May 25, 2006 - Cognitive Poetics and the LITERAL Concept in Poetry ..... The poem is written in iambic common meter, with alternating lines of eight and six ...
To appear in a volume on the literal/nonliteral distinction, eds. Seana Coulson and Barbara Lewandowska. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2005.
Is Iconicity Literal? Cognitive Poetics and the LITERAL Concept in Poetry Margaret H. Freeman
The terms literal and non-literal may have no theoretical status in cognitive linguistics (Lakoff, this volume), but natural language speakers notably recognize a distinction in their use of the two terms (Israel, this volume). This is not just a matter of folk belief, but involves the tropes of metonymy, metaphor, and irony, all of which involve utterances that indicate scalar levels of tension between literal and non-literal meaning.1 It is one of the central precepts of cognitive linguistics that language is underdetermined; that is, that the meaning of an utterance cannot be determined simply by linguistic analysis of the words themselves or by resort to their truth conditional status, but that the full (or at least partial) contextual cultural cognitive dimension of the utterance needs to be accessed for (any) understanding to occur (Ruthrof 1997, Sinha 1999).2 However problematic the terms literal and non-
1
As Gerard Steen (2002) notes: Metonymy involves the nonliteral use of a concept which stays within the limits of its own conceptual domain, and which does not have to involve abstraction in the way most metaphor does, depending as metonymy does on part-whole, product-producer relationships, and so on. By contrast, metaphor involves the nonliteral mapping of correspondences between two conceptual domains. (25) In identifying the role irony plays in satire, Paul Simpson (2003) describes irony as “the space between what is meant and what is asserted” (90), and notes that “the choice between literal and ironic interpretation must be based on information like contextual knowledge and other background assumptions that are external to the utterance” (91). 2
Two literary examples might suffice. From Josiah Gilbert Holland (1860): “These little sentences he had dropped into her ear as a man would drop pebbles into a pool, waiting to see them strike the bottom, and marking the ripples they awoke upon the surface. In all his language, there was something intended beyond its literal interpretation” (232). What was intended, the following paragraph makes clear, is not only the hidden import of the utterance, but the emotional harassment that went along with it. From George Santayana (1936): Nathaniel Alden knew how deep a lie it was to protest, as everyone did, that the old gentleman had been an innocent victim, who had simply shown firmness in exercising his indubitable right to collect his rents, and had been struck down by a moneyless tenant in a sudden explosion of hatred and despair. Such might well be the literal material truth; yet
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literal are, they attempt to capture the disconnect between utterance and event, and much work has already been accomplished in distinguishing the many ways such disconnects may occur, building on the earlier pragmatic theories of speech acts, inferencing, and implicature. In the realm of literary criticism, however, the terms take on additional, technical meanings, which, so far as I know, have never been examined or explained. As a result, the significance of the literal versus non-literal distinction in literary studies has not been adequately recognized in terms either of writer intention and reader interpretation or of establishing the particular qualities of a literary text.
It is my goal in this paper, therefore, to attempt a descriptive analysis of the conceptual domain of LITERAL as it is employed in literary studies in order to show that there is indeed a theoretical basis for the use of the term literal, and that this theoretical basis enables distinctions to be made, on the one hand, between the text itself and the writer and reader, and, on the other, between the writer in producing and the reader in processing the literary text. In the first part of my paper, I briefly survey the term literal as it is used in literary criticism and show how these senses are related in a conceptual network in order to lay the groundwork for my argument for literal iconicity. In the second part, I show how some of the principles of cognitive poetics put this literal/non-literal distinction into new perspective and apply them to a cognitive interpretation of a literary text, which, I claim, can be understood as a literal, and therefore prototypical, reading of the text. I conclude by suggesting that such a model may be useful in illuminating the distinctions between the writer’s production and the reader’s reception of literary texts.
In literary studies the terms literal or literally take on different meanings depending on the context. For example, literal in its etymological sense, related to the term literature itself, applies to the actual
what were the roots of that violence? That his father had always been a hard landlord and a miser, grown rich on uncertain and miserable payments wrung from the poor. That ultimate outburst of wrath, that one hand raised to smite, had been only a symbol, the fatal overflow, as it were, of all the silent curses and sullen bitterness gathering for years above his head. (17)
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physical letters and other markings inscribed on the page, such as punctuation and capitalization, and other formatting details.3 In recent years, manuscript studies have taken particular notice of the meanings of such literary-literal aspects (see, for example, McGann 1991, Smith 1998, Werner 1995).4 By extension, literal may also apply to the formal characteristics of poetry, such as rhyme, rhythm and meter, syllabics, or line breaks.5 Both these uses are closely linked to the phono-graphemic qualities of the text and lend themselves to iconic representation in Charles Sanders Peirce’s (1955 [1940]) sense: that is, that a sign “may represent its object mainly by its similarity, no matter what its mode of being” (105). Another use of literal relates to the meaning of words, and is often applied in translating literary texts as “word for word” translation. When literary critics paraphrase “the literal meaning” of a poem, they invariably are using the term literal to mean, as the OED defines it: “the distinctive epithet of that sense or interpretation (of a text) which is obtained by taking its words in their natural or customary meaning, and applying the 3
The word comes from the Latin littera, “letter.” The American Heritage Dictionary traces it back to the Indo-European root deph-, “to stamp,” which in its Greek suffixed form becomes diphthera, “prepared hide or leather used to write on, from which the Latin term possibly borrowed, in the sense of ‘tablet,’ via Etruscan.” 4
5
William Blake (1972[1810]), notes: Every Man has Eyes, Nose & Mouth; this Every Idiot knows, but he who enters into & discriminates most minutely the Manners & Intentions, the [Expression del.] Characters in all their branches, is the alone Wise or Sensible Man, & on this discrimination All Art is founded. I intreat, then, that the Spectator will attend to the Hands & Feet, to the Lineaments of the Countenances; they are all descriptive of Character, & not a line is drawn without intention, & that most discriminate & particular. As Poetry admits not a Letter that is Insignificant, so Painting admits not a Grain of Sand or a Blade of Grass Insignificant—much less an Insignificant Blur or Mark. (611)
In a famous passage from Alexander Pope’s (1956[1711]) “An Essay on Criticism,” the sound patterns, rhythms, and meter of each line iconically reflect its meaning: ‘Tis not enough no harshness gives offence, The sound must seem an echo to the sense: Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows, And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows; But when loud billows lash the sounding shore, The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar. When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw, The line too labours, and the words move slow. Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain, Flies o’er the unbending corn and skims along the main. (lines 364-373)
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ordinary rules of grammar; opposed to mystical, allegorical, etc. Hence, by extension, applied to the etymological or the relatively primary sense of a word, or to the sense expressed by the actual wording of a passage, as distinguished from any metaphorical or merely suggested meaning.” Both uses—“literal translation” and “literal paraphrase” —depend upon the traditional approach reflected in the OED definition that distinguishes the denotation of words from their connotations, a distinction which has no theoretical grounding in cognitive linguistics.6 Applied to prose fiction, this meaning of the term may be extended to characterize the overt (literal) story being told as opposed to the reader’s perception of the story’s symbolic import.
Although these literary uses of the term literal appear to fall into two distinctly separate groups—one referring to the physical and material phono-graphemic aspects of a text and the other to word meaning—I would argue that they are in fact polysemous occurrences reflecting a dynamic, complex network for the conceptual domain LITERAL that underlies the various uses of the term.7 Nodes in the network are entities that are singled out for attention, or “profiled” against the scope of their contextual background, or “base” (Langacker 1987, Glaz 2002). Thus the material markings that constitute one node in the LITERAL network are profiled against the material base of the actual, physical text. Instantiations of these markings, such as capitalization or punctuation, are elaborations of this basic domain, as are the particular groupings of letters that form words and the repetitions or patterns of words as they appear in the text. The phonemic characteristics of words form another node, which is elaborated into the instantiations of rhyme, alliteration, stress patterns, and so on. These entities or schemas acquire their values by the contextual domains of the text in which they occur, and are thus linked to the node for word meanings, characterized by their conventional or sanctioned usage within that same contextual domain. 6
Ronald W. Langacker (1987) sums up the cognitive approach as follows: “The distinction between semantics and pragmatics (or between linguistic and extralinguistic knowledge) is largely artifactual, and the only viable conception of linguistic semantics is one that avoids such false dichotomies and is consequently encyclopedic in nature” (154). 7
It is beyond the scope of this paper to sketch out the full network for the conceptual domain LITERAL. My analysis is restricted to the conceptual domain as it relates to literary studies.
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An example might suffice to make the point clear. In lines preceding the section of Pope’s “An Essay on Criticism” on iconicity (see footnote 5), Pope writes: These equal syllables alone require, Though oft the ear the open vowels tire; While expletives their feeble aid do join; And ten low words oft creep in one dull line: (lines 343-346) One domain for this textual instantiation is the iambic pentameter line, with alternating weak and strong metrical stress in ten positions. The arrangement of words on these metrical positions in line 344 creates, by virtue of the phonetic openness of vowel sound at the ends and beginnings of words and across metrical position, a situation in which the reader, reciting aloud, is forced to keep the mouth open, leading to fatigue, both on the reciter’s and the hearer’s part. It is no accident that the meaning of the line is that repetition of open vowel sounds without intervening consonants tires the ear. Similarly, in line 346, the arrangement of monosyllabic syllables, with strong stresses on eight of the ten metrical positions, reflects the line’s meaning, where there are literally (no pun intended) ten words that monotonously slow the line down.
Linked to the node for word meanings in the literary LITERAL network are those that elaborate the schema with respect to the knowledge domain of the text-producer or extend it with respect to the knowledge domain of the text-processor.8 It is in this part of the network that most controversy and confusion arise over what is meant by the literal meaning of a text. The idea of the stability of a word meaning as “natural or customary” or that one can access “the sense expressed by the actual wording of a passage” raises the ancillary idea that literal meaning represents the truth of the matter, that meaning can exist independent of context, that meaning can access what “really” exists. The rise of cognitive linguistics on the one hand and postmodern theory on the other have problematized even further the ideas 8
I am adopting the somewhat inelegant terms text-producer and text-processor from Simpson (2003) to avoid the awkwardness of referring to either the speaker/hearer or writer/reader.
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of truth conditional meaning or being able to access mind independent reality (MIR). However, cognitive linguistics, with its notions of embodied realism (Lakoff and Johnson 1998), referential realism (Sinha 1999), and inferential realism or realist textualism (Ruthrof 1997), allows for the idea of direct nonmetaphorical grounding. From the cognitive perspective, ideas are not objects and meanings are not concepts. Rather, meaning is activated by mappings that are motivated by the focus of attention, the picking out of figure against the grounding of our embodied experience, the corroboration of different significatory systems.
For poetry, what does it mean to say that a word has a natural or customary meaning or that one can access the sense expressed by the actual wording of a passage? Is there in fact a meaningful distinction between the literal and the non-literal? How can a text-processor know that the conceptualizings of a textproducer have been accessed successfully?9 There is no global or unified response to these questions because they all depend on the particular contextual, cultural domains of the utterance, the utterer, and the receiver. However, I think that an argument can be made for positive answers to these questions, in that the closer the construal of a text comes to its prototypical or central meaning, the more literal that construal will be.10 In this sense, literal is closely connected to Peirce’s (1955 [1940] definition of an icon, in its inclusion of images (representing simple qualities), diagrams (representing relations of parts), and metaphors (representing a parallelism in something else). For example, as I have shown elsewhere (Freeman 1995), Emily Dickinson’s conceptual universe contains the metaphorical AIR IS SEA image schema, so that in many poems when Dickinson refers to “sea” she means “air.” A reading of a poem that makes this metaphorical connection will be more “literal” than one that doesn’t. Some poems, like Robert Frost’s “The Draft Horse,” force the reader to construe a non-literal meaning as the literal meaning when 9
Here, of course, I am raising the idea that such communication is possible, a concept that is anathema to the deconstruction movement in literary studies over the past twenty years, but which I think obvious from a cognitive linguistic perspective. 10
I mean “prototypical” or “central” in Langacker’s (1987) sense of being most “conventional, generic, intrinsic, and characteristic” (159).
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elaborations of nodes in the conceptual network of word meanings become anomalous.11 Extensions of word meaning nodes occur when readers adopt a particular focus of attention and map possible meanings according to their own knowledge domains, where a scalar value of literal/non-literal applies depending on how close or far the reading is from the prototypical or central meaning (Freeman 2002).
With respect to poetry, when literal, prototypical readings activate word meaning, phono-graphemic, and material marking nodes, they are, in Peirce’s sense, iconic. In the remainder of this paper, I discuss a poem by Emily Dickinson to show how one might attempt a literal, iconic reading through a cognitive poetic analysis, taking the foregoing discussion of the conceptual domain of LITERAL into account.12
We have evidence that Dickinson made at least five copies of the poem under discussion, one of which has been lost (Franklin 1998). The four surviving copies vary in both stanza and line divisions, with two adopting the phrase “bestows on” and two “supplies to” as variants of each other. For the purposes of my analysis, which works for all four copies, I will focus on the copy Dickinson sent to T. W. Higginson, since it was the last of the four she wrote and has, unusually for Dickinson, the provenance of a date: 16 July 1867 (BPL 31, F819E),13 with the line breaks as regularized by the editors:
11
In Frost’s (1972[1962]) poem, the couple set out “with a lantern that wouldn’t burn,” in a buggy that is “too frail,” and with a horse that is “too heavy.” By the end of the first stanza, with the physically impossible image of a “limitless grove,” the reader is primed for a non-literal reading. Another example comes from an assignment I gave my first year students several years ago. Kenneth Koch (1999) wrote a short prose piece entitled “Arctic Dreams” in which he describes the impossibility he experienced of teaching polar bears to write poetry. Even though the students were primed with the fact that Koch is a poet and teacher of poetry at Columbia University, when asked whether they thought Koch was “really” talking about polar bears, a surprising number replied in the affirmative, even though the idea was absurd on the face of it. 12
The poem under discussion was chosen for a workshop on cognitive approaches to translation at the Emily Dickinson International Conference in Hilo, Hawaii, 2004. The workshop’s goal was to explore the extent to which a cognitive poetics analysis as described in this paper could aid in the translation of poetry into other languages. I am grateful to Connie Kirk, Claiborne Rice, Masako Takeda, and David Tennant for their comments and suggestions on my analysis. 13
The manuscript, numbered by Franklin (F) as 819E, is archived at the Boston Public Library (BPL).
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The Luxury to apprehend The Luxury ’twould be To look at thee a single time An Epicure of me In whatsoever presence makes Till for a further food I scarcely recollect to starve So first am I supplied.
The Luxury to meditate The Luxury it was To banquet on thy Countenance A sumptuousness supplies To plainer Days whose Table, far As Certainty can see Is laden with a single Crumb – The Consciousness of thee -
In his review of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Eric Griffiths (2002), a Cambridge University professor of English Literature, chastises his students for ignoring grammar when reading literary texts, asks them to “consider some characteristic lines from one of the language’s most grammatically resourceful writers, Emily Dickinson,” and then proceeds to produce a grammatically inaccurate and inadequate paraphrase of the first lines of Dickinson’s Luxury poem (one can read his “plain sense” as meaning “literal”): This would be described as “confused” by today’s undergraduates, who take it for granted that “accessibility” is the first requirement of all writing and impute confusion to
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any writer who stretches them. It is not confused, it is superbly elliptical, even aeronautic. Dickinson’s vaults and swivels resolve themselves into plain sense, as a paraphrase shows: “the sweetness of guessing how sweet it might be to see you, just once, looking at me and fancying me, whoever else was around, is so great that I almost forget to long anymore for a greater satisfaction - that sweetness is the first thing that keeps me going.” It appears that Griffiths is parsing the syntax of this first stanza in such a way that “Epicure” is seen as appositional to “Thee.” Because I find it difficult to follow his construal of Dickinson’s grammar, I asked a colleague who interpreted the term “Epicure of me” in the same way Griffiths did, to parse the sentence. This is what she wrote: "It would be a luxury [for me] to look at thee a single time [as an] epicure of me in the same way that I am supplied with food before I even know I'm hungry."
I read the "I" after food as shifting
back to the speaker again, but she's imagining that the speaker's experience would be the addressee's/thee's. My colleague’s paraphrase shows more clearly how the shift from speaker to addressee has occurred. However, it is noticeable that neither her reading nor Griffiths’ takes into account the present tense form of the verb “makes.” Although Dickinson has been accused of a cavalier approach to regular grammar, I believe, and have argued elsewhere (Freeman 1997), that she had full control of her grammar at all times, and that ignoring that grammar leads to misreading. What this tells me is not that Griffiths or my colleague are incompetent in their command of English or incorrect in recognizing the importance of grammatical awareness, but that recourse to traditional grammar accounts is insufficient for understanding literary discourse (and, I would argue, natural language discourse in general). What it also tells me is that one cannot lift a portion of a poem out of the whole and represent it adequately. Not only is Griffiths’ paraphrase faulty in its rendering of Dickinson’s syntax, it fails to capture the sense and emotion of the poem as a whole. In order to present a literal reading of the poem, one needs to take into account the way in which iconic elements are foregrounded in the imagistic, diagrammatic, and
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metaphoric aspects of the poetic text.
Elsewhere I have suggested that a poem constitutes a complex blend (Freeman 2005). “Blending” is the term Fauconnier and Turner (2000) have adopted to describe their theory of conceptual integration networks. Blending is a dynamic process that enables new meanings to emerge from old information. It occurs when elements from different conceptual domains are brought together in temporary mental spaces to create new structural relationships. In Fauconnier and Turner’s model, at least one generic space and two input spaces (though there may be more) exist in order for blending to occur. In Dickinson’s poem, several conceptual networks interact, based on two underlying metaphors: SEEING IS BEING FED in the first stanza and THINKING IS BEING FED in the second. The problem with Griffiths’ paraphrase is that it scrambles the subject-object relationships in the first stanza because he has not taken due note of the parallel treatment of agency in the metaphors across both stanzas. Dickinson’s “vaults and swivels” are even more complex than Griffiths realizes, and yet conform to grammatical syntax that reflects the poem’s sense, theme, and tone.
In her work on iconicity in poetry, Masako Hiraga (1994, 1998, 1999) has shown how the blending model can reveal the extent to which metaphor-icon links relate to the diagrammatic mapping of form and meaning. In Dickinson’s poem, image, metaphor, and diagram all interact to provide the poem’s iconicity of form and meaning.14 Its two stanzas provide two sentences that mirror each other on the levels of meter, sound pattern, word choice, syntactical structure, and local metaphor.
The poem is written in iambic common meter, with alternating lines of eight and six metrical positions. Following Franklin’s dating, the earliest manuscript is without stanza division, the second has four stanzas. The two later copies seem to indicate that Dickinson finally settled on the two stanza division of 14
My discussion of Dickinson’s poem in this paper is restricted to iconic representations of conceptual domains of meaning and phono-graphemic characteristics that arise from the printed text. A complete literal reading of the poem would, of course, include reference to the handwritten manuscripts.
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eight lines each that constitute the two sentences of the poem, making the parallelism across the two stanza sentences more evident.
Both sentences are completed by complex subordinate clauses. Linguistic parallels across the two stanzas prompt for parallel conceptual structures. These include the following parallels and repetitions:
Stanza 1
Stanza 2
The Luxury to apprehend
The Luxury to meditate
The Luxury ’twould be
The Luxury it was
To look at thee
To banquet on thy Countenance
a single time
a single Crumb
Epicure
Sumptuousness
whatsoever presence
plainer Days
recollect
see
First and second person pronouns pattern as follows. Their first occurrence alternates, with “thee” in line 3 and “me” in line 4. Then two first person pronouns follow in the first stanza and two second person pronouns in the second: “I” (lines 7 and 8), and “thy” (line 11) and “thee” (line 16). The only end rhymes in the entire poem reflect the play on the pronouns: be – me in the first stanza and see – thee in the second. The word single occurs in each stanza on the same metrical positions (6 and 7) in their respective lines, with the phonetic [s] falling on a strong stress position. Other examples of phonetic [s] on strong positions between these two occurrences of single reflect the contrast between deprivation in the first stanza (scarcely, starve) and repletion in the second (sumptuousness, [bestows], Certainty, see), both in the semantic import of the words and their relative length and number. There is also imagic symmetry in the pairing of equivalent lines across both stanzas, both with respect to actual repetition (as in lines 1-9 and 2-10) and related meanings (as in look–Countenance in lines 3-11 or scarcely…starve–single Crumb
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in lines 7-15). These are just a few of the examples that create imagic and diagrammatic iconicity in the paralleling of the two stanza sentences. Metaphoric iconicity occurs as a result of multiple blendings, as we shall see.
Ignoring for the moment the syntactic ambiguity of the first two lines of each stanza, the poem’s two sentences are grammatically iconic, with the main verbs “makes” in the first stanza and “supplies” in the second. As is characteristic of Dickinson throughout her poetry, both sentences invert the normal SVO order of English to SOV, so that the object of “makes” is the phrase “An Epicure of me” and the object of “supplies” is “A sumptuousness.” A preliminary paraphrase of these two sentences (which will be refined later with the addition of the “Luxury” lines) goes something like this: “To look at you just once, whoever else might be around, refines my taste until I’m scarcely aware that I might need (or I can scarcely recover the need for) more such food, since I have been given so much at first. To feed on your face bestows an opulence on days I don’t see you, so that I am confident that even the scarce resources of these days will continue to feed my memory with consciousness of you.”
Images of seeing and feeding inform the structure of the lexical categories in the poem. The poem’s network of meanings are created as the nodes for seeing and feeding are elaborated and extended. Langacker (1987: 370) explains elaboration as “the relation between a schema and its instantiations” and extension as “the relation between prototypical and peripheral values.” Both occur in text production. However, I venture to suggest that a literal reading of a text is more closely associated with elaboration, whereas an interpretive reading is more closely associated with extension.
The concept of SEEING provides one of the input spaces for the network. Because we are social beings, we enjoy meeting and seeing other people. In particular, we develop distinctions among the people around us, singling out family, friends, or coworkers as groups we recognize and know more intimately than strangers we might encounter. Within these groups, we discriminate even further, identifying a
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particular relative, a friend, or someone we work closely with, for special attention. Among those we love, there may be one unique individual whom we are especially delighted to see and be with. This provides the socio-cultural conceptual domain for the SEEING network in the poem. Normally, in the scalar value of the domain, the more we see someone we love, the better it is (MORE IS BETTER). But Dickinson’s speaker intensifies the sight of the loved one so that “a single time” is sufficient to give her what she needs.
Another input space for the network is provided by the FEEDING concept. We need food to survive. However, being human, we also take pleasure in our dining experiences. Thus we develop taste and discrimination for the quality of food we eat. On special occasions, we turn this experience into a banquet, where food is rich and plentiful. Banquets celebrate important occasions such as weddings, annual society events, anniversaries, or diplomatic meetings. Food left over from such occasions often serves to provide future meals. This provides the socio-cultural conceptual domain for the FEEDING network in the poem. Again, the scalar value would indicate that MORE IS BETTER in the sense that there is a certain quantity of food we need now and in the future. However, the speaker compresses this into “a single Crumb” which is all she needs to sustain her.
The poem is an example of blending in which the vital relations of cause-effect (making an epicure, supplying sumptuousness), part-whole (in the metonymy of countenance for person), identity (food for person), and analogy (crumb with time) are operative to create outer space links (between SEEING and FEEDING) and inner space relations of compression and fusion (face/person, food/person, single crumb/single time). Through these vital relations, SEEING THE PERSON IS BEING FED BY THE PERSON happens simultaneously in the blend. The blending created in the first stanza capitalizes on the romantic notions of the gaze of the beloved and sight feeding love, so that the expression in the second stanza, “to banquet on thy Countenance” can refer directly to it. If these blendings were all there were to the poem, the theme would be a pretty conventional romantic expression of love. However, the first two
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lines in each stanza prompt for a different kind of blending involving two different networks, APPREHENSION in the first stanza and MEDITATION in the second, both of which introduce another structural component to the network of meanings, that is, the concept of THINKING.
The conceptual domain for the term apprehend includes the notions of laying hold of, seizing, or grasping. As Eve Sweetser (1990) has noted, these meanings are metaphorically linked to seeing and knowing. Another node in the conceptual network for APPREHEND is “anticipate,” which, as the OED notes, is most always in this network linked to the notion of looking forward in fear or anxiety to potentially adverse things (as reflected in the grammatically elaborated term apprehensive). In the poem, these meaning nodes in the network overlap.15 The notion of grasping is triggered by the direct object, “The Luxury” in line 2, along with the notion of epistemic anticipation triggered by the modal tense of the verb would be. The tension that results between associating the negative suggestion of apprehend in its anticipation sense with the positive suggestion contained in the word luxury produces a complex emotional tone, not the simple preference for seeing a loved one over others present, but emphasis on the apprehension per se rather than the seeing event itself. This emphasis is reinforced by the choice of the epistemic modal would over the simple future tense will. My preliminary paraphrase of this stanza raised the suggestion of comparison between what the loved one could provide as opposed to others. Focalizing “apprehend” in topic position lends itself to a somewhat different mapping in the comparison spaces: not between the general ego-other SIGHT and FOOD spaces, but between the specific speaker-addressee SIGHT and FOOD spaces, so that “a further food” refers not necessarily to what others might provide but what seeing the addressee more than once would give. The ideas of scarcity and starvation that are raised in the subordinate clause hint at the deprivation, not fulfillment, that the speaker is accustomed to “recollect.” The poem then becomes an articulation of Dickinson’s own experiences of not feeling up to
15
Here I am following Adam Glaz’s (2002) exegesis of Langacker’s (1987) dynamic network with Catherine Fuch’s (1994) theory of semantic space, where use of a word opens a window onto its entire conceptual domain network, where different nodes may simultaneously be triggered and sometimes fused, depending on the word’s contextual occurrence.
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seeing a beloved visitor, a situation that has been documented as occurring more than once. The APPREHENSION network captures that ambivalent emotion.
Like APPREHEND, the conceptual domain for MEDITATE prompts for something more than simply thinking about or remembering; rather, to ponder on, to consider the effects or significance of. The two terms also have overlapping conceptual domains in that they both include the mental faculty of holding onto. Whereas apprehend in the first stanza is linked to an epistemic future tense “would” and thus prompts for anticipation of a not necessarily fulfilled future event, meditate in the second is linked to the past tense “was” and thus triggers the idea of remembrance that also underlies one meaning of the term recollect. Following the recollection of starvation from the previous stanza, the choice of the word meditate emphasizes the significance of “plainer Days” that denote the absence of the addressee, and more directly links the “single time” to the “single Crumb,” since it is again not the seeing per se that supplies/sustains the speaker but the thought of seeing. It is an internalization of vision into recollection in the sense of Wordsworth’s “Daffodils.” The chiasmus across the two stanzas of apprehend—look—recollect // meditate—banquet—see reinforces the change in focus. The speaker no longer needs to see the addressee, because once was enough to retain the thought of the addressee in the speaker’s mind. The central focus and climax of the poem thus become the speaker’s consciousness of the addressee.
The preceding analysis is certainly a possible reading of the poem. However, it overlooks an important dimension in that the word luxury cues for a more abstract blending, apprehension and meditation as preferred modes of being, what Roland Hagenbüchle (1974) has called “indeterminacy” for the former and David Porter (1981) “aftermath” for the latter. Dickinson’s preference for anticipation and aftermath can be seen in this poem as her way of experiencing the lived moment, the existential present. That is, the poem’s two stanzas provide the two input spaces of future APPREHENSION and past MEDITATION, triggered by the choice of tenses: “’twould be” in the first and “it was” in the second. The iconic
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mirroring of the two stanzas obscures the fact that logically there should be a third, middle, stanza to reflect a present EXPERIENCE space. As we shall see, the absence of this middle space iconically reflects the presence in absence that is the poem’s theme.
In the concrete existence of our human lives, we are grounded in the reality space of the present, contained within a moment of space and time. Physically, we can be nowhere else than where we are in a given space at a time that is NOW. Fauconnier’s theory of mental spaces explains how we are able, from our grounding in our own personal reality spaces, to project into other kinds of “spaces”: hypothetical, counterfactual, past, and future. The same is true for a literary text. It, too, is grounded, both in the present of its own story or situation and in the present of us as readers reading the text. For Dickinson’s Luxury poem, the text is grounded in the speaker’s use of the present tenses “makes” in the first stanza and “supplies” in the second. Ostensibly, the subjects of these verbs are the speaker’s physical actions of seeing and feeding. But as the foregoing analysis has noted, neither are in fact occurring. The first lines of each stanza prompt for the present tenseless moment: “The Luxury to apprehend/meditate.” But the object of the verbs, what is being apprehended or meditated, is not the looking or the banqueting themselves but “The Luxury” to look and banquet, further distancing the speaker from the actual experience. The complex blending of each stanza establishes new input spaces for the complex blend that is the poem itself.
The luxury of apprehension and the luxury of meditation are fused in the blend to create “The Consciousness of thee –” which, indicated by the nominalization, is an emergent structure that rests in an existential timeless present space including both past and future that exists in neither of the input spaces.
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time thought people
input space
I you apprehend future
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generic space
I you meditate past
I you conscious present
input space
blended space
I have previously noted that both the poem’s SEEING and FEEDING networks share the common structure of discriminating, which lends itself to scalar value. Dickinson reverses the concept MORE IS BETTER to ONE IS ENOUGH through the scalar values of quality (“Luxury”) and time. Though in each blended input network there is “a single time” and “a single Crumb” on the table of the speaker’s heart,16 these are not an instant of time or a temporary sustenance, but timeless in being present at all times in the consciousness of the speaker. The first lines of each stanza prompt for the present tenseless moment: “The Luxury to apprehend/meditate.” But the object of the verbs, what is being apprehended or meditated, is not the looking or the banqueting themselves but “The Luxury” to look and banquet, further distancing the speaker from the actual experience. That is, a more refined paraphrase of the poem would go something like this: “Just thinking of the possibility of looking at you just once supersedes being with 16
The reference is to the expression “the table of thine heart” from Proverbs 3:3 and 7:3.
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anyone else and supplies me with all the sustenance I need. When I ponder on the sumptuousness that the thought of looking at you has supplied me with, then what I am left with is really all I need, not the looking even, but just having you permanently in my mind, across past, present, and future.” Whether or not Dickinson was speaking of actually seeing the person addressed in the poem, its focus and emotional tone emphasize being conscious of, not looking at, the loved one. What has emerged from the complex blending of the poem is the paradoxical idea of presence in absence, the notion that it is not the sight of the beloved that provides the speaker with sustenance to enable her to live, but the idea of seeing the beloved that is brought into consciousness by the twin faculties of apprehension and meditation. And as readers, we too construct from the text the consciousness of the speaker’s beloved in our own reality spaces as we read the poem, much as Shakespeare has us do in Sonnet 18.
The poem’s effects, then, result from a literal iconicity that is brought about by the imagic, diagrammatic, and metaphoric mappings prompted by the conceptual and linguistic elaborations and extensions of the poem’s network of meanings. I suggest that the foregoing cognitive analysis might serve as a model for the “literal” interpretation of poetry. I said, rather peremptorily, at the outset that Griffiths’ and my colleague’s reading of the first stanza was mistaken. Given the well known fact that poetic texts do not have just “one” meaning, but lend themselves to multiple layers of all kinds of possible meanings, how do I justify my apparent arrogance? Why should the particular kinds of blending operations I exercised on the text be any more accurate or true to its literal meaning than the blending operations exercised by Griffiths and my colleague? After all, they both were able to discover meaning in their readings of the text, which means that they were, however unconsciously, performing conceptual integration, an ability that, as Fauconnier and Turner (2000) have shown, makes human reasoning possible. This raises the question, can blending be done erroneously, and, if so, what determines its falsity?
All misconceptions and misconstruings may be said to arise from false blending. Fauconnier and Turner cite the example of the driver who turns up the radio button in his car to hear his passengers in the back
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seat; the instructor who tells a skier to hold himself erect in the way a waiter balancing a tray does is attempting to correct the skier’s blending operation that is causing him to ski clumsily. Success and failure in all kinds of activities, mental or physical, both involve the dynamic operations of conceptual integration. So what distinguishes the false from the true? In Fauconnier and Turner’s examples, the answer is clear: false blending leads to a failure in performance, in achieving one’s objectives, whether it is to hear more clearly or to ski more successfully. In the case of poetry, however, why should one reading be considered true, and another false? Certainly, in literary criticism in the last few decades, postmodern theories, including deconstruction and reader response theories, invite the suggestion that it is I who am mistaken, that all coherent readings of a literary text are possible readings of that text.
Here, I think the twist is in the word coherent. What does it mean for a reading to be coherent? I will argue that coherency is not just a matter of what makes sense (or deconstructionist non/sense) to the reader. Rather, I will claim that readings of a given literary text fall either within a radial category of possible readings of that text or outside the category altogether. In other words, though there can be many different readings of a literary text, some more prototypical than others, there can also be readings that are, quite simply, wrong. These false readings arise, I will claim, when they fail to explicate the way a poem foregrounds the iconic mapping of its form and content through one or more of any of the following: accounting for all the conceptual linguistic elements present in the text; providing readings that harmonize with other possible readings (unless contradiction is deliberately called for by the text, such as in paradox or oxymoron); and being compatible with the author’s conceptual universe. I recognize that each of these claims can be attacked. However, in the case of Dickinson’s Luxury poem, I think my reading conforms to all three criteria. As I have already shown, Griffiths’ reading doesn’t. At least, the presentation of his paraphrase does not reveal how he is construing the grammar of the original, and I don’t think that one can argue for both his and my readings being compatible. Either there is a shift in agency or there isn’t.
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In the case of the Luxury poem, the mappings I include in my analysis are motivated by a strict adherence to concepts prompted by the linguistic elements of the text’s vocabulary and elaborations of their conceptual nodes. Earlier I referred to Langacker’s distinction between elaboration and extension in developing networks of meanings. I suggest that this distinction may very well help to characterize text production and text processing. In the case of Dickinson’s Luxury poem, I have described the schemas that represent the network of meanings in a given lexical category and analyzed their instantiations in an account that explicates the foregrounding of iconic mappings of form and content. These, I argue, represent a literal reading of the text and thus approximate its prototypical meaning(s). The values that readers ascribe to the instantiations of the schemas then determine how close or far their reading is from the poem’s prototypical meaning(s). Had I, for example, in my reading of the poem, added the expectation of adversity to the conceptual domain of APPREHEND as an extension of its network, I would have created additional cross-space mappings that would have produced a specific interpretation, as literary critics typically do in their analyses. Two examples in Dickinson scholarship on this poem are the extension of SCARCITY and STARVATION so that “the single Crumb” becomes a sign of the poet’s anorexia (Thomas 1990[1988]: 200), and extension of SUMPTUOUSNESS and TERROR so that “the Luxury to apprehend” becomes the receptivity of the soul’s encounter with God (Doriani 1996: 198).
For literary studies then, literal is iconic. If the distinction between literal and non-literal in literary criticism has any meaning at all, it is the distinction between an analysis of a poem that takes into consideration its literary iconicity—its blurs and marks (Blake 1972[1810]), its syllables and sounds, rhythms and rhymes (Tsur 1992) that make the sound seem an echo to the sense (Pope 1956[1711]), its “basic” image schematic, metaphoric, or prototypical content, all of which conspire to create an iconicity of language and thought—and the kind of analysis that extends interpretation into the conceptual domains raised by the text as a result of the choice of symbolic mappings made by the reader. That is, I am claiming that one can distinguish between literal iconicity—the compositionality of the text as created by
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the author—and non-literal mappings—the interpretation of the text arrived at by the reader—however difficult that distinction might be.17
A cognitive poetics analysis of a literary text, as I have tried to show in this paper, is therefore distinguished from other literary critical analyses by its adoption of cognitive theory that recognizes the accessibility of meaning through the activation of mappings “between a linguistically conceptualized referential situation, and a conceptually motivated expression, enabling the hearer to understand, in the context of the universe of discourse, the communicative act intended by the speaker” (Sinha 1999). The result of such analysis is to generate a literal reading of a literary text, one that takes into consideration the foregrounding of iconic elements in the relation between form and content. It also provides a principled way to distinguish between literal and non-literal interpretations, not in the traditional sense of representing a “real” state of affairs or reflecting the “sense expressed by the actual wording of a passage,” but in tracing, through the iconic aspects of image, diagram, and metaphor, the relation between sign and signification that arises from the embodied grounding of language.
17
Accessing the compositionality of the text as created by its author raises the admittedly problematic question of how one can ever access authorial intention. Here, I distinguish between motivation, of which one can never be sure, not even the author, and the ideas the author is expressing, or what Leonard Talmy (2000) calls “communicative goals and means.” It is beyond the scope and objective of this paper to go into detail as to how one is able to access the thoughts of another, but it is one of the basic principles of linguistics that communication of ideas is possible (though it can of course also fail).
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References Blake, William. 1972 (1810). Blake: Complete Writings with Variant Readings. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. London and New York: Oxford University Press. Doriani, Beth Maclay. 1996. Emily Dickinson, Daughter of Prophecy. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. Franklin, Ralph W., ed. 1998. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Freeman, Margaret H. 1995. “Metaphor Making Meaning: Emily Dickinson's Conceptual Universe.” Journal of Pragmatics 24: 643–66. —. 1997. “Grounded Spaces: Deictic Self-Anaphors in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson.” Language and Literature 61: 7–28. —. 2002. “Cognitive Mapping in Literary Analysis.” Style 36(3): 466-483. —. 2005. “The Poem as Complex Blend: Conceptual Mappings of Metaphor in Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Applicant’.” Language and Literature, in press. Frost, Robert. 1972 (1962). “The Draft Horse.” From In the Clearing. In Robert Frost: Poetry and Prose. Eds. Edward Connery Lathem and Lawrance Thompson. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Fuchs, Catherine. 1994. “The Challenges of Continuity for a Linguistic Approach to Semantics,” 93–107. In Continuity in Linguistic Semantics. Eds. Catherine and Bernard Victorri. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Glaz, Adam. 2002. The Dynamics of Meaning: Explorations in the Conceptual Domain of EARTH. Lublin: Maria Curie-Sklodowska University Press. Griffiths, Eric. 2002. “The Lavender of the Subjunctive.” The Guardian July 13. http://www.books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/referenceandlanguages/0,6121,753668,00.html. April
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14, 2004. Hagenbüchle, Roland. 1974. “Precision and Indeterminacy in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson.” Emerson Society Quarterly: A Journal of the American Renaissance 20: 33–56. Hiraga, Masako K. 1994. "Diagrams and Metaphors: Iconic Aspects in Language." Journal of Pragmatics 22(3): 5–21. —. 1998. “Metaphor-Icon Link in Poetic Texts: A Cognitive Approach to Iconicity.” The Journal of the University of the Air 16: 95–123. —. 1999. "'Blending' and an Interpretation of Haiku: A Cognitive Approach." Poetics Today 20(3): 461–81. Holland, Josiah Gilbert. 1860. Miss Gilbert’s Career. New York: Charles Scribner. Koch, Kenneth. 1999. "My Olivetti Speaks." In Straits. New York: Knopf. Reproduced in Harper's Magazine, January 1999, 34. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1998. Philosophy in the Flesh. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Volume 1: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford University Press. McGann, Jerome. 1991. The Textual Condition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1955 (1940). Philosophical Writings of Peirce. Ed. Justus Buchler. New York: Dover. Pope, Alexander. 1956 [1711]. “ An Essay on Criticism,” 58–76. In Alexander Pope’s Collected Poems. Ed. Bonamy Dobrée. London: J. M. Dent. Porter, David. 1981. Dickinson: The Modern Idiom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ruthrof, Horst. 1997. Semantics and the Body: Meaning from Frege to the Postmodern. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Santayana, George. 1936. The Last Puritan. New York: Charles Scribner.
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Simpson, Paul. 2003. On the Discourse of Satire: Toward a Stylistic Model of Satirical Humour. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Sinha, Chris. 1999. “Grounding, Mapping and Acts of Meaning.” In Cognitive Linguistics: Foundations, Scope and Methodology, 223–55. Eds. Theo Janssen and Gisela Redeker. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. http://www.formes-symboliques.org/IMG/pdf/doc-41.pdf. April 14, 2004. Smith, Martha Nell. 1998. “Corporealizations of Dickinson and Interpretive Machines.” In The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture, 195–221. Eds. George Bornstein and Theresa Tinkle. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. http://www.emilydickinson.org/resources/smith_corp/corp1.html. April 13, 2004. Steen, Gerard. 2002. “Toward a Procedure for Metaphor Identification.” Language and Literature: Special Issue on Metaphor Identification. 11(1): 17–33. Sweetser, Eve. 1990. From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Vol. I: Concept Structuring Systems. Vol. II: Typology and Process in Concept Structuring. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Thomas, Heather Kirk. 1990. “Emily Dickinson’s ‘Renunciation’ and Anorexia Nervosa. American Literature (1988): 60(2). Reprinted in On Dickinson: The Best from American Literature, 191–211. Eds. Edwin H. Cady and Louis J. Budd. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Tsur, Reuven. 1992. Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics. Amsterdam: North Holland. Werner, Marta L., ed. 1995. Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
