The Use and Abuse of Literature

by Marjorie Garber

  In his poetry as well as his literary criticism T. S. Eliot engages this sense of the body—which is not the same as what cognitive theorists call embodiment or embodied cognition, since what intrigues Eliot is the specific writing of poetry, not the presumed universal response to it:

  Webster was much possessed by death

  And saw the skull beneath the skin;

  And breastless creatures under ground

  Leaned backward with a lipless grin.

  Daffodil bulbs instead of balls

  Stared from the sockets of the eyes!

  He knew that thought clings round dead limbs

  Tightening its lusts and luxuries.

  Donne, I suppose, was such another

  Who found no substitute for sense,

  To seize and clutch and penetrate;

  Expert beyond experience,

  He knew the anguish of the marrow

  The ague of the skeleton;

  No contact possible to flesh

  Allayed the fever of the bone.28

  These stanzas, from a poem called “Whispers of Immortality,” might be catalogued under “Death Is an Adversary,” “Death Is a Devourer,” or, I suppose, “Death Is Going to a Final Destination,” but it is difficult to see how those “conceptual” categories would assist, in any way, to produce a subtle, nuanced reading of this (or indeed any) poem.

  Hunting the Wild Metaphor

  In their field guide, Lakoff and Turner mention no literary critics or theorists, no ancient or modern rhetoricians, no historical scholars, no periods or schools of poetry or literature, nothing at all to indicate that there is a tradition, thousands of years old, for the consideration of poetry, of rhetorical figures, of literary influence and literary resistance. Something called the “Great Chain Metaphor” is singled out for extensive discussion without any mention of works like Arthur O. Lovejoy’s 1936 classic The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea, not to mention E. M. W. Tillyard’s use of it in The Elizabethan World Picture (1940), or any of the several responses to Tillyard and to Lovejoy that have enlivened literary criticism and theory in the intervening years—nor to earlier articulations and discussions of this metaphor in the works of Dante, Boethius, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Pico della Mirandola, or the theory of the divine right of kings. What is the field to which this is a guide? The book’s subtitle alludes not to any intellectual or disciplinary field but to the genre of handbooks or guidebooks used to assist the reader in identifying wildlife or other objects in nature: birds, plants, rocks, trees, insects, and so forth—a practical, browsable, publicly accessible handbook like Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds of North America. “Poetic metaphor” in Lakoff and Turner’s guide is a “tool” that “allows us to understand ourselves and our world.”29 As for poets, they are “us,” with a linked-in database of conceptual metaphors, into which their poems can be neatly docketed:

  Great poets can speak to us because they use the modes of thought we all possess. Using the capacities we all share, poets can illuminate our experience, explore the consequences of our beliefs, challenge the ways we think, and criticize our ideologies.30

  Words like we, us, and our, when deployed in “philosophical” utterances, should probably come with a warning label, since they are both universalizing and coercive. Even in apparently open assertions where the specific nature of “our” experiences, ideologies, etc., is left to the reader, the claim is made that “we” all possess modes of thought that “respond” to the works of great poets. This claim is not made more convincing by the book’s recurrent citation from a single translated volume of Sanskrit verse—mentioned, with textual examples, six different times in the text, presumably as a nod to the “universal” nature of poetic metaphor—or by a Navaho war god’s horse song cited from an anthology of “poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania.”31 In any case, it is a profoundly uninteresting claim from the point of view of literature.

  About the horse song, the reader learns, in commentary on the (translated) line “My horse with a mane made of short rainbows,” that “The structure of a rainbow, its band of curved lines, is mapped onto an arc of curved hair, and many rainbows onto many such arcs on the horse’s mane. Such image-mapping prompts us to map our evaluation of the source domain onto the target. We know that rainbows are beautiful, special, inspiring, larger than life, almost mystic, and that seeing them makes us happy and awestruck. This knowledge is mapped onto what we know of the horse: it too is awe-inspiring, beautiful, larger than life, almost mystic.”32 Here is that troublesome we again—“we know that rainbows are beautiful, special, inspiring, larger than life, almost mystic.” Well, maybe. It depends on the literary context and on the culture. A person familiar with the book of Genesis might have a different set of associations with the rainbow, as might an aficionado of leprechauns in Irish folklore, a reader of D. H. Lawrence, or a fan of Judy Garland. None of these associations would, presumably, be germane to the Navaho war god’s song. But why should the reader believe that we, a transhistorical, transnational, transglobal we, “know” that rainbows are beautiful, special, make us happy etc., and that therefore this is a pertinent interpretation of a line of verse translated into English from a Navaho poem?

  Having given us the line and these truisms about their own assumptions on the universal meaning of rainbows, the authors then quote a larger section of the translated poem (still with no indication of whether it is the entire poem or an excerpt, and with no notations about Navaho culture, the tradition of Navaho verse-making, or even the poem’s date). “This line,” they say, “comes from a poem containing a series of such image-mappings”:

  My horse with a hoof like a striped agate,

  with his fetlock like a fine eagle plume:

  my horse whose legs are like quick lightning

  whose body is an eagle-plumed arrow:

  my horse whose tail is like a trailing black cloud.

  Working without any context, a reader can still see some poetic elements here that repay discussion, like the repeated refrain beginning “my horse,” the stripes that seem to characterize both rainbow and agate, the repetition of the eagle plume as a point of comparison, the triad of terms associated with storms and signs in the sky (rainbow, lightning, cloud), the progression from head to tail. But for the authors, these are all important because they are image maps, “prompts for us to perform mapping from one conventional image to another at the conceptual level.”33 What interests them is not the poem but what they think it tells them about the workings of the mind.

  I say the mind because the stress is on “our ordinary comprehension of the world,” a common reading of poetry that is not interested in individual poets, particular languages, historical time periods, or specific poems. This use of literature is like the use of a ladder or a yardstick, employed to reach or measure something else. Or, to adopt the image the authors propose, it is like the use of a map, but a satellite map from thousands of feet up in the air. From that distance, the maps of, say, Paris, Venice, and Las Vegas will have certain elements in common; indeed Las Vegas has both an Eiffel Tower and a Grand Canal.

  When Macbeth’s “Out, out, brief candle!” and Othello’s “Put out the light, and then put out the light” speeches are offered as versions of the conceptual metaphor “Life Is a Flame,” we are about as far from literary study as we can get while still using a word like metaphor. Of these great and complex lines it is not false to say that “the flame of the candle is the flame of life” and that “because life is conceived of as brief, the candle is called brief,” but these clichés do not afford the reader any entry into the complexity or nuance of the speeches or the plays. “All our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death,” although cited, goes uncommented upon, presumably covered by the “conceptual” phrase “Life Is a Flame.” There is no mention of Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene, in which “she has light by her continually at her command,” nor of
Banquo’s “there’s husbandry in heaven, their candles are all out,” nor of the scene after Duncan’s death when “by the clock ’tis day / And yet dark night strangles the traveling lamp,” nor, in Othello, of the role played by darkness, torches, or calls for light from the opening scene to the final one, from which the quoted speech is taken. The authors “use” literature, and from their point of view, presumably this use is not an abuse. What such work seeks to demonstrate, though, is that the language of poetry is assimilable to notions about workings of the ordinary everyday mind—the mind, an abstract universal made concretely universal through neuroscience.

  Field Work

  The title and the last pages of More Than Cool Reason refer to a conversation between Theseus and Hippolyta near the close of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Theseus is described by Lakoff and Turner as taking “a position reminiscent of a literal meaning theorist, arguing that poets are like lovers and madmen: they are fanciful and therefore misperceive the truth.” We might note that Theseus and Hippolyta have missed out on most of the imaginative action of the play, the world of the fairies, the transformation of Bottom into an ass, Puck’s anointing of the lovers’ eyes with the magical “love in idleness,” and other crucial events; Shakespeare’s play allows the audience in the theater, or the reader of the text, to regard this conversation between two highly placed and self-assured characters with some measure of comic irony. That Theseus and Hippolyta engage in an argument about the power of images that has animated literary studies since Plato, or that both participants in this dialogue are simultaneously right and wrong in their responses, does not fit into the declarative and prescriptive nature of The Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Again, there is no indication that any literary scholarship exists on any of these famous passages—indeed it is indicative of the level of regard with which the book holds literary scholarship that no critics or scholars are mentioned in these pages, and that the short list of further readings at the end of the book does not direct the reader to anything written by a literary critic. There is an index of metaphors and a general index but not an index of poems or poets: in the book’s own metaphorical construction, the conceptual metaphor (“Form Is Motion,” “Life Is a Fluid,” “Time Is a Healer,” “Staying Alive Is a Contest”) is the tenor and the poetry merely the vehicle.

  For whom is such a field guide intended or useful? According to its authors, “the book should … prove valuable to students and researchers in literature, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and cognitive science”—although they also note that they have “tried to write the book in a style accessible to undergraduates.”34 Accessible it may be, and since disciplines and uses vary widely, it might be useful to those studying cognition, philosophy, or the neuroscientific branches of psychology. In terms of literature, however, a handbook like this erases the history of literary scholarship and analysis, discounts the role of interpretation and reading, and above all, denies or resists the creative, transgressive, and excitingly unstable power of language. Reducing literature to concepts, even to conceptual metaphors, is a mode of appropriation that makes the literary disappear.

  The 2003 afterword to Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By included a section on “applications of metaphor theory” that attempted to put into context developments that had occurred in various fields since the book initially appeared. Here is how the Lakoff and Turner collaboration summarized the argument of More Than Cool Reason: “[M]etaphors in poetry are, for the most part, extensions and special cases of stable, conventional conceptual metaphors used in everyday thought and language. The metaphoric innovations of poets are shown thereby to consist not in the totally new creation of metaphoric thought but in the marshalling of already existing forms of metaphoric thought to form new extensions and combinations of old metaphoric mappings.”35

  This is actually not so different from what literary theorists have argued—except that the power dynamic is reversed, as is the purpose of making the argument. Where Lakoff and Turner locate the “existing forms of metaphoric thought” in “stable, conventional conceptual metaphors used in everyday thought and language,” critics concerned with rhetoric and the powerful instability of language have asserted the primacy of literariness, the ungovernable mobility of tropes and figures of speech, and the inevitability of productive misinterpretation in the creative act of reading.

  A First-Order Phenomenon

  Literature is a first-order, not a second-order, phenomenon. It is not simply a clever kind of code developed by the mind to ensure that we all possess a mental Rolodex of figures enabling the nimble linking and blending of commonly held thoughts. It does not merely frame concepts or conceptual metaphors in pleasing or memorable phrases.36 In other words, language makes meaning, or rather, meanings in the plural; it does not merely reflect it. Things that do not exist are often brilliantly brought to life through figures of speech, so that it is the figures that are primary, and the referents, the facts, that follow in their train. In large forms like mythology (or religion) and in smaller ones like individual figures or metaphors, concepts are created by the imaginative leaps that we call poetry or fiction or rhetoric. As Keats magnificently expressed it in one of his letters, “What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not.”37 But for Lakoff and Turner, since “metaphors allow us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another … there must be some grounding, some concepts that are not completely understood via metaphor to serve as source domains.” They offer a list of “source domains” that “are at least partly, if not totally, understood on their own terms: plants, departures, fire, sleep, locations, seeing, and so on.” What is at stake is a difference in understanding about the role and nature of language and figure. It is not that rhetorical theorists doubt the empirical existence of fire, sleep, plants, or departures, but that they do not find conceptual metaphors like “Love Is Fire,” “Life Is Fire,” “People Are Plants,” “Human Death Is the Death of a Plant,” or “Change of State Is Change of Location” to have anything to do with “the symbolic power of language” or the use of literature.38

  The point is not that one view of the power and nature of metaphor is right and another one wrong—to the contrary. There are many uses for these analyses, and the emergence of cognitive linguistics and other areas of cognitive science have been productive as well as provocative. What I am suggesting instead is that this kind of analysis is profoundly unuseful for the interpretation of literature. The claim that imaginative creation needs to be “grounded” in something else—a turn of phrase that recalls the figure-ground conundrums of visual perception—is an empirical claim about the dependence of language and figure on the extra-literary existence of things in the world.

  It might be helpful then to consider how these visual images strike the eye and the mind. The famous example of the Rubin vase, included by the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin in his two-volume book Visual Figures, shows a vase in the center of a visual field. The eye sees either the vase as figure and the surrounding area as ground, or two symmetrical human profiles, one on the left and one on the right, with the area in the center as ground. Each visual interpretation is valid, but even though the viewer knows they are both present, only one can (ordinarily) be seen at a time. This kind of image (sometimes called an optical illusion) was widely influential for Gestalt psychology and also for visual artists of the period. If we take this image as a figure for figure, what we can learn from it is that the idea of a ground, in the empirical sense asserted by Lakoff and Turner (“there must be some grounding, some concepts that are not completely understood via metaphor to serve as source domains”) depends upon the pre-determination of these undecidable entities: faces or vase? All language is figure, and figuration: it is the idea that we can see through language to encounter the real that is ultimately what might be called the conceptual illusion. Again, this is not to say that nothing is real, an empty claim as well as a
foolish one, but that the real is perceived through language. Every act of language is a creative act of figuration, whether the figure is fresh and new or so familiar as to be undetectable (the so-called dead metaphor). Even dead metaphors are not dead, but sleeping, waiting to be awakened by a new poet, a naive speaker, or an inquisitive child. This is one of the sources of wit as well as wisdom that is “bodied forth” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the play from which Lakoff and Turner take their title and to which we will now briefly return.

  Misreading Theseus Misreading

  The debate between Theseus and Hippolyta offers the literary critic an opportunity for a double reading of Theseus’s lines: