| Contents > Mis-Perception: Metaphor as a metaphor for the reception of fictional narratives by Russ Swinnerton |
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Mis-Perception: Metaphor as a metaphor
for the reception of fictional narratives
Abstract Metaphor is a fundamental element of language, increasing its potential to convey meaning economically. It is also a naturally attractive device for enriching narrative in fictional literary contexts. In metaphor, we notice the similarities of the concepts compared, and not the differences. Our reception of fiction – our ability to lose ourselves in a story – is analogous: we are attracted to the similarities with our own lives, our own inner narratives, and ignore the differences between ourselves and the characters of the fictional narrative we enjoy. And beyond fiction, when we relax our rational focus on a situation, we seem to be subject to cognitive illusions in the same way we are prone to optical illusions. This paper suggests that our evolutionary origins explain both our reliance on metaphor in narrative, and our willingness to suspend disbelief in our reception of fiction. When fiction contains a moral message (and I will suggest that all fiction does), we respond to it, either as a model for our own behaviour or a warning of behaviour to be avoided, whether or not our personal experience prepares us with opportunities for comparable behaviours. This paper reviews current research on the evolutionary origins of symbolic representation, language and narrative, before considering whether our willingness to suspend disbelief is similarly a product of the co-evolution of biology and culture. The paper then suggests some implications for readers when receiving a fictional narrative, and for writers in producing them. |
Introduction
This paper is drawn from my research project, which is examining the treatment of moral issues in modernist literature, including the way World War I influenced the moral context and authorial intention. I am coming at the problem in a roundabout way, beginning with a naturalistic exploration of human psychology in order to understand why literature reflects such a preoccupation with moral issues. Looking at cognitive approaches to the question of moral content – and anthropological, and sociobiological approaches – has exposed the question of where our capacity for symbolic representation comes from in the first place. Our reliance on symbols and metaphor, or our susceptibility to them, appears to be just part of the overall set of cognitive abilities and limitations that, among other things, influence the way we produce and receive literary texts. So let’s start with a metaphor:
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The shirt seemed heavy until he saw there was another shirt inside it, the sleeves carefully worked down inside Jack’s sleeves. It was his own plaid shirt, lost, he’d thought, long ago in some damn laundry, his dirty shirt, the pocket ripped, buttons missing, stolen by Jack and hidden here inside Jack’s own shirt, the pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one. He pressed his face into the fabric and breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty sweet stink of Jack but there was no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands. (Proulx, 2000, p. 316)
The metaphor of shirts synthesises and abstracts the concept of the relationship between the two men with a fluency and power that inarticulate Jack could never have expressed in words. When we read that passage, and share with Ennis his dawning comprehension of the symbolic power of the metaphor to represent Jack’s feelings for him, we can’t help but respond. Annie Proulx of course has something to do with drawing us in to vicariously experience the metaphor, embedded in the larger story. We respond to this narrative much as Ennis responds to the metaphor – seeing the similarities of this relationship with our own experiences, and passing over the differences.
Like any good post-grad English scholar, Ennis appropriates the metaphor and hangs it in his trailer under a thirty-cent postcard of the mountain, as if he couldn’t trust himself to make the symbolic connection between the shirts and the relationship without the visual prompt. (That’s a little unfair to Ennis; what he is actually doing in this final part of the novella is creating a shrine to their relationship, and to Brokeback Mountain; the shirts are altar cloths, symbolic of his – and our – need for spiritual connection, for myth and ritual.)
What I’d like to do today is explain why we don’t need the visual prompt, why we can trust our symbolic senses to understand metaphor for what it is, the tip of the iceberg (to use a tired old metaphor) of our symbolic aptitude, which underpins our language ability and our reception of narrative. We know from experience that metaphor works, and so does literature; whatever additional insights we can obtain to assist in understanding why it works, should assist us in writing and reading.
Sociobiology and the Culture Wars
There are competing explanations for the origins of symbolic representation. The application of cognitive, anthropological and evolutionary approaches to the humanities seems to have always been controversial, and especially so since the publication of E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in the early 1970s. In general, the debate has been about the extent to which genes influence behaviour; in its simplest form, it’s the ‘nature or nurture’ debate on the origins of human behaviour. One of Wilson’s key premises is that both are important, with behaviour a product of the co-evolution of culture and genes;1 but his project was (perhaps consciously?) misconstrued as ‘genetic determinism’, with its critics labelling it an attempt to provide genetic excuses for undesirable – even abhorrent – behaviours, such as racism, rape and war. But this is committing the ‘is/ought’ fallacy: Wilson himself sought to make clear that
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…there is a dangerous trap in sociobiology, one which can be avoided only by constant vigilance. The trap is the naturalistic fallacy of ethics, which uncritically concludes that what is, should be. The ‘what is’ in human nature is to a large extent the heritage of a Pleistocene hunter-gatherer existence. When any genetic bias is demonstrated, it cannot be used to justify a continuing practice in present and future societies. Since most of us live in a radically new environment of our own making, the pursuit of such a practice would be bad biology; and like all bad biology, it would invite disaster. (Wilson, in Segerstråle, 2000, p. 25)
The sociobiology debate (including the above quotation) is well covered in Ullica Segerstråle’s Defenders of the Truth. For Wilson, his (oft misunderstood) aim was to achieve ‘consilience’, the amalgamation of scientific and humanities approaches:
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There is only one way to unite the great branches of learning and end the culture wars. It is to view the boundary between the scientific and literary cultures not as a territorial line but as a broad and mostly unexplored terrain awaiting cooperative entry from both sides. … The two cultures share the following challenge. We know that virtually all of human behaviour is transmitted by culture. We also know that biology has an important effect on the origin of culture and its transmission. The question remaining is how biology and culture interact, and in particular how they interact across all societies to create the commonalities of human nature. (Wilson, 1998, p. 137)
See Wilson, 1998, pp. 136—177, Chapter7, ‘From Genes to Culture’, for a full explanation of the ‘epigenetic rules’ linking genes, culture and behaviour. |
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| Contents > Mis-Perception: Metaphor as a metaphor for the reception of fictional narratives by Russ Swinnerton |