphor. If we want to praise the summer or bring fresh insight into any aspect of human life, we do indeed need the "mad instead." Sense is so stale (another metaphor) that it must needs derrange (metaphor) the world to know it. The mad instead of metaphor derranges the world, wrenches it awry out of its conventional patterns in order that we can see it again as "fresh and strange."

• Donald Davidson's "What Metaphors Mean."
  • Metaphor is the dreamwork of language and, like all dreamwork, its interpretation reflects as much on the interpreter as on the originator. The interpretation of dreams requres 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 is as much a creative endeavour as making a metaphor, and as little guided by rules.

  • For me, here's the great Davidsonian insight: Metaphor is an invitation to imagine--it does not tell, it intimates. A spur, a prick, a goad, a bump on the head.

  • ...all communication by speech assumes the interplay of inventive construction and inventive construal.

  • There are no instructions for devising metaphors; there is no manual for determining what a metaphor "means" or "says"; there is no test for metaphor that does not call for taste.

  • A metaphor makes us attend to some likeness, often a novel or surprising likeness, between two things.

  • My spin on this Davidson sentence: a metaphor makes us notice a likeness between two things. One way to define a "dead" metaphor is to say that when the metaphor has been so frequently used that it doesn't make us notice anything out of the ordinary then it has become conventional--"dead." What dies is the metaphor's original power to arrest attention--to make us notice. Dead metaphors are still metaphors. We can easily recover the comparison when we're asked to do so. When they were alive we noticed them--they startled and made us puzzle and think about the comparison.

  • We can learn much about what metaphors mean by comparing them with similes, for a simile tells us in part, what a metaphor merely nudges us into noting.

  • The simile says there is a likeness and leaves it to us to pick out some common feature or features; the metaphor does not assert a likeness, but if we accept it as a metaphor, we are again led to seek common features (not necessarily the same features the associated simile suggests...).

  • In the case of simile, we note what it literally says, that two things resemble one another; we then regard the objectsand consider what similarity would, in the context, be to the point.

  • A metaphor directs attention to the same sorts of similarity, if not the same similarities, as the corresponding simile.

  • ....But then the unexpected or subtle parallels and analogies it is the business of metaphor to promote...

  • Metaphor and simile are merely two among endless devices that serve to alert us to aspects of the world by inviting us to make comparisons.

  • The most obvious semantic difference between simile and metaphor is that all similes are true and most metaphors are false.

  • My examples: "My love is like a red, red rose that's newly bloom'd in spring." Davidson's point: this is a true statement because "everything is like everything." My love and roses share life, color, beauty, etc. To say "my love is a rose" is a false statement. Cops are like pigs. They are both alive, etc. The metaphor "get the pigs off campus" is literally false. So similes are literally true statements and metaphors are literally false statements.

  • Generally, it is only when a sentence is taken to be false that we accept it as a metaphor and start to hunt out the hidden implication. Like Davidson's opening metaphor: "Metaphor is the dreamwork of language...." A literally false statement. The metaphor invites us to puzzle out the comparison.

  • But in fact there is no limit to what a metaphor calls to our attention, and much of what we are caused to notice is not propositional in character. When we try to say what a metaphor "means" we soon realize there is no end to what we want to mention.

  • Seeing as is not seeing that. Metaphor makes us see one thing as another by making some literal statement that inspires or prompts the insight.

  • The critic is , so to speak, in benign competition with the metaphor maker. The critic tries to make his own art easier or more transparent in some respects than the original, but as the same time he tries to reproduce in others some of the effects the original had on him. In doing this the critic also, and perhaps by the best method at his command, calls attention to the beauty or aptness, the hidden power, of the metaphor itself.

• Richard Rorty on Metaphor.

  Rorty is my favorite philosopher. In several books, he keenly comments on Davidson's work on Metaphor. I think that Rorty is one of the few readers of Davidson's essay who actually understands the subtly of the argument. In any case, Rorty's imaginative explication and expansion on Davidson's work certainly provokes lots of thought.

  Here are key ideas from the first chapter of Rorty's Contingency, irony and solidarity: "The contingency of language.

  • "Old metaphors are constantly dying off into literalness, and then serving as a platform and foil for new metaphors."--p.16

  • Davidson's distinction between literal and metaphorical use of language: "not as a distinction between two sorts of meaning, nor as a distinction between two sorts of interpretation, but as a distinction between familiar and unfamiliar uses of noises and marks. The literal uses of noises and marks are the uses we can handle by our old theories about what people will say under various conditions. Their metaphorical use is the sort which makes us get busy developing a new theory."--17

  • Why metaphors don't have meaning. "To have a meaning is to have a place in a language game. Metaphors, by definition, do not. (Metaphors are always false statements--my gloss on Davidson) .....Tossing a metaphor into a conversation is like suddenly breaking off the conversation long enough to make a face, or pulling a photograph out of your pocket and displaying it, or pointing at a feature of the surroundings, or slapping your interlocutor's face, or kissing him. Tossing a metaphor into a text is like using italics, or illustrations, or odd punctuation or formats. ( Notice Rorty uses a series of similes to explicate how metaphors function--to provoke, arrest, startle, confuse, goad into reflection.)

    All these are ways of producing effects on your interlocutor or your reader, but not ways of conveying a message.

    If a metaphor is repeated, caught up, bandied about and gradually acquires habitual use, then it will have a place in a language game. It thereby ceases to be a metaphor; it's a dead metaphor.--p. 18

  • Rorty expands Davidson's ideas. Here "metaphor" means any new concept, idea as well as words that don't fit into existing language games. "A sense of human history as the history of successive metaphors would let us see the poet, in the generic sense of the maker of new words, the shaper of new languages, as the vanguard of the species."--20

  • From chapter 2: "The contingency of selfhood": Metaphors are unfamiliar uses of old words, but such uses are possible only against the background of other old words being used in old familar ways."--41

  From "Unfamiliar noises: Hesse and Davidson on metaphor" in Objectivity, relatvism, and truth
  • Metaphors are "unfamiliar noises and marks." Literal language is "familiar noises and marks."

  • Davidson lets us see metaphors on the model of unfamilar events in the natural world--causes of changing beliefs and desires--rather than on the model of representations of unfamilar worlds, worlds which are 'symbolic" rather than 'natural." --p. 163

  • "...we come to understand metaphors in the same way that we come to understand anomalous natural phenomena. We do so by revising our theories so as to fit them around the new material. We interpret metaphors in the same sene in which we interpret such anomalie--by casting around for possible revisions in our theories which may help to handle the surprises." --167.

  • ( My aside on the meaning of Davidson's opening sentence: 'Metaphor is the dreamwork of language." I've puzzled over this metaphor because it certainly is arresting. What does it mean? I think Rorty has given me a clue. First, the statement is an allusion to Freud's theory of interpreting dreams. Dreams are not transparent communication but indirect communication. 'Dreamwork" is his term for how the overt content of dreams is the result of a number of activities--condensation and displacement, etc., so that the dream itself does not communcate a transparent meaning. The interpretation of dreams involves an active imagination in reflecting on what the dream might indicate about what's going on in the dreamer. Only an imaginative response of seeing how this dreamwork fits in which lots of other dreams and other bits of information about the person, will yield possible meanings. Metaphor is like that. Understanding metaphor requires an act of imagination in interpreting the implications of such strange and startling statements such as "an aged man is but a paltry thing/ a tattered coat upon a stick..." or "whatever flames upon the night/ man's own resinous heart hath fed."

  • Key difference between Davidson and Rorty and Lakoff and other philosophers on metaphor. For Davidson and Rorty when metaphors become cliches through habitual usage they come to have literal meanings--that is, they take their place in a normal language game. When this happens the metaphors are really dead, which means that they are no longer metaphors. When you're dead, you're dead. Lakoff and others think that dead metaphors are still metaphors. But only because they can see the obvious comparisons. But because the comparisons are now obvious, they no longer function as metaphors. There was a time when these dead metaphors--argument is war; thinking is seeing-- were puzzling and caused reflection. But now they've become cliches.

  • What's the difference between metaphor and paradox? "No man is an island" and "Love is the only law." Both statements are literally false. The test is by asking "whether the first utterer of what seems a blatantly false remark can offer arguments for what he says. If he can, it is a paradox. If not, it is a metaphor.

  • "Both are the sorts of noises which, on first hearing, 'make no sense'. But as metaphors get picked up, bandied about, and begin to die, and as their paradoxes begin to function as conclusions, and later as premises, of arguments, both sorts of noises start to convey information. The process of becoming state, familiar, unparadoxical and platitudinous is the process by which such noises cross the line from 'mere' causes of belief to reasons for beliefs."--p. 171

  • ( Aside: A paradox only appears to be a false statement, but it can be explained, argued that it is a true statement. "Love is the only law" is a central paradox of the Christian faith. Metaphor is always a false statement that can't be explained and therefore shown to be a true statement.)

• Haley on Metaphor and Metonymy ( Professor Haley's notes.)
  • Metaphorical Language: A metaphor is a transfer (both words mean literally "carry across"): the name of a thing or an activity is carried across to another thing or action. In other words, a metaphor involves misnaming. The deliberate misnaming gives us pleasure because it brings out identical or similar (hence the term simile) elements in two things or ideas not usually connected. In his sonnet 18 comparing his young friend to "a summer's day," Shakespeare writes, "Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines." Here the word eye is misapplied to the sun because the poet wants to convey the powerful effect of the young man's glance. He uses the shining summer sun as his vehicle to bring out the similarity between his young friend and a summer day, noting at the same time a difference: the young friend is "more temperate" (the difference or misapplication becomes clear when you look more closely at the metaphor; in this case, we sense that an eye does not "shine" with heat as the sun does). When you analyze metaphorical language, always look for the actual vehicle used in the misnaming or "transfer." Once you've identified the actual thing (e.g., a part of the body) or activity (e.g., a trade or skill) that serves as the vehicle, you'll have no trouble spotting both the similarity and the difference.

  • Metonymy (literally, "by-name") is metaphor based on association--not on similarity. Because the "transfer" does not carry across some natural resemblance but merely links up some customary association, you have to seek the meaning of metonymy in literary and symbolic tradition (all symbols are metonymy, including even so-called pictographs that are supposed to resemble the things they name; a reader ignorant of its traditional meaning would never be able to guess what the written sign or pictograph refers to). Sometimes the metonymy seems natural or intuitive: a snake, for example, is a natural symbol for evil. But the link does not involve actual resemblance; rather, it involves a natural association of the snake with our fears (as atavistic tree-dwellers?).

  • Note also that the other part of this metonymic "transfer," evil, is an abstraction rather than an actual, perceptible thing. The same kind of metonymy occurs in personfication. A personfication is metonymy involving some abstraction: its vehicle "transfers" concrete, physical attributes to the abstraction which is often capitalized (for example, Jealousy is personified as a yellow-faced woman tormented by snakes; Hope is a woman dressed in blue; Sorrow is dressed in black; Victory is imagined having wings; Lust--for reasons buried in folkloric tradition--is personified by a goat). Personification humanizes an abstraction, or else it relates an inanimate thing to us by endowing it with a purpose (e.g. the "biting wind"). Most personifications can be talked to like a human being or an animal and even addressed familiarly as "thou." Note that the abstraction need not be something imaginary or unreal; Time and Death, often personified, are undeniable realities--and so is Evil.

• Metonymy
  • What's the difference between metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche? The difference between a son of a bitch, mother fucker and asshole. Or shithead, cock-sucker and cunt.

    Or as Sarah Palin put it: What's the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull? My answer: The difference between a metonymy and a metaphor. Her answer: Lipstick. But "lipstick" is also a metonymy.

  • We define ourselves by metonymies. I am a soccer mom, a lawyer, doctor, teacher, film director, garbage man, student. In other words, we define ourselves by our contiguities, by our continuing associations and activities, such as the work we do. What we do substitutes for what we are.

  • Branding-- a metaphor-- in the Ad world means creating a distinctive identity by means of association of products with some kind of clever and attention getting image or saying or sound. By repetition of the distinctive thing in association with the product or corporation or city--the ad or commercial comes to stand for the product or city, et al. So when we see the swoosh or an apple with a bit out of it, we think of Nike and apple computers. When that happens the brand--the mark, like the brand on the rancher's cattle, has been successful. Just as the Rancher's brand on his cattle is a metonymy for his Ranch, so Nike's and Apple's marks have come to stand for, to represent them.

  • Metonymy grows out of characteristics of context. We create metonymies out of the worlds we live in, the daily actions and interactions between self and place, and with others. Patterns of behavior emerge with which we identify ourselves. Metonymies are condensations of context. We pick out some interesting detail from our world that can suddenly be seen to represent whole aspects of our experience. Example: joe six pack to describe working class men. Someone noticed a certain characteristic behavior--drinking beer, not martinis--of working class men, and chrisened working class men as Joe Six pack. So this bit of behavior captured in a witty phrase by some anonymous poet, comes to stand for and symbolize a whole class of men--the working class.

  • Notice the irony that many working class bars still are identified by a martini or a top hat sign-- metonymies of the upper class.

  • The irony of the Main street metonymy is that it's a metonymy of the small town world that actually had a main street. Now Main street has become a metonymy for the working and middle class, the vast majority of whom live in urban and suburban areas without any main streets. But the Main street metonymy is still effective because it has become a symbol of all those hard working Americans with their decent, sensible small town values as opposed to all those greedy, high-living city folks who work on Wall street and have driven us down the highway to hell.

  • The difference between metaphors and metonymies that emerge out of our common life language use and those created by the artist is only one of degree. The artist creates consciously and with more imagination. There is not a qualitative difference between an artist and us ordinary folk. All humans are creative and imaginative in their use of language to communicate; some do it better than others.

  • Good metaphor is always something unexpected. . Metaphor-makers bring us startling comparisons. Once they say them, we say "Oh yes. Once I was blind and now I see."

  • The same is true of metonymy. We ordinary folks don't see the details that can suddenly illuminate a context, that can stand for something else. Thank god for the eyes and ears who can see and hear and are voices for the rest of us.

  • Artists carefully and consciously create fresh metonymies by the means of attention and the repetition of details. For example, the eyes in Blade Runner; Albacore and eyes and glasses and "Chinatown" in Chinatown; Ligeti's "Monolith music" and Strauss's "Thus Spake Zarathustra" in 2001.

  • Film relies on a repertoire of metonymic actions and gestures. Reaction shots are metonymic--facial acting depends on the meanings of certain facial gestures--surprise, shock, fear, joy, triumph, etc.--whose meanings have been created by a long process of association.

  • Bodily language--movement, gesture, etc is metonymic. We are socialized into a world of metonymic meanings of actions, gestures, behaviors that communicate meaning. These meanings are conventional, the product of a given society and culture. Facial gestures such as smiling, crying, etc. do not mean the same thing in all societies. Their meanings are socially produced through usage. We learn what actions and bodily language means from hanging out with others. Metonymic meanings are produced through the interaction of humans in groups.

  • Columbus and the clash of Metonymies

    "That day there appeared from an eastward direction a large canoe with twenty-four men, all young and very well equipped with arms, bows and arrows, and wooden shields and, as I have said, they were all young, well built and not black, but fairer than the other natives I have seen in the Indies. They were handsome, with fine limbs and bodies, and long straight hair cut in the Spanish manner, and round their heads they wore a cotton cloth elaborately patterned in colours, which I believed to be almaizares(Moorish head-dresses). They wore another of these scarves round the body in place of breeches. As this canoe approached, they shouted to us from a distance, but neither I nor anyone else understood them. I gave orders, however, that they should be signalled to approach, and more than two hours passed in this way. Each time they came a little nearer, they immediately sheered off again. I ordered pans and other shining objects to be displayed in ordert to attract them and bring them closer, and after a while they came nearer than they had come before. I greatly desired conversation with them, but it seemed that I had nothing left to show them which would induce them to come nearer still. So I had a tambourine brought up to the poop and played, and made some of the young men dance, imagining that the Indians would draw closer to see the festivities. On observing the music and dancing, however, they dropped their oars, and picked up their bows, and strung them. Each one seized his shield, and they began to shoot arrows at us. I immediately stopped the music and dancing and ordered some crossbows to be fired. ( "Columbus's Narrative of the Third Voyage" in The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus, Penguin Classics, p. 210.)

• Batman Begins: Rachel explains Metonymy to Batman

     RACHEL
                      I never quite gave up on you.
            
            Wayne looks at her.   Thinking.   Gestures towards the Bugati.
            
                                  WAYNE
                      Rachel, all that... that's not me,
                      inside I'm... different. I'm-
            
                                  RACHEL
                      The same great little kid you used
                      to be? Bruce, deep down, your friends
                      out there are great, too. It's not
                      who you are underneath...
                          (pokes his chest)
                      But what you do that defines you.
            
  

  In Batman Begins, Rachel gives Bruce a very precise definition of one of the central roles metonymy plays in our lives. She says that it's "what you do that defines you." In other words, we define ourselves by our characteristic activities. We are so associated with what we do--our actions in the world--that our actions metonymical define us. So we are drs. and lawyers, professors, filmmakers, husbands and wives, parents and children--we are our metonymies.

  As Rachel well understood, our actions are not necessary, they are contingent. We can change who we are by acting differently, by creating a different world of associations. Change your metonymies.

• Symbol

  I think that most symbols are forms of metonymy. Symbols are socially constructed; they are created by usage and association. A detail, an action, a place over time comes to suggest other and larger meanings. The White House over time came to be a metonymy, a symbol of the President. What if the president's house had been pink? In the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico, two Black athletes raise their black gloved hands over their heads in a gesture of defiance. That gesture became a symbol of Black resistance to racial discrimination and oppression.

  In fiction, writers create symbols by repetition of details. They consciously select details and by a range of techniques, make the reader notice the detail. After the detail has been repeated a number of times, it functions as a metonymy--it takes on representative meaning--it becomes a symbol. Examples: The eyes in Blade Runner. Hal's lens on the control panel becomes his Eye. The phrase, "it's Chinatown" is repeated a number of times in the film. The place, "Chinatown," which is a region of the city of Los Angeles, becomes a symbol. "You never know what's going on in Chinatown." Why? Because Chinatown is where the inscrutable Chinese live. The Anglo cops can't read and understand the culture and behavior of the Chinese. Chinese facial gestures and body language are alien, which only means that they aren't European. So by a complex process of repetition of this detail about Chinatown, Polanski makes "Chinatown" representative of the inscrutability of existence. Because in Chinatown you can never know what's going on behind that Chinese mask, it's impossible to know how to act. As Jake says about what he learned working in Chinatown, "Do as little as possible." By repeated references to Chinatown, which are masterfully integrated into the fabric of the story, Polanski makes it represent life in general. Jake tries to understand what's going on with Evelyn and her father, but all his efforts to help her end in disaster. The film ends with Jake mumbling, "as little as possible."-- and his buddy saying, "Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown."

• Batman Begins: Metonymies and Symbols

  
            Wayne GRINDS METAL at a lathe. Alfred approaches with a
            thermos. Wayne stops grinding, BLOWS on his handiwork...
            
                                  ALFRED
                      Why the design, Master Wayne?
            
            Alfred indicates the steel carved into a BAT'S WING.
            
                                  WAYNE
                      A man, however strong, however
                      skilled, is just flesh and blood. I
                      need to be more than a man. I need
                      to be a symbol.
            
                                  ALFRED
                      And why the symbol of the bat?
            
                                  WAYNE
                      Bats frighten me.
                          (slight smile)
                      And it's time my enemies shared my
                      dread.
            
            Wayne tilts the crude BATARANG, watching light dance across
            the brushed steel. He THROWS it WHISTLING into darkness...
  

  In Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne's traumatic experience with bats as a child became his private metonymy for fear. He associated his feelings of fear with his bat experience. And on his maturation journey in Asia, he had to face and ultimately overcome his childhood bat experience because it was the embodiment of his fear.

  In this dialogue scene with Alfred, Wayne shows Alfred what he's been designing--a steel bat wing. He then explains why and what it means.

  He tells Alfred that being a mere man is not enough for fighting the kind of evil that is rampant in Gotham. He says, " I need to be a symbol."

  What's fascinating about his statement is that he goes on to explain how symbols are created. And his explanation is that symbols are metonymies. Wayne, of course, doesn't use these terms, but in fact that's what he's talking about.

  How is he going to create himself as a symbol? Alfred is puzzled because he sees that Wayne's symbol is a bat. He says, "And why the symbol of the bat?"

  Here's where Wayne articulates how symbols are created. He says, " Bats frighten me. And it's time my enemies shared my dread." Bats are his own private metonymy that stands for, represents his fear because of his actual experience with bats. In other words, bats are his private symbol of fear.

  His key statement which states how symbols are created is that "It's time my enemies shared my dread." What he's going to do is by becoming Batman and acting out the role of a bat that suddenly appears with frightening speed and scary sounds and brings criminals to justice, the criminal world will fear Batman even as he had feared those bats as a child.

  The key to creating Batman as symbol, is repetition. One foray in the city in his bat costume will not create him as a symbol. Only when he's successfully appeared out of nowhere and busted up robberies and drug deals and captured a number of criminals many times, will he become a symbol of dread to all the crooks in Gotham. By his repeated actions, Batman will make them associate their own fears of capture with the Bat-man.

  Bruce Wayne will become Batman. He will be defined by his characteristic bat-like actions that bring sudden destruction to crime and corruption. Because he looks like a bat and acts like a bat , the criminal world will see him as more than a flesh and blood man. He will make them share his dread of bats; his private symbol will become a public symbol--the Batman.

• Synecdoche
  • Synecdoche is a form of metonymy. The formal definition is that it is a "part for the whole." The part has some neccessary structural relationship to the whole. Example: He's a brain or a prick or a big mouth. Or "all hands on deck." Hands is a synecdoche--the hands representing the whole salior.

    What is unique about synecdoche is that it essentializes. That is, it picks out, in the context, the key part of the whole to represent the whole. Again, "All hands on deck." For sailors whose main function is to raise and lower sails using their hands, "hands" is their key part. One wouldn't say, "all ears or noses on deck." Nor he's a liver or a kidney or an elbow." To call someone a brain or a prick or an asshole is to say this is what he essentially is. This part very nicely represents the whole person. Synecdoche is a favorite form of insult. We take great pleasure in reducing our enemies to unflattering parts of human anatomy.

    What makes synecdoche a form of metonymy is that the part that comes to represent the whole is given its signifcance by usage, by association. "Hands" as representing sailors only became a synecdoche because of the actual experience of men working on ships with sails. But in a world of ships without sails this part would not have emerged as a short-hand way of defining sailors. The context of usage is what ultimately defines synecdoche. No part of any whole has an essential, inherent synecdochic meaning. The context of usage is what gives the part its representative meaning. The synecdoche "he's got balls", meaning that he's got virility and courage and power, only has meaning in a patriarchial culture. Only in a society dominated by men would male sexual parts come to represent potency and courage. In a world dominated by women, undoubtedly, the synecdoche would be, "she's got ovaries."

    Of course, "sailors" is also a metonymy. The men who worked on ships with sails were identified by their characteristic work--raising and lowering sails. In a world of motorized ships, the term has no metonymic meaning. It has become a dead metonymy.

  • Synecdoche, which is a form of metonymy--the part for the whole--essentializes. Most synecdoches have an organic, physical relationship of parts to whole. They are not just accidently and contingently associated, but are actual parts, which come to represent the whole.

    For example, "all hands on deck." The hands are a part of the sailor that represents the whole sailor. "Ten sails on the horizon." The sails are the parts that represent the whole of the ships.

    But it's not just any part. It's the most important part of the whole, depending, as always, on the context to determine that. One wouldn't say, all "toes on deck." All hands on deck picks out the most important aspect of the sailor for sailing a ship. Same with "sails on the horizon." Not anchors or rudders on the horizon, but sails--the distinctive part of the ships that represent the whole.

  • Synecdoche, like metonymy, is a form of communication that works by compression--shorthand-- and captures the unexpected by focusing on a quality that once stated evokes "a yes! that's it."

  • So Synecdoche and metonymy cut to the chase, get to the point, get to the heart of the matter and capture the essence of the thing or person. No wonder the language of anger and insult is dominated by bodily synecdoches: you are an asshole, prick, cunt; and metonymies: you are an ass-licker, mother-fucker, cock-sucker, etc.

  
  

• Metaphor and Metonymy in David Lodge's, Nice Work (from Kate Broom's course handouts)

• Definition of Metonymy in Wallace Steven's Theory

  I am what is around me.

  Women understand this. One is not a duchess
  A hundred yards from a carriage.

  These, then are portraits:
  A black vestibule;
  A high bed sheltered by curtains.

  These are merely instances.

• Rorty's riff on metaphor and cultural change in "Philosophy as science, as metaphor, and as politics" in Essays on Heidegger and Others .
  • "there are three ways in which a new belief can be added to our previous beliefs, thereby forcing us to reweave the fabric of our beliefs and desires--viz., perception, inference and metaphor."--p. 12.

  • "A metaphor is, so to speak, a voice from outside logical space, rather than an empirical filling-up of a portion of that space, or a logical-philosophical clarification of the structure of that space. It is a call to change one's language and one's life, rather than a proposal about how to systematize either."--p.13.

  • To think of metaphorical sentences as the forerunners of new uses of language, uses which may ecllipse and erase old uses, is to think of metaphor as on a par with perception and inference, rather than thinking of it as having a merely 'heuristic' or 'ornamental' function.--p. 14.