The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [161]
26. Ibid., 250.
27. Ibid., 242–43.
28. T. S. Eliot, “Whispers of Immortality,” in Collected Poems 1909–1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1952), 32–33.
29. George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), xi.
30. Ibid.
31. W. S. Merwin and J. Mouissaieff Masson, trans. Sanskrit Love Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), reprinted as The Peacock’s Egg (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981); Lakoff and Turner, More Than Cool Reason, 60, 70, 89, 91, 101, 102; Jerome Rothenberg, ed., Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 40.
32. Lakoff and Turner, More Than Cool Reason, 92.
33. Ibid., 90.
34. Ibid., xii.
35. Ibid., 267.
36. To underscore this idea and its importance, we might recall Nietzsche’s image of the “mobile army” discussed in chapter 7, a passage that Lakoff and Turner dispute—characterizing it as the “It’s All Metaphor Position.”
Paul de Man’s reading of this passage is indicative, since he sees it as a reminder of “the figurality of all language”:
What is being forgotten in this false literalism is precisely the rhetorical, symbolic quality of all language. The degradation of metaphor into literal meaning is not condemned because it is the forgetting of a truth but much rather because it forgets the un-truth, the lie that the metaphor was in the first place. It is a naïve belief in the proper meaning of the metaphor without awareness of the problematic nature of its factual, referential foundation.
Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 111.
37. John Keats, letter to Benjamin Bailey, November 22, 1817, in Selected Letters of John Keats, ed. Grant F. Scott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 54.
38. De Man’s comments on metaphor were written some years prior to the emergence of the cognitive theories popularized by Lakoff and his collaborators, but they nonetheless provide a thoughtful counterpoint, since De Man is concerned chiefly with stressing “the futility of trying to repress the rhetorical structure of texts in the name of uncritically preconceived text models such as transcendental teleologies or, at the other end of the spectrum, mere codes.” Contrary to the primacy claimed by cognitive theorists for stories and parables as the building blocks of mind, De Man offers the possibility that “temporal articulations, such as narratives or histories, are a correlative of rhetoric and not the reverse.” Paul de Man, “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” 16, 19, 27, 28.
39. Rosalie Colie, Shakespeare’s Living Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), 11.
40. Thus, King Lear’s despairing “In such a night / To shut me out” harks back, in her view, to the lyrical conversation between Jessica and Lorenzo in act 5 of The Merchant of Venice, and both are indebted to the classical “O qualis nox?” Colie, 11–12.
41. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 94.
42. Ibid., 70.
NINE The Impossibility of Closure
1. Oxford English Dictionary draft additions, March 2007.
2. The Indexer: The Journal of the Society of Indexers 15:72/2 (1986). OED, obelisk, 2.b.
3. Erwin Panofsky, “Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition,” in Meaning and the Visual Arts (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1955), 295–320.
4. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 3–4.
5. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 101–2.
6. For example, Susan Winnett, “Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles of Pleasure,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 105, no. 3 (May 1990), 505–18, and Teresa de Lauretis, “Desire in Narrative,” in Alice Doesn’t (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,