metaphor making meaning

ELSEVIER Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995) 643~566 ~lltrallhlt Metaphor making meaning: Dickinson's conceptual universe Margaret H. Freeman Department of English, Los Angeles Valley College, 5800 Fulton Avenue, Van Nuys, CA 91401-4096, USA Abstract If meaning, understanding, and reasoning in human language are achieved through bod- ily experience and figurative processes, as recent work in cognitive linguistics has argued, then the traditional notion of a separation in kind between ordinary discourse and poetic lan- guage no longer holds. Metaphor making, under this view, is not peripheral but central to our reasoning processes, not unique to poetical thinking but that which is shared by both ordinary discourse and the language of poetry. Poets, then, in their metaphor making, serve as arbiters of and commentators on the way humans understand and interpret their world. Much of Dickinson's poetry is structured by the extent to which she rejected the dominant metaphor of her religious environment, that of LIFE IS A JOURNEY THROUGH TIME, and replaced it with a metaphor more in accordance with the latest scientific discoveries of her day, that of LIFE IS A VOYAGE IN SPACE. Examples from her poems show how the schemas of PATH and CYCLE and the AIR IS SEA image metaphor contribute to a coherent and consistent patterning that at the same time reflects a physically embodied world and creates Dickin- son's conceptual universe. I. Introduction Does meaning make metaphor? Or does metaphor make meaning? The ortho- dox view, dominant in the tradition that comes down to us from Plato and Aristo- tle, sees metaphor as merely imitative of an objective reality, a reality that can be known independently of human participation. With the rise of modem science, however, and particularly in the philosophy of Kant, such presuppositions about the relation of human cognition to our understanding of physical reality and the 'truths' of this world have been called into question. Kant advanced the debate between the empirical and rational approaches to these questions by acknowledg- ing that human perception of physical reality was structured by a pre-existing cog- nitive ' f ramework' ; Einstein furthered the debate in the twentieth century by showing that reality is partially constituted by human participation in the physical 0378-2166/95/$09.50 © 1995 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved SSDI 0378-2160~95)00006-2 644 M. Freeman / Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995) 643~66 world. 1 Recent work in cognit ive science, especial ly in the area of metaphor, has developed a much more sophist icated view of the relations between human thought and perception. Researchers like George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Mark Turner have shown how the metaphorical structures of our everyday language are embodied in our physical experience of the world and have enabled us to identify and recognize the ideal ized cognit ive models that underl ie our common everyday understanding of the world in which we live. When we turn to l iterary criticism, recognition of those cognit ive models is par- ticularly important, both those that critics hold and those held by writers. In dis- cussing the stages of translating a poem into another language, for example, Robert B ly (1983: 18-19) warns us of the dangers of not recognizing the existence of such culturally embedded presupposit ions: "When a poet from another culture contradicts our assumptions, we tend to fudge his point; therefore to struggle with each eccen- tricity we see is extremely important . . . . I f we don't, we should let the poem alone and not translate it; we' l l only ruin it if we go ahead". What Bly says about trans- lating poetry is just as true when we are reading poems in our own language, espe- cial ly when the poet comes from a different mil ieu or century? I f we are to under- stand how a poet like Emily Dickinson structures her experience of the world, we need to look at the way she structures her metaphors of that world. Although recent critical work on Dickinson takes some account of cultural models (this is especial ly true of feminist studies), all the critics I have read presuppose a taken-for-granted world of objective reality, onto which Dickinson's images are mapped. Such read- ings assume that the goal of crit icism is to discover the nature of that mapping and how it fits with the truth conditions imposed by that reality. It is from this perspec- tive that a major work on Dickinson's poetry has found much of it without direction, coherency, or meaning, and has concluded as a result that Dickinson had a "f inless mind" (Porter, 1981 : passim). What I should like to argue is that it is the philosophical assumptions underlying such readings that cause these difficulties. An Objectivist view of reality sees metaphor as incidental to the proposit ional basis of truth. Recent work in cognit ive science, however, has shown, to the contrary, that we organize our knowledge according to prototypes, and that we assign membership to categories, not on the It is interesting that although both Kant and Einstein paved the way for a more complex view of the nature of reality as it relates to human cognition, neither gave up the traditional belief in objective real- ity. As Freeman J. Dyson (1980: 7) has noted, "The old vision which Einstein maintained until the end of his life, of an objective world of space and time and matter independent of human thought and obser- vation, is no longer ours. Einstein hoped to find a universe possessing what he called 'objective reality', a universe of mountaintops, which he could comprehend by means of a finite set of equations. Nature, it turns out, lives not on the mountaintops but in the valleys". 2 R.P. Blackmur (1980: 35) makes this point even more cogently in his discussion of Dickinson. He argues that the greatness of Dickinson (one can infer "any poet") lies not in "anybody's idea of great- ness" (or "cultural models" in our terms) but in the "poetic relations of the words - that is to say, by what they make of each other. This rule, or this prejudice applies ... exactly as strongly to our method of determining the influence of a culture or a church or a philosophy, alive, dead, or dying, upon the body of Emily Dickinson's poetry. We will see what the influence did to the words, and more important, what the words did to the influence" [my emphasis]. M. Freeman / Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995) 643q566 645 basis of inherent similarity in concepts or objects, but according to how tightly or loosely they conform to the prototypes. Metaphorical thinking, according to this view, is an imaginative mechanism that, together with bodily experience, is "central to how we construct categories to make sense of experience" (Lakoff, 1987: xii). In this paper I present a reading of Dickinson's poetry that shows how such metaphor- ical structure creates what I call "Dickinson's conceptual universe". Emily Dickinson lived during a time and in a place which both experienced radi- cal upheavals in beliefs. Puritan New England, as both Allen Tate and R.P. Black- mur have noted in making this point, was breaking up around her, despite the final dying gasp of one more Calvinist revival. The times were changing: the early part of the century saw the rise of what T.H. Huxley was to call "Victorian Agnosticism" (Lightmann, 1987), and the rise of evolutionary theories during the same period cul- minated in the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859, when Dickinson was 29 years old. The challenges presented to traditional, orthodox belief were enor- mous. And it is in these contexts - of time and place - that, in Blackmur's terminol- ogy, the "poetic relations" of Dickinson's words exist. How she creates her concep- tual universe and what its nature is can only be found in examining "what is said in the saying", to quote Heidegger (1975: 19). 2. The PATH schema and the language of time Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have shown convincingly that we structure much of our experience of the world through the metaphor of LIFE IS A JOURNEY, where life is the target and journey the source domain of the metaphorical construct. Johnson (1987:113) has further elaborated on this metaphor by showing how PATHS, which schematically underlie the source domain, journey, have "always the same parts: (1) a source or starting point; (2) a goal, or end-point; and (3) a sequence of con- tiguous locations connecting the source with the goal". What, then, for this metaphor, is the goal of life's journey? For Calvinist religion, the answer is simple: heaven. And man's purpose in life is therefore just as simple: to get there. The Calvinist view necessarily devalues life and the things of this world in favor of an afterlife (the desired goal and purpose of life's journey), as any cursory reading of Calvinist writings will show. And death, the physical termination of life's journey, is seen merely as a gate to the afterlife (Fig. 1). 3 But this is exactly where Dickinson balks. As one who once wrote, "I find ecstasy in living - the mere sense of living is joy enough" (L342a), 4 she could not accept the way the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor was defined by the religious outlook of her day. 3 I am grateful to Jorge Mata for providing the graphics for this paper. 4 References to Dickinson's works in this paper are drawn from the following sources: T.H. Johnson, ed., 1958. The letters of Emily Dickinson. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard Uni- versity Press; T.H. Johnson, ed., 1955. The poems of Emily Dickinson. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Letter numbers in the text are preceded by the letter L; poem numbers by the letter P. 646 M. Freeman / Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995) 643--666 source gate goal birth death heaven Fig. 1. She knew it all right, pervasive as it was in her readings and her culture. But it is the way she deals with that metaphor as it is embodied in the cultural model of Calvin- ist theology that shows her rejection of it. Note, for instance, how, in the fol lowing poem, the speaker subverts the journey by first making it incomplete, with the phrase "almost come", then slowing it down because of death's barrier, "the Forest of the Dead", f inally to stop altogether with a symbol of surrender in "the white f lag" between retreat and God 's gates (P615): Our journey had advanced - Our feet were almost come To that odd Fork in Being's Road - Eternity - by Term - Our pace took sudden awe - Our feet - reluctant - led Before - were Cities - but Between - The Forest of the Dead - Retreat - was out of Hope - Behind - a Sealed Route - Eternity's White Flag - Before - And God - at every Gate - The speaker 's discomfort with continuing the journey in this poem is a consistent moti f in Dickinson's poems and letters. Her roads are "funereal" (P735); "a scarlet way" associated with pain, renunciation, and crucif ixion (P527); the speaker on such a road "felt ill - and odd - " (P579); the paths don't so much achieve, or lead to, or even end at, so much as come to a "stop" at their destination (P344): 'Twas the old - road - through pain - That unfrequented - one - With many a turn - and thorn - That stops - at Heaven - In an early poem, she mocks the bibl ical metaphor (P234): M. Freeman / Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995) 643-666 647 You're right - "the way is narrow" - And "difficult the Gate" - And "few there be" - Correct again - That "enter in - thereat" - 'Tis Costly - So are purp les ! 'Tis just the price of Breath - With but the "Discount" of the Grave - Termed by the Brokers - "Death" ! And after that - there's Heaven - The Good Man's - "D iv idend" - And Bad Men - "go to Jail" - I guess - Dickinson explicitly rejects the idea that life is a path that has a specific, predeter- mined destination. In contemplating the importance of "experience" in our under- standing of the world in the following poem, rather than docilely accepting the con- vention that experience can "lead" us to our destinations, she turns it inward into the operations of the mind (P910): Experience is the Angled Road Preferred against the Mind By - Paradox - the Mind i tse l f - In a late poem, the perennial question of where we "go" after death is subtly sub- verted by the underlying negative connotation of its rephrasing (P1417): Of subjects that resist Redoubtablest is this Where go we - Go we anywhere Creation after this? One significant aspect of the PATH schema is its linear characteristic. The metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY is ostensibly grounded in notions of space and spatial orientation, embedded in the notion of "passage". However, since "passage" reflects in the aging processes of life the notion of time, the metaphor is actually temporally determined by the target domain, l ife. The word j ourney itself, in its original meaning, meant the distance one could travel in a day (from the French j our ) . More accurately, then, the full metaphoric construct is that of LIFE IS A JOURNEY THROUGH TIME. This point is crucial in understanding Dickinson's rejec- tion of the metaphor, because it was not simply the Calvinist view of l ife's jour- ney toward heaven that she could not accept; she could not accept traditional 648 M. Freeman / Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995) 643~566 notions of time, either. 5 Sometimes she denies clich6d attitudes, as in "They say that time assuages/Time never did assuage" (P686), or "Death 's waylay ing's not the sharpest/Of the thefts of Time - " (P1296); sometimes she condescends to time: "He doubtless did his best - " (P1478); but it is in her treatment of time in its relation to eternity on the one hand and the world on the other that we see the complexity of her attitudes toward it. Although this is not the place to explore the whole question of time in Dickinson's poetry, one poem in particular characterizes the way Dickinson uses time in the con- text of the metaphor I am discussing here. Dickinson found it difficult, if not impos- sible, to accept the notion that "death" was at the "end" of a linear progression of a "l i fetime" and that "eternity" somehow came after. For Dickinson, eternity was "in time" (P800). In "Forever - is composed of Nows - " (P624), time and eternity seem to collapse into one: " 'T i s not a different time - " , and the markers of time "dis- solve" and "exhale" to obscure the elements of "Infiniteness - /And Latitude of Home - " that distinguish "Forever" from "now": Forever - is composed of Nows - 'Tis not a different time - Except for Infiniteness - And Latitude of Home - From this - experienced Here - Remove the Dates - to These - Let Months dissolve in further Months - And Years - exhale in Years - Without Debate - or Pause - Or Celebrated Days - No different Our Years would be From Anno Dominies - If Dickinson rejected the metaphor of LIFE IS A JOURNEY THROUGH TIME in its Calvinist interpretation, what did she replace it with? The answer, perhaps, was lit- erally all around her. From the details of nature in its annual cycles, the circumfer- ence of hills that surround the valley in which the town of Amherst lies, and, ulti- mately, from the discoveries of the new science, Dickinson transformed the metaphor of LIFE IS A JOURNEY THROUGH TIME into that of LIFE IS A VOYAGE IN SPACE. 5 What is significant in the following story Dickinson told about herself, as noted by T.W. Higginson after his meeting with her, is perhaps not so much the facts she relates (though it is unusual, it is true, for a bright and intelligent child not to be able to grasp the 'telling' of time before the age of fifteen), but that she thought it noteworthy to tell Higginson about it years later. "I never knew how to tell time by the clock till I was 15. My father thought he had taught me but I did not understand & I was afraid to say I did not & afraid to ask any one else lest he should know". (Quoted by Higginson in a letter to his wife on the 17 August 1870. L342b.) M. Freeman / Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995) 643-666 649 It is perhaps diff icult for us, with space ship Ulysses on its four-year voyage to the sun, to imagine the concept of previous centuries that the solar system, though large, was not very distant, that earth was judged to be some 4.8 mil l ion miles from the nearest star. Not until Bressel succeeded in the first precise measurement, by means of parallax, of the distance from earth to a star in 1838, only eight years after Dick- inson's birth, did scientists establish just how vast the universe is. New discoveries were happening all the time: through the work of Thomas Wright, Kant, and Lam- bert, disk-shaped galaxies were discovered, with the sun no longer centered but at the edge of the disk that formed the Mi lky Way. 6 The stars and planets were seen to be afloat in a great expanse, and scientific metaphors developed which saw space as a vast sea, with the planets as boats, circl ing in sweeps around the sun (Ferris, 1989: passim). 7 Such heady stuff provided Dickinson with the imagery she needed. From her early chi ldhood days at Amherst Academy, Dickinson took a keen interest in develop- ments in all the physical sciences, from botany to astronomy. In his biography of Dickinson, Richard Sewall (1974: 343) describes how Edward Hitchcock, President of Amherst Col lege from 1845-1854, was known for his meticulous scientific obser- vations and made Amherst a leading center for scientific study. In his writings Hitch- cock developed a Natural Theology in which he attempted to reconci le a devout bel ief in revealed rel igion with the new scientific discoveries of his day. Dickinson's language is full of terminology related to the astronomical achievements of the pre- vious century and to the contemporary events and discoveries happening in her life- time. 8 This language is not incidental. Dickinson links it imaginatively into a coher- ent conceptual ization that is real ized by the metaphor LIFE IS A VOYAGE IN SPACE. 3. The AIR IS SEA image metaphor The metaphor of the JOURNEY, as we have seen, was problematic because, unlike the VOYAGE metaphor, it presumed a specific destination. 9 And "the voyage of l i fe" was a commonplace conception in her culture. Dickinson, however, transformed it 0 Kant's scientific work was conducted when he was a young man. One wonders whether his explo- rations into the 'new' science provided at least the groundwork for his later philosophy, just as Dickin- son's readings in the 'new science' led to those aspects of her poetry discussed in this paper. 7 Interesting evidence for the theory of cognitive metaphor is provided in the history of science. In 1728, Bradley solved the problem of aberrant starlight when idly contemplating the movement of a wind vane in the shape of a boat. As Ferris (1989: 138) explains, "It occurred to Bradley that the earth is adrift in winds of starlight". Similarly, Herschel's Book of Sweeps was named after the physical move- ments he made with his telescope to 'sweep' the night sky. Just think what would have happened to the history of science if Bradley's wind vane had been a rooster! s See the chapter "Dry Wine", in Emily Dickinson's Imagery (1979), in which Rebecca Patterson dis- cusses some of these terms and their possible associations with contemporary events. 9 One can see the difference I am alluding to here by considering our commonplace assumptions in our use of the two words, journey and voyage. When we say we are 'going' on a journey, it is assume