The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [132]
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.
Field Work
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