Metaphor

One of the most peculiar things about our universe is the way everything echoes, copies, "means," and symbolizes other things. The spiritual and physical realms do it; art and life do it; words and deeds do it.

Metaphor is generally defined as saying that one thing "is" another thing. In literary vocab lists, metaphor is distinguished from simile because simile uses the word "like" or "as."

But I think metaphor is more than a literary device. I think it gets at something real, something that actually exists in our world. People use it as a literary device because it works, and it works because it's true.

Ben wrote an interesting blog on transposition (borrowing from a Lewis essay I have not, alas, yet read). When you have a written word and a spoken word, one element exactly represents the other. One-to-one metaphor. When you transpose something into a simpler system--from an orchestral to a piano arrangement, was the example given--one element in the new system has to represent multiple elements in the old system. Information has been lost. The metaphor begins to break down.

The book of Hebrews is one of the most interesting works on metaphor that I've ever read. The temple was not the thing itself, but was a picture, a copy, of the One who was to come. The Old Testament is symbolic of the New Testament, that much is clear. But what of the things given in the New Testament? The Spirit, and baptism, and communion?

In given the Spirit we are given the thing itself. Baptism, I think, is the "sacramental" type of metaphor, because it is a symbol of the thing and also part of the thing itself. Communion is the same. (Oh! The effrontery of me to dismiss in four words a debate that has been raging ever since the Last Supper!) Lewis distinguished between purely symbolic and sacramental metaphors, and I think he hit on something there. I have a question, though: do types of metaphor come on a continuum or are they stairstep categories? That is, can this thing over here be a trifle more a sacramental metaphor, and that one a little less, or are metaphors exactly classifiable?

It is very like The Last Battle. The Narnia of the stories was only a shadow or a copy of the Narnia that was to come--the REAL Narnia, Narnia the way it ought to be. Plato and his forms took this idea of metaphor and ran with it: everything in this world is a metaphor for something more Real, and some copies are more like the original than others. It's all in Plato, all in Plato. Bless me, what do they teach them in these schools?