Phenomenological Metaphors in Readers’ Engagement with Characters: The Case of Ian McEwan’s Saturday PDF

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Phenomenological Metaphors in Readers’ Engagement with Characters: The Case of Ian McEwan’s Saturday Marco Caracciolo (University of Bologna, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures) To appear in Language and Literature 22 (2): 2013 Abstract Internally focalized passages in narrative often e...

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Phenomenological Metaphors in Readers’ Engagement with Characters: The Case of Ian McEwan’s Saturday

Marco Caracciolo (University of Bologna, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures) To appear in Language and Literature 22 (2): 2013

Abstract Internally focalized passages in narrative often employ metaphors to capture the experiential states of the focalizing character. My investigation of these metaphors—‘phenomenological metaphors’, as I call them—has two important precedents in the fields of narratology and literary stylistics: Dorrit Cohn’s (1978) treatment of ‘psycho-analogies’ and Semino and Swindlehurst’s (1996) approach to metaphor and ‘mind style’. After positioning phenomenological metaphors vis-à-vis these related concepts, I put forward the central claim of this article: metaphorical language plays a role in readers’ engagement with focalizing characters because it can sustain readers’ illusion of experiencing a storyworld through the consciousness of a fictional being. But what is it about metaphorical language that makes it especially suited to bring about this effect on readers? In order to answer this question, I use Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005) as a case study, presenting two different lines of argument. First, I contend that metaphors reflect, at a linguistic level, the seamless integration of perception, emotion and language that characterizes our everyday transactions with the world. Second, I look at the relationship between understanding metaphorical language and readers’ empathy for characters, arguing that the continuity between these psychological processes is grounded in their perspectival nature: just as metaphors invite recipients to adopt a new perspective on a conceptual domain, engaging with a focalizing character encourages readers to ‘try on’ his or her experiential perspective and worldview. Taken together, these

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hypotheses provide an explanation for the effectiveness of phenomenological metaphors at conveying to readers the qualitative ‘feel’ of characters’ experiences.

Keywords Metaphor; phenomenology; narrative; Ian McEwan; Saturday; empathy for fictional characters; mental simulation; mental imagery; synaesthesia; internal focalization.

1 Introduction This article investigates the use and function of a special class of metaphors in print narratives and in particular in contexts of internal focalization. My label for this class is ‘phenomenological metaphors’—i.e., metaphors that are meant to convey the phenomenology of a character’s experience, or ‘what it is like’ (Nagel, 1974) for him or her to experience the world in a certain fictional situation. Many internally focalized texts are rich in metaphorical language, and the central claim of this article is that metaphors are highly instrumental (together with other stylistic devices on which I will not concentrate here) in bringing about an effect on readers: they create the illusion that readers are given an almost unmediated access to the conscious experience of the focalizing character, thus experiencing the storyworld through his or her consciousness. The term ‘illusion’ contains a reference to Wolf’s (2004) account of ‘aesthetic illusion’ as a cognitive effect produced by some narrative texts. In Wolf’s words, such effect consists in ‘experiencing a [fictional] world in a mainly sensory (visual) and emotional way as if it were a slice of life’ (2004: 331). In my view, the sense of experiencing a storyworld through the consciousness of a character—therefore developing a feeling of ‘closeness’ to that character—is a kind of aesthetic illusion that is worth exploring more carefully. Empathy, as a form of perspective-taking, can be identified as the psychological mechanism behind this illusion (see Eder, 2006; Gaut, 1999). In the context of this article, I would like to present a speculative hypothesis concerning the possible role of phenomenological metaphors in triggering empathetic responses, thereby creating readers’ sense of intimacy with fictional characters.

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I section 2 I will build on ideas growing out of the fields of narratology and literary stylistics— Cohn’s (1978) treatment of ‘psycho-analogies’ and Semino and Swindlehurst’s (1996) article on metaphor and ‘mind style’—in order to argue that the connection between metaphor and phenomenology runs deeper than it may appear at first. Metaphor’s effectiveness at rendering the conscious experience of characters depends not only on the skill of individual authors but also on the nature and workings of metaphor itself. After having shown (in section 3) how phenomenological metaphors are positioned in the landscape of today’s metaphor studies, I will put forward two lines of argument for the link between phenomenological metaphors and the cognitive illusion that internally focalized texts can create. The first argument, presented in section 4, has to do with metaphor’s potential for blending together different experiential domains. Synaesthetic metaphors are a striking example of this integration, since they build bridges between sensory modalities that we normally think of as independent. Highlighting the continuity between these metaphors and synaesthesia (a neurological condition in which a sensory stimulus leads to involuntary stimulation in another sensory modality), cognitive psychologists such as Marks (1996) and Cacciari (2008) have argued that both phenomena reveal the imbrication of linguistic thought and sensory experience. By leveraging this intuition, I will claim that metaphorical language is uniquely suited to render characters’ experiences because of the way it simulates the cross-modal integratedness of everyday experience, intertwining verbal form, imagistic thought and pre-verbal consciousness. Readers’ imagination has a key role in turning the linguistic texture of phenomenological metaphors into an experiential texture. The second argument, which I will put forward in section 5, centers on the idea that there is an internal correspondence between metaphor and the processes of readerly engagement with focalizing characters. As cross-domain mappings, metaphors enable us to gain insight into the target conceptual domain by comparing and integrating it with the source domain. This ‘perspective-changing’ function, in Steen’s (2008) term, has a close parallel in the perspectival nature of readers’ empathy for characters. Just as phenomenological metaphors integrate different concrete images into a dynamic mental simulation, which enables readers to imaginatively apprehend a character’s perceptual or emotional experience, 3

relating to a character over a long stretch of text may lead the audience to temporarily ‘try on’ his or her worldview. In turn, this perspective-taking can leave a mark on readers’ own worldview. Such structural resemblance between the workings of metaphor and the feedback effect of narrative empathy could explain why phenomenological metaphors can trigger empathetic responses, thus fostering the illusion that readers are experiencing a storyworld through the consciousness of a character. Throughout the article, the theoretical discussion will be accompanied by the analysis of passages from Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005)—a brilliant example of internally focalized narration, and one characterized by a high occurrence of phenomenological metaphors. Saturday tells a day in the life of Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon at a London hospital, following him closely from the moment when he wakes up well before dawn to the moment when he falls asleep, almost 24 hours later. The plot revolves around a minor car accident, which results in a physical confrontation between Henry and a street criminal, Baxter, while a few blocks away a large crowd of demonstrators protest against the war on Iraq. Later on in the day, Baxter—who suffers from a degenerative neurological disease—breaks into the surgeon’s house, holding him and his family at knifepoint. But it is Henry’s consciousness that has center stage in the novel: the events of the day are densely interwoven with the character’s sensations, memories and reflections on themes that range from post-9/11 world politics to the ‘hard problem’ of reconciling mind and matter (the brain, of which Henry is—in his words—an expert ‘plumber’). Because of its meshing a thematic focus on consciousness with the convincing rendering of the protagonist’s own consciousness (see Thrailkill, 2011), McEwan’s novel provides an ideal case study for my exploration of phenomenological metaphors. Before moving on, some caveats are in order. First, ‘phenomenological metaphors’ should be taken here to include similes. The relationship between metaphor and simile has been a topic of much debate within cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics (see Croft and Cruse, 2004: 211–215), and there are good reasons to believe that—despite conventional assumptions—at least some metaphors should not be understood as implicit similes at all (Glucksberg and Haught, 2006). However, as I will point out in section 3, the metaphors I am interested in here—phenomenological metaphors—are likely to involve a 4

comparison or, more precisely, a mapping between two conceptual domains. Therefore, these metaphors may be associated with similes, since they share the same basic cognitive mechanism—namely, crossdomain mapping. Another caveat is that the kind of empathetic engagement with characters I will posit in the following pages should not be overextended (see Kieran, 2003): I will use the phrase ‘readers’ engagement with characters’ as shorthand for readers’ relations with experiencing characters in internally focalized passages, especially when these characters provide the main focus of consciousness for long stretches of text (as with the protagonist of Saturday). It is well-known that the focalization concept was introduced by Genette (1980 [1972]) to replace older concepts such as ‘narrative perspective’ and ‘point of view’, and that it is still hotly disputed within narratology (see Niederhoff, 2010). The definition of internal focalization I will adopt throughout this article is as follows: a text is internally focalized when it implements stylistic and representational strategies that invite readers to construe the storyworld ‘as perceived and registered (recorded, represented, encoded, modeled and stored) by some mind . . . which is a member of this world’ (Margolin, 2009: 42). In short, internal focalization creates a tension between the audience’s imaginative access to the storyworld and the mental processes they attribute to a character on the basis of textual cues (Caracciolo, 2012a). Sometimes this tension may lead to empathetic identification or perspective-taking. In an experimental study, for example, Barbara Tversky (1996) found that in internally focalized narration the audience tends to imagine the storyworld from the perceptual perspective of the focalizing character. I will argue that phenomenological metaphors have a key role in creating and modulating this empathetic involvement. Finally, there is the question of the epistemological status of my claims. It is important to stress that my argument about phenomenological metaphors and reader-response is purely speculative. Since this may appear problematic in times in which the empirical study of literature is gaining ground (Bortolussi and Dixon, 2002; Miall, 2006), I would like to point out that speculation is important—indeed, essential—as a heuristic tool for formulating hypotheses that may be tested empirically. Although the hypothesis I will put forward in this article has no direct empirical support, it is at least consistent with a 5

number of empirical findings about narrative empathy. Through a series of experiments, Hakemulder (2000) and Kuiken, Miall and Sikora (2004) have suggested that empathy for characters is the principal means whereby narrative impacts readers’ worldview and self-concept. Along these lines, in section 5 I will draw a connection between the psychological effects of reading and the ‘perspective-changing’ function of metaphor. Further, in a seminal article Miall and Kuiken (1994) argued that strategies of stylistic foregrounding—unusual or striking stylistic forms—tend to heighten the audience’s affective involvement. Phenomenological metaphors, of course, can be considered one of these strategies, and as such they are likely to trigger empathetic responses. Keen spells this out clearly when she writes that, ‘following Miall, unusual or striking representations in the literary text promote foregrounding and open the way to empathetic reading’ (2007: 87). However, Miall and Kuiken seem reluctant to draw this conclusion, probably because no empirical evidence exists on this issue—neither in general nor in connection to metaphorical language in particular. My article paves the way for experimental research by proposing two complementary explanations for the close link between readers’ illusion of closeness to characters (with its roots in narrative empathy) and phenomenological metaphors.

2 Precedents: From psycho-analogies to mind style One of the earliest attempts at isolating and describing a stylistic strategy similar to what I call ‘phenomenological metaphors’ can be found in Cohn’s seminal Transparent Minds (1978). Cohn’s preferred term for this device, ‘psycho-analogy’, appears for the first time in the section of her book devoted to ‘psycho-narration’—the narrator’s analysis of a character’s psychological life, as opposed to the direct presentation of the character’s thoughts (Cohn’s ‘quoted monologue’) and to the hybridization of the narrator’s voice with the character’s in free indirect discourse (Cohn’s ‘narrated monologue’). Generally, psycho-narration takes the form of a summary of a character’s mental states over a period of time. By contrast, psycho-analogies have a punctual nature; they are metaphors or similes— although Cohn seems to place a premium on the latter—embedded in psycho-narration in order to 6

‘describe a mental instant’ (1978: 37). This feature explains why psycho-analogies ‘digress from or impede the sequence of recounted events, slowing the pace by continually expanding the time of narration over the narrated time’ (Cohn, 1978: 43). An example would be this simile from McEwan’s novel: Patients would be less happy to know that [Henry is] not always listening to them. He’s a dreamer sometimes. Like a car-radio traffic alert, a shadowy mental narrative can break in, urgent and unbidden, even during a consultation. (2005: 20)

The psycho-analogy ‘Like a car-radio traffic alert’ renders the sudden intrusion of one apparently random thought into the flow of the character’s consciousness. It directs readers’ attention to the way in which this particular mental event plays out, thus slowing down the pace of the psycho-narration—an idea consistent with Miall and Kuiken’s (1994) finding that stylistically marked language increases reading times. But there is another, related aspect that Cohn highlights in her treatment of psycho-analogies. This device, she argues, is particularly suited to ‘reach a sub-verbal stratum in [a] character’s mind’ (1978: 43): in McEwan’s passage, for example, the simile conveys the mysterious—and seemingly random—way in which one thought grafts itself onto another. While the character’s thought has a linguistic or quasilinguistic form (it is a ‘narrative’), its sudden onset or ‘transitive part’—in William James’s (1950: 243) phrase—is too subtle to be verbalized in a non-metaphorical way. Hence, the author makes use of a simile to capture the subjective quality of this mental instant. Moreover, the source of the analogy remains unclear: is it Henry himself who comes up with this simile, or is it rather the narrator who is trying to reach towards the character’s pre-verbal consciousness? While in other phenomenological metaphors the wording seems to belong to the character, here the analogy exists in the no man’s land between the narrator’s voice and the character’s consciousness—and this, of course, strengthens the impression that we are penetrating into a layer of Henry’s experience that cuts below his verbal stream of consciousness. With these remarks, we are broaching the question of how literature, and narrative literature in particular, conveys what philosophers of mind call ‘qualia’—the ineffable, qualitative properties of an

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experience (see Tye, 2009). Being bound up with our phenomenology, qualia have to do not only with what is experienced, but also with how we experience it. And we have just seen that metaphorical language is often responsible for expressing this phenomenological ‘how’. Indeed, David Lodge has suggested that metaphors and similes are ‘one of the primary means by which literature renders qualia’ (2002: 13). Taking my cue from Lodge, I will explore the connection between phenomenology and metaphorical language in the next section. Before that, however, I would like to briefly touch on another research tradition that is clearly relevant to this discussion—namely, cognitive stylistics. Together with Black (1993), Semino and Swindlehurst (1996; see also Semino, 2002) have been among the first to stress the importance of metaphor in the creation of a character’s mind style. The concept of ‘mind style’ comes, of course, from Fowler’s (1977: 76) work, where it is defined as a set of linguistic forms and structures that bear a character’s unique cognitive signature, revealing his or her psychological traits, dispositions and worldview. Semino and Swindlehurst’s central claim is that ‘the systematic use of a particular metaphor (or metaphors) reflects an idiosyncratic cognitive habit, a personal way of making sense of and talking about the world: in other words, a particular mind style’ (1996: 147). Along these lines, many of the metaphors scattered throughout Saturday are tinged by the protagonist’s medical expertise, referring to anatomical structures or medical procedures in a way that clearly reflects the character’s training as a neurosurgeon: ‘These diaphanous films of sleep are still slowing him down— he imagines them resembling the arachnoid, that gossamer covering of the brain through which he routinely cuts’ (2005: 57). Unlike Cohn’s psycho-analogies, the metaphors discussed by Semino and Swindlehurst seem to appear at a higher level of consciousness, one fully mediated by a character’s linguistic habits and psychological dispositions—to the point that they can be taken as symptoms of his or her worldview. These metaphors originate in and belong to the character’s own thought activity: in the words just quoted, for example, it is Henry himself who imagines the ‘diaphanous films of sleep’ as ‘resembling the arachnoid’. We know, therefore, that the character has drawn the latter comparison. By contrast, it is uncertain whether the metaphor ‘diaphanous films of sleep’ results from the narrator’s verbalization of 8

Henry’s phenomenological state or if it already manifests itself in verbal form to the character. All in all, whereas the simile ‘he imagines them resembling the arachnoid’ is a clear pointer to the character’s mind style, the metaphor would count as a psycho-analogy, in Cohn’s term. And this indicates another difference between these two lines of investigation: whereas Cohn sees psycho-analogies as instantaneous ‘snapshots’ of a character’s mental state, Semino and Swindlehurst are interested in the recurring metaphorical patterns that run through a particular text, playing a role in the psychological characterization of a fictional being. I believe there are cogent reasons for trying to integrate these approaches: as a philosophical tradition that goes back at least to William James (1950; see Pred, 2005) has stressed, experience cannot be reduced to a series of single, self-contained mental events (captured by psycho-analogies); on the contrary, it dwells in the interplay and interaction between these events and our psychological dispositions and traits (reflected in a mind style). This is what my concept of ‘phenomenological metaphor’ attempts to do: it spans the continuum between small-sca...