There is Value in Metaphor

There is value in metaphor. Furthermore, Martin believes there is value in metaphor and that belief manifests in the story.

How do I know that Martin believes there is value in metaphor? Because he wrote a fictional story. A story is a metaphor for real life.

Where is the value? The value is in the lessons we learn by experiencing the story vicariously through the characters. Every character’s story is a journey from A to B which illustrates how we might travel from A to B ourselves, if B is desirable. Or how we might avoid B if B is undesirable.

There is a portion of the population who do not find much or any value in metaphor beyond entertainment. Here is my attempt to describe that position in what I think the people who hold it might consider an accurate representation.

Metaphor, and in fact all works of fiction and art, can be an entertaining way to spend our time, but that is where its value ends. It is a useful distraction from the pressures and responsibilities of life. No more and no less. The world would necessarily be a better place if people spent less time entertaining themselves with fiction and art and more time tending to the responsibilities of life. Additionally, when a person spends too much time and energy entertaining themselves with fiction and art it is indicative of a larger problem with the person. When people do it at a cultural level it is indicative of a larger problem with the culture. Stories, movies, books, plays, music and art fall into this category. Any value that people derive from these things beyond idle entertainment is invented entirely by themselves and not intrinsic in the thing itself. The proof of that is that people who experience the same story, movie, book, play, song or art can and do often come away with differences in their subjective interpretation of whether or not it was valuable and what made it valuable. For example, two people can read the exact same story yet draw entirely different lessons from it.

Certainly, individuals vary in how much of the position they hold as well as in their reasonings. But that seems to be the fullest version of it that I consider reasonable and that I have actually heard expressed by real people.

At the root of Relativity is the postmodern discovery that there is an infinite number of ways to interpret the world. I think there are two ways in which I can incorporate that discovery.

One is to say that all interpretations are equally valid. The other is to say that all interpretations are equally invalid.

I think the people who hold the position I described above are essentially saying that all interpretations are equally invalid. IE. Since people are of the sort that they can and do derive completely different and incompatible interpretations from the exact same story, that proves that the interpretations are entirely produced by the individual person rather than, say, an intrinsic characteristic of the story itself.

I think that’s wrong. My criticism against that is that there are obviously patterns across the set of all interpretations that people produce. We agree about most things in the story. For example, we all seem to be in agreement that Bran injured his legs rather than his arms. Our individual interpretations have more in common than not, more often than not. And it’s the patterns that prove that the value of a story resides majorly in the story itself.