Figures of Identity
Human cognition, as viewed by linguistics, can be defined as recurring acts of lingual identification of what we perceive. By naming objects (phenomena, processes, and properties of reality), we identify them, i.e. search for classes in which to place them, recalling the names of classes already known to us.
There are two varieties of lingual identification. It is either active, i.e. making the aim of a communicative performance as in This is a table implying: "what you and I perceive at the moment is a material object, the shape, size, potential and/or actual functions of which permit me to put it, as an individual example, in the class of furniture collectively associated (by English speakers) with the sound combination [teibl], spelt table." The lingual identification may be called passive, presumed or granted when several notional words follow one another without any special communicative emphasis on most of them; the emphatic communicative stress marks usually only one word or word-group of the utterance: A tall young man wearing a grey suit was silent. As can easily be guessed, only the concluding two words (was silent) perform the act of identification; the preceding eight may contain important information, yet they are presented to the reader as something self-evident, or ready-made, as a block of notions already identified.
Forms of active identification include statements actively expressing acts of claiming the identity, the equality of two notions (1). Identity implied is to be found in certain cases of the use of synonyms and synonymous expressions (2).
1. Simile, i.e. imaginative comparison. This is an explicit statement of partial identity (affinity, likeness, similarity) of two objects. The word identity is only applicable to certain features of the objects compared: in fact, the objects cannot be identical; they are only similar, they resemble each other due to some identical features.
The word explicit used in the definition distinguishes the simile from the metaphor. The learner remembers that every metaphor presupposes similarity of the notion expressed and the notion implied. However, when using a metaphor, we pretend to believe that the thing named is actually the thing referred to: calling a person pig, the speaker behaves as if he really believed what he said. In a simile, the speaker is always aware that the untidy, or greedy, or insolent person only looks or acts as does a pig.
The reader remembers that a metaphor is a renaming: a word, a phrase, a sentence, etc., used instead of another (more exact, but less picturesque). Simile, for its part, always employs two names of two separate objects (being a figure of co-occurrence, not that of replacement). Besides, and this is the most important point, it always contains at least one more component part — a word or a word-group signalizing the idea of juxtaposition and comparison. These formal signals are mostly the conjunctions like and as (as if, as though), than. They may also be verbs, such as to resemble, to remind one of, or verbal phrases to bear a resemblance to, to have a look of, and others.
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Hence, the general formula for the simile includes the symbols of the object named, the object being used to name, as well as the element expressing the comparative juxtaposition of the two: the words like, as and their equivalents.
Nj is like N2, where N1 is called in Latin 'primum comparationis', N2, 'secundum comparationis' (i.e. the first and the second members of comparison). The reason why the two objects are compared, their feature(s) in common constitutes the so-called 'tertium comparationis' (the third member of comparison). The 'tertium comparationis' is either mentioned explicitly (a), or left to the ingenuity of the recipient (b).
A. "He is as beautiful as a weather-cock" (Wilde). The common feature, the 'tertium comparationis' is expressly indicated: it is beauty that unites him with a weather-cock.
B. "My heart is like a singing bird" (Rossetti). Here, the most probable reason of likening a person's heart to a singing bird would be the feeling of happiness: the poet's heart is as gay as a bird that enjoys the pleasures of life.
Numerous assimilations have become all too current in everyday life — hackneyed phrases, in fact. Here are a few instances of trite phrases of this kind. To be more exact, the following enumeration only 'secundum et tertium comparationis' (i.e. the second and the third members of comparison) are given; the 'primum comparationis' (the first member — Nx) language users are at liberty to supply (any personal pronoun or personal name will do):
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as dead as a door-nail
as mad as a march hare
as bright as a button
as cool as a cucumber
as blind as a bat
as proud as a peacock
An attentive reader may have noticed alliterating words in all the phrases adduced. Sometimes the alliteration conceals the true sense of phrases. Thus, buttons (say, of a soldier's uniform) are admittedly bright,
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but the word bright in the phrase is used metaphorically, denoting 'clever', 'of high mental ability', 'having uncommonly strong intellect'. The adjective cool in the next phrase is also used figuratively: it has nothing to do with temperature, only with a person's temperament (cool = 'collected'). The rest of the phrases seem clear enough, except the first, which is not exactly logical: possibly, alliteration was the only ground for mentioning the door-nail.
To be sure, among ready-made similes there are many without a trace of alliteration:
to fit like a glove
to smoke like a chimney
as fat as a pig
as drunk as a lord
The last of the four phrases may seem to the learner of English rather unexpected or even abusive to British nobility, and yet the saying once had every reason to exist: excessive use of alcohol was an established custom among English noblemen of past centuries: a lord usually drank like a fish (another set phrase!), competing with other gentlemen of his circle.
It goes without saying that stylistic analysis of imaginative prose or poetry has very little to do with such trite similes as have just been discussed. A fresh simile, especially an elaborate one (discovering unexpected and striking similarities) is one of the best image-creating devices.
But before debating types of similes and savouring the strength of some of them, we have yet to draw, if possible, a line of demarcation between what is called a real simile, an image-forming stylistic device, and a logical comparison — a mere statement of identical (similar) or distinctive features of two objects, a statement of no stylistic value.
Compare:
She sings like a professional soloist. She sings like a nightingale.
He talks French like a born Frenchman. He talks French like a machine-gun.
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The changes in agriculture are as slow Our agricultural reform is as
as they were last year. slow as a snail.
It is clear that the examples in the left-hand column are mere comparisons, while those in the right-hand column, are true similes.
It is also evident that something more definite differentiates one from the other: a simile is practically always created by juxtaposing two notions pertaining each to a semantic plane radically different from the other. In the above examples, a woman and a singing bird, a French speaker and a machine-gun, the rate of agricultural development and the motion of a snail. Quite different is the case with the amateur singer
and a professional, a person who can talk French fluently and a born Frenchman, the present-day rate of production and that of the previous year. As distinct from simile then, comparison proper deals with what is logically comparable, while in a simile there is usually a bit of fantasy. A simile is the stronger, someone has remarked, the greater the obvious disparity between the two objects. On the whole, it has been known since Roman Jacobson that the secret of any stylistic effect is defeated expectancy; the recipient is ready and willing for anything but what he actually sees.1
True, it is not always possible to tell a picturesque simile from a sober, modest-looking logical comparison. Sometimes, the two notions compared belong to the same semantic plane, and yet the result is a simile — due to some accompanying stylistic device. To say Oh, John could do this forty times better than I is to use a simile: both John and the speaker are human beings, but evident exaggeration (hyperbole) makes the utterance a simile.
A simile has manifold forms, semantic features and expressive aims. It can be a simple sentence (She was like a tigress ready to jump at me), a complex sentence with an adverbial clause of comparison (She looked at him as uncomprehendingly as a mouse might look at a gravestone — O'Brian); often it is seen in a single compound word: dog-like, hungry-looking. In the following extract from one of O. Henry's stories the reader will find first two similes implied (or shortened) in of-phrases, then a metaphor followed by two ordinary similes with the conjunction like:
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"Old Zizzbaum had the eye of an osprey, the memory of an elephant, and a mind that unfolded from him in three movements like the puzzle of a carpenter's rule. He rolled to the front like a brunette polar bear, and shook Platt's hand."
As already mentioned, a simile may be combined with or accompanied by another stylistic device, or it may achieve one stylistic effect or another. Thus it is often based on exaggeration of properties described. So, a young woman is presented by E. McBain as being "hotter than a welder's torch and much, much more interesting."
Two more examples of hyperbolic similes:
"He held out a hand that could have been mistaken for a bunch of bananas in a poor light." (Gardner)
"She heaved away from the table like a pregnant elephant." (ibid.)
The following negative simile is at the same time a litotes:
"His eyes were no warmer than an iceberg." (McBain) Irony:
"Brandon liked me as much as Hiroshima liked the atomic bomb." (McBain)
J.H. Chase, a well-known detective-story writer, has a propensity for
using detailed, 'extended', or 'sustained' similes (cf. 'sustained
metaphors' — see above); in them, he gives detailed descriptions of
imaginary situations. This is what the narrator says about what happened
after he was captured by gangsters, who then delivered him to their leader:
"They eased me through a door as if I were a millionaire invalid
with four days to live, and who hadn't as yet paid his doctor's bill."
And thus he describes his meal at a third-rate restaurant:
"The rye bread was a little dry and the chicken looked as if it had a sharp attack of jaundice before departing this earth." An effective simile is used by Chase to depict a talentless and voiceless woman singer:
"A little after midnight Dolores Lane came in and stood holding a microphone the way a drowning man hangs on to a lifebelt." It has been mentioned that the act of comparing in a simile has varied forms of expression. In the last example it is expressed by the conj unction-like phrase the way. It would be useless trying to discuss and classify even the main types of assimilation of two mental pictures creating an image: the number of classes is practically unlimited. Suffice it to say that in many cases the confrontation of the notions compared is expressed lexically: by means of verbs (1), verbal phrases (2), or merely implied since there are two allegedly parallel statements in an utterance.
1. "He reminded James, as he said afterwards, of a hungry cat." (Galsworthy)
2. "Huddled in her grey fur against the sofa cushions, she had a strange resemblance to a captive owl." (ibid.)
3. "Mr. Witte's method of paying off debts would be a form of feeding a dog with bits of its own tail." (Nesfield)
2. Quasi-identity. Another problem arises if we inspect certain widespread cases of 'active identification' usually treated as tropes; when we look at the matter more closely, they turn out to be a special kind of syntagmatic phenomena.
What is meant here could be termed either 'tropes predicated' or perhaps 'tropes pre-deciphered'. Actually they are complete two-member utterances in which the theme ('topic') is the traditional, non-figurative denomination of an object, and the rheme ('comment'), its figurative, situational, characterizing denomination: a metaphor, a metonymy, or a combination of tropes (i.e., metaphor + hyperbole + irony amalgamated).
Utterances like Your neighbour is an ass or Jane is a real angel answer this description. They are traditionally qualified as examples of metaphors, although, as a matter of fact, only the words ass and angel are used metaphorically. Taken as a whole, the two utterances do not differ
greatly from similes. There are certainly no words in them that signalize comparison, but the mental act of comparative confrontation is evident enough, since no one would ever take the statements for what they mean literally. They (the utterances) are not metaphors in the strict sense of the term: the 'real' (usual) names of objects precede the figurative ones, and the idea of comparison, of claiming community of features in different objects is quite obvious. On the other hand, they lack what is indispensable for a simile, i.e. formal signals of comparison.
We can now positively state that the above utterances demonstrate a syntagmatic figure of active identification, which in both implies comparison.
There are, besides, other types of illogical identification: cases when the subject (theme, topic) and the predicative (rheme, comment) do not imply comparison, do not claim similarity, but expressly point out a real connection between the two objects. The general semantic formula here is not "Nj is (judging by community of features) N2", but "N, is (in a way connected with) N2". This is observed when the rhematic part of an utterance is a metonymy:
"That old duffer? He's oil, I guess."
The old man spoken of is not proclaimed to be oil, or to resemble this liquid: the implication is that he is a dealer in oil, that his line of business is in the oil industry.
Another example of metonymy participating in syntagmatic devices treated here:
"Caracas is in Venezuela, of course." "What's it like?"
"Why, it's principally earthquakes and Negroes and monkeys and malarial fever and volcanoes." (O. Henry)
The author of the present book insisted (in 1975) on differentiating the phenomena discussed from metaphors and metonymies proper.2 A few years later, S.M. Mezenin suggested a special term for the phenomenon, naming it 'quasi-identity' («квазитождество» in Russian).3The term seems quite acceptable.
Some of quasi-identities manifest special expressive force, chiefly when the usual topic — comment positions change places: the metaphoric (metonymical) name appears in the text first, the direct, straightforward denomination following it. See what happens, for instance, with a metaphorical characteristics preceding the deciphering noun:
"The machine sitting at that desk was no longer a man: it was a busy New York broker." (O. Henry)
The reader, who believes at first the subject dealt with to be just a machine, is strongly impressed when he learns in a moment the writer's verdict condemning the character concerned.
Similar results are achieved in Chandler's description of a young woman's coquetry:
"... she shot at me with two blue pellets which served her as eyes."
A considerable stylistic effect occurs in the following metonymic quasi-identity, for it strikes one as reversing the current maxim:
"Money is time, and writing an entertainment can bring a novelist a very sweet chunk of it." (Richler)
And it is not the mere fact of turning the current judgement topsyturvy, but rather sudden enlightment: the statement discloses a really infallible idea, perhaps more profound than the one in universal use. A famous scholar once remarked that every act of economizing ultimately aims at (or results in) sparing Time, the greatest of human treasures, as the reader will probably admit.
3. Synonymous replacements. This term goes back to the classification of the use of synonyms proposed by M.D. Kuznets in a paper on synonyms in English as early as 1947.4 She aptly remarked that on the whole, synonyms are used in actual texts for two different reasons. One of them is to avoid monotonous repetition of the same word in a sentence or a sequence of sentences. E.g.:
"The little boy was crying. It was the child's usual time for going to bed, but no one paid attention to the kid."
(Cf.: "The little boy... It was the boy's... attention to the boy.") The other purpose of co-occurrence of synonyms in a text, according to Kuznets, is to make the description as exhaustive as possible under the circumstances, to provide additional shades of the meaning intended:
"Dear Paul, it's very weak and silly of me, I know, to be so trembly and shaky from head to foot." (Dickens) M.D. Kuznets called the two ways of using synonyms 'replacers' and 'specifiers' («заменители и уточнители» in the original wording). It was not her task or concern at the time to assign the two types to two different branches of stylistic semasiology, as is done in the present book.
Comparing the two examples, one is bound to come to certain conclusions:
a) in the first example, the communicator (as well as the recipient) overlooks, or intentionally ignores, any differentiation of meaning in the synonyms; they are used on the assumption of complete identity of their meanings;
b) in the second example, the speaker is anxious to specify, to make a more adequate description of his mental and physical state: not only weak, but also silly, trembly as well as shaky; two more or less synonymous adjectives are supposed to be stronger than one.
It should be evident to the reader that the second type of synonym use has nothing in common with the idea of identity. Indeed, the synonyms are used here not because they are identical, for they are not. It is because they are different, because each has characteristics none of the others has. Therefore, the second type does not belong in this section of the chapter; it will be discussed in the one on figures of inequality (see below). Returning then to synonymous replacements, or, as they may also be termed, "variations", we will state again that they are resorted to for the sake of diversity, to avoid monotony. Excessive recurrence of the same words makes the style poor — in a way it betrays the poverty of one's vocabulary. See the following illustration:
"Well, ain't you the lucky one? Piggy's an awful swell; and he always takes a girl to swell places. He took Blanch up to the Hoffman House one evening, where they have swell music, and you see a lot of swells. You'll have a swell time, Dulce." (O. Henry) Consider also this quatrain (from G. McKnight's book, often quoted in the present one):
Two adjectives Susannah knows On these she takes her stand; No matter how this world goes, 'Tis either fierce or grand.
Interchange of denominations of the same thing in speech (especially
in writing) is called by English linguists 'elegant variation'.5 Examples:
"He brought home numberless prizes. He told his mother
countless stories every night about his school companions."
(Thackeray)
"Every man has somewhere in the back of his head the wreck of a thing which he calls his education. My book is intended to embody in concise form these remnants of early instruction." (Leacock)
Sometimes it is not synonyms that replace one another, but words (phrases) with essentially different meanings, which, however, can be regarded as 'situational' synonyms, or, to be more exact, со-referential units (i.e. such as apply to the same referent though classifying it in a different way). Thus, the same person can be referred to as neighbour, student, brother, Richard, he, etc. The words are not synonyms; they only happen to signify the same individual. Compare:
"She told his name to the trees. She whispered it to the flowers. She breathed it to the birds. Quite a lot of them knew it. At times she would ride her palfrey along the sands of the sea and call "Guido" to the waves. At other times she would tell it to the grass or even to the stick of cordwood or a ton of coal." (Leacock)
In certain cases we observe excessive use of this stylistic device: elegant variation becomes too elegant, pretentious, in fact. Recall the ridiculous figure of Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield by Dickens. His wife's monologues are no less elaborate and ornamental than those of her husband's. Thus, speaking about their pecuniary difficulties, she alternately uses such synonymous expressions as / feel, I am aware, I must not forget, I well know. Paying an emotional tribute of fidelity to her ever unfortunate spouse, this eloquent female exclaims: "He is the parent of my children! He is the father of my twins! He is the husband of my affections, and I ne-ver-will-desert Mr. Micawberl" As can easily be noticed, the first two sentences are synonymous, the third pertains to the same object of adoration, being somewhat different as to the idea expressed. The reader will also make a mental note of parallelism, as well as of the emphatic stress on the word never: the stress marks gradation in the whole discourse (see below, "Figures of Inequality").
Both synonymous replacers and mere co-referents (non-synonymous words and expressions applying to the same object of speech) are usually placed at some distance from one another: they do not immediately follow one another, mostly recurring in adjacent sentences or clauses.
If we now confront simile and synonymic recurrence, we shall see that they are included in the same group of Identity Figures on rather shaky grounds. They are certainly not correlative as regards their functions. Placed in the class of 'equalizers', they have only one feature in common: an implied equality. Yet synonymic recurrence is not only 'passive' in comparison with the active identification to be found in similes (in which the statement Ns = N2 is the purpose of the utterance); of special significance is whether the identification concerns really similar (sometimes identical) notions, or whether language users equalize basically different things. Now we can see that simile, as well as quasi-identity (figurative characteristics which follows the traditional denomination — The chap is a perfect ass) are samples of the latter case (different things similarized), while elegant variation of names, or synonymic variation (recurrence of co-referent names) renders the idea of equality, identity to a fuller extent.
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