Metaphors and Aliens

for Philosophy of Language class, 2012

 

Abstract

                In Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that most concepts we talk about and most concepts we think about are expressed metaphorically, i.e., in terms of other concepts. I argue that the omnipresence of metaphor in English is something of which writers of science fiction and fantasy should at least be aware, and which a skillful writer can probably use to great effect. This paper will mostly consist of examples of the kind of thing I mean – a skilled writer could probably pull off much more subtle and effective metaphors than my undoubtedly relatively clumsy examples.

 

Lakoff and Johnson

                One of the more common kinds of metaphors in our language, according to Lakoff and Johnson, are orientational metaphors, where concepts are described in terms of spatial orientation. Consider a few examples of orientational metaphors and examples of an English expression derived from each, direct from the book[1]:

• ·         “happy is up”: “that boosted my spirits”
• ·         “sad is down”: “I'm depressed”
• ·         “conscious is up”: “wake up”
• ·         “unconscious is down”: “he fell asleep”
• ·         “health and life are up”: “Lazarus rose from the dead”
• ·         “sickness and death are down”: “he fell ill”
• ·         “having control or force is up”: “I am on top of the situation”
• ·         “being subject to force or control is down”: “he is low man on the totem pole”
• ·         “more is up”: “my income rose last year”
• ·         “less is down”: “If you're too hot, turn the heat down”
• ·         “[prestigious] status is up”: “he's at the peak of his career” (Lakoff and Johnson phrased this in terms of the words “high status”, which is itself an example of this metaphor.)
• ·         “[unprestigious] status is down”: “he's at the bottom of the social hierarchy” (or, again, “low status”.)
• ·         “good is up”: “things are looking up”
• ·         “bad is down”: “things are at an all-time low”

 

                These metaphors are rooted in physical and cultural experience, and so may vary from culture to culture.

                What is less likely to vary is the coherence between these metaphors: for example, more is up, and up is good, so more is good. Sad is down, down is bad, and sad is bad. There exist subcultures that use inconsistent metaphors (for example, members of an ascetic cult might think more is up and up is good, but more is bad), but such incoherencies are only ever relatively recent inventions, adapted from existing language. Incoherence between metaphors is rare in language that has arisen and grown naturally.

 

A large part of the point is that these things aren't just in the language: they're in the way we think. Consider some examples:

Where is Heaven? Where is Hell? If they existed, they probably wouldn't literally be anywhere we can access; up and down would be meaningless with respect to the afterlife. But we still think of Heaven as being above us and Hell as being below us. Up is good, down is bad.

The story is similar for the denizens of Heaven and Hell: people refer to “God in the Highest”, calling for "gloria in excelsis Deo". And of course all the angels serve under God, in some cases literally (according to legend, God sits on some angels; they're called Thrones). At the other end of the spectrum, Satan is said to be the lowest of the low – but more on demons later.

Consider also: people are always trying to build the tallest skyscraper in the world. It's been nearly a constant competition ever since skyscrapers were invented, because up is good. In mythology, too; the story of the Tower of Babel is a point of overlap between skyscrapers and heaven. Up is good, up is important, skyscrapers are up, so skyscrapers are considered good and important.

But how many people cared when the Russians dug the deepest hole in the world at the time, just to see what would happen? (I refer to the Kola Superdeep Borehole, dug in 1970.) Very few! (Excepting, of course, the people who have, ever since, circulated fabrications about the borehole breaking into hell, or hearing the screams of the damned at the bottom.) The Kola Superdeep Borehole is still considered the deepest hole ever drilled and the deepest artificial point on Earth; nobody has bothered to dig deeper, because few people care about big holes, because nobody cares about down, because down is bad. Down is bad, down is unimportant, the Kola Superdeep Borehole is down, so the Kola Superdeep Borehole is widely considered bad or unimportant[2].

 

Applications In Fiction

One of my biggest complaints about most science fiction and fantasy is that aliens (be they elves, Klingons, lichs, Sebaceans, Goa'uld, garuda, anthropomorphic animals, or what-have-you) very frequently wind up simply being humans in non-human bodies – usually American humans, at that. (In this paper, by “alien”, I will mean, roughly, “persons who are not American humans”.)

Some authors do better than others at this: the alien-ness of aliens is a plot point in several of the sequels to Ender's Game, but even the formics and pequeninos are just humans with one or two bizarre concepts ("there's no such thing as an individual" and "one needs to be vivisected in order to advance to the next stage of life", respectively) pasted on.[3]

The house elves of Harry Potter, for another example, take utmost joy in slavery, something which is even more alien to us liberty-obsessed American humans. With one exception, being freed is considered by the house elves to be the worst thing that could possibly happen to them. But aside from that, they still read as basically human-minded.[4]

But, and this is the important part, these aliens still tend to use all the same metaphors we use in English.

The point is this: alien minds will use alien metaphors. When writing dialogue for aliens, an author should be careful about the non-literal language they use. If an alien doesn't have a reason to use the same metaphorical constructions we do, then they shouldn't. But even more, if the author doesn't want aliens to just read like humans in alien bodies, they should use different metaphors for the sake of having different metaphors.

 

C.S. Lewis did this fairly competently at least once: in The Screwtape Letters, the demons use words like "lowerarchy", and speak proudly of being demoted to a more prestigious, lower rank. For demons, having control or force is down, more is down, prestigious status is down, good is down. (Or, put in a more C.S. Lewis-y way, bad is good, so just reverse everything we say about good and call it a day.) Satan, the big boss, the one with force and power and prestige, is at the bottom, and all his inferiors (I almost wrote "subordinates") are arrayed above him.[5]

China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, a book whose major themes include the incomprehensibility (to humans) of alien minds, does this even better, at least in one instance. Consider the character of the Weaver, a transdimensional spider-like creature, the epitome of alien-ness, which speaks predominantly in metaphorical references to the fabric of reality. Consider a typical Weaver monologue:

 

. . . over and up in the little passage it was it was born the cringing thumb the twisted runt that freed its siblings it cracked the seal on its swaddling and burst out I smell the remnants of its breakfast still lolling oh I like this I enjoy this web the weft is intricate and fine though torn who here can spin with such robust and naive expertise . . .

. . . lovely lovely, the snipsnap of supplication and yet though they smooth edges and rough fibres with cold noise an explosion in reverse a funnelling in a focus I must turn make patterns here with amateurs unknowing artists to unpick the catastrophic tearing there is brute asymmetry in the blue visages that will not do it cannot be that the ripped up web is darned without patterns and in the minds of these desperate and guilty and bereft are exquisite tapestries of desire the dappled gang plait yearnings for friends feathers science justice gold . . .[6]

 

It makes only marginally more sense in context (the Weaver is doing something like explaining why it has chosen to aid the main characters).

But notice that the Weaver still uses common English container metaphors: “in reverse”, “in a focus”, “in the minds” – reverse, focus, and minds are not actually containers, so the usage of “in” is metaphorical in this context. (“in the little passage” is not a container metaphor; a passage is, more or less literally, a container, though the passage in question may itself be metaphorical.) So even in this style, riddled with obvious metaphors, the subtler metaphors of English creep in. (I wouldn’t be surprised if this turned out to have been deliberate on Miéville’s part; he may have discovered that expunging all our natural metaphors impeded understanding too much for his purposes.)

 

Lakoff and Johnson even provide a guideline, in passing, for use of novel metaphors in this fashion: an author should make sure the metaphors of their aliens are coherent with one another. If demons think good is down and more prestigious is down and more power is down and more is good, it won't do for it to suddenly turn out that they use more is up metaphors. It's inconsistent and, I suspect, is likely to grate on many readers, even if they don't consciously notice it.

 

Exercise 1: Xenophobia

Let us now, as an exercise, construct a culture by constructing its metaphors. Let's imagine that this culture is profoundly xenophobic, insular, and isolationist. Which is to say: out is bad; in is good. Let's just take the examples I cited previously examples and plug "out" and "in" in place of "up" and "down". Many of these metaphors actually exist in English (container metaphors being another of the most common kinds of metaphors we use), and the main change will be that we're emphasizing them over vertical metaphors. Others will require all-new metaphors. The metaphors, and the kinds of things these cultural xenophobes would say: 

• ·         happy is in: "I am in good spirits."
• ·         sad is out: "I am out of good spirits." (not "I am in bad spirits" – apparently good spirits are a substance)
• ·         conscious is in: "I am in my body."
• ·         unconscious is out: "I'm feeling out of it."
• ·         health and life are in: "I'm in good health."
• ·         sickness and death are out: "I am out of health." (This has some overlap with health is a limited substance, familiar to anyone who plays games with “hit points”.)
• ·         having control or force is in: "I have an in with the organization."
• ·         being subject to force or control is out: "I'm outside his power." (This could get confusing, as it means exactly the opposite of the usual English usage, where to be in someone's power is to be under their control. If a writer actually uses examples such as this in the text, they should be sure to add a clarifying note, to avoid confusion. Alternately, the characters themselves could become confused, and it could become a plot point.)
• ·         more is in: "I'm in great wealth."
• ·         less is out: "I'm out of money."
• ·         prestigious status is in: "The inner circle of the organization."
• ·         lack of status is out: "He's an outside man on the ring."

 

           As you can see, it is possible to create a sense of alien-ness simply by emphasizing some existing English metaphors over others.

          Now consider what one might expect to follow, given the above metaphors:

        These people probably think that heaven is within oneself, and hell is outside (be it outside the self, outside the home, outside the city, outside the civilization, outside the world, or what have you). Obviously, they'll practice meditation, focusing on the self, spending time inside oneself rather than thinking about the outside world. Perhaps they believe that good people, when they die, remain inside the body – perhaps this culture, in a fantasy setting, approves of necrourgy[7], as it allows people to, in some way, remain inside their bodies. Or perhaps they believe that the soul simply remains inside the heaven of the body for as long as the body remains intact, so they practice mummification to preserve the heaven of the body for as long as possible.

These people are, of course, likely to believe that the world is the center of the universe. But they don’t necessarily believe it to be spherical; instead, the metaphor inclines one to suppose that the world is flat. The city is the center of the country, the country is the center of the world, and the world is the center of the universe. If you go too far out, horizontally, you'll reach Hell. (The sky and the ground are probably conceptually less important to this culture than they are to us.)

Demons literally live outside the world (but one must be sure not to say demons live in Hell, because in is good, and any proximity to Hell cannot be good; you might say instead that demons live at Hell, a more neutral, less metaphorical term); the people who live outside the country are actively demonic; the people who live outside the city are bad; the people who live outside the home are merely distasteful. Which is to say: this culture of xenophobes is also likely to be a culture of introverts. This is unlikely to be a very large country; more likely it is to be many city-states, each of which comes into belligerent conflict with one another despite (indeed, because of) their shared culture.

 

Notice how I have taken a one-concept description ("xenophobic/insular/isolationist"), derived from that the sort of metaphors they’re likely to use, and then derived additional details of their culture and religious beliefs which simply follow from the metaphors. An author who has trouble with world-building might consider this as a world-building technique.

 

Exercise 2: Color

And yet "in is good, out is bad" is still a pretty human metaphor, by dint of its many points of overlap with our English container metaphors. We can easily see the culture of xenophobes being a human culture.

What if we want to describe truly alien minds? Let's consider creatures which are not subject to the force of gravity at all. Perhaps they're celestial beings, or they live in space, or they're jellyfish-people who live in a gas giant (with an atmosphere so thick it would take a lifetime to float from bottom to top or vice versa) and are neutrally buoyant.

Spatial metaphors may not be completely absent from the vocabulary of these creatures, but they're likely to be much less important. Being radially symmetric, jellyfish aliens will themselves not have a front or back or sides, so they're unlikely to have many metaphors that hinge on front or back or sides, if they even have words for “front” or “back” or “sides” at all.

They might have concepts of up and down, or at least top and bottom, unless they are perfectly spherical jellyfish. But, in this situation we’ve constructed, there's effectively no difference between travelling up and travelling down, so vertical spatial metaphors will probably be mostly absent from their vocabulary.

But if we're trying to make truly alien-minded aliens, let's just expunge all spatial metaphors entirely. Yes, container metaphors, too. No in/inside/out/outside.

 

So what metaphors remain for them to use, then? Let's suppose, for the sake of simplicity, that they see colors roughly like we do. (This is probably implausible, if they're gas-giant-dwellers; it's probably somewhat dark inside a gas giant, and it’s hard to imagine their diet consisting largely of fruit, which seems to be the reason color is so important to humans. But for the sake of exercise, we shall imagine it to be plausible.) Perhaps, then, as examples: 

• ·         happy is red: "I am red with joy."
• ·         sad is violet: "I'm feeling blue."
• ·         conscious is red: "I was orange and alert."
• ·         unconscious is violet: "I'm going to go see purple [i.e., sleep] for awhile."
• ·         health and life are red: "The redness flows in me."
• ·         sickness and death are violet: "My breathing organs are tinged with violet."
• ·         having control or force is red: "I oranged and he gave me all his money." (Exactly what sort of activity "oranging" is might need to be explained.)
• ·         being subject to force or control is violet: "He is the violet man in the painting." (The “painting” in question being the same sort of metaphor as the “totem pole” on which a person can be the “low man” in English.)
• ·         more is red: "My boss reddened my pay today."
• ·         less is violet: "My savings are so blue I can hardly feed my family."
• ·         prestigious status is red:  "He wears the red." (Note that, in this culture, red, not purple, is associated with royalty, because prestigious status is red and royalty is prestigious.)
• ·         lack of status is violet: "He was purple with envy." (Not green, as one might expect an English-speaker to say.

 

"Infrared" and "ultraviolet" are likely to be roughly equivalent to our "110%" and "less than nothing", respectively.

One advantage of color metaphors: they allow for somewhat more of a spectrum than spatial metaphors. If one is rooted to up/down metaphors, one can speak of up and down, further up and further down, but using color in this way makes it easier and more natural to pinpoint a specific point on the spectrum.

This implies that these aliens are more likely to think in terms of continua where we think in terms of black or white. Perhaps it’s impossible to get a straight yes-or-no answer out of one of these guys; they'll always give you some shade of “maybe-leaning-towards-yes” or “almost-but-not-quite-no” – which they have words for, probably the same words as they use for the colors. “Strong yes” is red, “strong no” is violet, “maybe/no opinion” is green or greenish-yellow. They may well identify more specific points on the color spectrum than the six or seven colors we choose to pick out as the most important ones.

Similarly, what we call “middle management”, these creatures would call “green management”; a “middleman” would instead be a “green man”. A greenman is green between a purpleman and a redman – which may imply that, in this color-oriented culture, all transactions are considered inherently and explicitly unequal. One can be spatially in the middle between two others, but spatial metaphors are irrelevant to these jellyfish-people; color is the metaphor that matters, and it is difficult to be “in the middle” between two colors without one being more red or more violet than the other.

 

Other Examples

All of the above examples do privilege happiness, consciousness, health and life, control and force, amount, and status, which is itself an anthropocentric view. What if a culture doesn't care about control or status, but does care about, say, delicious flavor? Delicious is up, disgusting is down!

A writer might use a particularly violent people – orcs, for example – whose metaphors are all in terms of violence – violence is good, peace is bad. Consider the situation: an orcish elder explains the plan to pillage and massacre the village of Aardham. A young upstart orc things they should pillage and massacre Beantown instead, and shouts out, metaphorically, "the elder is advocating peace!" Meaning that the elder is saying bad things, not that he's literally advocating peace, which he isn't. Or perhaps, if an orc eats the most delicious pie he's ever eaten, he might opine that "This pie really stabs me in the face!"

 

Or consider the most alien of all: cultures which communicate exclusively in metaphors, or cultures which use no metaphors in communication at all.

 

The former idea was explored in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmok”, wherein the Enterprise encounters the Tamarians, a species of aliens who communicate exclusively in metaphors, or more specifically references to stories, which the universal translator lacked the cultural context to properly translate. The pronouncements of the Tamarians were statements such as "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" (referring to fighting a common enemy), "Shaka, when the walls fell" (failure), "Temba, his arms wide" (giving and receiving), and "Sokath, his eyes uncovered" (comprehension). By the end of the episode, “Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel”, a reference to the events of the episode, had apparently become the Tamarian term for “first successful communication between Tamarians and humans”.

“Darmok” wound up being among the most critically-praised episodes of TNG, and I think it was certainly one of the episodes that was most like traditional (e.g., Asimovian) science-fiction. It was done quite well, if a bit awkwardly; I wouldn't necessarily expect anybody to be able to use this concept without any awkwardness. But it is a very interesting concept to explore, and I'd love to see it explored by more people.

 

A culture with no metaphors at all, on the other hand, would be even more awkward to write. The author wouldn't be able to use orientational or container metaphors. They would, for example, never speak of being in an organization or an emotion, they would never speak of being in love.

Indeed, a metaphor-free culture would never reify at all. Emotions, colors, properties, actions, thoughts, etc., are only metaphorically things at all. A metaphor-free culture would have no concept of "concepts". They would probably become confused if you used the word “love” or tried to describe it at all: love is itself not a literal thing.

Metaphor-free language would be so difficult to think with, let alone communicate with, that I doubt such a culture would have anything like the focus on linguistic communication that we do.

For comparison, years ago, I came up with an idea of a culture which, early on in their development of mathematics, discovered that you cannot divide by zero without entailing terrible nonsensical things. It didn’t occur to them, for whatever reason, to arbitrarily disallow dividing by zero as we do, so on that basis they concluded that all of mathematics is just incoherent. This culture threw out the whole discipline of mathematics, so all of science and engineering in this culture would run purely on trial-and-error, so they never would have gotten beyond the Iron Age.

In a similar way, it seems like a culture which never invented/discovered metaphors may have long since discarded language as an almost entirely fruitless endeavour.

 

Conclusion

Being aware of metaphors in the dialogue and thoughts of characters can be an important tool in selling the idea that the characters are not simply human minds in non-human bodies.

I have only given a few examples of the kind of thing I mean. There are, of course, countless other ways a writer could structure the metaphors of fictional aliens. As long as all the metaphors are coherent with each other and with the culture the author is trying to describe, I think almost any variation can work.

 

Works Cited

Card, Orson Scott. Speaker For The Dead. New York: Tor Books, 1986. Print.

"Darmok." Star Trek: The Next Generation. Season 5, episode 2. Paramount, 1991. Television.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Print.

Lewis, C.S. The Screwtape Letters. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942. Print.

Miéville, China. Perdido Street Station. New York: Random House Publishing Group, 2000. Print.

Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter. 7 vols. New York: Scholastic Press, 1997-2007. Print.

Wikipedia contributors. "Kola Superdeep Borehole." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 17 Apr. 2012. Web. 30 Apr. 2012.

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[1] Lakoff & Johnson (1980), pp. 14-17.

[2] Wikipedia.

[3] Card (1986).

[4] Rowling (1997-2007).

[6] Miéville (2000), p. 344.

[7] The usual word is “necromancy”, but the “–mancy” suffix refers to divination – necromancy is specifically telling the future by talking to the dead. As I strive for clarity, accuracy, and precision, the manipulation of the dead and the creation of “undead” creatures call for a different suffix, in this case “–urgy”, from the Greek for “work” – necrourgy thus being a more general “working with death”.