For much of the class, we went metaphor-hunting in Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly buzz.” I thought the picture of the whole poem that emerged was fascinating: how it moves through some relatively comfortable, conventionally structured figures (e.g. the simile of the storm in the first stanza, the extended legal metaphor of the third), toward the synesthetic uncanniness* of the fly, and that imponderable final line. It’s worth returning though to Cammie’s question, what about “when I died”—is that a metaphor, given that Dickinson (or her speaker) cannot be writing after her own death? What does she mean; what does that little clause stand for? Certainly it cannot be taken literally, and so you might say it is either a metaphor, or a fiction, or, of course, both. It certainly makes clear that a metaphor does not depend on anything like the straightforward grammar of “Juliet is the sun.” Pretty much any sentence that refuses literal interpretation may invite us to ask: does that mean more or other than it says? And if we find we can give an answer of that is-and-not-is form that Berger describes, we are in the territory of metaphor. Perhaps one could say something like: “when I died” is a way Dickinson has of figuring a state of altered consciousness, a lucid dream, or even a poem-writing trance. She is making a metaphor for those conditions. (How curious that death, about which we know so little, could be made to stand for something that we know better?)
That is all by way of saying, metaphor—more broadly, trope—is fundamental to what poetry is and does, and that it can happen almost anywhere we encounter interpretive difficulty. A text can provoke us to recognize it as a poem by its use of figurative language; recognizing a text as a poem can provoke us to consider its language figuratively. That circularity may be something like the poem’s boundary.
We asked, as we had to, about Dickinson’s fly itself, and I thought the three kinds of answers that we gave were really interesting.
- Sam, Cammie and others ventured explanations of the sort, the fly is x—tenors, in that I. A. Richards distinction, for which the fly was vehicle. (A last spark of vitality, a continuous process of life, etc.)
- John raised the question of whether the fly was just a fly—not a metaphor, but the refusal of metaphor, as though to say, here figuration reaches its limit, as it must in death.
- Pat wondered whether the fly wasn’t something in excess, or extra, or otherwise uncanny; within the x for y system of metaphors in the poem as a whole, a piece of grit, or a mote in the eye: a failure of metaphor, “interposed” between its parts.
Keeping those possibilities in view allows us to see the poem in its deep struggle with what it is to make the unknowable knowable, to find an equivalent in the language of the senses for what is beyond all sense.
We had too little time for Terence Hayes’ “American Sonnet”—but we started to get at the basic problem of its metaphors for confinement, as a bodily and as a political experience; and how he uses the chiasmus to build that cage (Inside me / As if / / As if / Inside me). A case of a rhetorical scheme, chiasmus, which does not mean anything definite in itself, being used by the poem to create an experience of compression and containment. We’ll have many more occasions as the semester proceeds to think about this general phenomenon, how a poem gives meaning to an aspect of its own structure, how it tropes a scheme. Hayes’ impossible question, at the end of the poem, is as confounding as Dickinson’s “I could not see to see.”
A final thought about epistemology: it seemed like a mere aside, to give a back of the envelope definition of ontology and epistemology at the beginning of class: ontology, the problem of being, and epistemology, the problem of knowing. But Allen Grossman’s remark that “the metaphor of metaphor is the fundamental situation of being conscious of something in the world” brought us back there at the end. What he means, I think, is that metaphor arises for us when our ordinary language, with its conventional names, doesn’t seem to touch the world; when the knowledge that conventional language supplies, fails. Metaphor is a leap across that gap, to try to touch the world again. Berger might say, to make a connection where we cannot see one.
*synesthetic uncanniness: i.e., the weird feeling that the senses are being mixed together, substituted for one another, as when the fly’s buzz is blue. (Is synesthesia a fundamental experience of metaphor?)
