This will not be new for anyone, but I'll try to begin at a beginning; so bear with.
Here's a scene of introduction to literary studies: my 10th grade English teacher writes on the board: "A mighty fortress is our God", defines "fortress" as "vehicle" and God as "tenor", and asks the class to come up with as many qualities of fortresses as possible, writes them in a column, and then asks us to think about what these qualities say about God. It is a striking and revelatory moment for the 15-year-old me, especially because it makes the interpretation of a metaphor dependent on my own associative thinking rather than on knowledge of authoritative explanations of this or that. So this association game becomes something of a model for the whole enterprise, for a while.
But something which was not apparent at first comes to be a problem: metaphors' directionality. This model assumes the vehicle to be something known and simple, a tool for teasing out some modalities of the difficult, multivalent thing that it is compared to. You cannot simply reverse the terms (as pointed out in Coetzee's Lives of Animals, where Elizabeth Costello gets in trouble for reversing the direction of comparison between slaughtered cattle and the victims of the Holocaust). At the same time, while the vehicle may have hundreds of qualities, some of which will be more relevant than others; somewhere along the slippery slope of associations, the metaphor loses its hold on sense. In any case, every metaphor, as long as it is not dead, requires work, it causes a certain distance to be covered by the mind.
So having set up these basic parameters, I'll try an exercise, to which I hope to return. There is a big and troubling thing: the vast field of critical theory. And I'll make a trial metaphor about it, just to see where it gets me. Needless to say, literature is not metaphor. And metaphor is not simply a "way of thinking," but a mind tease that refreshes/estranges by changing relations between objects/images (remember Shklovskiy?).
Critical theory, for my novel-reading purposes, is primarily Critical Analysis of texts. So let’s say that literature is a forest, where critical analyses thrive like mushrooms on or around trees (texts), which are not necessarily dead. Where does this image start from, and where does it lead?
Critical Analyses are like mushrooms. Not everyone likes them, and some are poisonous. Their spores are everywhere. They come in many sizes, shapes; thrive in different places and on different substrates differently. Some species resemble others; some form symbioses. Some detoxify their environment, some are pretty, and others turn out to produce medicine, unintentionally. Some are mind-altering. Some are small landmarks, others form centerless networks of rhizomes. They are opportunistic, but can be virtuous. They are fruitful, though not very nutritious. And while they have existed for a very long time, they depend yearly on rains, trees, wind, climate. The forest is not there in order for the mushroom to thrive; neither are the trees. There is no necessary place for a mushroom in the forest, except for the one it happens to be occupying. A particular species spreads through the forest as and if it is able to; this ability depends on the mushroom’s intrinsic qualities only in part. Fitness, adaptation to particular environments can appear to be the product of design, but is in fact the consequence of accidents and mutation.
ps. As for the title, those were my two inspirations: "Irreductions" and finding out that my horrid skin problem was not caused by secretive, nocturnal, impossible to get rid of pests.
