'My Wife with the Armpits of Martens and Beech Fruit'. A Typology of Arbitrary Metaphors in Surrealism

In metaphor studies, attention has shifted over the last couple of decades from linguistic metaphors to metaphorical expressions that are based on conventional conceptual metaphors in thought. This cognitive-based view has since been applied to a wide array of literary texts (e.g. Crisp 1996, Freeman 2002, Semino 2008). Lakoff and Turner (1989) argued that authors creatively develop conventional metaphors in different ways; and that novel mappings are constructed in so-called “one-shot image metaphors”. Despite their referring to a surrealist poem, their model cannot fully account for different types of novel metaphors in (experimental) literature. André Breton called in his Surrealist Manifesto (1924) for the greatest possible cognitive dissonance between images, such as can be found in the seemingly arbitrary metaphors of surrealism. In keeping with Semino’s statement that “a proper account of metaphorical creativity needs to consider both the conceptual and linguistic levels of metaphor” (2008), I propose a typology of arbitrary literary metaphors that is based on metaphorical expressions in surrealist poetry. I distinguish creative realisations of a conventional conceptual metaphor and creative realisations of a creative conceptual metaphor, besides one-shot (image) metaphors where a reader relatively easily maps the most “salient” (Stockwell 1999) features from a source on a target domain, and one-shot (image) metaphors where this is more difficult. I also take into consideration the issue of interanimation (Stockwell 2002, 2012) of both domains. Such a model can then be used to determine the arbitrariness of a set of metaphors of poets who acknowledge the importance of surrealism for their work. My case study will be the early work of the Flemish experimental poet Albert Bontridder.