The Senior Common Room was occupied by the usual three.
Mr Blottisham was explaining something to Miss Stray.
“Metaphor,” he said, “is simply a more colourful way of saying something.”
Professor Quillibrace looked up from his newspaper.
“No.”
Blottisham paused.
“It is.”
“No.”
“It is what metaphor is.”
“It is one thing metaphor can do.”
Blottisham looked irritated.
“What else can it do?”
“It can make a meaning the source of another meaning.”
Blottisham waited.
“That sounds unnecessarily complicated.”
“It is not complicated.”
“It sounds complicated.”
Miss Stray intervened.
“Suppose I say that life is a journey.”
“Yes.”
“The journey is already meaningful. So I use that meaning to construe something else.”
“My life.”
“Precisely.”
Blottisham nodded.
“So you are comparing your life to a journey.”
“Not quite. The journey provides a meaning through which the experience of life can be reconstrued.”
Blottisham frowned.
“What's the difference?”
Quillibrace folded his newspaper.
“The difference is that metaphor doesn't merely decorate an existing thought. It changes what can be meant.”
Blottisham considered this.
“But life isn't literally a journey.”
“Correct.”
“So it's not true.”
“Not literally.”
“Then what use is it?”
“An extraordinary one.”
Miss Stray said, “The point is that the journey meaning remains available. It isn't discarded. It is recruited.”
“A journey has destinations,” said Quillibrace. “Obstacles. Departures. Arrivals. Detours. Progress. Perhaps even getting lost.”
Blottisham looked increasingly uncomfortable.
“My life has some of those.”
“Most lives do.”
“So metaphor allows us to talk about things that aren't literally journeys as though they had properties of journeys.”
“Now you're beginning to understand.”
Blottisham leaned back.
“But surely that means metaphor can also mislead us.”
Quillibrace paused.
“Yes.”
Miss Stray looked at him.
“That may be rather important.”
“Very.”
Blottisham brightened.
“Then metaphor isn't necessarily reliable.”
“No.”
“Excellent.”
“It is productive.”
Blottisham's expression fell.
“Productive?”
“It generates possibilities of meaning.”
“But some of those possibilities may be false.”
“Certainly.”
Miss Stray smiled.
“Perhaps that is why metaphor becomes so important culturally. Once a metaphor is established, people can build further meanings upon it.”
Quillibrace nodded.
“Meaning becomes the source of meaning.”
Blottisham stared at them.
“Meaning meaning meaning.”
“Yes.”
“That's absurd.”
“No,” said Quillibrace. “It's civilisation.”
There was a silence.
Blottisham looked again at his book.
“So when Genesis calls God a rock—”
“Don't,” said Quillibrace.
“I was only going to ask.”
“That's how these things begin.”
Miss Stray laughed.
Blottisham closed the book.
“I suddenly feel that metaphor should have been regulated.”
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