Read, translate and analyze the texts below discussing the role of metaphor in the image creating process. Differentiate between trite and genuine metaphors.

Tranquility

Time slides

A gentle ocean

Waves upon waves,

Washing the shore.

2. The clock had struck, time was bleeding away. (A. Huxley)

3. Dance music was bellowing from the open door of the Cadogan;s cottage. (A. Barker)

4. The world was tipsy with its own perfections. (A. Huxley)

5. Money burns a hole in my pocke.t (T.Capote)

6. Love is a homeless guy searching for treasure in the middle of the rain and finding a bag of gold coins and slowly finding out they're all filled with chocolate and even though he's heart broken, he can't complain because he was hungry in the first place. (Bo Burnham, "Love Is")

7. Before I met my husband, I'd never fallen in love. I'd stepped in it a few times." (Rita Rudner)

8. England has two eyes, Oxford and Cambridge. They are the two eyes of England, and two intellectual eyes. (Ch.Tailor)

9. He was fainting from seasickness, and the roll of the ship tilted him over the rail on to the smooth lip of the deck. Then a low, gray mother-wave swung out of the fog, tucked Harvey under one arm, so to speak, and pulled him off and away to lee-ward; the great green closed over him, and he went quietly to sleep (R.Kipling).

10. Here and there a Joshua tree stretched out hungry black arms as though to seize these travellers by night, and over that gray waste a dismal wind moaned constantly, chill and keen and biting. (E.Brown).

11. This is a valley of ashes - a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight. (S.Fitzgerald)"

12. So that while Rosemary was a 'simple' child she was protected by a double sheath of her mother's armour and her own - she had a mature distrust of the trivial, the facile and the vulgar. (S. Fitzgerald)

13. She was contained in herself. Nothing had ever come to trouble her pool. Now the untroubled pool began to fill. There was no wonder and alive and a trace of speculation. I see how her nun-like innocence was an obedient avoidance of the deep and muddy pool where others lived. Where I lived. I gesticulated to her from the pool and she was sorry for me. (W.Golding)

14. R.Frost. The Road Not Taken.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference

15. Sara was a tyrant who tried to put me in a bottle and cork me up into a woman's cup of tea; and Rozzie was a slave who said, Beat me, eat me, but never, never ask me to make and to beat her. Alexander never felt bigger than me when I thumped that majestic meat upon the bone. Rozzie was a Leah, a concubine, a man tickler, the world's harem; she was the valley of peace and joy. She was a pillow for your head and a footstool for your rheumatism. But, of course, pillows and mattresses are not the sort of baggage a man wants to carry with him on a long journey. You could never get your own way with Sara. You might think so, but that was only her cunning. Life with Sara was all on the diplomatic scale, between the grand contracting parties. Sometimes we were noble allies and carried on the war together, sometimes we were enemies; but you were always yourself and Sara was always herself, and making love to Sara was a stormy joy, thunder and lightning. There was an exchange of powers, a flash and a bang; Jupiter and the cloud. You gave something and you took something.

But life with Rozzie was a doze beneath the palm trees; and loving her was like a shower of autumn leaves on a paddock. It left you bare. (J.Сarry)

16. Meanwhile, in the dining-room, Molly d'Exergillod was still talking. She prided herself on her conversation. Conversation was-in the family. Her mother had been one of the celebrated Miss Geoghegans of Dublin. Her father was that Mr. Justice Brabant, so well known for his table-talk and his witticisms from the bench. Moreover she had married into conversation. D'Exergillod had been a disciple of Robert de Montesquiou and had won the distinction of being mentioned in Sodome et Gomorrhe by Marcel Proust. Molly would have had to be a talker by marriage, if she had not already been one by birth. Nature and environment had conspired to make her a professional athlete of the tongue. Like all conscientious professionals, she was not content to be merely talented.

She was industrious; she worked hard to develop her native powers. Malicious friends said that she could be heard practising her paradoxes in bed, before, she got up in the morning. She herself admitted that she kept diaries in which she recorded as well as the complicated history of her own feelings and sensation, every trope and anecdote-and witticism that caught her fancy. Did she refresh her memory with a glance at these chronicles each time she dressed to go out to dinner? The same friends who had heard her practising in bed had also found her, like an examinee the night before his ordeal, labo­riously mugging up Jean Cocteau's epigrams about art and Mr. Birrell's after-dinner stories and W. B. Yeats's anecdotes about George Moore and what Charlie Chaplin had said to and of her last time she was in Hollywood. Like all professional talkers Molly was very economical with her wit and wisdom. There are not enough bons mots in existence to provide any industrious conversationalist with a new stock for every social occasion. Though extensive, Molly's repertory was, like that of other more celebrated talkers, limited. A good housewife, she knew how to hash up the conversa­tional remains of last night's dinner to furnish out this morning's lunch. Monday's funeral baked meats did service for Tuesday's wedding. (A.Huxley. Point Counter Point.)

17. The boy, Leonard Bast, stood at the extreme verge of gentility. He was not in the abyss, but he could see it, and at times people whom he knew had dropped in, and counted no more. He knew that he was poor, and would admit it; he would have died sooner than confess any inferiority to the rich. This may be splendid of him. But he was inferior to most rich people; there is not the least doubt of it. He was not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy, nor as lovable. His mind and his body had been alike underfed, because he was poor, and because he was modern they were always craving better food. Had he lived some centuries ago, in the brightly coloured civilisations of the past, he would have had a definite status, his rank and his income would have corresponded. But in his day the angel of Democracy had arisen, shadowing the classes with leathern wings, and proclaiming, "All men are equal--all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas," and so he was obliged to assert gentility, lest he slip into the abyss where nothing counts, and the statements of Democracy are inaudible.
As he walked away from Wickham Place, his first care was to prove that he was as good as the Miss Schlegels. Obscurely wounded in his pride, he tried to wound them in return. They were probably not ladies. Would real ladies have asked him to tea? They were certainly ill-natured and cold. At each step his feeling of superiority increased. Would a real lady have talked about stealing an umbrella? Perhaps they were thieves after all, and if he had gone into the house they would have clapped a chloroformed handkerchief over his face. He walked on complacently as far as the Houses of Parliament. There an empty stomach asserted itself, and told him that he was a fool. (E.D.Forster. Howards End)

PERSONIFICATION

If a metaphor involves likeness between inanimate and animate objects, we deal with personification, as in the “the face of London” or “the pain of the ocean”:

Mother Nature always blushes before disturbing (M.Beanchy)

England has two eyes – Oxford and Cambridge. (Ch.Tailor)

Personification can be described as a figure of speech in which an inanimate object is personified, by attributing human traits and qualities to it. In other words, whenever emotions, desires, sensations, physical gestures and speech are stated in context of non-living focused on the personified object for long.

Personification is believed to be one of the most potent tools of literature. The technique makes it possible to describe something, which may be inexplicable otherwise. As such, the effectiveness of personification has been long recognized. It makes it easier to imagine a particular thing or object by creating its picture in the mind. It enables the reader to relate to the subject and imagine how a lifeless thing would have behaved, had it been human and able to emote. However, using the right description at the right time is the key to meaningfully personify anything. For example:

Knocks and Sighs
The glacierknocks in the cupboard,
The desertsighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
(W.H. Auden, "As I Walked Out One Evening")

The poem is an instance of every day mourning for the beloved but long gone friend. The remembrance comes at any minute and place. That’s why when the cupboard is opened it fills the heart with cold (glacier) as the empty cup will never be warmed for the one who’s gone for ever. The bed is nothing but the lonely and hopeless place (desert) and so on. Personification animates and livens the objects which are connected with the person in question and deepens the feelings of the greatest loss in the most painful but emotional and obvious way. These personified objects are connected with something absolutely extreme in their quality: glacier with something utterly cold and almost eternal, desert with endless and tiresome roaming. Thus W.H.Auden imposes upon the reader his most hard and unbearable feelings of loss. Attributing certain human traits to the inanimate phenomena the poet makes his sufferings vivid and even physically percepted.

As any other SD personification may become trite due to its regular use: the face of London, the voice of mourning, Mother Nature. Or: The camera likes him. My computer hates me.

Thus the main stylistic function of personification is to make the image vivid, lively, visualised, attracting the reader’s attention to the most important items of the narration.

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 2372