A Time for the Humanities: Futurity and the Limits of Autonomy

4. Articulation and the Limits of Metaphor

61 c h a p t e r 4 Articulation and the Limits of Metaphor Ernesto Laclau 1 In a well-known essay, Gérard Genette discusses the question of the interdependence between metaphor and metonymy in the structuration of Proust’s narrative.1 Following the pathbreaking work of Stephen Ullmann,2 he shows how, on top of the central role traditionally granted to metaphor in Proust’s work, there are other semantic movements of a typical metonymic nature whose presence is, however, necessary for metaphor to succeed in its figural effects. A hypallage such as “sécheresse brune des cheveux” [the brown dryness of hair3 ]—instead of “sécheresse des cheveux bruns” [the dryness of brown hair]—would be a typical example of such metonymical displacements. Genette, however, insists from the very beginning that it is not a simple question of recognizing the coexistence of both metaphor and metonymy in the Proustian text, but of showing how they require each other: how without the one shading into the other, neither of them could play the specific role that is expected from them in the constitution of a narrative economy. In his words, “far from being antagonistic and incompatible , metaphor and metonymy sustain and interpenetrate each other, and to give its proper place to the second will not consist in drawing a concurrent list opposed to that of metaphors, but rather in showing the 62 Articulation and the Limits of Metaphor relations of ‘coexistence’ within the relation of analogy itself: the role of metonymy within metaphor.”4 Genette gives several examples of such interconnection. Thus, he refers to the numerous cases in which “bell tower” (clocher) is metaphorically (analogically) related to “ear [of wheat or corn]” (épis), or to “fish,” depending on the environment of the church—rural in the first case, and maritime in the second. This means that the spatial relation of contiguity is the source of metaphoric analogical effects: “Ear–bell tower” (meule–église [literally: haystack–church]) in the middle of the fields, “fish–bell tower” near the sea, “purple–bell tower” over the vineyards, “brioche–bell tower” at the time of the sweets, “pillow–bell tower” at the beginning of the night— there is clearly in Proust a recurrent, almost stereotyped stylistic scheme, which one could call chameleon–bell tower (caméléon–clocher). Thus, there is a sort of resemblance by contagion. The metaphor finds its support in a metonymy. Quoting Jean Ricardou, Genette enounces the principle, “qui se ressemble s’assemble (et réciproquement).”5 Many more examples of this essential solidarity between contiguity and analogy are given: that between autochthonous dishes and vin de pays; between paintings and their geographical framework; between the desire for pheasants and their rural milieu; between relatives; between images succeeding each other in diegetic metaphors; between landscapes and their re- flection in the windows of a library, etc. In all these cases we see that, without the mutual implication between metaphor and metonymy, it would be impossible to ensure the unity of a discursive space. Proust himself was only partially aware of this mutual implication and tended to privilege its metaphorical side. As Genette says, The indestructible solidarity of writing, whose magic formula Proust seems to be looking for (“only metaphor can give a sort of eternity to style,” he will say in his article on Flaubert) cannot only result from the horizontal link established by the metonymical trajectory; but one cannot see how could it result from just the vertical link of the metaphoric relation either. Only the crossing of one by the other can subtract the object of the description, and the description itself from “time’s contingencies,” that is, from all contingency ; only the mutual crossing of a metonymic net and a metaphoric chain ensures the coherence, the necessary cohesion of text.6 Let us see how this crossing takes place. Central to it is the structure of “involuntary memory.” Apparently we have, in the mechanism of reminiscence , the case of a pure metaphor, devoid of any metonymic contamination (the taste of the Madeleine, the position of the foot on the uneven Ernesto Laclau 63 pavement, etc.). But the punctual character of that analogical memory is immediately overflown. As Genette shows, it is only retroactively that the analysis finds that reminiscence starts from an analogy that it would isolate as its “cause.” “In fact, the real experience begins, not by grasping...