Letter to the Editor (1980)

FUSE, 4:3 (March 1980), 132.

I wrote this in defence of a friend, Judith Doyle, after her fiction pamphlet Anorexial was critiqued in Centerfold magazine. The letter was published after the magazine’s name change to FUSE. The title was supplied by the magazine.

Letters

More Barthes-odoxy?

“Illness as Metaphor” Centerfold (Nov. 1979) announces, or rather pronounces, as prelude to two denunciatory and misrepresentative reviews. In an article on metaphor, nowhere does Tim Guest give a definition, an analysis of its critical function, nor any indication of the many recent works on the subject, before a pronouncement is made of its permitted use (its “genuine, workable” use Guest wants to “prescribe”).

At any one time, certain terms bear the anathema of the distance from “reality” that is language’s necessary condition: such words as “symbol”, “representation,” and here “metaphor.” I am unsure of Guest’s understanding of the word “metaphor” and, therefore, its function since some of the language conditions discussed there are more properly analogy, allegory, mythology or ideology. Most of these are used interchangeably in the article. I also find his intentions vague and his terms suspect when he accuses the media of consciously terrorizing the public through metaphor, metaphor which is not operative in public media. One can talk of representation, ideology, or even myth as a second order signifying system in Barthes’ terms—but this demands a wholly different structural and careful ideological analysis that is not indicated in the confusion of Guest’s approach.

With the careful attention that Guest wishes to give to metaphor in his distinction between social reality and its representation (this endeavor shows a simple metaphysical assumption of a clear distinction between the two in language), one would think he would not fall victim to the traditional leftist fault of equating a text with its “subject matter,” as Martha Fleming’s misdirected “analysis” of Judith Doyle’s Anorexial, following Guest’s statement on metaphor and the same book, regrettably exemplifies. We have learned elsewhere that the text is not a representation but a production, and our reading a reproduction. An analysis of metaphor in a text must carefully observe its function within the whole before discussing a work through a presumed representation of its “nature” (a condition which also should be observed for the work itself).

Where is the responsibility of editorializing without sufficient grounding in critical tools, which Guest’s ambiguous and invested terms suggest? Surely we must examine the parameters of the problem before making a pronouncement, especially since it perhaps is now possible and necessary to use representation critically in art. What moral trends diffuse this analysis? “Illness as Metaphor”—the expression itself functions as a ready-made approach (a metaphor?) with dismissal in mind. At least we know that Centerfold does not hide behind (as if there was ever the question of a “behind” in a text) the metaphor of illness or literature, but behind the representation of the responsibility of their politics. Philip Monk, Toronto