Who’s Afraid Of A Paraphrase?

by
JERROLD LEVINSON
Universi $Maryland, College Park

Abstract I first show why Davidson was wrong to maintain that there is no such thing
as metaphorical meaning, that which paraphrases strive to capture. I then sketch a con-
ception of metaphors as utterances in contexts, and suggest how such utterances can
acquire metaphorical meanings despite there being no semantic rules for the projection
of such meanings. I next urge the essentiality of a metaphor’s verbal formulation to its
being the metaphor it is, and I conclude with some reflections on common and uncom-
mon metaphors, and on the difficulty of finding strings of words resistant to metaphori-
cal construal.

1.
HAVING NEVER WRITTEN on the topic of metaphor before, which right
or wrong I had always considered a fairly marginal one as far as aesthet-
ics was concerned - so much fuss for one little trope! - I decided to
begin where many modern discussions seem to begin, that is, with Donald
Davidson’s seminal essay on the topic. I will attempt to orient myself in
this debate by fixing on certain of Davidson’s assertions in that essay and
offering my reactions to them. As will be seen, I come down pretty clearly
on the anti-Davidsonian side of the fence, in that I regard the idea of
metaphorical meaning as ultimately defensible, as long as one correctly
identifies what has such meaning, correctly locates how such meaning is
acquired, and acknowledges that such meaning is perhaps not all there
is to a metaphor, depending of course on how broadly or narrowly one
chooses to deploy the notion of meaning. Certainly if metaphorical mean-
ing is restricted to what is in principle capturable by paraphrases, there is
indeed more to metaphor than that. But there is also, and undeniably, it
seems to me, that as well.
There is indeed a tendency, when the object is to challenge the ade-

’ “What Metaphors Mean”. Page references to the edition cited are given in parentheses.
8 J E R R O L D LEVINSON

quacy of paraphrase to the elucidation of metaphor, to construe the idea

of paraphrase as implicitly importing an ambition of paraphrase without
remainder, thus implying that paraphrases, if sufficiently elaborated, give
the whole of what a metaphor is about and can thus do duty for them.
Evidently, insofar as such an unstated importation is not remarked, the
pretension of paraphrase to a role in the elucidating of metaphor will be
unfairly denied, being held to be necessarily more sweeping than it in fact
need be. The fact that the task of exhibiting in literal language the meta-
phorical meaning of a metaphor might not, perhaps, ever be completely
discharged -the fact that it might always be possible to expand or supple-
ment the paraphrases with which one seeks to cash out such meaning -
should not be thought to license the inference that therefore the task can-
not be carried out, and thus that the paraphrases offered at any given point
necessarily fail to articulate any part of the meaning that a metaphor pos-
sesses.

2.
But to begin, now, with Davidson.
(1) The concept of metaphor as primarily a vehicle for conveying ideas, even if unu-
sual ones, seems to me as wrong as the parent idea that a metaphor has a special mean-
ing.. .if I am right, a metaphor doesn’t say anything beyond its literal meaning. (p. 246)

What this assertion most clearly overlooks is the fact that there are
phases in the comprehension and reception of a metaphor, in the accep-
tance of it as apt or just, once proposed. Perhaps oversimplifying, we
might posit a first phase in which the metaphor, typically an evident
falsehood if construed literally2, generates cognitive dissonance, shakes
up associations, induces seeing-as of an unfamiliar sort, etcetera, all of
which is by design, and a second phase in which, once the dust settles,
certain paraphrasable meanings, if the metaphor is minimally effective,
precipitate out of the first, intentionally disorienting phase.* That the
meaning of a metaphor only emerges at this second phase, while evad-

’ Typically but not necessarily, as is shown by examples of “twice true” metaphors. such as
‘No man is an island’. brought to our attention notably by Ted Cohen. [See Cohen (1978) and
Cohen (1997).] Here’s another: ‘Life is no bowl of cherries’.
 WHO’S AFRAID OF A PARAPHRASE? 9

ing us during the first, is no reason, of course, for failing to recognize the
existence of such meaning.
‘’1 The supposed figurative meaning o f a simile explains nothing; it is not a feature of
-7ord that the word has prior to and independent of the context of use, and it rests
upon no linguistic customs except those that govern ordinary meaning. (p. 255)

This pronouncement fails to recognize that even if a metaphor is based

on nothing but the preexisting literal meanings of its constituent words,
there may yet be a subsequent, metaphor-specific interpretive custom or
mini-practice that forms around a successful metaphor, so that it becomes,
even before eventual pasturage as a “dead metaphor” - and one might
remark, parenthetically, that all metaphors should be so lucky - an avail-
able descriptive resource of the language, one capable of right or wrong
employment.*
(3) ...what we attempt in ‘paraphrasing’ a metaphor cannot be to give its meaning,
for that lies on the surface; rather we attempt to evoke what the metaphor brings to our
attention. (p.262)
First of all, if it were really true that the meaning of a metaphor lies on
its surface - and one presumes, in construing this metaphor, that this is a
smooth, unbroken surface, free of nooks, crannies, or potholes in which
things can hide - would anyone ever need to have the meaning of a meta-
phor explained? But more importantly, this assertion ignores the fact that
what is evoked by a metaphor often crystallizes in a fairly pronounced
manner - that is to say, significant intersubjective convergence as to what
the metaphor recommends to our attention manifests itself - thus allow-
ing to paraphrase the job of articulating, at least partially, the meaning of
the metaphor.
Ted Cohen remarks much the same thing in a recent essay on our sub-
ject: “The metaphorical content of a metaphorical expression is more or
less specific.. .[while] there is no function that will calculate the meta-
phorical content of an expression from its literal meaning.. .there is a con-
tent that it is correct to take from the expres~ion.”~

“Metaphor, Feeling, and Narrative”, p. 227. A similar observation is voiced by Anders Eng-
strsm, in “Metaphor and Ambiguity”: “If there exists an inclination towards certain inter-
pretations within a community o f speakers, it should be clear that a basis for prescribing
these would be possible, and that a notion of metaphorical meaning could be maintained.”
(pp. 12-13.)
10 JERROLD LLVINSON

Back to Davidson:
(4) .. .in fact there is no limit to what a metaphor calls to our attention, i m c h of
what we are caused to notice is not propositional in character. When we try to say what
a metaphor ‘means’, we soon realize that there is no end to what we want to mention.
(P. 263)
This declaration, finally, overlooks the fact that there are many things
which, while indeed resemblances or similarities between the terms of the
metaphor, are arguably no part of what the metaphor ‘means’, or is plau-
sibly taken as conveying, as the history of subsequent interpretation of the
metaphor would establish. For example, it is no part of the meaning of the
metaphor ‘No man is an island’ that no man is made of sand, whereas it is
ineluctably part of such meaning that no man is inherently isolated from
the society of other men.4
Richard Moran has made the point as follows: “It may well be true, as
Davidson says, that ‘a metaphor makes us attend to some likeness’, but
it is not true that attending to just any of the infinite aspects of likeness
between the two things counts as understanding the metaphor.. .the pro-
cess of interpretation couldn’t even begin without some sense of which
are the relevant dimensions of the c~mparison.”~ Understanding meta-
phor, in other words, involves hitting on and attending to the right like-
nesses, the ones that the specific juxtaposition of the terms not customar-
ily brought together make come to the fore, in the given context in which
they are juxtaposed.6

3.
But the central claim in Davidson’s brief against metaphorical meaning,
and that on which his argument seems almost entirely to tum,is the claim
- and I spare you a quote confirming that this is indeed the core of the

argument - that in a metaphor the consitutent words carry only their orig-
inal, literal meanings, and do not acquire new, metaphorical ones. Now
with this claim I am inclined to agree: being used in a metaphor, however
successful, does not affect the meaning of a word as a term in the lan-

Of course the determinacy of this meaning is partly a function of the metaphor’s embedding
in Donne’s poetic discourse as a whole, but that does not affect the point at issue.
“Seeing and Believing: Metaphor, Image, and Force”. p. 106.
See also, and earlier, David Novitz, Knowledge. Fiction, and hnagination, chapter 7.
 W H O S A F R A I D O F A PARAPHRASE? I1

guage, even passingly. The problem, though, is that this in no way yields
the conclusion desired, that metaphors, that is, metaphorical utterances,
lack a meaning, acquired in context, a meaning that one may as well call
metaphorical m e ~ n i n g . ~
That in a metaphor the constituent words do not acquire new, meta-
phorical meanings, ones that might figure eventually in the dictionary, in
perhaps fifth or sixth place, and that the metaphor would not work, would
not perform as a metaphor at all, were its constituent words not to retain
their ordinary, preexisting, meanings, does not entail that the metaphori-
cal sentence, or perhaps better, the sentence taken as a metaphor, does
not acquire in situ a metaphorical meaning, one that paraphrases can be
charged with exhibiting. It is hard to underestimate the rhetorical benefit
that Davidson draws from this usually unremarked shift from words or
terms to sentences or utterances. The justice of his position in regard to
the former redounds undeservedly, and somewhat surreptitiously, to the
account of the latter.

4.

It is useful to compare the operation of metaphors to that of something

more homely, such as exclamations. Consider the exclamation “Fire!”.
Exclamations have meanings, in context, which go beyond the meanings
of their constituent words - or in this case, word - and often in a stable
and persisting manner. This meaning is partly propositional, and thus
paraphrasable, e.g. “there is a fire in the vicinity and everyone is urged to
leave”, and partly non-propositional, consisting in an expressive, illocu-
tionary force, though one that can also be described well enough. Would
it be reasonable to argue that since the constituent word of this exclama-
tion retains its meaning in the exclamation itself, and that the exclama-
tion would not function as such were that word not to do so, that therefore

David Novitz, however, is one who argues against Davidson that in a successful metaphor
some constituent words must in fact acquire new. metaphorical meanings, if the metaphor as
a whole is granted to have a new, metaphorical meaning (see Knoitledge, Fiction. and Imagi-
nation, pp. 154-56). But I think Novitz is impelled to this conclusion by not distinguishing
sharply enough between sentences in a language. whose meanings are perhaps solely a func-
tion of the meanings of their constituent words, and utterances on an occasion, whose mean-
ings are not.
12 JERROLD LEVINSON

there is no further, as it were, exclamational r. qing to that exclamation,

one that outlasts its use on a given occasion? I think not.
Consider also more closely the issue of dead metaphors. Here are
two from roughly the same sphere, as regards their literal roots: “you
are the light of my life” and “never again darken my door”. Obviously
such expressions now have quasi-literal meanings themselves, as not very
extended paraphrases of them would confirm, such as, respectively, “you
impart meaning and joy to my life and are central to it” and “you are not
welcome in my home and I hope never to see you again”.
But now try to picture those dead metaphors in their youth, a youth
shrouded in the mists of time and no doubt unrecoverable.* Is it yet plau-
sible to think that what is captured in the paraphrases offered a moment
ago, those homespun distillates, was no part of the meaning of those met-
aphors when newly minted, that those metaphors acquired such meaning,
all of a sudden, only after being laid definitively to rest in the graveyard
of spent expressions?* To take such a line, it seems to me, is to adopt a
sort of doctrine of semantic creation ex nihilo as regards metaphor, the
prospects of which seem no brighter than those of the parent doctrine in
theology.

5.

It is sometimes remarked that, notice taken of the differences between

individual words in isolation and complete utterances in context, David-
son is still right to deny metaphorical meaning to metaphors insofar as
it is the case that, unlike the literal meanings of words in a language
or the literal meanings of sentences composed from them in rule-gov-
emed ways, the supposed meanings of metaphors are entirely bound to
occasions of use, are simply a matter of what speakers intend to convey
on such occasions, and so belong entirely to pragmatics as opposed to
semantics. The final upshot of this, then, is that they do not deserve to be
called meanings at all, since not possessed of any generality, stability, or
exportability outside the specific circumstances in which they see light,
and thus of no explanatory value as far as semantic theory is concerned.*

Qualified support of Davidson in this vein, as prelude to advancing a theory of metaphori-

cal meanings that would not be subject to such objection. can be found in Josef Stem. “What
Metaphors Do Not Mean”.
 W H O ’ S A F R A I D OF A PARAPHRASE? 13

But this sort of vindication of Davidson, however guarded, mistakenly

exaggerates the occasion-boundedness of metaphors. Although born on
given occasions, and acquiring concrete, if never completely paraphras-
able, significances in specific contexts of utterance, successful metaphors
retain such significances in enduring fashion, ones they carry with them
on future occasions of use, once successfully constituted. The acquisition
of significance by a metaphor on the occasion of successful use is often
a relatively permanent one, and the more so, one may suppose, the more
just or compelling the metaphor.
The significance of the metaphorical ascription of sunhood to a young
woman by her lover is now, some five hundred years after Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet, hardly less stable, less exportable, less available for
meaning-making in the sense of speaker’s meaning, than the significance
of a literal ascription of sunhood to a particular heavenly body. That
metaphors are born in context and acquire their content therein, against
a complex background of shared understandings, assumptions, and dis-
positions, should not lead us to think that metaphors necessarily perish
once those originating circumstances have past, and with them the con-
tent then acquired. No, the content of many metaphors - that is, meta-
phorical assertions, understood as species of utterance - is as general,
stable, and exportable as that of most literal assertions, and so would seem
to count as semantic content of some sort.
If describing some thing as the opiate of the people, or the hobgoblin
of little minds, or a wound in the side of one’s country, or a tale told
by an idiot and full of sound and fury9, or someone as a snake in the
grass, or a utensil, or an Emma Bovary, or no Jack Kennedy - and I have
tried here to avoid metaphors that would be accounted irretrievably dead
- does not qualify as employing an expression with an available, para-

phrasable, occasion-transcendent meaning, then I begin to be unsure what

does. There is something called cultural literacy, in the sense E. D. Hirsch
has made familiar, and having a sense of the sense of such metaphors,
utilisable outside the site of their original application, is a part of it if any-
thing is.

I was about to add. “or an affair between a predicate with a past and an object that yields
while resisting”, but then I had to admit that I couldn’t think o f a reasonable re-employment of
this wonderful metaphor of Goodman’s, that is, to characterize something besides metaphor
itself.
14 JERROLD LEVINSON

6.

Another source of skepticism as regards metaphorical meanings has its

roots not in Davidson, but in the later Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s dis-
cussion of “secondary” uses of language, presupposing yet diverging
from those that can be considered “primary”, is taken by some to show the
pointlessness of postulating secondary “senses” yne by such language
in its secondary uses, in addition to senses suc; language bears in virtue
of its primary uses, uses that ground the language game in question. But
cases of the sort discussed by Wittgenstein in his remarks on secondary
uses of language, designed to forestall the postulation of parallel second-
ary senses, seem to me very different from those of successful metaphor.
Wittgenstein’s favored examples, recall, concern the colors of vowels,
e.g. ‘ e is yellow’, or degrees of stoutness of the days of the week, e.g.
‘Tuesday is thin’. Now such examples of, let us call it quasi-metaphorical
assertion, have an evident whimsicality, idiosyncrasy, “it’s-a-free-coun-
try-ism’’ about them that is quite foreign to cases of genuine metaphor. In
genuine metaphor, there is a rightness, or “click”, in the disparate things
that the metaphor brings into conjunction, which unleashes a meaning
for the sentence that was all along a potential for specific illumination,
if an unnoticed one, of the literal meanings of the terms employed once
conjoined.1° But even were a certain predisposition to view e as yellow
as opposed to other colors, or to view Tuesday as thin as opposed to fat,
to be observable in a given linguistic community, that would hardly be
enough to make “yellow” or “thin” a permanent descriptive resource of
the language of that community in regard to vowels or days of the week.”
Thus, the fact that secondary uses of language of this sort do nothing to
prompt recognition of corresponding senses of the terms involved does
not cast much, if any, suspicion on the idea that bonafide metaphorical

’”
As David Hills puts it in a recent insightful essay on our topic, bona fide metaphors pos-
sess ‘some degree of poetic power’. (“Aptness and Truth in Verbal Metaphor”, p. I 19.) Hills
usefully identifies and defends two positions on metaphor that he labels ‘aestheticism’ (meta-
phors are rightly assessed aesthetically, that is, for aptness) and ‘semanticism’ (metaphors
have semantic content, that is, a distinctive paraphrasable meaning); as should be clear, these
are positions to which I also subscribe.
l ’ The idea that Tuesday might generally be regarded as thin, incidentally, has always struck
me as especially misguided, given the conflicting force of the concrete and, one might add,
public association of Tuesday and fatness in the holiday of Mardi Gras.
 w m ’ s A F R A I D OF A PARAPHRASE? 15

uses of language might be said to underpin graspable metaphorical mean-

ings corresponding to them.

7.
Elsewhere I have developed a view of literary interpretation, or of at least
the central meaning of a text offered as literature, that I call hypothetical
intentionalism.l 2 Insofar as metaphors are utterances, and insofar as they
can be seen in particular as literary utterances, albeit of a small-scale sort,
then a hypothetical-intentionalist view of literary meaning would seem
naturally to recommend itself for getting a handle on metaphorical mean-
ing as well. What, then, does such a view maintain?
According to hypothetical intentionalism a literary work is to be con-
strued as an utterance, one produced in a public context by a historically
and culturally situated author, where the central meaning of such a work
is thus a form of utterance meaning, as opposed to either textual mean-
ing, the meaning of the brute text as a string of words in a language, or
utterer meaning, the meaning the utterer, speaker, or author had in mind
and intended to get across. Utterance meaning, in turn,is understood on
a loosely Gricean model according to which what an utterance means is a
matter, roughly, of what an appropriate hearer would most appropriately
take an utterer to be trying to convey in employing a given verbal vehicle
in the given communicative context. As applied to literature, and fleshed
out in certain ways, what this amounts to is roughly this: the core mean-
ing of a literary work is given by the best hypothesis, from the position of
an informed, sympathetic, and discriminating reader, of authorial intent
to convey such and such to an audience through the text in question.
In the light of that explication, then, we can give a fairly straight-
forward hypothetical-intentionalistaccount of the fact, emphasized by a
number of writers on metaphor, that understanding a metaphor requires
identifying or homing in on the right likenesses or connections between
-

’* See my “Intention and Interpretation in Literature”, “Messages in Art”, and “Two Notions
of Interpretation”. I am not alone in advocating such a view: William Tolhurst, Alexander
Nehamas, Gregory Currie, and Stephen Davies subscribe to something similar, and the broadly
Gricean outlines of the view will, at any rate, be familiar. In addition, certain current competing
views, such as the actual intentionalisms of Noel Carroll, Robert Stecker, and Paisley Living-
ston, are perhaps also more hypotheticaiiy intentionaiist than they seem at first glance.
16 JERROLD LEVINSON

terms in a given case, putting aside those that are not to the purpose. For
correctly understanding a metaphor in context, by hypothetical-intention-
alist lights, involves arriving at the best hypothesis, in epistemic and aes-
thetic senses, as to what a speaker would likely have intended to convey
or draw attention to, what similarities a speaker would plausibly have
wanted to highlight or bring into focus, bearing in mind that this will
naturally open out into resonances that a speaker would have endorsed
or welcomed in connection with the metaphor offered, if not ones it is
plausible to conjecture were foreseen or perceived in advance.
Now even if this is accepted, and the identification of metaphorical
meaning, a species of utterance meaning, be understood to run along
hypothetical-intentional lines, it remains true, in my opinion, that whether
or not a given utterance is in fact a metaphorical one is irreducibly an
affair of actual intentions, to be determined by whatever means serve
generally to determine the actual intentions of utterers. That is, in sug-
gesting the plausibility of a hypothetical-intentionalistview of metaphori-
cal meaning, as a species of literary meaning, I am not thereby propos-
ing, and in fact I would explicitly disavow, a hypothetical-intentionalist
view of metaphorical st~tus.’~ For indeed anything of a certain linguistic
form, roughly, that of an assertion, positive or negative, might be being
projected as a metaphor or with a metaphorical intent, and thus the most
plausible construction we might put on an utterance might categorize it
incorrectly. On the other hand, in the absence of knowledge of whether
something is in fact a metaphorical assertion, it would be reasonable to
invoke a hypothetical-intentionalistprinciple as a justification for revis-
ably ascribing or withholding metaphorical status to a given ~ t t e r a n c e . ’ ~

8.
Until now I have been highlighting the character of metaphors as possess-
ors of relatively stable and graspable meanings, and as reusable on occa-
sions other than those in which they first arise. I want at this point, how-

I3 For discussion, see “Intention and Interpretation in Literature”.

l4 Thus I can concur with this remark of Max Black’s regarding assignment of metaphorical
status, but only in the sense of defeasible assignment absent knowledge of actual intention:
‘Our recognition of a metaphorical statement depends essentially upon two things: Our gen-
 W H O S A F R A I D OF A PARAPHRASE? 17

ever, to underscore an aspect of metaphors that runs in rather the opposite

direction, that is, as against their, as it were, complete exportability. What
I call attention to now is the inseparability of content and form in meta-
phor, something which, reasonably construed, I take to be valid for all
artistic phenomena. l 5
The question can be put of whether metaphor should be conceived as
primarily a conceptual matter, as primarily a linguistic matter, or rather
as one that essentially straddles the divide.I6 Is the essence of a metaphor
a sentence in a language, that is, a sequence of words, or is it rather a
constellation of concepts, that different strings of words make available?
If the latter, how can those concepts be identified apart from a given lin-
guistic formulation, given the presumed impossibility of exact translation
of almost any term in a natural language into any other? Does the possi-
bility of neutral designation of the concepts involved in a given metaphor
require us to presuppose something like a language of thought, or at least
some identity of concepts across users of different languages, however
that comes about?
I am inclined to the view that regards the concrete vehicle of a meta-
phor - more or less those words, in that language, in that order, with just

era1 knowledge of what it is to be a metaphorical statement, and our specific judgment that a
mctaphorical rcading of a given statement is here preferable to a literal one.’ (“More About
Metaphors”, pp. 35-36.)
1 do not assume that verbal metaphors are literally speaking works of art, but only that they
can be appropriately treated in many respects as if they were, e.g. they can be assessed for
aesthetic merit.
See Arnold Isenberg, “On Defining Metaphor”, who aptly observes that metaphors ‘are
always strokes. if not always works, of art.’
I h The vicw that metaphor is essentially a conceptual matter - that what are called conceptual
nietaphors are the fundamental ones, and that ordinary verbal metaphors are just the verbal
expression or externalization of such underlying conceptual metaphors - is a view that at pres-
ent enjoys considerable currency, duc principally to the work of George Lakoff, Mark John-
son, and Mark Turner. (See Lakoff & Johnson, Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980; Johnson. Tl7e Bodi. in the Mind, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1987; Lakoff & Turner, h4ore Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor, Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1989: Lakoff. “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor”.
in A. Ortony, cd., Metaphor and Thought, 2d ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1993; Lakoff & Johnson. Philosoph! in the Flesh, New York: Basic Books. 1999.) I don’t
wish to deny that there may be. at some psychological-social level, what these thinkers call
conceptual metaphors. I only wish to insist on the at least equal claim to reality of metaphors
as specific pieces of language, and the prima facie irreducibility of the latter to the former.
(For similar cautions see David Hills, “Aptness and Truth in Verbal Metaphor”.)
18 JERROLD LEVINSON

those precise rhythms, resonances, and prosodic properties - as inelim-

inable, and thus as not after all the mere vehicle, but the very body and
soul of the metaphor.* That is to say, even once the cognitive content of a
metaphor is approximated through acceptable paraphrases, and its imag-
istic force, that in virtue of which we are made to see one thing in terms of
another”, identified as well, there seems to remain a residue that attaches
to the specific feel of the words employed to invoke that paraphrasable
meaning and put that imagistic force in play. In short, the verbal texture
of a metaphor bids fair to be considered essential to it, and not just its
conceptual structure. l 8
But perhaps we should recognize two notions of metaphor, or two cri-
teria of identity for metaphors, a restrictive and a permissive. On the per-
missive criterion, the metaphor is detachable from its linguistic formula-
tion, and is a sort of thought, or way of thinking, with respect to certain
things. On the restrictive criterion, the metaphor is undetachable from its
linguistic formulation, and is thus like a miniature work of poetry, akin
to a haiku. Which of these notions or identity criteria is more apt would
seem to depend on the context of inquiry into metaphor. Thus, it seems
advisable to recognize both.
At any rate, with a metaphor considered as something like a work of
literary art, if a tiny one, we must experience the content of the meta-
phor, including both its paraphrasable meaning and its imagistic force,
through its specific verbal form, if we are to fully appreciate the meta-
phor. That outstanding metaphors can usually be translated from one lan-
guage to another should not lead us to forget that the result is a transla-
tion, in which some part of the metaphor has been lost, in that part of the
metaphorical charge of the original is indissolubly bound up with specific
words, specifically deployed.
Un bon mot in one language is not necessarily un bon mot in another,
to which that very phrase bears witness; for a good word neither really

See Moran‘s two-part analysis of metaphor, in “Seeing and Believing”, according to which
metaphors have, on the one hand, a paraphrasable cognitive content, and on the other hand, an
evidently nonparaphrasable imagistic force, consisting in a prescribed, asymmetric viewing
of one thing through the lens provided by another.
l 8 In Max Black’s terms, I am suggesting that metaphors are paradigmatically emphatic: ‘ A
metaphorical utterance is emphatic to the degree that its producer will allow no variation upon
or substitute for the words used.. .’ (“More About Metaphor”, p. 26.)
 W HO’ S AFRAID OF A PARAPHRASE? 19

means the same thing as, nor has the same fluid sound as, un bon mot,
which sound contributes to its being the expression it is and to its con-
veying what it does. Metaphors are certainly not guaranteed to survive
largely intact when translated, even faithfully, from one language to
another. “Man is a wolf to man” is one metaphor, in English, but another,
“L’homme est un loup pour l’homme”, in French. For notice that the met-
aphor in French suffers, in comparison to the metaphor in English, in pos-
sessing to a slightly lesser extent, because of the unavoidability of articles
in French, the quasi-palindromic quality that is a feature of both versions,
and that reinforces the idea of reciprocity of behavior that is at the con-
ceptual core of the metaphor.19Assonance, alliteration, symmetry, synco-
pation, and so on are all part of a metaphor as a verbal entity. Translations
of metaphors from one language to another, in short, might with justice
be considered metaphorical cousins of one another, rather than simply the
same metaphorical individual in different linguistic dress.*

9.
In approaching the writing of this essay, my first idea, I confess, was to
compose it entirely in metaphor, as a way of demonstrating rhetorically
that effective metaphors, construed in context, have a paraphrasable mean-
ing operative within a linguistic community, whatever nonparaphrasable
force or charge they may have as well, and can thus communicate a set of
thoughts, advance a position - perhaps even ignite a revolution.
Since that seemed, on reflection, rather too hard to carry off,2o I
decided instead to cast an interested eye on the novel I had just begun
rereading, David Lodge’s Small World?’ combing it for figures with

’’ The Latin original of the metaphor, ascribed to St. Francis of Assisi, is “homo homini
lupus”, which, again, has its own peculiar linguistic flavor.
*’ I have, however, employed a larger than usual number of at least somewhat live metaphors
in this essay, which is what, I can now reveal, the unexplained asterisks after certain sentences
that the observant reader will have noted are meant to mark. But, and this was the point of my
little conceit, I take it that none of those metaphors impeded understanding of the cognitive
content of this essay. In fact, given my penchant for baroque but nonmetaphorical sentence
construction, I suspect that the intentional surplus of metaphors in the present essay was even
an aid to understanding!
London: Penguin Books, 1984. (Page references in parentheses.)
20 I E R R O L D LEVINSON

which to test the mettle of the convictions about metaphor I have been
airing here. As it turns out that novel, being written in a casually elegant
but not especially lyrical style, is not overly rich in metaphor, generally
achieving its effects by other means, notably similes, which in compari-
son are fairly thick on the ground.* In any event, here is the almost com-
plete22harvest of metaphors from the first fifty pages:*

1. “Dismay had already been plainly written on many faces.. .” (p. 3)

2. “...the narrow beds, whose springs sagged dejectedly in the middle.. .”
(P. 3 )
3. “He exhaled rather than pronounced the syllables.” (p. 9)
4. “...he bent forward over his roast shoe-leather.. .” (p. 11)
5 . “The rest of the audience was performing the same tableau of petrified
boredom as before.” (p. 16)
6. “. . .you have succumbed to the virus of structuralism.” (p. 27)
7. “...the individual campus is.. .the heavy industq ofthe mind.”(p. 43)

1 take it that few of us would have much trouble in discerning what is

conveyed by these figures, in elaborating the connotations the metaphori-
cally invoked predicate carries in relation to the literal subject to which
it is, with a characteristic degree of unusualness, applied. For example,
as regards the last and most ambitious of these metaphors, the individual
campus is therein painted as unwieldy, as on its way to obsolescence, as
perhaps even harmful to the health of its familiars.* Note that the specific
novelistic context is not even necessary for the construal of these meta-
phors, except in the case of the third, where it perhaps helps to know that
the syllables exhaled form the name of a girl, Angelica, whom the exhaler
has fallen in love with moments after making her acquaintance.
But rather than devote any more time to metaphors of middling quality,

‘‘ The hedge ‘almost complete’ is required partly because the borderline between metaphori-
cal senses and second-order or third-order literal senses is irredeemably blurry. So for exam-
ple, the list given does not include “His face darkened as he added ...” (p. 7), since I regard
‘darkened’ there as literal, but the case might be made that ‘darkened’ in such a context is
simply a very tired metaphor. Full disclosure also prompts me to add that, in those first fifty
pages of Lodge’s novel, two characters end up di.Tcussing a metaphor. that of a ‘wooily fold’
as it occurs in Keat’s “The Eve of St. Agnes”.
 WHO’ S A F R A I D OF A P A R A P H R A S E ? 21

I look briefly to the opposite ends of the metaphorical spectrum, address-

ing first two metaphors that are in my opinion especially fine, as well as
being, as it happens, good examples of humor, and then those that have,
as it were, fallen off the scale, in the sense that it is impossible, or virtu-
ally impossible, to construe them as metaphors at all, despite their partak-
ing of the canonical form “A is B” where “A is B” is manifestly false.*
Here are my two candidates for excellence in the category of metaphor,
the one encountered recently, the other an old favorite:

“Lotteries are a tax on the mathematically challenged.” (U.K.)

“A wife is an umbrella; sooner or later one hails a cab.” ( Freud)23

I’ll spare you any paraphrase of these metaphorical assertions, in

the first case because its sense is fairly transparent, in the second case
because, though its sense is not immediately transparent, it is more deli-
cious if deciphered on one’s own.
1 turn now to the outcasts of the society of metaphors, those sorry
would-be tropes consisting in manifestly false identity sentences that sim-
ply resist metaphorical redemption.* Note first that it is in fact rather dif-
ficult, and perhaps impossible, to find such entirely metaphor-resistant
sentences. It is instructive to consider Richard Moran’s throwaway exam-
ple of a supposedly completely profitless yoking of two items, the taste
of sugar and the discovery of America, which, so he claims, must fail to
strike any metaphorical sparks because the things brought together have
inherently no relation to one another.*24 But the statement “The taste of
sugar was the discovery of America”, would actually not be too bad a
way of conveying, metaphorically, that the exploitation of cane sugar in
the Caribbean islands was a driving force in the further exploration of the
Americas.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that ahnost metaphor-resistant sentences
can be found, though perhaps not at random. One formula for balking
metaphoricity would seem to be to equate assertively things from the
same family or category, at roughly the same level of specificity. Thus it

__
23 Offered in Jokes and Their Relations to the Unconscious (New York: W. W. Norton,
1963).
24 “Seeing and Believing...”, p. 106.
22 JERROLD LEVINSON

appears difficult, if not impossible, to make anything metaphorically of

“gold is lead”, or “a fox is a wolf”, or “every woman is a man”.25
On the other hand, given a bit more context and a crucial third element
in the mix, a metaphor equating things on the same level from the same
family can sometimes work remarkably well, as in this curious witticism:
“Wagner is the Puccini of music”. Now, what does this mean? What is
the cognitive content or imagistic transformation that, once caught sight
of, causes us to laugh? It is admittedly hard to say. But here is a stab at it.
Puccini, through being invoked to position Wagner in relation to music,
would seem to be being placed outside of music entirely, a rather grave
insult to a composer, one has to admit, while Wagner, for his part, comes
off hardly better, having been figuratively equated with a composer who
was not, so to speak, even a composer at all. 26
In any case, to revert in closing to what is arguably my main theme,
note how this metaphor, once effectively essayed, becomes an available
resource, one deployable, with suitable substitutions, on other occasions,
and with what one sees no good reason, ultimately, not to regard as a
metaphorical meaning. Thus, Rachmaninoff and Respighi might also be
called, of course unfairly, Puccinis of music, Pink Floyd the Puccini of
rock music, George Winston the Puccini of jazz, Renoir the Puccini of
painting, Gore Vidal the Puccini of American literature, and so on. For all
I know, I may well be the Puccini of metaphor studies. At any rate, I’ve
made a start toward the title.27

25 As I say, difficult, but not impossible. Thus ‘gold is lead’ might be employed, in the right
context, to express disapproval of earthly riches, or admiration for gold’s specific gravity.
Work in linguistics on the permeability and interconnectedness of semantic fields would in
fact argue against there being any cases of sentences whose metaphorical deployment was
to be precluded absolutely. (See Eva Kittay, Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic
Structure.) Max Black offers this as an example of a likely metaphor-proof form of words:
‘a chair is a syllogism’ (“More on Metaphor”, p.23.) Black is silent as to why such a predica-
tion resists metaphorical interpretation, but one may speculate that it turns on both the utter
dissimilarity and the categorial remoteness of the terms involved.
26 What are the musical failings for which Wagner directly and Puccini indirectly, if more
~

harshly - are here being reproached? Hard to say definitively, but I imagine tawdriness of
expression, cheapness of effect, and dramatic overblownness are among the targets aimed at.
(I hasten to add that I am not here endorsing those charges at least not without qualifica-
~

tion.)
27 Thanks to Jack Copeland, Ted Cohen, Stan Godlovitch, David Novitz, Paul Pietroski,
Diane Proudfoot and an anonymous reviewer for Theoria for valuable comments on this
essay.
 WHO‘S AFRAID OF A PARAPHRASE? 23

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