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Date Posted: 16:22:35 06/07/08 Sat
Author: SS
Subject: *********************RESPONSESSAY#3*******************

Noah Eaton
May 19th, 2008
English 490


Speaking What Otherwise Cannot Be Spoken


“I don’t accept the judgment that in using images and metaphors of other worlds, space travel, the future, imagined technologies, societies, or beings, science fiction escapes from having human relevance to our lives. Those images and metaphors used by a serious writer are images and metaphors of our lives, legitimately novelistic, symbolic ways of saying what cannot otherwise be said about us, our beings and choices, here and now. What science fiction does is enlarge the here and now.” - Ursula Le Guin


As I carefully scrutinized the various reflections on metaphoric devices in writing this week, I was immediately reminded of the foreword from Ursula Le Guin’s A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, where she offers what I find to be most persuasive ruminations on what science fiction’s pure purpose is as a literary genre, and that it’s not all cut-and-dry as it is often made out to be. Yet, as I turned back to this, I was also thinking to myself: “What about metaphors in general, regardless of literary genre? Do they not speak much about us as well?”
You mention in your introductory comment of “Teaching Everyday Metaphor” that when “we see the similar in the dissimilar we are practicing metaphoric thinking.” (11) because we often “do not realize that a metaphor is not isolated, but is instead part of the context of the piece of writing in which it is found.” (11).
You proceed in your publication “Composing with Metaphor” to provide insight into how we can comprehend metaphors in an academic environment, even create them, first by identifying them in non-literary publications such as magazine advertisements and speech transcripts, which I sense that you choose this approach because you claim toward the beginning of the latter publication that in “the last fifteen years studies from fields as diverse as philosophy, psychology, and linguistics have contributed to a growing accumulation of knowledge on the subject.” (11) Secondly, you claim to have adopted a technique from Gabriele Rico’s Writing the Natural Way where you first write a topic, then your students respond by mentioning qualities they associate with the topic, where from there they can create metaphors based on those qualities.
I thought it hilarious what my fellow classmates came up with myself when describing the English Department in metaphor; as an abode for purple beanbag-chair dilettantes and Martini-sipping introverts just to reminisce a couple of the results. And that is precisely where I believe you back your argument convincingly that metaphor “is a valuable heuristic for student writing” (14) because it helps writers or thinkers “discover an alternate mode of knowing, through which they know more than they think they know.” (15) when they would otherwise feel inadequate toward responding to any given topic.
This leads me back to Le Guin’s way of thinking, who also insists that one of the great virtues about science fiction, in her view, is beauty. She elaborates:

“The beauty of a story may be intellectual, like the beauty of a mathematical proof or a crystalline structure; it may be aesthetic, the beauty of a well-made work; it may be human, emotional, moral; it is likely to be all three…” (Le Guin 6)


She goes on to argue how many science fiction critics often diminish the greatness of any body of science fiction to what “message” or ideas it is attempting to convey, behaving as though “text were a mere vehicle for ideas, a kind of gelatin coating for the medicine.” (Le Guin 7).
I find what she said fascinating because, in tying this theme of metaphor with the themes of visual imagery, non-directed knowing and emotion in composition, last year I read this study by a Finnish scholar named Irma Hirsjärvi from Jyväskylä University, where 15–17-years-old students in six Baltic Sea countries (Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) were handed out copies of Ursula Le Guin’s “The Kerastion”, were asked to read it, and then were asked 1) what the story was about, 2) what kinds of feelings the story inspired, and 3) if they liked or disliked the story. Hirsjärvi would then scrutinize the varying results and find 1) how this piece of fantasy/fiction was read by all the nations involved, and 2) how might the varying results be related to social and cultural factors such as globalization and gender issues.
In a nutshell, two fascinating results were revealed in the study: 1) among students who admitted they were more avid readers of fantasy/science fiction generally speaking, overall they surprisingly exhibited minimal emotion in response to the reading and “seemed to analyze the text at a surprisingly superficial level” while students who admitted they rarely or usually never read fantasy/science fiction actually “were found to be able to approach the short story in a positive manner, and many of them even derived intelligent pleasure from it.” and 2) the more avid science fiction readers in the study were more likely to use neutral analytic answers, while avid fantasy readers struggled to interpret the story at all and the words “fuzzy” and “difficult” were common adjectives mentioned, thus drawing two clear, distinguishing perceptions toward the text: one more intellectual (avid science fiction writers) and the other more human and emotional (avid fantasy readers).
Which I believe underscores the persisting difficulty of how much of the academic community still dismisses metaphor as “one in a series of tropes that must be defined, differentiated, and finally memorized.” (11) rather than being recognized as a useful tool in making connections between ideas, given how “The Kerastion” is, in itself, a metaphor-heavy work almost entirely absent of dialogue and limited only to three pages in length, thus one can expect diverse sets of results when educating students about works of literature.
I, myself, am most fascinated with metaphor and, because I have social skills impediments, I find myself reflecting on my own experiences linguistically through metaphor almost tirelessly. For instance, when I celebrated my 24th birthday last October, I realized that the number “24” has a rather quintessential, semiperfect aura to it when you think long enough about it, beyond the obvious 24 hours in a day. Consider the following:

1) It is the smallest number with exactly eight divisors quantitatively speaking (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12) and is a highly composite number as well, having more divisors among all smaller numbers.

2) There are 24 major and minor keys in Western tonal music (Polish pianist Frédéric Chopin, one of the greatest piano composers of all time, famously composed during the Romantic Period what are known widely as the Preludes Op. 28; 24 short pieces written for the piano, one in every key (oddly enough, Chopin was 24 years of age when he first began writing the Preludes in France in 1831) regarded famously by German composer Robert Schumann as “…sketches, beginnings of etudes, or, so to speak, ruins, individual eagle pinions, all disorder and wild confusions."

3) There are 24 cycles in a Chinese solar year.

4) 24 carats represent 100% pure gold.

5) There are 24 spaces on a backgammon board.

6) Motion picture film is traditionally projected at 24 frames per second.

Thus, perhaps the fact that the number “24” is a most composite, quintessential and semiperfect number could serves as an appropriate metaphor, or yardstick perhaps, in my continuing maturity through this life. Just like the 24 cycles in a Chinese solar year, the various facets of my personality will be showcased throughout this next year.
Just like the default projection rate of motion picture film at 24 frames per second, all that I am is as real as it can get. Just like Chopin’s “Preludes”, my life is music, and is made up of a diverse breadth of sketches, ranging from easier moments like in Preludes 1 and 4 to more harmonically dense moments like in Prelude 9, to moments of “raindrops” like in Prelude 15, to moments of moral struggle like in Prelude 18, to my deepest, most inner-most emotions and desiring for resolve punctuated by scores of trills and arpeggios in the final Prelude where, when organized together from beginning to end, sounds very much like a yearly symphony of highs and lows. And, just as there are 24 carats in pure gold, there could very well truly be no year as priceless as this………however I choose to evaluate the beauty of this story unfolding.
Then again, that’s simply just one way of making connections between ideas, and one could just as eloquently adopt the number “24” as a metaphor for undesirable superstitious happenings (for example, 24 is considered an unlucky number in Cantonese culture because its pronunciation is similar to that of "easy to die".)
In the end, I find that’s the semi-complicated beauty in metaphor as it is: having the ability to see the similar in the dissimilar, even vice-versa, and only when we develop those instinctual and analytical capacities can we truly begin to competently not merely make sense of the here and now, but enlarge it as well by recognizing its meaning-producing beauty.

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