In Our Time - History of Metaphor

Episode Date: November 25, 2010

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the history of metaphor. In Shakespeare's As You Like It, the melancholy Jaques declares: "All the world's a stage/And all the men and women merely players." This is a celebrated use of metaphor, a figure of speech in which one thing is used to describe another. Metaphor is a technique apparently as old as language itself; it is present in the earliest surviving work of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh. Homer developed it into an art form, and his invention of the epic simile was picked up by later writers including Milton. In the Middle Ages the device of allegory underpinned much of French and English writing, while the Metaphysical poets employed increasingly elaborate metaphorical conceits in the sixteenth century. In the age of the novel the metaphor once again evolved, while the Modernist writers used it to subvert their readers' expectations. But how does metaphor work, and what does this device tell us about the way our minds function?With:Steven ConnorProfessor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck, University of LondonTom HealyProfessor of Renaissance Studies at the University of SussexJulie SandersProfessor of English Literature and Drama at the University of NottinghamProducer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, we'll be discussing metaphors. Here's an example. Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and sound and fury signifying nothing. Macbeth mourning the death of his wife in one of the best-known literary examples of metaphor, which is a figure of speech which compares one thing with another. Metaphor has been with us for millennia. In his epic poems, Homer turned it to an art form. Medieval writers were obsessed with it, Renaissance poets employed it so lavishly

that Samuel Johnson later complained that art had been ransacked for illustrations, comparisons and illusions. Shakespeare immortalised it, Dickens virtually reinvented it, and in recent years thinkers have become fascinated once more by what metaphor is and what it does. With me to discuss the history of metaphor are Julie Sanders, Professor of English Literature and Drama at the University of Nottingham, Steve Connor, Professor of Modern Literature and Theory

at Birkbeck University of London, and Tom Healy, Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Sussex. Steve Connor, I've just given a very basic outline, but can you explain in a bit more detail what metaphor is? Yes. So a metaphor is often represented as the subsistence. of one term for another. So speaking of one thing in terms of another, but one needs to be more specific than that,

it's on the grounds of likeness or resemblance, because there are lots of other ways of not quite saying what you mean. Metaphor is a way of not saying precisely what you mean, but it's the grounds of resemblance. And it's not just the resemblance between the things compared. Sometimes if I say that George is a swine, I'm really probably not saying he's very much like. swine, but I'm saying my feelings towards him are like the feelings that I might be supposed

to have towards this unfairly despised animal. So it's, you know, it's the question of resemblance, its likeness, or sometimes a rather more diffuse sort of equivalence that's involved in metaphor. And seems to be, seems to represent that really primary act of mind of human beings, of seeing things that seem like each other. For example, the few lines I quoted at the beginning of the introduction, that's a useful example for people to get into this subject on, isn't it? Yes, yes.

And one of the things about metaphor is that on the surface level, it's very easy to account for. You hardly take a step without getting into very deep water indeed. In the example you gave, we would be listening to somebody who was an actor saying life is just like actors walking around the stage. and you're thinking, well, what is the literal truth here? Because the person telling me this isn't really the person there purporting to be. They are themselves a walking shadow.

And that's a bit like metaphor, it gets. As soon as you, as it were, stop it just working on you and you try and watch it doing its work on you. Some very, very complicated and interesting things. How long... Why do we find the first metaphors in literature? Well, you know, we have our metaphor for firstness, don't we? the big bang, and I don't think

there was a big bang of metaphor. I think what's certainly wherever you look, and certainly in the earliest written records that we have at all, metaphors are already at work. Gilgamesh is the first really sustained piece of writing, survives in

many, many different fragments, mostly baked tablets. Around 2000 BC, writing had arisen in the area in which Gilgamesh was written around 2,500 BC, in that particular area between the Euphrates and the Tigris in what's now southern Iraq. Gilgamesh is the epic of somebody who goes off to find the secret of immortality. And just before he does, he's told he must stay awake for seven days and nights. He fails to stay awake

And sleep is said to steal on him Like a soft mist Or like soft wool That settles on his eyelids Very beautiful kind of metaphor I suspect the beginning of metaphor Is actually probably in thinking about dreams Tomahili

The first important writer Is the Greek epic poet Homer 8th century BC, 7th century And he may not have been a person But a committee or whatever it is How did he harnesses? the power of metaphor. I think in a

variety of ways, and I'd like to focus probably on two. The first is that he very much reminds us of the Homeric poems origins in oral, in the oral tradition. And so

one of the things that he will constantly do is to use metaphoric formula so that in the Odyssey, for instance, we continuously have the Don referred to as a rosy-fingered. and this helps in some way the poet to be able to repeat lines to establish with an audience that is listening a means of following through a certain line of thought without having to be original constantly. It also, I think, reflects the way that antiquity saw the supernatural and the natural as extremely closely intertwined. So dawn is continuously presented as a goddess.

So what we would think of as simply the indifferent act of physical forces that cause the sun to rise becomes an act of agency, a goddess who returns light to the world. The natural supernaturalism. As they're called words of spirituality is described as that. Indeed, and this becomes very important for later and particularly romantic thought. But the way that metaphor releases us fundamentally into thinking about, our relation with the world as a whole and characterising it. Secondly, and from a literary point of view, what Homer is much more important as,

is introducing the idea of what are called off an epic similes, which are much more extended metaphors, which go over a variety of lines and build an image, which, again, is supposed to amplify a substantiator, give a context to a listener or a reader to emotionally grapple with things which may in other circumstances they find in different or remote. Could you give us an example, then? Indeed.

But what I was going to say, too, is that importantly in Homer, there is a type of seeming digressive element. So at the beginning of book three of the Iliad, the Trojans and the Greeks are preparing for battle. And the Trojans are presented as very loud and clamoring, like flocks of birds, like flocks of cranes. The Greeks, on the other hand, are presented as silent. and Homer has this wonderful image where he says,

they're rather like the way, they come on rather like the way that a mist sweeps in over a mountain. And then there's this rather interesting digressive element, which he said, which shepherds fear but thieves like. And that this, so the Greeks came on in a cloud of dust. Now, this is fascinating because you wouldn't think, at this point in the poem, that Homer would wish to associate the Greeks with thieves.

After all, they're supposed to coming into Troy to make restitution for a theft. And this introduces a rather startling aspect into the poem that causes the reader something to halt, to reconsider what may be established parameters of what they're thinking about in relation to the two sides, the context of the poem as a whole. And that's the way metaphor often works. The classical world largely, as Steve mentioned,

sought as a type of substitution and they particularly tended at least the theoretical writers tended to feel that it was most successful when we hardly noticed it. But Homer often makes us notice it very dramatically and that's the other side of metaphor that holds us up that tries to reconstitute

how we think about a particular object and this becomes then part of an inheritance particularly within the epic tradition that's taken up by figures in our own traditions particularly by Milton and very successfully. Can you briefly tell it, give us an epic simile from Milton? Yes, I mean, there's a wonderful one in book nine

where Satan first encounters Eve, who he wants to tempt and corrupt and destroy. But he's so overcome by her beauty that he's rendered sort of stupidly dumb. And then Milton goes on to a long simile where he compares this as one who has left the pent-up populous city of London, moved into the countryside,

and seen a fair milk, made. And so there's on one hand a comparison of pastoral innocence as opposed to urban depravity, better air, eco-friendly, all of this. On the other hand, what the metaphor also does in an unsettling way is to bring us to feel something that we can immediately respond and understand to actually recognize that we may share Satan's temptations. What is our view towards this milk made? Are we enthralled by her because we wish to corrupt her? Are we innocent? Is there such a thing as innocence? And that again deepens, changes, transforms our thinking about the particular context of those lines

and our relation with the poem as a whole. Julie Sanders, in the Middle Ages, there's another sort of metaphor, came to dominate, which allegory is very important to medieval writers. Can you bring that into the conversation? Absolutely. I think what you get in the medieval period is, I suppose what I would call this kind of extended form of metaphor where it's sustained across the whole text where in a sense the whole landscape or environment of the poems

become allegorical. I mean I think metaphor's still operating at that local level as well and there's sorts of kinships with the hermeric similes and epithets that Tom's just been talking about if you look at the Anglo-Saxon text, something like Beowulf with its kennings as they're called, these compressed metaphors, very much based though in experiential world again,

in the natural world, We're talking about the way away as the sea and the swan way as the river. You can see the logic of it, but it's still poetic. It's still taking it to a heightened form. Though, of course, again, Beowulf, too, in its wider landscape, I think is operating as a metaphor in total. There's a kind of psychic spiritual landscape to that poem with the monsters and the dragons who invade the protected space, the built environment of the castle,

from that dangerous world outside. And as you move through the medieval period, I think if you come to kind of key texts like William Langlands, Piers Plowman, or the illiterative poems like Garwain and the Green Knight, again, you see this sense of the allegorical landscape, the psychic and spiritual landscape. Often, and it's interesting how often the metaphor of the journey has already come into our discussion.

Can you just take us a bit more slowly through the psychic landscape and tell people how this relates to metaphors, which is what we're discussing? So, I mean, for example, if we take Gawain in the Green Knight, Garwain is sort of challenged to a wager by the Green Knight, this monstrous green figure who appears in the church. A year and a day later, he is to ride out into the barren landscape, into the wilderness, to confront this kind of psychic other as it. It's what we fear.

It's as if these figures, and there's a folkloric figure, the green man, the wild man of the woods, embodying, if you like, the anxiety of what might be out there beyond the safe confines of home, of heart, out into the wilderness. So all this is a metaphor for the society that they're living in? A metaphor for the society in which they're living, I think also a metaphor for interiority. So you can see in some ways in which Garwain's fears are projected onto this harsh, cold, barren landscape. Alternatively, in something like Pierce Plowman, I think the landscape does become, as you say,

a kind of metaphor for wider society, a field of folk tilling their land, becomes a way of speaking not just about agricultural labour, but about the bigger spiritual landscape in which we are all working furrowing. ploughing our fields. Can you relate the... Tom gave us some indication of the way that Homer and then touched on, Milton was using Mantepause. Can you relate

what you've been talking about to what Tom was talking about? Is there a thread that joins these together? Absolutely. I mean, I think it is about Motifera is always working at this local and this wider level and that's as true as the crane comparisons in the

Homeric examples as it is here. So there are examples very local examples of metaphor in these texts where something is compared to an untended cottage where the fire has got smoky and that becomes a way of talking about the unkempt soul, the uncared for interiority but also then on the bigger picture these landscapes, these journeys, brilliantly I think in the Sir Gawain poem, the metaphor of the hunt, all kinds of ways. What's the metaphor of the hunt telling the listeners? The hunt I think very often used as a metaphor for courtship, as a metaphor for love and

passion, the pursuing of the particular quarry, often feminized, of course, though in interesting ways in Garwein, the gender is slipping in the way that that hunt is represented. And that we see picked up both as a very local metaphor through later Renaissance poetry and as a bigger thematic metaphor for texts. Steve Conner, one of the key figures in the history of metaphor, as I understand it, is Edmund Spencer, the poet Edmund Spencer. And, excuse me, how does his epic poem, The Fairy Queen?

take on metaphor and maybe even develop it. Yes. I mean, this is a very good link with the medieval world because Spencer draws, first of all, on Arthurian legend for this huge and unfinished allegorical poem and reaches back into that tradition and connects with it. The Fairy Queen is a poem in a sense not about anything except the nature of virtue itself. taking the framework of the Arthurian legends of Arthur and his knights,

Spencer puts together a poem in praise of the fairy queen, Gloriana, who is in fact Elizabeth I first, and embodies various kinds of virtues in a number of different knights. There is, for example, Article, who embodies the principle of justice. He has a sort of robot, a metal man called Talas, who swings a phyllis, who swings a fearsome flail and without mercy. He's really justice without mercy. And the point about the fairy queen is that here metaphorical comparison

has become so systematic, has become a world, as it were, on its own, that that act of translation back, of buttoning back the metaphor to what it's meant to mean, at times becomes almost impossible. You know, you're lost in a kind of a thick, of what you suspect is metaphorical, but you really can't quite name the literal. So how far are these, let's call them conceits for the moment, how far are they telling us things that otherwise could not be told

about the fairy queen, Gloria Anna, Queen Elizabeth I first? I think that that in a way is always both the opportunity and the risk of metaphor, that you start on a metaphorical track, which is running along, you know, you've sort of derailed from the literal and you run along a parallel rail, but you know that rail can then go off into sidings. But metaphor always gives us this paradoxical sense of an invented truth. Can you give us an example from the very great?

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think in the case, you know, to stick with Artigal and Talas here, you have the idea of justice given out without mercy, as it were, mechanically. So you have the metal man who simply, you know, he's a terminator. He simply, you know, puts people to death if they have done wrong. In the end, actually, in a nice little kind of twist, he refuses to rescue article who finds himself in prison because he's justly in prison.

He's done something wrong. So even his own kind of servant, there what's happening is metaphor is turning into narrative. And that's always a tendency in metaphor. Even when you're having an argument with somebody and they start off on a metaphor, you find yourself arguing in the terms of the metaphor, rather in terms of what's being metaphorised. Tom, I know you're trying to get in, but while you're coming,

can you explain, Spencer explained his method in a letter to his friend Walter Raleigh. What does it say? Well, taking up some of the senses of covering and difficulties that Steve has been talking about, Spencer says that the poem is a dark conceit that its design he says is to teach us or to teach a gentle or a virtuous man a gentle or a restraining man the arts of virtue

and that sense of virtue is often very very complex now in the example that Steve has just given there is on one hand a type of larger relation to our spiritual entity or our relation even our self-government of how we look after ourselves. But that particular example, Spencer makes it very clear that the area that Callas is decimating

and bringing serious justice to is Ireland. And there is a commentary here on how Elizabethan policy towards Ireland should be pursued, which is much more vigorous, repressive, than what Elizabeth and her counsellors wished. So Spencer is intervening into a rather delicate political position through suggesting that the moral, the virtuous thing to do

rests in our understanding of the range of how this metaphor works. It's not just particularly a specific act of practical statecraft. It has whole ramification for the health of the nation, the spiritual as well as

political health of the nation. What about I'd just let it do, Walter Roe. Well, the letter is ostensibly a private letter, but clearly designed to be printed and circulated with the book. So it's a type of public letter. And really what Spencer tries to do in it is to outline what he sees as the whole scope of the fairy queen,

the way that he will go through each book. And he talks about the nature of Arthur and the importance of Arthur. And one of the things that he's clearly trying to do is to say, what is the relationship between our present world, the world of Elizabeth I first, and Gloria Anna's world, the world of the fairy queen, which Prince Arthur, this legendary, but to most Elizabethans, more of a historical figure, quasi-historical figure, are we an exact mirror of this? Is history repeating itself? Is this a new Arthurian moment of glory that

Elizabeth represents? Or is it a false image? Is it a false image? Is, is, is, the parallel not hold. As we investigate what goes on in the fairy queen and the way that Prince Arthur and the fairy queen herself, who we never meet in Spence's poem, who's always absent from it, which she just talked about, she never appears as a character. Are these actually a means by which we recognise that our own era, that is the era of Elizabeth in England, is diminished, is in fact a false representation, is a declined world? Or should we see that it is a renewal, a moment of new English glory. Julie, Ney, we started, I started the programme, quoting from Shakespeare,

and a lot of people say he was a past master of the metaphor. Can you tell us what attitudes he has to it, if we can take, in the sonnets, first of all? Well, I mean, Shakespeare, as you rightly indicate, is such a vibrantly metaphorical writer. And it takes us back to a point, I think, Tom. was making earlier about the way in which metaphors deployed to try and encompass to understand, to comprehend really difficult, abstract ideas. So in the sonnets in particular, you've got these recurring themes of death and love and aging and passion. And what Shakespeare finds, I think, is this amazing kind of treasury of metaphors to kind of explore that. Well, for example, if we think

about Sonnet 2, so very early in the sequence where he's thinking about, looking at a young lover and imagining what the ageing process will do to them, the lines that will be writ quite literally upon a face by time. But it's an image of, again, of agricultural metaphors. When 40 winters do besiege thy brow and dig deep trenches in thy beauty's fields. A sort of wonderful image of the faces of field on which time kind of digs its spade and makes its mark. and these images then recurred and are reworked and repeated and reconfigured through the whole sequence. Lots of images about warring with time and time personified as a tyrant, as a devouring beast, as a thief, very, very resonant images and ideas.

But I think as well, I mean, what interests me about what Shakespeare is doing with metaphor is that I keep using these words like remaking and reconfiguring, because I think what he's doing is not somehow devising something completely novel. He's taking what's already very rooted in the kinds of literary traditions we've been hearing about in actually the kinds of everyday figures of speech that Steve kind of began us with. But what he does is he builds upon that. He re-sculps that. He remakes that in all kinds of vibrant ways. Is there any sense in which there's something in metaphor which is presupposes a sacramental view of life

and the idea is to find the spirit in matter? Does that enter into it at all? I think it does for some reasons. I almost want to see something different going on with shapes. I also think it's about grounding it in reality, which is why I sort of go back to this sense of it being rooted in the everyday. I think there is a kind of there's a spiritual reflection going on. But when in something like Sonnet 130, which many people will know,

my mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun, on the surface he would seem to be completely undoing, deconstructing metaphor. I don't think it's quite that. Well, can you just continue with that? Because it's a very good example. So we've got the first line. Can we have a few more lines and then you talk about?

For example, I mean, he's obviously working his way through all the traditional ways in which kind of feminine beauty is idealised. But he says, I grant, I never saw a goddess go. My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground. And it's that groundedness. I mean, it's actually embodied in that very particular metaphor. It's real feet on real earth. And it's about what he's challenging.

I think there is false compare, when metaphor kind of gets out of control and reining it back in, buttoning it back as a feeling. phrase that Steve used earlier? Tom Haley, does he... Is there any sense of a different use of metaphor in the dramatic works? Julius talked about the sonnets. There is a lot of overlap

because Shakespeare in his poetry is also dramatic. But in the plays, metaphor is placed within a dramatic context in which, as Steve in his discussion about the Lady Macbeth episode, very vividly pointed out, we're aware of an actress or an actor

delivering these lines. that changes our relation with the metaphor. And Shakespeare is often very good within the play, about often dealing with extensive metaphors, which he then places in a dramatic situation that we're asked to consider from, again, this rather different perspective. So in Coriolanus, for instance, he has a very long comparison at the beginning

where Rome is perishing of hunger, crops have failed. And this patrician figure called Meninius, gets up and gives a very long description about the importance of the patricians to the state through a comparison of the body being fed by the belly. So he says, the patricians are like the belly. We seem to have no purpose particularly to the body as a whole, but we distribute the health to all the other parts of it.

Now, as Julie mentioned, this is not a new comparison. This builds on long-established correspondence. correspondence and trips that deal with the body and the state. There is an interesting shift in making the belly, the center of things, but it is an extraordinary parable or fable, extended conceit, to give to a crowd of people who are starving, who do not have any food. And one of the things that Shakespeare, I think, brings attention to in this,

is it's very effective, the crowd disperses, is that actually how metaphor works is not necessarily, our intellectual and considered reasonable responses, but how we respond in often a more emotional sense, the way in which we are disposed, therefore, to feel towards a particular action, in this case, in ways that you might not expect. Yes, Tom just pointed out, Steve Conner,

he just pointed out in the extended metaphor, though, which is taking up the Homeric notion, and we all the world's stage, which we'd like to go to. That's 27 lines, by the... the time he's finished with that metaphor. And did that, the idea of extending the metaphors, playing with it, how do it affect the metaphysical poets? Can you bring in one or two and one of two examples?

I mean, I'd like to say as a kind of way into that, that one of the things that Shakespeare does is also in a dramatic context to show metaphors, as it were, bubbling up and breaking down, take arms against a sea of troubles. How do you do that? You know, it's no good to take arms against it. That's the point of the metaphor. Well, isn't he using it?

Hold on just a second. Isn't he using sea in the sense of ocean in sense of a mighty force? So he's not using sea as water. Obviously you can't take up arms and wade into the sea and slash the sea unless you're conute or whoever. But he isn't using sea as sea. So I don't think that's silly. Well, it's not. Inside the metaphors, that is another metaphor, isn't it? That's right.

And this is something that is precisely welling up. And, you know, it seems to me that Shakespeare is showing a metaphor in form. there are lots of metaphors that don't ever quite get articulated, the deep, dark, backward and abysm of time from Winter's Tale. It's a very, very complicated thing that scarcely, even grammatically, holds together. I think that that increasing self-consciousness about metaphor is what gets taken up in perhaps the next generation of metaphysical poets in the first half of the 17th century,

a sense that metaphor is likely to get you into paradoxes, that you mean, you know, metaphor is not to be thought of as to be rationally explicated. If you think of Marvell's wonderful dialogue between the soul and the body, you have the soul who begins to. Which is what I was saying about the sacramental idea before. Yes, indeed. I mean, in some sense, the soul and the body, that central conundrum is behind every metaphor, really. Perhaps every metaphor gives a kind of body to something abstract or otherwise unthinkable.

Marvell begins that poem The Words of the Soul complaining, Oh, who shall from this dungeon raise a soul enslaved so many ways? And then the soul, imagining the body as a dungeon, starts to imagine itself as a body imprisoned in a dungeon, which is, of course, an impossible notion, but fantastically expressive. So, you know, blinded with an eye, deaf with the drumming of an ear.

You imagine Marvell must have had tinnitus at some time in his life, fettered in feet and manacled in how. You know, you can only be manacled if you've got hands, but the soul is manacled by the fact that the soul has got hands. So, you know, the metaphor is both very immediate and yet also very generative of paradoxes, that it's kind of hard to get out of if you're trying to provide a rational explication.

And one thing that the medic physicals did, others did, but let's stay with them here for a moment, was to shock with metaphor. And so can we bring in John Dunn in this regard? Don's a wonderful example in terms of that generative energy that comes from the surprise, the novelty. You quoted Samuel Johnson towards the start of the programme being a sort of sense of that nature and up were being ransacked

for these particular metaphors in Dunn's extended conceits. He's grabbing from the new science, the new geography. And there's a strangeness, particularly talking, for example, about love in that way, a valediction-forbidding morning which compares lovers to the pair of compasses so famously as stiff twin compasses the lovers are but it also makes sense as you work through

but it's this labour you have to work at these more creative, more novel, more inventive metaphors and there's a kind of energy I think in that journey that the reader or the listener is taken on in having to unpack, make sense try and unpick these complicated metaphors. Can you give us an example?

So, I mean, if we turn to Dunn's holy sonnets, for example, where again I think he is building on all of the traditions we've been talking about in all kinds of ways. But to suddenly, for example, in batter my heart, three-person God, to think of the body as the ransacked castle or the usurped town, familiar images from Homer, from Spencer, from many texts that we've already cited, but to suddenly that interiority of battling with your personal God, your God literally invading the, the, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, of the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the. the town, the body. But inviting it to be here. Inviting it to be. Inviting to be battered. That's astonishing invitation that comes through the unpacking of the metaphor. And they are shocking and they're also deeply engaging and deeply energising.

And it's that active reader. I think, you know, we're beginning to think about here what metaphor does and why it does. It goes back to those emotions that Tom invoked. Tom, in the century after the metaphysical, sorry to gallop on a bit, there was a violent reaction against their work. What was going on there? Well, metaphor, as we've discussed, works on the principle of analogy. It brings things often dissimilar things together,

and it creates this type of energy that opens things up. The world of science increasingly found such analogous, metaphoric language, very unstable. They wanted to order, to describe, to characterize the world Life as it really was. Life as it really was. And when we think of the 18th century, it's a great era of classification.

And metaphor doesn't help when you're trying to classify things. So there was a movement towards a greater emphasis upon reasonable literalness. And metaphor when it then exists, even within poetry, is seen to be, should be seen in much more decorous type of ways. Dr. Johnson has wonderful, his definition, of metaphor in the dictionary is the application of a word to a use which in its original import

it cannot be put. So there is a sense almost of that this is actually slightly indecorous. It's violating the language. It's violating the language. It's moving in a way that actually is doing harm

to the language and not creating sensation that doesn't actually ground us in reasonable, lasting, permanent thought. And very much the... And searched for a different sort of knowledge brought to bear then, wasn't it? Yes.

That this was a different way to arrive at truths, and we didn't need those, so we could go a different way. We could go through experimental observation in that particular direction. Exactly. I mean, interestingly, in reaction to the 18th century, Shelley characterises, I think, this very very... He says reason is about the language of distinctiveness. So reason attempts to create a very determined, precise way that language can be used. Metaphor, imagination, as he says, is about similitude.

It creates these links across things that are inherently and creates instability, which reason doesn't like. Did Steve Conner, did Dickens change the way? metaphors were used or re-energize it? I think that what Dickens, along with other 19th century novelists, attempts to do in his huge, sprawling, compendious, inclusive novels, is to generate metaphors, as it were, for the work of the novel itself. And the work of a novel like Bleak House, 1851 to 3, is, in a sense, to provide a kind of imaging of England.

This is the great vocation of the novel. And how do you do that? and at the same time pay attention to the sheer complexity, and in Dickens' views, the chaos of things. Well, you find a metaphor that will actually connect people through their disconnectedness from each other. And that wonderful metaphor at the beginning of Bleak House and it runs through the novel, renewed and transformed,

is fog. Fog everywhere. And fog is everywhere, and it touches everybody, and it connects it. From the Kentish Heights. From the Kentish Heights to the little, the little ship's boy, you know, down at the end of the... In the coloist bunker.

And it's everywhere and especially it's in the heart of England in the courts of justice, the courts of chancery. And fog touches everything, connects everybody and also disconnects them because they can't see. So it's an absolutely brilliant metaphor. Dickens, I don't think, was a self-conscious metaphorical writer. That's to say he had a kind of inkling. But then what he did was improvise.

The metaphor itself, you know, starts to generate the thinking. But he also liked to call people by what they did, didn't he? I mean, boots and whatever it was. Yes, that's right. And, you know, people who are kind of reduced to a single kind of aspect. Raymond Williams says that Dickens' vision is that of the sudden glance in the street. You just capture, you know, capture one kind of aspect of somebody.

That kind of radical reductiveness. Julie Sanders, how does Virginia Woolf come into this conversation? I was really nice because the Dickens that Steve has been presenting in a novel like Bleak House is someone I think trying to use metaphor to come to terms of this fast-changing, fast-emerging urban landscape and Wolf, who herself is a great reader of so many of the figures we're talking about, but Shakespeare and Dickens and Dunn in particular, is dealing in the 1920s with her own response to the city to London in place, particular and thinking about it in that post-Great War moment and what it might be and what it

might become and what you get in in Mrs. Dalloway for example set on a June day in 1923 I think are a series of individual responses to the city through metaphor. Clarista in particular uses the metaphors of water and ocean seas of people ebbs and flows streaming down the strand particularly kind of resonant image but you have other characters who use different kinds of metaphorical caches. And I think what she starts to unpack there is that we all use metaphor, metaphor as pervasive, but we also have individual storehouses of metaphor, which become a key to our own identity, our own way of thinking, our own ways of perception. Tom, do you want to come in here? Yes, I was going to say that one of the things that I think

interestingly starts happening with modernism in the 20th century is that we go back in a way to the world of the metaphysicals, and they love metaphors which seem shocking and clash, which ask us to re-invisage how reality might be constituted. So Elliot, thinking about the evening sky as a patient etherized on a table, and it's an extraordinary comparison that no one is really quite sure exactly what he means, and yet we have a sense of how we might work towards some understanding. So I think there is a fascinating way in which modernism moves us, in re-establishing the centrality of metaphor.

Wallace Stevens wonderfully says that reality is a cliche which metaphor helps us escape from. And it also emphasizes that centrality of language to the way that we construct and organize the world. Steve Conner, in the last two centuries, academics have moved in and talked about, discussed the role of metaphor, the role it plays in our lives as well as in our literature.

Can we take one of these, the German philologist Max Muller in the 19th century. What did he have to say and why do you think it... His theory was... Really he brings his attention to bear in a systematic way, systematic for him meaning using the new science of language, on myths, mythology. And he called mythology a disease of language.

And the theory was this, that originally, and originally means among the peoples of the Indus Valley, discourse took the form of metaphorical rather proverbial utterances that mostly referred to celestial phenomena. Mueller seems to imagine people turning to each other and saying things like the charioteer drives his flocks across the sky, meaning the sun and the clouds. These expressions got forgotten and misunderstood,

at least their metaphorical import got misunderstood. From that grows the tangled thicket of metaphors. of, sorry, of myths. These myths then do our thinking for us. So Mueller is a rationalist, really of a very old-fashioned kind, looking back to these worries of the late 17th century in the 18th century,

that somehow metaphors are clouding our thought. And interestingly, he actually thought that the central meaning of all myths was the sun. And what he was trying to do as it was, was to clear the light of intelligence from the clouds of the myths that surrounded it. Is there any consensus these days, Tom Haley, about how metaphor works?

No consensus. There's never any consensus in a subject that spans quite a large number of disciplines of thought. I mean, metaphors increasingly become the province of psychoanalyst, linguists, a whole range of figures outside traditional literary or other forms of human scholarship. What I think has, where there is more interest in consensus, is something Steve started by alluding to,

and that is the very fundamental nature of the way that language works and language's relation to the world. Generally, up until certainly the 19th century on the whole, metaphor was thought largely as a type of embellishment. It was a substitution. It worked as replacing one thing by another. In the 20th century, metaphor becomes much more central. Metaphor, in a sense, becomes how language works.

It's not an addition to language. It is the very nature of how language operates itself. So we've moved, in the 17th century, at the end of the 17th century, there was a movement to reduce the, seeming impact of metaphor, its instability. The 20th century has recognised that language itself, by its very nature, is unstable. Wittgenstein, particularly in its philosophical investigations, comes to recognise that language is essentially a variety of games,

and that works on this model that metaphor is central to. Julie, kindly. Recent scholarship, I suppose, cognitive theory, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics are all deeply concerned with metaphors. In the end, I think they're not so far apart. They bring us back to what we've been talking about here, which is how it engages us, how it works on us, how it works out emotions, our bodies and our minds.

Well, thank you all very much. Thanks to Julius Sanders, Steve Connor and Tom Haley. Next week we'll be talking about Cleopatra, the last pharaoh to rule ancient Egypt. And thank you very much for listening. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research.

To find out more, visit bbc.co.com.uk forward slash radio four.