One real world example is KBYU censoring a few swear words in Les Miserables, but showing the Helen Hunt Twelfth Night stage production uncut. My favorite example if of the fabulous remake of The Thomas Crowne Affair. Cut out the nude scenes and you still have a movie about a man who gets away with the crime (moreover, ignoring the latter arguably makes you completely miss the point of the fairly tactful nude scenes.) Another great example is “His Girl Friday” which, like Twelfth Night, is chock full of [very witty] sexual innuendo, some of it so blatant I was quite surprised KBYU showed it (though thankful since it’s a hoot of a movie.)

Going back to Eugene’s comment about Fast Times. Having recently watched it again, what’s fascinating is how deeply moral the movie actually is. (Moreover, exactly how Phoebe Cate’s breasts being exposed is immoral is still beyond me, or should I say udderly beyond me.)

That one word marred a really fun movie for me, partly because it was so prominent as to be unavoidable, not a bit of profanity in passing. I certainly didn’t have that reaction to Jamie and Edmund tossing around the same word in Long Day’s Journey into Night when I read it 9th grade. (My sister’s baby, not many months old, had recently died of spinal meningitis and at the funeral my father said that when he heard Clark was ill he had gone to the saddest story he knew for consolation, so when I saw it in his office one day I started reading it.) I’ve learned since to expect some harsh profanity in Eugene O’Neill (though not as harsh as David Mamet and others), especially the later plays.

Please note, I’m not discussing whether I think it is appropriate to see a play by Eugene O’Neill, or a Matt Groening commercial enterprise, or even a Spike Lee Joint, I’m simply pointing out what O’Brian tells Winston in Room 101 in that 25-Years-Ago novel that I just listened to with Simon Prebble narrating. (Or is it the point Alex sans droogs learns in the reprogramming room in that bolshy horrorshow novel Tom Hollander narrated to me a year ago during Apricot month?) Everyone has something that terrifies them, that gives them an aversion reaction, or mars or spoils an otherwise pleasant, or lovely occasion. I have avoided reading that novel that sprang from the Orwell river (by George!) for a long time, because I knew those last four words were coming. (And I know that I truly do need to immerse myself in the sorrows of The Gulag Archipelago.) But that last comment about Winston is not the end of the novel, anymore than, “I was cured, all right” is the end of John Anthony Burgess Wilson’s novel.

The appendix on the Principles of Newspeak completes Orwell’s novel in the same way Burgess’s seventh chapter of part 3 makes the orange properly round, makes it run like clockwork.

Which is a very long way of saying that the metaphors Tyler is working with are themselves a reaction to a faulty metaphor, or a faulty argument, the argument that a little leaven really does not leaven the whole lump.

One of the characteristics we don’t talk much about when we discuss the nature of metaphor is that metaphor is a subset of metonymy, and metonymy works by displacement. When we say, “The White House assures us that Americans do not torture, and certainly don’t use Room 101,” no one imagines a white house with a mouth and vocal cords and a throat and tongue and teeth and jaws to produce sound.

The metaphorical meaning displaces the literal meaning so completely that if someone points it out they’re likely to sound like a crank.

In other words, metaphors work by seizing common sense. I mean, really, who would want to eat a pizza with a Kentucky fried rodent on it? That is, metaphors are essentially coercive. (Okay, maybe the coercion is part of the essence of arguments–as Robert Nozick explains in the preface to Philosophical Explanations–and not of the metaphorical tool arguers often use.)

Our natural reaction to coercion is resistance, and if someone finds a compelling argument, “It’s just one little part,” they may feel compelled to resist the argument with a compelling argument of their own.

Indeed, I have a nifty counter-example of “it’s just got a few objectionable words,” but it requires a glimpse into my private and embarrassing world of nonsense syllables, beats, songs and rhymes, so I think I’ll post this now and the other later.

I agree that it’s worthwhile – essential even – to critique the rhetoric of gospel metaphors. I think my concern is with the idea of critiquing them while ostensibly NOT debating the topics themselves – since it seems to me that much of whether we think a metaphor does or doesn’t work comes back largely to whether we agree with the message that it’s being used to deliver.

In short, we engage in what claims to be criticism of the rhetoric, but actually becomes criticism of the idea. (And I think there’s been a fair amount of that in this thread too.) Better, in my view, to admit that in talking about the rhetoric, we’re simultaneously debating the topic – and that arguments about whether metaphors are apt or not is an integral part of that debate.

With respect to describing metaphors in terms of degree of faultiness… The notion of degree of faultiness, it seems to me, immediately invites comparisons where some metaphors win and others lose. I’d rather talk about *areas* of congruence and dissonance, as opposed to *degrees* of congruence and dissonance. It is (in my view) more accurate – and more productive as well, since it moves us away from contests over which-metaphor-is-best and toward an arena where all metaphors become useful starting-points for examining ideas.

In our quest for better metaphors, it seems to me that it becomes all too easy to place the blame on the metaphor itself – that it wasn’t the right metaphor, that it emphasized the wrong elements, that it was atavistic. All these criticisms, it seems to me, essentially blame the metaphor for being a metaphor, and not the thing itself. It seems to me that what we need is not better metaphors, but better readers.

The other thing we need is a multiplicity of contrasting metaphors, so that no one metaphor (or set of related metaphors) starts to become canonical. I would argue that a multiplicity of contrasting metaphors is almost inherently better than any single metaphor, no matter how well-chosen.

In short, I’m not actually advocating testing metaphors in order to find out which ones are superior. Rather, I’m advocating teaching people how to interpret metaphors. The discussion becomes the end, and the metaphor the means to that end. It’s only when the metaphor starts to crack and display its fault lines that (I would submit) real learning starts to take place.

Like then Elder Packer said, when you really come down to it, soap isn’t really like repentance. Yet it’s a useful metaphor all the same.

So we need to be careful not to swing clear to the other side.

After all, is the kingdom of heave really like a pearl?

I also appreciate your thoughtful and substantive comment. In response: several thoughts of my own:

I think it’s awfully tough to discuss the rhetoric in which a topic is discussed without talking about the topic itself. If you critique someone’s metaphor, it’s almost guaranteed that the person will think you’re attacking that person’s position instead.

Of course it’s tough, but I think it is possible, as illustrated in what’s been happening in the short thread we’ve got going here. When people are really open to improving the effectiveness of their message, to judging the success of their attempts to persuade, they should also be open (though this isn’t always the case) to critiques of the rhetorical media the message was delivered in. And if we’re really interested as a People in teaching the gospel more effectively, we should be equally as interested in perfecting our teaching means and methods, including our language, our rhetorical tools.

The real difficulty, then, is becoming someone who keeps her/himself open to what others are saying, to the feedback others are giving, until s/he finds shared spaces of understanding from which real communion can grow (as Stephen expresses in his discussion of Wayne Booth’s rhetorical quest for connection).

So it’s a tricky thing to try to critique gospel metaphors.

But is it just tricky to critique gospel metaphors? Since, as you and others before you suggest, metaphors are our primary way of understanding the world (language itself is really just an expansive and self-referential system of metaphors), I think it’s tricky to critique any metaphors, but especially those that are atavistically embedded (thanks for that word, Eugene) in our cultural consciousness and which we often fail to really interrogate. So you’re right when you encourage us to test the metaphors we ourselves employ, including those that come to us through our cultural heritages.

I also think you’re spot on when you suggest that we stop calling metaphors “right” or “wrong,” “true” or “false.” To expand on your suggestion that we consider ways each may be true and false, perhaps we should talk about them by degree of faultiness, that is, in terms of their correlation with the object being analogized (as I’ve tried to do here). Maybe by doing this, we can create more compelling, more persuasive, more responsible ways of teaching the gospel to a wide variety of people, which, I believe, is what we’re driving at.

[I wonder if] there are others out there who may sense that there’s something terribly amiss in our popular analogies, but they just can’t put their finger on what it is.

Yeah. That. What you said.