‘We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves’

– John Berger

How do forms of literary description ask us to look at ‘things’ AND/OR at the relations between the self and the other?

In much of the literature and history of the English canon, the corresponding notions of ‘self’ and ‘other’ have denoted, in conjunction, one relatively simple paradigm of oppositional identification, wherein the ‘self’ remains broadly separate from the ‘other’ (or entity of comparison). But developments in feminist, postcolonial, and Marxist literary thought complicate this phenomenological schema by foregrounding the racially ‘othered’ self, and specifically, the Black self. Edward Said, Franz Fanon, and Jean-Paul Sartre all address, to varying extents, the manner in which a realized Black identity can function as both ‘self’ and ‘other’ simultaneously, due to its historical and ongoing positioning within the racialized structure of the West—for while a Black man might identify a white man as ‘other’ in relation to himself, the pre-existing systems of power in the West mandate that this white man be perceived as “not only ‘the Other,’ but also the master” (Fanon, 148). From a hegemonic standpoint, then, it will always be the Black man who is ‘othered’: his relentless marginalization is ensured by the very nature of the structures already in place. This dynamic ascribes a relative lack of demarcation to the Black identity, within the given phenomenological model of ‘self’ and ‘other,’ and thereby necessitates a category of critical theory that interrogates the interaction of oppositional identification beyond these binary foundations—that is to say, a discourse that addresses not only the ‘self’ and the ‘other,’ but also the ‘othered self.’

Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel, Beloved, epitomizes the strategies and ideals of such a discourse; as early as the first pages of the text, Morrison’s depiction of the fraught relationship that the protagonist, Sethe, endures with her own ‘self’ fundamentally disallows for any diametric reading. Of course, as a Black woman in antebellum America, Sethe is perpetually ‘othered’ in relation to the conditions of her existence; the parameters of her selfhood are thus defined, at least in part, by their oppositional positioning against the literary backdrop of a patriarchal, white supremacist culture. But even beyond the sociopolitical assessment that Fanon emphasizes, the character of Sethe demonstrates a number of compelling tensions between various forms of oppositional identification. The body upon which the narrative takes form, and wherein Sethe’s conflictions and identity are rooted, is maternal as well as formerly enslaved; therefore, its associations to motherhood recall many of the differential paradigms of ‘self’ and ‘other’—specifically those pertaining to children, such as Lacan’s mirror phase or the psychosis of the nursing child. Throughout the narrative, Morrison draws upon the notions of oppositional identification that her thematic emphasis on maternity has produced, employing the selfsame images of birth and psychosis to represent the horrors of slavery. In this fashion, Morrison brilliantly depicts a loss of differentiation between mother and child that mimics the absence of demarcation associated with enslavement; the maternal and formerly enslaved body of Sethe thereby provides the vital symbolic link between each instance of differential identification of the ‘self’ that the text contains.

It is precisely this nuanced representation of the Black ‘self’—as a kind of self-actualized, cultural ‘Other’—that facilitates Morrison’s narrative recalibration of racial centrality in Beloved: what Beth McCoy identifies as an “authorial shift from racialized ‘object’ to racialized ‘subject’” (McCoy, 44). The narrative of Beloved provides, through the production of the text itself, a literary realm wherein the Black ‘self’ is no longer reduced, like some bizarre form of racial chiaroscuro, to an othered foil for the white ‘self.’ Instead, the juxtaposition of a Black ‘self’ against the white ‘other’ establishes the conditions upon which the thematic weight of the novel is largely contingent, by allowing for a differential formation of the Black ‘self.” But this is not to suggest that the full relevance of Black identity in Beloved should be reduced to its terms of relation to the white supremacist paradigms that preceded it; on the contrary, to do so would resituate Blackness as oppositional to the Eurocentric presuppositions of the canon, and thereby reestablish whiteness as the “objective” center of criticism. Nevertheless, the fraught interaction between Morrison’s literature and the aesthetic conventions of the medium with which she engages lends her work a heightened sense of sociopolitical subversion; it therefore seems tantamount, in critical analyses of Beloved, to approach its conceptualization of Black selfhood both in relation to the white supremacist paradigms that inform the text, and as an organic discourse in its own right. For while Morrison’s text reckons fully and consciously with the pre-existing myths of white centrality, the novel is in no sense dependent upon them; on the contrary, Morrison articulates throughout Beloved, “a fully developed theory…that is central to her larger political and philosophical stance on black identity” (O’Reilly, 1).

In any relation between a ‘self’ and ‘other’ within the initial phenomenological model, there is necessarily a degree of oppositional distance whereby the identity of one can be induced from its relation to the other. But the events that inform Beloved’s narrative core are defined by the near-total absence of this distance; instead, the text is linguistically, syntactically, and thematically characterized by an almost staggering sense of intimacy. This loss of differentiation, which the Black ‘self’ suffers both in a phenomenological sense and in the circumstances of the narrative, is disturbing; thematically and linguistically, Morrison draws the Black subject within the narrative into the proximity of the white ‘other’ and makes any form of distinction almost unsettlingly difficult. The most memorable instance of this occurs, of course, when Sethe sees her former masters approaching her home, and reacts against the violence she anticipates by murdering her own daughter. In this instance, rather than replicating the traditional model wherein the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ establish a sort of necessary contingence upon mutual opposition, Morrison depicts a reimagined sense of identification that seems, rather than differential, disturbingly similar. The distance between ‘self’ and the ‘other’ is thereby eradicated; the two become not foils, but mimetic horrors of one another and themselves. This hideous sense of like identification can be read as an allusion to the disturbing mutual reliance of the slave and master upon one another: a specter of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic that haunts the foundations of the text.

But the physical images of intimacy and proximity in Beloved are certainly not limited to the racialized conceptions of ‘self’ and ‘other.’ In this same scene, Morrison also uses near-identical imagery to represent the problematized sense of differentiation inherent between infants and the maternal figures who have been, as historian Walter Johnson articulates, “…forced by their slavery into a doubled relation with their bodies and their children” (Johnson, 11). Even before the supernatural return of her child, Sethe enfolds her daughters within her own maternal identity: in the moments leading up to Sethe’s grisly murder of her own daughter, Morrison writes, “…she collected every bit of her life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil out, away, over there where no one could hurt them…where they would be safe” (Morrison, 163). In this passage, Sethe’s children are described as “parts of her,” engulfed within the greater whole of the maternal body. In some sense, this image could function as a poignant indicator of Sethe’s limitless devotion to her children; but this reading is problematized by the sheer brutality of Sethe’s subsequent actions. Instead, the overlapping of Sethe’s identity with that of the murdered child seems to thrust the ethical nature of her infanticide into ambiguity, suggesting that she has killed a “part of her,” rather than an autonomous human being. The very language of the passage obscures the agency of the murdered child, thereby casting doubt upon whether Sethe’s actions were a ritual sacrifice, or a kind of suicide. In accordance with this image, the allegorical distance between Sethe and Beloved becomes virtually nonexistent in the text: Jean Wyatt argues that Beloved’s fixation on Sethe echoes infantile psychosis, mimicking a “desire to regain the material closeness of a nursing baby” (Wyatt, 474). This insight is augmented by the images of blood and milk that imbue the narrative recounting of Sethe’s “rough choice” (Morrison, 180), and Morrison’s frequent use of terms like “hunger” to associate Beloved’s desire for Sethe with a desire or need for consumption. Similarly, the sense of utter unification that Sethe experiences is shared by Beloved, as indicated in the ambiguous line, “You are my face; you are me” (Morrison, 216). This quotation appears in arguably the most haunting and obscure section of the text, wherein Beloved’s further references to being “in the water” (Morrison, 216) also function as a potential description of the experience of a child still in psychosis: completely void of identity, and utterly unable to differentiate any semblance of identity separate from the body of the mother.

But at various points in the novel, Beloved also seems to carry within her the entire history of American slavery; in light of this, the appalling conditions, overwhelming darkness, and horrific proximity of bodies that she describes can also easily be read as a description of a voyage on an American slave ship. The very language of the passage is spatially devoid: punctuation is lacking and words seem to merge upon the page, signifying a disorienting and overwhelming sense of physical closeness that represents, according to Wyatt, “The loss of demarcation and differentiation of those caught in an ‘oceanic’ space between cultural identities, between Africa and an unknown destination” (Wyatt, 474). In either reading of this passage, this proximity is defined as a categorically dangerous state of being—a conviction mirrored earlier in the text by the grisly nature of the master- slave dialectic, and later by horrific consequences of Sethe’s lack of differentiation from her daughter. “There are no gaps in Sethe’s world,” Wyatt writes, “no absences to be filled with signifiers; everything is there, an oppressive plentitude” (Wyatt, 474). The complete lack of any form of distance between the Sethe and Beloved, whether it is read as the extended psychosis of a nursing child or a supernatural manifestation of the horror of non-differentiation within the Middle Passage, impedes Sethe’s conception of herself and very nearly consumes her.

The tragedy inherent within Morrison’s multifold, symbolic use of motherhood throughout the novel, particularly in relation to Sethe’s volatile relationship to her maternal and once-enslaved body, is particularly evident in the manner in which the various pieces of textual imagery simultaneously inform and corrupt one another in seemingly arbitrary, incongruous, or even upsetting ways. Slave masters, schoolteachers, mother’s milk, rusted shackles, childbirth, pregnancies, blood, slave ships, steel bits, frightened mothers, laughing children, empty homes—as the images clash and conflate, their horror lies, unsurprisingly, in a lack of differentiation. In this sense, the entire text allegorizes, through a number of narrative, linguistic, and thematic mediums, the white Other’s hegemonic perversions of the Black effort to formulate a realized self within pre-existing phenomenological terms. Although she offers no categorical solution to the problems of differentiation and identification that the text so thoroughly interrogates, Morrison nevertheless provides her audience solace in the form of the novel itself: a riveting narrative plane wherein the realized Black ‘self,’ though relentlessly ‘othered’, can nevertheless be represented and identified on its own terms—and where the Black maternal body, despite its history of suffering and enslavement, can provide this still-emerging ‘self’ with an intimate physical site of violence, desire, and resistance.

Works Cited

Collins, Patricia Hill. “The Meaning of Motherhood in Black Culture and Black Mother/Daughter Relationships.” Sage: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women 4.2 (1987): 4-11. JSTOR. Web.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto, 1986. Print.

Ghasemi, Parvin, and Rasool Hajizadeh. “Demystifying the Myth of Motherhood: Toni Morrison’s Revision of African-American Mother Stereotypes.” International Journal of Social Science and Humanity IJSSH (2013): 477-79. JSTOR. Web.

Hirsch, Marianne. The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. Google Scholar. Web.

Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999. Print.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved: A Novel. New York, NY: New American Library, 1988. Print.

O’Reilly, Andrea. Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart. Albany: State U of New York, 2004. Print.

Wyatt, Jean. “Giving Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” PMLA 108.3 (1993): 474-88. JSTOR. Web.

“All similes are true and most metaphors are false”

– Donald Davidson

In his essay “What Metaphors Mean,” Donald Davidson writes, “The most obvious semantic difference between simile and metaphor is that all similes are true and most metaphors are false. The earth is like a floor…. But turn these sentences into metaphors, and you turn them false; the earth is like a floor, but it is not a floor” (Davidson, 41). This assertion, while not fundamentally untrue, is nevertheless problematized: Davidson fails to acknowledge that the tension between literary subject and comparative object—which emerges from metaphoric structure, and gives rise to the semantic conditions he describes—is a categorical strength of the metaphor as a literary device. Metaphors interrogate and enrich a literary subject by challenging the ordinary parameters of its semantic reality: a function made possible by the precise sense of factual or literal incongruence that Davidson observes. In both William Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 18’ and Sylvia Plath’s ‘Metaphors,’ the poet endeavors to adequately convey his or her subject through figurative rhetoric. Plath is ultimately the more successful of the two: her employment of metaphors lends form and nuance to a topic too complex for simple articulation, while Shakespeare’s use of an extended simile, though effective, generates a diametric and comparatively simplistic representation of the poetic subject. The figurative strength of Plath’s poem, particularly in contrast to Shakespeare’s, is contingent upon her use of metaphors to interrogate the areas of the unnamed and the unnamable. Thus, the juxtaposition of these two texts underscores the metaphor’s literary potential to rival or even surpass the figurative capacities of the simile; through their production of the very dynamic that Davidson identifies as “false,” metaphors can in fact express a number of remarkably subtle and intricate narrative truths.

This essay posits that figurative language, especially in poetry, mimics a number of the structural and post-structural linguistic paradigms outlined by theorists such as Saussure, Jakobson, and Derrida. By generating interactions between the poetic subject and its object of comparison that closely resemble those of a sign and its signifier, similes and metaphors echo differing variations upon well-established semiotic models; in much the same manner that linguistic meaning emerges as “…the result of a process of division or articulation, of signs being themselves only because they are not some other sign” (Eagleton, 129), the subject of a poem is defined by both its analogous and its differential relationships to a comparative object. This is evident in Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 18,’ wherein a single simile runs through the text, comparing the subject—a nameless, genderless figure presumably functioning as a love interest for the narrator—to a summer’s day. ‘Sonnet 18’ demonstrates an inherent awareness of the inadequacy of its own simile: the references to “rough winds” and “summer’s lease” (Shakespeare, 18, ll. 3-4) underscore the relatively transient, and therefore inferior, nature of the comparative object. In this sense, Shakespeare’s employment of figurative language evokes the structuralist conception of the ‘poetic’ as residing, above all, “…in language’s being placed in a certain kind of self-conscious relationship to itself…the sign is dislocated from its object: the usual relation between sign and referent is disturbed, which allows the sign a certain independence as an object of value in itself” (Eagleton, 98). More specifically, though, the extended simile that runs throughout ‘Sonnet 18’ echoes the structural semiotic model applied in the writings of Saussure: it contains a “delimited structure of meaning” (Eagleton, 127) wherein the correlation between sign and signifier is direct and often simplistic. The subject of ‘Sonnet 18’ is like a summer’s day in that he or she is “lovely” and “temperate,” but not like a summer’s day in that he or she is “more lovely” and “more temperate” (Shakespeare, 18, l. 2). The association is fundamentally diametric, and leaves little space for interpretive nuance.

The demarcation inherent within the figurative language of ‘Sonnet 18’ is similarly apparent in the structure of the text itself: the consistent rhyme scheme, augmented by uniform iambic pentameter and an absence of enjambment, constitutes a perfect Elizabethan sonnet. Even the poem’s volta elucidates upon the simplistic nature of the relationship between the subject and its object of comparison: the word “but” in line 9, which denotes the poetic ‘turn,’ is in this case a mere vehicle whereby the narrator asserts that the poetic subject, once immortalized in literature, will defy the limitations that characterize the object of comparison (Shakespeare, 18, l. 9). The absolute nature of the relationship between the love interest and the object to which he or she is analogized is thus reiterated; the subject continues to be “like” or “not like” a summer’s day in a variety of differing but ultimately diametric ways. This simile therefore presupposes a fixed semiotic structure indicating little other than the beauty and aesthetic preservation of the poetic subject; it is “true” in the manner that Davidson’s interpretation of truth demands, but fails to employ the broader possibilities of figurative representation.

Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Metaphors,’ on the other hand, achieves a richer depiction of its subject largely because its allegories cannot be semantically categorized as “true” when reimagined as literal statements. Professor Catherine Addison asserts that, “Between sameness and its opposite lies an infinite possibility of degrees” (Addison, 408). The implications of this statement are vital to the language and conception of ‘Metaphors’: unlike Shakespeare, who establishes a direct correlation between two like objects, Plath constructs an entirely metaphorical understanding of her subject, the pregnant female body. Plath’s poem contains several metaphors for pregnancy; but rather than functioning as simple indicators of gestation, these references to elephants, “ponderous” houses, and “melons strolling on two tendrils” (Plath, ll. 2-3) engender specific evocations of awkwardness and enormity. This dynamic is echoed in the poem’s meter: various instances of enjambment disrupt the iambic pentameter, creating a palpable sense of impregnation within the rhythm. Paired with the numerical significance of nine syllables in each of the nine lines, indicating nine months of pregnancy, the formal composition of ‘Metaphors’ establishes the entire poem, like the individual images it contains, as an extended metaphor for an expectant body.

As Davidson himself asserts earlier in his essay, “[A metaphor’s] interpretation reflects as much on the interpreter as on the originator” (Davidson, 31). In other words, the literary value of metaphor arises largely as a consequence of its own imprecision: by indicating the nature of a poetic subject through varying descriptions what the subject is not, metaphors generate space for a critical analysis grounded in oppositional identification. Plath establishes her poem as “a riddle in nine syllables” (Plath, l. 1): employing various metaphors and compelling the audience to ‘solve’ the text by identifying these metaphors as allegories for her pregnant state. This initiates a discourse between reader and text that is contingent upon the metaphor’s factual ambiguity and resultant need for interpretation. Like Shakespeare, Plath recognizes that even figurative language is not fully adequate for communicating her subject; thus, the unspeakable magnitude of pregnancy in ‘Metaphors’ is represented not simply through metaphors, but through the very inability of these metaphors to fully verbalize the speaker’s state of being. Each allegorical image augments the interpretive versatility of the text, and the reader is tasked with giving interpretive form to the poetic subject by identifying not only the narrator’s pregnancy, but also its analogously denoted implications.

In this manner, the very characteristic of metaphor that Davidson identifies as “false” — namely, its lack of direct correlation between subject and object of comparison—becomes the primary means by which poets such as Plath better communicate their subject matter. Metaphors expand the thematic parameters of a text by situating the subject in the discursive excess between literal and allegorical, and so become, as Winifred Nowottny explains, “a useful means of dealing with the area of unnamed experiences” (Nowottny, 57). This recalibration is linguistic as well as thematic: by eliminating a single word—usually “like” or “as”—metaphors eradicate physical distance between the subject and the object of comparison, creating a condensed syntactic structure wherein interpretive potential can move beyond the constraints of the factual. In Plath’s poem, for instance, the word “pregnant” is never explicitly used; the text’s implications reside in a figurative space made possible by the nonliteral nature of the analogous images. Similes, on the other hand, can inhibit this dynamic by establishing the fixed, diametric subject-to-object correlations exemplified in ‘Sonnet 18.’ From a linguistic standpoint, then, poetic similes recall the structuralist conceptions of language by echoing a “delimited structure of meaning” between sign and signifier; poetic metaphors align with post-structural semiotic ideals by engaging with the differential excess between a subject and its object of comparison.

Of course, the identity that a metaphor ascribes to a ‘sign’ or literary subject is necessarily contingent upon its oppositional relationship to an allegorical object, and inevitably becomes inapplicable in a literal semantic context. Davidson’s claim that metaphors will constitute untruths when read as sentences, while similes will retain their factual validity, is thus substantiated; but this reading seems incomplete in light of works such as Plath’s, wherein semantic tension is precisely what allows the text to communicate thematic truths well beyond the confines of literalism. When Davidson’s definitions of “true” and “false” are reimagined within the framework of poems such as ‘Sonnet 18’ and ‘Metaphors,’ it is apparent that similes are likely to be insufficient or even outright false, because their inherent semiotic simplicity can yield, as Shakespeare himself acknowledges, inadequacies of comparison that result in a subject “belied with false compare” (Shakespeare, 130, l. 14). Metaphors, in contrast, emerge as a complex and useful literary device, the merit of which should not be limited to the oft-reductive discourses surrounding our conceptions of the literal and the semantic.

Works Cited 

Addison, Catherine. “From Literal to Figurative: An Introduction to the Study of Simile.” College English 55.4 (1993): 402-19. JSTOR. Web.

Davidson, Donald. “What Metaphors Mean.” Critical Inquiry 5.1, Special Issue on Metaphor (1978): 31-47. JSTOR. Web.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1985. Print.

Fishelov, David. “Poetic and Non-Poetic Simile: Structure, Semantics, Rhetoric.” Poetics Today 14.1 (1993): 1-23. JSTOR. Web.

MacCormac, Earl R. “Metaphor and Literature.” Journal of Aesthetic Education6.3 (1972): 57-70. JSTOR. Web.

Nowottny, Winifred. The Language Poets Use. 5th ed. London: Athlone, 2000. Print.

Plath, Sylvia. “Metaphors.” Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. London: Faber and Faber, 1989. 116. Print.

Shakespeare, William. “18.” Ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New York: Washington Square, 2004. 39. Print.

Shakespeare, William. “130.” Ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New York: Washington Square, 2004. 269. Print.