"Blending" and an Interpretation of Haiku: A Cognitive Approach

Abstract

This essay aims to demonstrate that the "blending" model proposed by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier is useful in analyzing short poetic texts such as haiku, which have rather obscure grammatical constructions and dense cultural implications. This model stresses the importance of "the emergent structure" of the blended space activated by inferences from the input spaces and the contextual background knowledge and, therefore, provides an effective tool for understanding the creativity of literary metaphors. In addition, this many-space approach better explains the rhetorical effects produced by loose grammatical configurations in the haiku texts, such as the juxtaposition of phrases by kireji (cutting letters) and multiple puns or phrases produced by personification and allegory. The analysis also shows that haiku texts, which are rich in traditional implications, assume common knowledge that shapes the cultural cognitive model. Such knowledge would include (1) pragmatic knowledge of the context, such as time, place, customs, life, and so on; (2) folk models, which originate from myth and folk beliefs about the conceptualization of existing things; (3) conventional metaphors, in George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's sense, which have been conventionalized in a given speech community over time, and which a poet exploits in nonconventional ways; and (4) the iconicity of kanji, Chinese ideograms, which link form and meaning, particularly with regard to their etymological derivation, and thereby serve as a cognitive medium for haiku texts. The blending model provides an account for the process of integration of these features of background knowledge in the reading of texts.

This essay will explore how promising a basis cognitive poetics, developed mainly in the Western literary tradition, provides for analyzing Japanese poetic texts such as haiku.¹ Since the eighteenth century, there has been an enormous amount of literature on haiku, most of which is philological and paleographical in nature. A brief list of modern criticism (much of which examines Basho's haiku) includes Akabane 1970, Morita 1970, Ogata 1971, Kaneko 1973, Yamamoto 1974, Imoto 1978, Ueno 1986, and Muramatsu 1988. Works on haiku from the perspectives of structural poetics and semiotics include Kawamoto 1978, 1986, Ikegami et al. 1983, Hiraga 1987, 1995, and Arima 1996. This study attempts to integrate the past philological and structural traditions and reinterpret their methodological contributions to cognitive terms. The explanatory power of the cognitive approach to poetic texts has been demonstrated by Turner 1987, Lakoff and Turner 1989, D. Freeman 1993, and Deane 1995, among others. Donald Freeman (1993: 1), for example, finds that "cognitive metaphor provides accounts of language patterns that are isomorphic with larger imaginative literary structures, as well as particular interpretations that are more explicit and falsifiable than existing interpretations founded upon the language of literary works."

In order to test the isomorphism of language patterns with "larger imaginative literary structures" (D. Freeman 1993: 1), the present research looks at two haiku texts taken from Basho's travel sketch Oku no Hosomichi, one of the acknowledged masterpieces of Japanese literature.² These two poems were chosen because structurally they form a thematic pair that frames the larger text of the travel sketch, the first poem in the sketch's opening phase, and the second at its conclusion. In my analysis, I hope to demonstrate that cognitive poetics offers explanations of the metaphorical structure of the haiku poems on two levels: first, at the local level, where each poetic metaphorical expression is interpreted in terms of its conceptual and/or image mapping; and, second, at the global level where the haiku texts themselves are seen as a metaphor, as is the travel sketch. It will further be suggested that the emergent model of "blending" proposed by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier (1995a, 1995b, this volume) provides a more effective tool for understanding poetic creativity in general and, in particular, allegorical personification,³ juxtaposition by kireji (cutting letters), and multiple puns in haiku.

It will also be pointed out that understanding haiku texts, which are rich in traditional implications, requires a deep understanding of traditional Japanese culture, which shapes the cultural cognitivemodel. A nonexhaustive list of the features of such...