METAPHOR AND "MEANING"

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Toward a Theory of Creative Iconoclasm

The argument of this book proceeds on a genial confidence in the rewards to be gained by taking Milton's metaphors seriously and even literally. This is not to say that a sufficient account of a given metaphoric passage can be derived from semantic analysis of its components. Rather, this argument holds that when John Milton compares moderate Episcopal ministers to cooling stewpots whose rising lukewarm scum "gives a vomit to God himself," we accomplish little by asserting that what Milton really means is that the Almighty prefers ministers of strong religious conviction. Such a reading seeks metaphor's "meaning" everywhere but in our experience of the image itself—the reading turns away from the metaphor (in this instance, with apparent embarrassment) rather than dealing with it. In the next chapter we will take a closer critical look at Of Reformation's iconoclastic image of God sick in the kitchen. But for the moment, I wish simply to propose that the analytic process we set in motion when we seek the real meaning of metaphoric passages is flawed from its inception. Metaphor is not about "meaning." If we consider how metaphor is used and what it does, we find that its proper milieu is not meaning but affective resonance.

As my phrase "experience of the image" suggests, this study values and uses interpretive procedures derived from reader-response theory—but with significant qualifications. Ordinarily, reader-response treats "meaning" as that which is actually composed by affective resonance, as opposed to the traditional idea that meaning gives rise to affective resonance. As Stephen Greenblatt reminds us, it is indeed "impossible to take the 'text itself' as the perfect, unsubstitutable, freestanding container of all of its meanings." But the interpretive theory on which such an account of literature is based demands a radical dislocation and redefinition of "meaning" (from its traditional home in the text to a new one in experience) that burdens the reading experience itself with a presumption of endlessly reverberating epistemological implications that it does not necessarily have. If we make such a radical dislocation, intellectual responsibility demands that we ask, "In the shift of meaning from text to experience, what exactly happens to the meaning of 'meaning'?" And the way out of that quandary, as Ogden and Richards demonstrated with great erudition and irony seven decades ago, is to recognize that neither philosophers nor other seekers after wisdom should entirely be trusted with the pursuit of "meaning," for the simple reason that the term is inaccurate. Rather than a shared enterprise, pursuit of "meaning" actually consists of a miscellaneous grab bag of inquiries and concerns whose proper domains emerge only when they are given their right names: intention, value, referent, emotion, symbol, and so forth. Today we might extend and refine Ogden and Richards's list of meanings for "meaning," but we would be unwise to completely ignore or forget their precept.

It may be just such critical amnesia that underlies the misunderstanding to which reader-response criticism seems peculiarly subject. If literary "meaning" is a construct of cultures and readers rather than of texts, if "meaning" is truly no other than what "happens ... in the interaction between the flow of print (or sound) and the actively mediating consciousness of a reader-hearer," then the reductive interpreter of reader-response theory may logically conclude that there is nothing in any reader's responding consciousness that cannot be claimed as what the literary work "means"—regardless of how variously a culture's or the reader's own mediating skills may happen to be constituted. Thus, to such an interpreter, the literary text can "mean" anything or everything or nothing. This charge has been leveled against structuralist and poststructuralist analysis in general, but the charge more properly should be seen as a reaction against the reductive maneuvers of injudicious deconstructionism—overly hasty renderings of the deconstructionist theory of apprehension that concludes no text can have a fixed meaning. In its popular formulation, reductive deconstructionism's rhetoric of effacing the text (and consequently the author) sets the stage for effacing the entire experience of literary art as well.

Reductive deconstructionism's zero-sum game results from a relentless implementation of what I take to be a casual (though polemically exploitable and therefore potentially vicious) oversimplification of theory, what amounts in practice to a twofold semantic mistake: the uncritical substitution (1) of the term "meaning" for "the reading experience" and (2) of the term "text" for "interpretation of the text." In the present argument, some distinctions will therefore be maintained by the following expedients: first, I will use the term "text" to refer only to the work that the literary artist produces—not the reader, not the reading experience. Next, for the reader's experience or interpretation, I will use "experience" and "interpretation"; and for the reader, the term "reader" will be used. When we turn to the case made by Areopagitica, on the other hand, Milton's own evolving conception of the reader as a self-constituting vital text will be seen to have invigorated these terms for him in such a way as to fuse readerly activity with the iconoclastic impetus that itself constitutes, as I argue in the present theoretical chapter, the only true "meaning" of metaphor. The term "meaning," however, has come increasingly to operate, for literary criticism in general and for discourse on metaphor in particular, as an epistemological red herring. For that reason, I limit the term "meaning" to as narrowly unambiguous a circuit as I can. When possible, I avoid the term altogether. My reasons for avoiding it—indeed the term's near expendability for a study in affective theory—will become apparent as we proceed.

Meanwhile, I wish to affirm that I am deeply sympathetic to arguments that assume the primacy and centrality of the work of art itself in the artistic experience. My own iconoclastic theory of creativity, indeed, makes and depends upon that very assumption. Also, though neither theory of meaning nor metaphor theory as such is the subject of this book, my analytical procedures throughout reflect the difference between what happens when we pursue the "meaning" of Milton's metaphors and what happens when we explore their affective dimension. A sufficient account of the latter requires that we understand Milton's polemical vehemence as integral to his creative thought. Toward that end, therefore, the interpretive model provided by the present chapter's theory of creative iconoclasm will explore Milton's rhetoric on a level of affective immediacy that places his arguments in a revealing new light.

First, however, explication of the theory itself is in order....