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discourse grows and grows until, in our chosen example, it fills seven impressive
volumes.
Analogy and contiguity seem, therefore, to be the ties that bind the things whose
representations are associated in the process of evocation. A taste leads to another
similar taste, which in turn leads to the image of the place where it was tasted, and
that image leads to a person known in that same place and then to an experience
with that person, and so on, image after image, word after word, until the end of the
text.
Analogy in shape or background, contiguity in time or space: these seem to be
two fundamental mechanisms of human thought and language, at least when we
devote ourselves to poetic evocation rather than exercises in formal logic.
The associative structures of memory (like those of magical thinking) have much
in common with other kinds of everyday rationality. [11] If Proust's language backs
up this hypothesis from the field of literary fiction, other discourses, taken from
clinical observation (specifically of aphasias), point in the same direction.
Roman Jakobson's theory, [2] according to which speech consists of two basic
and simultaneous operations, can be seen in this context. The first operation is
to
select
the vocabulary: among all the more or less
similar
terms offered by the
language, one is chosen (automatically discarding others), to be placed at a certain
point in the speech. The second operation is to
combine
the chosen elements of
language, putting them one after the other to form the line of argument.
These two operations correspond to the two chief axes which Jakobson finds in
language: the paradigmatic (that of selection) and the syntagmatic (that of combi-
nation). According to this theory, aphasic disorders can be classified in two groups:
those in which the capacity to associate analogous terms (and so substitute them
for each other) is damaged and others in which the disorder affects the capacity to
associate syntagmas by contiguity (and so combine them in the chain of speech). In
the first case the patient would be incapable of metaphor, in the second of metonym.
Jakobson's theory (here summed up very briefly) confirms for us that relations
of association by analogy or contiguity, found in Frazer's observations on the phe-
nomena of magical thinking and Proust's literary evocations, are not peculiar to this
kind of discourse but could become the basis for a general theory of language.
The mechanisms of metaphor (in which one term is replaced by another, simi-
lar one) and of metonym (in which it is replaced by a contiguous one), would no
longer be the exclusive property of the poet or the shaman, but be integrated into
our everyday language. They are not only rhetorical ornaments but foundations of
its structure, so much so that they sometimes pass unnoticed, so automatically are
they decoded.
So, while a teacher explains Jakobson's theory, one of his pupils may be thinking:
“I hope he soon stops droning on and I can go for a pint”. To do this he doesn't need
to stop and analyze the metaphorical analogy between a monotonous hum and a
metalinguistic lecture, nor the relationship of metonymic contiguity that allows him
to call the liquid, generally alcoholic, served in this measure, “a pint”.
The more or less arbitrary associations between images related by analogy or
contiguity are therefore, far from being a characteristic peculiar to psychotic or
