The Use and Abuse of Literature (38 page)
Read The Use and Abuse of Literature Online
Authors: Marjorie Garber
Those who object to the “artificiality” of Milton or Dryden sometimes tell us to “look into our hearts and write.” But that is not looking deep enough; Racine or Donne looked into a good deal more than the heart. One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts.
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Is T. S. Eliot, then, a cognitive theorist
avant la lettre
? Does his invocation of the cerebral cortex and the nervous system suggest that he finds in Donne’s work some hardwired connections or some metaphors to live by? I think his argument points in the reverse direction, toward the mind of the poet, not the poetry of the mind. Here is a passage from the essay in which he tries to explain how these poets use rhetorical figures in their work:
Donne, and often Cowley, employ a device which is sometimes considered characteristically “metaphysical”; the elaboration (contrasted with condensation) of a figure of speech to the farthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it. Thus Cowley develops the commonplace comparison of the world to a chess-board through long stanzas (
To Destiny
), and Donne, with more grace, in
A Valediction [Forbidding Mourning]
, the comparison of two lovers to a pair of compasses. But elsewhere we find, instead of the mere explication of the content of a comparison, a development by rapid association of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader.
On a round ball
A workman that hath copies by, can lay
An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia,
And quickly make that, which was nothing, All,
So doth each teare,
Which thee doth weare,
A globe, yea, world by that impression grow,
Till thy tears mixt with mine doe overflow
This world, by waters sent from thee, my heaven dissolved so.
Here we find at least two connexions which are not implicit in the first figure, but are forced upon it by the poet; from the geographer’s glove to the tear, and the tear to the deluge. On the other hand, some of Donne’s most successful and characteristic effects are secured by brief words and sudden contrasts:
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone.
where the most powerful effect is produced by the sudden contrast of associations of “bright hair” and of “bone.” This telescoping of images and multiplied associations is characteristic of the phrase of the dramatists of the period which Donne knew; not to mention Shakespeare, it is frequent in Middleton, Webster, and Tourneur, and is one of the sources of the vitality of their language.
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Eliot’s interest is certainly in cognition, but it is the cognition of the poet and the reader. Notice his attention to a “development by rapid association of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader.” In this analysis, the reader does not exhibit the necessary agility because he or she has assimilated a conceptual metaphor like “Tears Are Globes” (or perhaps “The World Is Made of Tears”—needless to say both of these “concepts” are my fabrications, unauthorized and unsanctioned). Moreover, while “a bracelet of bright hair about the bone” could connect to any one of the thirteen metaphors about death listed in Lakoff and Turner’s field guide to poetic metaphor (“Death Is a Devourer,” “Death Is an Adversary,” “Death Is a Reaper,” “Death Is Darkness,” etc.), its power lies precisely in eluding any such familiar conceptual categorization. It is not banal. It shocks with its unexpectedness,
its precision, its physicality, its mise-en-scène, its alliterative B’s that lead inexorably from
bracelet
to
bone
, its single adjective (
bright
) that seems at first to offer relief from the starkness of image and syntax but actually makes the verbal bridge between
bracelet
and
bone
. Historical research and cultural context—of a kind that is notable by its absence in Lakoff and Turner—would remind the reader that keepsakes made of woven or braided hair were common love tokens, so this macabre image is also, disturbingly, commonplace. Which is not to say that it is remotely ordinary.
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.
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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.
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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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.