EL 3207: Literary Stylistics
EL 3207: Literary Stylistics
Additional Tutorial Sheet (b)
Do an analysis of metaphor from both the literary and linguistic angles in the two passages below. (Lecture on metaphor: lecture 21)
No Road
Since we agreed to let the road between us
Fall to disuse,
And bricked our gates up, planted trees to screen us,
And turned all time's eroding agents loose,
Silence, and space, and strangers - our neglect
Has not had much effect.
Leaves drift unswept, perhaps; grass creeps unmown;
No other change.
So clear it stands, so little overgrown,
Walking that way tonight would not seem strange,
And still would be allowed. A little longer,
And time will be the stronger,
Drafting a world where no such road will run
From you to me;
To watch that world come up like a cold sun,
Rewarding others is my liberty.
Not to prevent it is my will's fulfilment.
Willing it, my ailment.
by Philip Larkin
Through the mountainous questions of reality and knowledge had passed great figures of civilization, some of whom, like Socrates and Aristotle and Newton and Einstein, were known to almost everyone, but most of whom were far more obscure. Names he had never heard of before. And he became fascinated with their thought and their whole way of thinking. He followed their trails carefully until they seemed to grow cold, then dropped them. His work was just barely passing by academic standards at this time, but this wasn't because he wasn't working or think-ing. He was thinking too hard, and the harder you think in this high country of the mind the slower you go. Phaedrus read in a scientific way rather than a literary way, testing each sentence as he went along, noting doubts and questions to be resolved later, and I'm fortunate in having a whole trunkful of volumes of these notations.
What is most astonishing about them is that almost everything he said years later is con-tained in them. It's frustrating to see how completely unaware he is at the time of the significance of what he is saying. It's like seeing someone handling, one by one, all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle whose solution you know, and you want to tell him, “Look, this fits here, and this fits here,” but you can't tell him. And so he wanders blindly along one trail after another gather-ing one piece after another and wondering what to do with them, and you grit your teeth when he goes off on a false trail and are relieved when he comes back again, even though he is discouraged himself. “Don't worry,” you want to tell him. “Keep going!”
But he's such an abominable scholar it must be through the kindness of his instructors that he passes at all. He prejudges every philosopher he studies. He always intrudes and imposes his own view upon the material he is studying. He is never fair. He's always partial. He wants each philosopher to go a certain way and becomes infuriated when he does not.
A fragment of memory is preserved of him sitting in a room at three and four in the morning with Immanuel Kant's famous Critique of Pure Reason, studying it as a chess player studies the openings of the tournament masters, trying to test the line of development against his own judgment and skill, looking for contradictions and incongruities.
Phaedrus is a bizarre person when contrasted to the twentieth century Midwestern Ameri-cans who surround him, but when he is seen studying Kant he is less strange. For this eighteenth-century German philosopher he feels a respect that rises not out of agreement but out of appreciation for Kant's formidable logical fortification of his position. Kant is always superbly methodical, persistent, regular and meticulous as he scales that great snowy mountain of thought concerning what is in the mind and what is outside the mind. It is, for modern climbers, one of the highest peaks of all, . . . .
from Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance