[untitled]
Author(s): Donald C. Freeman
Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Spring, 1991), pp. 145-164
Published by: Duke University Press
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Songs of Experience:
New Bookson Metaphor
Donald C. Freeman
English, Southern California
Mark Johnson, TheBody in the Mind: TheBodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1987. xxxvii +
227 pp.
George Lakoffand Mark Turner,More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide
to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1989. 230 pp.
Samuel R. Levin,Metaphoric Worlds: Conceptions of a RomanticNature.
New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1988. xv + 251 pp.
Phillip Stambovsky, The Depictive Image: Metaphor and LiteraryExperience. Amherst:Universityof MassachusettsPress, 1988. 156 pp.
Ann Thompsonand John O. Thompson,Shakespeare: Meaning and Metaphor. Iowa City: Universityof Iowa Press, 1987. xi + 228 pp.
Mark Turner, Death is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism.
Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1987. xi + 208 pp.
The Nature of Visionary Fancy, or Imagination, is
very little Known, & the Eternal nature & permanence
of its ever Existent Images is consider'd as less permanent than the things of Vegetative & Generative
Nature; yet the Oak dies as well as the Lettuce, but Its
Eternal Image & Individuality never dies, but renews
by its seed; just so the Imaginative Image returns by
the seed of Contemplative Thought; the Writings of
PoeticsToday12:1 (Spring 1991). Copyright ? 1991 by The Porter Institute for
Poetics and Semiotics. CCC 0333-5372/91/$2.50.
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Poetics Today 12:1
the Prophets illustrate these conceptions of the Visionary Fancy by their various sublime & Divine Images
as seen in the Worlds of Vision.
William Blake, A Visionof the LastJudgment
Reason is embodied in the sense that the very structures on which reason is based emerge from our bodily
experiences
....
Imagination
is not mere fancy, for
it is imagination, especially metaphor and metonymy,
that transforms the general schemas defined by our
animal experience into forms of reason-forms even
richer than the objectivists' transcendental reason has
been taken to be.
George Lakoff, Women,Fire, and DangerousThings
Reviewing these books is something of an exercise in theology. Either
one does or one does not believe, as classical theories of metaphor
and meaning require, that there is a language "out there" based on
classical categories, necessary and sufficient conditions, and predicate calculus. With that belief come certain necessary principles for a
theory of metaphor: that there is a "literal," nonfigurative language in
contrast to the figurative language of metaphor; that this "ordinary"
language is unmarked, while metaphor is language that is deviant,
foregrounded,
highlighted, made strange; that there is a difference
between literary and everyday metaphor, and a difference between literary and "ordinary" language (a position that had begun to be undermined in more general literary theory before the "linguistic turn" in
the study of metaphor examined here, to be sure, but which was stated
least equivocally about metaphor).
These principles dominated discussion of metaphor for two thousand years, from Aristotle until a time when, at the turn of the last
decade, there appeared a cloud no bigger than a man's hand: a little
book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
(1980). They argued that, far from being decorative or parasitic upon
"ordinary" language, metaphor figures in most, if not all language and
is fundamental to our very understanding; that, further, metaphor
is not an intellectual abstraction but is based in what Johnson was to
call our "embodied human understanding"-in
short, that meaning
and metaphor derive from our bodily experience. In a style strongly
reminiscent of the English Romantic poet, painter, and revolutionary
William Blake (as far as I am aware, the Romantic period was the only
epoch in which a similar theory of metaphor was propounded), they
asserted at the end of this volume that "metaphor is as much a part of
our functioning as our sense of touch, and as precious" (Lakoff and
Johnson 1980: 239).
Whatever one's view of this work, it has set the agenda for the en-
Freeman * New Books on Metaphor
147
suing debate. Books (to say nothing of scholarly articles) on metaphor
have appeared in such profusion that it is nearly a full-time job to
keep track of them. Of the six studies of literary metaphor reviewed
here (all of which have appeared since late 1987, and these are not
the only ones), one lacks a coherent position of its own; three-unsurprisingly-espouse the Lakoff/Johnson view; and two stay within the
traditional paradigm. All of the authors under review here agree to
some extent that metaphor is not merely a matter of words but a matter
of thoughts or concepts (or, for Samuel R. Levin, conceptions). Levin
and Phillip Stambovsky postulate a poetic or metaphoric world; for
Levin, readers of poetry construct a world in which the purportedly
deviant expression of a metaphor could be said to be true.
In Levin's MetaphoricWorlds,literary metaphors are "expressions that
evince a degree of linguistic deviance in their composition" (p. 1).
Levin implies that some, perhaps most, language is nonmetaphorical and that there is a significant, statable distinction between "deviant" and "nondeviant" language richer than the distinction between
grammatical and ungrammatical utterances (a distinction that itself
has been breaking down in linguistics for more than twenty years).
What distinguishes metaphors from ordinary expressions is that while
the latter need only be grasped, metaphors, Levin argues, must be
construed.
Levin holds that when we construe literary metaphors, we modify
our conception of the world to fit the "deviant" expression-we conceive of, in his terms, a world in which the "deviant" metaphorical
expression could be true. "The reader must start from the actual
utterance but then, in awareness of the poet's linguistic straits, he must
negotiate through that utterance to the poet's original insight. This
negotiation on the part of the reader represents not so much a semantic construal as it does a phenomenological or conceptual construal"
(pp. 141-42).1
Levin distinguishes the mental acts of "conceiving" (concepts) and
"conceiving of" (conceptions), on the one hand, from imagining, on
the other. "Conceiving of" is an intellection about states of affairs that
do not exist (? I conceive of a calm sea / I conceive of a laughing sea),
whereas imagining is an intellection about states of affairs that do exist
but are not present (? I imagine a laughing sea / I imagine a calm sea).
Acts of imagining can be validated by an "empirical sequel" (we may
1. Levin limits this characterizationof the "metaphoricworlds"of his title to what
one might call "sublime"poetry (he focuses on Wordsworth'sThePrelude[see p. 3]),
but it seems to me that, on his theory, this restriction does not matter: the theory
stands or falls with respect to poetic metaphor as a whole.
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Poetics Today 12:1
find a calm sea one day); acts of conceiving and "conceiving of" have
no empirical sequel (we will never find a laughing sea).
Levin further distinguishes "conceiving" (which produces concepts)
from "conceiving of" (which produces conceptions). Of the two mental acts, conceiving has more "epistemological weight," on this account.
The conceiver has a clear image of what he conceives, and conception
belongs to semantics: one's concept of a horse, for example, is a dictionary entry. But "conceiving of" a laughing sea is, Levin holds, preparing a mental space into which a laughing sea might be placed, but
which cannot be filled with a concept. We can conceive of a laughing
sea but not conceiveone because a laughing sea does not exist.
This "conceiving of" is, for Levin, the metaphoric impulse. Metaphoric construal, and hence reading poetry, consists substantially in
"conceivingof the states of affairs that, taken literally, [the 'deviant sequences' of metaphorical language] describe" (p. 80). In "conceiving
of," a reader of poetry does not interpret the "deviant" language of a
metaphorical sequence; rather, he conceives of a world in which that
language might not be deviant and the conceptions it embodies might
be true. "It is only by the conceiving of such possibilities that a reader
can approximate to the insight or vision that the poet has achieved
and (imperfectly) expressed" (p. 142), a vision creating a metaphoric
world "whose nature, in its abrogation of the canons that govern existential relations in our world, is estranged from common notions of
reality and may rightly be termed metaphoric" (p. 237).
That, in brief, is Levin's theory of literary metaphor. It is essentially a theory of reading certain kinds of metaphorical discourse.
Metaphoric Worldsis immensely learned, but its theory depends on a
special status for literary metaphor in particular and a deviant status
for metaphoric expression in general. I am attracted to the notion
that reading poetry like The Prelude is a world-creating experience in
which the metaphors of that world are true,2 but the attraction is more
to this idea's analogical appeal than to its probable accuracy. Little new
insight about Wordsworth's poetry arises from it.
Levin's theory of metaphoric worlds implies that literary metaphors
are different in kind from the metaphors that occur outside of literary
artworks, and he gives no systematic accounting for this difference. If
we recreate within us the world of a poem by conceiving of a world in
which its metaphors can be literally true, then it must also be the case
that we recreate within us the force of a nonliterary but metaphorical
2. In some respects this facet of Levin's theory is reminiscent of Lakoff's
generative-semantic proposal of"world-creating" verbs, in which the operation of
certain syntactic rules is suspended, e.g., "I dreamed that I was Brigitte Bardot
and that I kissed me [but not *myself]." I have been unable to trace any publication
of this example; I know it only in the oral tradition typical of that now faraway era.
Freeman * New Bookson Metaphor
149
expression by conceiving of a world in which its metaphors are literally
true. But then how do we account for Levin's notion of lexicalization,
the point at which metaphors can be said to "die," to become backgrounded, to become, in Levin's term, "non-deviant"? Every theory
of poetic language that depends on a variety of deviance-aktualisace,
ostranie, Entfremdung-entails some theory of backgrounding or automatization.
Levin seeks a way out of this dilemma by appealing to our knowledge about our own language. Attacking the Lakoff/Johnson account
in MetaphorsWeLive By, he observes: "When I say 'I spent three hours
on this problem' or 'This theory is weak,' I am not aware that these
statements are conditioned in any way by concepts like TIME IS MONEY
or THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS" (pp. 10-11).
Levin is, presumably,
like-
wise unaware that when he writes of a reader "negotiat[ing a] poet's
linguistic straits" (p. 141), he is expressing his understanding of the
reading process through two fundamental and well-attested metaphors, THOUGHTS FOLLOW PATHS (a subset of LIFE IS A JOURNEY) and
POETIC MEANING
IS DEEP
(from
LANGUAGE IS A CONTAINER).
But Levin's
conscious awareness or unawareness of his own understanding is not
evidence bearing on the correctness of this metaphorical analysis, any
more than a native English speaker's lack of conscious awareness that
he or she cannot question parts of conjoined pairs (*Who did I see you
out last night with Bill and?) is evidence bearing on the correctness
of that linguistic analysis. Explicit awareness of our human understanding has very little, if anything, to do with how we represent and
characterize that understanding. Hence the issue for competing analyses of metaphor, as of all linguistic phenomena, is not whether we
are more aware of one reading than another, but which analysis is
supported by better arguments.
Levin insists that "My time is precious" is not metaphorical because
that usage, originally catachretic (he asserts), is now completely lexicalized (in his sense) and hence no longer deviant, that is, it does
not "result in the need to project novel conceptions" (p. 12), and a
figurative expression produces no tension between itself and a term
"normally used in that context" (p. 10). But how do we determine what
is novel? How do we determine "normally used"? How do we determine the tension Levin takes to be crucial to metaphor? How do we
determine when we need no longer "project novel conceptions" for an
expression?3
3. I believe that Levin also misreads Lakoff and Johnson (1980) on the ancient
literal/figurative-language dispute. He quotes some of their discussion of the conceptual metaphor ARGUMENT IS WARand appears to catch them in an inconsistency.
"The authors say: 'the language [of argument] is metaphorically structured.' [Yet
in the very next paragraph] they say that the language of argument is literal. The
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In the end, then, Levin's theory of literary metaphor as deviant
sequences, like all such theories, is subject to the same problems
that Lakoff has documented (1987) for the classical categories of
modal logic and compositional semantics. The canons distinguishing
"deviant" from "nondeviant" sequences, and literary metaphor from
other kinds of metaphor, are Out There, foundational, determined
by necessary and sufficient conditions, based upon academic literary
experience rather than situated in everyday bodily experience. The
necessary consequence of this approach, like the more specifically phenomenological approach of Stambovsky's DepictiveImage, is a theory
of metaphor that is closed and hermetic.
Stambovsky purports to offer a phenomenological theory of metaphor. For him, the "literary experience" in which metaphor is situated is perceptual, not conceptual (p. 66); metaphor arises from "prereflective apprehension" (p. 44), characterized by the "presentational
immediacy" (p. 8) that, in his view, informs all of literary art. "Depictive literary imagery," Stambovsky writes, ". . . articulat[es] perceived
relationships (between objects, people, ideas, or feelings) in a presentationally immediate form that permits the literary reader to assimilate
them 'whole"' (ibid.).
Stambovsky is at pains to differentiate literary experience from literary analysis, which he regards as secondary. Too many studies of
metaphor, he implies, confuse the analysis of metaphor, a discursive
process, with the experience of metaphor, a "prediscursive," immediate experience that is part of an integrated field of meaning, the
"world" of the poem (hardly a revolutionary formulation). In particular, he opposes "atomistic grammatical, linguistic, or semiotic" (or
rhetorical) analysis of literary meaning because, he claims, the "rules
of construal" used in these analyses are "internal to grammatical or
linguistic or semiotic frames of meaning and not necessarily to those
frames of meaning inherent in any given piece of literary art" (p. 47).
What these inherent frames of literary meaning really are, Stambovonly apparent way to achieve consistency between these two characterizations is
to assume that by the first formulation they mean not that the language used in
argument is metaphorical but that lying behind and 'structuring'that language is
the metaphorical concept. This leaves us with the claim that the actual language in
which argument is conducted is in fact literal" (p. 7). Lakoff and Johnson's point
there (amplified by Johnson in The Bodyin the Mind and by Lakoff and Turner
in Morethan CoolReason, both discussed below) is simply to reject the distinction
between figurative and "literal"language, and they do so in the very passage Levin
quotes: "The metaphor [ARGUMENT IS WAR] is not merely in the words we use-it
is in our very concept of an argument. The language of argument is not poetic,
fanciful, or rhetorical; it is literal" (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 5).
Freeman * New Books on Metaphor
151
sky does not say. He insists that "aesthetic perception in its primitive,
living immediacy is the primary (if not the only) epistemic modality of
literary experience" (p. 48).
The few actual literary analyses in The DepictiveImage (particularly
the discussion of Emily Dickinson's "A Bird came down the Walk")are
acute. But they occupy only twenty pages or so of a short book. The
rest is, for the most part, an often opaque account of the philosophical
literature and other secondary sources. Stambovsky implies a disdain
for studies of metaphor that are merely "concerned with what metaphor is and what it does" (p. 6); this view may account for the book's
silence on many issues central to a theoretical treatment of metaphor:
What is metaphor? What is metaphor's role in language? What is its
role in semantic change? How do we typologize metaphors? What are
the constraints on metaphor? Moreover, in insisting upon a particularly literary experience for literary metaphor, Stambovsky, like Levin,
implies that metaphor in literature is different from nonliterary metaphor, a position that resurrects the ancient and unsustainable claim for
a special literary language. Stambovsky's appeal to the elusive notion
of the "literary experience" as justification for literary metaphor's independent status weakens the force of his claims for and about metaphor. The important context for literary metaphor and any theory of
it is not "narrative or poetic context" but the "living experience" that,
on Stambovsky's own account, metaphor communicates.
Only one of these books, Ann and John Thompson's Shakespeare:
Meaning and Metaphor,focuses upon the metaphorical habits of a single
writer. More such studies are needed. But this one seems to fall between two-or among several-stools. Each chapter of this series
of five, more or less free-standing essays (plus an introduction, an
afterword, and a valuable bibliography) takes a different topic from
the Shakespearean canon and applies to it a different theoretical approach: the Lakoff/Johnson paradigm to time metaphors in Troilus
and Cressida;the little-known semantic field theory of Eva Kittay and
Adrienne Lehrer to animal metaphors in King Lear; the metaphorical
theory of Group (t to body metaphors in Hamlet; J. F. Ross's analogy
theory to Sonnet 63; and the views of Donald Davidson on metaphorical meaning to the metaphors of books and printing that abound in
Shakespeare's work.4
The result is something of a hodgepodge. Because the Thompsons
do not give a critical or comparative account of any of these theories-which vary widely in quality and appropriateness-the book
4. See Kittay and Lehrer (1981); Group pt (1970); Ross (1981); and Davidson
(1978).
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cannot be read as a metatheoretical treatise on metaphor. Likewise,
the Thompsons' theoretical eclecticism prevents them from tracing
particular metaphorical habits through the plays and poetry (a project
that might produce very interesting and novel results, in light of the
recent theoretical advances in metaphor chronicled here). This book
contains some new and occasionally penetrating readings of particular passages
(the authors are quite good on the PEOPLE ARE BOOKS
metaphor [pp. 165-70]). It has value as a somewhat idiosyncratic survey of certain modern theories of metaphor and their applications to
one author. But the overall effect is more that of a collection of essays
by different hands (the seams of authorship frequently show) than a
sustained theoretical or literary argument. Precisely this kind of fully
articulated, consistent theoretical discussion typifies the three books
that center on cognitive metaphor.
Of these, the clearest and most comprehensive introduction to the
range of issues for cognitive metaphor isJohnson's TheBodyin theMind,
a book written with elegance, learning, and passion. For Johnson, the
theory of metaphor entails not only a theory of language but a theory
of understanding in its deepest sense. "Meaning and rationality," he
concludes, "are grounded in recurring structures of embodied human
understanding" (p. 209). On this account, metaphor is not deviant
or "special" language; metaphors are not derived from or parasitic
on "ordinary" language; they cannot be explained by reduction to a
propositional literal core; metaphor is not decorative (arguably, on this
theory, it is not even a "figure of speech" but speech-that is to say,
metaphor does not depict or express understandlanguage-itself);
or
experience. Rather, Johnson argues compellingly, metaphor is
ing
the basis of understanding and enables us to structure experience.
For Johnson, the source of metaphor is a range of physical experiences from which we extract image schemata, preconceptual gestalt
structures that are "recurring, dynamic pattern[s] of our perceptual
interactions and motor programs that give ... coherence and structure
to our experience" (p. xiv). Metaphorical projection consists in our
mapping these nonpropositional schemata, their structure and their
components, from our physical experience onto our nonphysical, abstract experience. The understanding achieved through metaphor is
shared-everyone in a particular culture has roughly the same bodily
the image schemata that construct that understandexperiences-and
ing "constitute a large part of what we mean by form itself in our
experience" (p. 206).
This account, then, characterizes, for example, the immense number
of BALANCE metaphors in our culture, as follows. From an early age we
learn physically about bodily balance: we learn to walk, we carry things,
Freeman * New Books on Metaphor
153
we lean over and pick up objects, we fall down, etcetera. We understand these repeatable and structurally similar bodily experiences, and
their meaning for us emerges, Johnson argues, as we construct a preconceptual (and in this case, nonvisual) image schema that contains
the general concomitants of balancing (equilibrium, symmetry, bodily
homeostasis, etc.). We then map this image schema and its structure
from the source domain of this repeatable physical experience onto the
target domains of, for example, our ethical beliefs (notions of fairness
and equity), our thought patterns (the mathematical notion of equivalence), even our aesthetic experience (the phenomenon of symmetry
in the visual arts, or resolution in such disparate artistic structures
as literary plots, sonnets, and sonata form). Precisely the structuring
of experience entailed by this theory of cognitive semantics is, for
Johnson, the creative function of metaphor.
The centrality of bodily experience in this theory explains such facts
as the dependence on the horizontal plane of the balance metaphors
in our language about law and justice. For example, we say that "the
evidence weighs in favor of the plaintiff," that a witness's testimony
is "biased," or that a jury is "leaning" one way or the other in its deliberations. Each of these metaphors (and the many others like them)
depends upon the image schema associated with our folk theory ofjustice, which includes our cultural icon for justice, a blindfolded woman
holding an old-fashioned two-pan scale. In these metaphors, the scale
is out of balance in the horizontal plane.5 Although we do have metaphors of verticalness
(MORE IS UP, exemplified
in "the stock market
rose 5.17 points today"), we have almost no metaphors that depend
upon vertical balance, upon some kind of stasis between flying and
falling. This gap exists because we have no bodily experience of selfpropelled flight from which to project an image-schematic structure
onto more abstract, nonphysical events. Indeed, the very notion of vertical balance is hard to characterize-hard to understand-because
we have no "geography of human experience," in Johnson's formulation (p. xxxvii), within which to comprehend that balance. Precisely
this lacuna in our metaphorical lexicon is what gives such peculiar
force and mystery to Gerard Manley Hopkins's picture, in "The Windhover," of a hovering kestrel on a windy day: "in his riding / Of the
rolling level underneath him steady air ...." The kestrel is balanced
between flying and falling, but Hopkins must comprehend it within
a source domain, horseback riding, of which we have real or vicari5. While in the image schema evoked by "biased" or "leaning," for example, one
pan of the scale is higher than the other, the structural aspect of this source domain
that is mapped onto the target domain is that the plane created by the imbalance
is horizontal but not parallel to the "just" plane of the icon.
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ous bodily experience. If birds could write poetry or humans could
fly, the structure of our metaphors would be different, a formulation
comprehensible only within an experiential theory of metaphor.
This synchronic evidence for a cognitive theory of metaphor is supported as well by evidence from the history of language. Johnson cites
a rich array of research by Eve Sweetser, showing that an important
source for semantic change is metaphorical projection from bodily experience to more abstract domains. Vision, Sweetser points out, is our
primary source of data from early infancy; with the human sense of
sight (unlike, for example, our sense of smell) we can focus at will on
various features of what we see; what different people see in a given
situation is more or less identical if they have the same point of view,
so we have "shared public knowledge" of what we see. Hence it is
no accident that words having to do with physical sight came to be
used metaphorically for knowledge ("I see your point"; "He has no
insight into his own problems," etc.) and equally no accident that we
have few, if any, words having to do with knowledge or understanding
based on the human faculty of hearing. As an image schema, hearing lacks the structure and components of vision that can be mapped
onto understanding: our hearing is much harder to focus, and while
it can select, it does so with greater difficulty than vision. Both abilities
are elements crucial to our understanding.6 Even the modern locution "I hear ya," meaning roughly "I understand," lacks intellectual
conviction and connotes at most a fuzzy emotional sympathy precisely
because the faculty of hearing appeals chiefly to intercommunication.
Hence the sense of "I hear ya" is almost that of a powerless phatic communion-"I sympathize, but there really isn't much I can do except
listen."
The paucity of metaphors projected from vertical equilibrium and
hearing to more abstract domains points up two related and important
issues in metaphor that this theory elegantly resolves: groundedness
and objectivity. Because metaphor (and hence human understanding)
is grounded in repeatable bodily experience, we can have no metaphors by which we understand abstract concepts that depend on a
bodily experience that we have not had, directly or indirectly, or that
posit a connection between a physical experience with a particular
structure and an abstract experience lacking the crucial elements of
that structure. "At the very least," Johnson asserts, "image-schematic
structures and their metaphorical projections have a shared, public
character which gives them a central role in the objectivity of meaning. By 'objectivity,' of course, I mean that there are meaning gestalts
6. This discussion summarizes part of chapter 2 of Sweetser (1990), a groundbreaking work that I have seen only in galleys.
Freeman * New Bookson Metaphor
155
connected to structures of bodily experience that we all can share"
(p. 175).
Thus, for Johnson, not only metaphor but understanding, reason,
and imagination-intellectual
activities that perceive new experiential structures and generate new understanding from them-"must
be understood . . . as an interaction of a human organism with its
environment (which includes its language, cultural traditions, values,
institutions, and the history of its social community)" (p. 209). The
objectivity of cognitive metaphor is not guaranteed sub specie aeternitatis, after the manner of classical category theory, but in the flux of
the human condition.
The Body in the Mind contains much else that is of interest primarily
to philosophers: Johnson's theory of imagination, and its derivation
from Kant; his disputes with Objectivism; the details of his theory
of meaning and understanding. Its importance for students of poetics resides in the broader philosophical context within which Johnson
embeds the theory of metaphor that he and George Lakoff first articulated in MetaphorsWeLive By.7This context is crucial to the theory
of literary metaphor that underlies Mark Turner's deep and provocative study of kinship metaphors, Death is the Mother of Beauty: Mind,
Metaphor,Criticism.
Turner seeks to account for the ubiquity and potency of the metaphors
typified in such passages as Keats's
hist, when the airy stress
Of music'skiss impregnatesthe free winds
And with a sympathetictouch unbinds
IEolianmagic from their lucid wombs....
I: 783-86)
(Endymion
In this typically rich Keatsian figure, we understand the "free winds"
as the mothers, the givers of birth to, harp tunes ("'Eolian magic");
their father is Music. Turner would also explain what such a figure has
in common with Dylan Thomas's "Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter" ("A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in
London")-in particular, how we variously understand the relations
between the "motherhood" of a city (whose child lies buried in it) and
the "motherhood" of a natural entity (the winds that mother IEolian
harp tunes).
Likewise, Turner's theory seeks to explain why we do not produce
kinship metaphors like "*Sable night, father of dread and fear" and
7. Lakoff(1987),not underreviewhere, providesa similarcontextfor the theory
of metaphorin linguisticsand cognitivepsychology.Whetherby coincidenceor
design,these booksare companionpieces.
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"*God of our mothers, Whose Almighty hand Leads forth in glory
All the starry band." Finally, Turner seeks to account for the deep explanatory power of metaphor in our culture. He best formulates this
power in discussing science:
Science models systemsso thatwe can recognize,explain,and predictthem.
The conceptualmetaphorsimplicitin our languageare a kind of science. It
might be said that genetic laws of transmissionor the sociobiologicalprinciple of inclusivefitness make sense out of metaphorsin languagebased on
or functionalpropertytransfer,but the
metaphoricinferences like inheritance
influence really works in the reverse order: it is the earlier formulationof
these sciences in the metaphorsof thought and language that made their
scientificformulationsseem conceptuallyso natural. (P. 194)
Turner accomplishes these goals in a study that is exhaustive, richly
documented, finely articulated, and extraordinarily broad in the range
of knowledge and literary examples that it brings to bear on these
questions. He is at his best and most relaxed when he discusses literary texts, in particular an obscure passage from Blake and Book 2
of Milton's Paradise Lost; the highly structured theoretical discussion
elsewhere in the book can be hard to follow.
The fundamental task of this book is to explain how we understand a rich domain of literary expression. In that understanding, as
in our command of language, we make infinite use of finite means.
Those finite means, Turner argues persuasively, consist of seven basic
kinship metaphors coupled with ten ways of interpreting those metaphors he calls "metaphoric inference patterns." "Some combination of
these conceptual inference patterns," Turner concludes, "accounts for
every one of the indefinitely many specific kinship metaphors in our
language" (p. 195).
An example
of a basic kinship metaphor is THE WHOLE IS THE
explains why Russians speak of Russia as
MOTHER OF THE PARTS, which
the "motherland" (as long as there has been a Russia, it has had restive
parts) and why Germans speak of a united Germany as the "fatherland" (for Germans, whether or not the nation has been divided at
a particular historical moment, its unity has always been both a goal
and an instrument, and father metaphors focus on instrumentality).
An example of a metaphorical inference pattern is place and time as
parent, which gives us an interpretational template for "Babylon is the
mother of harlots and abominations," a metaphor that derives from
the basic kinship metaphor AN ABSTRACT PROPERTY IS THE PARENT OF
HAVING THAT PROPERTY. Because we have a folk theory
SOMETHING
that parents and children share traits of character, we infer, from
the assertion that Babylon's children are harlots and abominations,
that Babylon is a harlot and an abomination; the metaphor shares
Freeman * New Books on Metaphor
157
this metaphorical inference pattern with the very different line, "Deep
with the first dead lies London's daughter."
Of these metaphorical inference patterns, the two most important,
for Turner, are causationas progeneration(confusingly, a key conceptual
metaphor
on this account is
CAUSATION
IS
[note: not as] PROGENERA-
to which he devotes an entire chapter, and lineage in the world,
mind, and behavior,by which, for example, poets often depict feeling
as the parent of behavior ("Fear, father of cruelty"). These two patterns, working together, Turner shows, "account for the principal use
of kinship metaphor, namely to express paths by which things in the
world, the mind, and behavior can spring from one another" (p. 143).
Some metaphors depend upon what cognitive semanticists call
Idealized Cognitive Models of kinship. These include such metaphors
as "the true child of vanity is violence" and "stench, diseases, and old
filth, their mother," which are interpretable by means of the inference
pattern causation as progeneration.In metaphors that partake of these
Idealized Cognitive Models, the cause corresponds to the parent and
the effect to the child; for a metaphor to be interpretable under this
inference pattern, a number of conditions must hold: cause and effect
must be capable of being personified, for example; they must be enduring, cohesive, and individuated. These requirements explain, for
example, the fact that for particular phenomena we have metaphorical
parents/causes that are individuated notions like night or age, rather
than the diffuse, unknowable, unpersonifiable biological processes of
reproduction, and the fact that we use, as source domains for metaphors of anger, relatively simple notions like heat and pressure, rather
than Freudian concepts of displacement.8
In contrast to the rich, creative kinship metaphors that involve
the causation as progenerationinference pattern are those interpreted
through mere similarity. In creative metaphors, Turner argues, we reconceive the target domain, with the result that these metaphors create
meaning. In similarity metaphors, we merely seek to match concepts.
Turner's treatment of this process, though as highly articulated as his
discussion of causation, is much clearer and gives greater insight into
the real virtues of his method.
When we interpret metaphors depending on similarity, the question
is "which connections to look for and which to ignore" (p. 185). Our
first move is to seek to match the stereotypical behaviors or operations
of the two concepts in, for example, "Music is twin-sister to poetry."
These concepts have the same "stereotypical components" and differ
TION),
8. For the most recent full treatment of particular metaphors, see the treatment
of anger, pride, and love in Kovesces (1986).
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Poetics Today 12:1
only in material. In metaphors where the concepts are not equally
behavioral, such as "My dazzled sight he oft deceives, A Brother of
the dancing leaves" (Wordsworth, "The Green Linnet," II, 33-34),
we map from the more articulated behavior of the glancing light and
rhythmic movement of the leaves to the less fully articulated concept
of the bird-like the leaves in the wind, the linnet darts and moves in
and out of the sunlight.
What this chapter amounts to is a handbook on the process of interpreting metaphors within Turner's theoretical framework. The book
is much more successful here and in chapter three's practical criticism of individual literary texts, particularly Turner's treatment of the
crucial kinship relations and the meaning their metaphors create for
Milton's account of Satan, Sin, and Death in ParadiseLost.The theoretical chapters show flashes of brilliance and conceptual breadth, but the
complexity of the theoretical framework often exceeds the benefit of
its insights. A more open terminological network might have captured
fewer generalizations, but would have enhanced the comprehensibility
of what it characterized.
Perhaps the occasionally fierce density of Death is theMotherof Beauty
is the fate of highly theoretical books (twenty-five years ago, Chomsky's Aspects of the Theoryof Syntax wasn't nightstand reading either);
Turner's more recent collaborative volume with George Lakoff, More
than Cool Reason, is broader in scope, more practical, less intensely
theoretical, and-possibly as a result-likely to be the standard work
in metaphor for some time to come.
As might be expected from a book subtitled A Field Guide to Poetic
Metaphor, More than Cool Reason sets out as theoretical background
much of the apparatus in The Bodyin theMind and Death is theMotherof
Beauty. What seem crucial in this later book are four points: clear accounts of specific metaphors; the theoretical derivation of what Lakoff
and Turner call "conceptual compositions"; how the theory of cognitive metaphor makes possible "second-order global readings" (what,
in Freeman [1976], I called "iconic syntax") of particular poems (they
produce a brilliant analysis of William Carlos Williams's "To a Solitary Disciple"); and a powerful demonstration of how an important
cultural model, the Great Chain of Being, explains an important quasiliterary form, the proverb, and, more important for our purposes,
proverb-like poems and passages.
Lakoff and Turner give a particularly clear and rigorous account of
metaphors focusing on the central concepts of life, death, and time.
They show, for example, how the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor entails
particular correspondences between the source domain of the journey
and the target domain of life: the person leading a life is a traveler;
Freeman * New Bookson Metaphor
159
his purposes are destinations; the means for achieving purposes are
routes, etcetera (p. 3). This metaphor is shown to entail others, such
as BIRTH IS ARRIVALand DEATH IS DEPARTURE, and to give more satisfying explanations of poems like Emily Dickinson's "Because I could not
stop for Death" and Frost's "The Road Not Taken." Other life-related
metaphors (PEOPLE ARE PLANTS, A LIFETIME IS A YEAR, DEATH IS REST,
and several others) are invoked to give an exceptionally rich, suggestive reading of the complex metaphorical structure in Shakespeare's
Sonnet 73, "That time of year thou mayst in me behold."
This reading shows, among other things, that the concept of
"imagery" is insufficient to explain the peculiar power of one quatrain
in this much-studied sonnet:
In me thou seest the glowingof such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereonit must expire,
Consumed with that whichit was nourishedby.
(11.9-12)
In order to explain the last line before the sonnet's couplet, we do
not need imagery-the line has none-but rather access to our "nonimagistic knowledge about fires" (p. 31). The ashes that consume the
fire, Lakoff and Turner argue, "are two things: that which smothers
the embers and that which is left over of the wood. Thus, what ultimately consumes [the speaker's] life is what once fed, or 'nourished,'
the fires of youth" (pp. 32-33).
Our experience with hearth fires structures our understanding of
this passage. If we have had no such experience, we need the explanatory footnote that editors of this sonnet usually provide. Nonimagistic
bodily experience of a highly articulated sort is thus projected onto
the abstract notions of love in late life. If the structure of that source
domain (fires) lacks the structure of the target domain (death, and the
nature of love relationships as death approaches), the analysis fails.
The theory of cognitive metaphor thus has a built-in constraint: the
requirement that there be a degree of structural isomorphism between
source and target domains. This fact is important in a time when the
term "theory" is loosely used of any form of literary analysis. Cognitive metaphor and the theory of embodied human understanding
produce analyses that are capable, in principle, of being wrong (and
hence of being right); the theory provides a basis for choosing among
the characterizations it produces.9
Similar theoretical consequences are entailed by the Lakoff/Turner
derivation of "conceptual compositions" (p. 72) like personification,
9. For discussion of the best-known modern literary "theory" and how it fails these
(and many other) tests of a theory, see Ellis (1989).
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which, they show, is notjust another figure of speech and not identical
to simplex metaphor. Rather, various kinds of personification (a type
of which its various actualizations are tokens) are derived by independently motivated, "everyday" simplex metaphors that combine in
particular patterns. For example, not all personifications depend on
persons in the source domain. While the LIFEIS AJOURNEY
metaphor
maps from a traveler (a person) in the source domain of the journey
to a person in the target domain, in the phrase "the Grim Reaper,"
we understand as a person (the reaper) something that is not a person
(death). We compose the personification from two basic metaphors:
PEOPLEAREPLANTS(independently motivated because it is required in
order to explain such lines of poetry as, "My way of life is fallen into
the sere, the yellow leaf") and EVENTS
AREACTIONS
(independently re"Do not go gentle
to
to
like
explain-or begin
explain-lines
quired
into that good night," where the event of death becomes an action
with an agent). By PEOPLE ARE PLANTS, people are understood as crops
that grow and must be harvested by someone; by EVENTS ARE ACTIONS,
the event of death is understood as an action caused by an agent; by
their combination, the action is harvesting and the agent is the reaper.
Analysis of this sort can be falsified not only if the structure of the
proposed source domains is not to be found in the structure of the
target domains, but also if the metaphors thought to form the composition are unique to this particular derivation-if, in short, they are
not independently motivated.
This concern with independently motivated metaphors as the basis
for analysis is the most convincing aspect of the Lakoff/Turner
"second-order global reading" of syntactic patterning in Williams's
"To a Solitary Disciple." What they mean by "second-order global
reading" occurs where Williams's speaker instructs the "disciple" to
observe that the lines of the church steeple being contemplated in the
poem rise above the abstract outline of the church building itself to
surround the moon:
Rathergrasp
how the dark converginglines
of the steeple
meet at the pinnacleperceive how its little ornament
tries to stop themSee how it fails!
(11.12-20)
At just this point, a regular patteru in the poem's syntax, "rather x
than y," is disrupted. Lakoff and Turner observe: "Just as the lines
of the steeple escape the pattern of the steeple, so the words describing the escape themselves escape the expected sentence structure"
Freeman * New Bookson Metaphor
161
(p. 155). This mapping between the structure of the sentence and the
structure of the image of escape is, they argue, metaphorical in nature,
partaking of the independently
motivated metaphor FORMIS MOTION
("Two paths diverged in a yellow wood"-the form of the path splits
in two; we understand that form as the motion of diverging). Because
the structure of the source domain (the syntax that escapes its pattern)
is consistent with that of the target domain (the lines of the steeple
that escape its pattern), and because this consistency yields a globally
consistent reading of the poem (briefly and insufficiently, the poem
argues for a way of seeing, in both senses), this mapping is iconic, a
fact which, in the authors' view, constitutes part of "the power that
metaphor has to reveal comprehensive hidden meanings to us, to allow
us to find meanings beyond the surface, to interpret texts as wholes,
and to make sense of patterns of events" (p. 159).
The value of this notion of a syntactic metaphor is evident in a
variety of other contexts. It seems, for example, a better way to characterize the iconic syntax in poetry, about which I have published a
number of papers.'0 The most fully developed of these readings (Freeman 1978) traces a strongly causative-inchoative pattern of verbs in
the first stanza of Keats's "To Autumn." But merely tracing the pattern does not suffice to establish the meaning claimed for it (that Keats
sought to make the sun the ultimate causer of natural process in the
poem's world). What does establish a meaning for this syntactic pattern is to see it as constituting the source domain for the independently
motivated metaphor CLOSENESS IS STRENGTH OF EFFECT (discussed in
Lakoff and Johnson [1980: 128-32]; in effect, they argue that a sentence like "John is unhappy" depicts stronger feeling than "John is not
happy" because the syntax of the first puts the negative unit closer to
the negated adjective. See Freeman [1989] and, for a fuller account of
iconic syntax from a purely linguistic point of view, Haiman [1985].).
The causes and effects of Autumn's agency are built into the verbs
("Conspiring with him how to load and bless / With fruit the vines
that round the thatch-eves run"-i.e., how to CAUSE the vines to become laden [effect -> load] with fruit). There is a mapping between
the structure of the stanza's images (repeated, intense burgeonings)
and the structure of its language (repeated expression of causativeinchoatives in one word). The CLOSENESS IS STRENGTH OF EFFECT metaphor bridges the epistemological gap between pattern and meaning
that was problematic in my earlier work (Freeman 1978).
The same kind of explanatory power is convincingly demonstrated
in Lakoff and Turner's extended discussion of how proverbs and
proverb-like poetry can be explained by the interaction of one per10. See Freeman (1975, 1976, 1978, 1986).
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vasive metaphor,
GENERIC IS SPECIFIC, the conversational
Maxim of
Quantity ("be as informative as is required and not more so"),11 a folk
theory of forms of being (that their attributes cause their behavior),
and a nearly universal cultural model, the Great Chain of Being. These
principles, when applied to the famous proverb-like lines from King
Lear, "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is / To have a thankless
child" (I, iv, 279-80), can yield a particularly rich reading.
The folk theory we have of snakes is that they bite (in fact, most
don't strike, and those who do don't bite, having fangs, not teeth, but
folk theory has little to do with herpetology), and that they slither and
do not walk (for that reason, they are at the bottom of the Animal
segment of the Great Chain, for they are in that respect least like animals). We have some highly specific folk knowledge about the role of
the serpent in the Garden of Eden. We also know that snakes have
scales, that they shed their skins, etcetera. This irrelevant information is ignored by the Maxim of Quantity, which selects from our folk
theory of snakes only the highest-level information about them, that
they bite and that one of them caused Eve to eat the fruit from the
Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Our snake-lore is part of the
source domain. Our folk theory of the Nature of Things says that an
attribute of snakes, their teeth, causes them to bite and inflict pain.
The GENERIC IS SPECIFICmetaphor picks out the relevant informa-
tion from the Great Chain cultural model as it structures the target
domain, King Lear, his feelings, and his daughter Goneril. Lear is a
man, a father, and a king. His daughter, below him on the Great Chain
in all three of these respects, owes him deference as a man, gratitude
as her father, and allegiance as her king. Her ingratitude in seeking to
strip him of his retainers makes it clear that she will give him none of
these. She has, in three ways, violated the Great Chain and caused her
father emotional pain. Intense physical pain is caused when serpents
bite humans (to say nothing of when a serpent frustrates God's will
for man by causing his fall). By the independently motivated metaphor EMOTIONAL PAIN IS PHYSICAL PAIN and by the cultural model of
the Great Chain, we understand Goneril's ingratitude to Lear as the
bite of a snake, as a triple violation of the moral order of the universe
as epitomized in the Great Chain,12 and as a reenactment of the Fall
of Man.
It will be contended that, when we read that line, we extract the
11. The Maxim of Quantity was originally formulated in Grice (1975). The wording here is that of Lakoff and Turner.
12. A point made again in Act IV, when, learning that Lear has stormed out onto
the heath, Albany reproaches Goneril: "If that the heavens do not their visible
spirits / Send quickly down to tame these vile offenses, / It will come, / Humanity
must perforce prey on itself, / Like monsters of the deep" (IV, ii, 46-50).
Freeman * New Bookson Metaphor
163
biblical allusion and the Great Chain information at once, and hence
do not require all the machinery of the
GENERIC IS
SPECIFICmetaphor,
the folk theory of the Nature of Things, and the Maxim of Quantity.
This objection partakes of the same mistake that Levin makes when
he insists that, because he is not aware that a particular metaphor
structures his understanding of a particular formulation, the analysis
positing that metaphor is incorrect. Lakoff and Turner are not proposing a production model but an explanatory model-that is, a theory
of metaphor. And a good theory must be explicit about its structural
descriptions and the operations based on those descriptions-here,
what particular pieces of information are relevant to the operation of
the Great Chain cultural model and how these are established. The
rigor with which Lakoff and Turner present this kind of analysis is,
again, the book's greatest strength. It is readable and contains many
useful insights. But, above all, it demands in its analyses a theoretical
explicitness that in my experience is unprecedented in literary study.
When we assess a theory of metaphor, the final judgment depends on
more than just that theory's elegance and force. Metaphor is crucial
not only in our verbal artworks, but in our lives. Hence the deeper
question is whether a particular theory is intuitively satisfying, whether
it makes the kinds of judgments that seem both right and relevant, not
just to literature but to all our uses of metaphor. The analyses yielded
by the cognitive approach to metaphor reflected in these books seem
to me to speak precisely to our intuitions about language and poetry
in the first instance and, more deeply, to our sense of what it means to
be human. Because it is grounded in embodied human understanding, cognitive metaphor as a theory explains in the same way that tonal
music pleases and delights. Because tonality is grounded in the physics
of the natural universe, it embodies the music of the spheres. Construed as human understanding that is constructed from our physical experience, metaphor arises, as the composer/conductor Leonard
Bernstein once remarked about our reception of tonal music, from das
Lied von der Erde.13
References
Davidson, Donald
1978 "What Metaphors Mean," Critical Inquiry 5(1): 31-47.
13. Bernstein was alluding with deliberate ambiguity, of course, to the Mahler
symphony of that name. We experience Mahler's Lied von der Erde through the
most humanly physical of all the many instruments at the composer's command:
the human voice-and
a particular human voice at that, the archetypal Earth
Mother of voices, the mezzo-soprano.
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Poetics Today 12:1
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1989 Against Deconstruction (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
Freeman, Donald C.
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