David Stubblefield, Senior Editor

“Like a dog!, he said, it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.” (Franz Kafka, from The Trial)

Why do people find metaphors, analogies, similes and other uses of figurative language so persuasive? We often hear that figurative language makes writing more compelling to an audience. But why? As it turns to out, virtuous speech may gain its virtue precisely through an engagement with erroneous speech.

Brown University professor Zachary Sng recognizes this apparent contradiction, arguing that classical rhetoric rests on a fundamental paradox: “a system seemingly devoted to the regulation of proper and excellent speech turns out to be dependent on the improper or erroneous” (Sng 6). Likewise, Quintillain, the great thinker of Roman rhetoric, also asserts that figures of speech “originate from the same sources as errors of language” because they begin with a violation of the norms of language (Quintilian 9.3.3).

Thus, there are good reasons to think to figures depend on and originate from errors: logical errors, grammatical errors etc.

However, if figurative language begins as an error, it is followed by a particular kind of movement: a turning or a deliberate shaping of error which, at the last minute, catapults the audience into the realm of correct speech. The figure, according to Quintillian,  is distinguished from an error only by this negative movement of “returning from” error. (9.3.3)

But how does this return from error provide persuasive force?

Consider the following simile from Asian Figures, a book of Asian poetry translated by the poet W.S. Merwin: Silent/ Like the Thief a Dog Bit. At first glance, the one who utters this statement appears to have said something that is blatantly erroneous. Certainly, a person who has just been bitten by a dog cannot serve as an image for silence. Surely, the audience is dumbfounded by the association of these two images. In effect, we might even say that it is the audience’s understanding which has been bitten by a dog or “wounded” by this apparently erroneous or senseless image.

However, once this wound is in place, the author can now perform the task of “healing” it, a task which not only demonstrates his skill, but—as we shall see—also releases a certain persuasive force in the audience.

For example, in the simile above, a good reader will realize—either immediately or as he reads on in the poem—that there are such things as strained silences, even silences that exist on the edge of involuntary, spasmodic outcries, silences that cover over our own wrongdoing and our own, often times, intense suffering from wrongdoing. Moreover, such silences may suddenly appear significant to human life, as something meaningful, and as something worth thinking about.

At any rate, the reader has discovered a sense of the figure, and this discovery releases her from the abyss of error. In a real sense, she has been saved from the terror of senselessness.

In this way, we can begin to think of figurative language as carrying within itself a condensed, mini-narrative. More specifically, we can think of this narrative as a kind of comedy. Like the plot of every teenage horror flick, the narrative begins with a disruption of what is often excessive normalcy and an entry into a dangerous and unknown land. While this place may intrigue the characters at first, once the danger is great enough, they are saved the last minute. The children put everything back in place at the last second. The parents return. Things return to normal. But only now the teenager’s ordinary, boring lives look much better since they have “returned from danger.” They can now assume their adult roles comfortably and willingly.

Moreover, the experience of the sublime, a central tenet of literary studies, follows from a similar engagement with the dangerous. For example, Edmund Burke argues that “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger… is a source of the sublime” (86). For the Romantics, the experience of sublime—famously found in awesome and terrifying experiences such as thunderstorms—is an experience which also engages and returns from danger and, in doing so, promotes a healthy drive for self-preservation.

When explaining the persuasive force of the figure, Quintillian seems to have something similar in mind. He discusses Horace’s credo virtus est vitium fugere (“virtue is to flee vice”) and begins by noting that vitium can be translated as vice, but can also be translated as “error.” He then asserts that, for Horace, virtue is not the absence of vice, but a kind of “return from vice.” (Quintillian 9.3.3).

And like Horace’s moral hero, the teenagers at the end of horror flicks, and the romantic encountering a thunderstorm, the virtuous figure for Quintillian enters or engages the realm of danger, vice, or error only to “return” from a potential destruction and escape unscathed. Such an escape, then, brings about experience of having “returned from error” and, therefore, persuades the audience of the worth of the figure.

So what does this tell us about figures?

Every effective figure, regardless of its semantic reference, is effective because of it brings about an experience of its own figurality, i.e. it points to its own status as a figure, its own journey into and return from error. In the moment of “returning from error,” the figure is completed and the force of its journey is realized. At this moment, the audience’s attention is drawn to the inner workings of the figure and suddenly grasps a meaning and, behind this meaning, the author’s intentional design.

Simply put, in the return from error, the audience suddenly realizes what has happened to them. It is as if the author stands victoriously at the end of the completed figure and lets us know that he has been there waiting for us the whole time. We suddenly realize that, to some degree, our experience, which often appears to us as isolated and fragmentary, has “always already” been anticipated by the author. We realize that the author, to some degree knew us, or at least knew enough of us to know how we would react. Indeed, he banked on our reaction happening. In effect, the author wounds us just so he can heal us

But this does not mean that the movement incited by the figure is somehow idle or somehow akin to running in place? I don’t think so.  The author is not simply going out and creating a pot hole in the road just so he can fix it and “ride the clock” or “look busy.”

Art has often been described as such “purposiveness without purpose” and the aesthetic pleasure of this turning of the sensibility itself has often been made into an intrinsic good. But the author does not breakdown the understanding just for the joy of building it back up any more than an athlete breaks down his body for sheer pleasure of feeling it recover. He does so because, like the athlete engaged in physical training, something happens in the return from error: a capacity is enlarged.

Likewise, if we return to the simile above, we can see that the reader is given a broader sense of both silence and of thievery and of the possible connection between the two. And these meanings did not exist before the simile—at least not in the singular configuration in which the author has depicted then. Thus, something has been created. As a result of the figure, the reader now has an expanded possibility of meanings, an expanded sensibility for sensing the connection between things and, therefore, an expanded self.

But this only happens if the reader tests these possibilities against his experience and incorporates them—however, loosely—into his existing patterns for understanding the world. Is there a remarkable silence even when a wrongdoer has been injured in the act of wrongdoing? When we have done wrong, did we persist in our schemes with such determination that we ignored our own pain? What are we make of this power of silence? Where do we see it in our lives? What kinds of things does this kind of silence explain to us?

These kinds of questions must be answered by the reader if he is to realize the possibilities offered by the author. In short, for the figure to work, the reader has to do something; he cannot simply be the plaything of the author or a passive consumer of meaning. As readers, we never simply bow down to the fuhrer.  Meaning is never some miracle created by a great man creating ex nihilo. As readers, we cannot be so blown away by the movement of the author’s language that we becomes trapped inside of it.

That is, the movement of the figure is not an example of the famous fort/da game of the child described by Freud, where the child hides something just for the pleasure of finding it, and then experiences the repetition-compulsion to repeat this formal structure endlessly. While it is true that we often find ourselves trapped in these repetitive feedback loops and self-enclosed circuits of thinking and acting—moral vice, confirmation bias, addiction, narcissism etc.—the movement of an effective figure is precisely the antithesis of these stultifying movements.

As C.S. Lewis insists that “one of the things we feel after reading a great work is ‘I have got out’” (Lewis 138). That is, by breaking these self-reinforcing enclosures, the figure—as the essence of the literary—takes us out of the deadening prison of our own ego, creates something new and enlarges possibilities.

But this creation takes place on the brink of disaster; this sense emerges on the edge of senselessness. Martin Heidegger translated and quoted the German poet Holderlin as saying, “but where danger is/grows the saving power also” (28).  For our purposes, we might say, where the danger is, there grows the persuasive power also.

Here it becomes clear that the prideful man will perhaps feel ashamed once his understanding has been disrupted and never enter into the figure. At such times, he may feel overpowered, as if his shame would outlive him. Hence, good reading requires a certain humility or a certain willingness to have our understanding violated. When this occurs, we are suddenly opened up for the jolt of persuasion which comes if it can be successfully restored.

In this moment of the completed figure, when we grasp the figure and have returned from error, we are saved from error—saved from the bite of the dog, but—interestingly enough—we are saved by none other than the dog himself, the author, who has wounded and violated our understanding, but done so in order to awaken new life.

(1). Burke, Edmund, and David Womersley. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings. Penguin, 2004.

(2). Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper and Row Torchbooks, 1977.

(3). Lewis, Clive S. An Experiment in Criticism. Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. P, 2013.

(4). Sng, Zachary. The Rhetoric of Error from Locke to Kleist. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010.

(5). Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria. Translated by H. E. Butler, vol. 2, Loeb-Harvard UP, 1980.