SILHOUETTES OF SPEECH,
I have taken issue with metaphor.
I admit the reasons for my unwillingness to excuse the metaphor. It starts with my mother tongue, raised among the intricate ways of idiomatic expression. It is hard to characterise the Portuguese language’s usage as something other than a fluency in exaggeration, irony and impatience in equal measures; this is already a clue to the heritage of reliance in figurative speech, as I cannot describe it without resorting to the very thing I propose to be at odds with. Mix this with a penchant for swearing, subverse intentions and a heritage of recent dictatorial censorship and you get an ideal scenario for the proliferation of the Metaphor’s most evident issue, which is its unparalleled misuse.
It is no wonder that language this reliant on special effects has found its healthiest expression in poetry; Poetry has been the coded medium of communication through which democracy was planned and demanded; it’s nuanced ways becoming a subterfuge for the necessary practice of complaint and revolt required to end dictatorships. Portugal country of poets, we say. However, I’ve been stuck in struggles with other figures of speech before and for this I blame poetry.
The Lusíadas are considered the most important literary work in the Portuguese language. The Lusíadas are an epic written by Luiz de Camões in the 1500’s (16th century), in poetic rhyme, championing the Portuguese people as its collective hero in a mythical fable around navigator Vasco da Gama’s discovery of a maritime route to India, elevating the glories of Portuguese identity as God-like through a dramatic recollection of the Discoveries period.
The Discoveries are praised as the “resurrection” of Europe after the 14th century. A series of attempts were made, by the Portuguese crown and navigators, to go down the Western coast of Africa; each time the boat expeditions reached a cape, they wondered if it was the southernmost tip of Africa and often recoiled from the unknown. After 1434 the Discoveries become the country’s central effort. Portuguese navigators reached the Canary Islands, Madeira, Azores and Cape Verdean Islands and settled on several coastal towns — bringing the first documented “African slave ship” to Europe in the process — but the coast just kept going after each cape, and when navigator Bartolomeu Dias finally crossed the south tip of Africa this was imortalised as the Portuguese ingenuity defeating Adamastor, the storm monster seeking to destroy the Discoveries glory. When published, the epic was dedicated to the young king of the time who Camões, the poet, praised as a divinity.
Lusíadas are a metaphorical mega-complex, a monumental construction of a nationalistic mythology in the molds of Virgil, forcing the “lusitan people” into the heroic shape required by all epics and have the Gods fight over the desired glory or predestined doomfall of the expeditions ( — for what is an epic without myth, and what is myth without metaphor?).
The metaphor’s issues reside precisely in the particularity of its meanings, and the open endedness of its interpretations. The metaphor’s core reason is the possibility of a shared understanding, an attempt at the simplification of difficult concepts resorting to familiar terms... But the metaphor fails, again and again, at its purpose (its mission becoming an unruly amalgamation of confusion and misunderstanding).
“The more the metaphors, the riper the misunderstanding fruit.”
Metaphors are to be taken figuratively, not literally — but if 500 years go by, and language evolves, its metaphors will be open to misinterpretation and originate a sort of narrative of the absurd, a linear lay out of the metaphor’s alleged promises - paying a disservice to stories and memories. Fernando Pessoa, notorious Portuguese poet, had 47 heteronyms throughout his life. 47 voices, 47 styles, 47 insides. But it was with his own self that he wrote Mensagem, a poetry book comprising 44 poems in intertextuality with Camões’ Lusíadas in which Pessoa preaches the nation’s heroic past and seeks to understand what caused its decay — moral, honor, spiritual decay — in the XXth century. In this continuation of Camões’ intentions, Pessoa further fabricates the Discoveries mythology and replenishes it with more symbols and figures. Mensagem was first published in 1934 to critical indifference, apart from one award by the Propaganda Secretariat of what was the newly installed regime of Estado Novo, which would be the dictatorship ruling the country for the following 40 years.
In those 40 years after publishing, both Lusíadas and Mensagem’s metaphors were taken literally and appropriated to instil a national identity and pride as part of a long and exhaustive operation of fascist propaganda. The Discoveries frenzy as chanted by Camões and Pessoa was remixed and thoroughly indoctrinated, gluing itself into every aspect of culture. Estado Novo rightfully assumed that if everybody felt the Discoveries had been their own, that glories past could be present and that conquest was a holy duty, people would not go against this oppressive ruling class and count their own sacrifices and miserable conditions as worthy (or even as a certainty) of future glories — as well as justify the regime’s colonial projects overseas as a national birthright and the “re- construction” of the Portuguese Empire. The Discoveries as heroically preached by Camões and Pessoa are, today, a deeply rooted foundation of the country’s culture.
The strangest token of the fundamental misunderstanding of Lusíadas has been the literal assumption of Pessoa’s prophetic addition to Camões’, as Mensagem picks up where Camões left off in 1572 and promises that Camões’ beloved king (the one who died in an idiotic fight of his own design) will return in a foggy morning, to save Portugal from its slow death. This speculative future is known as the Fifth Empire and through each crisis it is rehashed, brought back from the depths and articulated into nationalistic rhetoric — as are the Discoveries.
The “Discoveries” were, first, a poorly employed metaphor; later they became a dead metaphor — “a figure that lost the original imagery of its meaning by extensive, repetitive, and popular usage, or because it refers to an obsolete technology or forgotten custom”. It has been reworked in such a way its literal heritage is indissociable from the regime’s imperialism, from which a direct consequence is a strong denial and resistance in acknowledging the role of Portuguese navigations both in the transatlantic slave trade as in the spoils of its colonial project in Africa (which lasted until 1974).
The original persistent use of metaphors and analogies in Lusíadas has made it impossible for us to grasp the embodied thought, the literal symbolic meaning of any piece of the story as anything other than an enormous feat of fabulation and artistry; and the death of the Discoveries epic as a metaphor has served the purpose to clean the conscience of the Portuguese people and hold on to its new meaning — an imperialist fabrication of the dear past.
If we are still permeable to 500 year-old dead metaphors, and exist in their remixed heritage, it is only natural that metaphors are now unavoidable even if we bear witness to their incessant failure, even as poetry.
Alas I am addicted to metaphors and analogies and other seductive figurations, even as I take issue with them — but because nobody can live a life of such self control as to ban them from speech, we must turn to the last resort which is to employ them poorly ourselves in good conscience,
and practice good bad usage with determination and the certainty that as long as they retain some sort of transmittable meaning it is a job well done and far more effective than a misused metaphor or a dead metaphor or a humiliating analogy, which ends up playing against itself. For we understand nothing of it except its death and the condition of having its meaning reinvented each time.
In alternative, find comfort with its far more generous cousin, the malaphor; even better with malapropisms, the sweetest coincidence of closely-sounding words within idioms frequently attributed, in fiction writing, to the mistakes of fools. But to express through malapropism, it is a privilege! not a fault. We ought to not be embarrassed of malaphor usage and feed it lovingly instead; combine two things, three things; loose track of the initial idea; be free to rhyme and pantomime. Its meaning is not under the writer’s control; there is no universal meaning; it will be lost anyway; Make do with the mischievousness of words.
I leave some malaphors and poor metaphors:
— They ached to be drowning in glory.
— You hit the nail right between the eyes.
— Ocean growling with love
Rays from that strong twilight
That are like mother’s kisses
— We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it — Giving new worlds to the world
— It takes a village to raise an idiot.
— A watched pot is still right twice a day; however a wrong clock never boils.
— Fool me once, shame on me. Teach a man how to fool me and I’ll be fooled for the rest of my life.