Book reviews 801

r, Death is the mother of beauty. Mind, metaphor, criticism.

Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987. 207 pp. $16.95.

Reviewed by Pierre LASZLO*

Roman ladies had a most peculiar way of honoring Mater Matuta, or

Metaphor, the goddess of Dawn. A black slave would be brought into the
temple. They would rush to chase her out with a great display of violence,
lashing out at her with sticks. Following this, they would raise into their arms,
hug and recommend for protection to the deity not their children, but their
nephews.
The significance of this stra n elucidated by comparatists.
awn first removes the omin m the sky. It then rescues - as a
second mother so to say - the child begotten by benevolent Night, her sister,
the Sun.
yth is indeed a parent of metaphor (Dun&i1 (1973)). Turner’s book grew
out of a fascination with the metaphorical uses of kinship terms - whence his
title. This is not merely a natural history of kinship metaphor in literature.
Turner seeks to build a modem rhetoric. e aims at providing literary
criticism with a double tool, one that will ve our understanding of
literature from the study of cognitive processes, and one that will, vice-versa,
abstract from the huge body of literary examples a rofound truth about
important cognitive processes. Since we look at thi and put them into
mental categories depending upon perceived similarities, a famirv reset&lance
comes naturally to the mind for expressing the relationship.
Turner thus first sets up a lexico of ten kinship me
reduced in turn to a basic model, nnecthg the world
). He then proceeds to display the
uch as ‘Necessity is the mother o
child of avarice, the brother of iniquity, the father of mischief”. The central
part of the book is the app n of this model to literary texts, such as
segments of ParadiseLost th with the human condition, the genealogies
ride, and Shame i esiod’s Theogony*In the third part
of the book, Turner explains the overarching recourse to kinship metaphors,
in lieu of causative accounts where causation is progeneration; this statement
may be kept as the prototype for the other kinship metaphors.
The book is a useful, interesting, and highly readable addition to the
literature on metaphor and its epistemological status. It does quite a good job
in reducing a vast body of data, culled from the Scriptures and from English
* Correspondence address: P. Laszlo, Lab. DCFI, Ecole Polytechnique, F-91 1% Palaiseau
Cedex, France. e-mail: syolas@frpoly 11.bitnet
802 Book reviews

literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries mainly, into a few basic
structures. Its chief merit is that it is highly stimulating. The book reaches out
from literary criticism to directions as diverse as anthropology, comparative
religion, and the sociology of everyday experience.
y thesis is that kinship metaphors form a coherent gro only in that they
derive from sacred books, Greek mythology, and the Bi ; and that myth
rather than metaphor has been, and continues to be, to some extent, a
privileged means for acquiring knowledge about the outside world.
A criticism that can be leveled ;t Yurner’ ook concerns its structural
analysis. The core of kinship metaphor, it su ts, is the WFB model. This
generative kernel is so general and vague as to be worthless. It applies to ot
metaphors, besides kinship metaphors. For a given kinship metaphor, many
other connections between the terms are reasonable. Take as an example one
rner prides himself on the clarity of the concatenation (p. 50):
is the mother(F) of crimes(B)“. Another, very mundane, chain
k of money/lack of education, lack of control/excessive violence.
It has already been noted that proposed metaphoric meanings tend to the post
hoc and do not saturate the metaphors selected for consideration (Kintsch
iller (1979), Verbrugge (1980)).
Of course, the reason for the failure of the WF model lies in its nature, by
necessity syntactic. T er just labels the camp ents in a manner at slight
variance from usage. is model is (in new clothes) the classic action sentence:
/subject/action verb/object/ in which the ‘action verb’ is an odd mix of
causation and emotion.
taphors are uttered by speakers. They are part of the language. They are
re. They don’t exist in a void - otherwise they
book gives one the impression of visiting a
rms stand on pedes in the cold Northern light.
th is the Mother o auty’ has its archetext. It is
backed up with agrarian myths of the Eternal turn such as those of Osiris,
eter and Persephone, . . . In other words, kinship metaphors have a
as their referent. This is so obvious that two examples will suffice, the
1225 ‘Cantico di frate Sole’ of St. Francis ( e praised, my Lord, with all your
res / especially Sir brother sun / w ves the light of day, and by
you illuminate us / etc.‘; gue to the ‘Gates of
dise’, in which he describes Satan as ‘The Son o om in weary Night’s

etaphors, kinship metaphors assuredly, cannot be excised from mytho-

logy and religion. Neither should they be cut from history. There is an
artificiality of the a-historic lumping together of kins metaphors. The
production mode of Turner’s corpus is the kiss of de use a metaphor
sely related to kinship metaphors. in a speech in
ingham, January 18, 1865 stated that ‘England is the mother of Parlia-
 Book revipws 803

ments’, any semantic analysis of this metaphor has to consider history (the
British, American, and French Revolution), the rhetoric of oratory (going
back at least to Cicero), befote it calls on a disembodied rhetoric of kinship
metaphors.
Metaphor is a mask. This has to do with the essence of poetry. It gives one
a sensation of opaque understanding. this near-oxymoron I mean to say
that cognition’s rational axis is lined with intuition. To call on myth indi-
rectly, by way of metaphor, is to tap the vast archetypal depths of language,
By calling thus on the resources of the collective psyche, we are able to root
intuition in words, so that it be capable of a degree of expression - otherwise
it would not exist: “If the message is as urgent and important as one
supposes, why zre we not given it straight in the first place? A partial answer
(. . .) may lie in ehe nature of mystical experience: it is without content and so
resists literal communication, but one may still try to induce the feeling in
others by=skillful mebtaphor”(Quine (iW9 : i WI).
I turn now to the epistemological side in Turner’s book. Metaphor is indeed
001 of cognition. Philosophers of science dispute s exact function is.
any would prefer to see adult, free of metaphor
(indeed, for some scientific referees a derogatory term, when
applied to theory for instance). Yet, most will agree on metaphor’s seminal
role in discovery. To know is to understand. To understand is to bring a new
object into the sphere of the existing knowledge. No wonder if, when reaching
out toward the mysteries of nature, past lore is put to use. It is as if
knowledge in its infancy was devoid of articulate speech, and had to point to
kindred objects to hint at its meaning.
Often, the advancement of science has to go through some problem-solving.
Nature offers us a puzzle. Only after having formulated it to ourselves can we
try a solution. Such formulation antecedent to the solution draws in part
upon the resources of natural language or the language of a particular
scientific discipline. Where it to draw upon language alone, the formulation of
a problem would be totally equivalent to its solution. And it is very true that a
problem posed is a probfe~ ~@%olved - but only half-solved, that is the rub.
For the other half, the mind evoke ions: mental imagery
lement (1981), Dreistadt (1968 fmann (19803 198%
lkup (1965)), half-perceived a te ignorance of entire
aspects, free associations; Problem formulation is
impure; it is partially metaphoric.
Conversely, a riddle is a non self-evident metaphor. A riddle is a figure of
speech. It is an opaque statement, formulated from within natural language.
vert language. If mined by riddles, natural language cannot serve
1 of communication. This is why riddles, as they are uttered, beg
for a solution. The status of riddles is very close to that of phors.
Scientific innovation is metaphorical (Leatherdale (1974)) are reminded
 ok reviews

that the ‘human intelkt can only know componendo et dividend0 by putting
together and taking apart’ ( ackey (1978)). The role of metaphor is also to
be hed to its utmost consequences, however unlikely, in order to ascertain
the ain of applicability. A good example is the metaphor of billiard balls
for atoms, in the kinetic theory of gasses. It led the Dutch physicist Van der
aals to discover deviatio om ideal gas behavior, because atoms indeed
offman (1980)). Conversely, the stretching of a
1 show where it fails: “an interesting divi end from metaphorical
which they are false”
of a particle has little to do with
a spinning top. If the’ particle were indeed spinning, points on its periphery
would have velocities greater than that of light - a physical impossibility.
n interesting topic for research is the far-from-random nature of scientific
his is one of the reasons why it is e
ass of metaphor, as Tu,rner does
ther of Beauty. The ew Science of Descartes and Galileo was
much in the mechanistic metaphor - the universe as ua AX&urrurri.
m~phinp
suffering under the dictatorship of this particular metaphor. It is
important to avoid being victimized by metaphor, and to keep in mind that
any given scientific metaphor is neither necessary nor inevitable. For instance,
it has been a most judicious and entertaining exercise to show that the science
of optics, had erkeley been followed, could very well have been founded on a
set of linguisti rather than mechanistic metaphors (Turbayne (1970)).
This review has already dra attention to the proximity of metaphor to
riddles and to poetic discourse. atuta, or Dawn, is that go
whose cult calls for violent ething or someone standi
, the Sun, can be nurtured and raised to his
glowing fulfilment. ere is a kinship metaphor, at its most intriguing - till the

Let us look more closely at some of the key components. The association to
sunrise of a particular deity, atuta, “is an act of deviant predication rat
than of deviant denominatio (Ricaur (1979: 143)). Sk
above attributes, i.e. mythological thought projects anthr
on the natural phenomenon (this is no different than contemporary physicists
imbuing elementary particles with color or C/WV@.The deviance is from a
literal interpretation. ta has nothing against this slave,
and that the black fearsome features of d
ow that the nephews hugged a the slaves expulsion are
emblematic of the Sun, in its ship relationship to the Dawn goddess, within
the religious system of the omans. In other words, the metaphor (the
atuta myth) connects two symbolic systems, the rofane and the sacred:
“the notion of metaphorical sense is not complete w out a description of the
split w$erence which is specific to poetic discourse” iccreur(1979 : 156)).
 Book reviews 805

A third aspect of the Matuta myth is the very close connection with the
classical rhetoric of the theater of the memory, which Frances Yates has so
nicely instructed us about: a little drama is staged so that the name, Matuta,
related to that of the morning matutimun, is associated by the mind with a
strange and moving ritual. In like manner, metaphors stand at the juncture of
verbal traces and of imagined scenes. “The metaphorical meaning compels us
to explore the borderline between the verbal and the non-verbal” (Ricceur

this cursive reuse of the example we started with,

participants in the atuta ceremony must have n affected by it. Their
emotions, we venture to submit, ran high. They were expelling the slave
indignantly. They were grabbing their nephews in a gentle and cherishing
manner: the importance of an emotion as a necessary correlate to the
co ive ux of metaphor has already n brought out (FGaur (1979)).
P4atuta story is one of (su’bsti ther and child. Turner notes that
the most frequent kinship metaphors deal with mothers and with children.
This substantiates his perceptive c that the original kinship metaphor
equates generation and causation. e notes further, in a rather interesting
way, that “mothers, usually, are diffuse states, conditions, or places” (p. 56)
that “children are connoted with submissiveness” (p. 57).
ythic accounts should serve as a touchstone for the penetration power of
the analysis by Turner. this criterion, s incisiveness. Let me
document this failing wi the example of Turner devotes
no less than 10 pages to it, yet he does not do justice to-the subject.
contents himself with a paraphrase of the vario esiodic genealogies. In so
ores key components. Turner for i does not emphasize the
siodic generation. It can occur by procreation.
ke, and Eirene;
occurs by scissiparity, such as
ts male counterpart. s is a

complex but handsomely

ordered enumeration.

(i) the macabre triad of

(Th );
(ii) glee: pnos) and its retinue, the Tri
ron);
(iii) the ‘sleep of history’ dyad, omos), and Distress (0ix-N;
these have to do with men who did not rise to heroic status on the
battlefield;
 Book reviews

0V “all the visible manifestations of evil in human life, grouped under three
main categories: deprivation (toil, rgetfulness, hunger, pain); violence
(fight, battle, murder, manslaughte and misuse of speech (quarrel, lie,
dispute, and lawlessness)” ( amnoux (1976: 72)).

Night, in the esiodic poem, had another two children. These are procreated
- whereas the 0th came from division -
Aither (Ether) and mere (the light of day).

atuta festival, with which we have

vision of the physical world. It gives both partners equal status. The present
ante of science is unhealthy. It pushes myth into nidden
it tends to spring back with a ngeance: this might be
one of the lessons from the recent flap, in the me , over the ‘memory of
water’ claimed b would have given support to
homeopathy. Th ry had perfeet poise, and this is
a lesson well worth rem

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meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Berkeley, CA.
reistadt, R., 1968. An analysis of the use of analogies and metaphors in science. The Journal of
Psycho!ogy 48 : 97-l 16.
Dumezil, G., 1973. Mythe et &pop&e,III. Histoires romaines. Paris: Gallimard. pp. 99-199.
Gordon, W. J., 1961. Synectics. New York: Harper.
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and figurative language. illsdale, NJ : Lawrence Erlbaum.
Hoffman, R. R., 1985.‘Some implications of metaphor for philosophy and psycholsgy of science’.
In: R. Dirven and W. Paprotte, eds., The ubiquity of metaphor. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
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Maslow, A., 1969. The psychology of science. Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery.
Miller, G.A., 1979. ‘Images and models, similes and metaphors’. In: A. Ortony, ed., Metaphor
and though?. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 Book reviews 807

Quine, W.V., 1979. ‘A postscript on metaphor’. In: S. Sacks, ed., On metaphor. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press. pp. 159-160.
Ramnoux, C., 1976. La nuit et les enfants de la nuit dars la tradition greque. Paris: Flammanon.
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ed., On metaphor. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 141-157.
Turbayne, C.M., 1970. The myth of metaphor. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina
Press.
Verbrugge, R.R., 1980. ‘Transformations in knowing: A realist view of metaphor’. In:
R.P. Honeck and R.R. Hoffman, eds., Cognition and figurative language. Hillsdale, NJ:
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