Fire Metaphors

Discourses of Awe and Authority

Jonathan Charteris-Black

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781350070097
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781472528131
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistic Semantics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This detailed study of fire metaphors provides a deep understanding of the purposeful work of metaphor in discourse. It analyses how and why fire metaphors are used in discourses of awe (mythology and religion) and authority (political speeches and media reports).

Fire serves as a productive and salient lexical field for metaphors that seek to create awe and impose authority. These metaphors offer a rich linguistic and conceptual resource for authors of mythologies, theologies, literature, speeches and journalism, and provide insight into the rich interplay of thought, language and culture.

This book explores the purpose of fire metaphors in genres ranging from the Norse sagas to religious texts, from Shakespeare to British and American political speeches. Ultimately it arrives at an understanding of the rhetorical work that metaphor accomplishes in communicating evaluations and ideologies.

Part One

Fire in Culture, Language and Thought

1

The Meaning of Fire

Introduction: Fire and power

On the 17th of December 2010, a young street vendor, Tarek Bouazizi, set himself on fire as a personal protest against the confiscation of his wares and the humiliation he had experienced at the hands of the Tunisian authorities. This symbolic action, and his resulting death soon afterwards, sparked off the Tunisian revolution leading to the fall of President Zine Ben Ali, and ignited civil protest against the authorities in many parts of the Arab world in a series of related protests that spread rapidly and became known as ‘the Arab Spring’. While the ‘Arab Spring’ is easily recognized as a metaphor, if only from being placed in inverted commas, the other metaphors in the previous sentence – ‘sparked off’, ‘ignited’ and ‘spread’ – are less readily recognized as metaphors for two reasons. The first is because when passions are ‘inflamed’, it seems natural to employ a ‘fire’ metaphor because of our embodied experience of a rise in temperature when emotionally aroused. The second is because the events that they describe actually involved the use of fire; angry people tend to burn cars and buildings and, more tragically, people set fire to themselves. Metaphors of fire derive from our experience of heat and fire, either within our bodies or in the external world, and they communicate powerful psychological and emotional responses. It is such fire metaphors that form the topic of this book.

While our scientific understanding of fire has grown in disciplines such as climatology and environmental management – accelerated by the burning of fossil fuels and the carbonization of the atmosphere – this has not yet been accompanied by an equivalent understanding of how fire works in the human mind. Our relationship with fire has influenced our understanding of a wide range of spiritual, psychological and social relationships. Fire has come to represent divine punishment, personal creativity, social protest and private emotion. It is little surprise that a very successful form of electronic reading device has been branded as the ‘kindle’ because fire metaphors are inherently persuasive and are therefore commonly used in the language of product ‘branding’ (itself originally a ‘fire’ metaphor). A study of metaphors derived from the fire lexicon in a range of religious and political discourses provides insight into how they contribute to a language of power that I will refer to as discourses of awe and of authority. As Sontag’s study of ‘war’ metaphors in illness experience has illustrated, an in-depth exploration of an apparently narrow linguistic area can offer a much broader understanding of the mental constructs that underlie the role of language in constructing the social world.

There was nothing essentially novel about the act of self-immolation committed by the young Tunisian street hawker; what was novel was that acts of self-combustion are more commonly associated with Indian and Buddhist cultures rather than Islamic ones where suicide is strictly forbidden. The practice of Buddhist self-immolation became more widely known in the West after its use by Buddhist monks in Vietnam during the anti-colonial protests of the 1960s. In June 1963, a Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Duc set himself on fire while seated in a meditation position at a major crossroads in Saigon. The act of self-immolation came to symbolize Buddhist resistance to President Diem’s suppression of Buddhism. Western media coverage of this symbolic action made the practice more widely known to audiences who had previously associated death by fire with the martyrdom of religious non-conformists. The original meaning of immolation was ‘killing a sacrificial victim’ and its etymology can be traced to the Latin ‘immolare’ to sprinkle with sacrificial meal (mola salsa).

While burning at the stake is not an exclusively European practice, it was one extensively employed by European powers during their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wars of religion, and, to a lesser extent, in their overseas colonial conquests. Burning heretics was the most visible, final and theologically grounded means for eliminating ideological opponents. This practice was employed by the Jesuits of the Inquisition when enforcing religious conformity through the trial known as the auto-de-fe – a ritual re-enactment of the Last Judgement. The sight of heretics being publicly burnt at the stake was intended to remind the audience of the divine punishment that awaits all sinners in the form of eternal hell-fire. The public display of suffering was a highly persuasive means for enforcing conformity. Those who repented during the auto-de-fe would be strangled or garrotted prior to being burnt and so would be saved from the punishment that awaited the damned. As Foucault (1975: 58) reminds us: it was a ‘policy of terror’, whose aim was ‘to make everyone aware, through the body of the criminal, of the unrestrained presence of the sovereign. The public execution did not reestablish justice; it reactivated power’.

As well as the almost unimaginable pain, what is most significant about self-inflicted death by fire is that it implies a spiritual motivation as the perpetrator could only bear such sacrifice as a result of psychological suffering, or with a view to making a spiritual point. When Joan of Arc was asked at her trial, ‘Do you not, then think yourself bound to submit your words and deeds to the Church Militant, or to any other but God?’, the heroic young militant replied:

What I have always said in the Trial, and held, I wish still to say and maintain. If I were condemned, if I saw the fire lighted, the faggots prepared, and the executioner ready to kindle the fire, and if I myself were in the fire, I would not say otherwise, and would maintain to the death all I have said.¹

In the margin of the original manuscript the Registrar Manchon wrote: ‘Responsio Johanne superba’. The terror of such a fate eventually forced her to recant – albeit too late to satisfy the ‘Church Militant’. But her testimony of courage and of resistance remains.

A Jesuit, Bocanegra, recorded a similar act of defiance by a heretic:

All along the way the confessors and the Catholic bystanders shouted at him to repent and the heretical ways answered with gestures that showed his rebelliousness … (Once they got to the brasero) they held a torch to his beard and face to see if the grief would make him sane and the pain would make him open his eyes. But with words and actions he consummated his last impenitence, and dragging the wood closer with his feet, he let himself burn alive, showing no signs of remorse. What is more, no longer being able to speak, one could see him shake his head and hands as if he were saying no to the common voice that was claiming his conversion, experiencing already in this life the prelude of the eternal flames.²

The voluntary embrace of the flames – whether by a sixteenth-century heretic, or by a 21st century protestor – is a symbolic action that rejects all forms of human authority. Self-immolation reclaims the divine motivation as the victim re-asserts control over his own body by complete acceptance of suffering; the immolated therefore ceases to be victim and becomes the agent of his own salvation: a martyr!

Isolated acts of self-immolation are relatively rare, and it is their imitation that enhances their significance as symbolic actions. Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia sparked off many others in countries across the Middle East and Europe: in the six months after his death, at least 107 Tunisians sought to commit suicide in this way. Social psychologists refer to the contagious, or spreading, effect of self-immolation as the ‘Werther effect’. A study of fire metaphors contributes to an understanding of how and why fire takes on this symbolic meaning. I hope to explain the dual and apparently contradictory role of fire in human conceptualization that may account for how an apparently nihilist act of self-destruction may be interpreted as meaningful. Since fire changes the state of the material world it has agency: it is transformational and this capacity to change the state of matter forms the basis of its symbolic meaning. An understanding of the symbolism of fire therefore contributes to an understanding of martyrdom: when an act of individual protest – through imitation and replication – itself becomes a form of communication.

Evidence is provided in the fire metaphors in the official English language publication of the Islamic State (also known as ISIL and ISIS and Dabiq); each edition of the publication has the following strapline on its contents page: ‘the spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify … until it burns the crusader armies in Dabiq’,³ here we have a deliberately ambiguous use of fire words that activate metaphoric and literal senses. The ‘spark’ is a metaphor that refers to their religious beliefs, but the burning of ‘crusader armies’ is quite literal: the ‘heat’ could refer to embodiment or to actual fire.

Although my primary concern is the insight into human conceptualization offered by such fire terms, I also believe that a detailed study of fire metaphors has implications for a more general understanding of the relationship between thought, language and social action. I propose that the fire lexicon contributes to discourses of awe – language that creates feelings of reverence and wonder – and that these are then integrated within discourses of authority: language that expresses and imposes power relationships. By identifying how a single semantic field creates social meanings, I hope to provide a general account of language and power relationships.

There are other related areas of human experience such as illness, contagion and the human body that are also exploited through metaphor to contribute to discourses of awe and discourses of authority that underlie legitimacy claims (see for example Sontag 1991; Mitchell 2012; Musolff 2010). Mitchell (2012) provides a historical overview of the contagion metaphor and traces ideas of moral panic and Dawkins’s meme theory back to the root concept of contagion. While power theorists – political scientists and philosophers such as Hobbes, Machievelli and Nietzche – have accounted for discourses of authority, fire provides a historically earlier, more tangible and probably less well-understood model for establishing legitimacy claims. Perhaps it is for this reason that fire metaphors – although not the most frequent – are the most prototypical of all metaphors. Fire offers a complex and rich frame for understanding the interrelationships between the bodily experience and society. Although both disease and fire are entities that motivate by arousing fear, disease is instantly recognizable as something inherently threatening to human survival, conversely, fire is conceptually ambiguous because it brings both gains and losses – both warmth and destruction; such ambiguity demands an explanation.

Fire, evolution and survival

Fire has contributed in significant ways to human survival and evolution. As well as providing protection, warmth, light and the means to cook, fire was also at the basis of scientific thinking by encouraging observation to understand causation, and gaining control over the environment through technology. Pyne (2001: 24) puts this eloquently:

All humans manipulate fire, and only humans do so. We are truly a species touched by fire. Fire opened the night by providing light and heat. It protected caves and shelters. It rendered foods more edible, leached away toxins from cassava and tannic acid from acorns, and killed bacteria that caused salmonella, parasites that led to trichinosis, and waterborne microbes. It interacted with every conceivable technology from flint mining to ochre painting, Fire was a god, or at least theophany; fire was myth, fire was science, fire was power, We could call it forth as we could not call forth floods or hurricanes or earthquakes or droughts.

While he may be right in claiming that the manipulation of fire is the exclusive preserve of humans, recent research into chimpanzees (Warneken and Rosati 2015) indicates that they share with early hominins some of the cognitive capacities that are involved in cooking. These include having the motivation to cook and having the patience to collect ingredients rather than eat them straight away. Cooking also involves understanding causal relationships between behaviours, such as putting ingredients in a cooking device, and their outcomes. The chimpanzees in the study showed a preference for cooked over raw food and demonstrated self-control by sacrificing food in their possession. They could also save food in anticipation of future cooked food; deferment of gratification to obtain the benefits of future consumption shows an orientation towards the future.

A fascinating implication of this research is that if chimpanzees and early hominins do share common cognitive capacities, then the ability to cook may have originated much earlier in human evolution than was previously thought. It suggests that early hominins may have been able to cook with naturally occurring fire some time before they had mastered the ability to use hearths and ovens. Such opportunistic use of fire would then have created the conditions for the development of more complex uses of fire to cook in an enclosed space. Irrespective of whether or not there is a cognitive link between the behaviour of chimpanzees in a twenty-first-century empirical experiment and early hominins, it is certain that the emergence of cooking-related behaviours contributed significantly to the development of human cognition.

Fire that occurs naturally will necessarily spread: control over fire is only fully established when it is contained in some way. A hearth provides warmth and when contained within an oven, fire can be used for cooking; when within a kiln, it can be used for technological transformations....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Fire in Culture, Language and Thought
• Part II: Fire in Religious Discourse
• Part III: Fire in Political Discourse
• Appendix 1 – British Sample
• Appendix 2 – American Sample
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Index of Conceptual Metaphors, Metonyms & Frames
• Imprint