Anne Sheppard has observed that works of literature (and by implication
works of art in general) are like metaphors.^4 In representing and expressing,
but in a novel way, with a special focus on the materials of a medium (words,
line and color, sound as tone, space and volume, etc.), works of art, like
metaphors, invite interpretation. Comparisons among different works are
possible and useful. Critical elucidation and paraphrase of metaphors and
works of art is open-ended, as new aspects of wording or other formal
arrangements are noticed; elucidations and paraphrases are sometimes con-
tested among different responders. The metaphor and the work seem to
“show”something, in and through their specific materials, as much as to
“say”it. We are aware of and alert to the“presence”of an artist in the
metaphor and in the work, in having a sense of a governing intentionality
trying to mean something distinctive (and not wholly preplanned) by the
work and through its formed elements. Though we may be initially puzzled
and provoked into interpretation, advances in clarity about the meanings of
works and metaphors is possible through critical elucidation and other forms
of the understanding of art.
Why do we make metaphors and art? Why do we undertake to mean or
represent things expressively and in distinctive formal arrangements, other-
wise than as straightforward statements? Monroe Beardsley claims that the
successful work of art affords
a remarkable kind ofclarification, as though the jumble in our minds were
being sorted out...In aesthetic experience we have experience in which
means and end are so closely interrelated that we feel no separation between
them. One thing leads to the next and finds its place in it; the end is immanent
in the beginning, the beginning is carried up into the end. Such experience
allows the least emptiness, monstrosity, frustration, lack of fulfillment, and
despair–the qualities that cripple much of human life.^5The experience of art–both of making art and of following its significant
gestures–offers an anticipation of human expressive freedom and full
meaningfulness: of mind representing objects and actions, expressing and
clarifying attitudes toward them, through the dense, attentive working of
the materials of a medium.
(^4) Sheppard,Aesthetics, pp. 119–31.
(^5) Beardsley,Aesthetics, pp. 574, 575.
Epilogue: the evidence of things not seen 287