METAPHORIC NARRATION:

The Role of Metaphor in Narrative Discourse

Introduction

“Any form of contiguity,” says Jakobson (1977, 66), “may be conceived as

a causal series.” In traditional narrative the relations of causality have
always had a central role in the arrangement and design of narrative
units. For this reason, Jakobson has repeatedly insisted that metonymical
relations predominate in prose and metaphorical ones in poetry (1963
[1956], 62, 66; 1960, 374-5; 1977, 63-64). Although there are, he says,
“poems with a metonymic texture and prose narratives studded with
metaphors (Biely’s prose being a case in point) (…), there is definitely a
closer and more fundamental kinship between verse and metaphor and
prose and metonymy. Poetry is based on associations by similarity; its
effect is imperatively conditioned by rhythmic similarity, and rhythmic
parallelism is enhanced by similarity (or contrast) in the images. Such
attempts at calling attention by a deliberate similarity in the articulation
of segments are unknown to prose. It is association by contiguity that
gives narrative prose its fundamental impetus; narrative moves from one
object to the next, by proximity, following causal or spatio-temporal
trajectories, the passage from the part to the whole and from the whole to
the part is nothing but a particular instance of this process.” (1977, 63-64)
If we start from the fundamental premise that the essence of
narrative is transformation, 1 and that the concatenation of such

1
“La structure, constituée par un énoncé de faire régissant un énoncé d’état [ i .e.
transformation], est appelée programme narratif (…): elle sera considérée comme
2 Luz Aurora Pimentel / Metaphoric Narration

transformations, or “events”, results in a narrative text, it would seem,

then, that narrative is indeed a phenomenon of “association by
contiguity,” dominated by relations of causality, and/or by spatio-
temporal relations subordinated to the causal. Such a description of
narrative would also entail a description of its basic mode of signification.
To speak of metaphoric narration, therefore, would seem a sheer
contradiction in terms. Yet if we look closely at the following texts in
juxtaposition, two distinct forms of organization become apparent:
thereby two radically different modes of narrative signification are implied.
John got up and went to the door.
“I’m sorry, Veronica, if I’ve hurt you. You’re very lovely, my
dear, and I once loved you very much. Can’t we leave it at that?”
“Good-bye, John. We’re not leaving it at that. You’ll find that
our all right. I think—I think I hate you more than I believed I
could hate anyone.”
“I’m sorry. Good-bye.”
John walked back slowly through the woods. When he got
back to the swimming pool he sat down on the bench there. He
had no regrets for his treatment of Veronica. Veronica, he
thought dispassionately, was a nasty bit of work. She always had
been a nasty bit of work, and the best thing he had ever done was
to get clear of her in time. God alone knew what would have
happened to him by now if he hadn’t: (…)
He looked up sharply, disturbed by some small unexpected
sound. There had been shots in the woods higher up, and there
had been the usual small noises of woodlands, birds, and the faint
melancholy dropping of leaves. But this was another noise—a
very faint business-like click.
And suddenly, John was acutely conscious of danger. How
long had he been sitting here? Half an hour? There was someone
watching him. Someone—
And that click was—of course it was—
He turned sharply, a man very quick in his reactions. But he
was not quick enough. His eyes widened in surprise, but there
was no time for him to make a sound.
The shot rang out and he fell, awkwardly, sprawled out by the
edge of the swimming pool. 2

l’unité élémentaire opératoire de la syntaxe narrative.” (Greimas, 1979, “syntaxe

narrative de surface”)
2
Agatha Christie, The Hollow (London: Collins, 1946), pp. 66-67.
 Luz Aurora Pimentel / Metaphoric Narration 3

As he cut his beet, he lost the whole thing, and while he was
attempting to recover it, the untimely pricked red ball began to
bleed. Demetrio trapped it for a third time, but it broke and slid
away: half was stuck to the fork and half, with a new malign
insistence, laid its wound once more upon the delicate cloth
which soaked up the red liquid with slow avidity. As the ancestral
cream colour of the tablecloth mingled with the beet’s
monsignorate, three isles of bleeding showed up among the
rosettes. But those three stains actually gave the relief of splendor
to the meal. In the light, in the resistant patience of craftsmanship,
the omens, in the way the threads absorbed the vegetable blood,
the three stains opened up in a somber expectancy.
Alberto took the shell of his two prawns, using them to cover
the two stains, which thereupon disappeared under a saddle of
delicate red. “Cemi, give me one of your pawns, because we
have been the first to enjoy their meat and we can cover the
other half stain”. With Cemi’s prawn now in his hand, he
comically pretended that the tasty morsel was flying, like a dragon
setting fire to the clouds, until it fell into he mutilated red nest
formed by the half-moon of beets. (….)
While the dessert was being served, Dona Augusta signaled
Baldovina to bring the fruit bowl, colorful with apples, pears,
tangerines, and grapes. A glass stand supported the scalloped plate
and the colours of the fruit could be seen through varied,
intertwined stripes, with the predominance of violet and orange
reduced by the reflection. The fruit bowl had been set in the
center of the table, over one of the bee stains. Alberto picked up
one of the prawn shells and stood it up, as if it were going to
climb the glass stand until it could sink its claws into a soft piece
of fruit. The fruit bowl, like a sea plant being rubbed by a fish,
sparkled in a cascade of colours, as the prawn stretched out,
content in its new environment, stretching our towards the
curbed sky of the fruit-painted plate. 3

3
José Lezama Lima, Paradiso (trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 1974), pp. 182-3.
Fue entonces cuando Demetrio cometió una torpeza, al trinchar la remolacha se
desprendió entera la rodaja, quiso rectificar el error, pero volvió la masa roja
irregularmente pinchada a sangrar, por tercera vez Demetrio la recogió, pero por el
sitio donde había penetrado el trinchante se rompió la masa, deslizándose: una
mitad quedó adherida al tenedor y la otra, con nueva insistencia maligna volvió a
reposar su herida en el tejido sutil, absorbiendo el líquido rojo con la lenta avidez.
Al mezclarse el cremoso ancestral del mantel con el monseñorato de la remolacha,
4 Luz Aurora Pimentel / Metaphoric Narration

The first text, from Agatha Christie’s The Hollow, illustrates, point by
point, Jakobson’s description of metonymic relations in narrative prose.
The contiguous appears in the form of a casual relationship: the reader
will tend to associate, causally, John’s argument with Veronica and his
being shot, so that she will become the first suspect (the whole craft of
detective novels also lying, among others, in the presentation of false
relations of causality that depend on relations of contiguity). The spatio-
temporal relations drawn here are strictly subordinated to the causal:
John’s spatial position, the time that elapses between the argument and
his murder, the descriptions of the woods and its activities are all
narrative indexes, as Barthes has called them (see part I, note 22), which
provide important information and/or delays for suspense effects: in
short, information that feeds the casual chain of the main narrative
functions (especially “kernels”). Indeed Christies’s narrative moves from
one object to the next, “by contiguity;” it is a TRANSITIVE narrative,
calling attention to the causal chain. The reader, like the narrative itself,
moves one, his attention centered on what happens next—who did it
why—; he is never detained by the verbal texture of the narrative. It is

quedaron señalados tres islotes de sangría sobre los rosetones. Pero esas tres manchas
le dieron en verdad el relieve de esplendor a la comida. En la luz, en la resistente
paciencia del artesanado, en los presagios, en la manera como los hilos fijaron la
sangre vegetal, las tres manchas entreabrieron como una sombría expectación.
Alberto cogió la caparazón de los dos langostinos, cubrió con ella las dos
manchas, que así desaparecieron bajo la cabalgadura de delicados rojeces. —Cemí,
dame uno de tus langostinos, pues hemos sido los primeros en saborear su masa,
para que cubra la otra media mancha—. Graciosamente remedó, con el langostino
de Cemí ya en su mano, que el deleitoso viniese volando, como un dragón
incendiando las nubes, hasta caer en el mutilado nido rojo formado por la semiluna
de la remolacha.
Al mismo tiempo que se servía el postre, doña Augusta le indicó a Baldovina que
trajese el frutero, donde mezclaban sus colores las manzanas, peras, mandarinas y
uvas. Sobre el pie de cristal del plato con los bordes curvos, donde los colores de las
frutas se mostraban por variados listones entrelazados, con predominio del violado y
el mandarina disminuidos por la refracción. El frutero se había colocado al centro
de la mesa, sobre una de las manchas de remolacha. Alberto cogió uno de los
langostinos, lo verticalizó como si fuese a subir por el pie de cristal, hasta hundir sus
pinzas en la pulpa más rendida. El frutero, como un árbol marino al recibir el
rasponazo de un pez, chisporroteó en una cascada de colores, estirándose el
langostino contento de la nueva temperatura, como si quisiera llegar al cielo curvo
del plato, pintado de frutas.
José Lezama Lima, Paradiso (México: Era. 1968), pp. 196-8.
 Luz Aurora Pimentel / Metaphoric Narration 5

the reference to the causal chain that is essential, for “poetry is centered
on the sign, while the pragmatic prose is mainly centered on the
referent.” (Jakobson, 1963, 66) Thus, the mode of signification of this
kind of texts is predominantly referential—the reference being not
outside the text, but in the fictional world the narrative creates.
By contrast, the second text, from Lezama Lima’s Paradiso, is
perfectly INTRANSITIVE, centered on the poetic function: that is, it forces
the reader to dwell on its verbal texture and on its particular
organization, which is its only mode of signification. What happens next,
though textually contiguous, does not build up a casual chain: it is
simply a series of events in which the relations of causality are either
played down or non-existent (after this dinner scene, Alberto has a few
drinks at a café, he quarrels with a Mexican guitarist, etc., the arbitrary
series concluding with Alberto’s purely accidental death).
The description of the beet stains, and the spatial relations
established between fruit bowl, prawn stains and table are not
subordinates to the narrative of “events”; quite the contrary, this is the
event: the description itself is a narratively dominant. Because of narrative
articulations that are of a purely metaphorical nature, Alberto’s death is
prefigured by the beet stains and the tablecloth, both elements
interacting metaphorically with the handkerchief and the blood in
Alberto’s face (p.195). All four—beet stains, tablecloth, handkerchief and
blood—constitute the “joints”, so to speak, in this metaphorical
articulation. By the same kind of articulations, the prawn, symbolic of
involution, becomes identical with Alberto, a sort of metaphorical alter
ego. In terms of the story, the family is unaware of Alberto’s death at the
end of chapter VII, yet, the description of the prawn that closes that
chapter simultaneously develops the symbol and suggest Cemi’s
metaphorical awareness of his uncle’s death:

he could only remember the warmth of the hand that had

taken the prawn out of his so that it could hug the crystal
base of the fruit bowls. He seemed to see the prawn once
more, leaping merrily in the cascade of iridescence unleashed
6 Luz Aurora Pimentel / Metaphoric Narration

by the tray of fruit. The fruit prawn advanced, refracting the

fruitful colours towards a coral cemetery. (p.196) 4

If the reader of Paradiso merely moves from object to the next, by

proximity, the text will hardly make any sense. In order to generate a
meaningful text, the movements must proceed by leaps, in search of
similarities, telescoping narrative sequences that become meaningful due
to an association, not by contiguity, but by similarity. Lezama’s text does
“call attention by a deliberate similarity in the articulation of segments;”
its narrative effects, and therefore its basic mode of signification, “is
imperatively conditioned by rhythmic similarity, and that rhythmic
parallelism is enhanced by similarity (or contrast) in the images.” Thus,
the mode of narrative signification in this kind of texts is predominantly
metaphorical or poetic.
Therefore, my contention in this study is that in certain narrative
texts the productive act of narration performs operations that are
essentially identical—or at least homologous—to the process of
metaphorization itself: that there is, in other words, a narrative dimension
inherent to metaphorization that is liable to a semiotic transposition from
the purely linguist to the fictional domain. Accordingly, part I describes the
semiotic and semantic mechanism of the process in order to define that
potential narrative dimension of metaphor. A model of metaphoric narration
is then propped, covering both, the level of organization of the text.
Illustrations are deliberately drawn from a broad, heterogeneous body of
narrative and poetic texts, belonging to three different literary traditions.
In part II, once metaphoric narrations has been defined and
illustrated, I have explored its complex effects on narrative structure. For
this purpose I have made and extensive use of Gérard Genette’s narrative
theory, as expounded in “Discours du récit” (1972a) and complemented in
Nouveau discourse du récit (1983). Illustrations in this second part have been
drawn consistently from Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, for I believe
that a systematic exploration of one single narrative text best illustrates the
complex effects of metaphoric narration on narrative structure.

4
Pero él recordaba tan sólo la tibiedad de la mano que había cogido de las suyas el
langostino para que se abrazase al pie del cristal del frutero. Le pareció de nuevo ver
al langostino saltar alegre en la cascada de la iridiscencia desprendida por la bandeja
con las frutas. Volvió de nuevo el frutero a lanzar una cascada de luz, pero ahora el lan-
gostino avanzaba, al refractase los colores frutales, hacia un cementerio coral. (p. 211)