1. Fiction and Metonyms
While most consumers of fiction are perfectly familiar with the metaphor, far fewer have even heard of the metonym. This is odd considering its importance in creating plausible stories. When it comes to understanding how fictions ‘come alive’ the metonym is the key.
A good way to grasp the metonym is by contrasting it with the metaphor. With a metaphor you try to capture the essence of something by calling it something else, My love is, a red, red rose, for example. Clearly this isn’t meant literally. A rosebush would make an ungrateful lover, even for a rugged Scotsman. It’s only an allusion to qualities shared by both; youth, vitality, beauty, symmetry, silky textures and bright colours, and perhaps a little thorniness too.
With a metonym on the other hand you describe something using an aspect of that very same thing. Calling alcohol the bottle or a car your wheels. Calling Sinatra Blue Eyes and Van Damme the Muscles from Brussels. The nicknames, Brains, Fingers and Four Eyes. For that matter, calling a woman a bit of skirt, or a man a prick.
Of course they’re not mutually exclusive. Calling a man a prick can be a metonym and a metaphor. If you mean he’s sexually predatory, or sexually obsessed it’s a metonym. If that one small part of him seems to have an unnatural hold over the rest, it’s apt to call him by that thing. But if you were just using it to imply that he was stupid, or even resembled one physically, then that would be a metaphor. You’d be suggesting he had the same intelligence, or appearance, as this famously dumb-looking organ.
While metaphors certainly are an important part of fiction, metonyms are central. Fiction is all about describing things by their parts. Has to be. Reality is too complex to describe in full. The only thing fiction writers can possibly do is transcribe aspects, bits and bobs of the complex whole.
Nevertheless, when fictions work they do ‘feel’ real. When they work properly they can make it feel like a whole other world is alive before us. That’s really what people are buying when they buy fiction, a taste of another reality. The worst thing you could say about any novel is that you didn’t believe in any of the characters. With fiction, believable is the bottom line.
Of course some will argue that most of fiction is pure fantasy, with an audience fully aware that it’s all made up, but it’s really not true. If you care in any way about what happens to the characters in a film, you must believe they exist, in some sense, if only for the duration of the show. Of course Princess Lea doesn’t exist, but we can still fear for her life. Of course Bambi never existed, yet grown men cry.
Even something as simple and abstract as Itchy and Scratchy conforms to this. If we didn’t believe they were real in some sense we wouldn’t wince at the violence. You can’t pity something without believing it exists. You can’t feel pain for another creature if you don’t believe it to be sentient, at least for the duration of the show. Somehow, a crudely drawn three-dimensional cat appears to be in agony.
That ‘somehow’ comes down to choice of metonyms. With that particular cartoon, we may believe the cat exists to some degree, but not much. The choice of metonyms, the parts represented, restrict our reaction to squeamishness, rather than full-blown revulsion. If all you use to represent the complexity of a cat’s leg is a thin black stick, with a pink cross-section, then it’s no surprise we don’t vomit when it’s amputated with a chainsaw.
Alternatively, by selecting ever more subtle, more ‘realistic’ metonyms it would be possible to ratchet-up the reality, and so the revulsion. A Bambi-quality version of Itchy and Scratchy would be quite sickening, and a Walking with Dinosaurs-style computer generated version would probably spark-off riots in the Home Counties.
You might think all that’s happening here is increase in detail. A more detailed cat looks more realistic and so is more likely to generate sympathy. In part I’d agree, this is all about realism, or realistic-ness. But I’d argue that it’s choice of metonym, rather than amount of detail, that dictates whether a fiction ‘comes alive’. Choice of detail rather than quantity of detail.
The success of such things as The Blair Witch Project bears this out. Tiny, slithery little metonyms: darkness, heavy breathing, the snap of a twig. You can hardly call these devices detailed, yet they can cast a huge and horrifying reality onto an audience. And it’s not just scary movies. The most heart-wrenching scene in a romance might well consist of three minutes of virtual darkness, with just two voices chatting quietly. Maybe throw in an owl.
Clearly it’s not how much you say, it’s what you say and how you say it. It’s the choice of detail, not the amount of detail that makes fictions ‘feel’ real.
Part Two will follow shortly.....
