Day: April 16, 2025

·  🔸 Metaphor as a Natural and Noble Act of Naming:
Drawing from Quintilian, Donoghue opens by stating that metaphor is a natural human gift:

“It is both a gift which Nature herself confers on us… [ensuring] that nothing goes without a name” (p.182) ✴
This framing treats metaphor not as a mere rhetorical flourish, but a fundamental linguistic and existential impulse.

·  🔸 Metaphor and the Liberty of the Mind:
Metaphor emerges from the freedom of the imagination, striving to give things their “proper names,” though often failing.

“The source of metaphor is the liberty of the mind among such words as there are” (p.184) ✴

·  🔸 Metaphor as Both Resource and Failure:
Metaphor reflects the inadequacies of language, and thus, its use becomes a noble but doomed attempt to make sense of a deficient world.

“Rhetoric… is a glorious failure, and the cry of metaphor is doomed” (p.184) ✴
“We cry out to change the world by giving things their proper names—but often we fail” (p.184) ✴

·  🔸 Allegory and Catachresis: Extensions of Metaphor:
Metaphor gives rise to allegory and to its extremes, catachresis—abused or “forced” metaphors that reveal linguistic limits.

“Allegory is its narrative form… Catachresis is the figure of its abuse” (p.185) ✴
“Something monstrous lurks in the most innocent of catachreses” – Paul de Man (p.185) ✴

·  🔸 Metaphor as Escape from Literal Reality:
According to Wallace Stevens (via Frye), the motive for metaphor is to escape the oppressive weight of objective reality, “the weight of primary noon.”

“The motive for metaphor, shrinking from / The weight of primary noon” – Stevens (p.186) ✴
“To defeat or evade the force of the world, it must resort to the imaginative capacity of the mind” (p.188) ✴

·  🔸 Interpretive Differences: Frye vs. Ransom:
Frye sees the metaphor as a bridge between mind and world; Ransom views it as a poetic solution to inexpressible moral feelings.

Frye: “The only genuine joy… is in those rare moments when you feel that… we are also a part of what we know” (p.187) ✴
Ransom: The metaphor avoids “the dreary searching of your own mind” (p.187) ✴

·  🔸 Stevens’s Hegelian Idealism and Artistic Desire:
Stevens’s poetic vision resonates with Hegel’s aesthetics, where art “lifts the inner and outer world into his spiritual consciousness.”

“The universal need for art… is man’s rational need to lift the inner and outer world into his spiritual consciousness” – Hegel (p.189) ✴

·  🔸 Art and Metaphor as Acts of Decreation:
Donoghue invokes Simone Weil and Picasso to show how metaphor contributes to a modern aesthetic of undoing the real, transforming or annihilating it.

“Modern reality is a reality of decreation” (p.191) ✴
“A poem is a horde of destructions” – Stevens (p.191) ✴

·  🔸 The Danger of Bad Metaphors:
Metaphors have the power to undermine themselves—a bad metaphor, Donoghue notes, can “murder” a good one.

“He must defy / The metaphor that murders metaphor” (p.191) ✴

·  🔸 Repetition, Association, and Stevens’s Reluctance to End:
Stevens’s poetry exhibits an additive and associative structure—where metaphors are strung together without clear hierarchy.

“One phrase is instructed to produce another by association” (p.192) ✴
“His sentences tend not to be decisive… he always sees a further possibility” (p.193) ✴

·  🔸 Shrinking from Fixity and Embracing Change:
Stevens shrinks from fixed truths, favoring the fluid, unstable states metaphor enables.

“A poet writes of twilight because he shrinks from noon-day” – Stevens (p.196) ✴

·  🔸 Resemblance as a Core Principle of Metaphor:
Stevens’s metaphors rely heavily on resemblance, which Donoghue critiques as too general to be philosophically sound.

“In some sense, all things resemble each other” – Stevens (p.198) ✴
“Similarity… is relative, variable and culture-dependent” – Nelson Goodman (p.199) ✴

·  🔸 Metaphor Intensifies Reality:
When it works, metaphor heightens our sense of reality, transforming the mundane into the sublime.

“It enhances the sense of reality, heightens it, intensifies it” (p.200) ✴
Example from Ecclesiastes: “The silver cord… the golden bowl… the wheel broken at the cistern” (p.200) ✴

·  🔸 Metaphor vs. Simile:
A metaphor demands total imaginative immersion, unlike simile which allows safe distance.

“A metaphor incurs resistance… and is indifferent to shame” (p.201) ✴

·  🔸 “X” as Final Resistance and Symbol of Limit:
Stevens’s “dominant X” represents the intractable world, the final, unchangeable reality metaphor fails to penetrate.

“Nothing in the poem defeats the final ‘X'” (p.206) ✴

·  🔸 No Final Word on Metaphor:
Donoghue concludes that Stevens’s relation to metaphor is inherently unstable. Each poetic mood shifts the meaning and function of metaphor.

“We can’t expect from Stevens a definitive statement about metaphor” (p.207) ✴
“In such seemings all things are. Metaphor… will do its transforming work another day” (p.207) ✴

• 🧠 Metaphor as Cognitive and Ontological Tool
  Donoghue elevates metaphor beyond ornamentation, presenting it as essential to how humans name, understand, and exist within the world.

“It ensures that nothing goes without a name” – Quintilian (p.182)

• 🌀 Poetic Language as Idealist Expression
  Stevens’s metaphoric thought aligns with Hegelian idealism, portraying metaphor as a spiritual act uniting inner consciousness and external reality.

“He woke in a metaphor: this was / A metamorphosis of paradise” (p.189)

• 🎨 Metaphor as Aesthetic Resistance
  Metaphor becomes a form of imaginative protest against oppressive, fixed realities—”the weight of primary noon.”

“The motive for metaphor, shrinking from / The weight of primary noon” (p.186)

• 🔧 Engagement with Classical Rhetorical Tradition
  Through references to Aristotle, Fontanier, and Quintilian, Donoghue reinterprets rhetorical devices like allegory, catachresis, and simile.

“Allegory is its narrative form… Catachresis is the figure of its abuse” (p.185)

• 🧩 The ‘X’ as Limit of Language and Metaphor
  The “dominant X” in Stevens’s poem marks the threshold where metaphor fails—where language can no longer transform reality.

“Nothing in the poem defeats the final ‘X'” (p.206)

• 🗣️ Rhetoric as Anthropological Necessity
  Donoghue, citing Blumenberg, reframes rhetoric not as persuasion but as an existential necessity driven by human lack and insufficiency.

“The axiom of all rhetoric is the principle of insufficient reason” (p.184)

• 📖 Validation of Radical and ‘Abused’ Metaphors
  Defending even bizarre metaphors like “bisqued mountain,” Donoghue legitimizes catachresis as a productive, imaginative force.

“To speak of ‘forced metaphor’ is not to degrade its manifestations” (p.185)

• 🔍 Critique of Resemblance as Metaphoric Ground
  Donoghue challenges Stevens’s assumption that resemblance is natural, invoking Nelson Goodman’s view that similarity is culturally constructed.

“Similarity… is relative, variable and culture-dependent” (p.199)

• 🧬 Metaphor as Creative Ontology
  Metaphor does not just reflect reality—it makes it. It is a poietic act that creates new ways of seeing and being.

“Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal” (p.188)

• 📜 Interplay of Modernist Certainty and Postmodern Ambiguity
  Donoghue highlights Stevens’s shifting moods and refusal to settle on a singular metaphoric theory—an openness aligning with postmodern literary theory.

“We can’t expect from Stevens a definitive statement about metaphor” (p.207)

• 🧩 Overreliance on Stevens’s Poetic Authority
  Donoghue hinges much of his theory on Wallace Stevens, potentially narrowing metaphor’s scope across diverse literary traditions.
  ➤ Critics might argue that using one poet’s temperament to frame a general theory of metaphor limits its broader applicability.

• 🔄 Philosophical Inconsistency
  The essay oscillates between idealism and skepticism, invoking both Hegelian unity and postmodern ambiguity without fully reconciling the two.
  ➤ “We can’t expect from Stevens a definitive statement about metaphor” (p.207) may reflect this unresolved tension.

• 🎨 Romanticization of Metaphor
  Donoghue tends to elevate metaphor to near-mystical status, emphasizing its aesthetic and existential powers while underplaying its structural or political dimensions.
  ➤ This limits metaphor’s role in critical discourse, including feminist, postcolonial, or ideological critiques.

• 📏 Neglect of Formal and Linguistic Precision
  Critics may find Donoghue’s acceptance of vague terms like “resemblance” too generous, despite his citation of Nelson Goodman’s challenge to that notion.
  ➤ He critiques Stevens but doesn’t fully abandon slippery conceptual terrain, potentially undermining analytical rigor.

• 🧠 Underuse of Contemporary Linguistic Theory
  While Donoghue engages with classical and continental thought, he gives minimal attention to modern cognitive or conceptual metaphor theory (e.g., Lakoff & Johnson).
  ➤ This makes the work more philosophically poetic than practically linguistic or interdisciplinary.

• 🌐 Limited Cultural Range
  The examples and allusions are primarily Western, white, male, and canonical, raising concerns about inclusivity and broader relevance in global poetics.
  ➤ There’s little engagement with metaphor in non-Western traditions or contemporary marginalized voices.