II.
ABOUT THE PURSUIT OF IMAGES
or
THE CHINESE TAILOR.
The old-style rhetoric which obliged all of us to practice the trade of the pedantic rhetorician has been abolished. Now, the present risk is all the greater in that everybody keeps his discoveries for himself, he does not compare them nor can he criticize them. In place of the amiable variety we might have expected, here is a monotonous abundance of incorrect principles, subject to the simplest illusions, in particular to those which are favored by the desire to make words serve rapidly.
This is true of the principle which attaches the writer's application to the discovery of new images. Not that it is any more stupid than the next one; it has served its purpose. Still, it is strangely weak as soon as it has to give its reasons.
If all words have been images.
We know with what strange favor the theory according to which words are chilled metaphors was met. The critics saw in it a proof of the doctrine which they had held dear for more than a hundred years.
"The origin of the word briller," wrote Rémy de Gourmont, "has been determined; it is beryllare, to scintillate like the béryl. What would the professors of belles-lettres not say, if some 'decadent,' -- since briller has really nothing more than an abstract sense -- should forge the words émerauder or topazer?"
It is important here to justify the decadents, elsewhere the romantics. There is no image so daring, it will be said, but that the people's instinct has not imagined a still more daring image, and one which has succeeded. A professor is astonished that Jules Renard should write: "she agitates her little lizard hands . . . ." Now the latin tongue, equally audacious, calls a lizard, lacertus, the muscular arm, because the trepidation of the muscles under the skin is compared with a passing lizard.
Thus there would not appear to be two different ways of making language; but the process used by the good writer is universal, or almost so; in the present state of European languages, "almost all words are metaphors." So that if we ask for details or reasons, Bréal or Darmesteter will offer us long lists of popular metaphors which seems to have been born in groups.
"To accost a passer-by, aborder (lit. to land), échouer (to strand) in an enterprise, are all metaphors come from the sea; opportune, inopportune, are images borrowed from the idea of a more or less convenient landing beach. Travail supposes at first the image of a horse fettered and broken, etc."
Well and good. From a few thousand similar observations, they conclude as follows: in one of the languages the history of which we can study, is there an abstract word, which, if we know its etymology, does no resolve itself into a metaphor.
I am willing to admit that its cause is in "the need which we all feel to represent and paint in images that which we feel"' but then Bréal and Darmesteter only forget one thing: which is to show that what we are dealing with are really metaphors.
Criticism of Scientists.
A carpenter speaking of a law that has just been voted: "It sill needs a good planing down"; a photographer: "a bit of touching up." Each, in speaking this way, uses the simplest terms that suggest themselves to him and which represent naturally for him the idea that a finishing is to be given to some piece of furniture or a law. So far from seeking the metaphor, they avoid it.
But this plane, this touching up, you say, create images. Doubtless for you, who are neither carpenter nor photographer, "It's simply a question of making a redraft of the law." Well, it will be your "redraft" that will seem to the carpenter to be an image.
The metaphor, in such cases, far from being the effect of our "need to paint we feel," indicates a defective understanding between the interlocutors: in this instance, we receive what has been said to us reversely, and on a different plane.
There exists between men a diversity which is more subtle than that which is characteristic of their or habits of living: a difference of language, especially, and above all, a difference in the ease and surety with which they handle the same language. By which the field of the false metaphor is enlarged. It is no longer merely a question of words which, although they go along by themselves as far as the speaker is concerned, seem to the listener deliberate and affected, but those very words which the speaker discovers are found according to an unexpected direction.
If a child, or a foreigner, speaks of a "spoon with holes," or "a top for the head," we say: what imagination! It is because they did not know the words fork or hat; or else these words had escaped them. They only want to bring the object nearer and make themselves understood.
(The image in this case begins to strike us with fork, and in the evolution towards spoon, which we are obliged to follow. The same image does not occur for them with spoon: because they tend towards the fork).
We can't blame too much the person who, in such cases, comments upon the "curious image." But should he want to develop still further his admiration for the use of metaphor by the child or the foreigner, we should stop him and point out his illusion to him.
It is an illusion approaching an optical illusion: there is not doubt that Bréal is caught by it, as well as Darmesteter. For the image just happens to operate for those two linguists, who, ast the same moment, consider this actual abstract word: to accost, and this other word, which is different and yet the same: coast. It operates to the advantage of this distance between them, as in the above case between fork and spoon with a hole, or for the professor, between making a redraft and planing. Bréal's only mistake is to admit that the Latin or French of four hundred years ago used language with such science and detachment.
Céline and Kikouyou
Because the Kikouyous call the milky way "lianae of the sky," and joy "heart's moonshine," Céline is astounded, and wants to live in their country: "What poets!" she exclaims. But the civilized Kikouyou is moved to hear that his lineage were for us a "milky way"' "road of milk -- what a charming image, and how nice it is to be with erudite people." Now, Céline had not thought of the milk, nor the Kikouyou of lianae.
Stanley and Gastchet, the explorers, find Negroes and Indians who seem to possess no ideas, but only images. I have had the opportunity of being with a few elderly men from Madagascar who had retained the same impression from a European trip with regard to the English and French languages, and who expressed it openly. They drew certain conclusions from it relative to the character of the various races.
And what of that mother who just said: "Where does Jacques find these things? He tells me he has unscrewed the rainbow-ball. What a poet! . . . . And it was nly the glass-knob on the stair-post."
We might answer the mother, Stanley and Céline as follows: "You see an image because you understand badly, and to the advantage of your hesitation. Thus rainbow-ball surprises you. You try to get its meaning and think of everything that is rainbow before discovering the ball. But the child, who proceeds from the ball and is in a hurry to give it a name, has never taken such pains not to see a rainbow. In the same way, Céline, you alone distinguish the moonshine in a heart: the Kikouyou does not perceive it today because he is accustomed to the word: the first time, he distinguished it still less even, because he was eager to outline the thing and not to get confused."
We do not understand words directly, but according to the sense which we form for them. The presence of the image in this sense, reveals a delay, a rupture of the union, something like a short circuit of language. In the same way we judge writers.
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