Archetypal Analogies in the Language of Criticism

ARCHETYPAL ANALOGIES IN THE LANGUAGE OF CRITICISM M. H. ABRAMS T HE task of analysing the nature and function of metaphor has traditionally been assigned to the rhetorician and to the critic of literature. But metaphor, whether alive or moribund, is an inseparable element of all discourse, including discourse whose professed purpose is neither persuasive nor aesthetic, but descriptive and informative. Metaphysical systems, in particular, are fundamentally metaphorical systems, as Professor Stephen Pepper has recently shown in some detai1.1 Even the languages of the natural sciences cannot claim to be literal, although thei; key terms often are not recognized to be metaphors until, in the course of time, the general adoption of a new analogy yields· perspective into the nature of the old. And in the criticism of poetry, metaphor and analogy, though less conspicuous, are perhaps no less functional than in poetry itself. What I want to do is to indicate briefly the role in the history ·of criticism of certain submerged conceptual models-what. I have called "archetypal analogies"-in helping to select, interpret, systematize, and evaluate the facts of literature.2 Let me introduce the subject with a passage from Plato, whose characteristic and self-admitted use of myth and parable makes him a convenient point of departure. One of Plato's habitual analogies is that of the reflector, either a mirror ·or water, or else that less perfect "reflection" of things that we call shadow. These he uses to clarify the inter-relations of all the items in the universe: of things to their prototypes, or Ideas; and· of imitations of things, including those in the arts, to their models in the world of sense. When, in the tenth book of the Republic~ Socrates considers the problem of the true nature of poetry, he at once introduces this analogue. The maker of an actual bed or table proceeds in accordance with the Ideas of these things. But the artist has another and easier way to make these and all other things. · What way? An ea:sy way enough; or rather, there are many ways in whkh the feat might be quickly and easily accomplished, none quicker than that of turning a mirror round and round-you would soon enough make the sun and the heavens, and the earth and yourself, and other animals and plants, and all the other things of which. we were just now speaking, in the mirror.3 And from the properties of such mirror images, Plato goes on to evolve several unflattering consequences about the character and value of art. lWorld Hypotheses (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1942); also Dorothy M. Emmet, The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking (London, 1946). · 2A more comprehensive and detailed study will he· found in my book, now nearing completion, tentatively entitled The Mirror and the Lamp: The Transition to Romantic Theories of Poetry and Art. BRepublic X. 596. Jowett's translation. 313 314 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY Ordinarily one would say that Plato introduced the mirror to illustrate a ready-formed concept of the nature of art, and the only question to be raised is whether the illustration is apt. But there is another reasonable question, and this is the one I wish to emphasize in this paper, not: "How apt is the analogy to the concept?" but: "To what extent may the concept have been generated from the analogy?" Many expository analogues are indeed, as standard rhetorical theory proposes, passing and illustrative; but some few, at least, seem recurrent and constitutive, not merely illustratiye: they yield the. ground-plan and essential structural elements of a literary, or other, theory. By the same token, they select and mould those "facts" which a theory comprehends. For facts are facta, things made as much as things found, and made in part by the analogies through which we look at the world as through a lens. "I wonder," Coleridge once remarked, "why facts were ever called stubborn thmgs? ... Facts, you know, are not truths; they are not conclusions; they are not even premisses, but in the nature and parts of premisses."" Any new area for investigation, so long as it lacks prior concepts to give it structure and an...