Others have attempted to define the value of a metaphor according to the greater or lesser ‘distance’ between the properties of the terms brought into focus; it does not seem to me, though, that there is such a rigorous rule. It is the encyclopedic model constructed for the purposes, of interpreting a given context that sets ad hoc the center and periphery of the relevant semes. There remains the criterion of the greater or les-ser openness, that is, of how far a metaphor allows us to travel along the pathways of semiosis and to discover the labyrinths of the encyclopedia. In the course of such traverses, the terms in question are enriched with properties that the encyclopedia did not yet grant them.
These considerations do not yet definitely establish an aesthetic criter-ion for distinguishing ‘beautiful’ metaphors from those that are ‘ugly’. On that score, even the strict relations between expression and content and between form and substance of expression come into play (in poetry one might speak of musicality, of the possibility of memorizing both contrast and similarity, and thus such elements as rhyme, paronomasia, and assonance enter one’s consideration). But these considerations do permit us to distinguish the closed (or scarcely cognitive) metaphor from that which is open, thereby enabling us to know better the possibilities of semiosis or, in other words, precisely of that categorical index of which Tesauro spoke.
3.12. Conclusions
No algorithm exists for the metaphor, nor can a metaphor be produced by means of a computer’s precise instructions, no matter what the vol-ume of organized information to be fed in. The success of a metaphor is a function of the sociocultural format of the interpreting subjects’ ency-clopedia. In this perspective, metaphors are produced solely on the basis of a rich cultural framework, on the basis, that is, of a universe of con-tent that is already organized into networks of interpretants, which de-cide (semiotically) the identities and differences of properties. At the same time, content universe, whose format postulates itself not as rigidly hierarchized but, rather, according to Model Q, alone derives from the metaphorical production and interpretation the opportunity to restruc-ture itself into new nodes of similarity and dissimilarity.
But this situation of unlimited semiosis does not exclude the existence of first tropesy of ‘new’ metaphors, in other words, never before heard of or, at least, experienced as though they were never before heard. The conditions of occurrence for such tropes, which we might term Metaphorically ‘auroral’ (but which in Eco 1975 are defined as instances of invention), are multiple:
(a) There always exists a context that is capable of reproposing as new a codified catachresis or dead metaphor. One can imagine a text of the ecole du regard in which, by means of an obsessive description of our Perceptual activity, the force and vividness of such an expression as the neck of the bottle is rediscovered.
(b) In shifting from one semiotic system to another, a dead metaphor becomes an inventive one anew. Think of Modigliani’s female portraits, which, it could be said, visually reinvent (but also oblige us to rethink even conceptually and, through various mediations, verbally) an expres-sion such as neck of a swan. Investigations of the visual metaphor (see Bonsiepe 1965) have shown how a worn-out expression such as flexible (used to indicate openness of mind, lack of prejudice in decision mak-ing, sticking-to-the-facts) can reclaim a certain freshness when, instead of being uttered verbally, it is translated visually through the represen-tation of a flexible object.
(c) The context with an aesthetic function always posits its own tropes as ‘first’: insofar as it obliges one to see them in a new manner and arranges a quantity of correlations between the various levels of the text so as to permit an ever new interpretation of the specific expression (which never functions alone, but which always interacts with some new aspect of the text; see the image of the mast/pendulum in Benjamin). Moreover, it is characteristic of contexts having an aesthetic function to produce objective correlatives, which have an extremely ‘open’ metaphori-cal function inasmuch as they give one to understand that relations of similarity or of identity may be postulated without the possibility of those relations being further clarified. At this point, one frequently speaks of symbol.
(d) The ‘deadest’ trope can work ‘like new’ for the any ‘virgin’ subject, approaching for the first time the complexity of the semiosis. Both re-stricted and elaborate codes exist. Imagine a subject who has never heard of comparing a girl to a rose, who ignores the intertextual in-stitutionalizations, and who responds even to the most worn-out metaphors as though discovering for the first time the relations between a woman’s face and a flower. The kinds of metaphorical communication may also be explained on the same basis, the cases, namely, in which the ‘idiot’ subject is incapable of understanding figurative language or perceives its functions in a labored manner, experiencing it only as a bothersome provocation. Situations of the kind also arise in the translat-ing of metaphors from one language to another: there are equal chances of a translation producing puzzling obscurity or limpid intelligibility.
(e) There are privileged cases, finally, in which the subject ‘sees’ for the first time a rose, notices its freshness, its petals pearled with dew — because previously the rose for him had only been a word or an object espied in the windows of a florist. In such cases the subject reconstructs, so to speak, his own sememe, enriching it with properties, not all ver-balized or verbalizable, some interpretable and interpreted by other vi-sual or tactile experiences. In this process various synaesthesic phenomena compete in constituting networks of semiosic relations. These reinvented metaphors are born of the very same reason that one tells one’s own symptoms to a doctor in an improper manner (My chest is burning . . . I feel pins and needles in my arms . . .). In this way a metaphor is reinvented through ignorance of the lexicon, as well.
And yet, these first tropes themselves arise because every time there is an underlying semiotic network. Vico would remind us that men know how to speak as heroes because they already know how to speak as men. Even the most ingenuous metaphors are made from the detritus of other metaphors — language speaking itself, then —and the line between first and last tropes is very thin, not so much a question of semantics as of the pragmatics of interpretation. At any rate, for too long it has been thought that in order to understand metaphors it is necessary to know the code (or the encyclopedia): the truth is that the metaphor is the tool that permits us to understand the encyclopedia better. This is the type of knowledge that the metaphor stakes out for us.
In order to arrive at this conclusion, we had to give up looking for à synthetic, immediate, blazing definition of the metaphor: substitution, leap, abbreviated simile, analogy. . . . Because the way in which one seems to understand a metaphor is simple, it is easy to be deluded into thinking that the metaphor is capable of being defined by means of a simple category. This simplicity, it must be noted, this felicitousness in making shortcuts within the process of semiosis, is a neurological fact. Semiotically speaking, instead, the process of metaphorical production and interpretation is long and tortuous.
It is not at all a given that the explanation of the immediate physiological or psychic processes must be equally immediate. In his collection of classical Witze, Freud quotes this aphorism of Lichtenberg: “He marveled that cats should have two slits in their skin, just where their eyes are.” And Freud comments: “The stupefaction exhibited here is only apparent; in reality this simplistic observation conceals within it the great problem of teleology in the struc-ture of animals. That the flap of the eyelid should open where the cornea is exposed is not at all obvious, at least not until the history of evolution has made clear for us this coincidence” (1905, 3.1). Behind the ‘felicitousness’ of natural (physical and psychic) processes, remains hid-den a long labor. I have tried here to define some of the phases of that labor.
[4] Symbol
What is a symbol? Etymologically speaking, the word σ ύμβολον comes from σνμβάλλω, to throw-with, to make something coincide with some-thing else: a symbol was originally an identification mark made up of two halves of a coin or of a medal. Two halves of the same thing, either one standing for the other, both becoming, however, fully effective only when they matched to make up, again, the original whole. In the semiotic dialectics between signifier and signified, expression and con-tent, or name and thing, such a rejoining is always deferred, the first half of the couple being always interpreted by our substitution of another first half of another couple, and so on in infinitum, so that the initial gap between signans and signatum grows more and more. On the contrary, in the original concept of symbol, there is the suggestion of a final recom-position. Etymologies, however, do not necessarily tell the truth —or, at least, they tell the truth, in terms of historical, not of structural, seman-tics. What is frequently appreciated in many so-called symbols is exactly their vagueness, their openness, their fruitful ineffectiveness to express a ‘final’ meaning, so that with symbols and by symbols one indicates what is
