What Makes For A Good Metaphor?
Ocean Vuong writes that good metaphors are “exploratory” rather than “performative.” Metaphors should help us deepen our relationship to and understanding of the world, not show off our writerly cleverness.
If I say, “Life is a ketchup packet (predictable inside, yet hard to open without making a mess)” that’s performative because it reads more like “look at me, being clever” than as a genuine statement in search of the meaning of life.
Yet metaphors can be—and often are—both exploratory and performative (all utterances, even those given in good faith, are a form of signaling).
Wallace Stevens writes of things “too much as they are to be changed by metaphor,” which I take to mean that some phenomena resist metaphor, expose it to be a ruse, a form of artifice, an inadequate response to the world.
If Stevens is right that the best things in life refuse metaphor, then metaphor must be understood as a form of protest against “things as they are.” Our use of metaphor signals—on a meta-level—our need to assimilate what is foreign into what is familiar.
But why not let the foreign remain foreign? Life—is life. The road—is a road. A cigar—is a cigar.
What if the problem with metaphor were not a matter of craft or aesthetics, but of psychology. There’s no such thing as bad metaphors, because all metaphors are already “fallen”?
Though we can’t think without metaphor, I’m not convinced that “the road is a washed-up clown” is absolutely worse than “the road is library.” Perhaps the only practical criterion for whether a metaphor is good is whether it works in context.
This sentence, like most, is an ex-convict.
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