More than cool reason: A field guide to poetic metaphor by George Lakoff and Mark Turner (review)

REVIEW ARTICLE More than cool reason: A field guide to poetic metaphor, by George Lakoff and Mark Turner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Pp. xii, 230. $11.95. Reviewed by Ray Jackendoff, Brandeis University, and David Aaron, Wellesley College* This book (MTCR) presents itself as 'analyzing the role of metaphor in poetry ... [taking] up general questions of the theory of metaphor... The book should therefore prove valuable to students and researchers in literature, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and cognitive science' (xii). The book is organized into four chapters. The first, 'Life, death, and time', explores the range of metaphorical conceptions of these fundamental notions, illustrated by analyses of passages from a wide variety of poems of different periods. This introduction serves to motivate the second chapter, 'The power of poetic metaphor'. This is the core of the book, presenting in detail the authors ' theory of poetic metaphor and comparing it with other approaches. Ch. 3, 'The metaphoric structure of a single poem', treats William Carlos Williams's 'The jasmine lightness of the moon' in depth as a further application of the theory. The final chapter, 'The great chain of being', deals with a widespread metaphor (or metaphor complex), shows its application in poems and proverbs, and draws some general conclusions. In the present review article we can only touch on some of the many provocative issues that the book raises from the points of view of linguistics and literature. Our discussion focuses primarily on Ch. 2. 1. Basic claims. L&T make a number of claims, repeated throughout the book, which form the basis of their approach to metaphor. (1)A metaphor is not a 'figure of speech', a linguistic object. Rather, it is a conceptual or cognitive organization expressed by the linguistic object. As a consequence, many different linguistic expressions may evoke (or invoke) the same metaphor. (2)Metaphorical expressions pervade ordinary language; they are not just used for artistic purposes. These everyday metaphors reveal cognitive and cultural conceptions of the world. (3)Metaphor in poetry is not a distinctly different phenomenon from metaphor in ordinary language. Rather, poetic metaphor exploits and enriches the everyday metaphors available to any competent speaker of the language. (4)The act of reading texts is a cognitive process of bringing one's construal of the world to bear on the concepts evoked by the text. Claims (1) and (2) are the central burden of Lakoff' s earlier book with Mark * We are grateful to George Lakoff, Mark Turner, Sarah Thomason, and an anonymous reader for many helpful comments on an earlier version of this review article. This research was supported in part by NSF Grant IRI 90-46528 to Brandeis University. 320 REVIEW ARTICLE321 Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff & Johnson 1980); it is the application to literary contexts that is novel here. In general we find ourselves in agreement with these claims (although, as will be seen in §4, we find (2) considerably overstated); they constitute an important statement of a 'cognitivist' view of literary interpretation. In particular , claim (3), the grounding of literary metaphor in 'everyday metaphor', strikes us as especially interesting. However, as in the case of any large-scale claim of this sort, the theory should be judged in terms of how satisfyingly the details are fleshed out. If we point out weaknesses in L&T's presentation, it is not with the aim of undermining their overall cognitivist perspective, but rather to explore how a more convincing case could be constructed. 2. Scholarly stance. Before going into the substance of L&T's claims, we must first make a few general remarks. The authors tell us that the book is aimed above all at a nonspecialist audience ('We have tried to write the book in a style accessible to undergraduates who are learning to read poetry in depth' [xii]). However, the passage quoted at the beginning of this review suggests that readers with a broad range of scholarly concerns are also being addressed. Given the latter concern, and in view of the vast literature on metaphor—Black 1979 cites a list of references in Shibles 1971 containing some four thousand titles—it is somewhat surprising to find in MTCR a bibliography of only fourteen items...