Metaphoricness

In time, the irrational refusal to accept the reality of an other-controlled existence ends in the pseudoschizophrenic posture, in which the offended but innocent self-styled victim complains, “I am damned if I do, and I am damned if I don’t.” This double bind – as Gregory Bateson and his colleagues call it – is characterized by the most hopeless confusion of literalness and metaphoricness. Like the schizophrenic patient, the embattled and confined and angry and anxious part, persisting in his metaphorical identity with the collective good, seems doomed to some permanent rupture with reality.

[Roman] Jakobson himself showed long ago that the supposedly indispensable criterion of poetry, “metaphoricness,” can, on occasion, be dispensed with or can be replaced by metonymic relations, grammatical echoes, and contrasts.

In this section, Weinreich planned to deal with the concept of metaphoricness as a variable. His notes show that he regarded the degree of metaphoricness in an utterance as reflecting differences of intent. He saw the speaker in possession of considerable control over the degree of this variable, arguing that “there are no synchronically dead metaphors; no lexicographically listable metaphors.”

If now we put together the syntagmatic principle, of metaphors occurring in syndromes and the paradigmatic principle of an ordered series of metaphorical steps, we can see that the two axes together define a semantic space, within which metaphoric variation in the grammar creates its meaning. It is a highly elastic space, with enormous semogenic potential. For any given instance, there are not simply two alternative wordings, one congruent, the other metaphorical (the Doric and the Attic that I started with), but rather a range over different degrees of metaphoricness, which moreover may be spread quite unevenly across the syndrome.