| [W]hen a new insect first arrived on the island, the tendency of natural selection to enlarge or to reduce the wings, would depend on whether a greater number of individuals were saved by successfully battling with the winds, or by giving up the attempt and rarely or never flying. As with mariners shipwrecked near a coast, it would have been better for the good swimmers if they had been able to swim still further, whereas it would have been better for the bad swimmers if they had not been able to swim at all and had stuck to the wreck. | Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859) |
A caricature compares the commonplace form of a thing to the epitome or extreme form of the same. Comparisons to human activity for the purpose are thus drawn most often from its fringes – from the doings of people who are at some distance from the conventional center of human affairs by their nature (the madman, the child, the disabled) or by circumstance (the shipwrecked sailor). The skilled eye, the eye of a Dickens, is able to see the extreme possibilities in a wider range of less obvious circumstances: the ways in which an architect may, in the right circumstance, epitomize a certain kind of skepticism.
The meaning of a source in the lexicon of metaphor may diverge from its meaning in the world. The line just shown from Emerson is an example. The insane do not bite others and cause them to run mad also (today the metaphor would probably borrow from horror movies); and to recur to previous examples, the stench of a plague in old Assyria, or the effect of a pebble on the Scotch Express, may have a tenuous relation to fact. We will see more such cases in every chapter. Makers of metaphor traffic heavily in lore. And there is a larger point to observe as well: the strength of the image in a metaphor typically arises less from its factual rigor than from its vividness; indeed, the mind tends to treat vividness as evidence of accuracy – a bad habit, but valuable for makers of metaphors to understand.
As the illustration from Darwin shows, comparisons to human behavior can also simplify a subject in valuable ways. Sometimes these comparisons also function in a manner that might be considered the opposite of caricature. Instead of comparing a common thing to an extreme one, they compare a thing more contentious or obscure to a source that is more common. The comparison demystifies the subject. Johnson’s simplifications often work this way and can be artful for their homeliness, as we saw earlier in the chapter: comparing a decision about education to a decision about which leg to put in the trousers first.
Under the heading of human behavior and roles we also might include, finally, human institutions: the use of governments, religions, markets, and other such entities as sources of metaphor.
| Brutus. . . . Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream: The Genius and the mortal instruments Are then in council; and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection. | Julius Caesar, 2, 1 |
Sources of this kind are sometimes invoked for the sake of visibility. The institution borrowed for the purpose – a kingdom – may itself be an abstraction, but the incidents associated with it (here, images of insurrection) give perceptible form to an inner state that had no visibility of its own. Institutions may also be borrowed to describe other abstractions; the author means to trade on the reader’s sense of familiarity with one of them in order to explain another, and so to drive home a conceptual argument, as in this case:
| But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas – that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. | Abrams v. United States (1919) (Holmes, dissenting) |
Some traditional uses of human activities as sources of comparison are examined in Chapters 7, 8, and 9.
d. Comparisons to stories. Under this heading go both mythology and history; those sources might be separated, of course, but they frequently do similar work in comparisons. Both tend to be used for the sake of caricature. The reason can be viewed by considering what makes a story memorable and famous, whether it be historical or mythical. It is often because the story epitomizes something resonant and recurring in human behavior or experience. Metaphor draws out those prime features of a tale and uses them to illuminate the meaning of a new case.
We saw earlier that comparisons to animals serve a similar purpose. They caricature human appearances and activity. But mythical and historical comparisons throw a different light onto their subjects. They more easily elevate or lend grandeur to them, and may put a subject into a more contemplative and dignifying posture even when the comparison is unflattering.
| In the Pythian fury of his gestures – in his screaming voice – in his directness of purpose, Fox would now remind you of some demon steam-engine on a railroad, some Fire-king or Salmoneus, that had counterfeited, because he could not steal, Jove’s thunderbolts; hissing, bubbling, snorting, fuming; demoniac gas, you think – gas from Acheron must feed that dreadful system of convulsions. But pump out the imaginary gas, and, behold! it is ditch-water. | de Quincey, Schlosser’s Literary History of the Eighteenth Century (1880) |
| The South means to repress with decisions of the Supreme Court; they might as well, like Xerxes, try to subdue the waves of the ocean by throwing chains into the water. | Schurz, speech at St. Louis (1860) |
The materials in this general category are wide-ranging. They can include any comparisons drawn to stories in history or literature or, for that matter, to the movies or television shows mentioned in the preface, though those particular sources won’t detain us here. We will make a sample study in Chapter 10 of some parts of this field: uses of mythology, fable, and classical history.
e. Comparisons to man-made things. Another family of material for metaphor comes from human invention.
| The forms of beauty fall naturally around the path of him who is in the performance of his proper work; as the curled shavings drop from the plane, and borings cluster round the auger. | Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) |
| [J]ust as a written constitution is essential to the best social order, so a code of finalities is a necessary condition of profitable talk between two persons. Talking is like playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hand on the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out their music. | Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858) |
The usual purpose of comparisons to the manufactured world, as these examples show, is similar to the most common use of nature (for notice that both sources are intricate and impersonal): they can give visible form to abstractions or other invisibilities, or make complex systems easier to understand, or both. We will take a chapter-long look at this family of material with emphasis on one distinguished aspect of it: architecture (Chapter 11). The most reliable sources of metaphor tend to be the features of the world we know best, and dwellings are among the most familiar of all human creations.
There are exceptions to every generalization just made. Animals and mythology are most often invoked to exaggerate a feature of human appearance or behavior, not to give visibility to an abstraction or the workings of the mind – but all combinations