Metaphor used to belong to poetry. As a trope or figure, its scope in
prose narrative is traditionally limited to an aspect of style. In a recent
empirical study Gerard Steen sets out to prove that this commonly-held
perception is misguided. In one of the tests devised by Steen a team of
language experts were presented with a 25-line extract from Norman
Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago and asked to identify and
isolate examples of metaphor. They agreed on nineteen cases. ¹ That
there should be such a concentration of metaphors in any small text, let
alone one written by a well-known literary star, should no longer be
regarded as exceptional, for an increasing number of language special-
ists are moving towards the view articulated by the two scholars cited in
the introduction to Steen's study who speak of metaphor as being
situated in the ‘deepest and most general processes of human interaction
with reality’. ² Current research driven by the work of Ortony,
Lakoff and Johnson, and Dirven and Paprotté aims to investigate what
the metaphorical basis of language reveals about the cognitive capa-
cities of the human mind. However, just as interest in the workings of
metaphor has extended far beyond the domain of literature, so the
literary text has lost its privileged status as the site of metaphor-
ical meaning. Literature is not an habitual mode of expression, therefore
literary language is less interesting to researchers absorbed by the
question of how we organise the reality around us than recorded
speech, or even standard journalists' reports. Thus, in metaphor studies
literature has been sidelined. This general obliviousness may explain in
part why comparatively few literary commentators have tapped into
the rich fund of material resulting from the explosion in ‘metaphorology’
of the last twenty or so years. ³

Living at the end of the twentieth century, we are accustomed to
contrast literary fiction as genre with documentary fact. This is a
relatively recent development predicated on an assumption which is not
always reliable. Stein Haugom Olsen cites writers as disparate in style,

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