Genealogy, Growth, and Other Metaphors

T IS CLEAR to me, having read essays forming this issue of New Literary History, that literary scholars start out with a number of advantages denied social scientists and historians these days. Among these are, first, awareness of element of art that lies in all efforts to grasp reality, no matter how undergirded by pretentious methodologies and computer systems these efforts may be; second, that, however one proceeds, with whatever degree of objectivity and devotion to truth, he cannot escape limitations imposed by form of his inquiry; and third that many of words through which social scientists, humanists, and others approach reality are unalterably metaphoric. These are a few of points lessons to social scientist I find explicit or implicit in essays of this issue. As I say, I have clear impression that all three of points are so well known by literary historians and scholars as to be a part of what Michael Polanyi calls tacit knowledge. Would that same were true in social sciences and history! Most of contributions here would make splendid nourishment for those starting out today to become social scientists or historians. Or, changing figure, splendid prophylaxes against kind of pedantry that always result of prolonged immurement within metaphors of his own trade. No occupation or discipline can do without its metaphors. They are ways of knowing. Each, as Sir Herbert Read has written, is synthesis of several complex units into one commanding image; it expression of a complex idea, not by analysis, nor by direct statement, but by sudden perception of an objective relation. And Wallace Stevens has told us that in metaphors we are confronted by the symbolic language of metamorphosis, which seems to me immensely clarifying.' Even so, metaphors must be watched; they can be treacherous.