Forceville, Charles

The following is a pre- proof version of a paper t hat was subsequent ly published as: Forceville, Charles ( 2002) . "The ident ificat ion of t arget and source in pict orial m et aphors." Journal of Pragm at ics 34( 1) : 1- 14. I f you want t o quot e from it , please consult t he published version [ ChF]

Abstract. Lakoff and Johnson's dictum that "metaphor is primarily a matter of thought and action and only derivatively a matter of language (1980: 153) has given rise to numerous studies investigating how metaphors' verbal manifestations relate to their cognitive origins. Curiously, little attention has hitherto been paid to a logical extension of this adage, namely the examination of non-verbal metaphor, for instance pictorial metaphor. In this article, Noel Carroll's (1994, 1996) proposals concerning the nature and identifiability of pictorial metaphors are discussed in terms of the model developed by Forceville (1996). Two theses inherent in Carroll's approach are investigated and rejected: (1) that most prototypical pictorial metaphors, unlike verbal ones, allow a reversibility of their respective targets and sources; and (2) that prototypical pictorial metaphors are `homospatially noncompossible', that is, that they are visual hybrids. The article ends by making suggestions concerning the investigation of cinematic metaphors in line with Forceville (1996). KEYWORDS: Pictorial/visual metaphor; picture analysis; images & cognition; metaphorical (ir)reversibility.

1. Introduction

The study of metaphor received a tremendous boost with the rise of cognitivist linguistics. One of the crucial tenets of the cognitivist paradigm is its assumption that verbal metaphors are not identical with conceptual metaphors, but perceptible manifestations of them. That is, metaphor is "not a figure of speech, but a mode of thought" (Lakoff 1993: 210). Among many other things, this cardinal cognitivist principle of the non-identity of thought and language, which Lakoff claims originates in the work of Michael Reddy, creates opportunities for the study of non-verbal metaphor. If metaphor characterizes thinking, and is thus not an exclusive attribute of language, it should be capable of assuming non-verbal and multi-medial manifestations as well as the purely verbal ones that have hitherto been the central concern of metaphor studies. Indeed, in an early article on visual rhetoric, Kennedy focused on the question "which of the many kinds of metaphors in speech have direct parallels in depiction" (1982: 593), while Connor and Kogan (1980) had experimentally investigated a more narrowly defined type of pictorial juxtaposition in terms of visual metaphor. A modest trickle of studies pertaining to pictorial (or visual) metaphor has since then begun to drip into the sea of metaphor studies. Such studies not only illuminate the various subjects with which they are concerned (political propaganda in Simons, 1995; advertising in Kaplan, 1990, 1992, Forceville, 1994, 1996, 2000, and Messaris, 1996; cartoons in Rozik, 1994; drawing in Kennedy, 1993, Danto, 1993; Surrealist art in Forceville, 1988; film in Whittock, 1990), but are also indispensable for a better understanding of the Idealized Cognitive Models (Lakoff and Turner, 1987) that shape human understandings of, and interactions with, the world. If metaphor does not necessarily appear in verbal guise, cognitivist scholars can hardly afford to ignore the pictorial realm. Moreover, the

TARGET AND SOURCE IN PICTORIAL METAPHORS

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fact that recent studies re-direct attention to the place of metaphors in their specific cultural context (Emanatian, 1995; Shore, 1996; Gibbs, 1999) is another reason for moving metaphor research more structurally into the realm of the pictorial and the multi-modal. But the theory of pictorial, or visual, metaphor -- let alone that of multi-modal metaphor -- is still in its early stages.1 One of the chief problems in further developing this theory is identifying both the aspects in which pictorial (or visual) metaphors differ from verbal ones, and the aspects they share. After all, the justification for calling some pictorial phenomena metaphors depends on an underlying similarity between these phenomena and what are commonly called verbal metaphors. In Forceville (1996) I argued that for anything to deserve the label `metaphor', at least the following questions should be capable of being answered: 1.

Which are the two terms of the metaphor, and how do we know?

2.

Which is the metaphor's target domain and which the metaphor's source domain, and how do we know?

3.

Which features can/should be mapped from the source domain to the target domain, and how is their selection decided upon?

In this article I will discuss Noel Carroll's (1994, 1996) contributions to the delimitation of what he calls `visual' and I call `pictorial' metaphor in light of these questions. In these articles, this film scholar not only discusses pictorial metaphors in static pictures, but also in moving images. Since his views on what does, and what does not, constitute pictorial metaphor partly conflict with my own model, it will be necessary for the further charting of the field of pictorial metaphor as well as of its place within metaphor studies more generally to investigate Carroll's


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views in some detail. Let me begin by summarizing Carroll's stance on pictorial metaphor.

2. Carroll (1994, 1996) on pictorial metaphor

Not much having been written on metaphors in images, including film, Carroll devotes considerable space and energy to persuading sceptics that images, no less than language, can contain metaphors. He rightly emphasizes that, analogous to the ìs' or ìs like' of verbal metaphors, "visual metaphors use pictorial or otherwise visual devices that suggest identity in order to encourage metaphorical insight in viewers" (1994: 190), observing that pictorial metaphors can occur in images of all sorts. His central claim is that for something to qualify as a pictorial/visual metaphor, it must exemplify the occurrence of "two physically noncompossible elements" which are "saliently posed in ... a homospatially unified figure" (1994: 214). Moreover, there must be properties or features that are mappable from the source to the target domain. Other conditions he postulates for the label `visual metaphor' to be applicable are that the maker intends the metaphorical relation to be perceived as such, and that the viewer is aware of this intention. Carroll (1994) presents six examples to launch the discussion. Five of these are of a static nature, that is, they involve non-moving images. They are Magritte's famous painting Le Viol (1945), which blends a female face and female torso; Picasso's sculpture Baboon and Young (1951), in which the baboon's head is a toy car; Man Ray's Violon d'Ingres (1924), a photomontage where a naked woman's back has a violin's F-holes; Claes Oldenburg's drawing Typewriter-pie; and a priest with a pig-head in the central panel of The Temptations of Saint


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Anthony by the 16th-century painter Hieronymus Bosch. The sixth example comes from a scene in Fritz Lang's film Metropolis (1926), which contains a blending between a machine and a man-eating Moloch. The selection of the examples, as we will see later, may be more significant than Carroll realizes. Abstracting from these examples, Carroll summarizes:

The elements are features of the same thing in virtue of inhabiting the same spatial co-ordinates -- in virtue of inhering in the same body -- i.e., within the same continuous contour, or perimeter or boundary. The elements fused or superimposed or otherwise attached are recognizable as belonging to the same unified entity. Homospatiality, in this sense, is a necessary condition for visual metaphor. It serves to link disparate categories in visual metaphors physically in ways that are functionally equivalent to the ways that disparate categories are linked grammatically in verbal metaphor (1994: 198).

Carroll considers homospatiality a defining characteristic of visual metaphor. The consequence of two phenomena simultaneously occupying the same space is that the result is incongruous; the two phenomena that have been merged are "noncompossible" (ibid.). Carroll sees this combination of homospatiality and noncompossibility as roughly equivalent to verbal metaphor's "falsity or apparent falsity" (ibid.). A third characteristic of pictorial metaphors is that there is a mapping of a feature, or features, from source to target domain. The works of Magritte, Picasso, Ray, and Oldenburg, however, suggest to Carroll that visual metaphors may be more prone to the reversibility of target and source than verbal metaphors are: both FACE IS TORSO and TORSO IS FACE; BABOON'S FACE IS TOY CAR and TOY CAR IS


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BABOON'S FACE; WOMAN IS VIOLIN and VIOLIN IS WOMAN; TYPEWRITER IS PIE and PIE IS TYPEWRITER seem to be viable conceptualizations of the metaphors. Carroll goes on to point out, correctly, that the two metaphorical domains need to be somehow saliently present. Given Carroll's criterion of noncompossible homospatiality, the supposed metaphor is bound to display some sort of anomaly. This anomaly, Carroll postulates, must furthermore have been intended by the maker and have been intended by the maker to be understood as anomalous by the audience. Moreover, not every anomaly of this sort is a metaphor; horror films and cartoons may be inhabited by hybrids that do not necessarily invite metaphorical construal (the same point is made by Kittay, 1987: 157). An anomaly that is to be construed as a pictorial metaphor must have "heuristic value" (Carroll, 1994: 210). This I take to mean that not only must a similarity be perceived between two elements that are usually categorized in different domains, but it must somehow make sense to apprehend one of these as a target and the other as a source domain in a metaphorical relationship. No general rules or mechanisms have hitherto been identified that guide such identification, except that it must be relevant in the situation at hand to do so (see Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995; Yus Ramos, 1998a; Chiappe, 1998; Stockwell, 1999; for a recent review of work conducted in the Relevance Theory domain, see Yus Ramos, 1998b). Carroll (1996) covers largely the same theoretical ground as the earlier study, but focuses specifically on cinematic metaphors. The article was triggered by the fact that Whittock's (1990) "excellent study" (Carroll, 1996: 212) of cinematic metaphor fails to discuss what Carroll considers the most clear-cut case of pictorial metaphor, namely the class of `noncompossible homospatiality' metaphors -- a type he here refers to as "strict filmic metaphor or core


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filmic metaphor" (ibid.: 218, emphases in original). The author offers as cinematic examples the metaphorical identification of the camera-lens and the human eye in Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (achieved by superimposing the two images); of people and video-cassette recorders in David Cronenberg's Videodrome, where the James Woods character has a video cassette inserted in his body; and of spies as a monkey and a fox respectively in Sergei Eisenstein's Strike. Again, what these cases have in common is that "they are all composite figures" (1996: 212), to which Carroll later adds, "the elements in the visual metaphor ... are fused or superimposed or otherwise attached as parts of a recognizable integrated or unified entity" (1996: 213). Carroll returns to the question of directionality in pictorial metaphor, that is, the question whether target and source domain are reversible, as he claimed was possible in a number of the examples discussed in Carroll (1994). This is a key issue. In linguistic and cognitive studies of metaphor, it is generally accepted that in each metaphor a target and source domain can be distinguished, with the mappings going from source to target rather than the other way round, and that hence target and source cannot be reversed. That is, metaphors are, in principle, asymmetrical, and the mapping of features is unidirectional. This point, one of the cornerstones of the Lakoffian theory of metaphor, was already made in Max Black's (1962, 1979) interaction theory (for a discussion of Lakoff's misinterpretation of this aspect of Black's theory, see Forceville, 1995). Carroll agrees that this irreversibility holds for many film metaphors as well. Coming back to the Metropolis example, he observes that the general context of the film (which thematizes the inhuman labour of people working in factories) indicates that the metaphor is MACHINE IS MAN-EATING MOLOCH, and not MAN-EATING MOLOCH IS MACHINE.


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But Carroll still adheres to his earlier view that

even if most linguistic metaphors are asymmetrical, this might not be an essential feature of film metaphors. Perhaps Vertov's imagery leads us to think of cameras as eyes and of eyes as cameras. Maybe film metaphors always invite the spectator to explore them by, among other things, testing to see whether the putative target domains and source domains can be flipped. Or maybe film metaphors just invite this bi-directional exploration more frequently than linguistic metaphors (1996: 220-21).

Moreover, Carroll insists on the criterion of physical compossibility as a criterion of pictorial metaphors. While he reluctantly admits that "in certain compelling cases, it may be that incongruously or implausib[ly] juxtaposed elements which are nevertheless physically compossible elicit metaphorical thinking" (1996: 223, note 15), Carroll sees these as non-central specimens of cinematic metaphors.

3. Problematic aspects in Carroll's approach

Carroll makes an eloquent case for the existence of visual/pictorial metaphors generally and filmic ones in particular, and he is right to insist on the importance of the `contract' between the maker and the recipient of a metaphorical image (rephrasable in terms of Sperber and Wilson's adage that each communicator tries to be optimally relevant to her audience (1986/1995); for applications in the visual realm, see Forceville 1996: chapter 5). He is right to discuss the issue


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of reversibility at length, since it is crucial to defining metaphor, and he aptly discusses a number of examples from art and film in terms of pictorial metaphor. Nonetheless, Carroll's approach advocates the adoption of two criteria governing the delimitation of pictorial metaphor that are contestable: (1) Pictorial /filmic metaphors are more often symmetrical than verbal ones; (2) Central specimens of pictorial metaphor (Carroll's strict visual/filmic metaphor type) conform to the criterion of homospatial noncompossibility. In this section I will explain why I reject these claims.

3.1 Are visual metaphors more easily reversible than verbal metaphors?

Carroll's suggestion that visual metaphors may be more easily reversible than verbal ones would, as he himself observes, create a major difference between the two types. Since the cognitive paradigm insists on the non-reversibility of target and source, Carroll's suggestion that pictorial variants allow greater freedom to flip the order of target and source would seriously weaken the idea of a unified metaphor theory. Before such a far-reaching dichotomy is accepted, the claim should first be examined in more detail. Basically, I agree that at least the Magritte, Picasso, Ray, and Oldenburg examples allow reversion. The question, however, is to what extent these specimens are typical examples of pictorial metaphors. It is to be noted that all four can be characterized as `Surrealist' images. Magritte is one of the Surrealist painters par excellence; Man Ray one of its pre-eminent (photo)collagists; and Claes Oldenburg's work also has Surrealist inspirations. 2 Picasso's talent, of course, was too wide-ranging for him to be called simply a Surrealist, but his temporary


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affiliation with the movement is beyond doubt. 3 With reference to the Hieronymus Bosch example, Carroll discusses only the PRIEST IS PIG variant, not its inverse, and the same holds, as we have seen, for the MAN/MOLOCH metaphor in Lang's film. The Surrealist affiliation -- literal or spiritual -- of the four `reversible' examples is important in the light of one of the primary tenets of the movement. As André Breton, the spokesman of Surrealism, put it in the second Surrealist Manifesto from 1929:

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions. Now, search as one may one will never find any other motivating force in the activities of the Surrealists than the hope of finding and fixing this point (quoted in Bigsby, 1972: 38).

The Surrealists, that is, in their revolt against the dictatorship of reason over emotion and intuition, wanted to subvert and annul existing dichotomies and antitheses in every possible way and to search for novel connections between objects and ideas. Metaphor is an instrument exquisitely suited to establishing such connections, and since the Surrealists practised their ideas both verbally and non-verbally, it is tempting to start developing a theory of pictorial metaphor by analysing Surrealist art. But it is doubtful whether Surrealist art provides prototypical examples of what can usefully be labelled pictorial metaphor. In the interest of destroying ‘false’ antitheses, the Surrealist programme favours the reversibility of metaphor -- but the big question is then


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whether the reversibility of target and source is typical of pictorial metaphor in general, or merely of what turns out to be a very famous and intriguing sub-type of it, namely Surrealist metaphor. Indeed, that is what I propose: Surrealist metaphor, both of the verbal, the pictorial, and the multi-modal variety, is a limiting case of metaphor in general, and it is wrong to base a model of visual metaphor primarily on that limiting case. After what I regard as a false start (Forceville, 1988) my own work on pictorial metaphor has shifted from Surrealist art to advertising, in which the product advertised (or an element metonymically associated with that product) invariably constitutes the target domain of the metaphor, which is in some way connected with the source domain that provides the feature(s) to be mapped onto the target. In other words, the mappings in each metaphor go unidirectionally from source to target. My contention is that prototypical pictorial metaphors are no more amenable to reversibility of target and source than are prototypical verbal metaphors. This proposal, if it is correct, has the great advantage of aligning prototypical pictorial metaphors with prototypical verbal ones, and of making both tally with the dominant cognitive paradigm. Indeed, in my own description of the procedure to locate and analyse pictorial metaphors, I have made the distinction between target and source domains, and their irreversibility, a defining characteristic. I am not completely sure now hat this position does not require some nuancing, but I still stand by the less strong claim that prototypical metaphors of all kinds and occurring in all media have clearly distinguishable target and source domains, which in a given context cannot be reversed. 4 The same point can be made with reference to the film examples Carroll mentions. The cases of filmic metaphors Carroll adduces all have a context which clearly dictates an asymmetrical distribution of target and source -- with one exception. The only example Carroll


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gives of a visual metaphor that appears not to be asymmetrical is the example of Dziga Vertov's CAMERA IS EYE/EYE IS CAMERA. Again, this image does not occur in an ordinary, narrative film, but in a (silent) film (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929) that Bordwell and Thompson describe as flaunting "the manipulative power of editing and cinematography to shape a multitude of tiny scenes from everyday reality into a highly idiosyncratic, even somewhat experimental documentary" (1997: 415), and which they discuss as a specimen of a subcategory of non-narrative film form, namely àssociational form' -- a type of film which "juxtaposes loosely connected images to suggest an emotion or a concept to the spectator" (ibid.: 129). This might be an important clue: even if it is to be decided that metaphors with reversible target and source domains still deserve that name, they are probably restricted to specific genres of films -- and of genres of images more generally.

3.2 How central is Carroll's strict filmic metaphor type?

The type of cinematic metaphor Carroll claims to be the most central co-presents two elements which ordinarily do not co-occur (they are `noncompossible') and they appear `homospatially'. This entails that the target and the source of the metaphor appear in some sort of hybrid, in which both, or at least parts of both, are simultaneously visible. This is the type I identify as a `metaphor with two pictorially present terms' (Forceville, 1996: 126ff.), or MP2 for short, in the printed advertisements and billboards of my own corpus. A defining feature of pictorial metaphors in static images (such as Carroll's Surrealist art works and my advertisements) is that they must convey the information that leads to the identification of target and source, as it were,


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in a single glance. Carroll's strict type examples conform to this requirement: they are all hybrids of some sort. They are simultaneously one thing or creature and another thing or creature occupying the same space -- hence the homospatiality. Carroll acknowledges that this homospatiality can be achieved in various ways: by superimposing images, so that, in the Eisenstein example, the spy and the monkey are, briefly, simultaneously visible on screen; but also through make-up (in the Eisenstein example, say, the spy could have been made to look like a monkey in this manner as well). But because of his requirement of homospatiality, Carroll must exclude from his strict metaphor type situations in which (parts of) the two metaphorical terms are not simultaneously visible. The strict metaphor type, he argues,

is closer structurally to linguistic metaphor than the juxtaposition of two shots of similar objects for the sake of comparison, since such cinematic juxtapositions carry no suggestion of an identity relation, whereas linguistic metaphors and what I call homospatially fused film metaphors do (Carroll, 1996: 218).

The famous cut from the officer Kerensky to a peacock (in Eisenstein's October) which Whittock mentions as a cinematic metaphor presenting an "overt" comparison (1990: 48) is ruled out, as is Lang's cut in Fury from "housewives gossiping ... to shots of clucking hens" (Bordwell and Thompson, 1997: 304, including photos of shots of the housewives and the hens), which Bordwell and Thompson themselves call metaphorical. Carroll's second condition for something to qualify as a strict cinematic metaphor is that the two elements of the metaphor must be noncompossible. As a consequence, Carroll must bar


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another situation, as he (regretfully?) observes himself:

What I have in mind are images like the ones in Roger Corman's film Gas, where the football players are partially attired in Nazi regalia. The point of this imagery seems clear, if unflattering: `Footballers are Nazis'. At the same time, however, this cannot count as a strict or core film metaphor because, though there is homospatiality, there is not physical noncompossibility (1996: 223, note 15).

Another famous case that Carroll bans from his core examples is that in The Gold Rush where the Chaplin character is so hungry that he starts eating his own shoe, treating the nails as if they were fishbones and the laces as if they were spaghetti (discussed in terms of metaphor by Whittock, 1990: 31, following Arnheim). Carroll is aware of the metaphorical qualities of the scene, but due to his definition he cannot accept it as visual metaphor, and proposes for it the term "mimed metaphor" (ibid.: 222, note 7). It seems to me that Carroll is entrapped here by his own classifications. Categorizing and name-giving should follow analysis of phenomena, and not the other way round. Carroll makes useful distinctions between different subtypes of pictorial metaphor by formulating the criterion of possible or nonpossible reversibility of target and source, as well as describing a number of techniques in which metaphorical identification between two phenomena can be pictorially realized. But surely there is no need to be so insistent about the primacy of his `strict metaphor'. Metaphor can present itself in many different guises, and there is no good reason at all to call metaphors featuring noncompossible homospatiality the best type of cinematic


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metaphors.5 It appears that Carroll has fallen victim to his own Surrealist examples, which indeed all are noncompossibly homospatial -- but as I have argued these are not representative examples. There is a danger in extolling one type of metaphor as the `best' type, since it may blind scholars to other manifestations of metaphor, and this in turn impedes both the study of metaphor in cinema and the study of pictorial metaphor as a specific manifestation of cognitive metaphor. Why give the non-compossibly homospatial type of metaphor pride of place? I suspect that Carroll has been carried away too much by the analogy between verbal metaphor's falsity and (strict) pictorial metaphor's homospatial noncompossibility. But falsity is not really that important: most verbal metaphors are trivially false -- or, for that matter, trivially true (`No man is an island'). Literal falsity in verbal metaphors is no more a necessary condition than anomaly is in pictorial ones. It is correct, of course, that falsity and anomaly are often important clues for detecting metaphors. But far more significant than falsity or anomaly for a definition of metaphor is another notion, used by Carroll as well, namely the notion of target in terms of source. After all, "the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another", in Lakoff and Johnson's celebrated phrase (1980: 5), and the very generality of the formulation is both a reminder to take into account the cognitive level and a warning against formulations that may obfuscate non-linguistic examples.

4. Further speculations on cinematic metaphor

The two other types of metaphor besides metaphors with one pictorially present term (MP1s) -of which Corman's Nazi-footballers would be a cinematic example -- and MP2s I located in


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advertisements and billboards, namely, `pictorial simile' and `verbo-pictorial metaphor' (VPM), also have analogies in film. The pictorial simile subtype simply juxtaposes two phenomena and suggests a metaphorical relationship between them. One advertising example, for swim wear, saliently juxtaposes a diving girl and a dolphin in such a way that the picture invites the metaphor DIVING GIRL IS LIKE A DOLPHIN (Forceville, 1996: 137-38). The position of girl and dolphin, the texture of bathing suit and dolphin's skin, lighting -- they all contribute to making the comparison salient and metaphorical. Notice that this subtype is neither noncompossible nor homospatial. The same subtype could well occur in film -- indeed, it would be a very subtle type, since the viewer is not crudely forced to acknowledge the metaphor, but gently nudged into perceiving it (for a detailed case-study, see Forceville, 1999a). Verbo-pictorial metaphor in advertising arises when one of the two terms 6 of the metaphor is rendered pictorially and the other verbally. An advertising example is a billboard promoting the Amsterdam zoo featuring a photo of a smiling orang-utan, with the text `Mona Lisa' superimposed on it (Forceville, 1996: 158). Such metaphors, of course, are also possible cinematographically: a significant juxtaposition of a line of dialogue, or a word on an onscreen signpost, with a close-up of a character, can result in a verbo-pictorial metaphor. In addition film, in contrast to print ads and billboards, has the medium of sound at its disposal, which means that one of the two metaphorical terms can be suggested by music, or by a sound (effect) instead of spoken/written language. An example is a KLM-commercial of some years ago, where the target domain of the metaphor KLM PLANES ARE SWANS is presented pictorially by `landing' swans, while the source domain is cued by sounds from an airport control tower and screeching tires. (For more detailed analyses of pictorial metaphor in commercials, see


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Forceville, 1999b). A topic discussed both by Carroll and Whittock (1990: 50) is that the conjoining of the two metaphorical terms must be somehow salient. That is, the filmmaker must intend the connection to be construed metaphorically. However, Carroll rightly emphasizes that audiences may subsequently come up with mappings from source to target not envisaged by the filmmaker herself (1996: 217). In certain situations, viewers are apparently capable of eliciting a metaphor from stimuli that were not intended by their maker to be interpreted as metaphorically conjoined, and hence by definition these stimuli were not, in the situation at hand, saliently presented with that purpose. This is a healthy reminder of two things: in the first place, salience is a matter of degree, and the question whether it is registered depends on many factors. Only some of these are text-immanent; others depend on the viewer’s identity (in terms of gender, sexual preference, education, ethnic background, age, familiarity with a genre or oeuvre …). In the second place, a flaunted conjunction of two phenomena can signal various other things besides, or instead of, metaphor: contrast, intimacy, balance, mutual attraction, etc. Consequently, two phenomena may be conjoined in such a way that a metaphorical interpretation is invited, but not required. After about twelve minutes in Griffith's pioneering silent movie Birth of a Nation (1915), the Southern planter Ben Cameron, walking with his sisters and his Northern friend Stoneman in a cotton field, picks a flower, of which the viewer gets a close-up. A little later, Cameron coincidentally sees a photograph -- also presented in close-up -- of his friend's sister Elsie, which makes him immediately fall in love with her. Since the flower's presence is realistically motivated (it grows in the cotton field where the party is currently walking, and moreover metonymically symbolizes the American South), there is no


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need to construe a metaphor, but both the current situation (Ben Cameron falls in love with Elsie's photograph) and the cinematographic presentation (both the flower and the girl's photograph are presented in close-ups) allows for the metaphoric construal ELSIE STONEMAN IS (LIKE) A FLOWER. (Notice, incidentally, that in such a construal the source domain FLOWER is in the film presented before the target domain ELSIE. It is thus not necessary for a metaphor to present its target domain first -- as the paradigmatic A IS B format may incline one to forget.) A similar situation occurs after some 132 minutes into the film. One of the Cameron sisters is at the spring to fetch a bucket of water while she is completely unaware of being spied upon by the dubious Gus. In this scene there are several cross-cuts between the girl, a squirrel she watches, and the spying Gus. Given the situation (the girl is being watched by Gus, and the squirrel is being watched by the girl) and the way of presentation (the cross-cutting), it is again possible, but not necessary, to construe a metaphorical connection between the vulnerable, lovely girl and the equally vulnerable, lovely squirrel. Indeed, in the last shot of the squirrel, it darts away -- anticipating the girl's flight when she discovers Gus -- thus reinforcing the similarity. As in the first case, the presence of the source domain, here the `watched squirrel', is realistically motivated, so that a metaphorical construal, GIRL IS (LIKE) SQUIRREL, is optional, not necessary, to make sense of the scene. These examples suggest that a continuum can be postulated between explicitly and implicitly signalled metaphor (Forceville, 1999a; see also Steen, 1994: 44f.). Since such implicitly signalled metaphors depend to a considerable extent on the viewer's active construal, we also need to be alert to the possibility that a metaphor is validly construed where none was at all consciously intended by its original maker. For one thing, viewers in a very different culture


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from the one where a film originated may see interesting and relevant metaphors where none were envisaged; and similarly, the progress of time may change the connotations adhering to domains in such a way that powerful metaphorical construals become viable that were previously unthinkable. And finally, certain types of representations, or genres within them, allow or even encourage their recipients to look for meanings (metaphorical and otherwise), that are not explicit, or even consciously intended. Artistic representations, of course, are foremost among these types and genres.

5. Summarizing remarks

Contrary to Carroll, I hold that pictorial metaphors – indeed metaphors tout court -- are typically irreversible. I suspend judgment on the strong view that only irreversible metaphors deserve the name of metaphor anyway, but I endorse the less strong view that metaphors (irrespective in what medium or genre they occur) are prototypically irreversible. Let me emphasize that this does not mean that metaphors can only be of the ‘A IS B’ type and that ‘B IS A’ is impossible. The endlessly reiterated textbook pair of the surgeons and the butchers proves that both ‘Surgeons are butchers’ and its inverse, ‘Butchers are surgeons,’ are plausible metaphors. However, in a given context there is usually no uncertainty which of the two metaphors is at stake. The first metaphor is a statement about surgeons; the second about butchers, and there will seldom be uncertainty which is meant to apply. My hesitation about the ‘strong view’ that all metaphors deserving of the label are irreversible, stems from the following consideration: one can imagine that there are situations in which uncertainty about whether one should


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construe ‘A IS B’ or ‘B IS A’ is deliberately created rather than anxiously avoided. Jokes and art are genres which spring to mind. One example I gave in Forceville (1995) comes from the ballet film The Turning Point (Herbert Ross, 1977), in which both the metaphors DANCING IS LOVEMAKING and LOVEMAKING IS DANCING can be fruitfully construed. Furthermore, what Carroll baptizes `strict visual/filmic metaphor' is in my view one major subtype with at least two other major subtypes -- those which I termed pictorial simile and `metaphor with one pictorially present term'. Moreover it is undesirable, particularly where the focus is on cinematic metaphor, to ignore or relegate to the margin metaphors in which the target and the source are presented in different modes. In cinema, both the target and the source domain of a metaphor can, in principle, be rendered pictorially, linguistically (in spoken and written form), or in sonic form (musically or via a sound effect) in each thinkable permutation. What is more, a domain can draw on two or more of these channels simultaneously. In the future the tactile and olfactory domains may become feasible channels as well. Such situations will still be amenable to the three questions whose answerability I called crucial for deciding whether something is a metaphor in the first place:

1.

Which are the two terms of the metaphor, and how do we know?

2.

Which is the metaphor's target domain and which the metaphor's source domain, and how do we know?

3.

Which features can/should be mapped from the source domain to the target domain, and how is their selection decided upon?


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The `how' questions necessitate taking into a account a wide variety of factors. The recovery of the metaphor maker's intention is important, though not in all instances indispensable. Other elements pertain to the issue of salience: in what ways can a metaphorical juxtaposition be made salient, and what range of mappable features is suggested? To what extent are the cues that suggest the answers to these questions text-internal and to what extent are they determined by the interpretational practices of the cultural community in which the texts function? What mechanisms for cuing either the salience of the metaphorical conjunction or the selection of the mappable features are dependent on the medium, and what mechanisms depend on the genre of the text in which the metaphor occurs? Fortunately, there is still a lot of work to do.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. I thank Lachlan Mackenzie (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), who has been familiar with my work on pictorial metaphor from its very early stages, for critically reading an earlier draft of this article. I am further indebted to two anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Pragmatics. For all errors and misconceptions, of course, no one but myself is to be blamed.

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1. The journal Metaphor and Symbol regularly devotes attention to matters relating to pictorial metaphor: e.g, Sedivy (1997), Cabe (1999), McGuire (1999); see also Kennedy (1997).

2. One art historian observes about Oldenburg's Green Gallery Show in 1962 that "the comparison to surrealism was inevitable, since the radical shift in scale and the metamorphosis of familiar objects into soft sculptures gave them a dreamlike aura" (Fineberg, 1995: 199).

3. Robert Short, for instance, states that "although Picasso never formally joined the Surrealists, a constant exchange of innovative ideas occurred between the Spanish painter and the group in whose exhibitions he was always represented. In the twenties, it was the Surrealist example that encouraged Picasso to abandon the exhausted vein of Cubism for a fantastic art full of violence, humour, dreams and eroticism" (Short, 1980: 147).

4. Note that one of David McNeill's four main types of gesture is labelled `metaphoric'. He reserves this label for situations in which an abstract concept is conveyed by means of a gesture; this mode of non-verbal metaphor, too, appears, to display the non-reversibility of target and source (see McNeill, 1992: 14 et passim).

5. Interestingly, Goldwasser calls this subtype "the most intriguing" (1999: 614) of those proposed in Forceville (1996).

6. I have problems with Carroll's fleetingly mentioned "at least two terms" (1994: 214, my emphasis) of a pictorial metaphor, but lack of space precludes further discussion here.