Allegorical elements

An allegory is an abstract representation of principals or ideas through the use of characters, figures or events. It is also the classification for a creative work, such as a story or a play, which makes use of allegory. In most cases, allegory is the term used (rather than metaphor) when the symbolic representations reflect an aspect of human behavior or values.

The term allegory originated from the Greek term allegoria (speaking otherwise). It came into common use through plays, generally religious, which would act out human frailties in order to teach a lesson. Characters (often taking the form of animals) would actually be named for their representation. The betrayer would be named “betrayal”, the evil character named “evil” the faithful character named “faith”. The characters had few, if any, characteristics beyond their representation of a concept. These plays were publicly called allegories and were performed at religious gatherings.

Allegories took many forms over the years, such as fables and parables. The story of the tortoise and the hare is an allegory, expressing the belief that the slow and steady will always defeat the quick and prideful in the end.

While the old-time allegories were very direct in showing the audience what represented what, over time allegories became more subtle. In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, for example, the white whale is seen as an allegory for evil. In the Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, the fight clubs are an allegory for modern man’s repressed primal instincts and the need to express them.

Most novels and plays contain some allegorical elements. Symbolic representations of emotions or dilemmas are such a common concept that often writers include them without even realizing they are doing so. Of course, the most masterful of writers are very conscious of the allegories they are creating, even when the allegories seem subtle to the audience.

by John Hewitt

For more information read:

The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition by C. S. Lewis

Allegories of Reading by Paul De Man

The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

Figures of speech

The various rhetorical uses of language (such as metaphor, idiom, and chiasmus) that depart from customary construction, order, or significance. Attempts to draw strict distinctions between figures and tropes have largely been abandoned.

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Hypertext as a metaphor

Do you think there is some possible use of the idea of hypertext, the idea of this kind of linking and putting in relation different scattered pieces of information outside the field of literature, of writing? Do you think hypertext can also be seen as a kind of model or metaphor in other fields?

David Kolb - I think so. If you think about hypertext as linkage which is non-linear and also non-hierarchical - although you can build a hypertext which is hierarchical, you can build a hypertext which is purely linear, the problem is that you cannot keep it that way, it is going to have other links, it is going to move out - if you think about that image of non-linear, non-hierarchical linking, and forms that can be created but which cannot dominate the field of writing because other forms could be created out of the same pieces of text, that idea can be transferred. Here’s an example. Many people complain, especially in American but I think also increasingly in Europe, about suburbs and suburban sprawl. We tend to think that we have a very concentrated historical city core surrounded by a flat area which has houses and factories and malls just kind of scattered about with no order. This lack of order is felt to be somehow inappropriate. But you might try reading the suburbs as a hypertext.

You might say: Do not try to impose on the suburbs the old hierarchical kind of order, look for linkages, see the economic links that go among pieces of the suburbs, see how people make lives, especially in America, by using their car to make links from one activity to another. See how a community is created which is not a community of people who live in the same neighbourhood but a community of people who are linked by car, by telephone, by e-mail. A disconnected, discontinuous community but nonetheless a community.

So this idea of linkage without hierarchy and linkage that has many possible patterns at the same time may be a useful way to think about the kind of physical civilisation which tends to be growing up in a dispersed fashion rather than the concentrated, hierarchical city.

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Metaphor and metonymy

Jakobson sees metaphor and metonymy as the characteristic modes of binarily opposed polarities which between them underpin the two-fold process of selection and combination by which linguistic signs are formed . . . .

Thus messages are constructed, as Saussure said, by a combination of a 'horizontal' movement, which combines words together, and a 'vertical' movement, which selects the particular words from the available inventory or 'inner storehouse' of the language. The combinative (or syntagmatic) process manifests itself in contiguity (one word being places next to another) and its mode is metonymic. The selective (or associative) process manifests itself in similarity (one word or concept being 'like' another) and its mode is metaphoric. (Hawkes, pp. 77-8.)

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Flight of birds

Metaphors for interactivity in electronic narratives are rich and varied.

Some critics define the navigation actions taken by the reader as a kind of augury. In this interpretation, the reader is seen as the Roman augur, anticipating from the flight of birds the direction that the story will take. Some critics liken the electronic narrative to a game - one in which the reader becomes a player, selecting options to obtain a favorable outcome.
Others cite the Wunderkammer, holding that the electronic narrative provides the associational structure of a medieval cabinet or an assemblage by Joseph Cornell. And, still others describe the gathering of narrative incidents as bricolage – a wandering about, in which the reader uses whatever comes to hand to construct a personal collage - narrative. All of these metaphors provide insight into the process by which readers identify, select, and make connections between narrative elements in electronic literature.

However, each of them elides the complexity present in current electronic works. Comparing it to linear activities or even to physical spatial constructs may not adequately represent the nature of interactivity in electronic literature today. While electronic literature has considerable materiality, the syntax of interactivity is not so much a process or place, it is more like a language itself. As such, the links between electronic objects and between narrative events and outcomes have a flexibility akin to the grammar of transitions. Aspects of multilinearity, simultaneity, movement/resistance, and media oscillation all enter the inter-active potential of a hypermedia text (from M.C.Luesebrink).

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Crux of hypertextual aesthetics

We must reinforce our view by constantly referring words to pictures and pictures back to words.

Ebooks must contain illustrations of the subjects we describe, and of course readers are invited to go to the actual scenes themselves; but the theory holds good only for literal representations and requires the denial of subjective elements such as association and an independent faculty of imagination. The crux of aesthetics is the treatment of figurative representation; and here, as we will see, we hold that metaphors further enhance our perception of natural and spiritual powers.

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Problems of reading

The way that a paradox of self-reflexivity is revealed is in the fact that a reader is reading a text in terms of the way it thematizes the problems of reading.

In this way we can read the text as rigorously as possible in terms of what the text itself—as a rhetorical entity—makes possible, even necessary. In other words the text makes a claim (at the level of its statement) on behalf of the value of presence, according to which the most essential figurative tropes are metaphorical as opposed to metonymical. But in the performance the text reveals a praxis (the Greek word for action or practice in the sense of something that one habitually does)—i.e., it achieves its effects—through metonymic combinations, which ground the metaphorical substitutions.

Nutritious centre

How does the metaphor work?

Imagine a nut. A nut has a shell that, once removed, yields a nutritious centre. This is what Paul de Man means by the following statement: “when form is considered to be the external trappings of literary meaning or content, it seems superficial and expendable.” The formalists, on the other hand, taught that it is the shell, rather than its content, that is important in literature. So when Paul de Man observes that the trend in literary criticism has moved from form to reference, what interests him is the underlying metaphor that governs how we have up until now always—without thinking about it too much—imagined meaning to come about. That is, before we interpret a text we have already accepted an interpretation—based upon a metaphor—of what interpretation is. It is this unwitting interpretation of interpretation that interests de Man.

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Isolated similarities

Metaphors are culturally-based, and define what those with certain assumptions and presuppositions find real.

The "isolated similarities" are indeed those created by metaphor, which simply create a partial understanding of one kind of experience in terms of another kind of experience. They are grounded in correlations within our experience.

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Intended meaning

Inevitable clash of metaphors in all writing shows too well that language may subvert or exceed an author's intended meaning.

Paul de Man saw language as an endless chain of words, which cannot be closed off to a definitive meaning or reference. The literal and figurative meaning of a text is not easily separated, and the realities posited by language are largely those accepted by the dominant ideology as truthful representations of the world.

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Metaphor is rooted in the beliefs

Where is metaphor actually grounded?

Not in logic, nor literary theory. There is no purely literal language in terms of which metaphor may be evaluated and objectively assessed. Along a broad front in cognitive psychology and social anthropology, metaphor is currently subject to extensive analysis, but the findings can only be partial, and relative to the discipline involved. What is becoming clearer is that metaphor — like linguistic theory and theories of speech acts — is rooted in the beliefs, practices and intentions of language users.

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No objective world

Metaphors are much more powerful instruments in the eyes of Lakoff and Johnson.

Metaphors have entailments that organize our experience, uniquely express that experience, and create necessary realities. Lakoff and Johnson attacked the two commonly accepted theories of metaphor. Previous theories derive, they believe, from a naive realism that there is an objective world, independent of ourselves, to which words apply with fixed meanings. But the answer is not to swing to the opposite and embrace a wholly subjectivists view that the personal, interior world is the only reality. Metaphors, for Lakoff and Johnson, are primarily matters of thought and action, only derivatively of language. Metaphors are culturally-based, and define what those with certain assumptions and presuppositions find real. The "isolated similarities" are indeed those created by metaphor, which simply create a partial understanding of one kind of experience in terms of another kind of experience.

They are grounded in correlations within our experience.

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Textural contexts

Since all attempts to ground meaning in more fundamental entities have failed, perhaps we should conclude that sentences have no meaning at all, no final, settled meaning that we can paraphrase in non-metaphorical language.

That is the contention of postmodern authors. Deconstruction is the literary programme that derives from this approach, though Derrida himself does not see deconstruction as a method, and still less an attack on the western canon of literature, but more a way of investigating the textural contexts in which words are used. The social, cultural and historical aspects of that context, and how we interpret a text from our own current perspective, are the concerns of hermeneutics.

What metaphors means

Donald Davidson works with a thesis, stating that "metaphors mean what the words, in their most literal interpretation mean, and nothing more".

He opposes those who believe that, in addition to the literal sense, it has an additional sense or meaning and lists many, including: Aristotle, Freud, Plato, Lakoff. He suggests that his approach means that metaphors accomplish more than what they're given credit for and what they accomplish is different than what others suggest. His argument is that "metaphors belong exclusively to the domain of use"and that to suggest that they have an additional meaning is to weaken their power.

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Computational methods

According to L. Floridi, one can think of three main ways for applying computational methods towards philosophical matters:

Conceptual experiments in silico: As an innovative extension of an ancient tradition of thought experiment, a trend has begun in philosophy to apply computational modeling schemes to questions in logic, epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of biology, philosophy of mind, and so on.

Pancomputationalism (or the fallacy of a powerful metaphor): By this view, computational and informational concepts are considered to be so powerful that given the right Level of abstraction, anything in the world could be modeled and represented as a computational system, and any process could be simulated computationally. Then, however, pancomputationalists have the hard task of providing credible answers to the following two questions:

how can one avoid blurring all differences among systems, thus transforming pancomputationalism into a night in which all cows are black, to paraphrase Hegel?
what would it mean for the system under investigation not to be an informational system (or a computational system, if computation = information processing)?

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