¹ Quoted by Jones Richard Foster in “Science and English Prose Style, 1650-75,” in Seventeenth-Century Prose: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Stanley E. Fish (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 63, 62.

² See my “Peter of Spain and William of Ockham: From Metaphysics to Grammar,” The Modern Schoolman, 43 (1966), 133-41. On Bacon's struggle with his demand for concept-object correspondence, see my study Dialectical Criticism and Renaissance Literature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975), pp. 20–35.

³ Ogden C. K., Bentham's Theory of Fictions (Paterson: Littlefield, 1959), p. 15. Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things (New York: Random, 1973), pp. 17-44 et passim, analyzes the Renaissance conceptions of language-reality correspondence. Some of the difficulty of separating out literal and metaphorical meaning may be suggested by noting that the literal correspondence between verbal language and the language of things which Foucault discovers in 16th-century thought is usually treated in Renaissance literary studies as the foundation of poetic metaphors. Are such metaphors actually based on assumptions of a literalistic copy theory? And, if so, is this copy theory an elaborate metaphorical system treated as if it were literal? I.e., is the 16th-century doctrine of correspondences a metaphor treated as a literal reality or a literal reality treated as a mteaphor?

⁴ Metaphor and Reality (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1962).

⁵ Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957).

⁶ Cf. Derrida Jacques, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” New Literary History, 6 (1974), 5-74.

⁷ “The Renaissance Imagination: Second World and Green World,” Centennial Review, 9 (1965), 36-78.

⁸ See Berger, p. 52: “In a single place we find two absolutely different and physically unrelated spaces, the three-dimensional field of the picture and the two-dimensional field of the surface. Insofar as a single geometrical system may be viewed ambiguously as a set of graphic lines on a plane and a set of visual rays cutting through the plane, perspective sharpens the artist's awareness that the claims of his medium tend to divide into two opposed stylistic categories, those of surface design and those of spatial recession.”

⁹ Cf. these comments by the magister ludi, Kenneth Burke, whose tutelary spirit presides over this discussion: “Man must spontaneously recognize that his word for a thing is not that thing. . . . Thus, in general we might say: To use language properly, you must know how to discount language. (That is: You must know when something is not quite what language, taken literally, states it to be.). . . One uses metaphor without madness insofar as one spontaneously knows that the literal implication of the figure is not true. Hearing an expression like 'the hammer of his diction,' we never for a moment think that a literal hammer is involved. We language-users are too essentially 'negative-minded' for that. We spontaneously know that this ‘hammer’ is not a hammer,” “A Dramatistic View of the Origins of Language and Postscripts on the Negative,” in Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966), pp. 461–62.

¹⁰ “Commentary,” New Literary History, 6 (1974), 225.

¹¹ The following diagram may help to clarify these infolded complexities:

Don Quixote, Pt. ii (1615)

World of late 16th-century Spain

Don Quixote (character) Don Quixote, Pt. i (1605) (book)

Don Alvaro Tarfe (character) Spurious Pt. ii of Don Quixote (1614) (book)

Don Alvaro Tarfe

The spurious “sequel” to Pt. i of Don Quixote, by one Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda, was published in 1614, while Cervantes was in the process of finishing his own sequel; obviously, Cervantes saw a rare opportunity to put down his rival and increase the complex illusions of his own work at the same time.

¹² This kind of recognition led Julián Marías to attack a conception of the task of philosophy that would have it “remove . . . interpretations in order to get at the ‘naked reality’ ” (“Philosophic Truth and the Metaphoric System,” Interpretation : The Poetry of Meaning, ed. Stanley Romaine Hopper and David L. Miller, New York: Harcourt, 1967, p. 48). But as Marias says, “Reality is something that makes me make interpretations.” Consequently, he envisions philosophic systems as employing metaphorical structures in ways that are usually allotted only to fictions. Jacques Derrida more recently took the problem even further when he pointed out that the attempt to distinguish the metaphors in a philosophical text from their literal meanings is itself a philosophical enterprise. The philosophical categories through which we would study metaphors in philosophy are themselves metaphoric, and therefore part of the thing to be studied (pp 28-29 et passim).

¹³ Cf. Derrida, p. 53, where he shows the problems inherent in discussing the use of the sun as a paradigm for all putatively literal referents for metaphorical meaning, after one discovers that the sun in our perceptions of it and language about it becomes itself a metaphor: “In the metaphysical alternative which contrasts formal or artificial and natural language, ‘natural’ would always be bound to lead us back to physics as a solar system, or, more precisely, to a certain account of the relation between earth and sun in the system of perception.” Thus, for Derrida all literal language is metaphorical, while on the other hand (see n. 12), all discussion of metaphor is itself metaphorical.

¹⁴ Nuttall A. D.: “The claim that all discourse is metaphorical, if granted, . . . destroys itself. To say that all discourse is metaphorical is to empty the word ‘metaphorical’ of all content. The concept 'metaphorical,' in fact, presupposes the concept 'literal.' We say that a word is metaphorical when we perceive that it has been transferred from its proper, literal, application. If we claim that there is no such thing as a 'proper, literal, application,' we shall find it hard to explain how people ever arrived at the conception of a 'transferred term,' ” (Two Concepts of Allegory: A Study of Shakespeare's “The Tempest” and the Logic of Allegorical Expression, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967, p. 21). In the opposite direction, F. E. Sparshott, in “ 'As,' or The Limits of Metaphor,” New Literary History, 6 (1974), 83-84, notes a comment by Wittgenstein regarding the ways we ordinarily extend a word such as “game” from one activity that is usually considered a game to another that is not. By one account such an application might be considered metaphorical, but by another it would simply be an expansion of the literal meaning the word already has. The point is that if the meanings parole already has within its langue are capable of such expansion, then the distinction between literal and metaphorical usage becomes extremely blurred.

¹⁵ Kuhn See Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1962). In saying this I am extending Kuhn's analysis somewhat, since he does not take up the question of treating scientific paradigms literally from the viewpoint I adopt in this essay. On this matter, one might observe the following: (1) “normal science” as Kuhn describes it takes for granted its own paradigm even to the extent that scientists may resist dealing with theories and phenomena other than those accommodated by the paradigm (pp. 24–25, 37); (2) as Kuhn says: “Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly, i.e., with the recognition that nature has somehow violated the paradigm-induced expectations that govern normal science” (pp. 52-53); (3) “Once it has achieved the status of paradigm, a scientific theory is declared invalid only if an alternate candidate is available to take its place. . . . The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other” (p. 77). These 3 points taken together suggest that normal science in day-to-day research treats its current paradigms as if they were literal, thereby so taking for granted their metaphoricalness as provisionally to ignore it. This metaphoricalness would not raise itself as a problem except in those cases where the postulate of an isomorphic match between paradigm and material phenomena was upset by the appearance of an anomaly. In these cases the paradigm which was previously taken for granted as literal can now no longer be taken so, but its metaphoricalness instantaneously reappears and it becomes specifically a metaphorical construct in need of readjustment or even abandonment. Consequently, Kuhn's analysis would seem to support my contention that scientific discourse becomes literal only on the prior condition that its discourse is first treated as metaphorical. Years may pass (as after Newton) in which the paradigm works well when treated as if it literally corresponded to the structure of the material universe. But in order to be so treated it had to be first constructed as a metaphor. (One might note, finally, that the very possibility of a perspective and a book like Kuhn's is the result of a historically evolved insight into the ways in which what an earlier period thought was literally true is later seen to be “only” metaphorical.)