But some ambiguities remain. The rose lives one morning and it closes at night, but only to see the light again the next day. The maiden dies, instead, and is not reborn. Must one review, then, what is known about death for human beings? Is there rebirth? Or must one review what is known about the death of flowers? Is the rose that is reborn tomorrow the same as yesterday’s, or is yesterday’s that which was not picked? The effect of the condensation is unstable; underneath the cadaveral stiffening of the maiden, the long pulsation of the rose con-tinues. Who wins? The life of the rose or the death of the maiden? Obviously, there is no answer; the metaphor is, in point of fact, ‘open’ — even if it is sustained by a play of intertextually familiar over-codings that verges on the manneristic.
3.11.5. Five rules
We are now in a position to sketch a series of rules for the co-textual interpretation of a metaphor (noting that the process of interpretation maps out in reverse the process of production):
(a) Try to provide a first tentative and partial componential representa-tion of the metaphorizing sememe or sememes (the vehicle). This repre-sentation must single out only those semes or properties that the co-text has suggested as relevant. (For the processes of blowing up and narcotizing properties, see Eco 1979, 0.6.2). This operation represents a first abductive attempt.
(b) Look abductively in the encyclopedia for some other sememe that possibly shares some of the focused properties of the first sememe(s) while displaying other, interestingly different properties. This new sememe becomes a plausible candidate for the role of metaphorized sememe {tenor). If there are competing terms for this role, make further abduc-tions based upon co-textual clues. It must be clear that by ‘identical properties’ we mean those representable by the same interpretant. By ‘interestingly different properties’ we mean those that are representable by interpretants that are not only different from each other, but that can also be opposed according to some overcoded incompatibility (such as open/closed, living/dead, and so on).
(c) Select one or more of the mutually different properties and build on them one or more Porphyrian trees such that these oppositional couples may join at one of its upper nodes.
(d) Tenor and vehicle display an interesting relationship when their mutually different properties meet at as high a node as possible in the Porphyrian tree.
Expressions such as ‘interestingly different’ and ‘as high a node as pos-sible’ are not vague; they refer to a co-textual plausibility. Similarities and differences can be evaluated only according to the co-textual success of the metaphor, and we cannot look for a ‘formal’ criterion that estab-lishes the proper degree of difference and the proper position in a Por-phyrian tree. According to these rules, we start from metonymical rela-tions (from seme to sememe) between two different sememes and by checking the possibility of a double synecdoche (which interests both vehicle and tenor); we finally accept the substitution of a sememe with another. Thus the sememic substitution appears as the effect of a double metonymy verified by a double synecdoche. From this point on, a fifth rule holds:
(e) Check whether, on the grounds of the ‘abduced’ metaphors, new relations can be implemented, so as to enrich further the cognitive power of the trope.
3.11.6. From metaphors to symbolic interpretation
Once the process of unlimited semiosis has started, it is difficult to say where and when the metaphorical interpretation stops: it depends on the co-text. There are cases in which from one or more metaphors the in-terpreter is led to an allegorical reading, or to a symbolic interpretation, where the boundaries between metaphor, allegory, and symbol can be very imprecise. (For a distinction between these three notions, see Chapter 4.)
On this score, Weinrich (1976) has posited an interesting distinction between micrometaphorics, metaphorics of the context and metaphorics of the text.
Let us briefly follow his analysis of a lengthy passage from Walter Benjamin, of which only the most salient points will be summarized here. In the text Seagulls (Mowen), Benjamin speaks of a trip by sea that he made, a voyage that is dense with metaphors which will not be analyzed here. Two, however, appear singular to Weinrich: the seagulls, peoples of winged creatures, winged messengers, bound in a pattern of signs, which at a moment divide into two rows, one black, vanishing westward into thin air, the other row white, pulling toward the east, still present and ‘to be resolved’; and the mast of the ship, which describes in the air apendular movement. Weinrich develops first a micrometaphorics (for example, of common and dissimilar properties between mast and pendulum) and then a metaphorics of the context, where he connects the various ‘metaphorical fields’ activated by Benjamin.
In brief, something slowly emerges that begins to look increasingly like an allegorical enunciation, which in the final stage of the metaphorics of the test reveals its politico-ideological key (whereby the text is considered also in terms of the historical circumstances of its enunciation): the year 1929, the crisis of the Weimar Republic, the contradictory situation of the German intellectual, on one side obsessed by the extreme polarization of con-trasts (friend vs. enemy), on the other uncertain about what position to take, and oscillating between neutrality and a dogmatic surrender to one of the parties. Hence the mast that becomes a metaphor for the «pendulum of historical events», and the antagonistic contrast between the seagulls.
Regardless of whether Weinrich’s reading is correct or not, let us re-turn to the metaphor of the mast-pendulum, to identify its constitutive mechanism, which must permit all the contextual inferences that the reader (in the case postulated as a Model Reader) may possibly draw. We will go right past the stage of finding those contextual pressures that lead the reader to select certain semes at the expense of others, and draw the componential spectrum of the two terms present in the context: mast and pendulum. In effect, the text does speak of a “pendular movement”
(Pendelbewegungen)y so that more than of metaphor we should speak of a simile (the mast moves as though it were a pendulum). But the specific effect of condensation is not affected by this.
The representation of mast and of pendulum is as follows:
/Mast/ F Vertical Fixed
Blocked at base
A Culture
Permits
M P
Wood Support Iron for sails
movement of ship Space
Slight oscillation Ship
/Pendulum/ F Vertical Mobile Blocked
at top
A M Culture Wood
Iron Permits
P Counterweight
movement of hands Time
Sensible oscillation Time-piece
We can see immediately on which semes the identity may be estab-lished and on which the difference may be based. A hasty conjunction in a given Porphyrian tree would give disappointing results: both a mast and a pendulum are handcrafted, both are of wood or iron, or, at the very least, both belong to the class of vertical things. This is just not enough. The only oppositions worth noticing seem to be that between fixity and oscillation, and the fact that the one must be referred to inter-vals in space and the other to intervals in time. At a second inspection, we see that even a mast, while staying fixed, must oscillate somewhat, just as a pendulum to oscillate must be fixed at its peg. But this is still not a cognitive acquisition worth nothing. A pendulum fixed at its top end oscillates and measures time, and a mast fixed at its base oscillates and in some way is bound to the dimension of space —which we already knew.
If this metaphor had appeared in a context that dropped it im-mediately, without taking it any further, it would not constitute an in-vention worthy of emphasis. In this analysis Weinrich shows that the intertextual framework focuses the interpreter’s attention on the theme of oscillation; moreover, within the same context, the insistence on the play of alternation among the seagulls and on the oppositions right/left and east/west establishes an isotopy of tension between two poles. This is the isotopy prevailing at the deepest levels, and not that which is established by the topic ‘trip by sea’ at the level of discursive structures (see Eco 1979). The reader is led, then, to shift the center of semiosis to the seme of oscillation — which is the primary function of a pendulum and secondary for a mast (the encyclopedia must begin to acknowledge a hierarchy of semes).
Moreover, the pendulum’s oscillation is functionally adapted to precise measurement, whereas that of a mast is more casual. The pendulum oscillates in an unfaltering, constant manner, without any changes of rhythm, whereas the mast is subject to changes and, at the worst, to fractures. The fact that the mast is functionally adapted to a ship (open to movement within space and to idefinite adventure) and that a pendulum is functionally adapted to being a timepiece, fixed in space and regular in its measurement of time, opens the way to success-ive oppositions: the certainty of a pendulum against the uncertainty of a mast, the one closed and the other open . . . ; and then, naturally, the relation of the mast (uncertain) to the two contradictory peoples of
