The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [130]
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.27
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.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