‘A Fling of Freedom’

In 1978, in a special issue of Critical Inquiry devoted to metaphor, American literary critic Wayne C. Booth made the striking observation that there were ‘no conferences on metaphor, ever, in any culture, until our own century was already middle-aged’, and that the intellectual movement then developing around metaphor might well constitute ‘one of the “greatest” in the history of thought’.¹ ‘Explicit discussions of something called metaphor’, Booth wrote, ‘have multiplied astronomically in the last fifty years’ – though the parameters of the term, then as now, were often loosely defined. In the forty years since, the explosion of interest in metaphor has shown no signs of abating. Across disciplines as diverse as cognitive linguistics and literary criticism, philosophy and psychology, critics and theorists have tackled the question of why we find it so appealing – in literary texts, in rhetorical speeches, in conversation and in thought – to appear to say that something is what it is not.

With the publication of Metaphor, Denis Donoghue is the latest critic to throw his hat into the metaphorical ring. Crowning a prestigious literary career spanning over half a century – with studies of Yeats, Swift, and T. S. Eliot to his name, as well as books, essays, and articles on Irish, English, and American literary history, criticism, and theory – Donoghue brings a lifetime’s critical and philosophical reflection to the table. The result is a retrospective of metaphor at once appealingly personal and almost unassailably erudite in its range.

Readers familiar with Donoghue’s previous (and, especially, recent) work will recognise the engaging, relaxed, and at times autobiographical style that characterises this book. Speaking of Beauty (2003) begins, for instance, ‘I started thinking of writing a short book on the language of beauty when, over a period of several months, I read nothing but Ruskin’ (p. 1). Metaphor similarly wastes no time in grounding Donoghue’s interest in the subject biographically. The first chapter begins ‘Figures of speech, figures of thought: I was suffused with metaphors and other figures before I knew there were such things’ (p. 13). As Donoghue himself warns, the opening chapter is ‘irrepressibly autobiographical’ – ‘it insisted’ (p. 12), apparently – and throughout the book references to Donoghue’s personal engagement with his task (he records the act of consulting the OED on various occasions, for instance) make it feel almost as if author and reader are on a journey through metaphor together.

The introduction opens with a reassuringly precise definition of metaphor taken from I. A. Richards –judged ‘good enough’, as if to suggest that Donoghue himself will provide a better one if we stick with him – according to which a metaphor is ‘a shift, a carrying over of a word from one place to another’ (p. 1). A helpful definition is given of Richards’s now famous ‘tenor’ and ‘vehicle’, coined in 1936 to refer to ‘the ordinary word that could have been used’ and ‘the unexpected one’ that ‘drives the statement in an unexpected direction’, as Donoghue puts it. He uses an illustration from Shakespeare: when Brutus claims ‘Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar | I have not slept’ (Julius Caesar II. i. 61–2), ‘whet’, more commonly used to describe the sharpening of a weapon or tool, is the metaphor’s ‘vehicle’, and ‘displaces literal verbs that could have been used’, such as ‘tempt me’, to describe the true subject, or tenor (pp. 1–2).

This gentle opening is followed, however, by a dizzying array of examples, jumping from T S. Eliot back to Shakespeare, and then from Tourneur to Seamus Heaney to Psalm 118, and pausing only briefly – and sometimes not at all – to consider the implications of each before moving on. Donoghue offers an intoxicating display of metaphors, but leaves it to us to establish precisely what is significant about them. At times he has perhaps too much faith in his readers’ ability to follow his drift; it is in the more sustained close readings, of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, for example, and Eliot...