Memory, Metaphors, and Meaning: Reading Literary Texts (review)

Nicolae Babuts’s latest work on the relationship of memory to creative expression and interpretation is an invaluable addition to the current research on cognitive approaches to literature being carried out by such influential scholars as Elaine Scarry, Michael Holquist, and Jonathan Gottschall. In pioneering earlier studies like The Dynamics of the Metaphoric Field: A Cognitive View of Literature, 1992, and Baudelaire: At the Limits and Beyond, 1997, Babuts has analyzed the way literary texts reveal the crucial role played by an individual writer’s mnemonic processes as they intervene to transform the world of lived experience into freshly conceived metaphoric patterns. He would agree with Holquist that “there is a difference between the kind of reading that people do when they read Marcel Proust or Henry James and a newspaper, that there is a value added cognitively when we read complex literary texts.” (New York Times, April 1, 2010) The recurring word, “free,” is central to the importance Babuts attributes to literature in its power to create a fully emancipated reader. For him literary studies are “an instrument of discovery” in an age when clichéd language is too often used as a tool for the control of power rather than for understanding; they are exemplary exercises of creative freedom from the “shibboleths of the day” (xvii).

Babuts makes a strong case for the study of literature by showing how complex literary texts bear out the discoveries of cognitive psychologists in ways that expand the horizon of meaning. His focus on the mnemonic process of retrieval that differs from one writer to another sets him sharply apart from post-structuralist critics who deny the role of authorial agency in the creation of literary texts. His close readings of the way Homer or Milton, Shakespeare or Allen Tate, Hugo or Eliot, for example, treat similar metaphoric fields (such as “yielding in conflict,” “the movement of falling,” or “the light of the eyes”) bring out striking differences in worldviews, thus restoring an important historic dimension and the case for genuine originality to the works he studies. Memory, Metaphors, and Meaning abounds in finely textured interpretations that demonstrate the power of literature to create meaning: in the way Ted Hughes and Pablo Antonio Cuadra treat the freedom from imprisonment inherent in the wild animal in “The Jaguar” and “The Myth of the Jaguar,” for example, or how modern poets like Wallace Stevens, Mitchell LesCarbeau, or Katha Pollitt rework Homer’s Penelope pattern. In Chapters 5, “Beginnings and Endings,” and 7, “The Tonality of Metaphoric Fields,” where he analyzes the originality of Virgil’s Aeneid or Allen Tate’s “Aeneas at Washington” and “The Mediterranean” in relationship to Homer’s Odyssey, one experiences the thrill of discovery from readings that can emerge from the wellspring of a highly literate memory.

The ethical and humanist dimensions of Babuts’s position are everywhere apparent, but I felt most keenly what is at stake for him when he joins the exiled hero, Aeneas, as he stands before the temple murals depicting the fall of Troy: “Nowhere is Virgil’s capacity to reach out beyond himself to envision human suffering in terms of his own sensibility more evident . . . each scene is endowed with so much sensory and visionary energy that readers may be aware of Aeneas’s own experience of seeing and reliving the painted events of the Trojan war in the plenitude of the present . . . Sunt lacrimae rerum ‘there are tears for passing things’ . . . all things that belong to this world and betray the transitory character of all human endeavor” (169–71). “What writer,” he asks “has highlighted more poignantly and more clearly the ruin and the tragic losses of war?” In saying this, Babuts challenges both “politically motivated theories” and, perhaps most importantly, the idea that “knowledge . . . is obtained through a reasoning process alone. . .through a never-ending proliferation of abstraction-bred abstractions,” as he puts it in his concluding remarks. “Poetry,” he writes, “eschews the kinds of generalizations that...