But, to reach these conclusions, one must undertake an impassioned ‘hermeneutic circle’; one assumes a code, which is verified against the simile, whose metaphorical transformations are appraised in advance; or one starts from the simile in order to infer a code that makes it accept-able; one starts to become familiar, at one and the same time, with both the biblical poet’s aesthetic ideology and the maiden’s properties; in other words, one learns something extra about the maiden and about the intertextual universe of the biblical poet, simultaneously.
Analyzing further this process of trial and error, we would realize that we are deal-ing with multiple inferential movements: hypothesis (or abduction), in-duction, and deduction. The same process takes place when we under-stand a catachresis — not the institutionalized catachresis, transformed into a codified lexeme (for example, the leg of a table), but the institu-tive catachresis, which later will be identified by many as the ‘auroral’ moment of language. Inflationary spiral is an institutive catachresis (lan-guage creates metaphors even outside of poetry, simply out of a need to find names for things). And if institutive catachreses require interpretive labor, it is because the latent proportion (which could be expressed in a simile) does not exist before the metaphor; it must be found, whether by the person who invents the catachresis or by the person interpreting it (at least, for a brief stretch of the trope’s circulation), after which dis-covery language absorbs the trope, lexicalizes it, and registers it as an overcoded expression.
This is precisely what Aristotle meant to say when he assigned a cognitive function to the metaphor—not only when he associates metaphor with enigma, an extended sequence of metaphors, but also when he says that creating metaphors «is a sign of a natural disposition °f the mind,» because knowing how to find good metaphors means per-ceiving or grasping the similarity of things between each other (τо ομοιον θεωρέίν) (Poetics I459a6—8). But if the proportion between cup and shield and between Ares and Dionysus were already overcoded, that metaphor would not say anything other than what is already known. If it says something new, it means that either (a) the proportion was not so commonly accepted, or (b) if it was accepted it was then soon forgotten. And thus the metaphor posits (‘posits’ in a philosophical sense, but also in a physical sense, as «in putting before the eyes’, то πρό όμμάτωνηοιεϊν a proportion that, wherever it may have been deposited, was not before the eyes; or it was before the eyes and the eyes did not see it, as with Poe’s purloined letter.
To point out, or teach how to see, then. To see what? The likeness between things, or the subtle network of proportions between cultural units (that is, the fact that sheep are indeed unique and equal in their variety or the fact that a certain culture sees a flock of sheep as an example of unity within variety)? To this question Aristotle gives no an-swer, as was only appropriate for one who had identified the modes of being of Being (the categories) with the modes of being of language.
What Aristotle understood was that the metaphor is not an ornament (κοσμος), but rather a cognitive instrument, at once a source of clarity and enigma:
Accordingly, it is metaphor that is in the highest degree instructive [. . .]. It follows, then, for style and reasoning [enthymenes] alike, that in order to be lively [lively expressions are the άστεiα, which in the Baroque period will be the metaphorical witticisms] they must give us rapid information. Conse-quently, we are not highly gratified by enthymemes that are obvious — and «obvious» means absolutely plain to everyone, not demanding a bit of men-tal inquiry —nor by those which, when stated, we do not understand. What we like are those that convey information as fast as they arc stated — so long as we did not have the knowledge in advance — or that our minds lag only a little behind. With the latter two kinds there is some process of learning. (Rhetoric 14Olbl4-25; Eng. tr., p. 207)
Aristotle provides the most luminous confirmation of the metaphor’s cognitive function when he associates it with mimesis. Ricoeur (1975) warns that if metaphor is mimesis it cannot be an empty, gratuitous game. In the Rhetoric(1411b25ff)0there is no room for doubt: the best metaphors are those that «show things in a state of activity.» Thus metaphorical knowledge is knowledge of the dynamics of the real. That definition seems rather restrictive, but it can be reformulated as follows: the best metaphors are those in which the cultural process, the dynamics itself of semiosis, shows through.
Aristotle defeats right from the start the theorists of the easy metaphor, whether they are the classical moralists, who feared the metaphor’s cosmetic and deceitful nature, or the Baroque immoralists, who privileged its ‘spicy’ nature, or, finally, the current semanticists who see rhetorical ornatus, at the most, as a structure even more superficial than surface structure, incapable of tapping deep structures, whether these are syntactic, semantic, or logical. To all of these theorists Aristotle had already said, «Metaphors . . . should be drawn from objects that are related to the object in question, but not obviously related; in rhetoric as in philosophy the adept will perceive resemblances even in things that are far apart» (ibid., 1412a11-12; Eng. tr., p.212).
And that these likenesses were not only in things but also (perhaps above all) in the ways in which language defines things, the philosopher knew well when he lamented (ibid., 1405a25—27) how pirates in his time had the gall to call themselves purveyors, and how wily the orator is in a calling crime an error or an error a crime. All that pirates had to do, it seems, was find a genus that fitted their species and adapt to the purpose a creditable Porphyrian tree; it is true that they transport mer-chandise by sea, as do commercial purveyors. What is manipulatory of reality, or ideological, is to select only that one out of all the other proper-ties that were characteristic of pirates, and through that choice make themselves known, put themselves before others’ eyes in this perspective and under that particular description.
3.9. The semiosic background: the system of content
3.9.1. The medieval encyclopedia and analogia entis
We have seen how Aristotle’s limitation consists in his identifying the categories of language with the categories of being. This identification is not questioned by post-Aristotelian rhetoric — from the Rhetorica ad Herennium, through Cicero and Quintilian, all the way to the medieval grammarians and rhetoricians. In the meantime, the traditional classification of figures has been worked out in this period. However, a panmetaphorical attitude, established in the Middle Ages, deserves a brief discussion, since it helps resolve (even if in a negative manner) the
question with which we are concerned.
Saint Paul had already affirmed that «we see through a glass, darkly» (1 Corinthians 13:12). Medieval Neoplatonism gives a metaphysical frame to this hermeneutic tendency. In a universe that is nothing other than an emanative outpouring from the unknowable and unnameable One down to the furthest ramifications of matter, every being functions as a synecdoche or metonymy of the One.
When Hugh of Saint Victor affirms that the «entire sensible world is, so to speak, a book written by the hand of God,» and that «all visible things, visibly presented to us by a symbolic instruction, that is, figured, are proposed for the declaring and signifying of things invisible» (Didascalicon, PL, CLXXVI, col. 814), he gives us to understand that there exists a sort of code that, assigning to things emergent properties, allows them to become metaphors for supernatural things, in accordance with the traditional theory of the four levels of exegesis (the literal, allegorical, moral, and analogical).
This is the project taken up in bestiaries, the lapidaria, the imagines mundit all formed on the Hellenistic model of the Physiologus: certain properties are predicated of every animal, plant, part of the world, or event in nature and, on the basis of an identity between one of these properties and one of the properties of the supernatural being that is to be metaphorized, a correlation is established. There exists a network of cultural information, which functions as a cosmological code.
The code is ambiguous, nevertheless, since of all the properties there are to choose from it chooses only a few, and those are contradictory. The lion erases his tracks with his tail to throw the hunters off his track and is thus a figure of Christ canceling the traces of sin; but in Psalm 21 the terrible maw of the beast— «Salva me de ore leonis» — becomes a metaphor of Hell, and «per leonem antichristum intelligitur» definitively.
Even though medieval Neoplatonism was not aware of it (but the medieval rationalists, from Abelard to Ockham, would not fail to realize this), the universe,
