Dominant Metaphor in Maltese Literature

Abstract This study deals with the way Malta has been represented in poetry and narrative written in Maltese. Metaphor, with its ability to stretch language and thought beyond its elastic limit, has played a fundamental role in the forging of the national imaginary that lies at the junction between real history and literary texts. On one hand, the conventional conceptual metaphors of the mother, home, traveller, and village are rooted in conventional conceptions of the nation; on the other, the relocation of the motherland in the sea marks a return to and a reinterpretation of the figure of the mother. While conventional conceptual metaphors have the potential to structure the concept of the nation by imagining the unimagined, fresh conceptual metaphors simultaneously create and defy that new structure. Dominant Metaphors in Maltese Literature DominantDominant MetaphorsMetaphors inin MalteseMaltese LiteratureLiterature Adrian Grima 2003 2 Dominant Metaphors in Maltese Literature This is an original study written by Adrian Grima 3 Dominant Metaphors in Maltese Literature 4 Dominant Metaphors in Maltese Literature DominantDominant MetaphorsMetaphors inin MalteseMaltese LiteratureLiterature A dissertation presented to the Faculty of Arts of the University of Malta for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Maltese Adrian Grima June, 2003 5 Dominant Metaphors in Maltese Literature A Note of Thanks I would like to thank my two supervisors, Professor Oliver Friggieri of the University of Malta and Professor Joseph A. Buttigieg of the University of Notre Dame (Indiana, USA) for their expert advice and encouragement throughout the six years that I have been working on this dissertation. I would also like to thank my colleagues at work, especially Mr. Marco Galea and Dr. Carmel Cassar, with whom I regularly discussed this study, and my colleagues within the cultural organization Inizjamed, with whom I have explored many of the issues related to identity and literature which are dealt with in this study. Thanks also to Professor Jeremy Boissevain for taking a personal interest in my research on the Mediterranean imaginary. Adrian Grima June, 2003 6 Dominant Metaphors in Maltese Literature Lil Nathalie, Samwel u Rafel, li għexu dan ix-xogħol miegħi 7 Dominant Metaphors in Maltese Literature Contents Chapter I Metaphor and the Construction of Reality 1 “A Totally Discoursive Being” 3 Possession By and Seizure Of 6 Conventional and Novel Conceptual Metaphor 13 Metaphor, Metonymy and Simile 17 Conclusion: “Cultivating an Intimacy” 22 Chapter II The Nation-Mother 24 Positing the Metaphorical Home 27 The Metaphor of the Nation-Mother 31 Dealing with the Father 39 A Silenced Woman 55 The Metaphor of the Immobilized (Grand)Mother 72 Conclusion 77 Chapter III A Disorientated Traveller 83 Emigration as Metaphor of Emancipation 87 “A Ship Without a Compass” 98 The Metaphor of the Immobilized Son 116 A Progressive Sense of Place 126 Conclusion 136 Chapter IV Narrating Malta-as-Village 142 Ethnic Awareness and Traditional Peasant Values 143 Concentric Circles 162 8 Dominant Metaphors in Maltese Literature Insiders and Outsiders 162 The Country and the City 182 Cultural Diversity and Heterogeneity 205 Conclusion 216 Chapter V An Alternative Motherland 223 The Citadel by the Sea 225 The Metaphor of the Sea as Motherland 231 A Republic Struggling with Independence 243 Changing the Nation 257 The Mediterranean Sea as a Common Motherland 263 Conclusion 268 Conclusion 272 Bibliography 283 9 Dominant Metaphors in Maltese Literature II MetaphorMetaphor andand thethe ConstructionConstruction ofof RealityReality 10 Dominant Metaphors in Maltese Literature Metaphor allows us to deal with abstract concepts and to perform abstract reasoning by mapping a more concrete, or at least a more highly structured subject matter onto a relatively abstract or inherently unstructured subject matter.1 Maltese literature constructs and elaborates the concept of “Malta” by mapping onto it concepts like those of the mother, home, traveller, village, and sea. The choice of metaphor made by a writer and the variations he or she introduces in the conventional conceptual metaphor reflect on his or her vision of the nation; and an understanding of the nature, structure and functions of metaphor allows the critic to draw informed conclusions from the writer’s often metaphorical narrative of the nation, because metaphors belong to those who use them, not to those who “create” them;2 on the other hand, by creating them, these metaphors come to constitute culture and therefore, in this sense, the writer invents an imaginary that is then understood as “real” rather than constructed by the users of the metaphors. “Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind’s eye.” This image of the nation, or narration, writes Homi Bhabha, might seem “impossibly romantic and 1 George Lakoff, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor,” Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony, 2nd ed., (Cambridge: University Press, 1993), 245. 2 Antonio Skármeta, Il Postino di Neruda, trans. Andrea Donati (Milano: Teadue, 1998), 59. “La poesia non è di chi la scrive, ma di chi la usa!” 11 Dominant Metaphors in Maltese Literature excessively metaphorical,” but it is from those traditions of political thought and literary language that the nation “emerges as a powerful historical idea in the west. An idea whose cultural compulsion lies in the impossible unity of the nation as a symbolic force.”3 “A Totally Discoursive Being” This study deals with the construction of the Maltese imaginary. The main methodological approach that has been adopted is that of close textual analysis through which general trends can be perceived. One of the most important ways in which this is done, apart from music, folklore and art, is through literature, and within literature, metaphor plays a leading role in the way “malteseness” is created, reproduced, disseminated, modified, and challenged. The “innocent” reader who is unaware of the dynamics involved in the construction of identity and nation is bombarded by these metaphors and takes them to be real; the culture constructed by writers and other influential actors comes to be reality and develops into something that is strongly resistant to change because it becomes firmly rooted in the popular imaginary. 3 Homi Bhabha, “Narrating the Nation,” Nationalism, ed. John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith (Oxford: University Press, 1994), 306. 12 Dominant Metaphors in Maltese Literature At the end of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a novel set against the turbulent background of the emerging Irish nation state in the late nineteenth century, Stephen Daedalus writes this note in his diary: “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” 4 Joyce acknowledges that the conscience, the inward knowledge or consciousness, of a race is constructed and that the writer is in a position to create or invent it. The use of the verb “forge” is particularly interesting because it suggests both the act of building and formation and the act of forgery and falsification. The ambiguity of this verb suggests that the construction of a collective identity or imaginary is both a creation and a fabrication; it is both an attempt to lead and an attempt, perhaps an unintentional attempt, to mislead; it gives the impression that it is a reproduction or representation of reality when in fact it is an invention of reality which passes for “reality itself.” In this sense, like metaphor and resemblance, it is made up of a tension between identity and difference, between “being” and “being like,” that is, “not being.” One can apply the double-edged meaning of “forge” as it appears in Joyce to the construction of the Maltese identity. The significance of the use of “forge” in such a context lies in the fact that it uncovers the creative act that 4 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1992), 253. 13 Dominant Metaphors in Maltese Literature constructs the Maltese imaginary. In the case of a relatively new metaphor, the figure calls attention to itself as an unusually creative linguistic act and therefore the metaphor isn’t normally mistaken for a literal statement about reality; but conventional conceptual metaphors do not call attention to the metaphorical mappings that constitute them because they have become invisible, part of everyday thought and language, and therefore they can easily be mistaken for some kind of “essential” reality. An analysis of both novel and conventional conceptual metaphors reveals that a “race’s conscience,” to follow Joyce’s formulation of the creation of an ethnic or collective imaginary, is culturally constructed and literature, especially but not exclusively through metaphor, plays a significant role in this cultural construction of identity. In another revealing passage on the cultural construction of identity, the French nation is seen as constituting “a totally discoursive being,” a nation “welded” by “culture and its institutions,” a process that equates the national and the cultural in an overt way. 5 Art and literature, writes Kristeva, are the signs of recognition with which the most unassuming citizen identifies. The case of France, where “literature plays a considerable part in the consciousness [the nation] acquires of itself and its

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