The ins and outs

When you read a book you bring something to the table. Unless, of course, you happen to be certain U.S. presidents who shall remain unnamWed and a vice-presidential candiate who will remain anonyPmous.

This means that different people understand books at different levels. If you don’t understand what “caviar” means, the word won’t evoke images of privilege, or poshness, or fishiness - whatever the author hoped to evoke.

So this is a kind of meaning that requires operating on the same wavelength - system of signification, we could call it - as the author. It’s something brought from outside the text to the reading of the text.

Then there are associations that take shape within the book. A black dog comes to represent violence. A broken arm is a reminder of a man’s cowardice in a earlier confrontation.

Some meanings come from the outside (the reader brings them with her to the reading), some from the inside (the reader learns the associations during the course of the reading).

Meanings can be either metonymic or metaphoric.

If they are metonymic, they are simple associations, a nod to a closeness between two objects. A common example: The sails crossed the ocean. The sail is used to refer to the ship. A part is used to refer to the whole.

But the two objects could be completely separate entities that happen to be associated with one another. Pavlov’s dog and the bell are a good example. The bell and the phone share no characteristics; they just exist repeatedly in the same time and place, so the dog develops an association.

"A metonymy neither states nor implies the connections between the objects involved in it. . . . We must already know that the objects are related, if the metonymy is to be devised or understood. Thus, metaphor creates the relation between its objects, while metonymy presupposes that relation."
(Hugh Bredin, "Metonymy," Poetics Today, 1984)

Symbolism is thus a kind of metonymy, where an iconic signifier is used to convey a conventional meaning. The cross comes to represent Christianity. The Jolly Rodger piracy. A coffin death. In all of these cases, many readers would recognize the complex meanings behind these simple symbols.

Metonymy is thus about referring to something.

Metaphor on the other hand is about comparing -- about showing that there are shared characteristics between the sign and the signifier. Using the black dog example again; it could represent violence only because in the story it always shows up just before, say, the Hells Angels arrive (a metonymic association).

But we might also say, the black dog had a face like a viper. Now we've compared it to a deadly creature and evoked a far more sinister feeling in the reader regarding the dog.

We've made a new connection from the dog to the viper, that didn't exist until we wrote it. Until then it could have been a perfectly nice black dog. Linguists would say we've applied meaning from a "source domain" to a "target domain."

One interesting aspect of this, is that the meaning we are drawing from the source domain is essenially metonymic: the association between a viper and deadliness is something we've brought to the book, or if we haven't we one get the authors hidden meaning.

(This makes me think of something said during the recent Nobel Prize announcements by one of the judges - if I recall correctly - that American authors are too caught up in American pop culture. If the judge was correct, that would suggested American authors are perhaps using references and comparisons in their stories that no one but other Americans - or at least consumers of American cultural products - can understand.)