[lit-ideas] All cliche is metaphor
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2007 10:05:04 EDT
"All slang is metaphor" (Chesterton)
Note below -- as per OED ps -- that 'cliche' is (mostly) metaphor, too!
L. Helm is reading a book and has posed an interesting question to the list.
To wit:
>[The author] is in the process here of building support for her
>contention that [X] was "a stupid man". But can we
I perceive a rhetorical question here:
>generalize? Can we assert that people who in speech can't
>progress (or don't want to progress) beyond clichés are incapable
>of (or have difficulty) seeing reality from another person's
>perspective?
Well, you are dealing with translations into various languages, and I have a
problem with the word 'cliche' in any case.
I believe that an exclusively cliche speaker (or utterer) as I prefer, would
be quite a sight to see.
On the other hand, most language learning is done _through_ cliches -- think
of the silly nursery rhymes that are supposed to give Geary fluency in the
verbal forms, "Its fleece was white as snow -- and ... the lamb was sure to
go").
If Mothers (with their Motherese) were _not_ relying on cliches -- as My
Mother Did Not -- you get MONSTERS, not real nice, sociable and personable
people.
The problem with cliches is that sometimes they have a LITERALLY false first
meaning. Think of 'winged words', or to use an example by Grice, "pushing up
the daisies".
Grice was obsessed with cliche ways of expressing that someone was dead.
There's not just 'kick the bucket" and "push up the daisies", but things which
are "less cliche". His example, "fertilizing the daffodils".
In any case, he liked to play with the ambiguity of:
(1) "If I shall be then helping the grass to grow,
PROTASIS
I shall have no time for reading."
APODOSIS
Literally, he explains, in the William James Lectures at Harvard -- for the
Spring term of 1967,
"It would be approximately true to say that the utterer means (has as one of
its meanings):
(2) If I shall then be assisting the kind of things
of which lawns are composed to mature,
PROTASIS
I shall have be protected from the horrors of the world"
APODOSIS.
He is playing with the idea that both protasis and apodosis have multiple
'meanings' and in the end it's a matter of wild guess as to what the speaker
means.
I'm sure it's the same with the author your author is discussing.
Some people love an idiom, so I disagree with your comment:
Those who cannot go
>beyond clichés are incapable
>of (or have difficulty) seeing reality from another person's
>perspective?
But that's precisely what a cliche gives you -- another person's perspective
-- indeed, the whole human race -- of the language which is your form of
life -- and their perspective on things.
I will grant that "Curiosity killed the cat" is a cliche. By sticking to the
cliche, you are sticking to the received opinion, to the wisdom of the ages.
It takes some effort to see reality not from ANOTHER person's perspective
but from your OWN. After all, as Castaneda, the Guatemalan philosopher used to
say, Philosophy is written IN THE FIRST PERSON and FOR the FIRST PERSON.
The English language -- unlike perhaps the German -- is so rich in cliches
that you will find one that contradicts the other. Spanish too:
"No por mucho madrugar se amanece mas temprano"
-- tricky to translate, but something to the effect that early rising does
not mean early _dawn_.
But English has,
"The early bird catches the worm"
-- and a few others.
I suppose there must be cliches FOR and AGAINST heavy drinking, or less
strongly, the enjoyment of alcoholic beverages.
It is said that Homer relied too much on cliches -- like 'epea pteroenta',
winged words. The reason, I contend, is that he was part of an 'illiterate',
oral tradition, and these cliches -- as the ones you find in Bewoulf -- allowed
the oral poet to keep the audience engaged. Gauchos do the same thing in
Argentina.
A cliche like that is worth examining in detail. In Anglo-Saxon J.L. Borges
has studied them in detail -- they were called "kenningar" in Old Norse.
Modern theories of figurative language express the view that there are
prototypes and SCHEMES -- this is Turner's word -- at play in such cliches.
Indeed, the imagery of German and anti-German, Semitic and anti-Semitic
speeches has been well documented by discourse analysts.
I wish I had a cliche to hand to title this -- by Wilde preferably, ...
Interesting question. Maybe others can provide further thoughts. Castaneda's
idea of the first person to the first person is interesting. It does not
really SAY it's from the first person of the utterer to the first person of
the
utterer, but, perhaps to the first person of the addressee. This is what one
should 'feel', say, when reading Plato -- in the Loeb, for how else will you
listen to his _voice_?
The idea of communication as communion is a good Greek and Christian and
Judeo-Christian if you wish, one. We have to wait till Wittgenstein with his
scepticism when he felt that there was nobody around who could _feel_ his pain
when he said,
"I have a toothache".
-- Saying that, and in German too, to a bunch of curious privileged students
at King's, Cambridge -- got them into thinking that Wittgenstein was
_reviving_ the 'cogito ergo sum' and the Cartesian solipsism, and it took a few
English practical philosophers (notably John Wisdom in Cambridge) to set things
back on the right track.
Cheers,
JL
---
from the OED
1832 BABBAGE Econ. Manuf. xi. (ed. 3) 95 A process for copying, called in
France clichée. 1850 Art. Jrnl. 219 Cliché is also applied to the French
stereotype casts from woodcuts. 1868 C. DARWIN in Life (1887) III. 87
Engelmann
has..offered me clichés of the woodcuts.
************************************** See what's new at http://www.aol.com
Other related posts:
- » [lit-ideas] All cliche is metaphor
