Metaphors are more complicated than you think (oh boy!)
What are metaphors? What happens in a reader’s head when they see a metaphor? How do we use this knowledge to improve our writing? In this post I discuss the research of Gibbs RW and Matlock T into how readers understand metaphors by mentally simulating the activity, and what understanding the cognitive process of interpreting metaphors teaches us at writers. Don’t worry, I’ll try throw in some jokes.
Gibbs and Matlock–Metaphor as Embodied Simulation
In a dusty corner of my hard drive I found a draft of what I’m think ended up being Gibbs RW and Matlock T, Metaphor, “Imagination and Simulation”, Chapter 9, The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, CUP (2008)–at the time entitled “Metaphor as Embodied Simulation: Psycholinguistic Evidence”: an analysis of the empirical work on how people understand metaphors. I was interested because of the work of Peter Stockwell and a course I did in cognitive poetics was back in 2014. I read a lot of other people’s plays now, some good, some bad, and an awful lot containing stinky metaphors. But what makes a good or a bad metaphor? Why are some metaphors cliché and what does that mean? How can I make my metaphors better?
Why do we use metaphors?
“Conscience is a man’s compass.” (Vincent Van Gogh). So, what, he uses it to draw circles? If it’s his compass does that mean it is separate from him, something he can replace with another tool? Vincent, what are you talking about!? Here’s William Wordsworth: “Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” Sorry, Bill, but hearts don’t breathe, and paper doesn’t inflate. Unless you fold it to make a water bomb. Is that what you’re talking about?
At first glance metaphors make things harder to understand. Why not say a man’s conscience helps him decide what best to do? Your feelings should drive your writing? Both are clearer. I’m pretty sure I remember William Strunk[i] telling me that clear writing was better writing. So, metaphors are for ponces to confuse people and sound clever, right?
Actually, quite often that’s true. So, don’t be that guy. If your metaphor makes things unclear, ditch it and say what you mean. We’ll come back to how to make metaphors clear later.
On the face of it, metaphors make things unclear. So why use them at all? Why make your writing harder to understand? Is it just about making things pretty – and if your reader has given up because hearts don’t breathe is there any point in the prettiness?
What is a metaphor?
Right, we’d better get this out of the way. At school they usually teach us metaphor by how it differs from simile. A simile describes something by saying is like something else: Keith is like a grumpy bear. A metaphor describes something by saying is something else. Keith is a grumpy bear. [ii] A metaphor tries to explain something by comparison. They aren’t literally true: I am a grumpy human, not a grumpy bear, no matter how hairy.
So, more formally, a metaphor is a figure of speech that refers to something not literally true.
But there are two important types of metaphor, and, because English professors must have something to do with their time, the debate about defining metaphor is ongoing. The argument that metaphor is embodied simulation is also not uncontroversial.[iii] Great.
Well, I’m not and English professor–I do Law, Economics, and one-handed nappy-changing in the dark. But these are the two main definitions of metaphor:
- The A is B metaphor: Keith is a grumpy bear. This one most of us know.
- The correlative experience metaphor. Are you scared yet? Correlative experience metaphors are also known as “primary metaphors”, where a basic connection exists between abstract and concrete experiences. Up is good. Red is Danger. Obviously, there’s a strong cultural component, but this lets us use metaphors without comparison. Try: “He walked into the room. The wallpaper was red.” Voila. Danger, without a comparison in sight. Unless you’re Chinese. Then it’s time to buy a lottery ticket.
Now if we can have metaphors without even making comparisons we haven’t just opened a new can of worms, we’ve released the floodgates and thrown the baby out with the bathwater. You can see why scholars argue. At this point a metaphor is basically describing stuff with stuff it is not, except when it is. We are telling the reader something about the room beyond its colour when we tell them it is red. If you feel the definition has got so broad as to be useless, hey, I’m a lawyer, I hear you comrade.
But for our purposes, the broadest definition of metaphor is the most useful. What happens when we describe things by comparing them with other things? Whether simile, an A is B metaphor or a correlative experience metaphor, the process is the same. We must understand something that the writer has deliberately obfuscated.
So why is this good? I mean, how could this possibly be a good thing?
Thinking is pleasing
Understanding a metaphor uses mental capacity. We’ll get more into how later. But if you engage in visual processing to “see” the compass of your conscience, you literally reduce your perception of the external, real world. This isn’t a theory–a wealth of empirical evidence has proved the phenomenon, cited in Gibbs and Matlock’s paper.
Ever felt you were so lost in a book you could no longer tell where you were? When your brain is engaged in understanding a metaphor it switches off those bits of your perception of the outside world it needs to handle the metaphor. So, there’s our first good reason for using metaphor: Thinking is the ultimate escapism.
But how does it work, and how can we make it happen?
Metaphors work by physical simulation
When we read a metaphor, the first thing we do is try to picture it in our head. “Stomp out racism” is one example used in the article. Racism is an abstract concept.[iv] So you start by picturing yourself stomping. The next step is to imagine your body in action against the metaphorical object–in doing so transforming the abstract idea into an object or living entity. Picture whatever racism means to you–coppers beating protesters, comments on the metro, border guards separating children from their parents[v]. Then imagine your foot, a massive great foot, stamping on it. Notice the satisfying squish? Congratulations, you used metaphor to help make the abstract and absurd notion of stamping out racism into a real, understandable thing.
This is how we understand metaphor. We take the bit we can understand or visualise and turn it into a physical action. We then try to recreate what it must be like to engage in the action–to stamp on racism. And that facilitates our understanding of racism as a real thing, rather than a simple abstraction.
Simulation is how we reason–and that reasoning is physical.
This sounds a tough thing to do, but simulation is part of everyday reasoning. It is so fundamental to how our brain works, we start doing it right from the moment we have brains. Watch a child trying to figure out how to pick up a glass of water. Their eyes narrow. They move their hands, without noticing. They’re imagining interacting with the glass. Once their imagination has provided a solution, they test. Their imagination grows, the water is drunk, or spilled, or both, and their ability to simulate improves.
Over time this becomes so sophisticated that we simulate the impossible and the implausible. Indeed, we are constantly engaged in simulated: “In reasoning about everyday events and actions, people frequently engage in physical simulations as a way of “offloading” mental computation into the world, which makes problem solving much easier”[vi] [Clark(1997)]
More empirical research has shown that this is so rooted in the physical that moving your body in the way described in the metaphor helps you understand the metaphor. Stomping your foot helps you better imagine stomping out racism. Ever sat next to the guy who keeps twitching his shoulders during fight scenes in a movie? He’s embodying the simulation: his engagement has reached a level that his is recreating it internally. Right in that moment, the metaphor has made him James Bond. How cool is that!
Moving in the appropriate manner does not activate a lexical item–it is not triggering words–it enhances how the reader experiences the simulation. This is where embodied simulation gets controversial–as the common theory of metaphor insists that the meaning must inhabit the understanding of the word itself. But instead we use our embodied understanding of action verbs to simulate the physical experience in our minds.
What does this mean? The emphasis is on action verbs! Metaphor rooted in action is easier to simulate. Ease is not necessarily good – but for immediacy action verbs are key. They create fictive motion. As the preceding motion metaphor sets up the following they carry through us and immerse us in the text.
Fictive metaphors include more motion elements, and motion is the heart of embodiment. Don’t believe me? Did you know that when we read handwriting we perceive movement of the pen?[vii] Good metaphors work via change. The embodied movement of the phrase informs the next–whereas metaphors that operate differently will clash. Embodied metaphor is very powerful, so you need to align them for maximum impact.
Simulation lets us understand–but understanding is hard.
So: metaphor makes things easier to understand, because it invokes physical simulation, but uses up cognitive reasoning (which may or may not be a bad thing depending on whether you are driving at the time.)
Metaphorical simulation is not abstract. It is experienced as if it were really happening – a model is created in the readers head that is as close as possible to something they could actual do, and then they interpret the metaphor from there. The stepping stone of imagining a physical process allows people to easily visualise the impossible and even make it plausible. I You visualise yourself interacting with the object of the metaphor.
This power is not unlimited, sadly: “Peoples mental images for metaphorical action phrases are constrained by their embodied, metaphorical understandings of the target domains referred to in these expressions (e.g. ideas, concepts, feelings.)”
So, all our lives we are building a web of metaphorical associations, like the child imagining different ways to get the water from the cup, such that one metaphor helps us understand another. But what achieves greatest impact?
Remember the web of metaphorical meaning?
People have embedded models for abstract concepts – which you can work with or against. Strong as a bull, lightening fast, heartbroken: we learn meaning in these phrases from an early age, depending on our cultural and educational surroundings. Yep, I’m talking about clichés. Clichés have huge inherent advantages. They are the cheap, sugary sweets of literature.
It’s not quite the same thing, but when the bad guy in the recent Mission Impossible film broke character to shout “why won’t you die!” at Ethan Hawke they did it because it was an easily accessible cliché that communicated information without distracting the audience from the big action set-piece on screen.
But when said bad guy broke character to give us the cliché, I personally was annoyed. If you recall from our reading on Cognitive Poetics, part of the pleasure of literature comes from investment. To a more sophisticated audience–one used to fine patisserie, perhaps–clichés and easily accessible embedded concepts are dissatisfying or even downright annoying.
So, choice of metaphor is inherently tied to choice of audience and the reason for which you are using the line. I would argue it was correct for the Mission Impossible character to use that awful, awful, over-used line, because the audience weren’t there for Dostoyevsky and, without wishing to be offensive to anyone, people who are not literate or do not particularly enjoy literature find more complex metaphorical behaviour confusing, alienating and annoying.
Work that pleases Umberto Eco lovers is less likely to please people whose favourite book is the Hunger Games[viii]. But that doesn’t mean metaphor is binary (cliché or literati). We can use cliché as a launching point; we can play on images or ideas subtly changed from those with which readers are familiar; there are a million ways to use embedded models to take readers somewhere new. This is what I was talking about when I said, “ease is not always good.” You need to target your metaphors at your audience and their web of understanding.
If you’re determined to write literary fiction you’re probably stuck trying to deconstruct the sentence, or writing multi-level nested analogies, or whatever floats your boat. You and the 12 people that read your literary magazine will love you for it. (Just kidding literary fiction peeps, you know I love you.) Meanwhile, if your plot is all those exploding helicopters, the occasional easy metaphor keeps your audience on track and focusing on stuff going boom. Everything in its right place.
Metaphor and Movement
The key take home message (see, a movement metaphor) is that to understand metaphor readers imagine themselves as performing action. The fact that such action may not be physically possible–that it is a metaphor, not a description of an actual thing–doesn’t change to how we try to understand it.
Because they are actively simulating the movement they experience the metaphor as if they were doing the metaphor. People imagine “she felt like she was lost beyond the dark side of the moon” by attempting to simulate the experience of floating in space. That’s awesome! It’s part of how reading produces intense emotional experiences.
As a writer, this means you should use movement and action in your metaphors that fits with the movement and action in your scene. Try to get your readers feeling the experience of your characters by using metaphor that fits the physical environment of your characters. How you do depend on the sophistication of your readers (that’s not intended to be patronising–I really enjoyed the new Mission Impossible. What can I say. I’m a simple guy. The complicated Chinese police drama we went see after. Meh–not so much).
If you’re writing an action flick beware over-complicated metaphors: you don’t want to pull the audience away from what’s on the screen (although, maybe, just maybe, skip “why won’t you just die!” or tying up the only female in the third act. Just saying). If you’re writing for the New Yorker you’d better have some new way of putting things or you aren’t getting published. Make your reader work for it and the buzz they’ll get when they understand is that much stronger (like drinking good wine when you know good from bad.) But remember that metaphor is action. Use it.
[i] Strunk, The Elements of Style – if you haven’t read it you need to stop reading this and go read The Elements of Style.
[ii] Turns out that both examples are also correct descriptions of me this morning. Grumpy! Hairy! Liable to eat anyone who disturbs me in my cave!
[iii] My Strunk is frowning and saying, “why say not uncontroversial” instead of “controversial.” Well, Mr Strunk, you are both American and dead. You cannot be expected to understand the linguistic subtleties of a modern neurotic Englishman
[iv] Unless you’re American, in which case it means ducking around the corner every time you hear a police car. Too soon? Anyway, obviously I am not claiming that racism isn’t real because it’s an abstract concept – rather I’m stating that it’s a social phenomenon rather than something you can pick up, like a cup.
[v] Jesus Christ, what a world we live in today.
[vi] Clark A, Being There: Putting brain, body and world together again. MIT Press (1997)
[vii] Again, check out the footnotes in Gibbs and Matlock, this has all been extensively empirically tested.
[viii] As I’ve said before, I loved the Hunger Games and stayed up all night to read the whole series in one go – horrific clichés, grammar errors and all. Story>everything. I know lots of excellent grammarians who couldn’t write a story to save their lives (aaaah! Cliché!)
