The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [124]
Today, however, discussion of the power of figurative language has moved away from literature and toward cognition theory and brain science. Cognitive psychologists and cognitive linguists seek to read through metaphor and other rhetorical figures to discover something about the functioning of the mind.
The Metaphor of Metaphor
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s book Metaphors We Live By (1980) focuses on metaphor’s “power to define reality.” In most cases, they argue, “what is at issue is not the truth or the falsity of a metaphor but the perceptions and inferences that follow from it.”4 Metaphor, according to Lakoff and Johnson, is an aspect of cognitive thinking, “pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action.”5 Metaphors We Live By offers examples like “Argument Is War,” “Time Is Money,” “Life Is a Journey,” and then, in a chapter called “Some Further Examples,” a list of concepts, each an umbrella topic under which actual metaphors could be grouped, such as “Theories Are Buildings” (sample metaphorical terms: foundation, buttress), “Ideas Are Food” (half-baked, fishy, can’t swallow), “Love Is Magic” (cast a spell, entranced, bewitching), and so on.6 Ideas, as Lakoff and Johnson would have it, can be not only food but also people, plants, products, commodities, money, cutting instruments, and fashions, while love can be magic, madness, war, a magnet, or a patient. In other words, language is figure. The notion that metaphor is not “just” language but also influences thought and action means that—as poets, linguists, philosophers, rhetoricians, and politicians have known for quite a while—what people say and how they say it affects, shapes, and directs understanding and response. But the phrase not just in language is indicative of a devaluation of the power and nature of words and rhetoric, and it contributes to the remanding of the literary to a secondary or tertiary role. This point is underscored in an afterword, where the supposed primacy of the conceptual is described under the heading “Persistent Fallacies”:
The single biggest obstacle to understanding our findings has been the refusal to recognize the conceptual nature of metaphor. The idea that metaphors are nothing but linguistic expressions—a mere matter of words—is such a common fallacy that it has kept many readers from even entertaining the idea that we think metaphorically.7
Notice the rhetoric of diminishment: “nothing but linguistic expressions”; “a mere matter of words.” Could we call this, following Lakoff and Johnson, the metaphor of “Language Is Negligible”?
“Life is a journey” and “time is money” are cultural clichés of the kind that we associate with the greeting-card industry. Actually most of the metaphors mentioned above or listed in Metaphors to Live By are often (and erroneously) called dead metaphors, which is to say, metaphors whose originality of expression has eroded over time so that we no longer encounter them as figurative (for example, the horsepower of an engine, or the foot of a page). Do readers who encounter the phrase half-baked ideas think, consciously or subliminally, of cookie dough? In short, the concept of metaphor becomes a metaphor in Lakoff and Johnson’s work. “Happy Is Up” (to use another of their examples, the one they call “the major metaphor in our culture”)8 is not a metaphor; it is a concept.
In subsequent books, George Lakoff pushes his claim about metaphor to encompass, for example, the political differences between