The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [134]
The point is not that one view of the power and nature of metaphor is right and another one wrong—to the contrary. There are many uses for these analyses, and the emergence of cognitive linguistics and other areas of cognitive science have been productive as well as provocative. What I am suggesting instead is that this kind of analysis is profoundly unuseful for the interpretation of literature. The claim that imaginative creation needs to be “grounded” in something else—a turn of phrase that recalls the figure-ground conundrums of visual perception—is an empirical claim about the dependence of language and figure on the extra-literary existence of things in the world.
It might be helpful then to consider how these visual images strike the eye and the mind. The famous example of the Rubin vase, included by the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin in his two-volume book Visual Figures, shows a vase in the center of a visual field. The eye sees either the vase as figure and the surrounding area as ground, or two symmetrical human profiles, one on the left and one on the right, with the area in the center as ground. Each visual interpretation is valid, but even though the viewer knows they are both present, only one can (ordinarily) be seen at a time. This kind of image (sometimes called an optical illusion) was widely influential for Gestalt psychology and also for visual artists of the period. If we take this image as a figure for figure, what we can learn from it is that the idea of a ground, in the empirical sense asserted by Lakoff and Turner (“there must be some grounding, some concepts that are not completely understood via metaphor to serve as source domains”) depends upon the pre-determination of these undecidable entities: faces or vase? All language is figure, and figuration: it is the idea that we can see through language to encounter the real that is ultimately what might be called the conceptual illusion. Again, this is not to say that nothing is real, an empty claim as well as a foolish one, but that the real is perceived through language. Every act of language is a creative act of figuration, whether the figure is fresh and new or so familiar as to be undetectable (the so-called dead metaphor). Even dead metaphors are not dead, but sleeping, waiting to be awakened by a new poet, a naive speaker, or an inquisitive child. This is one of the sources of wit as well as wisdom that is “bodied forth” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the play from which Lakoff and Turner take their title and to which we will now briefly return.
Misreading Theseus Misreading
The debate between Theseus and Hippolyta offers the literary critic an opportunity for a double reading of Theseus’s lines:
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush suppos’d a bear! (5.1.18–22)
To suppose the bush a bear, to see or read it as a bear (in the night, in the darkness, in the dream world), is not, or not only, a mistake; it is also a true reading, for the moment, at least. This is the power of strong imagination, and if Theseus’s tone is dismissive (like that of Lakoff and Turner’s “literal meaning theorist”), his words are truer than he understands them to be: the frightening bush/bear is not a mistake, but a creative act.
The literary critic Rosalie Colie describes what she calls “unmetaphoring” in the work of Shakespeare and other writers, whose practice of “unmetaphoring and remetaphoring familiar literary clichés” creates “new forms and patterns to bequeath to successors.