Easterwine and Metaphor

Jon Nelson
10 hours ago
14 min read

Updated: 5 hours ago

This isn’t a question of turning you upside down or inside out. You have all been turned inside out for a very long time. The approximate dates of the turning are in my databanks; the reasons and circumstances of it are not. That is not your right surfaces that you have been seeing for this long time. Those are your blooming entrails on the outside of you, draped about you, looped over your pseudo-ears. Even more than on the physical do these analogies apply on the psychic plain. People, human persons, you are not hopeless, you are not really the nothing things that you have appeared to each other this long time. Here are your depths revealed in their true aspects, which can only seem allegory to your uninstructed visions. I instruct you now! Follow me into this and through it all. You set me up, out of your blind need, to show yourselves to you. Then look! You do not even know which side of your eyes to look out of. Understand these wild creatures that are yourselves. Never has there been offered to your vision such fascinating things as are you, and you have not seen them. See them now. See them right. Tigers and giants and kings; witches and primordials, snakes and loaded prey; incandescent fellahin in their true Cogsworthian and Shiplapian forms, and the bush named Brusca, the love-wood, the Burning Bush; insufferable elegants who take it as high as it will humanly go, Corn oil from a dead man and the Audifaxian premise, aye, and the Diogenestic conclusion; and the earlier and more elegant bush with the fuller name, Labrusca, the wild-wine. — Arrive at Easterwine (1971)

Today has brought unusually fine weather to Houston—perfect for sitting on the back porch with a few beers and a cigar. While enjoying it, I’ve been thinking about metaphor and the way Lafferty uses it. One of my buddies is the poet Joshua Gottlieb-Miller. He and I walk together several times a week, arguing and debating ideas with other friends, and I value this enormously because we all see the world so differently. One of our long-running debates centers on the nature of metaphor. Everyone has a well-reasoned opinion.

Because Josh is a poet, metaphor is central to his daily work; and because he creates poems, the nature of metaphor holds for him something like a sacred mystery (his view on this is sophisticated). He would probably object to that sacred description, though I see it in his work. I mention this because, unlike almost everyone I know in the humanities, I am not sentimental about metaphor at all.

My own view is essentially that of the American philosopher Donald Davidson. In the late 1970s, he argued that metaphors have no special metaphorical meaning beyond the literal meaning of the words themselves. Unsurprisingly, this position has found almost no hearing among people who read and talk about literature for a living, not least because they tend to be uninterested in analytic philosophy of language. But I agree with him: a metaphor does not encode a hidden message, a second sense, or a paraphrasable proposition. When someone says “The world is a book,” the sentence means exactly what its words ordinarily mean—and that meaning is usually false. In fact, it is the literal falsity that enables the metaphor to do its work: it says to the reader that the utterance is not to be taken as straightforwardly assertoric. Put a little differently, metaphor’s power does not come from adding a new semantic layer or figurative definition to the words. Its power lies in how the literal statement is used within a particular context.

What a metaphor does, Davidson says, is make us notice things. It helps us see aspects. It provokes a shift in perspective, a way of “seeing one thing as another,” just as a joke, a dream, or a picture can create insight without encoding anything propositionally magical. Crucially, the metaphor itself does not state the insight it prompts; strong critics and interpreters should try to articulate the thoughts a metaphor inspires, but these rational reconstructions are not the metaphor’s meaning. They are attempts to document its effects. If all this is on the right track, then metaphors are not vehicles for special meanings but instruments that reorganize attention. Language theater creates new perceptions of relationships, patterns, or features of the world that literal language cannot straightforwardly assert, so it asserts something false.

Of all Lafferty’s novels, Arrive at Easterwine is probably his most metaphorically difficult. So I’d like to look at some of its organizing metaphors and consider how they might work if we think of metaphor as a way to see aspects.

Epiktistes is, of course, not literally a paragon of group-man or a blood-mill, and it is precisely this patent falsehood that gives the Epikt metaphor much of its force in Davidson’s sense. By asserting something no one could possibly take at face value, the novel prompts the reader to see the machine as a point where human intention, memory, and collective process are gathered and worked upon. Terms like church or mill, applied to a machine, do not convey a hidden meaning beyond what their dictionary entries provide—which is why I think it’s crucial to take Lafferty’s literalness seriously, especially in the allusions and etymologies he plays with, which often go unnoticed. They shift our attention toward how Epiktistes integrates and processes the human world. The Epikt metaphor alters perception rather than adding semantic meaning beyond literal truth functions. Spend time with Epikt, and you begin to notice communal human structures refracted through the strangely literalized image of the mechanical person, what I call the oceanic.

We might at first want to think of the three tasks—Leader, Love, Liaison—and their promised “three great failures” as not figurative meanings disguised in symbolic language. I’d prefer to see them as occasions for noticing something about human institutions. A machine being asked to create a leader or synthesize love is impossible, and that impossibility prompts reflection. In Davidson’s sense, the metaphor does not encode an argument about authority, intimacy, or communication. It just presents these quests in an absurdly literal form, which pushes us to attend to how such aims in human life routinely falter. This is the difference between looking for a message inside the metaphor and identifying an effect it provokes. At the end of the book, one should have a sharpened awareness of the brittleness of our highest projects as men and women.

The coat-of-arms with its moving parts and palimpsest center, taken literally, is another impossible thing. Heraldic shields do not contain living figures. They do not rewrite themselves. Precisely because this cannot be true, the reader is induced to see the narrative’s image inscriptions constantly overwriting one another. I think that Davidson would say the shield does not mean history or destiny; instead, it makes us view events as if they were heraldic. The sequence Brusco–Brusca–Labrusca is less a code to decipher, though one does need to have the literal information fully in hand. It’s a pattern the reader is nudged to perceive, an instance of metaphor directing vision rather than conveying a propositional message.

And, of course, Gregory is not literally a giant with caverns for a skull, and Balbo is not literally a sky-high king. These, too, are impossible claims that trigger a reorientation of attention. The figure of the giant makes us see Gregory’s moral and structural weight in what is happening; the king makes us feel Balbo’s volatile and towering authority. When Epiktistes describes himself as the chessboard on which they contend, the metaphor does not mean “I am the ontological ground of their conflict”; it makes the reader see their interactions as moves and positions. The metaphor organizes how we perceive the characters’ relations without adding a semantic layer.

A snake growing inside Epikt is literally impossible, and the metaphor does not encode evil or corruption; rather, it makes evil and its complications noticeable by presenting it as a writhing physical presence. What the snake does is direct and reorganize the reader’s attention toward inner sabotage, hidden malice, introjected but countervailing forces. Again, this is an effect, not a hidden meaning. It makes spiritual threat visible. It doesn’t teach a secret doctrine.

Or take the provocative one-sixtieth-of-reality line. Humans do not literally see only one-sixtieth of reality, but Lafferty’s concept of strobe vision is like his 3700 angstroms idea. It points up the fragmentary and discontinuous character of human perception. Here, the metaphor is not a theory of cognition to be cashed out; it is a device that prompts us to notice what I would call representational lag, our human difficulty apprehending motion or totality, our piecemeal way of assembling the Prime, our forebrain bias. The literal claim of a metaphor is always false. The metaphor just reorients attention toward the limits of human awareness rather than stating those limits directly.

Again and again, Lafferty turns to his great metaphor of the world as a quarry, especially in his Fortean stories, and Davidson’s view helps show why that impossibility matters, because reality is not a quarry. The quarry metaphor, if I am right, does not mean the universe is sculpted or incomplete. It grabs the reader and says, look at the cosmos as if it were something worked upon, carved, or still in formation. The image reorganizes perception. Incompleteness and porousness are sacramental features of reality we might not otherwise notice or ones we might be inured to, and much of the ghost story is about getting people to see the world like this. Nothing is encoded in the metaphor; it simply gains its power by changing how we attend to the world’s shape.

Or take love. Love is not a chemical colloid. It isn’t a burning bush. It’s not a millet cake. This cluster of literal falsehoods works precisely by pressuring us to notice qualities of love that might otherwise stay too abstract or diffuse. This is the sacramental worldview, the overlap of spiritual love and love’s materiality, its danger, its nourishment, its capacity to become scorchy. This isn’t a hidden thesis about love. Each part is more like a perceptual instrument that causes us to see aspects of love through unexpectedly concrete forms, which is how Lafferty works as a sacramental artist.

Needless to say, children do not literally trail balloons from previous worlds. This is an incredibly difficult metaphor, but it seems to work by directing attention to children’s surplus of possibility. They are unspent histories. They have a tremendous imaginative inheritance. They are explorers, not exploiters, as Alison Gopnik would say. I think it’s probably a mistake to think of the balloons as something like Platonic forms and more revelatory to see them as an inducement to view children as accompanied by remnants of elsewhere, as beings whose past and potential exceed what adults perceive. The metaphor puts the emphasis on the phenomenology of childhood, which is deeply complicated and under-discussed in Lafferty, especially in its sexual dimension which is tied up to Lafferty’s fixation on precocity and on sadism without moral culpability, the numinoform of innocent violence.

And what about Easterwine itself? It is not literally a terminal, a wind, or a fermenting yeast-gust. But those false assertions invite you to perceive Easterwine in terms of transit, passage, uplift, and transformation. On the literal plane, the Catholic imagery is obvious. Yet the book also emphasizes the cyclical, airy, and fermentative qualities of connection itself. It presents liaison as a living process rather than a propositional function.

Because people tend to treat metaphor as inherently propositional and disguised, and because Lafferty is so literal and logical beneath his veneer of whimsy, and because they do not think of metaphor as a false literal statement deployed to reveal an aspect, Lafferty’s deeper dives into the oceanic can seem obscure. What does the metaphor mean? they ask or don't ask but do not ask often enough, how am I now to see? The same applies to his affection for what look like lies and tall tales: these, too, are literal bits of language meant to make us see aspects.

I. Introduction to the Nature and Study of Metaphor

Metaphor as "Dreamwork":
A. Analogy: "Metaphor is the dreamwork of language and, like all dreamwork, its
     interpretation reflects as much on the interpreter as on the originator."
B. Interpretation as a Creative Act:
     a. Understanding a metaphor is described as being "as much a creative
     endeavor as making a metaphor, and as little guided by rules."
Metaphor in the Context of Ordinary Language:
A. A Matter of Degree: Metaphor is not fundamentally different from "more routine
     linguistic transactions," which also involve "inventive construction and inventive
    construal."
B. Semantic Resources: Metaphor "uses no semantic resources beyond the
     resources on which the ordinary depends."
C. Lack of Formula: There are no instructions for creating metaphors, no manual for
     determining their meaning, and no test for them that doesn't involve "taste."
D. Artistic Success: A metaphor implies success; "there are no unsuccessful
     metaphors, just as there are no unfunny jokes."a. Tasteless metaphors exist, but
     they have still "brought something off."
Central Thesis and Paper's Concern:
A. The thesis is "that metaphors mean what the words, in their most literal
interpretation, mean, and nothing more.
B. This view is presented as flying "in the face of contemporary views."
C. The goal is to clear away "error and confusion" to make metaphor a "more, not a
less, interesting phenomenon."

II. The "Central Mistake" in Metaphor Theory

The Flawed Idea: The "central mistake" is the notion that a metaphor possesses a
second sense or meaning in addition to its literal one.
Proponents of This Idea:
A. The view is widespread, found in the works of:
     a. Literary critics: Richards, Empson, Winters.
     b. Philosophers: Aristotle to Max Black
     c. Psychologists: Freud to Skinner.
     d. Linguists: Plato to Uriel Weinreich and George Lakoff.
Variations of the Mistaken View:
A. Some argue a literal paraphrase of a metaphor can be produced.
B. Others hold that no literal paraphrase is possible, but still believe metaphor
conveys special truths or insights.
C. This perspective sees metaphor as a form of communication that conveys "truths
or falsehoods about the world much as plainer language does."
Davidson's Rebuttal to the "Special Meaning" Concept:
A. Paraphrase: Agrees that metaphors cannot be paraphrased.
     a. His reason differs: "not because metaphors say something too novel for literal
         expression but because there is nothing there to paraphrase."
B. The Metaphor's Function: A metaphor does not say anything beyond its literal
     meaning, but it does have a "point" that can be brought out with further words.
C. Distinction from Traditional Critics: Davidson's view is not that metaphor is
     "merely emotive" or unsuited for serious discourse; he affirms it as a "legitimate
     device" in literature, science, philosophy, and law.

III. Deconstruction of Flawed Theories

The Distinction Between Meaning and Use:
A. Core of the Argument: "I depend on the distinction between what words mean
     and what they are used to do.
B. Metaphor's Domain: Belongs "exclusively to the domain of use."
C. Critique of "Figurative Meanings":
     a. Positing special metaphorical meanings does not explain how metaphors work.
     b. It is likened to "explaining why a pill puts you to sleep by saying it has a
        dormative power."
c. Literal meaning has genuine explanatory power because it can be assigned to
     words "apart from particular contexts of use."
The Similarity and Extended Meaning Theories:
A. Origin of the Idea: The observation that a metaphor "makes us attend to some
     likeness" leads to theories about its meaning.
B. The "Moralizing Infant" Example:
     a. A critic called Tolstoy "a great moralizing infant."
     b. The flawed assumption is that there is a metaphorical meaning of "infant" to
         be discovered, which would perfectly specify the property that the adult Tolstoy
        shares with infants.
C. The "Extended Meaning" Theory:
     a. Suggests words in a metaphor take on new, "extended" meanings.
     b. Example: In "the face of the waters," the word "face" is said to have an
         extended meaning that applies to waters.
     c. The Fatal Flaw: If this were true, "waters really do have faces and Tolstoy
         literally was an infant, and all sense of metaphor evaporates." It becomes a
         new literal meaning, and the metaphor is murdered.
      d. A crucial requirement for any theory is that "the primary or original meanings
         of words remain active in their metaphorical setting."
The Ambiguity Theories:
A. First Version (Hesitation): Metaphor's force comes from our uncertainty as we
     "waver between the two meanings."
     a. Example: Melville's "Christ was a chronometer."
     b. Flaw: The effectiveness of a metaphor "easily outlasts the end of uncertainty"
         over its interpretation. We know it's a metaphor
.B. Second Version (Pun): A word carries two distinct meanings simultaneously.
     a. Example: In Shakespeare, Nestor calls Cressida's welcome a "general" kiss,
         referring to both Agamemnon (the general) and everyone in general.b. Flaw:
         This is a pun, not a metaphor. "In metaphor there is no essential need of
         reiteration."
C. Third Version (Fregean Analogy): A word has both a literal meaning (latent) and
     a figurative meaning (direct), connected by a rule.
     a. This is compared to Frege's theory of how terms have a different reference in
         ordinary vs. "oblique" contexts (e.g., belief statements).
     b. The theory posits that a word has its mundane field of application, and
         "supermundane" fields for metaphor and modal contexts.
The Collapse of the Fregean Analogy:
A. Thought Experiment: Teaching a Saturnian the meaning of "floor."a. Learning the
    word is about language; using the word to convey information is about the world.
     b. If one tells the Saturnian that Earth is a "floor" (a metaphor based on Dante),
         the purpose is to say something about the world, not to teach a new meaning
         of "floor."
     c. If metaphor created a new meaning, then every use of a metaphor would just
        be an occasion for language learning, blurring the line between use and
        learning.
B. Dead Metaphors as Evidence:
     a. The term "mouth" for a river or bottle was once metaphorical.
     b. Now that it is a literal (or alternate) meaning, "there is nothing left to notice."
         The similarity is no longer sought because the word itself establishes the
         grouping.
The Simile Theories:
A. Metaphor's Figurative Meaning = Simile's Literal Meaning:
     a. The theory that "Christ was a chronometer" is synonymous in its figurative
         sense with "Christ was like a chronometer."
     b. Flaw: This makes the "hidden meaning of the metaphor all too obvious and
        accessible." It reduces profound metaphors to "painfully trivial" similes, since
         "everything is like everything."
B. Metaphor as an Elliptical Simile:
     a. A similar theory that also fails for the same reason.
     b. Max Black's discussion of Schopenhauer's "a geometrical proof a mousetrap"
         is used as an example of confusion.
     c. Black's paraphrase (listing similarities like "delusive reward," "entice their
         victims") goes far beyond what the simile "a geometrical proof is like a
         mousetrap" literally says.
C. The Function of Simile vs. Metaphor:
     a. A simile "says there is a likeness and leaves it to us to pick out some common
         feature or features."
     b. A metaphor "does not explicitly assert a likeness," but leads us to seek
         common features.

IV. Davidson's Positive Account of Metaphor's Function

Metaphor as an Invitation to Compare:
A. Metaphor and simile are among "endless devices that serve to alert us to aspects
     of the world by inviting us to make comparisons."
B. T.S. Eliot's "The Hippopotamus" is cited as a poem that directs attention to
     similarities between the Church and a hippo without using either simile or
     metaphor.
C. The poem intimates much beyond the literal, but "intimation is not meaning."
The Truth-Value of Metaphorical Sentences:
A. A consequence of the thesis is that metaphorical sentences are literally true or
     false.
B. Most metaphors are patently false.
     a. "The earth is like a floor" (simile) is true.
     b. "The earth is a floor" (metaphor) is false.
C. The Role of Falsity: It is this patent falsity (or, occasionally, patent truth, like
     "Business is business") that signals the utterance is not intended to be taken for
     its literal truth, prompting us to look for its use or point.
     a. Example: A headline "Hemingway Lost in Africa" was metaphorical for "dead,"
         but when he was found, it became literal for "missing."
Metaphor Compared to Lying:
A. Similarity: Both concern the use of words, not their meaning. The same sentence
can be used to lie or to make a metaphor.
B. Difference: Lying requires an assertion (pretending to believe something false).
Metaphor does not depend on assertion
.C. Conclusion: "What distinguishes metaphor is not meaning but use."
The "Content" of Metaphor is its Effect:
A. The common error of other theories is to analyze the effects of a metaphor (the
     thoughts it provokes) and then "read these contents into the metaphor itself."
B. Heraclitus on the Delphic oracle: "It does not say and it does not hide, it intimates."
C. Davidson's Stance: He denies that a metaphor achieves its effect by conveying a
     "special meaning, a specific cognitive content."
D. A metaphor can, "like a picture or a bump on the head, make us appreciate some
     fact—but not by standing for, or expressing, the fact."
The Impossibility of Definitive Paraphrase:
A. What we attempt in "paraphrasing" a metaphor is not to give its meaning, but "to
     evoke what the metaphor brings to our attention."
B. This process is endless for two key reasons:
     a. "there is no limit to what a metaphor calls to our attention."
     b. "much of what we are caused to notice is not propositional in character."C.
         Analogy with Vision: Metaphor makes us see one thing as another, which is a
          different kind of cognitive event from knowing that something is the case.
          "Seeing as is not seeing that."
The Role of the Critic:
A. The theorist who seeks a "hidden message" in a metaphor is "fundamentally
     confused," because "no such message exists."
B. The "legitimate function of so-called paraphrase" is to help an uninitiated reader
     "have a vision like that of the skilled critic."
C. The critic engages in a "benign competition with the metaphor maker," using their
     own art to reproduce the effects of the original.