CREENCIAS, PRÁCTICAS Y PREJUICIOS ALREDEDOR DE LA DIVERSIDAD

Public art such as statues typically has symbolic value: this is also true of monuments and other memorial structures. Kövecses (2002:59) comments on how the symbols may often be based on metaphors, which are culturally significant, and cites as an example the Statue of Liberty in New York. This, he says, ‘was created to evoke the idea that liberty was achieved in the United States (together with its “accompaniments”—knowledge and justice)’. He identifies several metaphors in the statue as symbol, and he sums up his analysis by saying ‘the statue may be regarded as an embodiment of the metaphorical

source domains: UNINHIBITED MOVEMENT, MOVEMENT FROM DARK TO LIGHT, and SEEING’.

Statues, of course, may be symbols based on a culture, which many find to be alien in terms of history. For many years, in the centre of Dublin, Ireland, there stood a statue known as Nelson’s Pillar. This statue, in memory of the hero of the Battle of Trafalgar, had Nelson standing sword in hand at the top of his pillar, evoking a metaphor for the triumph of Nelson and the Royal Navy in particular and the might of the British Empire in general. Over a century later, the statue was destroyed by a militant political organization, who presumably interpreted this symbol rather differently. In fact, their action in itself can be seen as the metaphor HISTORICAL CHANGE IS MOVEMENT FROM A STATE OF IGNORANCE TO A STATE OF KNOWLEDGE (see Kövecses 2002:59). Close to where Nelson’s Pillar used to stand is a building, which realizes a very important historical symbolism for many Irish people: this is Dublin’s General Post Office. The Post Office was occupied by armed men on Easter Monday 1916, and marks the beginning of the rebellion which led to the independence of twenty-six of Ireland’s thirty-two counties a few years later.

Kövecses (2002:63) points out that in one metaphorical system of morality, BEING GOOD IS UPRIGHT and BEING BAD IS BEING LOW. In the war against Iraq, Saddam Hussein had to be ‘toppled’ and this was symbolically realized in the pulling down of his many statues throughout the country. Ironically, during President Bush’s state visit to London in November 2003, demonstrators ‘toppled’ a plastic statue of the President. This symbol could be observed by television viewers as a non-verbal action, and delivered verbally by a newsreader actually using the lexical item toppled.

Other countries have other objects as metaphors. The Arc de Triomphe in Paris is one example: a monument in which there are sculptures and other symbols. These symbols include the grave of the Unknown Soldier, a permanently burning flame of remembrance and, on national days, a flag which is draped through the arch. Buildings themselves can be seen as a type of non-verbal metaphor: we will not discuss metaphor in architecture here, but we give suggestions for further reading at the end of this chapter.

Flags, as we have seen, are symbols that can evoke certain feelings. To return to Ireland: in Northern Ireland, it is not unusual to travel through a part of the Province where the tricolour (national flag of the Irish Republic) can be seen flying from telegraph poles with, very often, the kerb stones painted in the colours of that flag; green, white, and orange (the colours themselves are potently symbolic). A little later, the traveller might well see the Union Flag (the national flag of the United Kingdom) accompanied by red, white, and blue kerb stones. The former symbolizes the feelings of many Nationalist citizens and the latter of many Unionists or ‘Loyalists’. The gable walls at the end of working-class terraced streets in Belfast often have quite elaborate murals depicting scenes from Irish history or the recent ‘Troubles’. These symbols will indicate to the passer-by the political affiliations of the local residents. (There is a certain irony here in that these are now fast becoming a tourist attraction.) Finally, rather different symbols from Ireland are to be found within the Police Service for Northern Ireland. This police force was set up to replace the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) which for many in one of the two main communities was a symbol of oppression. The new force not only has a new name but a new cap badge and a new motto. Furthermore, police cars are now painted in colours similar to those to be found in the rest of Great Britain. Again, these

are examples of the way in which non-verbal metaphor can be utilized for the purposes of propaganda. In the case of the police symbols they were created in the attempt ‘to win hearts and minds’ (a linguistic metonym, of course).

RELIGION

Religious institutions have long been seen as the guardians of a country’s morals. As such, religion plays a major part in the day-to-day life of many people, and notably at times of great danger. The military funerals of British servicemen killed in the Second Gulf War and afterwards provide an evocative symbol of this: the uniforms, the flag-draped coffins, the slow march, and sometimes regimental music of a suitably sombre type. Interestingly enough, the televising of military funerals is not permitted in some countries. Is this a fear on behalf of the authorities that such scenes might persuade people to question the activities of their country’s troops? Why are soldiers being killed?

What is the morality of this? The very absence of such televised reports can itself be seen as a non-verbal metaphor, capable of interpretation in several ways.

As we have already seen, concepts of HIGH/UP and LOW/DOWN are used metaphorically in relation to good and evil, morality and immorality. We have, in the Christian religion at least, the concept of the fallen angel, and throughout history Hell has been conceived of as being ‘down there’ and Heaven ‘up there’: compare our discussion in Chapter 7. Britain is often regarded as not being a church-attending nation. However, while this may be so in terms of the established Christian Church, religion is still regarded as enshrining morality, and reinforcing the metaphors EVIL IS A FORCE and MORALITY IS A STRENGTH (see Kövecses 2002:63). This reinforcement is executed both verbally and non-verbally. Furthermore, it should not be forgotten that Britain is now a multi-faith society, with all the major world religions and guardians of morality represented. The United States, of course, is also a strongly religious country.

In Christianity, two of the most well-known symbols are the bread and wine used in the service of Holy Communion: the body and blood of Christ. Perhaps the best-known Christian symbol of all is the cross itself upon which Christ was crucified. Variations of this have become symbols of something a lot more sinister, such as the fiery cross of the Ku Klux Klan which persecuted and often murdered black Americans in the southern United States: compare the swastika, a form of cross, which was originally a symbol of good luck, but is now associated with Nazi Germany and fascism.

One metaphorical, non-verbal realization which Christianity shares with other world religions is that of the significance of water. Here, both history and myth combine. For the Christian, water which is blessed and therefore pure symbolizes baptism and acceptance into the faith when the priest makes the sign of the cross upon the forehead of the candidate. It thus represents the beginning of LIFE IS A JOURNEY both spiritually and physically for the infant, and spiritually for the adult. Some Christians see so much significance in the symbol of water that baptism means total immersion.

In Islam, regular bathing symbolizes the unity of body and soul, belief in which is a basic tenet of that faith and is a religious requirement for the very notion of worship.

According to Islam, all natural, unpolluted water is clean and is a gift from God. Unlike Christianity, it requires no special blessing.

For members of the Jewish faith, water represents purity, and the mikveh is a ritual bath of natural water for cleansing after menstruation or in the initiation rites for converts or after contact with a dead body. Priests too had to wash their hands and feet before taking part in services in the Temple. The washing of hands before and after meals is also an important ritual washing.

In Hinduism, where a system of beliefs is based on an intimate relationship with nature, rivers are sacred. The River Ganges is probably the most sacred and Benares, sited on the banks of that river, is a place of pilgrimage.

Buddhism, too, values water. Water symbolizes clarity and calmness. For Buddhists water is a reminder to cleanse the mind and acquire a state of purity.

SUMMARY

Non-verbal metaphor, as we have seen, can take a variety of forms and ranges across a spectrum of representation: film, music, painting, photography, religion, public art, and even road signs. We could have written a book on non-verbal metaphor alone, and there are areas and contexts which space has not permitted us to investigate. Gesture is one, and this includes sign language. Consider, too, the work of the British actor and satirist John Cleese in his representation of Basil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers or, more recently, Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley in Absolutely Fabulous. All three performers achieved much of their success not only because of what they said but also because of their ability to exaggerate their body language. In other words, parts of their body, their facial expressions, and so on can become non-verbal realizations of happiness, anger, or embarrassment. In the context of comedy, exaggerated movements ‘speak’, and if we think of circus clowns or Charlie Chaplin’s silent movies, we have two excellent examples where communication relies on the manipulation of the non-verbal metaphor.

The clowns and Chaplin use mime, and that mime, after all, is farce based on real life using mimicry. Think also of pantomimes like Mother Goose and Cinderella. Equally, in ballet, we have the conveyance of meaning by both movement and music working together to present a story that may involve one or more themes. The point is both music and dance can convey metaphor, and they are well worth exploring further because of this.

FURTHER READING

Caballero, R. (2003) ‘Metaphor and genre: the presence and role of metaphor in the building review’, Applied Linguistics 24/2:145–167. (Investigates the use of metaphorical language in writing about architecture.)

Forceville, C. (1998) Pictorial Metaphor in Advertising , London: Routledge.

Forty, A. (2000; paperback edn 2004) Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture , London: Thames and Hudson. (Discusses the relationship between architecture and language:

Chapters 4 and 5 deal specifically with metaphor.)

Kövecses, Z. (2002) Metaphor: a Practical Introduction , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

(Chapter 5.)

Vestergaard, T. and Schroder, K. (1985) The Language of Advertising . Oxford: Blackwell.

(Chapter 2 on the visual image.)

CODA

At the beginning of Chapter 1, we said that the intention of this book was to introduce the study of metaphor, and to show how and why it is important. We could not hope to cover the topic exhaustively, but we hoped to bridge the gap—another metaphor—between brief discussions in general linguistics books and the detailed discussions of specialist texts: to outline sufficiently the principal aspects of the topic and then to describe how figurative language is used in a variety of linguistic and non-verbal contexts. We have given some suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter, after summarizing our main points, and we give suggestions for small-scale student investigations of figurative language in our appendix ‘Researching metaphor’.

We could have called this short final chapter a conclusion. But the word conclusion suggests a completion, or perhaps a final rational judgement based on an assessment of the available evidence: conclude and conclusion themselves derive from the Latin verb claudere ‘shut’. It seemed important to us to emphasize that the study of metaphor, whether theoretical or practical, is open-ended, and that this book is just a beginning for that process.

So instead we have chosen the word coda as title: a musical term for a passage at the end of a piece, derived via Italian from Latin cauda ‘tail’, and so itself metaphorical. In linguistics, Labov’s model of the structure of oral narratives uses coda to refer-to a section at the end of a narrative, containing general observations or linking the narrative to the time of narration (see Labov 1972:363ff.). In dance, the coda of a ballet is a finale in which the principal dancers reappear. For our coda, we simply offer some further examples of metaphor for consideration.

Contestants in TV shows in which they undergo an extended period of intensive training, competing for a recording contract or other such prize, commonly use the metaphor journey to refer to their experiences. ‘It has been such a journey’, they say;

commentators talk of obstacles on a contestant’s ‘journey’. Does the use of this metaphor shift attention from the material goals of fame and money to personal development? Does it make participation in what might be considered just shallow entertainment seem serious and worthwhile?

The following is the opening of a poem, ‘The Second Voyage’, by the Irish poet, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin:

Odysseus rested on his oar and saw