ABSTRACT
According to a now-standard theory, “Juliet is the sun” is supposed to be a “pregnant” metaphor, ready at any moment to beget a sprawling heap of adorable semantic puppies. Its two parts—”Juliet” and “the sun”—ostensibly meet at a virtually endless number of points, and it’s allegedly illuminating, enjoyable, or at least interesting to sit there all day spelling them out. I don’t think any of that is true. Instead, I’ll suggest, successful creative comparisons actually tend to meet at exactly two points, the first of which makes an image adequate, while the second gives it power. To put it metaphorically (as is only appropriate): a good poetic comparison is neither an iceberg (à la Cavell) nor a simple triangle (à la Aristotle) but a tetrahedron, a muscle, a covalent bond.
In my paper, I’ll advance arguments for this claim, in conversation with Black, Booth, Camp, Cavell, Davidson, Hills, Moran, and Richards; I’ll offer a taxonomy of two-point images ([1] abstract link /concrete link, [2] analogy/contiguity, [3] analogy/disanalogy); I’ll discuss some apparent exceptions; and I’ll explain the potential payoff. The telos of two-point metaphors, I’ll propose, isn’t to transmit additional information but intensify, or disorient, or even—surprisingly—make us feel at home in this godawful world.My examples will be drawn from Emily Dickinson, Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Amy Schumer, Marcel Proust, Ernest Hemingway, Philip Larkin, Oscar Wilde, Paul Krugman, Monty Python, an imaginary conversation between Romeo and Mercutio, and, yes, Nelly Furtado.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Joshua Landy is the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University, where he co-directs the Initiative in Philosophy and Literature and co-hosts the NPR show “Philosophy Talk.” His books include Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford, 2004), How to Do Things With Fictions (Oxford, 2012), and (as coeditor) The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford, 2009).