The Humility of Imaginative Reading and The Role of Metaphor
The act of reading is often seen as a solitary, isolated, or even escapist activity. To see reading this way is to focus on a narrowing of space as the reader retreats into themselves. Not only does this narrow the space and draw the focus onto the reader, but the text itself becomes something that is consumed. Quality is then based not on what the text says in craft, complexity or otherwise, but becomes based on the reader’s taste and if the reader was changed through the consumption.
To get beyond this individualistic understanding of reading, we need to redefine the boundaries of the space in which reading functions. What would it look like to reimagine the act of reading as an expansive endeavor; one that actually opened up the self beyond its own limitations? If language is only something that we consume, and are or are not changed by, then the text becomes something that is completely subjectively used and then set aside, or even discarded. I want to suggest that a more iconic appreciation of reading (whether text or image) is that it is an act that should be contemplated and not used. Meaning becomes textually referential rather than self-referential, and the space that metaphor specifically opens allows reading to become a dynamic and imaginative activity. Metaphor then is actually a central concern, and not poetic excess lingering at the periphery of how we make meaning of text and image. Ideally, reading becomes a humble, iconic, and imaginative engagement with metaphor in which we are stretched beyond self-referential ways of using texts and images.
The way we relate to texts governs how we will interact with them. Whether we regard texts and the reading of texts as raw material able to be consumed, or as differentiated entities that are to be contemplated, we must examine how it is we relate to art and our interactions with them.[1] C.S. Lewis writes, “The distinction can hardly be better expressed than by saying that the many use art and the few receive it.”[2] Gregory Wolfe develops this idea of contemplating art rather than using it, and says “to use it is to abuse it.”[3] To regard art as something that can be used is already to disregard its dignity and entity beyond the subjective view of self as viewer/reader. Wolfe attributes this notion of using art to our inability to find proportions of truth, goodness, and beauty each with equal dignity and measure. Our suspicion of beauty is that it can be counter to truth, and this can cause us to take from art rather than to experience it.[4] Not only are truth, beauty, and goodness each entities with equal measure, but they can also be vehicles for the other. For many however, the suspicion is that beauty cannot be a vehicle for truth. Before engaging the nature of metaphor, it will be helpful to acknowledge and investigate where there is suspicion of metaphor that leads toward consumptive rather than contemplative acts of reading.
The two paths of suspicion for understanding language worth noting here are rationalism and deconstruction. Both of these ways of thinking have considerably impacted the way language is interpreted, expressed, and tied to meaning. What is worth considering are the questions raised around both ways of thinking, and what may be conceptually borrowed from each in considering the role of metaphor. Derrida specifically shifts philosophy and writing away from the world of ideas to the fallibility of the vehicle of language. One example is the idea that language is frustratingly circuitous; language yields more language, which does not guarantee moving in the direction of meaning. Rather the writing and reading of texts shows the tenuous nature of language itself to the meaning that is sought. In this way, language becomes a deferral of meaning, catching us within its own transmission. Derrida’s work in shifting philosophy to textuality reveals these inabilities and shortcomings of language.
In terms of interpretation of the texts, not only is there a need to confront the possibility of an incomplete certainty, but also the awareness of “how everything is falling apart.”[5] Derrida’s work calls into question not only how language functions, but the implications of that within our acts of reading and writing, such as the forces of signification: the act of signs always distancing themselves from other signs. It is within this space between words that actually give words their meaning, spoken as a “productive negativity.”[6] Therefore the question arising from this way of thinking about texts, language, and reading is: is there really anything there?
On the other hand, suspicion of metaphor in terms of rationalism poses that “meaning and truth are successfully conveyed only by means of concepts of an intellectual kind which have been purified as completely as possible from all imaginative content.”[7] In explaining this type of conceptual rationalism, Colin Gunton goes on to say that “concepts are strictly distinguished from and opposed to pictures and images: while the former are fitted to convey truth, the latter are, because of their unclarity, the source of deceit and confusion.”[8] So not only do words need to be stripped of all superfluousness and poesis, but in this overly rationalistic mindset, images downright deceive. Because of this desire for clarity and directness, “metaphor becomes disqualified from being a means of our rational interactions with the world: unless is ceases to be metaphor, it cannot tell the truth.”[9] Metaphor becomes an enemy of truth, not the vehicle.
In the face of this suspicion, Jeremy Begbie asserts that metaphor is not an enemy of truth, particularly because it is oriented to an object, and even creates bonds through language.[10] The profound success of metaphor is that it is indirect, though through the fusion of the seemingly incompatible, there can be a burst of meaning. Even the way we speak about language is a metaphor therefore the relationship between language and the world is indirect.[11] Because of this very indirectness, metaphor becomes the most appropriate way to know the world.[12] Here Gunton disqualifies the idea of clarity and distinctiveness as necessary parts of truth, and instead returns to the indirectness of metaphor as holding together the “affirmation that ‘it is’ with the vital qualifier that, even so, ‘it is not.’”[13] David Brown speaks about metaphors in this way: “They do after all both affirm something to be the case and yet refuse complete identification and closure.”[14] The indirectness of metaphor is what contributes to its success of relating our language to reality. This purchase of metaphor makes them “not odd, unusual, improper or merely decorative. They are so persuasive a part of our experience that they are a, if not the, clue to what language is and does.”[15] Metaphor becomes something that is not only for artistic endeavors, but more integral to the way we use language to understand, make meaning, and connect to our world. The function of metaphor, in giving or receiving, is an imaginative exercise that advances our understanding, particularly and not detrimentally, in its indirectness.
So the claim that metaphor has the potential to create more space, due to its indirect way of relating language to reality begs the question of how this may occur. Additionally, why might this be a necessary construct for how we interpret text and image? The suspicion of beauty sees metaphor as excess and not essential, but if metaphor is truly a way in which we interpret the world, then the ‘indirect purchase’ on reality in which the metaphor presents must be taken into account. When the only reference to a work is the self, the viewer/reader uses the texts for their purposes. In a way, this is what would be considered ‘closed’ or ‘fixed’ meaning. When we are open to contemplate and are able to respond to a work, we will less likely use it for our own purposes. This openness allows for more of an ‘open’ meaning, and allows the work to speak, albeit often indirectly and suggestively. Being open to a work is an imaginative activity, which Paul Ricoeur describes the role of metaphor as having the ability to redescribe reality.[16] The question of image or word dominance becomes irrelevant because the role of metaphor connects word to image and image to word. In the search of a Christian understanding of word and image, they are intricately connected through the incarnation. This precludes the idea that word based or image based endeavors are more successful than the other, because they are inextricably held in tandem.
Hart explains this practice of believing in two distinct tiers of intellectual engagement (through image and word) as a mistake, specifically because “the fact of the incarnation eschews any neat or convenient bifurcation between word and image.”[17] They are more interwoven and they also mutually illuminate the other. Trevor Hart writes: “the lesson to be learned from Christology, and applied more widely is that the levels of image (eikon) and idea/concept (logos) must constantly be held closely together, generating meaning precisely and only as they are maintained in a dialect where each is constantly qualified and rejuvenated by the other.”[18]
So part of being open to a work is being aware of the metaphor; how image and word are at work. The temptation, to return to Lewis is to use art, and when that happens “you don’t lay yourself open to what it, by being in its totality precisely the thing it is, can do to you.”[19] The role of metaphor becomes not only an imaginative endeavor but a humble one. Lewis makes this distinction as an act of humility, that in reality, “the first demand that any work of art makes upon us is surrender.”[20] Purely subjective reading runs the danger of being consumptive, whereas Lewis is calling readers to open to the realities of the text that exist beyond themselves. This is where Lewis introduces the idea of the humility of the icon, in that the point is not to fix attention upon itself but rather being a conduit of passing through to something beyond itself.[21] Returning to the metaphoric qualifier of ‘it is and it isn’t’ can also be understood in these iconic forms. Thomas Torrance describes open meanings, which permit us to ‘look through’ words rather than ‘looking at’ them.[22] Although Torrance’s argument continues down a path of the conceptual rationalism that Gunton introduces, the idea of the iconic use of language (without its need to be stripped of its metaphorical or pictorial content) is a useful one. Specifically, iconic use of language reveals the distrust and desire to remove image from word, and the desire to deny that the experience of art is an imaginative activity rather than a consumptive one. It is the difference of “nothing is really there” and “something is really there” that are both possibilities arising from the idea of open meaning. What becomes suspicious in light of Christian reading is that open meaning feels like the loss of truth. What if actually our hesitation with metaphor as essential rather than excess has to do with our uncertainty of the interconnectivity between images and words and the idea that metaphor and open meaning is the enemy of truth?
Returning to the idea of incarnation, Hart proposes that we must maintain “apophatic humility without compromising or attenuating the significance of the claim that the Logos of God is always an enfleshed logos.”[23] Through Christ, the word self-presents as physical and the physical re-presents as word. Image and word are bound, inseparable, not to their disservice, but to their merit.
The incarnate and simultaneous relationship between word and image prevents the full embrace of the suspicion of metaphor present in rationalism and deconstruction. Rationalism expects that language must be stripped of image in order to be true, and deconstruction expects that there is so much semantic slippage that nothing is truly there. So the humble imaginative reading of image and/or word becomes what George Steiner calls a wager on transcendence.[24] It is the assertion that something is really there, as the reader/viewer dances between closed and open meaning in hopes of being surrendered to the work. Hart sums it up in this way:
Both Torrance and Gunton would, I think, see due intellectual humility (and hence demand for openness, indirectness and imaginative semantic surplus in our speech and thought) as proper to all properly objective knowing, and a vital counterpoint, therefore, to whatever efforts in the direction of the precise determination and tight definition of terms may legitimately arise in our dealings. Only thus can we both ‘fix’ meaning sufficiently to think and speak and write in a coherent manner about things at all, and yet, at the same time, allow reality to enforce constant modifications and adjustments to those meanings, rather than leaving them ‘fixed’ in some once and for all manner and thus blind and deaf to further insights and discoveries.[25]
Here Hart outlines the possibility of metaphor to communicate meaning, and that the indirect nature of it still demands an openness of us as readers. The use of language can be concrete enough in order to communicate, but does not rule out changes and modifications that language inevitably undergoes. The ability of the viewer/reader to remain open to the work, approaching with humility and imagination, allows the interconnectivity of the word (and the images it evokes) and the image (and the words it evokes) to connect us with our realities.
Returning to the idea of the importance of the incarnation, Ricoeur introduces the texture of narrative within the biblical word: “life of the word occurs through the death of the body.”[26] The word made known through the biblical text is read through the lens of the bodily death of Christ. Even still, this death does not mean an absence of flesh (image) but a resurrected (redeemed) one. On the other hand, it is the very “broken image”[27] that opens us up to the world, and “permits the world in its turn to enforce changes in the meanings that our words bear.”[28] Therefore the life and death of Christ shows not only the simultaneity of image and word, but also the transformation each undergo. The word became image, the image was then broken, and this becomes the metaphor in which we understand our reality.
Understanding the role of metaphor then becomes crucial to how we read a text or image. Ideally, each work invites the viewer/reader to the risk of contemplating the presence of something beyond not only the self, but the physicality of the work. Our cultural suspicion of beauty and desire for pure clarity push the metaphor into the margins, and cause us to use art for nothing more than how we want to. In order to receive what the work has to offer, we must be willing to ponder how a work respects mystery, constructs its language, while still giving glimpses of transcendence. We must enter into the enlargement of space that metaphor provides, and the into imaginative activity to which word and image beckon us.
I am using the term art here, as Lewis does in this section, to represent both verbal/text and visual/image. We will return to this idea later when we examine the role of metaphor and why they can be used interchangeably.
C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 19. Emphasis added.
Gregory Wolfe, “Why Using Art is a Sin,” Lecture, [trans]formation Conference Seattle, February 28th, 2015.
Reminiscent of the writings of Hans Urs Von Balthasar, especially within The Glory of the Lord, that theology must actually begin from a place of beauty
Carl Raschke, “Derrida and Post-structuralism,” Lecture, Philosophy II from The Seattle School, June 5th, 2014.
Ibid.
Colin Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), 17.
Ibid.
Ibid., 30.
Jeremy Begbie, “Faithful Feelings,” Lecture, Emotional Life of Artists Retreat, Kerrville TX, April 30th, 2015. Gunton also writes that metaphor “brings expression to some but not all aspects and relationships of the segment of the world to which it is directly.” See Gunton, Actuality of Atonement, 34. Metaphor, though indirect, is still directed to an object.
“The speaker puts ideas (objects) into words (containers) and sends them (along a conduit) to a hearer who then takes the objects out of the containers.” See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 5. Even when we try to break down the language we use about language, we run into metaphor. This does not even take into account the complexities of contextual hearers and speakers.
Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 38. One of Gunton’s working definitions of metaphor involves the transfer of a word from one context to another.
Trevor Hart, Between the Image and the Word (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2013), 26.
David Brown, God and Mystery in Words: Experience through Metaphor and Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22.
Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement, 32
Paul Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor: Multidisciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 216-256.
Hart, 34 & 77. Also Ricoeur writes about this mutually illuminative process in terms of intertextuality, as the embedded narrative revealing the symbolic potentialities of the encompassing narrative. Interestingly he calls this process metaphorization, as the process between the two texts. See lis: Fortress Press, 1995), 144-166.
Trevor Hart, Between the Image and the Word, 33
Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, 17.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Thomas Torrance, Theological Science (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 20 as quoted in Hart, Between the Image and the Word, 27.
Hart, 34.
See George Steiner, Real Presences: Is There Anything In What We Say? (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 229.
Hart, 26.
Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 163.
Gunton, Actuality of Atonement, 46
Hart, Between the Image and the Word, 37.