Gestión de la productividad y competitividad en los niveles nacionales y

It is well-known, we use to say, that “I drink a glass of water” is a meta- phorical statement, but actually it is metonymical, because it defines my drink by substituting the content with the container. Likewise, “the sweaty papers” Leopardi mentioned in To Sylvie are not metaphorically but meto- nymically wet (the effect for the cause), although it is quite common to read that the sweat is a metaphor which stands for the poet’s studies. It is not allowed to muddle up metaphor and metonymy for reasons of linguistic usage, but it is necessary to point out that pure metaphors and metonymies are very rare. What is common, in fact, is the combination of both in one single expression.

15 _{“The study of poetic tropes has been directed mainly toward metaphor, and the so-called}

realistic literature, intimately tied with the metonymic principle, still defies interpretation, although the same linguistic methodology, which poetics uses when analyzing the meta- phorical style of romantic poetry, is entirely applicable to the metonymical texture of real- istic prose” (Jakobson 1958: 214).

Let’s consider this baroque verse, written by Giuseppe Artale: “il crin s’è un Tago e son due soli i lumi”. The poet compares his lover’s hair to a river (Tago) for its flowing aspect, and her eyes are said to be two suns (“Maria’s hair is a Tago and two suns are the eyes”). According to Dardano and Trifone (1983: 437), the quoted verse is a good example of a meta- phorical construction in literature, but this is just a simplification. Defining a woman’s hair as a river is a metaphor, but to express this equation by nam- ing just one specific river among the others (that moreover ceases to be an individual and becomes a class) is a metonymy.

R H

.Po .Tago .Laura’s hair .Seine .Maria’s hair

Her hair is a river (metaphor)

R

.Po .Tago tR: TR .Seine

Tago is a River (premise of a metonymi- cal shift: an individual refers to a univer- sal; but the individual at stake is gener- alized as the prototype of a class)

R H .Po

.Seine .Maria’s hair .Laura’s hair T

Her hair is a Tago (metonymical meta- phor: Maria’s hair is a kind of river, it is an instance of the Tagos)

Thus, instead of using of the adjective “metaphorical”, we would better speak, very often, of the “figural” property of literary texts, because it is hard to identify completely metaphorical statements. Figurativeness not only makes possible a more effective approach to the specificity of literary lan- guage (since it is no more necessary to cut off the purity level of a rhetorical choice), but it also seems to bear easily the different views of the tropes at issue, with the intuition of an ontological scenery which is able to reabsorb the contradictions developed by our analytical theories. I will come back on this point at the end of the paper, precisely to suggest that we have to drop the analytical rigor in the field of the speculative enjoyment of literary lan-

guage and production.16 It is important indeed to understand that, when we talk about literature, what is at stake is an experience which implies a “form of life” (as Bachtin 1926: 43 also says) and that, as such, passes over the boundaries of science and takes its place in the framework of a collective

social enthymeme (Ronchi 2013: 29-31), where the power of empirical

proofs and of classical logic is no more so determinant.17

5.1. Some theories of metaphor we could find interesting

However, we can keep on studying metaphor as one of the main devices we find in literary production. But metaphor itself is not one single entity. Or better: what is at work in metaphors is not always the same linguistic mechanism. This fact is widely recognized by some modern theories, even when they stress on the conflict of interpretations that any metaphor imply (see Prandi 2003). However, the most important distinction is that between an ontological and an instrumental figuralism.

Theories of metaphor may be divided into those that see metaphor as a secondary use of language, a departure from its basic function of describing our responses to the outside world, and those that see it as an essential characteristic, inherent in the nature of language itself. Put otherwise, the question is whether all lan- guage is metaphoric or whether there is a literal as well as a metaphoric use of it (Levin 1992: 285).

I would like to anticipate that I will subscribe a theory of language in which there is indeed a basic degree of signification, but this standard form is the result of a figural development of the comprehension of the world. The lat- ter, therefore, lays outside the epistemic sphere of language, but is entailed in the semantic power of the word.

Commonly, anyway, people think that the world comes prior to any lan- guage, and that language first of all reflects in its own structures the ar- rangements of the things. It seems to be a guarantee for science to conceive the topic at issue in such terms.18 This is the reason for speaking of a figura-

16

What I am speaking about is a kind of reflexive but unguarded attitude towards the vir- tual experience disclosed by the aesthetic speech. See Iser 1974: 50: the experience of lit- erature is the active (re-)construction of a sensible structure, in which our sensibility is involved together with our intellect, but avoiding the preeminence of what we call “ratio”.

17

See Ponzio 1980: 24: there are many forms of life that may set up our sceneries of knowledge and experience, therefore to isolate the epistemic one is at least thoughtless.

18 _{Notice that, even in the so-called first Wittgenstein (1922), such a view turns out to be}

tive dimension of all those linguistic intercourses that cannot be classified as mistakes of communication, but in which objects and events are told with names and expressions they usually do not bear. If we try to understand lin- guistic transactions in which metaphors are decisive by giving credit to this assumption, then we will have to consider two main theories of metaphor.

When regarded as the modified use of literal language, metaphor may take one of two basic forms: in one, the modification reflects itself in an incongruity between the literal sense of the expression and the (non-linguistic) environment in which it occurs; in the other, the incongruity is reflected in the expression itself. Thus, in responding to an opponent’s argument, a speaker might say, “That’s a pile of garbage”; a poet, to describe the formation of dew at nightfall, might say, “When the weak day weeps”. The latter expression – Shelley’s – is syntactically well formed, but it is semantically deviant, in that the grammar of English does not ‘sanction’ predicating weak and weep of a day. In the first type of metaphor, on the other hand, nothing in the expression is linguistically unorthodox; there is, however, a form of deviance in the use to which the expression is put; we might refer to metaphors of this type as pragmatically deviant (Levin 1992: 286).

Metaphors, in the broad sense we have specified above, are linguistic ex- pressions that, by a logical point of view, have more than one single truth value, because they can be interpreted at the literal and at the figural level. For sure, this fact implies that metaphors, and figurative language in gen- eral, deviate from the ordinary rules of explanation of the message. If meta- phor is an unorthodox use of language which anyway is not wrong,19 then we have to distinguish this heresy according to whether it is a violation of linguistic rules or pragmatic rules: in the first case we have a linguistic choice that is not allowed in ordinary speaking, in the second case we deal with a verbal pattern that is absolutely normal and correct, but that clashes with the laws of referring to the world.

To tell the truth, there is a third possibility (see Levin 1988): if it is really important to save the realism of a basic degree of signification, we can also think that metaphors are false in the actual world, but true in other possible worlds. Thus, the speaker who receives a figural message, having ascertained that its traditional explication contrasts against the actual state of affairs, should try to conceive the world which fits better the discourse.

is the whole body of the facts, not of the things” and above all 5.6: “The boundaries of my

language mean the boundaries of my world”.

19 _{Against Davidson (1978), who states that there is no semantic deviance in metaphors,}