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Philip Wheelwright describes metaphor as the act of "tensive language" in which "man gropes to express his complex nature and his sense of the complex world . . . seeks or creates representational and expressive forms . . . which shall give some hint, always finally insufficient, of the turbulent moods within and the turbulent world of qualities and forces, promises and threats, outside him."
16 Wheelwright pays special attention to the intentional, creative act of juxtaposition: ''what really matters in a metaphor is the psychic depth at which the things of the world, whether actual or fancied, are transmuted by the cool heat of the imagination. The transmutative process that is involved may be described as semantic motion; the idea of which is implicit in the very word 'metaphor,' since the motion (phora) that the word connotes is a semantic notionthe double imaginative act of outreaching and combining that essentially marks the metaphoric process."17 This transmutation may occur through "epiphor" or "diaphor:" epiphor indicates "the outreach and extension of meaning through comparison," and diaphor "the creation of new meaning by juxtaposition and synthesis."18 |
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The practices of epiphor and diaphor usefully extend our understanding of the practice of comparison, because the practice of them invites us to emphasize the way in which a comparison can be constructed so as to produce an initially uncomfortable tensiona semantic motionat the moment when the texts are taken up in order to be read together, even the feeling that the comparison is unjustified, or too weak, or too hasty. One may be upset, disoriented, intrigued; but one is thereby enabled to reflect on the implications of that tension, appreciating it without making it more permanent than the momentary construct it may in fact be. |
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The powerful motion frequently achieved in poetry through the careful manipulation of words in relation to one another can be achieved also in the juxtaposition of texts from different traditions: placed unusually together, they come to mean differently, though only insofar as they also maintain their own meanings. The decision to read Amalananda alongside Aquinas has an important effect on both texts insofar as they are read attentively together; yet one does not rewrite either text, nor |
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