I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World

by James Geary

  During one of Prati and Coleridge’s strolls, talk turned to the then obscure thinker Vico. Coleridge expressed an interest in Vico’s work, so on his next visit Prati lent him a copy of New Science, wherein Coleridge was afforded an intellectual banquet of his own.

  Coleridge immediately and enthusiastically embraced Vico as anticipating many of his own ideas about metaphor and the imagination. “I am more and more delighted with G. B. Vico274,” he wrote to Prati. “I should twenty times successively in the perusal of the first volume . . . have exclaimed: ‘Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixere’” (May they perish who have expressed our bright ideas before us). It was largely owing to Coleridge’s enthusiasm that Vico’s ideas became influential in England.

  Vico believed that metaphorical thought was not only essential to philosophy but intensely enjoyable, too. In The Art of Rhetoric, he suggested that the pleasure of metaphor lies in the hidden link between the source and the target, a connection Vico called the ligamen, from the Latin word ligare, meaning “to bind.” (Ligare is the etymological root of English words such as “ligament,” “ligature,” and even “religion.”) The orator, Vico wrote,

  makes beauty275 which is left to the hearer to discover; for it is present by virtue of the rational connection [ligamen] which, when the hearer discovers it, unites the extremes to allow for the contemplation of similarity and thus reveals the beauty which the orator brought to pass. Thus the hearer seems ingenious to himself and the acute saying is delightful because it is more known by the hearer than presented by the speaker.

  The ligamen links metaphors with jokes, both of which deliver the same kick of recognition. Both metaphors and jokes involve unexpected twists and violated expectations. There is an initial sense of surprise or consternation, followed by a burst of insight and closure. There is a moment when you “get” a metaphor just as you “get” a joke. And “get” is precisely the right verb, since deciphering a metaphor is no spectator sport. Readers actively retrieve a metaphor’s meaning, just as a punch line requires listeners to resolve a joke’s incongruencies for themselves.

  Metaphors thus involve a “co-operative act of comprehension276,” according to philosopher Ted Cohen, an act that involves seeking the hidden connection, the ligamen, which makes sense of the metaphor. So, though the speaker may make the metaphor, the hearer makes its meaning. Hearer and speaker are accomplices; the one unpacks what the other presents. In terms of creativity, producing a metaphor and penetrating one are almost the same act.

  Metaphors are so entertaining because of the pleasure we get from figuring them out, as in the following saying, a brilliantly condensed lesson in the uselessness of the wisdom that comes with age:

  Experience is a comb277 that nature gives to bald men.

  Or, take this description of the sound of a harpsichord by British conductor Thomas Beecham:

  Like two skeletons copulating278 on a corrugated tin roof.

  Or, how about this spectacular simile from Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee, which describes the effects of a life-long snuff habit on Granny Trill’s nasal passages:

  She had nostrils like badger-holes279.

  Each of these metaphors requires us to find the thread, however tenuous, connecting experience to bald-headed men with combs, fornicating skeletons to harpsichords, and snuff-eroded nostrils to badger holes. Once we find that thread, we scurry across it, completing the connection between these utterly unlike things. The originator has already done this high-wire act in his or her own mind. Through the metaphor, we are forced to perform the same feat. And cognitive gymnastics like this are good for us since they boost mood and sharpen mental skills.

  Researchers at Radboud University in the Netherlands showed a group of students different sets of images. One set depicted negative situations (scenes of violence, car accidents, and drug addiction) and the other depicted neutral situations (pictures of traffic, geometric shapes, and expressionless faces). After viewing the images, the students had to solve a math problem, either one that was relatively easy or one that was more difficult. Those who had seen the disturbing images and then solved the more difficult math problem reported feeling less troubled than those who had seen the same images but solved the less difficult problem.

  The Radboud research group repeated the experiment, this time using a “humorous stimulus” (i.e., a joke or a cartoon) instead of a math problem. Once again, subjects looked at neutral or negative pictures. They then looked at a joke/cartoon or a non-humorous but positive stimulus, like a picture of a father holding a newborn baby. Those who had seen the disturbing images reported feeling less troubled after reading a joke or looking at a cartoon than those who had seen the same images but then saw the man and his child.

  These studies do more than just state the obvious (jokes cheer you up) or prove the much less obvious (math cheers you up). What really cheers you up, the researchers concluded, is the effort to resolve the cognitive dissonance280 inherent in both jokes and math problems.

  A lot of cognitive effort goes into understanding jokes and solving math problems. Incongruities must be worked out, variables evaluated, inconsistencies reconciled. What jokes and math problems have in common—with each other and with metaphor—is the need to resolve cognitively dissonant elements. The greater the cognitive exertion, the researchers found, the greater the subsequent positive feelings.

  Brain scans of people laughing281—as a result of watching television sitcoms, for example, or reading cartoons from the New Yorker—show that finding something funny activates the same primal pleasure centers as food and sex. Moreover, jokes also trigger the brain regions involved in language comprehension, incongruity resolution, and association formation, the same ones needed for metaphor processing.

  Why should jokes and metaphors give such pleasure? Because we can’t stand very much ambiguity. Cognitive dissonance makes us uneasy, and for good reason—survival depends on making the world as predictable as possible. So when we figure something out, when we impose order on what seems chaotic, we heave a psychological sigh of relief. The reestablishment of coherence is largely achieved through good old pattern recognition or, as Vico would have described it, our instinctive ligamen-knitting abilities.

  One type of brain cell in particular—Von Economo cells282—seems especially skilled at detecting and resolving incongruities. Discovered by Constantin von Economo and Georg Koskinas in 1925, these cells reside primarily in the frontoinsula cortex (FI) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The latter brain region is found only in humans, the great apes, and some whale and elephant species. The FI and the ACC are active during the processing of humorous stimuli (i.e., when you get a joke), and the ACC has been associated with ambiguity and error detection283 (i.e., the resolution of cognitive dissonance).

  Von Economo cells seem to be central to our ability to quickly resolve incongruities, and may thus be central to our metaphorical abilities, too. Individuals with Asperger’s syndrome and other autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have fewer Von Economo cells than those without ASD, which might help explain why so many with ASD struggle with figurative language.

  Von Economo cells could also be crucial to how we understand mixed metaphors, those delightfully discombobulated comparisons that switch metaphorical horses in midstream. The great Roman rhetorician Quintilian warned of the dangers of the mixed metaphor:

  Above all things, care is to be taken284 . . . that whatever kind of metaphor we begin with, we conclude with the same. But many speakers, after commencing with a tempest, end with a fire or the fall of a building, an incongruity which is most offensive.

  Alas, we haven’t paid much heed to Quintilian. The New Yorker has run “Block That Metaphor285” as a recurring heading under its “Newsbreaks” rubric since 1959. Newsbreaks, often sent in by readers, are typically funny or erroneous excerpts from other publications that were originally used to fill up leftover column inches at the bottoms of stories. But they soon became popular features in their
own right. This “Block That Metaphor” headline, from Tulsa World, shows why:

  STEP UP TO THE PLATE AND FISH OR CUT BAIT286

  as does this sentence, from Our Town, N.Y.:

  The moment that you walk into the bowels of the armpit of the cesspool of crime, you immediately cringe287.

  Karyn Hollis, a professor in the English Department at Villanova University, has compiled a “Block That Metaphor288” archive of her own, culled from high school English papers. While not exactly mixed, these metaphors have certainly been excessively shaken and stirred:

  She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

  He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

  Mixed and meandering metaphors like these are so much fun because they put our Von Economo cells’ noses to the cognitively dissonant grindstone and make them sweat blood. However outlandish the comparisons may seem, we can still locate the ligamen. But because we have to look so much longer and work so much harder to find the link, these metaphors deliver even greater pleasure. To use Vico’s terminology, the metaphor is delightful because “it is more known by the hearer than presented by the speaker.”

  Absurdist literature, which also contains high levels of cognitive dissonance289, produces the same effect. Psychologists asked a panel of undergraduates to read a modified version of Franz Kafka’s short story “The Country Doctor,” a nightmarish tale of a physician who makes a bizarre house call on a sick boy and his family. One group read a version in which the narrative gradually broke down, ended abruptly with a series of non sequiturs, and was accompanied by bizarre and totally unrelated illustrations. Another group read a parallel tale that made conventional sense, contained no non sequiturs, and was accompanied by illustrations related to the story.

  Researchers then gave both groups sixty different letter strings, each of which was made up of six to nine letters, and told them that half the strings contained a pattern. Their task: identify the pattern and all the letter strings containing it. Those who had read the more absurd version of “The Country Doctor” were almost twice as accurate in their answers as those who had read the conventional story.

  The researchers concluded that the incongruities in illogical stories, like the incongruities in jokes, spur the brain to look for patterns it might not otherwise detect. The same thing happens with advertisements, which also often require us to figure them out. Presented with an absurd story, or an absurd metaphorical comparison, we want to quickly restore equilibrium, so we instinctively look for the ligamen.

  But how do we know when we’ve got hold of a good ligamen? Philosopher and self-described “devotee of metaphor290” Max Black suggested an answer.

  According to Black, a metaphor activates two thoughts of two different things at the same time, similar to psychologist Alan Leslie’s description of the way metarepresentations work. The metaphor’s meaning results from the interaction of these two thoughts. Black used one of the oldest metaphors in the book to illustrate his “interaction theory”:

  Man is a wolf.

  When we call man a wolf, Black argued, we activate complex networks of meanings related to the metaphor’s source and target. For the metaphor to make sense, we must attend to both meanings at once. The source (wolf) is not a substitute for the target (man), nor is it a fanciful embellishment. Rather, in comprehending the “Man is a wolf” metaphor, what we know of wolves interacts with what we know of man. The result: a wolf-man.

  “What is needed291,” Black wrote, “is not so much that the reader shall know the standard dictionary meaning of ‘wolf’—or to be able to use that word in literal senses—as he shall know what I will call the system of associated commonplaces . . . The important thing for the metaphor’s effectiveness is not that the commonplaces shall be true, but that they should be readily and freely evoked.” Naturally, Black provided a metaphor for how associated commonplaces work:

  Suppose I look at the night sky292 through a piece of heavily smoked glass on which certain lines have been left clear. Then I shall see only the stars that can be made to lie on the lines previously prepared upon the screen, and the stars I do see will be seen as organized by the screen’s structure. We can think of a metaphor as such a screen and the system of “associated commonplaces” of the focal word as the network of lines upon the screen. We can say that the principal subject is “seen through” the metaphorical expression—or, if we prefer, that the principal subject is “projected upon” the field of the subsidiary subject.

  So, when we read “Man is a wolf,” man is immediately seen through the prism of wolf-associated commonplaces. We zoom in on those aspects of wolves that apply to man—sly, predatory, hungry, vicious—while those aspects that do not apply—fourlegged, furry, litter-bearing, living in the woods—fade into the background.

  Metaphor is a lens that clarifies and distorts. It focuses our attention on a specific set of associated commonplaces, but in so doing also narrows our view. Experiments have provided a very clear demonstration of how Black’s model of metaphor works. In one study conducted in the United Kingdom, researchers asked participants their opinions of a certain Donald Leavis, a resident of Northern Ireland. They were given no information whatsoever about Mr. Leavis, except the metaphorical description that he was “the George Wallace of Northern Ireland293.”

  They then jotted down what they knew about George Wallace, the fiercely segregationist Alabama politician who was paralyzed from the waist down by an assassin’s bullet in 1972. They correctly noted that he was a Southern conservative, was disabled, had been married numerous times, and was a staunch opponent of civil rights.

  They then jotted down what they believed about Mr. Leavis. Eleven of the twenty-nine participants mentioned Wallace’s complicated love life when asked about him, but only two mentioned Leavis’s marital status. Similarly, twenty-four of the twenty-nine mentioned Wallace’s disability but just seven mentioned this in relation to Leavis. Nearly everyone, however, concluded that Leavis was a conservative politician with bigoted views. What the participants did not know was that Donald Leavis did not exist; he was an entirely fictional character made up by the study’s organizers. This experiment demonstrates how we use associated commonplaces to understand metaphors.

  Wallace’s conservatism and bigotry transfer well to Northern Irish politics; his antipathy toward African Americans is analogous to the antipathy of conservative Protestants toward Catholics. Wallace’s other characteristics, such as his marital troubles and his disability, are not as relevant to Northern Ireland, so they are not carried over to Donald Leavis. Leavis is “seen through” the network of associated commonplaces characteristic of George Wallace—or, if we prefer, those commonplaces are “projected upon” him. Those associations that resonate with both Leavis and Wallace are highlighted; those that don’t are blacked out.

  Whether these associated commonplaces are actually true is, as Black pointed out, irrelevant. The effectiveness of a metaphor depends not on the truth of its associations but on their easy accessibility, as the experiment with the “nation = body” metaphor showed.

  Once a metaphor aligns the stars in a specific constellation, we are primed to see things from exactly that point of view. And we seem ingenious to ourselves, and are therefore mightily pleased, when we unite the extremes that reveal the hidden similarities between source and target. Cicero identified this intellectual sleuthing as metaphor’s essential pleasure principle:

  Metaphorical terms give people much more pleasure294, if the metaphor is a good one. I suppose that the cause of this is either that it is a mark of cleverness of a kind to jump over things that are obvious and choose other things that are far-fetched; or because the hearer’s thoughts are led to something else and yet without going astray, which is a very great pleasure.

  Of course, metaphors are not always good and we can go badly astray when looking for the lig
amen. This is, in fact, what differentiates successful from unsuccessful metaphors.

  The most successful metaphors are the least expected. “Metaphorical force295 requires a combination of novelty with fitness, of the odd with the obvious,” as art historian Nelson Goodman put it. “The good metaphor satisfies while it startles.” Metaphor is a bit like alchemy in this respect; it creates novelty by combining the already familiar, not by finding the utterly new. The more distant the source (badger holes, for instance) from the target (Granny Trill’s nostrils), the more surprising and delightful the metaphor. But there has to be a conceptual tie that binds source to target. Otherwise, the result is mere surrealism.

  It is difficult to think of two things more remote from one another than nostrils and badger holes. Yet this description immediately conveys a precise and vivid image. Both orifices are roughly oval in shape; the entrances to both are dark, permitting only limited visibility; and, depending on how far you want to burrow into this particular comparison, there is an analogy to be made between nose hairs and the tree roots dangling from the roofs of badger holes. All this makes Laurie Lee’s line a successful metaphor.

  The following line, by the poet Isidore Lucien Ducasse—Comte de Lautréamont, who was born in Uruguay and moved to Paris, where he wrote one startlingly beautiful book, Les Chants de Maldoror, before dying in 1870 at the age of twenty-four—is not a successful metaphor:

  Beautiful like the accidental meeting296 of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissection table.

  An umbrella, a sewing machine, and a dissection table are about as unlikely a combination as nostrils and badger holes. But the ligamen connecting these three things is too threadbare to bear much weight. The image is vivid, but the ligamen doesn’t lead anywhere.