The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [133]
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.”34 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.”35
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.
A First-Order Phenomenon
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