A Method only Suitable for Imaginative Works
Since, according to many exegetes, the «Correspondences» are the "Analogies", we will now study the figures of speech. "Meaning and Distance 4" deals with a few important tropes, among which comparison and metaphor are the best known. To discuss the composition of these figures, we will start with a brief but bright observation made by Aristotle in his "Poetics". Its importance has been seen by Vuillemin and we follow in his footsteps. Mathematical analogy, of the type 2/3 = 4/6, might be the logical basis of a four trope family, whose types are "for life, old age is like the evening of a day", "old age is the evening of life", "old age is like an evening", "old age is an evening". Let us apply this rationale to the central purpose of our essay in order to find out if any imaginative author, whether bard or writer, literary celebrity or obscure traditional storyteller, isolated individual or mouthpiece of a community, whether in the realms of mythology or poetry, really wanted to use the figure of speech discerned in his text by the critic, or if the latter invented it from too little evidence. Designing an incremental scale in the perspective of Leibniz or Bernoulli between the two extremes, we measure the degree of certitude concerning the presence of figures of speech belonging to one of the four kinds mentioned above. For this, we use part of the tools previously employed in progressively sifting out the likely from the unlikely.
"Meaning and Distance 5" examines similar figures, especially those of the types "I see a sail", "he visited all the sceptres in Europe", "how I like his bicycle", "they will cause him to disappear", «Believe me, I don’t hate you». The idea of distance is again at the root of this development. Let us consider the following text "society needs you, as sound boxes, as alarm devices, and let us not forget that in a significant moment of the general moral crisis, Baudelaire too played his part". The figure of speech "you are a Baudelaire" will be judged less plausible than in "society needs you, Baudelaire too played his part". To state it briefly, in all the cases we have studied, memory replaces the codified links that are well known in verbal usage, when they are missing. Thus, despite their distance, two words may be related to each other if the author has voluntarily linked them by a grammatical device, as for «corrupt» and «incense» in the poem. Conversely, for the overwhelming majority of authors, readers and listeners, the connection between two words not expressly linked together is governed only by the trace of the first one, in memory, when the second is brought on. Therefore their relation weakens when their distance apart increases. Newton described masses in space as being attracted to each other in inverse proportion to the square of their distance apart. We can imagine that under certain conditions and within the same text, meanings are more attracted to each other the closer they are together, and less attracted the further they are apart. For this the text must not be too strictly and precisely written, which explains why this method is only suitable for imaginative works.
Michel Magnen
Translated into English by Fay Guerry