Word: metaphor
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...fruitful theatrical device: the two characters play out their separate alonenesses simultaneously on the same set. Most of the dramatic tension, then, resides in the blocking, since both actors must studiously maintain the illusion of solitude while barely avoiding coliisions. The setup also gives the directors a concrete metaphor for the songs' philosophizing: when the characters notice each other at all, when they touch, the show crosses from reality into fantasy...
...final scene, where poor Tom Rakewell, insane at last, finds himself in Bedlam. The wall is covered with graffiti, each one a quotation from Hogarth, and in front of it the chorus of lunatics is housed in a stack of boxes, splayed in false perspective, a feverish metaphor of cellular confinement...
Anomaly is the stuff of history. Aristotle taught that while poetry speaks in universals, history speaks in particulars. But those who deal in historical metaphor have no interest in particulars...
Past may be prologue but it is not destiny. The central fallacy of the metaphor mongers is to assume-against history-that history repeats itself; to assume that superficially similar conditions produce identical development. Consider Iran. Ever since the fall of the Shah we have been waiting for other Irans to happen (for the other Shah to drop, as it were). There have been a variety of candidates, from Saudi Arabia to Mexico, none of which has panned out. The Great White Hope of the theory was Sadat's Egypt. Here was another autocratic, modernizing, pro-Western leader, arrogantly...
...matter: new Irans will keep popping up (in our minds) regardless. The empirical world can do little to dampen the appeal of metaphor, since it deals in what Historian Michael Oakeshott calls "practical" or "didactic history," a species of pseudo history in which what passes for analysis is the waving of icons...