Literature and the Question of Philosophy Book

I had never heard of this book before, or its author. Now, that might not sound terribly surprising, but I have been reading quite a lot about semiotics lately. Anyway, I was at Readings and they had 'Routledge Classics' on a three-for-two sale and this was one of them on the table.

This utterly changed (and very much for the better) with Chapter Three, Semiotics as a Theory of Reading. What he does here with Blake's London is really lovely - and worth reading all on its own if you only have the wind for a dozen or so pages. This isn't about giving a 'new interpretation' to a poem that has been extensively interpreted before - rather, what he does is look at a number of contradictory interpretations of the poem - particularly in how they resolve (in opposite ways) some of the mirrorings that occur in the poem - the soldier and palace walls, the chimney sweep and church walls, the harlot and the marriage hearse, and he complicates the interpretations so as to help show why a remarkably simple poem has no reading that is really all that 'simple'.

For instance, most people read the stanza with the chimney sweep and the blackening churches being appalled as a criticism of the Church - which, I admit, I've always read just as that. But this is a reading that is hard to justify from the actual text itself. Which, I'm not going to pretend, I was quite taken aback by. You really do need to read more stuff into the poem than is explicitly there to make that reading. Like I said, that has always been my reading, and it is likely to remain my reading of that stanza, but I'm much less confident in my reading now than I was. And that is a really good thing, I think.

The ten or so pages from about page 75 where London is quoted in full are really worth reading - just wonderful.

The other chapter of this that blew me away was Chapter 10. Look, I've read lots and lots about metaphor over the years. It's just one of those things that keeps coming up in my reading. Borges's lectures on Poetics, Metaphors We Live By, a lovely book about Poetry and Metaphor - so, I wasn't expecting to be surprised here. But this was particularly interesting and super clever. It starts by asking where are there so many conferences and books today on metaphor, but also points out that the idea of there being, say, a conference on synecdoche or simile seems odd to the point of being a joke. Why is that? What's so special about metaphors?

The thing is that metaphors are like an advertisement years ago for a board game called Othello (a moment to learn, a lifetime to master). And part of the problem is that metaphors aren't as easy to spot as we like to imagine or have been taught to expect. For instance, at high school when we were introduced to them by some jaded English teacher we were probably taught their meaning in opposition to similes. If you say 'like', it's a simile; if you don't, it's a metaphor. He is like a lion, simile - he is a lion, metaphor. Simplicity itself. The problem is that metaphors have a habit of stopping being obvious. Did you know, for instance, that 'develop' is from Middle English and from Old French and means to unfold - sort of the opposite of envelop. And this original meaning sort of remains in its current meaning - to develop is a kind of unfolding in the sense we expect what is developing to 'already be there' in a sense. Metaphors 'die', as Orwell liked to say, but it is becoming increasingly likely that virtually everything we say, particularly all our 'nouns', were probably once 'metaphors' that have now died. That we no longer see as metaphors.

The bit I liked the most was him quoting Donald Davidson at the end of the chapter about a geometrical proof being like a mousetrap. Now, he doesn't explain how the two things are alike, and that is the point. We immediately go looking for the ways in which the two things will be alike and disregard the ways they aren't at all alike. Ideas like 'surprise' and 'simplicity' seem like promising lines of attack in linking the two things that are appearing in a metaphorical connection - whereas cheese or decomposing rodents are probably less promising. And this reminded me of that lovely line from Get Smart where Max says that life is like a cumquat and someone questions him about this comparison, to which he responds by asking in a nearly outraged and surprised tone, "Life isn't like a cumquat?" It is almost as if we are programmed to need to find similes and metaphors and to find out how they 'work' (which bits 'work' and which bits we can ignore) and that we will go to enormous lengths to make sure that they do work - as if making the metaphor work is our task, rather than something that should be left for the metaphor to do for us.

I really liked this book and it was much more clear than I thought it might prove to be when I picked it up. Semiology, like linguistics, has a pretty bad name for being insanely difficult (which, when you think about it, ought to be about the best definition of irony there is). Really a nice read and very clever.