Poetry Incarnate: Puccini’s Mimì as metonymy and metaphor combined

Abstract

This essay is linked with a lengthy book I published in 2015, Masterpieces of Metonymy. There I argued that metonymy and metaphor, as they are known in verbal art, are analogous respectively to horizontal and vertical threading in the art of weaving. Taking a broader point of view here, I will argue that the art of fabric work in general can be represented as an interaction of metonymy and metaphor. Such a representation comes to life, I think, in the story of Puccini’s opera La Bohème. Here a woman named Mimì, a fabric worker, is pictured as the incarnation of poetry. This picturing, I further think, is expressed by way of metonymy and metaphor combined.