Chapter Two Metaphor, Symbol, Allegory and Moby-Dick

2.1 Introduction

The study is supposed to give a cognitive model for literary interpretation that will integrate author, reader, text and context based on the reading of Moby-Dick. This chapter002.

2.2 Interpretation

Research on the reader’s “interpretation” of literary work can be traced back to Russian Formalists and the Prague Linguistic Circle. Shklovsky and Mukarovský have recognized the crucial role that reader’s attention plays during the process of literary interpretation. The theory they built is called “foregrounding theory” makes effort to explain the striking textual features that may cause estrangement in the reading process. Foregrounding involves the dynamic interaction among author, (literary) text and reader. On the one hand, the material presence of certain foregrounding devices will guide the reader to his interpretation and evaluation of the text; on the other hand, the reader will look for such devices in order to satisfy his aesthetic needs in reading a literary text (Mukarovský 1932/1964).

Foregrounding is opposite to automatization; the more an act is automatized, the less it is consciously executed; the more it is foregrounded, the more completely conscious it becomes. Automatization schematizes an event; foregrounding means the violation of the scheme (Mukarovský 1964: 19).

Foregrounding theory was later developed by Van Peer (1986, 2007), Miall and Kuiken (1994), Miall (2001, 2006, 2009). They have carried out empirical studies to explore the relation between the degree of deviation and the effect of readers’ aesthetic appreciation. They did research on the foregrounding effect that is assumed to be the key to understanding the meaning of literature, and to readers’ interpretation of a text; they also attempted to explore emotional or “affective” responses to literature using both psychological experiments and new developments in neuropsychology.

The 1960s witnessed a real turn to the reader’s response in literary theory owing to the rise of reader response school that highly stresses on the reader’s role in creating the meaning and experience. They thrived in the 1970s and 1980s particularly in America and Germany. The representatives are Wolfgang Iser, Robert Jauss, Stanley Fish, Norman Holland, Jonathan Culler and others.

They all share the common ground that the reader as creator of textual meanings occupies the central position. Literary texts contain a plurality of interpretative codes, which readers need access in order to decipher the message. The hermeneutic or interpretative code involves meaning-making. This reader is explicitly foregrounded in reader response approaches (e.g. Fish 1971; Iser 1978; Jauss 1982).

They classified “the implied reader” (Iser 1978), “the model reader” (Eco 1979), “super reader” (Riffaterre 1972), and “the mocked reader” (Gibson 1950/1980). Culler proposes that readers of literature should have literary competence which helps them make sense of poetry:

(i) The rule of significance/primary convention: Read the poem as expressing a significant attitude to some problems concerning man and/or his relation to the universe.

(ii) The rule of metaphoric coherence: Attempt through semantic transformations to produce coherence on the levels of both tenor and vehicle.

(iii) Inscribe the poem in a poetic tradition.

(iv) The convention of thematic unity: Read the poem as coherent.

(v) The convention of binary opposites: Look for terms “which can be placed on a semantic or thematic axis and opposed to one another’’.

(vi) The fiction convention: Read the poem as fiction,

(Culler 1975: Chapter 6)

While reader response theory focuses attention on the importance of reader-text interaction, reader response criticism tends to “work from the text itself rather than from information about responses” (Culler 1981/2001: 62), so that the distinction between literary criticism of this type and literary criticism more generally is more a matter of presentation than of methodology, and the basic model for research being one in which a lone academic scrutinizes the linguistic structure of a text in order to pronounce upon its meanings and effects.

Fish takes a step even further. He argues that the reader-oriented approach is based on conventions of reading that impose meanings on texts too, rather than discovering meanings in texts. Just as formalist analyses assume that there is one correct analysis, Fish argues, reader-oriented approaches assume that there is one correct reading experience (Pilkington 2000: 35).

Fish (1971) illustrates his point with an experiment he did in the literature class. He wrote a list of linguists’ names on the blackboard like this:

Jacobs-Rosenbaum

Levin

Thorne

Hayes

Ohmann(?)

He reports that the students applied many strategies to transform the list into poems. Therefore, Fish believes that it is not that literature exhibits certain formal properties that compel a certain kind of attention; rather, paying a certain kind of attention (as defined by what literature is understood to be) results in the emergence into noticeability of the properties we know in advance to be literary (Fish 1980: 10). Readers are active in making their own interpretations and all these interpretations are meaningful.

Fish together with many poststructuralists’ efforts removes the literary text from the center of critical interpretation and the reader’s cognitive experience takes its place. The shift arouses new methodology and approaches to study reading process in the light of cognitive science especially cognitive linguistics. This field is known as cognitive poetics or cognitive stylistics.^[1]

A central claim of cognitive poetics is that it casts light on the process of reading (Miall 2006). Peter Stockwell in Introducing Cognitive Poetics writes that “it is all about reading literature” (Stockwell 2002: 11). Yet like most other literary scholars, the reader throughout his book remains a theoretical one. Indeed, for most scholars in the cognitive paradigm their work is primarily analytical: What we find are theories of reading, based on cognitive constructs such as deixis, conceptual frame theory, or embodied metaphor (Miall 2006).

Cognitive stylistics is an interesting and useful paradigm precisely to the extent that it helps us to open up stylistics to reader and context. Indeed, the cognitive context provides the necessary link between the text, the reader, and the social context. Here, the reader goes beyond what affective stylisticians’ concern over the mock reader or super reader and the context in cognitive stylistic analysis must not limit itself to the cognitive context but reach out into the wider social context. Most of Lakoff’s work has this—at least potential—social edge (Lakoff 1987). Therefore, cognitive stylistics presents a much more comprehensive model to include more elements for literary interpretation. Even psychological experiments have been carried out by some, for example, van Dijk and Kintsch (1983), Zwaan (1993), Tsur (1982, 1997, 1998). These efforts certainly meet some challenges that former reader response theorist could not have met.

Reuven Tsur (2003) in Israel has developed in great detail models for the expressivity of poetic rhythms, of metaphor, and of word-sound in poetry (including different actors’ readings of a single line of Shakespeare). Richard Gerrig (1993) in the U.S. has experimented with the reader’s state of mind during and after a literary experience. He has shown how readers put aside ordinary knowledge and values while they read, treating, for example, criminals as heroes. He has also investigated how readers accept, while reading, improbable or fantastic things, but discard them after they have finished.

There has been some pioneering fundamental work done by cognitive stylistians. Efforts have already been made by works such as Semino and Culpeper (2002), Stockwell (2002), and Freeman (1999, 2000, 2002, 2005) to show how cognitive linguistics can shed light on literary understanding and appreciation. Stockwell claims that cognitive stylistics emphasizes “the study of literary reading” from both the individual and social perspectives (Stockwell 2002: 165-167). Semino and Culpeper present an equally similar view of cognitive stylistics as combining “the kind of explicit, rigorous and detailed linguistic analysis of literary texts that is typical of the stylistics tradition with a systematic and theoretically informed consideration of the cognitive structures and processes that underlie the production and reception of language” (Semino and Culpeper 2003: ix). According to Gavins and Steen, cognitive stylistics studies the “psychological and social effects” of the structures of the literary text on the reader’s mind. Freeman also brilliantly explains in details her “cognitive-cultural-contextual frame” of Dickinson’s poetry (Freeman 2002: 40) and argues the possibility to set up cognitive poetics as a framework (Freeman 2005, 2006).

2.3 Metaphor, symbol and allegory

Metaphor, symbol and allegory are keys to the understanding and interpretation of literary works. Metaphor is redefined in cognitive linguistics and is deemed as entrenched in human being’s mind and reveals how the world is conceptualized. Mapping in conceptual metaphor has been profoundly researched recently. Symbol and allegory share similar projection process and are less studied in the field.

2.3.1 Conceptual metaphor in literary discourse

Cognitive stylistics draws insights from cognitive linguistics and applies different schools of thoughts in various ways. New concepts of prototypes, cognitive grammar, conceptual metaphor etc. have shed light on cognitive stylistics. Among them, Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and Blending Theory (BT) are among the most influential ones. They are more “complementary” in their respective understandings of metaphor. CMT offers a systematic perspective to investigate metaphor and thought, while BT presents how the metaphor are construed and processed by the reader.

Lakoff and Turner point out in More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Lakeoff and Turner 1989) the function of conceptual metaphor in literary works. They argue that metaphor is not merely a linguistic deviance but a mode of ordinary thought. Even in literary discourse like poetry, metaphors seem unconventional; they are still the extension of conventional conceptual metaphors. In Chapter three of the book (“The Metaphoric Structure of a Single Poem”), they take William Carlos Williams’ “To a Solitary Disciple” as an example to illustrate how the poet appeals to conceptual metaphors to communicate a deeper meaning to the reader.

Steen (1994) proposes an attempt to present aspects of an empirical theory of metaphor in literary reception and shows how evidence can be collected from readers’ processing of metaphor in literary text and evaluates how this processing relate to the function of metaphor in literature. Steen (1999) carries out another attempt to approach metaphors in poetry by a systematic and multidimensional approach. Emphasizing the readers’ cognitive effect, Steen investigates linguistic, conceptual, communicative structure and function of metaphor by taking Wordsworth’s “I wondered lonely as a cloud” as an example.

Margaret Freeman (1996, 2000, 2002, 2005, 2006, 2009) has been consistently working on applying cognitive linguistics to the building of cognitive poetic model. She uses blending theory to explain the process of that taking place in both the construction and construal of poetry. She investigates Emily Dickinson’s (1996, 2000, 2002), Plath’s (2005), and Wei Ying-wu’s (2006) poems. Her practice in cognitive poetics shows how blending theory can bridge the author and the reader’s mapping space in literary works.

Following Freeman’s model Hiraga (2005) explores the metaphoric structure in Japanese Haiku. Teresa Calderon (2005, 2006) also applies blending theory in analyzing poems. She works out an “integrational method” which includes CMT, ICM (Idealized Cognitive Model),BT, and discourse analysis and takes Plath and Larkin’s poems as examples to illustrate her points.

Donald Freeman (1993, 1995, 1999) controversially puts a model on how conceptual metaphor can be applied to drama analysis. He takes King Lear, Macbeth, Anthony and Cleopatra, and others as examples to show how cognitive metaphor and image schemata can be used to illustrate the characters in the drama. For instance, he reads the play Anthony and Cleopatra as a “richly blended amalgam of the CONTAINER, LINK, PATH image schemas”. The analysis characterizes within an analytical model Anthony’s oft-remarked dissolution, Cleopatra’s dissolution, and the sharp outline’s idea of Rome. Therefore, Cleopatra functions as a subversive force against Rome.

Kimmel (2005) discusses the role of image schema in shaping narrative macrostructures and in organizing literary metaphor systems. He proposes a model to analyze the rich metaphor system of Heart of Darkness and explores the relationship of metaphor network and the theme, plot and structure of the novel.