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Proxy and Proximity: Metonymic Singing

1989; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 58; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3138/utq.58.2.305

1712-5278

Jill L. Matus,

Translation Studies and Practices

In Book II of The Mill on the Floss the narrator pauses to lament the association of intelligence with the ability to wield metaphor. "Aristotle! if you had the advantage of being the 'freshest modern' instead of being the greatest ancient, would you not have mingled your praise of metaphorical speech, as a sign of high intelligence, with a lamentation that intelligence so rarely shows itself in speech without metaphor, —that we can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by saying it is something else?" In the context of the narrative, this critique of metaphoric privilege is a plea for valuing different ways of seeing things and saying things. George Eliot does not name this different perspective; I suggest it is a concern with the metonymic. In contemporary, post-structuralist criticism the scrutiny of metaphoric privilege has often meant a reconsideration or defence of the 'other trope,' metonymy. My interest in metonymy here is to consider what relationships exist between the various ways in which it has been construed—common figure of speech, signifier of desire in the rhetoric of the unconscious, a concern with provisionality, positionality, and gender in culture and language. I am interested also in the difference a sensitivity to metonymy makes to the way we approach texts. After exploring the implications of post-structural theories about metonymy in language, culture, psychoanalytic discourse, and narrative, I want briefly to suggest how a metonymic perspective clarifies some problematic issues in The Mill on the Floss, a novel in which George Eliot struggles to reconcile contextual relativism and the essentializing claims of metaphor.