ABSTRACT
When I began teaching English Literature some thirty years ago, metaphor was viewed widely as a literary technique which was ornamental, which appealed to the reader’s imagination or emotions and which enriched poetic meaning. It was thought to consist of an implied comparison, in which one experience or state of affairs (the ‘topic’) was described in terms of another (the ‘source’ of the comparison), and the reader’s task was to understand the ‘grounds’ of the comparison and thereby arrive at the meaning. Thus in L.P. Hartley’s celebrated opening to The Go-Between (1953), we read: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ In this case the topic is ‘the past’, the source is ‘a foreign country’ and the fact that ‘they do things differently there’ provides the grounds for comparison. Of course, the three elements (topic, source and grounds) are not spelled out so clearly in every metaphor, and often the reader is left to infer the topic, to identify the point, aptness and range of the comparison, and to explore the tensions as well as the similarities between the topic and the source. At the heart of this conventional, Aristotelian approach to metaphor, however, is the belief that metaphors point to some literal truth, and that it is the literal truth that matters. The metaphor simply draws attention to the literal truth by expressing it in a concise or engaging way (Davidson 1978; Searle 1993).
