The Use and Abuse of Literature (39 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.

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.

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

To suppose the bush a bear, to see or read it as a bear (in the night, in the darkness, in the dream world), is not, or not only, a mistake; it is also a true reading, for the moment, at least. This is the power of strong imagination, and if Theseus’s tone is dismissive (like that of Lakoff and Turner’s “literal meaning theorist”), his words are truer than he understands them to be: the frightening bush/bear is not a mistake, but a creative act.

The literary critic Rosalie Colie describes what she calls “unmetaphoring” in the work of Shakespeare and other writers, whose practice of
“unmetaphoring and remetaphoring familiar literary clichés” creates “new forms and patterns to bequeath to successors.”

Remetaphoring is, for Colie, in part a reminder by the poet that culture and literary tradition think through figures—not the “conceptual” figures of Lakoff and Turner but
literary
figures, the language “bequeathed” from poet to poet.
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“The best in this kind are but shadows,” Theseus says to Hippolyta before they sit down to watch the play, explaining his forbearance with imperfect or unschooled performers, and in the play’s epilogue, Puck will remind the audience that the actors they have been watching, as well as the denizens of fairyland, are “shadows,” too. The fact that Theseus is a fiction—that these speculations on the power and limits of the imagination are spoken by a literary character imagined by a poet/playwright about whom much has been written and imagined—may gesture further toward the work of art as a
mise en abyme:
the frame within a frame, the dream within a dream, the play within a play, the door that opens only onto another door. Which is the figure and which is the ground? Which is the metaphor and which is the concept? Theseus may smile at the idea of a bush (mis)taken for a bear, but then he has not seen what the audience has seen: the “translated” Bottom, whose metaphorical status (“man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream”) is as powerful as his disconcertingly hybrid presence, half man, half beast (“methought I was—and methought I had”). Onstage Bottom is a walking and dreaming catachresis, a man with an ass’s head. Would we call such an onstage representation “literal”? It is certainly an example of creative “unmetaphoring.” The effect is to make the audience see something of the transformative—and dangerous—effect of figurative language.

Neither Theseus nor Hippolyta grasp the dimensions of this power, which is wielded in their play by the
other
royal pair, Oberon and Titania, the king and queen of fairies. Bottom’s metaphorical identity as an ass is violently unmetaphored by Oberon so that his estranged queen will awaken to find herself in love with a monster. Titania seems perfectly content in this erotic space of fantasy—it is her husband who decides to “pity” her “dotage” and to restore her to ordinary sight (“My Oberon, what visions I have seen,” she later reports. “Methought I was enamoured of an ass”). The wish and the unwish are both accomplished by the string-pulling Oberon, leaving Bottom unmoved and unscathed, ready to perform his part in yet another play, where yet another hybrid monster (a timorous amateur actor in a lion suit) menaces a young woman. As her histrionic lover, Bottom draws his sword and kills himself, to the amusement, rather than the horror, of the onstage audience watching the play:

A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, 5.1.295–299

Ace
and
ass
were pronounced the same in Shakespeare’s time. Each was a “low” entity—the ass in the animal kingdom, the ace, the smallest number, so that Demetrius’s pun on “die” (the singular of “dice” as well as a familiar Renaissance pun on sexual climax) trivializes both Bottom’s language and the “death of Pyramus.” These joking spectators have not encountered the transformed figure of Bottom as an ass, but—uncannily—they rename him as one. In other words, their joke unwittingly re-creates the metaphor, the “vision” of Bottom-is-an-ass. They don’t know what they know. Their language speaks through them to us. But Lysander and Demetrius are themselves dramatic characters, literary creations. The profoundly trivial and yet astonishingly apt little
conversation that we in the audience overhear offers us another insight into the many layers of this world of
Dream
. It is not because they are real that their words function in this dizzying way, but because they are figures: literary or dramatic figures speaking in figures of speech.

Language does change our world. It does make possible what we think and how we think it. This is one vital reason to read and study literature, rather than merely to apply its strategies. As for the conceptual metaphors, from “Life Is Fire” to “Death Is a Reaper”—perhaps we should look to the words of a former politician and rhetorical expert and ask what the meaning of
is
is.

Consider a wisely riddling observation by Harold Bloom from his powerful work of literary theory,
The Anxiety of Influence
, published in 1973 and subtitled
A Theory of Poetry
. “The meaning of a poem can only be another poem.”
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The argument is first set out in the context of a paragraph describing what Bloom calls “antithetical criticism,” a term he develops from his reading of—and productive resistance to—his two great critical “precursors,” Nietzsche and Freud.

“Tautology” is a version of what Cleanth Brooks called “paraphrase”; “reduction” is the idea that poetry conveys a message, a moral, or a theme. What Bloom proposes is what he observes in the literary tradition—that poems beget poems, that imaginative thinking produces imaginative thinking, that literature is what I have called a first-order phenomenon, not a conveyor belt for ideas that find their “impact,” their “reality,” or their “application” elsewhere.

Literature is figure.

Because no interpretation of literature is “final” or “definitive,” literary study, like literature, is a process rather than a product. If it progresses, it does so in a way that often involves doubling back upon a track or meandering by the wayside rather than forging ahead, relentlessly and single-mindedly, toward some imagined goal or solution. As we have noticed, one of the defining characteristics of literature and literary study is to open questions, not to close them. This has sometimes been regarded as a trait—as something that makes literature and literary study both unique and also “useless,” in contrast with problem-solving disciplines like economics, political theory, or even certain branches of philosophy. And in an era when persistent questions about outcomes and impact have gained ascendancy for legislatures, educational researchers, and the public press, the absence of answers may look like a manifest failure either on the part of imaginative writers, or of critics and scholars, or of both. Hence some of the desire to convert passages of poetry or taglines from novels into social and ethical
doxa
: “Good fences make good neighbors”; “Only connect.” Quotations like this, taken out of context, seem like useful advice, or wisdom.