The Renaissance as Metaphor: Some Significant Aspects of the Obvious

The Renaissance as Metaphor: Some Significant Aspects of the Obvious The obvious, wrote J.R.R. Tolkien of Beowulf studies, is usudly the last thing that academics think about1 There is double relevance in citing this cautionary overstatement prefatory to an essay on the metaphor of the Rendssance. For Tolkien, the obvious point about Beowulf was that the monsters were red and central, not metaphors peripheral to an historicd epic; the critics' attitude to the metaphoricity of the monstrous was, he urged, a way of domesticating and of asserting the academic integrity of the poem (for in historicd epics metaphors should not have too prominent a place); and this was at the expense of understanding what was redly going on in it With the expression 'the Rendssance', the metaphor is obvious to dl and is certdnly thought about too little, like Grendel; and like Grendel, it seems to be a mere figurative intrusion which can be pushed to the periphery of the descriptive world of the historian when charting the historiographicd epic of the Renaissance. The metaphor might attest to the facts of the epoch, but it only intimates the more adequate understandings of the period which, we are so often told, was to be properly re-discovered in the nineteenth century. Such an epicdly whiggish view as this has amounted to something of an historiographicd orthodoxy;2 but it may have maintained the integrity of the 'autonomous epoch'3 at the expense of a more plausible explanation of what, lingdstically, was going on in the process of developing a concept of the Rendssance. An academic mythology may have been founded upon a misconception of metaphoricity. For, to suggest that the locution 'the Rendssance' represented the prior epoch which lay awdting a more adequate description, cdls forth a theory of metaphor which should raise our suspicions, just as we might dl be suspicious of stories of Old English Monsters haunting the halls of old Danish kings. As Tolkien put the monsters at the centre of Beowulf s world so the twentieth century has seen many putting metaphor much more towards the epistemologicd centre of ours. Writers as disparate as Richards, Black, Derrida, Le M a n and Ricoeur, Geertz, Chattergee and Sahlins have dl argued that metaphors can be crucial to any discriminate understanding.4 The point, *J.R.R. Tolkien, Beowulf, The Monsters and the Critics, Proceedings of the British Academy 22, 1936, 8. 2 See especially Wallace K. Ferguson's standard work, The Renaissance in Historical Thought, Cambridge, Mass., 1948. 3 Peter Gay, Style in History, London, 1974, 150. 4 I.R. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, Oxford, 1936; Max Black, Models and Metaphors, Ithaca, 1962; Jacques Derrida, La Mythologie Blanche, Rhitorique 92 C. Condren expressed so imprecisely, might be disputed, but insofar as dl discussions of metaphor have been couched in figurative language, a role for metaphor in the formation of understanding seems technically, if uninformatively to be assured. Some metaphors at least, to use Ricoeur's expression, seem to be catachrestic in that they do not simply abridge, reflect, or represent what w e know and can express in other terms; but rather they both open and foreclose on our interpretive options and help reconstitute the world that w e may know it afresh. The creation of a catachrestic metaphor, however, is only a point near the beginning of a complex process of change. As such metaphors are acclimatized within an area of attraction, as the variable options they suggest are taken up to become part of socid structures, the research possibilities they intimate become routine programmes, so they become particularly subject to reification: that is, the initidly imaginative and contingent operations of the mind are projected as prior facts with which the mind must then come to grips. In this way interpretation is run together with raw discovery. The furniture of the mind becomes the form of the world. The Pythagorean principles of enumeration, perhaps, are seen as the underlying redity of Number.5 This broad continuum from metaphor to reification I shall cdl the figurative vector and it is this as a whole which seems particularly significant for understanding the intellectud operations of a...