Metaphor: A Settled Scene in the World of Rhetoric, an Enigma in the World of Language Teaching

Abstract

Metaphor is poetic in its essence and wisdom is its fundamental nature. Metaphor and poem have an equally identical function since they bring into being a symbolic image, a reflection that bears a lived experience. It is symbolic since the signifier is not clearly conveying the signified. It is a lived experience as it springs from a culture: climate, history, myth, manner, customs and institutions. I have entitled my work: Metaphor: A Settled Scene in the World of Rhetoric, an Enigma in the World of Language Teaching. It is “a settled scene” because it is beautiful and attractive. It is charming and appealing to the reader. It is pleasant for the ear and the heart but it is also “an enigma in the world of language teaching” because it is inaccessible to reason. It is hard to define with logic. It becomes then the matter of the spirit and the heart to comprehend. It is an enigma that carries truth, a hidden truth, that one seeks to unveil, to unearth, charm and magnetism emanating from mystery, obscurity. From the moment the heart and the spirit take part in this “settled scene”, intuition befalls as necessary equipment, even though; metaphor is an analogical image that is fundamentally based on similitude. It is not in the vein of the algebraic signs, because it is an ambivalent and multivalent image as distorted as a dream. This distortion might be an act of censorship. My questions are: why does metaphor not say directly what it means? Why does it not reveal its meaning without disguise? Is it like a dream only a wish fulfilment? What is the origin of this distortion in metaphor that resembles that distortion in dream? These questions incited my motivation to venture into the fascinating "usage” of this figure of speech that is metaphor.