Metaphor and Iconicity: A Cognitive Approach to Analysing Texts

Metaphor and Iconicity A Cognitive Approach to Analysing Texts

Masako K. Hiraga

Metaphor and Iconicity

Also by Masako K. Hiraga CULTURAL, PSYCHOLOGICAL AND TYPOLOGICAL ISSUES IN COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS (Co-editor with Chris Sinha and Sherman Wilcox)

Metaphor and Iconicity A Cognitive Approach to Analysing Texts Masako K. Hiraga

© Masako K. Hiraga 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–3345–6 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hiraga, Masako. Metaphor and iconicity : a cognitive approach to analyzing texts / Masako K. Hiraga. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–3345–6 (cloth) 1. Metaphor. 2. Iconicity (Linguistics). 3. Discourse analysis. 4. Poetics. 5. Cognitive grammar. I. Title. P301.5.M48H57 401¢.43–dc22

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Contents Acknowledgements

ix

List of Tables

xiii

List of Figures

xiv

List of Abbreviations

xvi

Part I 1

2

Framework

1

Introduction 1.1 A glimpse of the issue 1.1.1 Metaphor in icon 1.1.2 Iconicity in metaphor 1.1.3 How a poem manifests metaphor–icon links 1.2 Purpose of study 1.2.1 Contribution to the study of linguistic iconicity 1.2.2 Contribution to the study of the status of written language 1.3 Scope and organisation of study 1.3.1 Scope of study 1.3.2 Organisation of study Methodological Framework 2.1 Background literature 2.1.1 The traditional treatment of metaphor and iconicity 2.1.2 Metaphor and iconicity in cognitive linguistics and poetics 2.2 Peircean definition 2.2.1 Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness 2.2.2 Icon, index, symbol 2.2.3 Image, diagram, metaphor 2.3 Cognitive definition: interplay between metaphor and iconicity 2.3.1 Iconicity and metaphor defined 2.3.2 The model of blending v

3 3 3 5 7 14 14 18 19 19 20 22 23 23 25 29 29 30 31 35 35 36

vi

Contents

2.4

2.5 Part II 3

2.3.3 Grammatical metaphors Jakobson on poetic function revisited 2.4.1 The poetic function of language 2.4.2 The role of repetition in text 2.4.3 Repetition as grammatical metaphor Summary

41 45 46 46 49 50

Analysis

55

Manifestation of Metaphor–Icon Links: Prototypical Examples 3.1 Shape and sense in Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’ 3.1.1 Text as shape 3.1.2 Text as icon 3.2 Grammatical parallelism in Shelley’s ‘Love’s Philosophy’ 3.2.1 Text as metaphor 3.2.2 Iconic interpretation by metaphor 3.3 Isomorphism of text structure in Basho’s Oku no Hosomichi 3.3.1 Haiku and cognitive metaphor 3.3.2 Texts 3.3.3 The spring poem 3.3.4 The autumn poem 3.3.5 Metaphor–icon links in macro-structure 3.4 Concluding remarks

57 58 58 59 63 63 67 70 70 72 73 80 85 89

4

Vision as Meaning 4.1 Poetry and visual representation 4.1.1 The writing systems of English and Japanese 4.1.2 Visual representation in poetry 4.2 Visual poetry 4.2.1 Imagic manifestations 4.2.2 Diagrammatic manifestations 4.2.3 Remarks on comparison 4.3 Subtle manifestations of visual iconicity in poetry 4.3.1 General diagrammatic features 4.3.2 Orthographical revisions of haiku 4.4 Concluding remarks

91 91 92 96 100 100 106 115 116 117 118 125

5

Sound as Meaning 5.1 Poetry and auditory representation 5.1.1 The sound systems of English and Japanese 5.1.2 Auditory representation in poetry

127 127 128 131

Contents vii

5.2

5.3

5.4 Part III 6

7

8

Phonosymbolism 5.2.1 The dance of sounds in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Bells’ 5.2.2 Charging the music: phonological revisions of haiku Diagrammatic structuring of the sound 5.3.1 Mirror of sounds in Williams’s ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ 5.3.2 Hidden melodies in Tomonori’s ‘Hisakata no’ Concluding remarks Further Issues

The Interplay of Metaphor and Iconicity in Grammar and Discourse 6.1 A typology of grammatical metaphors 6.1.1 Relational diagrams 6.1.2 Structural diagrams 6.1.3 Iconicity in discourse 6.2 Metaphor–icon links in polite language 6.2.1 VERTICAL DISTANCE 6.2.2 TEMPORAL DISTANCE 6.3 Concluding remarks

134 135 146 156 157 161 168 171 173 173 175 178 185 186 187 191 192

Iconicity and Written Language 7.1 Written language and writing systems 7.1.1 The alphabet vs non-alphabetic writing systems 7.1.2 Chinese characters as ideograms and logographs 7.2 Iconicity and kanji 7.2.1 Metaphor–icon links in kanji 7.2.2 Kanji as a poetic medium 7.3 A re-evaluation of written language 7.3.1 The comprehensive view 7.3.2 An extended definition of written language

194 194

197 199 200 206 207 207 212

Conclusions 8.1 Summary of main claims 8.1.1 Theoretical contributions 8.1.2 Methodological contributions 8.2 Further research issues

219 219 219 222 224

195

viii Contents

8.2.1 8.2.2

‘Languaging’: language in the making Ecology of communication media

224 225

Notes

228

References

239

Index

253

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the many people who have helped and encouraged me both before and during the writing of this book.

Central to this project are the vision and insight of Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, who deserve my greatest debt of gratitude. I would like to thank them for their works and words, which always boosted my confidence and sharpened my thinking.

On the entire manuscript, Hayley Davis and Joan Turner offered extensive comments and suggestions. As friends and colleagues, they have meant so much to me. I would also like to express my gratitude to Yoshihiko Ikegami, Gunther Kress and Michael Toolan for their constructive criticisms on early drafts of the manuscript. Not only for being my first mentor in linguistics at Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo, but also for his continued influence through the research circle of the Institute of Human Linguistics (IHL), I must thank Yasuo Isami. Members of IHL who have helped through their various discussions include Masako Akimatsu, Haruo Hoshii, Katsutoshi Ito, Masaru Makiuchi, Yumiko Mikuni and Niro Ohki.

Ever since we first met, Yoko Fujii, Joanna Radwanska-Williams and Valerie Anne Wilkinson have been constant friends and the most ideal of colleagues. Without their rich input at every stage of thought and writing, the book would have been much the poorer.

The moral support, encouragement and friendship of Erich Berendt, Brian Falconbridge, Masanori Higa, Sachiko Ide, Teruyuki Kume, Kenichi Noda, Kumiko Torikai and Yasukata Yano are highly appreciated.

A

special thank you goes to Joseph Goguen, John Robert Ross and Linda Waugh, whose feedback has been invaluable in shaping my ideas and challenging my thought. ix

x Acknowledgements

Principal among many other linguists to whom I have referred in the book, are several close friends and colleagues who deserve special thanks, including Michiko Arima, Donald Freeman, Margaret Freeman, Hartmut Haberland, Jacob Mey and Eve Sweetser. Home away from home in England was provided by Dorrik Stow, Lynn Watson and their families. I also appreciate detailed editorial assistance given by Dorrik Stow.

Of all my friends and colleagues, I wish to thank Rosalia Dutra, Ranjana Goel, Momoko Hirayama, Hiroko Ito, Akiko Kawasaki, Junko Nagato, Emiko Noda, Akiko Sakuma, Kyoko Sakuma, Michiyo Somura, Suk-Ying Wong and Naoko Yazawa, for their compassion and support. My thanks also go to Keiko Naruoka, Ayako Shibata, Chiho Sunakawa, Hiroko Takanashi, Kyoko Watanabe and Tomoko Watanabe, for their assistance at various stages of this project. I am especially grateful to Jill Lake, my editor at Palgrave Macmillan, for her guidance and insight. Real gratitude throughout my life goes to my late parents, Kimpei and Yoshiko Koshiyama. I would also like to thank Shigetaka and Tomoko Hiraga, for their support and encouragement. This book is dedicated to my husband, Nobutaka, who knows how much I must thank him.

Acknowledgements xi

Acknowledgements for material in the text Sections 1.1.1, 1.1.2, 3.1 and 3.2 are reprinted from ‘The Interplay of Metaphor and Iconicity: a Cognitive Approach to Poetic Texts’. Special Issue on Metaphor, edited by Tomasz Komendzinski, Theoria et Historia Scientiarum: International Journal for Interdisciplinary Studies, VI/1 (2002), pp. 179–244. Reprinted with the permission of Uniwersytet Mikolaja Kopernika, Poland. Table 2.2 is reproduced with a slight alteration from ‘Diagrams and Metaphors: Iconic Aspects in Language’. Special Issue on Metaphor and Iconicity, edited by Masako K. Hiraga and Joanna Radwanska-Williams, Journal of Pragmatics, 22(1) (1994), pp. 5–21. Reproduced by permission of Elsevier. Figure 2.1 is reproduced with a minor alteration from the blending website at http://markturner.org/blending.html, with the permission of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner. Figure 2.5 is reproduced with a slight alteration from ‘How Metaphor and Iconicity Are Entwined in Poetry: a Case in Haiku’, in Wolfgang G. Müller and Olga Fischer, From Sign to Signing (2003), pp. 317–35. With kind permission by John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia. www.benjamins.com ‘l(a’ is reprinted from Complete Poems 1904–1962, by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage, by permission of W. W. Norton & Company. Copyright © 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust and George James Firmage. ‘Swan and Shadow’ is reprinted from Types of Shape, by John Hollander, by permission of Yale University Press. Copyright © 1969, 1991 by John Hollander. ‘40-Love’ is from After the Merrymaking, by Roger McGough, published by Jonathan Cape, London. Reprinted by permission of PFD on behalf of Roger McGough. Copyright © 1971 Roger McGough. ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ by William Carlos Williams, from Collected Poems: 1909–1939, Volume I, copyright © 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

xii Acknowledgements

‘In a Station of the Metro’ is from Collected Shorter Poems by Ezra Pound, copyright © 1928. Reprinted by permission of the author and Faber and Faber Ltd. Tables 5.5, 5.6, 5.8, and Figures 5.7 and 5.8 are reproduced from ‘Eternal Stillness: a Linguistic Journey to Basho’s Haiku about the Cicada’. Poetics Today, 8(1) (1987), pp. 5–8. Reproduced by permission of Duke University Press. Figure 6.3 is reproduced from ‘Deference as Distance: Metaphorical Base of Honorific Verb Construction in Japanese’, in Masako K. Hiraga, Chris Sinha and Sherman Wilcox (eds), Cultural, Psychological and Typological Issues in Cognitive Linguistics (1999) pp. 47–68, by kind permission of John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam/Philadelphia. www.benjamins.com Figure 7.1 Cretan pictographic inscriptions in early Minoan Period. Extract from The Alphabet: a Key to the History of Mankind by David Diringer published by Hutchinson. Used by permission of The Random House Group Limited. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

List of Tables 1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 3.1 3.2 4.1 4.2 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 5.11

Distribution of vowels Distribution of consonants Icon, index and symbol Subtypes of icon Grammatical metaphors Units of repetition Iconic meanings of repetition Lexical pairs in ‘Love’s Philosophy’ Stanzaic pairs in ‘Love’s Philosophy’ Characteristics of character types Different types of revisions Onomatopoeic words Sound-symbolic elements Alliteration and rhyme in the framing lines Repeated lexical items Revision of the verbs Revision in the vowels Occurrence of vowels in the 50 haiku in Oku no Hosomichi Sound pattern of vowels in sequence Mirror-image of vowels Mirror-image of consonants Number of occurrence of consonants

xiii

12 12 30 34 42 47 49 69 69 93 119 140 140 143 144 149 150 150 151 160 160 164

List of Figures

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 5.11 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4

The model of blending Metaphor–icon links in the model of blending Structural diagram Relational diagram Manifestations of repetition types Metaphor–icon links in language Metaphor–icon links in ‘Easter Wings’ Metaphor–icon links in ‘Love’s Philosophy’ Blend of the spring poem Metaphor–icon links in tori naki Metaphor–icon links in futami Revision from tachikaeru to yukikau Use of the logograph in the paralleled texts Use of the logograph in the beginning and the conclusion of the travel sketch Use of the logograph in the macro-structure of text Metaphor–icon links in ‘Swan and Shadow’ Metaphor–icon links in ‘40–Love’ Metaphor–icon links in concrete poetry Metaphor–icon links in ‘The Bells’ Syntactic framing format Phonological and semantic progressions of the text Oneness of silence and voice Metaphor–icon links in ‘Shizukasa ya’ Mirror-image of syllables Metaphor–icon links in ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ Distribution of [h] and [n] Distribution of [k] and [r] Kokoro inside hana Metaphor–icon links in ‘Hisakata no’ Relational diagram Structural diagram

37 40 44 45 48 51 60 67 74 79 84 87 88

DEFERENCE IS VERTICAL DISTANCE

88 89 104 107 108 139 143 152 153 154 159 161 164 165 167 168 176 179 189

Metaphor–icon links in grammaticalisation of verbs of vertical motion

190

xiv

List of Figures xv

7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5

Cretan pictographic inscriptions in the early Minoan period Modern ideograms Shookei-moji of ‘gate’ and ‘the moon’ Metaphor–icon links in Metaphor–icon links in

196 197 201 202 203

List of Abbreviations ACC accusative ADJ adjective AUX auxiliary DAT dative GEN genitive GER gerundive GOAL goal HON honorific IMP imperative INT intensifier N noun NEG negative PAST past POL polite PRES present QUES question SUB subject TAG tag TOP topic

xvi

For Nobutaka

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Part I Framework

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1 Introduction

The ubiquity and mutual implication of Verb and Verbal Art impart a seminal unity to the forthcoming science of the two inseparable universals, Language and Poetry. Roman Jakobson and Linda R. Waugh (1979) This book attempts to clarify the interplay of metaphor and iconicity in the creation and interpretation of spoken and written discourse. The claim is that the interplay is particularly foregrounded in the case of poetic texts. By analysing a number of short Japanese and English poems, I will argue against the dominant view of language that sees the linguistic sign as primarily non-iconic or arbitrary. This chapter offers an overview of the issues to be discussed in this study.

1.1 A glimpse of the issue 1.1.1 Metaphor in icon Icons resemble objects It is only recently that the word ‘icon’1 has become readily understood as a loan word in Japanese. This is because of the pervasiveness of computer culture. When we actually manipulate the ‘folders’, ‘documents’ and ‘wastebasket’ on the ‘desktop’ of our computer screen, we can see the shape of the folders and open, move, close or even discard them into the wastebasket as we wish.2 We can understand what the icons stand for even without instructions because the folders and documents on the screen resemble the objects that we already know in our office. The folder on the screen is an icon for a folder, the document for a document, the wastebasket for a wastebasket, the desktop (the term 3

4

Metaphor and Iconicity

actually refers to the screen itself) for the surface of a desk. Icons resemble the objects they stand for in terms of their shape, form, appearance or structure. Icons are easy to understand because their resemblance to the objects is immediate and concrete. A moment’s reflection, however, makes us realise that the folder, document, wastebasket and desktop are very different from the objects that we actually have in our office. Folders in our office do not include other folders in them, while folders on the screen can, in theory, contain an unlimited number of other folders. In our office, we do not usually put a wastebasket on the top of our desk, but the desktop of the computer screen has a wastebasket on the same surface as the file-folders.3 The metaphorical navigation of icons The use of the words ‘folder’ and ‘desktop’ to signify these icons is metaphorical in a technical sense, because we are making connections between different things based on certain similarities. The folders represented by icons on the screen as well as the folder objects in our office are containers of information used for the purpose of storage and classification. The desktop is a place where we work both on the screen and in the office. When we call the rectangular signs on the screen folders and documents, the names for the icons are a metaphorical extension of the original items, which signify the referents (i.e. the folder object and the document object). Names such as folder, document and desktop, with their extended metaphorical meaning, cue the interpretation of the iconic signs. If we call these iconic signs by different names, say, ‘box’ or ‘rectangle’, it would be difficult to draw the connection, because the metaphorical extension is less obvious. In short, a metaphor reinforces or navigates the iconic meaning of the sign. Iconicity dominance in metaphor–icon links The folders, documents and wastebasket on the computer screen can be described as both icons and metaphors at the same time. They are icons because they look similar to the objects they represent. They are metaphors because, through metaphorical extension of the names given, certain properties of the concept of folder, document and wastebasket are cognitively mapped onto the signs on the screen, or onto the mathematical computation represented by those signs. Because of the visual resemblance of the folder and wastebasket icons with actual folders and wastebaskets, their iconicity is more readily noticeable than their metaphorical status. In other words, while iconicity is more

Introduction 5

dominant than metaphor in the computer screen example, both iconicity and metaphor are at work in the signification of highly iconic signs. 1.1.2 Iconicity in metaphor Metaphorical understanding Metaphor and iconicity occur together at the level of metaphorical signification, too. As computer jargon became popular, we began to use it when thinking and talking about something else. For example, when we say, ‘I have too many files open in my mind, and my mind is jammed’, we are referring to our mind as if it were a computer.4 Here, we are not only using expressions from computer vocabulary, but we are also conceptualising our mind as if it were a computer.5 So, we also say the expressions given in Example 1.1. Example 1.1 (a) My system crashed. (b) He has a read-only memory. (c) You gave me a lot of input. (d) I have too much on my desktop. (e) She’s in emulation mode. Metaphor allows us to understand a relatively abstract and unstructured subject matter (technically called a target domain) in terms of a more concrete and structured subject matter (a source domain). In our example, we use the terms designating computer processes as tools to represent the workings of our own minds. We know how to install, save, and delete information in the computer because these are the terms that describe our practical experience with the computer. Therefore, it is natural to apply the pattern knowledge gained from the experience of using a computer to the invisible, complex functioning of our own brain. This is the experiential basis for metaphorical conceptualisation. The image content of metaphor The same process that made computer icons of the files, desktops and wastebaskets of the conventional office makes those same icons useful for conceptualising the functioning of the brain; we use items which are cognitively accessible as the source for metaphors. Metaphors may be imaged from visual, auditory and other sensory experience. When we say, ‘I have too many files open in my mind’, it is easy to evoke the image of a screen with many files open. And the image evoked in our

6

Metaphor and Iconicity

mind is similar to the actual computer screen with many files open. In this way, we can say that the image content of metaphor, particularly of a source domain, is an iconic moment involved in metaphor. In Danesi’s words (1995: 266), ‘the particular content of a metaphor can be said to constitute an interpretation of reality in terms of mental icons that literally allows us to see what is being talked about’ (italics in the original). The diagrammatic content of metaphor Not only the image content but also the correspondence of the two items mediated by metaphor signal an iconic moment. As mentioned earlier, metaphor is a mapping from a source to a target. Each mapping consists of a set of correspondences between entities in the two domains. In our example, some of the characteristics of computers are mapped onto what we know about the human mind. For example, files correspond with the storage of ideas, crash with no functioning, readonly memory with a lack of learnability, input with information, and emulation mode with imitating. Technically speaking, this mapping is a projection of image-schemas from the source domain onto the target domain. Image-schemas are skeletal patterns or structures that recur in our sensory and motor experiences, perceptual interactions and cognitive operations (cf. Johnson 1987). For example, when we say, ‘I have too many files open in my mind’, the image-schemas of excess in the source (‘too many opened files’) and in the target (‘too many ideas’) are aligned. Note that there is an iconic moment in this alignment of image-schemas. The image of too many files corresponds to the image of too many ideas diagrammatically. In other words, they resemble each other in terms of the image-schemas of excess. There is a structural analogy between the two image-schemas. Metaphor dominance in metaphor–icon links While iconicity is more dominant in the computer screen example, metaphor is more dominant than iconicity in the signification process of MIND IS A COMPUTER, because the projection of the COMPUTER domain onto the HUMAN MIND domain is more conceptual than perceptual (visual, auditory or sensory). Nonetheless, the experiential motorsensory image base and schematic parallel structure are iconic moments in the metaphorical signification. It may not be easy to recognise the interplay of metaphor–icon links in the above examples, because the interplay is backgrounded by the dominance of metaphor over iconicity or of iconicity over metaphor in

Introduction 7

their manifestations. However, a different picture emerges once attention is paid to foregrounded cases such as poetic texts or signed languages.6

1.1.3 How a poem manifests metaphor–icon links In this section, a haiku text composed by Basho Matsuo (1644–94) is considered as an illustration of metaphor–icon links in poetry. Before going on to analyse the haiku in detail, it is necessary to give some background information on haiku as a poetic form. Haiku, or hokku as it was formerly called during the time of Basho, is the shortest form of Japanese traditional poetry. It comprises 17 morae,7 divided into three sections of 5–7–5. Haiku originated from the first three lines of the 31-mora tanka, and began to rival the older form in the Edo period (1603–1867), evolving into a more serious and profound art form as practised by the great master Basho. It has since become and remained the most popular poetic form in Japan. At first, the subject matter of haiku was restricted to a simple description of nature, with veiled reference to one of the seasons, and was intended to evoke a clear emotional response in the reader. Later, its subject range was broadened considerably but was always striving to express as much as possible in the fewest possible words. From very early in their history, both tanka and haiku have been and still are composed by people of every class, men and women, young and old. There is no attempt to achieve any form of rhyming, in the sense of European poetry, as the Japanese language has only five vowel sounds, [a], [e], [i], [o] and [u], with which to form its morae, either by themselves or in combination with a consonant as in consonant–vowel sequences. Brevity, suggestiveness and ellipsis are the ‘life and soul’ of these poetic forms, and much is left for the reader’s own imagination.8 The haiku to be looked at here is taken from Basho’s Oku no Hosomichi, one of the acknowledged masterpieces of Japanese literature (Example 1.2). Example 1.2 araumi ya rough sea:

Sado ni yokotou Sado in lie

ama no gawa heaven of river9

‘Rough sea: lying toward Sado Island the River of Heaven’ (Matsuo 1996 [1694]: 109).

8

Metaphor and Iconicity

Metaphorical juxtaposition At first reading, the poem describes a natural scene with two contrasting elements – a rough sea lying between the poet and Sado Island, and the Milky Way (River of Heaven) overhead. Even without any pragmatic knowledge about Sado Island or the Milky Way in Japanese history and culture, it is possible to sense something of the grandeur and even the danger that this haiku evokes with such eloquence. It is a starry night with an awe-inspiring Milky Way arching across the sky towards Sado Island. The peaceful, silent grandeur of the Milky Way is placed in stark contrast to the rough, noisy sea that churns and moans, so dangerous and terrifying in the darkness. Indeed, the arm of the Sea of Japan that separates Sado Island from the mainland can be wild and rough and has taken countless lives of fishermen and island residents over the years. Though the island is clearly visible across the troubled waves, perhaps with scattered houselights in the distance, the passage is often dangerous especially at night. Human beings (including the poet) are so small and helpless in the face of this spectacular pageant of powerful nature. The individual stories of many thousands of human lives are etched forever in the scene, almost as stars across the Milky Way. The first line or segment, araumi ya, consists of a noun, araumi (‘rough sea’), and a kireji (‘cutting letter’), ya. There are about a dozen particles, or kireji, typically used in tanka and haiku, that mark a division point in the text and leave room for reflection on the feelings or images evoked by the preceding segment. The ya in this example is a kireji particularly favoured by Basho and said to have ‘something of the effect of a preceding “Lo!” It divides a haiku into two parts and is usually followed by a description or comparison, sometimes an illustration of the feeling evoked. There is always at least the suggestion of a kind of equation, so that the effect of ya is often best indicated by a colon’ (Henderson 1958: 189). In this case, araumi (‘rough sea’) is metaphorically juxtaposed against the rest of the text. The next line, Sado ni yokotou (‘[which] lies toward Sado’), is an adjectival clause which modifies the last segment, ama no gawa (‘the river of heaven’). Sado is the name of an island located about 50 miles southeast of the mainland, ni (‘toward’) is a postpositional particle of location, and yokotou (‘to lie’) is a verb that describes the action of spreading one’s body on something flat (when used as a transitive verb) or the state of a body spread out on something flat (when used as an intran-

Introduction 9

sitive verb). It normally has an animate agent, but as the grammatical subject in this poem, ama no gawa (‘the river of heaven’), is an inanimate noun, the verb is used metaphorically. The last line, ama no gawa, is a proper noun literally translated as the river of heaven, but here signifying the Milky Way. In itself it is a metaphor in which the broad band of stars (the Milky Way) is seen as a river. The second and the third segments of the poem thus constitute a local metaphor, in which a river of stars in the night sky spreads its body toward Sado Island. The conventional metaphors behind this local metaphor are that NATURE IS ANIMATE (in this case RIVER IS ANIMATE)10 and that A PATH-SHAPED OBJECT IS A RIVER. In addition to understanding the grammatical structure and convention used in the poem, further insight is gained by considering the historical setting and cultural tradition at the time of writing. Firstly, the Island of Sado has a rich and colourful past. It is separated from the mainland by a narrow but hazardous arm of the Sea of Japan. Because boat crossings were especially fraught with danger, the island was used as a place of exile for felons and traitors from the tenth to late nineteenth century. But the discovery of gold on the island, in the early seventeenth century, attracted fortune seekers as well as the already wealthy. At the time of Basho, the Tokugawa Shogunate had control of the gold mines, and the people imprisoned on the island were forced to serve as free slave labour. The metonymy of a rough sea with Sado Island evokes its cultural heritage, while the roughness of the waves is consonant with an undoubtedly harsh life on the island, one in which violence, cruelty and despair were rife. Secondly, there is a sad legend about the Milky Way, which originated in China and was brought to Japan. On either side of the Milky Way, there are two particularly bright stars, Vega and Altair, which are taken to represent Princess Weaver and Oxherd. Although they face each other every night, the Milky Way is so wide they cannot easily meet, so one day the god of heaven, pitying Princess Weaver and her lonely life, arranged for her to marry Oxherd. Soon after they married, the Princess became too lazy to weave, so the god became angry and punished her. She was to be allowed to visit her husband only once a year, on the seventh night of the seventh month of the lunar calendar, but only if the night was fair. The date on which this poem was composed (6th July) suggests that the poet had this legend in his mind. For the seventh night of the seventh month (7th July) is known and celebrated as the ‘star festival’

10

Metaphor and Iconicity

after the Chinese story. Basho has cleverly used the legendary separation of this couple as a hidden metaphor for the people imprisoned on Sado Island away from their loved ones at home. Both the Milky Way and the Island of Sado, therefore, share event frames for confinement – spatial confinement, limited freedom, limited means of travel and the mental state of being separated. A third important point lies in the name of the island when written in Chinese kanji. It is made up of two Chinese logographs, and , which mean ‘to help’ and ‘to cross’ respectively. The cognitive meanings of these logographs are both intricately bound into the fabric of the poem. It is also possible to detect, in the alignment of the two imageschemas, rough sea and island, the use of such salient conventional metaphors as LIFE IS A BOAT JOURNEY and THE WAVES ARE AN OBSTACLE TO SUCH A JOURNEY. In summary, this most exquisite haiku of Basho comprises a multitude of metaphors in which numerous images are overlain and integrated to produce the multi-layered meanings that become apparent on careful reading. Such images include the rough sea and Milky Way as obstacles, but also as potential bridges toward union, the legendary couple and prisoners as people prevented from reuniting with their loved ones. Furthermore, there are other more deeply hidden images, together with the feelings they evoke – for example, of sorrow at separation, or a realisation of the helplessness of human beings in the awesome face of nature. There is ever an implicit contrast – for example, a contrast of motion between the violent waves and the peaceful skies; a contrast of light between the dark sea and the starlit Milky Way; and a contrast of reality and legend between life stories of people and the love story of stars. Iconic interpretation navigated by metaphor The true richness of Basho’s poem lies not only in the multiple layers of metaphor, but also in the visual and the auditory configuration of the text, which reveals a remarkable iconicity. In terms of the visual elements, the Japanese language has a unique writing system in which three different types of signs are used to describe the same phonological text: kanji (Chinese logographs), hiragana (syllabary for words of Japanese origin) and katakana (syllabary for words of foreign origin other than Chinese). The choice and use of particular logographs are of particular importance because they function as a cognitive medium for poetry. Basho was, of course, well aware of this fact, which led him to make an orthographic revision of an earlier

Introduction 11

version of the poem from Example 1.3 (a) to 1.3 (b) (Matsuo 1957 [1694]). Example 1.3 (a) (b) araumi ya Sado ni yokotou ama no gawa The three noun phrases, araumi, Sado and ama no gawa, were all written in kanji in both the first (Example 1.3 (a)) and the revised (Example 1.3 (b)) versions. However, the verb yokotou (‘to lie’) was changed from kanji to hiragana (see boxed sections). This had the effect of making that part of the text a ground for the conspicuous profile of (‘rough sea’) and (‘Milky Way’). In general, because kanji have a distinct angular form and semantic integrity, they differentiate themselves visually and cognitively as the figure while the remaining hiragana function as the ground. This differentiation of kanji is particularly prominent in the words, (‘rough sea’), (‘Island of Sado’) and (‘Milky Way’), which are all written in two kanji. Furthermore, all of them include kanji (underlined in Example 1.3(a) and (b)) such as (‘sea’), (‘to cross water’) and (‘river’) which are made up with the same radical signifying water. Both (‘rough sea’) and (‘Milky Way’) relate to water, as described above. The semantic similarity between (‘rough sea’) and (‘Milky Way’) in terms of wateriness and the obstacle (in real life and in the legend explained above) and their dissimilarity (violence in the ‘rough sea’ and peacefulness in ‘the river of heaven’) are also foregrounded. This is a case of diagrammatic iconic effect, whereby the meaning of the foregrounded elements is intensified by the repetitive use of similar visual elements – two-character nouns and the same radical. The logograph in Sado , the name of the island, is also important because it means ‘to cross water’. As both history and legend show, the ‘rough sea’ and ‘the Milky Way’ are each obstacles that the loved ones must cross in order to meet. This character is aptly placed in the very middle of the poem as if it signalled the crossing point. The sound structure also exhibits interesting iconic effects, which are navigated by the metaphorical interpretation. The following analysis illustrates three possible iconic effects produced by the distribution of vowels, consonants and the repetition of adjacent vowels. Example 1.4 is a phonological notation of the poem’s moraic structure.

12

Metaphor and Iconicity

Example 1.4 Line 1 a-ra-u-mi ya ([-] = the division between mora) Line 2 sa-do ni yo-ko-to-u Line 3 a-ma no Na-wa Firstly, the nature and distribution of vowels show a predominance of back vowels such as [a] and [o]. As indicated in Table 1.1, there are 8 [a] (47 per cent) and 5 [o] (29 per cent) out of 17 vowels.11 Both vowels [a] and [o] are pronounced with a wide passage between the tongue and the roof of the mouth, and with the back of the tongue higher than the front. The backness and the openness of these vowel sounds can create a sonorous effect, which in turn may draw associations of something deep and large (cf. Jespersen 1964 [1921]). In Basho’s poem, these sounds may evoke something of the size of waves, the wide expanse of dark sea, and the broad width of the Milky Way. Secondly, sonorous effects are also created by the frequent use of nasals ([m], [n], and [N]), and vowel-like consonants ([y] and [w]). Table 1.2 shows the nature and distribution of consonants. The dominance of sonorants such as [m], [n], [N], [r], [y] and [w] is clearly evident. They provide prolongation and fullness of the sounds, and hence usually produce lingering effects (cf. Shapiro and Beum 1965: Table 1.1 Distribution of vowels a

o

i

u

e

Total

Line 1 Line 2 Line 3

3 1 4

0 4 1

1 1 0

1 1 0

0 0 0

5 7 5

Total

8

5

2

2

0

17

Table 1.2 Distribution of consonants Position of mora in line

Line 1 Line 2 Line 3 Total

1

2

3

4

5

6

s

r d m

n n

m y N

y k w

t

No. of sonorants

No. of obstruents

3 2 4

0 4 0

9

4

7

Introduction 13

10–12). As such, it could be argued that the back vowels and sonorant consonants jointly reinforce a sound-iconic effect of the depth, breadth and large size of water elements in the poem. It is also significant that the only line that has obstruents (i.e. non-sonorants such as [s], [d], [k] and [t]), is Line 2, in which the island is mentioned. If we interpret sonorants as iconically associated with water elements, then obstruents are associated with non-water, namely, the island in this text. Thirdly, the text seems to conceal very cleverly and, perhaps wittingly, a keyword, which is congruous with the metaphorical interpretation of the poem. The prototypical sound sequence in Japanese is an alternation of a single consonant and a single vowel such as CV–CV–CV. This general feature applies to Basho’s haiku under discussion. A closer look, however, reveals just three occurrences of two vowels adjacent to each other – [a–u], [o–u] and [a–w], since [w] is phonetically close to [u]. They occur in araumi in Line 1, yokotou in Line 2, and as the similar sound sequence, gawa, in Line 3. Each line of the poem, therefore, has a similar vowel sequence hidden within the text. Very interestingly, these vowel sequences, [a–u] and [o–u], are both verbs in Japanese, and , which mean ‘to meet’. Their hidden repetition in each line can be read as the echo of a hidden longing between separated persons. Once again, the iconic effect of this hidden element can only be guided by reading the whole poem as a global metaphorical juxtaposition, i.e. the separation of stars, of people and of loved ones.

Summary Compared to the simpler examples from computer jargon, the poetic text displays the complexity of metaphor–icon links. The basic mechanism of metaphor–icon links, however, is the same, and can be summarised in the two aspects: iconic moments in metaphor and metaphor giving iconic meaning to form. As has been seen, once metaphor–icon links are established in the interpretation of text, such links tend to be taken for granted. Because an iconic interpretation, once apprehended by metaphor, is more immediate and straightforward, it becomes difficult to free oneself from such an interpretation. Moreover, when this process is conventionalised as has been seen in computer jargon, one does not even pay attention to it. It becomes an automatic and therefore an unconscious cognitive operation prevalent in language. It is the aim of this study to attempt to explicate these unconscious cognitive processes, particularly by elaborating the interplay of metaphor and iconicity.

14

Metaphor and Iconicity

Because poetic texts tend to foreground the functioning of these processes, they will be used to illustrate my analysis of the interplay between metaphor and iconicity in the creation and interpretation of spoken and written discourse. In effect, I will argue against the dominant view of language that sees the linguistic sign as being primarily non-iconic or arbitrary. If one is interested in why language is structured in the way it is and why it functions in the way it does, metaphor and iconicity are important issues to be explored in detail and in depth. Iconicity is therefore presented here as a manifestation of the motivated nature of the linguistic sign.

1.2 Purpose of study 1.2.1 Contribution to the study of linguistic iconicity The case against the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign The problem of iconicity has been a recurring theme in the inquiry into the nature of the linguistic sign. Plato’s Cratylus is an early example of the debate about the relationship of form and content in language, between physei (‘nature’) and thesei (‘agreement, convention’) (Plato 1926: 7). In modern linguistics, Saussure asserts that the nature of the association between signifié (‘signification’) and signifiant (‘signal’) is arbitrary, i.e. not based on any inherent resemblance (Saussure 1983[1916]: 67). Although he sees arbitrariness as a fundamental principle of the linguistic sign, he also admits that the linguistic system itself, the way certain parts of the mass of signs are combined and ordered, is relatively motivated, i.e. arbitrariness is limited. In his Course in General Linguistics (1983 [1916]: 131) Saussure states: Everything having to do with languages as systems needs to be approached, we are convinced, with a view to examining the limitations of arbitrariness. It is an approach which linguists have neglected. But it offers the best possible basis for linguistic studies. For the entire linguistic system is founded upon the irrational principle that the sign is arbitrary. Applied without restriction, this principle would lead to utter chaos. But the mind succeeds in introducing a principle of order and regularity into certain areas of the mass of signs. That is the role of relative motivation. (My italics) Linguists after Saussure have also largely tended to neglect issues relating to motivation.12 One of the ways in which such motivation is manifested is iconicity, in which a form signifies meaning by its resemblance

Introduction 15

to the meaning. There are various degrees in which iconicity manifests itself in language, ranging from prominent manifestations (e.g. onomatopoeia and sound-symbolism) to obscured manifestations (e.g. word order, inflectional forms, discourse/text structures, conceptual integration). In order to construct a solid argument, it is essential to establish a valid methodological framework for the concepts used and the data explored. Peircean insight According to Peirce,13 iconicity is divided into three subtypes, i.e. image, diagram and metaphor, based on the degree of abstraction as well as the dominance of characteristics of similarity such as mimicry, analogy and parallelism: Those which partake of simple qualities, or First Firstness, are images; those which represent the relations, mainly dyadic, or so regarded, of the parts of one thing by analogous relations in their own parts, are diagrams; those which represent the representative character of a representamen by representing a parallelism in something else, are metaphors. (Italics in the original) (Peirce 1962 [1955, 1902]: 105) Peircean classification of iconicity into three subtypes has not been fully elaborated in the semiotic literature. The notion of Peircean metaphor in particular has received very little attention (Anderson 1984). One possible reason is that Peirce himself did not write much about metaphors as opposed to his lengthy discussion of images and diagrams. The other reason is perhaps that there is a difference in the nature of the similarity relationship among the three subtypes. The first two subtypes (image and diagram) deal with a similarity relation between forms and concepts, whereas the third subtype (metaphor) deals with a similarity relation between two concepts. Consequently, those linguistic and poetic studies that have incorporated Peircean iconicity in the scope of their analysis have either discarded issues of metaphor from their studies (Haiman 1985a, b, Waugh 1992, 1994, among others) or treated iconicity as a subordinate issue to metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Lakoff and Turner 1989).14 The cognitive approach to metaphor–icon links: a challenge By contrast, this study attempts to clarify the interrelationship of metaphor and iconicity in the context of the cognitive model of metaphor developed by Lakoff, Johnson and Turner (Lakoff and

16

Metaphor and Iconicity

Johnson 1980, Lakoff 1987, 1993, Lakoff and Turner 1989, Johnson 1987, Turner 1987, 1991, among others). Ungerer and Schmid (1996: x) encapsulate the meaning of ‘cognitive’ in their model as ‘an approach to language that is based on our experience of the world and the way we perceive and conceptualise it’.15 Langacker (1998: 1) gives a more concrete definition by saying that cognitive linguistics emphasises the semiological function of language and the crucial role of conceptualization in social interaction. It [cognitive linguistics] contrasts with formalist approaches by viewing language as an integral facet of cognition (not as a separate ‘module’ or ‘mental faculty’). Insofar as possible, linguistic structure is analyzed in terms of more basic systems and abilities (e.g. perception, attention, categorization) from which it cannot be dissociated. In particular, I would like to draw on Turner and Fauconnier’s work in this theoretical tradition, using the model of ‘blending’16 that they have developed (Turner and Fauconnier 1995a, b, 1999, Turner 1996, 1998, Fauconnier and Turner 1998, 2002). This new model provides a more elaborated and sophisticated account of the mechanism of creativity in metaphor than the earlier Lakoff–Johnson model (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). By introducing four items (two input spaces (a source and a target), a generic space (which includes abstract shared properties of both inputs), and a blended space (in which new meanings are emergent)), the model of blending can specify which part(s) of the metaphorical process relate(s) to the interplay of form and meaning in the text, and thereby can clarify the complexity of systematic creation and interpretation of ambiguity with reference to the ways visual and auditory representation contribute in this process of meaning creation. In cognitive and semiotic terms, icons and metaphors share a common property of signification, namely, that ‘motivated’ by similarity. Whether the items to be connected are concrete objects, formal structures, relational properties or abstract concepts, connecting things of similarity is one of the basic operations of the human mind. Iconicity deals with a mapping between form (structure) and meaning in various degrees of abstractness, from concrete attributive similarities between objects to abstract relational analogies between structures of form and meaning. On the other hand, metaphor is a mapping between two conceptual domains of meaning, a projection of a schematised pattern (system) from a less abstract source domain onto a more abstract target domain. The clarification of metaphor–icon links will strengthen

Introduction 17

the cognitive approach so as to provide a more cohesive and integrated explanation of various linguistic phenomena, including word formation, word order, grammaticalisation, semantic change, poetic discourse, signed languages and writing systems, as manifestations of metaphor– icon links. Data delineation Following Jakobson and Waugh’s assumption (1979) that iconicity is foregrounded in poetic texts rather than in ordinary spoken discourse, my exploration of the interplay of metaphor and iconicity will also be focused on poetic texts. Some texts display pure iconicity. Namely, their visual or auditory form itself mimetically signals the meaning. Other texts show iconicity more subtly through metaphors. For example, a metaphorical reading of the text supports certain iconic patterns prevailing in the textual form such as syntactic structures, lexical choice, phonological patterns, or the choice of characters and letters in writing. Logographic writing systems are particularly conducive to an analysis of iconicity because of their origins, as are the signed languages (cf. Deuchar 1990, Taub 2001). Using Japanese poetic texts, which incorporate logographic writing systems, as principal data for analysis, optimises the challenge of demonstrating the complexity of the interplay between metaphor and iconicity. Consequently, the primary focus of this book is an analysis of the styles of meaning creation by metaphor and iconicity in Japanese short poetic texts, particularly in haiku. Haiku, poetry of 17-mora text-form, is an optimal example of how the human mind connects things with minimum linguistic resources, but in a particularly subtle way.17 Haiku deliberately create rich microcosms, i.e. situations where a multiplicity of interpretations can be apprehended in the poetic text as spoken and written forms. This study argues that metaphor and iconicity are the essence of such mental acts of literary creation, and thus it attempts to analyse their interplay from a cognitive perspective. Since the eighteenth century, there has been an enormous amount of literature on haiku, most of which is philological and palaeographical in nature. A brief list of modern criticism, much of which examines Basho’s haiku, includes Aso (1961), Akabane (1970), Akimoto (1970), Morita (1970), Ogata (1971), Kaneko (1973), Yamamoto (1974), Imoto (1978), Ueno (1986) and Muramatsu (1988). Works on haiku (and tanka) from the perspectives of structural poetics and semiotics include Kawamoto (1978, 1986), Jakobson (1981 [1979]), Ikegami et al. (1983), Kikuchi (1984), Hiraga (1987a, b, 1995a), Arima (1996) and Shirane

18

Metaphor and Iconicity

(1998). It can be said that this study along with Ikegami (1996) and my recent works (Hiraga 1999a, b, 2000a, 2002, 2003) is an attempt to integrate the past philological and structural traditions and reinterpret their methodological contributions in cognitive terms. In this research, therefore, I would like to demonstrate that in language structure and process, and particularly in the poetic texts looked at, a close link between metaphor and icon is manifest in two ways: that there are iconic moments in metaphor; and that a form acquires an iconic interpretation via metaphor. 1.2.2 Contribution to the study of the status of written language Discursive and presentational representation The issue of iconicity involves an examination of writing systems with reference to modes of representation in text. The comparative framework for studying Japanese and English texts undertaken in this study also opens new ground for a discussion of the status of written versus spoken language in a general theory of language. Langer (1957: 79–102) divides the configuration of symbols into two modes of representation: discursive and presentational. The former adds the mode of linear configuration to digital elements, whereas the latter relates to the holistic mode of representation by less discrete elements. Even a quick look at the writing systems of English and Japanese makes one realise that the English alphabet is more discursive than presentational, and kanji or Chinese logographs used in Japanese are more presentational than discursive. The use of three different sign systems (kanji or Chinese logographs, hiragana and katakana or two sets of syllabaries) in Japanese to spell out the same phonetic configuration gives rise to a consideration of linguistic representations from two interrelated perspectives: the written and the spoken language; and discursive and presentational modes of representation. The use of kanji in combination with hiragana and katakana, results in a stronger tendency toward iconicity at the visual and presentational level rather than at the auditory and discursive level. The broader choice of character types makes both poets and readers more conscious of the visual presentation of Japanese poetry. This forms a sharp contrast to the writing systems developed in the Western tradition, in which the alphabetic signs try to record the decomposed sounds of language, and therefore, rhythm and rhyme, the music of poetry, are more essential and prominent (Brooks and Warren 1960: 2). It is no wonder therefore that auditory iconic manifestations are more

Introduction 19

readily recognisable in alphabetic languages, whereas visual iconic manifestations are more readily available in logographic languages. The cognitive role of written language Furthermore, because of their iconic and metaphoric nature, an examination of kanji logographs provides a deeper understanding of the cognitive role of written language in poetic texts. The formation of the shape and the meaning of kanji is seen to be governed by iconic and metaphoric processing. Poetic language therefore exploits these iconic and metaphoric implications of kanji to enrich the complexity and multiplicity of meaning in the text. It is a challenging task of this study to re-evaluate the sharp insight of Fenollosa (Pound 1936) into the nature of Chinese logographs as a medium for poetry and to place it in the new context of cognitive poetics. I believe that a comparative and contrastive study of English and Japanese poetic texts is beneficial since it not only epitomises the commonality of iconic manifestations in diverse texts but also clarifies the difference in iconic manifestations in relation to the modes of representation. It also has a bearing on the important but ‘neglected’ issue of the status of written language in a general theory of language.

1.3 Scope and organisation of study 1.3.1 Scope of study By concentrating on the analysis of the interplay of metaphor and iconicity in Japanese haiku and comparable short poems written in English, the study develops a comprehensive methodological programme for the analysis of multiple meanings and interpretations in poetic texts. A consideration of metaphor–icon links will illustrate the fruitfulness of the cognitive approach toward an understanding of poetic discourse. Introducing iconicity and metaphor as an analytical tool has implications within the larger frame of reference of semiotics. To demonstrate such implications, differences in the manifestations of metaphor–icon links will be analysed from the point of view of written versus spoken language with special reference to kanji or logographs used in the Japanese writing systems. Hence, this study, which initially deals with literary texts, ultimately presents a methodology for the examination of iconicity, or a link between form and meaning based on similarity, in language in general.

20

Metaphor and Iconicity

1.3.2 Organisation of study The book is organised in the following way. Part I (Chapters 1–2) provides an overview of the issues to be covered in the study, reviews the basic literature, and offers theoretical and methodological frameworks. Chapter 2 aims to discuss the major background literature and to give the basic framework for analysis. Part II (Chapters 3–5) consists of detailed sample analyses examining how metaphor–icon links manifest themselves on the visual, auditory and conceptual levels in Japanese and English short poetic texts. Chapter 3 provides a comprehensive analysis of how metaphor and iconicity are intertwined with the structure of poetic texts. Four distinctive texts are to be discussed as illustrative cases for further elaboration in the chapters to follow. In Chapter 4, how poetic form embodies meaning in visual terms is explored with respect to the status of written language. Sample analyses of visual poetry will be offered. More subtle manifestations are also analysed with special reference to the orthographical revisions of poems. In Chapter 5, how poetic form embodies meaning by way of auditory manifestation is explored through sample analyses of phonosymbolism and the diagrammatic structuring of sounds in poetry. Part III (Chapters 6–8) summarises the main findings and discusses their implications for general linguistic issues. In Chapter 6, the interplay of metaphor and iconicity analysed in the poetic texts is reevaluated in the light of general linguistic theory. In particular, metaphor–icon links are looked at as they manifest themselves in grammatical structure and aspects of pragmatic usage. A typology of manifestations of grammatical metaphors is given, and examples of polite language in English and Japanese are analysed with respect to metaphor–icon links. In Chapter 7, the status of written language is considered in relation to the formation and use of kanji logographs. Based on the insights that the logographic writing system provides, the chapter also reconsiders written language as a medium of graphic communication in the era of electronic communication. In Chapter 8, a summary of the main claims is given and further problems are discussed. This book, therefore, contributes to the following three issues: 1 Theoretical clarification – defining the interrelationship of metaphor and iconicity in the model of ‘blending’; 2 The demonstration of metaphor–icon links in poetic discourse and logographic writing systems – examining how metaphor–icon links

Introduction 21

are manifested in an illustrative analysis of Japanese poetic texts in comparison with English counterparts; 3 The evaluation of the status of written language – providing new ground for discussion on the importance of written language in a general linguistic theory. Thus, this study is a contribution to the development of a theory of poetic language. However, it is also assumed that a detailed survey of the cognitive operations of iconicity and metaphor in poetic texts gives an insight into iconicity and metaphor in language in general,18 and therefore it contributes to a general discussion of the nature of human cognitive processes in linguistic theory.

2 Methodological Framework

Blended spaces do cognitive work in the strongest sense. They provide inferences, emotions, and novel actions, and consequently leave their mark upon the real world. Mark Turner (1996)

Overview of the methodology Methodologically this study draws on three theoretical traditions in the analysis of iconicity and metaphor: Peircean semiotics, the Lakoff–Johnson–Turner cognitive model of metaphor, and Jakobsonian poetics. The study owes its basic insight into the nature of the iconic sign to Peirce (1931–58, 1962[1955, 1902]). He considered metaphor to be one of the three subtypes of iconic signs along with images and diagrams, claiming that metaphor involves the latter two subtypes. While Peirce himself did not particularly elaborate the interrelationship of metaphor and iconicity, it is such an elaboration that this study is concerned with. Specifically, this interrelationship will be conceived of as two basic manifestations: iconic moments residing in metaphor; and metaphor giving iconic interpretation to form. This study refocuses Peirce’s original conceptualisation with the aid of the cognitive theory of metaphor, which proposes a renewed claim for the motivation of the linguistic sign based on cognitive operations of the mind. In particular the recent theory of ‘blending’ advocated by Turner and Fauconnier (Turner and Fauconnier 1995a, b, Turner 1996, Fauconnier and Turner 1998, 2002, among others) will be developed to clarify the complexity of the interplay of metaphor and iconicity. 22

Methodological Framework 23

The primary data for analysis are taken from poetic texts in which the interplay of metaphor and iconicity is foregrounded. For a detailed analysis of the texts, this study uses the structural approach developed by Jakobson and his advocates (Jakobson 1971, 1981, 1985, Jakobson and Waugh 1979, Jakobson and Rudy 1985 [1980]). Jakobsonian analysis has been criticised on the grounds that it excludes the role of the reader (Fish 1996 [1973], Attridge 1996 [1987], Weber 1996). But if Jakobsonian methodology is put in the new context of cognitive poetics with its emphasis on the conceptual processing of both the writer and the reader, the status and the rigour of Jakobson’s argument must be reevaluated. At the same time, a Jakobsonian microscopic analysis of the structure of texts will in turn refine the cognitive approach. This chapter is organised as follows: firstly, how traditional and modern theories have treated metaphor and iconicity is discussed; secondly, the major methodological issues – Peircean semiotics, the theory of blending, and Jakobsonian analysis – are presented and elaborated.

2.1 Background literature 2.1.1 The traditional treatment of metaphor and iconicity Metaphor and iconicity had been treated separately in the traditional literature of linguistics, poetics and rhetoric until the recent development of cognitive linguistics and poetics. Traditional theories of metaphor The most comprehensive review of past studies on theories of metaphor is provided by Ricoeur (1977). He discusses the main viewpoints of metaphorical theories in various disciplines, ranging from linguistics, semantics and the philosophy of language to literary criticism and aesthetics. He classifies such viewpoints into three – rhetorical, semantic and hermeneutic – and identifies his position with the hermeneutic. The rhetorical viewpoint (cf. Aristotle 1954) sees a metaphor as an art of verbal persuasion. A metaphor is regarded as a substitution of words, as completely paraphrasable into a non-metaphorical expression by means of an analogy between the substitution word and the word being substituted. Hence, a metaphor is assumed to be an ornament of language which conveys no new information. Criticising this rhetorical treatment of metaphors, the semantic view takes metaphors to be a transference of meaning. This view can be further divided into the word-centred approach and the

24

Metaphor and Iconicity

sentence-centred one. The former approach is taken, for example, by the semic analysis of Group m (1970). Such word-centred treatment of metaphors contributes to the clarification of the semantic structure of metaphors. The latter approach is taken by Richards (1936), Beardsley (1958) and Black (1962), who regard a metaphor as an interaction between a metaphorical word and its context. They explicate the mechanism of creating meaning. What is common to both approaches is that they deal with metaphor as a problem concerning meaning in the language system without paying much attention to the influence of metaphor on extra-linguistic reality. The hermeneutic viewpoint, as taken by Ricoeur (1977, 1978, 1979 [1978], 1981) develops the theory a step further, based on a critical examination of the former two views of metaphor. Ricoeur’s contribution is his emphasis on the power of metaphor to ‘redescribe’ reality. Namely, it is the referential function of metaphorical statements, which breaks through the old categorisation of reality to establish a new one. Thus, his theory foresees the cognitive role of metaphor in conceptualising human experiences and realities. However, his focus is on the creativity of metaphor as an innovation of our view of the world and not on the ubiquity of conventionalised conceptual metaphors, in terms of which we speak, think and act in our ordinary life. Pioneers in the study of linguistic iconicity Only a few linguists since Saussure have discussed the issue of the role of iconicity in the linguistic sign. Jespersen (1933 [1922], 1964 [1921]: 396–411) pioneered the discussion of non-arbitrariness in his study on sound-symbolism. His famous survey on the symbolic value of the vowel [i] shows that this vowel ‘serves very often to indicate what is small, slight, insignificant or weak’ (Jespersen 1933 [1922]: 283). Works by Fónagy (1963, 1979) present a more comprehensive study in the field of sound-symbolism. Bolinger (1965) was interested in word affinities. He claims that there is what he calls ‘sound suggestiveness’ in the sounds shared by a group of words with similar meanings: e.g. the family of ‘slap’, ‘clap’, ‘rap’, ‘tap’, ‘flap’ and ‘lap’ denotes actions that strike and then glide off, or the group of ‘nip’, ‘clip’, ‘tip’, ‘sip’, ‘dip’, ‘grip’, ‘pip’, ‘quip’, ‘yip’ suggests a lighter or sharper blow or its result (cf. 1965: 245–6).1 It was Jakobson who made the most integrated achievements in the treatment of the theme of iconicity before the advent of cognitive linguistics, particularly in his critique of Saussure’s notion of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign (1971 [1965]). He enlisted Peirce’s typology

Methodological Framework 25

of signs in his argument that language also has the non-arbitrary property of iconicity, i.e. association by similarity between form and meaning in syntax, lexicon, morphology, phonology and poetry.2 His work with Waugh (1979) also devotes a whole chapter to the issue of iconic relations between particular sounds and the meanings they carry. It was also Jakobson who further elaborated the notion of iconicity in the analysis of poetic language, saying that ‘apart from these relatively rare instances of grammatical utilisation, the autonomous iconic value of phonemic oppositions is damped down in purely cognitive messages but becomes particularly apparent in poetic language’ (1971 [1965]: 356) (for further discussion, see Section 2.4). 2.1.2 Metaphor and iconicity in cognitive linguistics and poetics Cognitive linguistics places a new importance on metaphor and iconicity. Both are based on an analogical mapping between different domains. Iconicity deals with a mapping between form and meaning in various degrees of abstractness, whereas metaphor is a mapping between two conceptual domains of meaning, a projection of a schematised pattern from a less abstract source domain onto a more abstract target domain. Although metaphor and iconicity are closely linked cognitive operations (Danesi 1995), they have not been treated as such in the cognitive model of metaphor by Lakoff, Johnson and Turner. As stated above, linguistic discussions of iconicity have been confined to the mimetic relationship between form and meaning. In cognitive semantics, Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Johnson (1987), Lakoff (1987, 1993) and Sweetser (1990) have been more concerned with the centrality of metaphor. Although they have treated iconicity, they have relegated it to a subordinate role. The cognitive theory of metaphor Cognitive linguistics claims that metaphor is primarily an issue of conceptualisation. Metaphors are defined as ‘mappings across conceptual domains’, in which ‘the image-schemata structure of the source domain is projected onto the target domain in a way that is consistent with inherent target domain structure’ (Lakoff 1993: 245). In other words, metaphor allows one to understand a relatively abstract and unstructured subject matter in terms of a more concrete and structured subject matter through image-schemata, which Johnson (1987: 79) defines as ‘those recurring structures of, or in, our perceptual interactions, bodily experiences and cognitive operations’.

26

Metaphor and Iconicity

Deane (1995: 628–9) provides a succinct summary of the main claims of the cognitive theory of metaphor. Metaphor is defined as a cognitive process in which one set of concepts is understood in terms of another. Each metaphor establishes a mapping between a source domain and a target domain. Metaphoric mappings then cannot alter imageschematic structure of each domain; for example, a part/whole relation in the source domain must correspond to a part/whole relation in the target domain. The mapping thus established enables the transfer of knowledge about the source domain to the target. Many metaphorical mappings are conventionalised in a particular language and culture. The cognitive theory of metaphor assumes that linguistic metaphorical expressions such as ‘I hope our paths will cross sometime soon’, ‘He got a ticket for success’ and ‘they have a bumpy marriage’ are possible because there are metaphorical concepts such as LIFE IS A JOURNEY and MARRIAGE IS A JOURNEY which correspond with the linguistic expressions. In this view, metaphors are primarily a conceptual phenomenon rather than a verbal phenomenon. Metaphors are not classified as a species parallel to other tropes such as simile, metonymy, synecdoche and so on, but treated as a conceptual base, which gives rise to the linguistic expressions to be classified as tropes. The cognitive account of poetic metaphor Cognitive poetics3 (cf. Turner 1987, 1996, Lakoff and Turner 1989, Freeman 2000, among others) applies the cognitive theory of metaphor as outlined above to the analysis of poetic texts. It claims that the basic conceptual metaphors, which underlie everyday expressions, also underlie many of the poetic metaphors and that they serve in part to give power to the poetic metaphor. In other words, the poetic metaphor is a non-conventional use of conventional metaphor. Lakoff and Turner (1989: 67–72) explicate the ways in which poets aim at poetic effects from conventional cognitive metaphors. According to them, there are four techniques: extending a conventional metaphor in a novel way; elaborating the image-schemas by filling special or unusual cases; questioning the limitations of conventional metaphors and offering a new one; and forming composite metaphors by the non-conventional combination of multiple conventional metaphors for a given target domain. These techniques, which use conventional metaphors in special and non-automatic ways, make poetic metaphor noticeable and memorable. Poets, by their non-conventional use of metaphors, lead their readers beyond the bounds of ordinary modes of thought.

Methodological Framework 27

Several studies have contributed to revealing how the poetic text represents the conceptual universe of such metaphors. As outlined above, Lakoff and Turner (1989) have pioneered our understanding of the way in which cognitive metaphors structure poetic texts, and the way in which poetic texts are structured as a metaphorical icon of the overall meaning that they represent. Research by Turner (1987, 1996) has demonstrated in detail how literary metaphors use the ordinary system of conventional conceptual mappings. Analyses of English poems from a cognitive perspective include Deane (1995) on W. B. Yeats, M. Freeman (1995, 1997, 2000) on Emily Dickinson, Hamilton (2003) on Wilfred Owen and Steen (2003) on love poems. Works by D. Freeman (1993, 1995) offer a comprehensive analysis of conceptual metaphors in Shakespearean drama, and Sweetser (1995) provides a cognitive metaphorical account of Greek mythology. Gavins and Steen (2003) and Semino and Culpeper (2002) are collections of papers on the cognitive analysis of literary texts ranging from poetry, parable and short stories to narrative texts. Cognitive studies of poetry have clarified the fact that poetic texts can be metaphoric on two levels. On the one hand, they display local metaphors, which manifest themselves locally as linguistic expressions in the text. They are based on either conceptual mappings (systematic mappings at the conceptual level such as events as actions, and life as journey), image mappings (mapping of the motor-sensory images evoked by linguistic expressions in the source superimposed onto the target, e.g. the colour of objects mapped onto feelings), or a combination of both. On the other hand, texts as a whole can be read metaphorically. This is the case of text as global metaphor. Namely, the text presents a source which is to be mapped onto a target of larger concern. According to Lakoff and Turner (1989: 146–7), a reading of the text as a global metaphor is constrained in three major ways: by the use of conventional conceptual mapping; by the use of commonplace knowledge; and by iconicity – a mapping between the structure of a text and the meaning or image it conveys. Cognitive poetics therefore sees iconicity as a structural mapping between the form and meaning of the text, and metaphor as a system mapping between the conceptual domains mediated by the text. The cognitive treatment of iconicity The problem of iconicity is indeed undergoing a revival in cognitive studies of syntax, morphology, lexicon, language change and pragmatics. Here the iconic motivation of form with respect to meaning has

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been investigated with reference to the correspondence between conceptual structure and linguistic manifestations in grammar and discourse. Haiman (1985a) offers a detailed survey of iconicity in syntax, while works by Waugh (1992, 1994, Waugh and Newfield 1995) present a study on iconicity in morphology and lexicon. There have been several collections of papers on iconicity published since 1985. Haiman (1985b) is one of the first collections in contemporary linguistics, including articles on diagrammatic iconicity in various linguistic phenomena, such as iconicity in inflectional forms, temporal sequence, grammatical categories, intonation and deixis. Hiraga and RadwanskaWilliams (1994) is a special issue featuring iconicity and metaphor in syntax, morphology and pragmatics. Landsberg (1995) collects more recent works on iconicity in syntax. This growing interest in the issue of iconicity in cognitive linguistics is having repercussions in the related fields of semiotics and anthropology. Bouissac et al. (1986), Evans and Helbo (1986) and Simone (1995) have articles on various aspects of iconicity from a semiotic perspective. Hinton et al. (1994) is a collection of papers on soundsymbolism, representing a recent accumulation of cross-linguistic data. Nänny and Fischer (1999) and Müller and Fischer (2002) collect articles on iconicity from a range of different perspectives including semiotics, linguistics, graphics and literature. Iconicity has of course found its detractors. Among the most prominent of those detractors is the semiotician, Umberto Eco. Eco (1976, 1984) emphasises the importance of cultural codification for any signfunction. He sees that even in iconic signs a conventionally established code is in operation. Rejecting the notions of iconicity such as a sign sharing the same properties as its object, being similar or analogous to its object, or being motivated by its object, Eco (1976: 192) assumes that icons are ‘culturally coded without necessarily implying that they are arbitrarily correlated to their content’ (italics in the original). However, Eco’s argument could be appropriated by the Peircean analysis of iconicity elaborated below, in which it is stated that diagrammatic and metaphorical icons may involve convention (for further discussion, see Section 2.2.3).

Having in mind the background literature on metaphor and iconicity, I will move to major methodological issues, which give a frame of reference to the present study. The definition of metaphor and icon by Peirce will be reformulated with the aid of the contemporary development of the cognitive theory of metaphor.

Methodological Framework 29

2.2 Peircean definition The semiotic notion of iconicity originates with the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. In order to grasp the Peircean notions of iconicity and metaphor, it is essential to examine them in the entire context of his doctrine of the sign, which is beyond the scope of this study. However, Peirce’s persistent classification of the signs into three categories that he calls Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness deserves a brief summary as it is this ternary account that distinctively marks Peircean semiotics and recurs throughout his work (cf. Feibleman 1946, Ayer 1968). It is also this aspect of Peirce’s system that is particularly relevant to the treatment of metaphor and iconicity in this work. My claim that metaphor and iconicity are interrelated is derived from Peirce’s ternary account whereby the notion of Thirdness includes both Secondness and Firstness, the notion of Secondness includes Firstness, while the notion of Firstness stands alone. It is the idea of Thirdness as an inclusive category of the other two that is of most importance in my analysis of metaphor–icon links. 2.2.1 Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness Peirce defined the sign as follows: ‘a sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity’ (italics in the original) [2.228].4 That is, a sign A stands for an object B to an interpretant C. This simple formulation of the definition of the sign characterises the ternary structure and the interactive nature of the signs that Peirce sought out in his semiotic theory. A sign, or representamen, is ‘the First Correlate of a triadic relation, the Second Correlate being termed its Object, and the possible Third Correlate being termed its Interpretant’ (italics in the original) [2.242]. There are two critical points to note: the basic traits of these three modes; and the importance of the mediatory nature of the third. The distinctions of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness can be drawn in terms of their basic traits. For Peirce [1.23], these distinctions represent three different ontological modes of being, defined in his words as ‘possible quality’, ‘actual fact’ and ‘law in the future’. Elsewhere [6.32], he defined them according to the relations of elements they involve. Firstness is the monadic mode, in which signs can exist independently of anything else; Secondness presupposes the dyad, in which two elements are compared or connected, such as cause and effect. Thirdness is the ‘conception of mediation whereby a first and a second are brought into relation’. As regards the relationship among these three modes,

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Metaphor and Iconicity

Peirce said, ‘not only does Thirdness suppose and involve the ideas of Secondness and Firstness, but never will it be possible to find any Secondness or Firstness in a phenomenon that is not accompanied by Thirdness’ [5.90]. It is clear that Peirce regards Thirdness as embracing both Firstness and Secondness. In my view, this mediatory nature of Thirdness is particularly important in the application of the Peircean classification to the analysis of sign systems, because Thirdness functions as a general law, which navigates the interpretation of the Firstness of ‘quality’ and the Secondness of ‘actuality’. In other words, Thirdness provides a context or a relation in which the other modes of being can be identified and interpreted. 2.2.2 Icon, index, symbol It is by the application of the three categories above to the sign–object relation that the icon–index–symbol distinction emerges in the Peircean theory of signs, and so does the image–diagram–metaphor distinction. Peirce defined signs in relation to their objects according to his Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness and termed them icons, indices and symbols. Table 2.1 indicates the defining conditions and the means by which these three signs achieve their signification. An icon is defined as a sign which represents an object mainly by its similarity to that object. An icon is a Firstness of the three signs, because its signification is achieved by its intrinsic characteristics. For example, a photograph is an icon of a person photographed when one sees the similarity between them or when it is used as such. ‘Anything whatever, be it quality, existent individual, or law, is an Icon of anything, in so far as it is like that thing and used as a sign of it’ [2.247]. A sign of Secondness, an index, represents its object by its existential relation to the object. In Peirce’s words, ‘an Index is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that object’ (italics in the original) [2.248]. There is a contiguity relation, either spatial or causal, between the sign and the object. For example,

Table 2.1 Icon, index and symbol Sign

Defining conditions

Signification by virtue of

Icon Index Symbol

Similarity Contiguity (causal or spatial) Conventionality

Its intrinsic characteristics Its existential relation to the object Its relation to the interpretant

Methodological Framework 31

smoke is an index of fire, based on the causal relation in reality. Smoke exists as an effect of fire, and therefore it indexes fire. ‘A Symbol is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of a law, usually an association of general ideas, which operates to cause the Symbol to be interpreted as referring to that Object’ (italics in the original) [2.249]. For example, a red traffic light is a symbol of stopping for those who know the traffic rules. As Peirce mentioned, any utterance of speech ‘signifies what it does only by virtue of its being understood to have that signification’ [2.304]. It is undeniable that language structure and use depend largely on symbolic signification. As one cannot play a game of chess when one does not understand its rules, one cannot speak a language when one does not understand its rules. In dealing with the examples, however, what seems important to me is the nature of manifestations of these signs rather than the nature of classification as an ideal and abstract construct. Even when it is granted that a photograph is iconic, and that language is symbolic, it can still be argued that a photograph can be an index because a person photographed is a cause and the photograph is an effect, or that there are indexical (e.g. pronouns, demonstratives) and iconic (e.g. soundsymbolism, word order) aspects in language (cf. Jespersen 1964 [1921], Jakobson 1971 [1965], Haiman 1985a, b). In the real sign–object situations, a sign may involve all three types of Peircean signs – icon, index and symbol – with predominance of one over the others. Moreover, when one looks for examples to explain any of his signs to the full, it is clear that both Firstness and Secondness can be involved in Thirdness. Peirce said, ‘the category of first can be prescinded from second and third, and second can be prescinded from third. But second cannot be prescinded from first, nor third from second’ [1.353].5 2.2.3 Image, diagram, metaphor It is precisely in this context of Peircean ontology that his further divisions of icons are to be introduced, i.e. the divisions of icons into images, diagrams and metaphors. Again, the trichotomy rules the classification, and subtypes of icons are characterised by the dominance of mimicry, analogy and parallelism. Those which partake of simple qualities, or First Firstness, are images; those which represent the relations, mainly dyadic, or so regarded, of the parts of one thing by analogous relations in their own parts, are diagrams; those which represent the representative character of a

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representamen by representing a parallelism in something else, are metaphors. (Italics in the original) [2.277] Image achieves similarity by partaking of some of the simple qualities of its object, such as a portrait for the person portrayed or a sample of a wallpaper for the wall. It is First Firstness, because it is an intrinsic aspect (First) of the intrinsic quality (Firstness) that characterises images. The relationship between an image and its object is monadic in the sense that the defining condition of similarity is achieved by the image’s exhibiting its intrinsic qualities which resemble some of the simple qualities of its object. In short, images are mimetic to their objects. Images are immediate signs, which are less abstract and less dependent on conventions than the other two subtypes of icons. The second subtype is the diagrams, which exhibit a structure analogous to the structure of their object. Diagrams, as Second Firstness, show the abstract structure which resembles the structure of their object. Diagrams are, in this sense, analogical to their objects in structure, but not necessarily in substance. For example, an architectural elevation shares no significant substantial properties with the actual building; nevertheless, it may, in conjunction with certain conventions, be graphically representative of the structural relationships among the elevational designs of the building. Or a scientific model of the solar system is a diagram of the actual solar system. The model is proportionally much smaller than the actual object and the materials composed of the model are different from the actual solar system; but it represents analogically the relational positions of planets in the actual solar system. As the diagram involves an analogical relationship between the two abstract structures, i.e. that of a sign and of an object, the relationship between the diagram and its object is dyadic. The diagrammatic signification is a dyadic correspondence or isomorphism, which is characterised by the structural analogy between the diagram and its object. Moreover, the similarity between the two structures is univocal rather than equivocal. Although it is on an abstract level, there should be oneto-one correspondence between the dyads, which is the basis of the structural analogy. In a word, the similarity between the diagram and its object is a dyadic, relational or structural or proportional analogy. Being based on a structural rather than a sensory dimension, diagrams are more abstract and conventionalised than images. It might be said that the image is recognisable by anyone, whereas to recognise the diagram requires an understanding of certain conventions. The third subtype of iconicity, metaphor, is only very briefly discussed

Methodological Framework 33

by Peirce. Besides the definition given above, there are only a few descriptions of metaphors in his writings, in contrast to his recurrent explanation and description of images and diagrams. Metaphors, as I interpret them from the definition, ‘those which represent the representative character of a representamen by representing a parallelism in something else’, are different from images and diagrams in that they require an existence of ‘something else’, i.e. a third thing in addition to a sign and the object. In this sense, it is by a triadic relation that metaphors achieve their signification. For example, a metaphorical icon (e.g. ‘The human mind is a computer’) signifies its object (e.g. ‘mind’) by pointing to a parallelism between the object (e.g. ‘mind’) and something else (e.g. ‘computer’). This parallelism could be a set of semantic associations (e.g. receiving ideas, storing ideas, manipulating ideas) between the object and something else. Instead of saying that ‘there are too many ideas in my mind’, the metaphorical message, ‘I have too many files open in my mind’, points to an associative parallelism in which a set of characteristics of a computer is mapped onto that of the human mind. Because of its triadic mediatory nature, i.e. Thirdness, a metaphorical sign largely depends on convention. This is particularly so when metaphors become conventionalised, as they manifest themselves in everyday language (cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1980). On the other hand, a novel and creative metaphor requires both imagination and convention in order for us to make sense out of it (cf. Lakoff and Turner 1989). For such a metaphor manifests both the feeling and the law, i.e. Firstness and Thirdness. Furthermore, when a metaphorical text displays itself as an allegory, then it involves an indexical interpretation, pointing to an actual context it relates to, i.e. Secondness. It is speculated, therefore, that a metaphor is a sign which exhibits Firstness (quality), Secondness (fact) and Thirdness (law). Following Peirce’s logic of Thirdness, which, in his characterisation, includes Firstness and Secondness (cf. [5.90]), it can be said that metaphor also involves image and diagram, and so does symbol involve icon and index. As Haley (1988: 34) convincingly puts it, the relations among the three hypoicons may be more aptly conceived as a continuum of iconicity, suggesting that in every iconic experience there is at least some degree of metaphoricity, diagrammaticality, and imagery; the three grounds of iconicity would then be distinguished, in actual occurrence, according to which ground was judged as predominant. (Italics in the original)

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Table 2.2 Subtypes of icon6 Subtypes

Image

Diagram

Metaphor

How similarity is achieved

Partakes of some of the simple qualities of its object

Exhibits the abstract structure of its object

Represents a parallelism in something else

Similarity in

Quality

Structure

Association

Sign–object (sign) relationship

Monadic immediate mimicry

Dyadic structural or relational analogy

Triadic representational parallelism

Example

Sample

Model

Parable

Manifestations in language

Onomatopoeia, sound-symbolism

Linearity, proximity, symmetry, asymmetry, etc.

Metaphorical transfer from one domain to another

The immediacy of sign–object link decreases from images to diagrams, from diagrams to metaphors. At the same time, an icon may involve all the three subtypes with predominance of one over the others. The differences among the three subtypes of icons are a degree of abstraction and conventionality as well as dominance of different characteristics of iconicity, as illustrated in Table 2.2. To sum up, images are based on a monadic simple, sensory or mimetic resemblance; diagrams are based on a dyadic proportional or structural analogy; and metaphors are based on a triadic mediatory representational parallelism. The degree of abstraction increases from images to diagrams, from diagrams to metaphors. Although Peirce emphasised the importance of the third mediatory category, he never developed his notion of metaphor in relation to images and diagrams. As briefly mentioned in Chapter 1, this lack of elaboration might be derived from the notional confusions in the three subtypes. For the first two, images and diagrams, deal with a similarity relation between form and concept, while metaphors deal with a similarity relation between two concepts. In the following section, I am redressing Peirce’s neglect of metaphor in his ternary account of iconicity, by linking his understanding to the contemporary treatment of metaphor. Peirce’s insight is therefore refined with the aid of the cognitive theory of metaphor.

Methodological Framework 35

2.3 Cognitive definition: interplay between metaphor and iconicity 2.3.1 Iconicity and metaphor defined The cognitive approach regards metaphor and iconicity as important theoretical issues in the exploration of the operation of the human mind. The vagueness of the Peircean notion of metaphor is compensated for by the definition given by the cognitive theory of metaphor. Working definitions In cognitive terms, iconicity (i.e. images and diagrams in Peircean terminology) refers to the mapping between form (structure) and meaning (cf. Lakoff and Turner 1989) in various degrees of abstraction, from concrete attributive resemblance to abstract relational analogy. Metaphor, on the other hand, is the mapping between two conceptual spaces of meaning, a projection of a schematised pattern (system) from a less abstract source space onto a more abstract target space (cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Lakoff 1987, 1993, Turner 1996). In most cases, the basis of similarity between icons is derived from visual, auditory and other formal traits of the object that they stand for, while iconic signs are themselves often visual, auditory or formal representations. Metaphors, however, do not necessarily have such traits, but act as a heuristic device to mediate dissimilar concepts by means of the similarity they yield. As Anderson (1984: 459) correctly points out, ‘a metaphor, like an image or an analogy, is what it represents – but not because of an antecedent identity or similarity, not as a reminiscence, but in virtue of a similarity which it creates’. Indeed, in icons, the similarity relationship between the sign and the object is taken to be preexistent. For example, there is a similarity between the folder icon on a computer screen and the folder object in the office even if one has no prior experience with computers. In contrast, a metaphor connects two entities, say a mind and a computer, which are a priori dissimilar. The connecting act via a metaphor establishes the similarity between two dissimilar entities, and thus creates a new meaning or interpretation. Metaphor and iconicity often work together, through what can be called an iconic moment in metaphor. Such iconic moments manifest themselves as image-schematic structures that generate specific meaning. In addition, there needs to be some metaphorical navigation in the understanding of icons. Hence, metaphor in icons concerns an interpretation of iconic aspects of the form. The metaphors that

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underlie the relationship of form and meaning (i.e. grammatical metaphors, see Section 2.3.3 below) guide the interpretation of forms as diagrammatic icons. This interplay between metaphor and iconicity is not a static product of structure, but a dynamic process. It emerges from, is elaborated by and integrated with background knowledge, contextual information and human feelings. This takes place at the precise time at which meaning is generated both in composition and interpretation. 2.3.2 The model of blending Although cognitive linguistics offers a clearer definition for metaphor and iconicity, it is not satisfactory that metaphor and iconicity are treated as somewhat isolated manifestations. Because metaphor and iconicity are similar cognitive operations motivated by analogical reasoning, they would be best captured in their interplay rather than in isolation as Peirce correctly suggested but failed to develop. Therefore, my intention is to refocus Peirce’s original conceptualisation of metaphor and other iconic signs in the context of the cognitive theory of blending. The claim is that the model of blending developed by Turner and Fauconnier (Turner 1996, 1998, Turner and Fauconnier 1995a, b, 1999, Fauconnier and Turner 1998, 2002, among others) offers a promising theoretical basis and an effective methodological contribution to explicating the interrelationship of metaphor and iconicity (i.e. Peircean ‘image’ and ‘diagram’) and analysing their actual manifestations in language. Basic claims of the model of blending Turner and Fauconnier (1995a: 184) propose a model of ‘conceptual projection across four or more (many) mental spaces rather than two domains’, to explain a wide range of phenomena including ‘conceptual metaphor, metonymy, counterfactuals, conceptual change’ (p. 183), ‘classification, the making of hypotheses, inference, and the origin and combining of grammatical constructions’ (p. 186), ‘idioms, . . . , jokes, advertising, and other aspects of linguistic and nonlinguistic behavior’ (p. 186). The basic claims of the cognitive account of metaphor were expounded by Lakoff, Johnson and Turner (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Lakoff 1987, 1993, Lakoff and Turner 1989), and elaborated as a more general model of ‘blending’ by Turner and Fauconnier (Turner and Fauconnier 1995a, b, Turner 1996, Fauconnier and Turner 1998, 2002, among others). These ideas are summarised as follows and illustrated in Figure 2.1:

Methodological Framework 37 Generic Space

Input (Source)

Input (Target)

Blend Figure 2.1 The model of blending7

1. Metaphor is a cognitive process in which one set of concepts (a target) is understood in terms of another (a source). According to the model of blending, metaphor is a conceptual integration of four mental spaces.8 Mental spaces are small conceptual arrays constructed for local purposes of understanding. When a conceptual projection occurs, two input mental spaces (source and target in a metaphor) are created. There is a partial mapping of counterparts between the input spaces, as represented by solid lines in Figure 2.1. These input spaces have relevant information from the respective domains, as well as additional structure from culture, context, point of view and other background information. 2. There are two kinds of middle mental space in addition to the input spaces. These middle spaces are a generic space and a blended space. The generic space maps onto each of the input spaces, as indicated by dashed lines in Figure 2.1. It reflects some abstract structure shared by the inputs. The blended space also receives partial projections from the inputs, as indicated by dashed lines. The blend is a rich

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Metaphor and Iconicity

space integrating the generic structure, structures from each input space and background information. Often the blended space has an emergent structure of its own, as represented by the square in the figure. This emergence occurs in ways of composition (in which new relations emerge from projections from the inputs), completion (in which the composite structure projected into the blend is completed into the larger system by background knowledge, cognitive and cultural models), and elaboration (in which the blend is further elaborated according to its own logic) (cf. Fauconnier and Turner 1998: 271). 3. Each mental space has a consistent image-schematic structure that is preserved through a conceptual projection of generic and input spaces. The image-schemas are skeletal patterns in our sensory and motor experience, such as a container, a motion along a path, part and whole, centre and periphery, symmetry and so forth. 4. The blended space develops inferences, arguments, ideas and emotions, which can modify the initial input spaces and change our views of the knowledge used to build those input spaces (cf. Turner 1996: 83). Therefore, the blend is a dynamic mechanism of creativity. Iconic moments in metaphor By using the example, ‘I have too many files open in my mind’, I will recapitulate the main points about iconic moments in metaphor according to this model of blending. As discussed above, the conceptual metaphor, MIND IS A COMPUTER, allows us to understand an abstract entity, a human mind, in terms of a concrete entity, a computer. The cross-space mapping between the inputs constitutes the content of the generic space. In the above example, the image-schemas of objects resembling files, an excessive amount of them, a machine and its movement in the source input (‘too many opened files’) are aligned with the imageschemas of abstract objects and manipulation of the mass of these objects in the target input (‘too many ideas’) by the generic space which has the highly abstract, skeletal image-schematic structure taken to apply to both the input spaces (e.g. a frame of an excess of objects). It should be noted that there are iconic moments in this alignment of image-schemas. The choice of the term, ‘image-schema’, itself suggests that both ‘image’ and ‘diagram’ are to be related to this cross-space mapping of metaphor. In the input spaces, from a vast amount of information provided by our bodily experiences, interactive perception, contextual and background knowledge, we have an array of images that do

Methodological Framework 39

not clash with the entire cognitive process of metaphor. In our example, the image content includes visual (or interactive) images of an action of opening many files, a screen showing many files open, a dialogue box saying ‘too many files open’, and/or a screen frozen due to too many files open. These are mimetic mental representations of sensory perceptions, and constitute imagic iconicity. At the same time, a mental space develops a structure by selecting and schematising the images, namely, an image-schematic structure, which has a diagrammatic representation of the image content of mental space (e.g. an image-scheme of a blocked action due to an excessive amount of files). A similar process might occur in the target input space to a less concrete degree. For example, the evoked images for ‘too many ideas’ may be more abstract than what happens in the source, and so is its schematisation. Therefore, there are two types of iconic mappings in the input spaces: an attributive imagic mapping between the sensory perception and the image content, and an analogical diagrammatic mapping between the image content and the schematised images. Conceptual and image projections not only occur in input spaces, but they also include a generic space and a blended space. There is a relationship of similarity between the generic space and the input spaces, because the generic space has an image-schematic structure shared with the two inputs. This shared image-schematic structure is skeletal and abstract. In the metaphor, ‘I have too many files open in my mind’, the generic structure can be an image-schema of a purposive action or some kind of blocked progress. As the image-schematic structure is preserved, the two input spaces are structurally analogous. The analogy supported by the generic space can be described as diagrammatic because it is a structure-preserving schematic correspondence between the source and the generic space, and between the target and the generic space. In other words, diagrammatic iconicity is at work in the analogy between the corresponding image-schematic structures of the generic space and the input spaces. This metaphor gets its full interpretation and understanding as a conceptual integration in the blended space, which has a conceptual mapping of partial structures from both inputs and the generic space, and which develops an emergent structure of its own, for example, disorder, a lack of proper motion, a stoppage, as a result of excessive movements. Figure 2.2 illustrates imagic and diagrammatic iconic mapping inherent in the conceptual mapping and integration of metaphor. Needless to say, it is metaphor rather than iconicity that prevails in this particular example of ‘I have too many files open in my mind’. For

40

Metaphor and Iconicity

Generic Space DIAGRAMMATIC MAPPING

DIAGRAMMATIC MAPPING

Image-Schema

Target

Source DIAGRAMMATIC MAPPING Image Content IMAGIC MAPPING Sensory Perception

Blend CONCEPTUAL MAPPING AND INTEGRATION

METAPHOR Figure 2.2 Metaphor–icon links in the model of blending

only the very abstract conceptual (theory-building) level seems to involve iconic moments: imagic and diagrammatic iconicity in the evoking of images and the schematisation of images in the input mental spaces, and diagrammatic iconicity in the correspondence or counterpart projection of image-schematic structures between the generic space and input spaces. The discussion above has illustrated that the model of blending lends itself to understanding the semiotic implications of imagic and diagrammatic iconicity in the cognitive process of metaphor. When I say that metaphor has iconic moments, it means that there are some traces of iconic mapping in general between a fairly abstract form and a

Methodological Framework 41

concept. No visible figure mirrors the concept in the linguistic representation of this particular example of a conventional metaphor. This does not mean that language structure and use are deprived of iconicity. Until linguistic iconicity is delineated, however, it will not become visible, because it is not foregrounded. 2.3.3 Grammatical metaphors Iconic meanings given to form by metaphor One of the ways by which we can detect iconicity in linguistic resources (such as sounds, words, sentences, discourses and writing systems) comes from conventional metaphors relating to our conception of language. Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 126–38) provide a basic insight into how metaphor can give meaning to form. They point out that we conceptualise language by orientational and ontological metaphors, that is, in terms of space and in terms of objects. A pervasive conceptualisation of language9 is the CONDUIT metaphor (Reddy 1979) in which ideas are seen as objects, linguistic expressions as containers, and communication as sending and receiving the containers containing ideas as objects. Because we speak and write in a linear order, we also conceptualise language in terms of space in a linear order. There are a handful of conventional conceptual metaphors which function as a useful tool to give iconic meanings to form. Table 2.3 gives a non-exhaustive list of examples of such conventional metaphors. For ease of discussion, I will call these conventional metaphors ‘grammatical metaphors’, because these metaphors, more or less, concern the relationship of form and meaning in grammatical conventions (e.g. phonology, morphology, word formation and word order). Because we conceptualise expressions as containers and meanings as contents, it is assumed that the bigger containers have the larger contents. So, MORE MEANING IS MORE FORM. For example, prolongation, repetition, iteration and reduplication of linguistic forms such as a sound, a syllable and a word tend to stand for more of the content. The SIMILARITY OF FORM stands for the SIMILARITY OF CONTENT, the DIFFERENCE OF FORM, the DIFFERENCE OF CONTENT. For example, the use of the similar sound signifies the similar (or equivalent) meaning in English morphology, an [s] for the plural, a [non] for the negative prefix and so forth. LOCATION OF FORM also gives iconic meanings. In general orientational experiences, we put important things in the centre. For example, there tends to be a building or a monument of importance (a castle, a

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Metaphor and Iconicity

Table 2.3 Grammatical metaphors Source

Target

QUANTITY OF FORM

QUANTITY OF CONTENT MATERIAL

SIMILARITY OR DIFFERENCE OF

LOCATION

SIMILARITY OR DIFFERENCE OF CONTENT

SEQUENCE SYMMETRY/ASYMMETRY OF FORM

SYMMETRY/ASYMMETRY OF CONTENT

LOCATION OF FORM

CLOSE

STRENGTH

LINEAR

SEQUENCE OF TIME

LINEAR

CAUSE/EFFECT

FIRST/LAST

IMPORTANCE

SEQUENCE OF FORM

church or a tower) at the centre of a city, a village or a campus. In English, for instance, when a word is embellished with inflections and affixes, they are peripheral. The stem, which expresses the core meaning, stays in the central position. It is rare that the central shape of a word is altered. Not only the location of the form, but also the sequential order of the form can mirror the space, time and causal sequence of the content. In the standard representation of temporal events, for example, it is more common to state things in line with their occurrence in time, from past to the present rather than the reverse. Halliday (1994b) has also noted the diagrammatic correlation (which he calls ‘iconic’) between expressions in the discourse grammar and the contents expressed. According to him, there are three types of such correlation: 1. There is a movement from a given Theme (background) to a rhematic New (foreground); this movement in time construes iconically the flow of information.

Methodological Framework 43

2. New semiotic entities are created by . . . nominal packages, . . . ; the nominal expression in the grammar construes iconically an objectified entity in the real world. 3. The combination of (1) and (2) construes iconically the total reality, . . . a reality consisting of semiotic entities in a periodic flow of information (1994b: 143). Halliday’s notion of ‘packages’ and ‘movement’ is similar to the grammatical metaphors discussed above, namely, LINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS ARE CONTAINERS and CHRONOLOGICAL OR CAUSAL ORDER IS A LINEAR SEQUENCE; but it goes further to point out that nominal expressions are the prototypical construal of EXPRESSIONS as PACKAGES. Structural diagram and relational diagram As a diagram refers to its object by virtue of similarity between the relationship among the parts of the diagram and the relationship among the parts of the object, the structure of linguistic representation resembles the structure of the content that it conveys. As in Caesar’s ‘veni, vidi, vici’ (I came, I saw, I conquered) (cf. Jakobson 1971[1965]: 350), the syntagmatic order of mention in speech corresponds to the chronological or causal order in which the event occurs. Paradigmatically, word affinity relations such as morphemes (e.g. ‘acceptable’, ‘readable’ and ‘replaceable’ – sharing ‘able’ in form and ‘being CAPABLE of doing’ in meaning), phonesthemes (e.g. ‘gleam’, ‘glance’, ‘glare’ and ‘glitter’, – sharing initial /gl/ in form and ‘connection to vision’ in meaning) and so forth, suggest that similarity in form signals similarity in meaning; difference in form signals difference in meaning. Diagrammatic icons are, in this sense, analogous to their objects in structure and/or in relation. Semiotically speaking, these two examples illustrate two broad possibilities in which diagrammatic iconicity is manifested in grammar, and thereby receives interpretation as such by the presence of ontological and orientational metaphors explained above. I will call the two types of iconic form ‘structural diagram’ and ‘relational diagram’, which roughly follow Haiman’s classification of diagrammatic iconicity into ‘motivation’ and ‘isomorphism’ (cf. Haiman 1985a, b).10 ‘Structural diagrams’ display a correspondence between structure of form and structure of content, whereas ‘relational diagrams’ show a tendency to associate similarity in form with similarity in content; difference in form with difference in content. In an extreme case, this tendency is expressed as the principle of ‘one meaning, one form’ (cf. Bolinger

44

Metaphor and Iconicity

Iconic Mapping

SEQUENCE IN TIME IS SEQUENCE IN FORM

QUANTITY OF CONTENT IS QUANTITY OF FORM

FORM

MEANING

Figure 2.3 Structural diagram

1977). The difference between structural diagrams and relational diagrams seems to be that the former are a structural analogy whereas the latter are a relational analogy. Structural diagrams tend to deal with a correspondence between the structure of linguistic form and the structure of conceptualisation; relational diagrams with a correspondence between the relation in linguistic form and the relation in linguistic meaning. Figures 2.3 and 2.4 are a graphic presentation of the two principles in question. Both auditory and visual forms can receive an iconic meaning from the grammatical metaphors, and function as structural or relational diagrams. The relationship of form and meaning in grammatical metaphorical mapping is diagrammatic, because what is preserved is an analogical relationship mediated indirectly by grammatical metaphors. This contrasts with a direct attributive connection such as pure imagic iconicity between the linguistic form and meaning, e.g. a case of onomatopoeia

Methodological Framework 45

Iconic Mapping

DIFFERENCE IN MEANING IS DIFFERENCE IN FORM

SIMILARITY IN MEANING IS SIMILARITY IN FORM

FORM

MEANING

Figure 2.4 Relational diagram

and visual language such as logographs (for more examples and discussion on grammatical metaphors and diagrammatic manifestations, see Chapter 6).11

2.4 Jakobson on poetic function revisited In addition to the theoretical basis on which I investigate manifestations of metaphor–icon links, I would like to provide some methodological considerations of how to analyse the texts. As discussed in Chapter 1, the primary data of analysis for metaphor–icon manifestations will be sought in Japanese and English poetic texts. Poetic texts

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are considered to offer optimal examples to explore the issue and clarify the complexity of metaphor–icon links because their manifestations are foregrounded as the ‘poetic function’ of language. 2.4.1 The poetic function of language In twentieth-century ‘linguistic poetics’ (cf. Fónagy 1965, Jakobson 1971, 1981, 1985 [1980], Shapiro 1976, Worth 1977, Jakobson and Waugh 1979, Jakobson and Rudy 1985 [1980], among others), the structure of poetry has been analysed by looking at certain abstract patterns in the distribution of linguistic elements, such as distinctive features, phonemes, syllables, morphemes, words, phrases and sentences. The subliminal patterns revealed by these microscopic analyses have supported Jakobson’s assertion that ‘the poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection onto the axis of combination’ (Jakobson 1960: 358). When two elements in the sequential configuration are equated due to some kind of formal similarity such as alliterated words, rhymed feet or syntactic parallelism, and when there is also a semantic or conceptual link between the two elements thus equated, then it can be said that they exhibit an iconic manifestation: similarity in form signals similarity in meaning. Thus, what Jakobson refers to as the principle of equivalence can be interpreted as a way to analyse the manifestations of iconicity as he claims that ‘in poetry similarity is superimposed on contiguity, and hence “equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence”’ (Jakobson 1985[1960]: 42). 2.4.2 The role of repetition in text The most prominent patterns revealed by the semiotic analysis of poems tend to take some form of the recurrence of equivalent elements, namely, a repetition of some kind. It seems inevitable that an analytic methodology of structural poetics leads to a realisation of such recurrent patterns, because the working principle of equivalence, when projected onto the axis of combination (Jakobson 1960: 358), presupposes the recurrence of equalised forms. Traditionally, repetition in poetry has been studied as a rhetorical device in such forms as alliteration, assonance, consonance, rhyme, meter and so on. Attention has been paid to phonological and prosodic aspects with less emphasis on the semantic. The Jakobsonian approach, however, tackles the semantic effects of repetition, namely, the semantics of patterns of formal parallelism revealed by a detailed semiotic

Methodological Framework 47 Table 2.4 Units of repetition Visual level

Auditory level

Conceptual level

A part of character Character Part of lexical item Lexical item Phrase Sentence Grammatical pattern

Distinctive feature Phoneme, syllable, mora Syllable, mora, ictus Lexical item Phrase Sentence Grammatical pattern

Radical Logograph Morpheme Lexical item Phrase Sentence Grammatical pattern

analysis of a poetic text. Concrete and abstract repetitive patterns are manifest in several general types, and carry different types of iconic meaning. Units of repetition Units of repetition can be detected from linguistic resources. They vary in length and appear at different levels such as visual, auditory and conceptual levels, as indicated in Table 2.4. The visual level has a part of character, a character, a part of a lexical item, a lexical item, a phrase, a sentence and a grammatical pattern. The auditory level, corresponding to the visual units of ‘part of a character’ up to ‘part of lexical item’, has a distinctive feature, a phoneme, syllable, mora, or ictus. On the conceptual level, corresponding to these three smallest units are a radical, a logograph and a morpheme. Once one gets to the level of a complete lexical item, the visual, the auditory and the conceptual levels have a one-to-one correspondence. Manifestations of repetition Repetition manifests itself in time and space. On the visual level it primarily occurs in space, whereas on the auditory level it primarily occurs in time. On the conceptual level, it seems that the manifestation of repetition takes a rather complex form as it involves at least two dimensions – mental time and space. It can also cross time or culture as historical quotation or cultural allusion on the conceptual level. As shown in Figure 2.5, repetition appears in the text in several prototypical types. A certain item may be repeated in abundance. Repetition may manifest itself in certain locations such as of regular intervals,

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Metaphor and Iconicity

A. Repetition in quantity

B. Repetition in similar intervals

-R----------R-----------R-----------R-----------R---------------R-----------R-----------R-----------R-----------R-------R-----------R-----------R-----------R----------------R--------R-----------R-----------R----------R -----------R-----------R------------R----------R------------R---------R-----------R----------------------R------R---------------R-----------R----------R------------R------------------R-----R-----------R-------------R-------R----------R -----------R-----------R-------------------R---------------------------R-----------R---------------R--------------R---

--------R--------------R--------------R------------------R--------------R--------------R------------------R--------------R--------------R------------------R--------------R--------------R------------------R--------------R--------------R------------------R--------------R--------------R------------------R--------------R--------------R------------------R--------------R--------------R------------------R--------------R--------------R------------------R--------------R--------------R-----------

C. Repetition at the beginning and the end

D. Repetition in sequence

R---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------R

------------------------------------RSTUVWXWZ RSTUVWXWZ -------------------------------------

E. Repetition in pairs

F. Repetition by symmetry or other orders

--------------------------R --------------------------R --------------------------S --------------------------S

--------------------------R------------------------R-------------------------------------------------R --------------------------R------------------------R-------------------------------------------------R

G. Change in repetitive units and/or in repetition patterns

H. Change to non-repetition

R-----------------R----------------R---------------R R-----------------R----------------R---------------R S--------S--------S-------S-------S-------S------S S--------S--------S-------S-------S-------S------S

R---------------R--------------R--------------R R---------------R--------------R--------------R ---------------------------------------------------R---------------R--------------R--------------R R---------------R--------------R--------------R

Figure 2.5 Manifestations of repetition types

in symmetry, in pairs, or at the beginning and the end of text. Repetitious patterns may change, from one to another, or from one to none. Even from the non-exhaustive list of abstract repetition types in Figure 2.5, it is clear that when a certain item is repeated in a certain pattern, it is likely to be perceived as ‘figure’ against ‘ground’. If the content expressed by the figured repetition conveys some meaning which ‘fits’ with the figure, then the link between form and meaning is felt stronger, and becomes self-evident.

Methodological Framework 49

2.4.3 Repetition as grammatical metaphor Iconic meaning of repetition Sapir mentions that the repetition of all or part of the radical element is ‘generally employed, with self-evident symbolism, to indicate such concepts as distribution, plurality, repetition, customary activity, increase of size, added intensity, continuance’ (1921: 76). Taking up Sapir’s insight into the ‘symbolism of repetition’, Hiraga (1993) analyses Japanese and English concrete poetry to demonstrate how repetition types appear on the visual level of manifestations, and how these types of repetition convey iconic meanings respectively. It is common that a piece of poetic text manifests several repetition types at a time even when one looks at visual elements exclusively. However, the types of repetition patterns almost self-evidently show certain correspondences to the contents they express as indicated in Table 2.5. It can be assumed that this kind of taxonomy of repetition types and their corresponding iconic meanings is applicable not only at the level of visual manifestations but also at the level of auditory manifestations. Repetition navigates textual interpretation Combined with grammatical metaphors discussed in Section 2.3.3, the correspondence of repetition types and their iconic meanings gives rise to another set of grammatical metaphors, which contribute to the interplay of textual form and meaning at the level of the macro-structure of the text.

Table 2.5 Iconic meanings of repetition Repetition type

Iconic meaning

Repetition in quantity

Dominance, abundance, continuation, monotone Regularity, unity, coherence Framing, cycle Coupling, contrast Emphasis, echo Thematic development Change in content, mood, effect, etc. Foregrounding, distinctiveness

Repetition in similar intervals Repetition at the beginning and the end Repetition in pairs Repetition in sequence Repetition by symmetry or other orders Change in repetitive units and/or in repetitive patterns Change from repetition to non-repetition

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Metaphor and Iconicity

For example, if a certain text contains a number of repetitions in pairs, they may navigate the interpretation of the text as a dominance of the concepts expressed by the paired segments in repetition, which may further signal coupling or contrast. Here, the grammatical metaphors of SIMILAR CONTENT IS SIMILAR FORM, A PAIRED CONTENT IS A PAIRED FORM and MORE CONTENT IS MORE FORM are working at two levels. At the level of interpretation of segmental elements, the similar sound sequence (FORM), for instance, may signal the similar (or equivalent) interpretation (CONTENT) as in the case of alliterations and rhymed feet. Identification of the similarity presupposes the notion of repetition, as it is perceived that an item A is similar (or equivalent) as an item B based on the realisation that B is a repetition of A. At the level of textual interpretation, on the other hand, if a certain sound sequence is repeated many times in pairs, the abundance (MORE FORM) of such repeated pairs (PAIRED FORM) suggests a dominance (MORE CONTENT) of the paired meanings (PAIRED CONTENT). Thus, repetition can function as grammatical metaphors at the level of the macro-structure of the text, and therefore it guides or reinforces the textual interpretation as listed in Table 2.5. In terms of repetition in the text, DOMINANCE or EMPHASIS IS QUANTITY; REGULARITY, UNITY, or DEVELOPMENT IS ORDER; PAIRS MEAN COUPLING or CONTRAST; A FRAME or A CYCLE IS SIMILARITY (EQUIVALENCE) OF BEGINNING AND ENDING; and CHANGE IN CONTENT IS CHANGE OF FORM.

2.5 Summary To sum up the main argument of the methodological framework, it has been discussed that there are two types of metaphor–icon links in language: iconicity in metaphor and metaphor in icon. Iconicity in metaphor concerns the imagic and diagrammatic representation in the creation of meaning in metaphor. This is most prototypically illustrated in the notion of image-schematic structures crucial in the cognitive account for metaphor. Metaphor in icon also relates to imagic and diagrammatic aspects of the linguistic form. Conventional metaphors which conceptualise our everyday experiences and reality also conceptualise our understanding of language structure and use. These metaphors navigate the way one interprets the forms of linguistic expressions as structural or relational diagrams. The relationships of these two types of metaphor–icons link may be graphically represented by Figure 2.6. The model in Figure 2.6 is based on the Turner–Fauconnier model, but elaborated by the addition of the

Methodological Framework 51 Generic Space

Grammatical Metaphors

MEANING

FORM

Generic Space DIAGRAMMATIC MAPPING

Visual Structure Sound Structure Syntactic Structure

IMAGIC MAPPING Sounds Visual Shape

DIAGRAMMATIC MAPPING

DIAGRAMMATIC MAPPING

Visual Structure DIAGRAMMATIC Source Sound Structure MAPPING Input Syntactic Structure

Target Input

DIAGRAMMATIC MAPPING Blend

Image-Schema DIAGRAMMATIC MAPPING Image Content IMAGIC MAPPING Sensory Perception Figure 2.6 Metaphor–icon links in language12

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metaphor–icon interplay indicated by arrows. In the box of ‘meaning’, the metaphorical process is illustrated according to the model of blending. There are four mental spaces (represented by four circles): two input spaces, a generic space and a blend. Imagic and diagrammatic iconicity relate to: (1) the inside structure of input spaces (as shown in the balloon in Figure 2.6) in which sensory perception is projected onto the image content by imagic mapping, and then onto the image-schema by diagrammatic mapping; and (2) the relationship of inputs to the generic space (inside the meaning box) in which diagrammatic mapping projects the image-schema in one space onto the image-schema in another. The box of ‘form’ represents linguistic and other semiotic resources. When the form (sounds and/or visual shape) directly mirrors the meaning, as in the case of onomatopoeia and visible language, the imagic mapping occurs in the direction from form to meaning, as illustrated by an arrow. On the other hand, when grammatical metaphors give meaning to form, there occurs a diagrammatic mapping in the direction from meaning to form (visual, sound and syntactic structures), also illustrated by an arrow. There are three types of occurrence of diagrammatic mapping: from the input space, from the generic space and from the blended space onto the form. The general structure included by these diagrammatic mappings of form and meaning constitutes the upper generic space in which the grammatical metaphors reside. Grammatical metaphors are conventional conceptual metaphors which give iconic meanings to form, and hence contribute to the interplay of form and meaning at the level of both text segments and text macrostructure. The effectiveness of this model is in the ability to specify which part or parts of the metaphorical process – whether the input, generic or blended spaces – relate(s) to the diagrammatic mapping of form and meaning. In theory, there are four mapping possibilities: from generic space onto form; from input source space to form; from input target space to form; and from blended space to form. However, in practice, the third case is unlikely because the target space in metaphor, by its own nature, is where the mapping finalises rather than initiates. The model of blending also accounts for the dynamic and creative interplay between metaphor and iconicity by way of ‘an emergent structure’ as represented by the square inside the blended space in Figure 2.6. Creation and interpretation of metaphor and icon are not a fixed process, which is pre-set prior to the text. Instead, meaning of metaphor and icon is emergent at the time of the blend in which all the mental spaces are integrated, completed and elaborated into the larger system

Methodological Framework 53

by inferences, emotions, background knowledge, cultural and cognitive models. The following chapter will show that the interplay of metaphor and iconicity is manifested at the visual and the auditory levels, in various combinations. Through detailed analyses of a few prototypical examples, it will be demonstrated that the poetic texts chosen indeed foreground metaphor–icon links and thus serve as optimal data to support the theoretical claims made in this chapter.

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Part II Analysis

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3 Manifestation of Metaphor–Icon Links: Prototypical Examples

. . . there is clearly an iconic element in metaphor. Paul Henle (1958) The purpose of this chapter is twofold: to develop the idea that poetic texts foreground the interplay between metaphor and iconicity; and to demonstrate, with prototypical examples, the theoretical claims and methodological procedures discussed in the previous chapters. As a prototypical illustration of the complexity of metaphor–icon links, I would like to present an analysis of two short English poems and two haiku texts. These poems display both local and global metaphors. Local metaphors are placed in various parts of the poem. They are based on either conceptual mappings (in which structured image-schematic concepts are mapped from one domain onto another [involving diagrammatic iconicity]), image mappings (in which locally evoked images are mapped from one onto another [involving imagic iconicity]), or a combination of both. The local metaphors may or may not contribute to the formation of a global conceptual metaphor, which is a metaphorical reading of the whole text, i.e. the poem as metaphor (see Section 2.1.1 for details). The poems analysed below differ in the degree to which metaphor and iconicity are manifested in combination. The first one is an example of English pattern poetry, which displays an overt imagic iconicity. By contrast, the other three poems analysed in this chapter covertly contain diagrammatic iconicity. The second example is a manifestation of diagrammatic patterns in a single poetic text where diagrammatic iconicity is achieved through the choice of lexical items and grammatical parallelism. The two haiku are chosen to show that a larger text such as a literary work containing a series of poems can also display iconic 57

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structure as a whole. The analysis will demonstrate that in all examples, metaphor–icon links are at work strongly in the creation and interpretation of meaning. In addition, the model of blending is adduced as a means of clarifying the dynamic mechanism of metaphor–icon links, because it allows us to see which part of the metaphorical process relates to which type of iconic mapping in the poetic text.

3.1 Shape and sense in Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’ 3.1.1 Text as shape ‘Easter Wings’ by George Herbert (1880 [1633]: 34–5) is one of the bestknown examples of pattern poetry in the English language.1 The poem is presented as a silhouette of wings. The visual image mirrors the theme of the poem, which is concisely stated in its title, ‘Easter Wings’. This is a typical example of imagic iconicity, as the relationship of form and meaning is immediate and mimetic. The very shape of the poem – the rising wings of two birds – exhibits the content of the poem in which a human being relates to the actions of a bird (specifically as a lark). Example 3.1

Manifestation of Metaphor–Icon Links 59

N.B. The following ‘prosaic’ presentation of the poem is provided only for the clarification of the content of this graphic representation: Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store, Though foolishly he lost the same, Decaying more and more, Till he became Most poore: With thee O let me rise As larks, harmoniously, And sing this day thy victories: Then shall the fall further the flight in me. My tender age in sorrow did beginne: And still with sicknesses and shame Thou didst so punish sinne, That I became Most thinne. With thee Let me combine And feel this day thy victorie: For, if I imp my wing on thine, Affliction shall advance the flight in me. 3.1.2 Text as icon Overall metaphor–icon links There are at least two major input spaces created by the reading of this poem as a global metaphor: a bird and a human being. This is done not only in linguistic expressions such as ‘let me rise as larks’, ‘the flight in me’, and ‘imp my wing on thine’, but also in graphic expressions such as the shape of the two sets of wings, and their layout on two facing pages. In the first stanza, a human being (both ‘Adam’ and all humanity) is (re)presented as a bird which is about to rise on Easter Day. God created Adam (‘man’) giving him wealth, but he fell and forfeited his paradise. Man’s abundance is steadily ‘decaying’ into poverty. God’s only son, Christ (‘thee’), enables man to ‘rise’ again spiritually just as Christ rose from the dead on Easter Day. In the second stanza, with the inheritance of original sin, humanity begins in ‘sorrow’, and also decays into sickness. As in the first stanza, it is ‘with thee’ that provides an

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Iconic Mapping

Metaphorical Mapping

FORM

MEANING Generic Space

BIRD WINGS

IMAGIC MAPPING

HUMAN

BIRD WINGS

DIAGRAMMATIC MAPPING

Blend

Grammatical Metaphors Generic Space Figure 3.1 Metaphor–icon links in ‘Easter Wings’

uplift for humanity and for the individual. The narrator sees himself as a bird which will ‘imp’ his wing with feathers from Christ’s wings so as to make the ‘flight’ to heaven. In effect, both the physical flight (or strength to go on with life) and the spiritual uplift are implicated in the poem. As illustrated in Figure 3.1, a bird is both the input source space for a global metaphorical mapping (onto a human being) and the target space for an imagic iconic mapping (from the visual source space of the wings of a bird). The metaphorical mapping of a bird onto a human being is represented by the four mental spaces on the right-hand side of Figure 3.1. The source input space has an image-schema of a bird – a lark with

Manifestation of Metaphor–Icon Links 61

wings, singing, flying, and the movement (expansion and contraction) of the wings. The target input space, on the other hand, has an imageschema of a human being – Adam (‘man’), a narrator (human being in general), sin and retribution. In the blended space, a fused imageschema of a bird and a human being receives a dynamic structure from the cultural background of Christianity. Adam’s original sin is related to the punishment, mortality and death of human beings. Man’s wealth is shrinking and decaying into poverty. The soul is also in decline. Then, Christ (as represented by ‘thee’) enables man to rise again spiritually. The victories of Christ on Easter Day are celebrated by the song of a lark. The movement of wings, i.e. expansion and contraction, is mapped onto the processes of salvation and decay, respectively, as they relate to human beings. This metaphorical reading leads on to suggest a diagrammatic iconic mapping between the form (the space on the left-hand side) and the blended space, as indicated by the arrow in Figure 3.1. It should be noted that the wings, an icon for the bird, had to be put vertically on the pages in order to display the fact that they are wings and the bird is rising. The wing shape is an imagic icon because it is a direct mimicry. The rising shape, on the other hand, is a result of the reading of the poem’s content. The wings on the second page look smaller because the first and the last lines are shorter than those on the previous page. They give the impression that the bird on the second page has taken off or is flying further. Seen as a global metaphor, the vertical form of the two wings is charged by layers of religious readings provided by Christian tradition and culture. The form embodies the metaphorical meaning of Easter as celebrating Christ’s being born again, or rising from death. The form also awakens associations with splendidly winged angels, and image patterns such as fall and rise, decay and advance, loss and victory, to list but a few. Diagrammatic iconicity by grammatical metaphors The poem, moreover, exhibits structural correspondences between form and meaning navigated by conventional metaphors for linguistic forms as discussed in the previous chapter (see Sections 2.3.3 and 2.4.3 in particular). The narrowest lines are given emphasis both by location, i.e. at the centre of each stanza, and length, i.e. their brevity. The central position of the wings displays a phrase repeated in both verses of the poem, ‘With thee’. If one interprets this poem as a religious declaration against a Christian cultural background, ‘with thee’ is central to the poem’s

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declaration of belief. The focal significance of ‘with thee’ is centralised visually or physically in the core of the poem. In addition, ‘with thee’ at the joint of the wings suggests a relationship – as if that most poor creature at his most diminished is saved by a hand reached out. The other short lines, one in each stanza, ‘most poor’ and ‘most thin’, form a pair. There is an analogical link between the shortness of form and the smallness of the objects (‘man’ in the first stanza, and ‘I’ in the second stanza) described.2 The third line in the first stanza, ‘Decaying more and more’, also corresponds diagrammatically to the decrease in the length of the lines of the poem. These correspondences are more subtle and less noticeable than the overall silhouette of the poem; nonetheless, they are as important. These are cases of diagrammatic iconicity. Imagic iconicity by visual layout It is clear that the imagic iconicity dominates in this text because, if we put the words of the poem in an ordinary prosaic format or even in a horizontal layout as in Example 3.2, the intended iconic effect of the poem is easily lost (Harris 1995: 61).3 Example 3.2 Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store, Though foolishly he lost the same, Decaying more and more, Till he became Most poore: With thee O let me rise As larks, harmoniously, And sing this day thy victories: Then shall the fall further the flight in me. My tender age in sorrow did beginne: And still with sicknesses and shame Thou didst so punish sinne, That I became Most thinne. With thee Let me combine And feel this day thy victorie: For, if I imp my wing on thine, Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

Manifestation of Metaphor–Icon Links 63

In short, the meaning expressed by the language and the visual form of this poem constitute simultaneously an image, a diagram and a metaphor of ‘Easter Wings’. The image is the dominant iconic manifestation in this particular example; but the creativity of this image is enhanced by the diagrammatic and metaphorical manifestations as clarified by the analysis.

3.2 Grammatical parallelism in Shelley’s ‘Love’s Philosophy’ 3.2.1 Text as metaphor Example 3.3 Love’s Philosophy4 The fountains mingle with the river, And the rivers with the ocean, The winds of heaven mix for ever With a sweet emotion; Nothing in the world is single, All things by a law divine In one another’s being mingle – Why not I with thine? See the mountains kiss high heaven, And the waves clasp one another; No sister flower would be forgiven If it disdained its brother: And the sunlight clasps the earth, And the moonbeams kiss the sea – What are all these kissings worth, If thou kiss not me?

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Local metaphors P. B. Shelley’s ‘Love’s Philosophy’ (1904 [1820]: 216) abounds in the use of local metaphors.5 The following analysis will clarify what conventional metaphors are employed and how they are sculpted into the composite metaphorical conception for the given target space, which is hinted at by the title of the poem, ‘Love’s Philosophy’. The abundant use of metaphorical expressions reflects conventional cognitive metaphors as follows in Example 3.4.

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Example 3.4 (a) A NATURAL PHENOMENON IS AN ENTITY (b) A NATURAL OBJECT IS AN ENTITY (c) FEELING IS AN ENTITY (d) NATURE IS HUMAN (e) OPPOSITES FORM PAIRS (f) FUSION IS MIXING (g) UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING (h) CONTACT IS TOUCHING (i) REQUESTING IS QUESTIONING (j) LOVE IS A FUSION OF OPPOSITES (k) LOVE IS CONTACT (l) LOVE IS PAIRING The first cognitive metaphors, A NATURAL PHENOMENON IS AN ENTITY, A and FEELING IS AN ENTITY, are what Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 25–32) call ‘ontological metaphors’ which enable us to conceive continuous events, ongoing realities, and unstable or even moving states of things as if they were quantifiable objects, entities or units with which we can refer to, quantify, identify and so on. In this poem, NATURAL PHENOMENA and NATURAL OBJECTS such as ‘fountains’, ‘rivers’, ‘winds’, ‘mountains’, ‘heaven’, ‘waves’, ‘sunlight’, ‘earth’, ‘moonbeams’ and ‘sea’ are treated as discrete ENTITIES which have boundaries and shapes. ‘Emotion’ is seen as if it were an ENTITY, which is countable and even modifiable by an adjective of taste, ‘sweet’. Furthermore, some of these entities are personified by the NATURE IS HUMAN metaphor: e.g. the ‘mountains’ that ‘kiss’ high ‘heaven’; the ‘waves’ that ‘clasp’ one another; the ‘sister flower’ that ‘disdained’ its ‘brother flower’; the ‘sunlight’ that clasps the ‘earth’; and the ‘moonbeams’ that ‘kiss’ the ‘sea’. It might be worth pointing out in this connection that some of the metaphors are what Lakoff and Turner (1989) classified as a non-conventional expansion of conventional metaphors. For example, the metaphor of a ‘sister-flower’ disdaining its ‘brotherflower’ in lines 11 and 12 extends the NATURE IS HUMAN metaphor to include not only the male/female distinction but also the particular kinship of brother and sister. The ENTITIES are put into semantic oppositions such as: LARGE vs. SMALL (‘river’ vs. ‘fountain’; ‘ocean’ vs. ‘river’); HUMAN vs. DIVINE (‘emotion’ vs. ‘heaven’); HUMAN vs. NATURE (‘emotion’, ‘I’, ‘thou’, ‘me’, ‘thine’, ‘brother’, ‘sister’ vs. ‘fountains’, ‘river’, ‘ocean’, ‘wind’, ‘mountains’, ‘waves’, ‘flower’, ‘sunlight’, ‘earth’, ‘moonbeams’, ‘sea’); EARTH vs. NATURAL OBJECT IS AN ENTITY

Manifestation of Metaphor–Icon Links 65 HEAVEN (‘fountains’, ‘river’, ‘ocean’, ‘mountains’, ‘waves’, ‘flower’, ‘earth’, ‘sea’ vs. ‘heaven’, ‘law’, ‘divine’, ‘sunlight’, ‘moonbeams’); MAN vs. WOMAN (‘brother’ vs. ‘sister’; ‘I’ vs. ‘thou’; ‘me’ vs. ‘thine’); WATER vs. SOIL (‘fountains’, ‘river’, ‘ocean’, ‘waves’, ‘sea’ vs. ‘earth’, ‘mountains’); and DAY vs. NIGHT (‘sunlight’ vs. ‘moonbeams’). FUSION is expressed by the verbs of MIXING such as ‘mingle’ and ‘mix’. What is FUSED has the same quality: SHAPELESSNESS. The image of FUSION is thus introduced by the MIXTURE OF THE FLOW OF LIQUID, such as the ‘fountains’ mixed with the ‘rivers’, and the ‘rivers’ with the ‘ocean’, and by the MIXTURE OF THE FLOW OF THE INVISIBLE, such as the ‘winds’ mixed with each other with a ‘sweet emotion’. As the poem progresses, the image of FUSION turns into the image of CONTACT, particularly PHYSICAL CONTACT. It seems to indicate the progression of the lover’s longing from an abstract fantasy to a concrete vision. The opening line of the second stanza starts with the verb ‘see’, in the imperative mood. This is a focal point. The act of seeing merges with its double meaning via the metaphor UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING, and the seeing by the physical eye and the mind’s eye fuse. The cognitive metaphor UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING is pervasive in ordinary language. For example, ‘I see what you mean’, ‘It looks different from my point of view’, ‘I was totally in the dark during the presentation she gave’, ‘I’ve got the whole picture’, and ‘He gave an illuminating paper’. CONTACT is expressed by the verbs of PHYSICAL BINDING and TOUCHING such as ‘clasp’ and ‘kiss’. Those being united by PHYSICAL CONTACT are PERSONS, i.e. PERSONIFIED NATURAL OBJECTS. Obviously the poem uses nonconventional elaboration of image-schemas such as ‘the mountains kiss the heaven’, ‘the sunlight clasps the earth’, ‘the moonbeam kisses the sea’. In the conventional metaphors, PERSONIFIED NATURE may ‘touch’ and ‘manipulate’ objects such as ‘the mountain ridge touched the sky’, or ‘wind carries seeds’; but it does not interact with them to the extent that this poem describes. PAIRING is implied by the semantic oppositions as pointed out above; but it is expressed in more specific terms by a paired set of antonyms such as ‘I’ and ‘thou’, ‘brother’ and ‘sister’, ‘sun’ and ‘moon’. The image of PAIRING is also supported by the abundance of MIXING and CONTACT metaphors. Each stanza ends with a question, which also implies a double meaning: an inquiry and a request. While the questions at the end of the poem are direct questions, they also function as a request, longing and/or wooing (indirect speech acts). Thus, each stanza is a REQUEST (LONGING, WOOING) in the form of a QUESTION.

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Global metaphor Now that it is clear that many of the metaphorical expressions in this poem are based on the conventional cognitive metaphors that we use in everyday language, then the question is how Shelley exploited conventional metaphors to create his unique poetic text. As has been pointed out, he used a non-conventional extension and elaboration of conventional metaphors to some extent. Nevertheless, the most prominent technique is the formation of composite metaphors by combining multiple conventional metaphors together to produce a richer and more complex set of metaphorical networks, which gives inferences beyond those that follow from each of the metaphors alone. The overall global mapping present in the poem is a mapping of the NATURE domain onto the HUMAN domain. All the MIXING and FUSION and CONTACT in NATURE are mapped onto the PAIRING of two lovers. The network of composite metaphors discussed above constitutes a series of local blends, which are recruited at the time of the global blend of NATURE and HUMANS. The input source space has a rich image-schematic structure provided by various pairing acts of natural phenomena and objects. The input target space recruits an image-schematic structure from our common-sense knowledge and background information about the lovers. The image-schematic structure of each input space is preserved in the abstract structure in the generic space, a frame of PAIRING, in this example. The frame of PAIRING is schematised in two ways: a coupling of the two similar things, on the one hand (e.g. the water and the water, the waves and the waves, the flower and the flower, the human and the human), and of two different things, on the other (e.g. what is solid and what is air, brother and sister, man and woman). In the blended space, all these structures from the generic space and the input spaces are preserved, and in addition, some emergent structures such as the separation of the two lovers, arise. In spite of the fact that the metaphors in the poem concern the mapping of mixing, fusion and contrast found in nature, onto the pairing of two lovers, the lovers themselves are not united. Shelley’s poem is a blend which recruits inferences not only from linguistic conventions instantiated in a composite metaphorical network but also from common-sense knowledge, culture, tradition, history and religion. The poem can be a general statement about love’s philosophy. It can also address the potentiality of what may happen. Or it can also be Shelley’s own message to his lover. The poetic imagination extends the conventional metaphors of love to

Manifestation of Metaphor–Icon Links 67

the realm both of the poet’s particular experience and of the potential experience of all lovers. All reside in the blend. 3.2.2 Iconic interpretation by metaphor Figure 3.2 illustrates the metaphorical blend discussed above and the diagrammatic iconic mappings to be explained in detail below.

Iconic Mapping

Generic Space 2

Metaphorical Mapping

Grammatical Metaphors PAIR

FORM

MEANING

Generic Space 1 PAIR

DIAGRAMMATIC MAPPING

PAIR

OPPOSITION DIAGRAMMATIC MAPPING

NATURE

HUMAN

Blend

OPPOSITION Grammatical Generic Space 3 Metaphors Figure 3.2 Metaphor–icon links in ‘Love’s Philosophy’

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The point in this particular poetic text is that the poem’s form can acquire an iconic meaning by the grammatical metaphors which actually constitute the content of the two generic spaces (Generic Spaces 2 and 3) for the two iconic mappings. Firstly, there is a diagrammatic mapping between the schematic structural form of the poem and the image-schema of Generic Space 1, which is a frame pairing the similar and the different. This mapping is supported by the grammatical metaphor in the Generic Space 2, A PAIRED CONTENT IS A PAIRED FORM. Secondly, there is another diagrammatic mapping between the schematic structural form of the poem and the image-schema of the blended space. This concerns an iconic mapping of the image-schema of separation projected through Generic Space 3, AN OPPOSING CONTENT IS AN OPPOSING FORM. A PAIRED CONTENT IS A PAIRED FORM

In terms of the lexical architecture of the poem, the frequency of the use of certain words in this poem mirrors PAIRING, which is a shared image-schematic frame of the global metaphor. Even a hasty reader would notice that several lexical items are used repeatedly. The most prominent characteristic of these repetitions is that the same (or similar) items are repeated only twice as if they are PAIRING each other. There are ten identical pairs and five semi-identical pairs, which are either derivationally or inflectionally similar. Table 3.1 shows these pairs and their position in the text. On the stanzaic level, too, the first and the second stanza form a PAIR in such a way that each stanza has the same number of elements lexically, syntactically and prosodically, as summarised in Table 3.2. Lexically, the first and the second stanza have the following: six the’s, two be’s (including ‘being’), one lexical item repeated four times (i.e. four with’s in the first stanza and four kiss’s in the second), four adjectives (i.e. adjectives – sweet, single, all and divine in the first stanza and high, sister, all and worth in the second), four plural nouns (i.e. fountains, rivers, winds and things in the first stanza and mountains, waves, moonbeams and kissings in the second). Syntactically, there are five affirmative sentences and one interrogative sentence in each stanza. And prosodically, both stanzas have the same end rhyme scheme, i.e. ababcdcd. AN OPPOSING CONTENT IS AN OPPOSING FORM

The fact that the poem consists of two stanzas indicates that the stanzaic form of the poem itself is a means of the OPPOSING PAIRS making

Manifestation of Metaphor–Icon Links 69 Table 3.1 Lexical pairs in ‘Love’s Philosophy’ Parts of speech

Lexical item

Line number

Verb

mingle clasp river heaven one another I – me thine – thou it – its all a no – nothing why – what not in if

1 and 7 10 and 13 1 and 2 3 and 9 7 and 10 8 and 16 8 and 16 12 and 12 6 and 15 4 and 6 5 and 11 8 and 15 8 and 16 5 and 7 12 and 16

Noun Pronoun

Determiner

Adverb Preposition Conjunction

Table 3.2 Stanzaic pairs in ‘Love’s Philosophy’

Lexical items repeatedly used Adjectives Plural nouns

Introductory sentence Concluding sentence Rhyme scheme

First stanza

Second stanza

six the’s two be’s four with’s four adjectives – sweet, single, all and divine four nouns – fountains, rivers, winds and things affirmative interrogative ababcdcd

six the’s two be’s four kiss’s four adjectives – high, sister,6 all and worth four nouns – mountains, waves, moonbeams and kissings affirmative interrogative ababcdcd

CONTACT. This also holds true in the alternation of indentation of the even lines, with further alternation of paired line initials (And–With– All–Why in the first stanza, and And–If–And–If in the second stanza). The syntactic features of some lexical elements and the syntactic patterns in the text also reflect the image-schemas of OPPOSITES. Firstly, the OPPOSITION of ‘I’ and ‘thou’ seems to be supported by the presupposed SEPARATION between ‘I’ and ‘thou’, expressed by the final questions of

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each stanza, which contain a negation: ‘why not I with thine?’ and ‘what are all these kissings worth, if thou kiss not me?’ (My italics.) Secondly, the OPPOSITIONS are also embodied in the grammatical differences between the first and the second stanza. In the first stanza, the verbs are all intransitive, and each line has one preposition, whereas in the second stanza, the verbs are all transitive, and there is no preposition. Hence, the first stanza and the second stanza are grammatically contrastive. In addition, the affirmative introductory sentences and the interrogative concluding sentence form an OPPOSITION within each stanza, though they form a PAIR between the first and the second stanza. Multi-layered metaphor–icon links It has been seen so far how this poem manifests multi-layered metaphor–icon links. There are several conventional conceptual metaphors sculpted into the composite metaphorical conception of LOVE. There are images in local metaphors, too, which enrich the feel of the poem. A mixing act of waters and of invisible air is mapped onto a mingling act of lovers. The contact of visible natural objects and of fragrant flowers is mapped onto the kissing of lovers. The lexical, syntactic and stanzaic form of the poem displays a diagrammatic relationship to the content of the text navigated by the global metaphorical blend as well as conventional grammatical metaphors. To summarise, ‘Love’s Philosophy’, describing the longing of a narrator to be one with his separated (or unreachable) lover, displays the theme iconically and metaphorically in its cognitive content, linguistic form and image, particularly achieved by a creative choice of vocabulary and grammatical patterns. Indeed, the poem is a metaphorical icon of ‘love’s philosophy’. The analysis by the model of blending has demonstrated how and where the organic network of the poem is buttressed by diagrammatic and metaphorical coherence between the formal dimension and the dimension of concept and image in the poetic text.

3.3 Isomorphism of text structure in Basho’s Oku no Hosomichi 3.3.1 Haiku and cognitive metaphor Data selection The interplay of metaphor and iconicity is not only manifested at the level of a single poem but also at the level of a whole literary text. In

Manifestation of Metaphor–Icon Links 71

this section, I will look at two haiku texts taken from Oku no Hosomichi (Matsuo 1996[1694]). Oku no Hosomichi was written as a travel sketch, which consisted of a main narrative body, 50 haiku poems by Basho, and a few other poems by other authors. The 50 haiku poems are considered as an integrated text in its own right, conforming to the general principle of composition and structural congruence. The two haiku texts 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 metaphor–icon links manifest themselves not only at the level of respective haiku texts but also at the level of macro-structure of the entire literary work of the travel sketch. In other words, it is an attempt to substantiate the claim for the effectiveness of the cognitive approach made by literary critics such as Donald Freeman (1993: 1): ‘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’. According to the model of blending, cognitive metaphors, both local and global, will be analysed in conjunction with the iconicity they yield. Blending and haiku text The blending model appears to be particularly useful in analysing haiku texts for the following three reasons: 1. It stresses the importance of ‘the emergent structure’ of the blended space, and therefore provides an effective tool for understanding the creativity of literary metaphors (not only of haiku but also of any poetic text); 2. Blending better explains than the past literary studies (cf. Kobayashi 1966, Toyama 1970) the rhetorical effects of loose grammatical configurations in the haiku texts such as the juxtaposition of phrases by kireji (‘cutting letters’ or rhetorical punctuation) and kake-kotoba (‘hanging words’ or puns); 3. The blending approach, which does not specify unidirectional mapping between input spaces, seems to provide a better means of understanding the frequent occurrence of allegory7 and personification in haiku than the standard two-domain model of cognitive metaphor (cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Lakoff 1987, 1993, Lakoff and Turner 1989).

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Cultural cognitive model It is also pointed out that understanding haiku texts, which are extremely short in form and rich in traditional implications, requires a deep understanding of traditional Japanese culture, which shapes the cultural cognitive model. A non-exhaustive list of the features of such an understanding includes: the actual context such as time, place, customs, life and so on, which contextualise the poem in general terms; folk models, which originate from myth, folk beliefs and concepts of the time; conventional metaphors (cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1980), which have been adopted into a given speech community over time, and which a poet can exploit in non-conventional ways; and the iconicity of kanji, Chinese logographs, which link form and meaning, particularly with regard to their etymological derivation, and thereby serve as a cognitive medium for haiku texts. As stated before, Japanese has three different writing systems: kanji (to write words of Chinese origin), and the two types of Japanese syllabary, hiragana (to write words of Japanese origin, most function words and conjugations) and katakana (to write words of foreign origin other than Chinese). The complexity of the Japanese writing systems gives a unique dimension to a visual and conceptual representation of haiku. The following analysis will look at how such knowledge is activated and recruited when reading the poems. 3.3.2 Texts Before looking at the macro-structure of the entire text, it is necessary to explain the two haiku poems, which play an important role in structuring the travel sketch. As mentioned earlier, these poems were placed at the beginning phase and in the conclusion of the travel sketch. Example 3.5 (a) Yuku haru ya going spring:

tori naki uo no birds cry fish of

me wa namida eyes TOP tears8

‘Departing spring: birds cry and, in the eyes of fish, tears’ (Matsuo 1996 [1694]: 43).9 (b) Hamaguri no a clam GEN/SUB

futami ni wakare lid. flesh into separate Futami (place name) to separate

yuku aki zo going autumn INT

Manifestation of Metaphor–Icon Links 73

‘A clam separates lid from flesh as autumn departs’ (Matsuo 1996 [1694]: 133). These two haiku texts both describe a moment of sadness caused by departure, one at the start of a trip and the other at the end. Both poems further depict sadness in images of separation and transience, which are embodied in metaphors of natural species and of the passing seasons. Specifically, crying birds and fish suggest tears of sadness; the clam-shell separated from its flesh stands for the pain of leave-taking. The passing of spring and autumn are tropes that symbolise the transience of nature, which in turn causes pangs of sorrow. ‘Spring’ and ‘autumn’ are natural events that here represent human action, namely that of a traveller who is ‘departing’. Birds, fish and a clam are also personified in the text in that birds and fish cry with tears, while the clam-shell and the clam-flesh separate. Three prominent cognitive metaphors are illustrated.10 They are TIME IS A TRAVELLER (based on EVENTS ARE ACTIONS); NATURE IS HUMAN; and its inverse version, PEOPLE ARE NATURE (ANIMALS, BIRDS, FISH, INSECTS, PLANTS, etc.). From the intra-textual context, most readers of haiku would realise that the poems do not just describe natural events, but also reflect the feelings of the poet and his friends as represented by birds, fish and the clam. In examining these two poems, two aspects are considered: how each haiku text manifests local and global metaphors, which are interpreted with common prior knowledge and the principle of iconicity; and how metaphor–icon links in each haiku constitute another metaphor–icon link in the larger structure of an entire literary text of the travel sketch.

3.3.3 The spring poem Overview of the spring poem Preceding the spring poem, Basho wrote: . . . My close friends, who had been gathered since the previous evening, sent me off in a boat. When we climbed out of the boat at a place called Senju, I was depressed by the thought of the three thousand li that lay ahead and shed tears at a parting in this illusory world (italics in the original). Yuku haru ya going spring:

tori naki uo no birds cry fish GEN

me wa namida eyes TOP tears

‘Departing spring: birds cry and, in the eyes of fish, tears’ (Matsuo 1996 [1694]: 43).

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The poem, at first reading, describes natural events: that the spring season is passing, birds are crying, and the fish have watery eyes. These natural events can then be personified, based on the metaphor NATURE IS HUMAN. Depending on the reader’s interpretation of which natural event is projected onto which human action, the poem can be read in several ways. For example, ‘passing spring’ can be interpreted as literal or metaphorical (representing, say, Basho’s departure), and the crying birds and fish as either Basho himself or his friends. At a more sophisticated or abstract level, the reader might also attribute to this poem a global metaphorical structure, in that it captures the oneness of human beings and nature, or the undifferentiated nature of human feelings and the feelings evoked by natural events, objects and creatures. This level of allegorical interpretation is based on the metaphor PEOPLE ARE NATURE, and is very much an embodiment of Basho’s poetics.11 Such non-differentiation can probably be better captured by understanding the poem as a global metaphor derived from a global blend, as illustrated in Figure 3.3. Generic Space sadness

NATURE IS HUMAN Personification HUMAN in general human beings traveller

weeping fish crying birds passing spring spring

Particular PEOPLE Basho friends

NATURE

PEOPLE ARE NATURE Allegory

Blend unity of feelings Figure 3.3 Blend of the spring poem

Manifestation of Metaphor–Icon Links 75

There are several input spaces – the passing spring season, crying birds and weeping fish as the NATURE inputs, and the human beings in general, the traveller, Basho and his friends as the HUMAN inputs. The two arrows indicate personification and allegorical interpretation. On the one hand, the natural season and the natural creatures are represented metaphorically as a traveller and human beings respectively. On the other hand, these personified natural events and creatures are interpreted allegorically as Basho and his friends. The blend inherits a partial structure from all of the inputs; but it also has an emergent structure of its own – the revelation of the unity of feelings in nature and humans. There is also an abstract generic space, which reflects event frames for sadness common to both input spaces – agent, action, mental state of being sad, and so on. The global blend of the text as a whole takes, from the target input space, the feeling of sadness and regret, and the sentiment of farewell at the departure of the trip, and, from the input source space, audible wailing and visible tears of creatures.12 Each of the input spaces further constitutes a blended space of its own. Each input space is a local blend of ‘passing spring’, ‘birds crying’ and ‘fish weeping’. Inferences derived from these local blends, in addition to common prior knowledge, contribute to the understanding of this poem. Local metaphors in the spring poem The first line of the first poem, yuku haru (‘passing spring’), is based on the conventional metaphor, TIME (SEASON) MOVES. There are many similar examples in idiomatic Japanese: kisetsu ga meguru (‘seasons turn around’), kisetsu ga kawaru (‘seasons change’), haru ga chikazuku (‘spring is approaching’), fuyu ga kita (‘winter has come’), natsu ga sugiru (‘summer passes’), and so on. By using the verb yuku (‘to go’), the poem suggests that we are living in the present, and can feel or even see moments of spring passing us by, going away from us. In addition to this TIME (SEASON) MOVES metaphor, TIME and SEASON are also often conceptualised metaphorically in Japanese as A PERSON, especially A TRAVELLER. When people say, haru no otozure o matsu (‘to wait for the visit of spring’), aki no ashioto ga kikoeru (‘to hear the footsteps of autumn’), kibishii fuyu ga tourai-suru (‘severe winter has arrived’), for example, they are personalising the seasons. The verb yuku (‘to go’) also implies metaphorically that the motion of ‘going’ is a departure or farewell. Japan has four distinct seasons and spring is always the season of new beginnings. After the harsh winter, spring brings warmth, birth and new life. In folklore as well as today, SPRING is conceptualised as the starting

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point of progress and prosperity, and the other seasons follow on. This is clearly reflected in the LIFETIME IS A YEAR metaphor (e.g. jinsei no haru ‘spring in life’, kare no jigyoo ni wa aki-kaze ga fui-te iru ‘there is autumn wind blowing against his business’). Choosing spring as the time to begin one’s long journey, therefore, accords with both its figurative and literal (real-life) implications. But why does the poet choose the end of spring? In Japan, the freshness of spring fades with the approach of a wet and humid rainy season, before the onset of summer. Hence, the last phase of spring evokes sadness or melancholy. The verb yuku (‘to go’)13 in yuku haru ya, is thus a metaphor of FAREWELL as a part of TRAVELLING. The blend of ‘the passing spring’ exploits and develops counterpart connections between TRAVELLER, the source space and SPRING, the target space. It is important to note that the poem establishes a correspondence between the departure of a TRAVELLER and the ending of SPRING, and not between the more structurally matched counterparts, of a TRAVELLER reaching a goal and the ending of SPRING. This correspondence can be guided by pragmatic knowledge recruited in the source that the poet is departing on a journey, and in the target that it took place in the last phase of spring. It is also provided more directly by common folk belief in the cyclic nature of life and time. People in Basho’s times generally believed that a death was a birth into another world; an end was a beginning of a new event. This cyclic interpretation of life and death is an underlying philosophy of Basho’s Oku no Hosomichi, which will be discussed in length below (see Section 3.3.5). Neither of the input spaces, SPRING or a TRAVELLER, necessarily implies ‘sadness’. But it is the blend of a departure fused with the ending of spring, that leads to an interpretation of the sadness of farewell as identical to the sadness of that season’s fading. Historical and contextual knowledge further suggests that the traveller was Basho, and so leads to an allegorical interpretation that Basho is represented by SPRING as A TRAVELLER. Note that if spring is a metaphor for Basho, then the source and target are related inversely. In the blend yuku haru ya, spring is at once a generic traveller and Basho in particular. A further interesting aspect of the relationship between SPRING and TRAVELLER, or more accurately a difference between the two, is that natural events like spring passing to summer cannot be stopped by human will, whereas human actions like travelling can be stopped at any time. This difference can perhaps be read as a similarity in the blend ‘the passing spring’. Since no one can stop the course of the seasons, so Basho’s trip(s) cannot be discouraged or stopped by anyone or anything.

Manifestation of Metaphor–Icon Links 77

The second line of the first poem contains another local blend, tori naki (‘birds cry’), which can be read either be a literal expression or a metaphorical one (personification of birds). What is interesting here and characteristic of the poem is that the possibility of multiple interpretations is reinforced by the choice of a particular Chinese logograph for naki (‘cry’), , instead of the ones more commonly used, and . Among the more common logographs, the former, , means that humans shed tears, and the latter, , means that birds, animals and insects cry aloud. The meaning of these two logographs is unequivocal as the radicals of each logograph, particularly the left-hand radical of ‘water’ for the former and the right-hand radical of ‘bird’ for the latter, contribute to specifying, rather than broadening, the meaning. By contrast, Basho’s choice of the Chinese logograph, , for this poem, suggests that he deliberately used the etymological implication and the equivocal nature of this logograph. It consists of two radicals: that on the left, , etymologically means ‘a mouth as a metonymy for voice’, while that on the right, , means ‘to wring something (usually wet)’. Thus, the logograph itself can be seen as a blend of two inputs, corresponding to the two radicals.14 This blend produces a meaning of the logograph as ‘crying in a voice produced by wringing the throat’. Furthermore, because the left-hand radical of ‘a mouth’ is ambiguous, implying both human and non-human agents, the logograph can be seen as a blend of two lexical meanings: for humans to shed tears and cry aloud in such a voice, to wail with pain; and for birds, animals and insects to cry aloud, to wail. Hence, the blend ‘birds cry’ displays a double image: birds crying aloud and humans wailing and shedding tears. Two metaphoric understandings of tori naki (‘birds cry’) are dependent on the conventional conceptual metaphors, BIRDS ARE HUMAN and its inverse version, PEOPLE ARE BIRDS. In the first case, birds are personified in a general sense, the actions of birds are understood in terms of our own actions. In Example 3.5(a), the birds cry aloud in sorrow is an image-mapping of the crying of human beings onto the crying of the birds. Note that it is not specified whether the noun tori (‘bird(s)’) is singular or plural, nor is the type of bird specified – there is no mention of size, shape, colour or name. It is a bird or birds in a very generic sense, which in turn could be a symbol for a creature representing the sky in myth and folklore. Hence, tori naki could imply metonymically that the sky shows grief. Specification of the bird(s) in this poem comes only from a personified action – making the noise of humans crying aloud in grief, where cry means both shedding tears and wailing. But

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still, tori naki can be taken as describing the action of birds rather than people. Second, there is an inverse metaphorical reading, PEOPLE ARE BIRDS, which leads to an allegorical interpretation. Many proverbs express human actions as bird actions: e.g. tobu tori ato o nigosazu (‘departing birds clean up the place before’); kago no naka no tori (‘a bird in the cage’), and so on. Therefore, the personified birds in the poem, which are crying in sadness, could signify either Basho, his friends, or both. In other words, this allegorical reading comes from the historical fact which comprises the pragmatic knowledge of this poem, that the sadly crying agent could be either Basho or his friends, or could even include both of them. Thus, the equivocality of tori naki seems to be embedded iconically in the Chinese logograph of naku, , and the two-way mapping in the blend of the input spaces, HUMAN and BIRD. Figure 3.4 is a graphic representation of the interplay between metaphor and iconicity of tori naki. Firstly, the Chinese logograph, , is a blend of (‘mouth’, metonymy for voice) and (‘to wring something’, meaning of crying) represented in the box of ‘form’. Secondly, the two-way metaphorical mapping, i.e. BIRDS ARE HUMAN (personification) and PEOPLE ARE BIRDS (allegory), in the blend of tori naki is illustrated by the two arrows in opposite directions in the box of ‘meaning’. The principle of iconicity is at work on two levels. On the level of imagic mapping, the logograph, , mirrors the blend space of crying by humans and non-humans in a specific manner. The radical, (‘mouth’), also signals towards the generic space as it is a metonymy for voice in a general and a skeletal sense. On the level of diagrammatic mapping, the equivocality of tori naki corresponds to the ambiguity of (‘crying by humans’ and ‘crying by non-humans’), navigated by the grammatical metaphor EQUIVOCALITY IN MEANING IS EQUIVOCALITY IN FORM. The poem concludes with another personification, uo no me wa namida (‘there are tears in the eyes of fish’), which is a novel extension of the conventional metaphor, FISH ARE HUMAN. Although the personification of fish appears frequently in folk tales and children’s stories, there are only a few linguistic manifestations of this metaphor in everyday idioms, e.g. kono sakana wa indo-yoo made tabi ni deru (‘this fish takes a trip to the Indian Ocean’). What fish do in the conventional FISH ARE HUMAN metaphor is prototypically a physical action of some sort rather than a mental reaction. In Example 3.5 (a), uo no me wa namida (‘there are tears in the eyes of fish’), is novel in that it extends the FISH ARE HUMAN metaphor to emotions; namely, the fish are crying in grief, shedding tears of sadness. It involves a very vivid and creative image of tears

Manifestation of Metaphor–Icon Links 79

Metaphorical Mapping

Iconic Mapping

Generic Space mouth

to wring

IMAGIC MAPPING

action of crying

NATURE IS HUMAN Personification

HUMAN in general human beings Basho friends

birds crying BIRD to cry

Particular PEOPLE

IMAGIC MAPPING

PEOPLE ARE NATURE Allegory crying of humans and non-humans

DIAGRAMMATIC MAPPING sadness felt by humans and non-humans Blend FORM

MEANING

EQUIVOCALITY IN MEANING IS EQUIVOCALITY IN FORM Grammatical Metaphor Figure 3.4 Metaphor–icon links in tori naki

in the human eyes mapped onto the eyes of the fish. An analysis similar to the BIRDS CRY metaphor may apply here, too. Fish are depicted in general with no specification of number, size, shape, colour or name. As birds are a symbol for the sky, fish are a symbol for water in myth and folk belief. Hence, uo no me wa namida could imply metonymically that the water world shows sadness. On the other hand, an inverse allegorical reading, PEOPLE ARE FISH, is also possible. In Japanese, it is said that kare wa mizu o eta sakana no yoo da (‘he is like a fish swimming competently in the current’). In the poem, then, the personified fish which is (are) weeping in sadness could

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signify either Basho, his friends, or both. In other words, the reading comes from the historical evidence that the agent of weeping could either be Basho or his friends, or both. 3.3.4 The autumn poem Overview of the autumn poem Basho wrote the following at the conclusion of his travel sketch: Rotsu had come as far as this port to welcome me back and accompanied me to the province of Mino. As I entered the manor of Ogaki, assisted by a horse, Sora came from Ise to join us. Etujin galloped his horse to do the same, and we all gathered in Joko’s house. Zensenshi, Keiko and his sons, and others who are close to me came to visit day and night and, as if meeting someone who had returned to life, expressed joy and consolation. Even before I was able to shake off the weariness of my travels, the sixth day of the ninth month came along, so I decided to offer prayers at the rebuilding of Ise Shrine and put myself on a boat again: Hamaguri no a clam GEN/SUB

futami ni wakare lid. flesh into separate Futami (place name) to separate

yuku aki zo going autumn INT

‘A clam separates lid from flesh as autumn departs’ (Matsuo 1996 [1694]: 133). Generally speaking, a similar analysis and argument hold for this poem. It is also a poem of farewell, and the season is the ‘passing autumn’. The poem’s more complex grammar and its sophisticated use of a pun betray Basho’s intent to be grammatically and lexically ambiguous. First, no in hamaguri no, can either be a genitive marker or a subject (nominative) marker. Second, futami functions as a multiple pun meaning ‘the clam-shell and clam-meat’, ‘to see the lid’, and the placename ‘Futami’. Third, wakareru is an intransitive verb of separation, meaning that something united or grouped as one becomes separate into two or more parts. Fourth, yuku in wakare yuku aki zo, can be grammatically connected either with wakare ‘to go separate ways’, or with aki ‘the autumn that is going away’. Without the contextual and cultural background, this poem sounds nonsensical or even funny. Why does the poet mention ‘a clam’? Why

Manifestation of Metaphor–Icon Links 81

Futami? What does ‘the clam-shell’ mean? The literal senses of the poem seem to lead to the two basic readings, both based on the futami pun. On the one hand, the poem literally describes natural events – that the autumn season is passing, the clam-shell and clam-meat separate. On the other hand, it depicts the human action of literally leaving for Futami (which is famous for good clams) or of leaving for the external Shrine of Ise (as metaphorised by the lid of a clam)15 in autumn. The blending model seems to explain how these two readings ‘blend’ in the poem. It is assumed that the two literal readings – the natural events of a separated clam-shell and the human action of leaving – represent two input spaces. The generic space has an event frame of separation common to these input spaces. The blend takes, from the input space of natural events, a strong image of the clam-shell and the clam-meat, once united but now in separate forms, and from the other input space of human action, an image of a traveller going his separate way to visit the renovated Ise Shrine. Each input space draws inferences derived from the local blends. Such inferences may include a strong sentiment of physical separation, the pain of a fatal wound from the ‘separation of the clam-shell and clammeat’. From ‘the passing autumn’, one may infer a sad feeling of parting of the traveller. Futami also has a double image of a place and a shrine. These inferences enrich the blend. In addition to the partial structure inherited from the inputs, the blend space has an emergent structure of its own – a fusion of death and life, or a death and rebirth. A vision of the blended double image of the death of the separated clam-shell and clam-meat is mapped onto the departing traveller, on the one hand, and the decline of the autumn season is mapped onto the renovation of the Ise Shrine, on the other. This subtle reading of contradictory images derived from the blend also echoes the passage preceding the haiku text: those ‘who are close to me came to visit day and night and, as if meeting someone who had returned to life, expressed joy and consolation’ (my italics) (Matsuo 1996 [1694]: 133). Local metaphors in the autumn poem The first word, hamaguri (‘a clam’), together with the second word, futami (‘a lid and meat’) instantiates the traditional traits of haiku, that is, aisatsu (‘greeting’) and kokkei (‘wit’ or ‘a sense of humour’).16 The poetic form of haiku originated as hokku (first haiku in the linked haiku texts) in the linked poetry called renku at the time of Basho. Hokku functioned as a greeting by a chief guest to the host of the poetry party

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where linked poetry was a major entertainment. Hamaguri in this poem retains this trait of greeting, because both Ise where Basho composed this poem, and Futami, which is a town in Ise, are famous for good clams. To pay a compliment to something good relating to the host is a typical device of greeting. Hamaguri and futami also involve a blend of the HUMAN and the SHELLFISH inputs. The blended image of HUMAN and SHELLFISH can be witty or humorous, another trait of haiku. Basho’s choice of the word futami (‘a lid and meat’) presents a novel and witty image of separation. As mentioned earlier, two conceptual metaphors are interconnected here: NATURE IS HUMAN (or EVENTS ARE ACTIONS) and PEOPLE ARE NATURAL THINGS. First, the phrase, hamaguri no futami ni wakare, can imply that the clam-shell and the clam-meat are separated by the direct action of an agent (personification). However, hamaguri (‘a clam’) is a unified whole made up of two elements, futa (‘a lid’) and mi (‘meat’), which are to separate by their own free will. The image is novel because the SHELLFISH domain is not generally exploited in the conventional NATURE IS HUMAN metaphor in Japanese. On the other hand, the inverse metaphor of PEOPLE ARE SHELLFISH is conventional in Japanese. The prototypical image-mapping of the PEOPLE ARE SHELLFISH metaphor is based on the image of the closed lids of shellfish and the closed lips of humans, as in the idiomatic expression, kaigara no yoo ni kuchi o tozasu (‘to close the lips as if they were shells’). Thus, the image of the shells and the meat mapped onto human separation is a novel extension of the PEOPLE ARE SHELLFISH metaphor. The allegorical interpretation of the separation of the personified clam into its shell and meat is derived from the blend of two input spaces: the CLAM as a source and the HUMAN as a target. Basho’s parting from his friends and disciples with whom he was united at the end of the journey, the pragmatic knowledge provided by the context, is understood metaphorically as an image of separation of the shell from the meat of the clam. There are two other ways in which the image of the outside shell and the inside meat can be interpreted: functionally and ontologically. First, the shell functions as a protection for the inside meat, and so may be likened to the patrons and supporters who provided food, money and shelter to the poet on his travels. Second, the relationship of the shell and the meat involves ontological values17 held between the centre and the periphery, between the interior and the exterior.18 The clam, an animate creature in the centre, a metaphor for the poet, is of primary importance, whereas the shell, a protective cover, a metaphor for his friends (patrons and disciples) is of secondary importance, at least as

Manifestation of Metaphor–Icon Links 83

concerns the poet and his work. But the strength of the image of the separated clam-meat and shell comes from the factual knowledge that the clam no longer survives when its shell is separated from the meat. It is a forced separation against something united, in which some kind of force makes the shell open and separates the lid and the meat. In the blend, this image of fatal separation is mapped onto Basho’s departure on another journey. What is most notable in Basho’s choice of futami, however, is not simply this strong and novel image content, but also the multiple puns19 that epitomise and integrate the multiple interpretations of the poem, most notably the one about nature and the other about human beings. Each different reading of futami constitutes an input space in the blend, in which multiple meanings are integrated. As mentioned above, futami as a common compound noun of ‘a lid’ and ‘meat’ can be read allegorically as Basho’s friends (patrons) and Basho at the time of parting, based on the novel metaphor, SHELLFISH ARE PEOPLE, and the pragmatic knowledge of Basho’s farewell. There are two more readings of futami. Futami can be two words, a noun, futa (‘a lid’) and a verb, mi (‘to see’). Futa may then refer to an external Shrine of Ise, based on an imagemetaphor of exterior as discussed above and on the pragmatic knowledge of Basho’s visit to the Ise Shrine. This actually consists of two separate shrines: naiguu (‘the internal shrine’), and geguu (‘the external shrine’). The internal shrine houses the Sun Goddess, the most important goddess in Shintoism, while the external one houses Princess Toyuke, the goddess of food and industry. Here, too, the asymmetrical values in the internal/external relationship hold. Every 21 years, both shrines are renovated, with the ceremony for installing the new buildings taking place in September. Basho is recorded as having attended the ceremony for the external shrine, but missing the one for the internal shrine, which had been held three days earlier. Futami is also a proper noun, meaning Futami Cove, a bay near the Ise Shrine, and clams are one of the bay’s major products. Hence, in the blend of futami, several images and meanings derived from these readings are fused: the lid and meat of a clam, Basho and his friends, the internal and external shrines of Ise, and Futami Cove with its wealth of clams, as illustrated in Figure 3.5. The written form of futami also contributes to the multiple pun. As mentioned earlier, Japanese has three different writing systems: the use of Chinese logographs, kanji, and the two types of Japanese syllabary, hiragana and katakana. In revising this text, Basho changed futami in kanji, , which represent the place name exclusively because of the

84

Metaphor and Iconicity Metaphorical and Metonymic Mapping

Iconic Mapping

Metonymy (one meaning – Place Name) revision

(multiple meaning)

cove shrine

HUMAN in general human beings Basho friends

shellfish

Particular PEOPLE

SHELLFISH IS HUMAN Personification

PEOPLE ARE NATURE Allegory

DIAGRAMMATIC MAPPING Blend FORM

MEANING

EQUIVOCALITY IN MEANING IS EQUIVOCALITY IN FORM Grammatical Metaphor Figure 3.5 Metaphor–icon links in futami

specific logographs chosen, to futami in hiragana, , which just represent the moraic reading of the word (Matsuo 1957 [1694], 1985, Kaneko 1973). Figure 3.5 shows this revision in the box of ‘form’. Based on the grammatical metaphor EQUIVOCALITY IN MEANING IS EQUIVOCALITY IN FORM, the choice of hiragana writing for futami retains iconically the multiple meaning of futami in this poetic text. As futami has so many different readings, so the phrase, futami ni wakare, also displays a range of different interpretations. Wakare (‘to separate’) refers both to the action of human parting and the separation of the lid and meat of the clam. An image of the strong force of separation and even death of the clam, implied in the ‘lid and meat’ reading, is mapped onto the human farewell, the separation of Basho from his friends. The implication of death is also consonant with the season in which this haiku is set, that is the end of autumn. This is both the concluding phrase of the poem and of the whole of Basho’s travel sketch.

Manifestation of Metaphor–Icon Links 85

The last phrase of the poem, yuku aki (‘passing autumn’), is based on the conventional metaphors, TIME (SEASON) MOVES and TIME (and SEASON) IS A TRAVELLER. Also the metaphorical reading of AUTUMN as A TRAVELLER comes from the intra-textual knowledge that was explained earlier. In Japan, autumn is the season of two opposing aspects, bountiful harvest and inevitable decline as winter approaches. In the cognitive cultural model, however, the decline of progress and prosperity is stronger. For example, based on the LIFETIME IS A YEAR metaphor, there is a conventional conceptual metaphor, AUTUMN IS THE DECLINE OF LIFE, as seen in the following expressions: jinsei no aki (‘autumn in life’), and kare no jigyoo ni wa aki-kaze ga fui-te iru (‘there is an autumn wind blowing against his business’). The end of autumn, suggested by yuku aki (‘passing autumn’), is a period of cold winds, falling leaves and diminishing daylight hours, which gives a strong image-mapping between the NATURE and HUMAN domains in terms of decline. The verb yuku (‘to go’) in yuku aki zo implies, on the one hand, that autumn is drawing to an end, but perhaps on the other, departure for a new journey. The end of autumn is the end of an adventure and time for a much needed rest. It is also a metaphor of FAREWELL as a part of TRAVELLING, and signifies allegorically that Basho is setting off on yet another journey as autumn departs. 3.3.5 Metaphor–icon links in macro-structure By way of a summary of the above discussion, it will be claimed that metaphor–icon links in the macro-structure of the travel sketch are isomorphic with those in the two haiku texts analysed. There seem to be two major conceptual metaphors contributing to the macrostructure as well as the micro-structure of the text: LIFE IS A JOURNEY and LIFE AND DEATH (REBIRTH) IS A CYCLE. LIFE IS A JOURNEY Basho is known as a poet who was on the road for much of his last ten years. Oku no Hosomichi was one of the several travel sketches that he wrote about his journeys. Basho, a ‘traveller poet’, stated his philosophy of life very clearly in the first passage of Oku no Hosomichi: The months and days are wayfarers of a hundred generations, and the years that come and go are also travelers. Those who float all their lives on a boat or reach their old age leading a horse by the bit make travel out of each day and inhabit travel. Many in the past also died while traveling. In which year it was I do not recall, but I, too, began

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to be lured by the wind like a fragmentary cloud and have since been unable to resist wanderlust, roaming out to the seashores. (Matsuo 1996 [1694]: 41) Here, Basho exploits two conceptual metaphors, which are interrelated with each other. They are TIME IS A TRAVELLER and LIFE IS A JOURNEY. TIME IS A TRAVELLER

(a) The months and days are wayfarers of a hundred generations. (b) The years that come and go are also travellers. LIFE IS A JOURNEY

(c) Those who float all their lives on a boat . . . (d) or reach their old age leading a horse by the bit . . . (e) [they] make travel out of each day and inhabit travel. On the one hand, the poet sees days, months and years, as travellers of eternity. On the other hand, one’s life from birth to death is a journey (boat journey or land journey on the horse). One travels each day; and travelling becomes one’s home. Compared to a ‘hundred generations’, one’s lifetime is very short. The double image of time merges here. Human life is a brief transient phase in eternity, which is travelled by time; nonetheless, human beings travel their lives each day, each month, each season and each year. As time passes by as a traveller, human life passes by. Furthermore, Basho’s philosophy of life as a journey can be placed in an even larger metaphorical framework in which every event and all things in the world are seen as a traveller. For the first passage of Oku no Hosomichi alludes to the preface to Li Po’s (701–62) ‘Holding a Banquet in the Peach and Pear Garden on a Spring Night’. Li Po wrote: ‘Heaven and earth are the inn for all things, the light and shadow the traveler of a hundred generations. Accordingly, the floating life is just like a dream’ (quoted in Matsuo 1996[1694]: 40). It is noted that Basho took the phrase ‘the traveller of a hundred generations’ and rephrased ‘the light and shadow’ to ‘the months and days’. It was probably because Basho interpreted ‘the light and shadow’ as a metaphor for time.20 In addition, Basho sees life as maboroshi (‘an illusion’ or ‘a dream’) as he wrote that ‘[he] shed tears at a parting in this illusory world’ (Matsuo 1996[1694]: 43). This is a reflection from Li Po’s passage. The TIME IS A TRAVELLER metaphor is also detected in the use of a particular kanji, (‘to go’, ‘to pass’). As mentioned above, this logograph

Manifestation of Metaphor–Icon Links 87 tachikaeru revision yukikau Figure 3.6 Revision from tachikaeru to yukikau

is used in the two haiku texts which describe ‘passing spring’ and ‘passing autumn’. In the beginning passage of Oku no Hosomichi, Basho also used the same logograph when he said: ‘the years that come and go are also travelers (my italics)’ (Matsuo 1996[1694]: 41). The choice of this logograph to represent his philosophy of life was a deliberate one, because he revised the passage from tachikaeru (‘to start and return’) to yukikau (‘to come and go’). Notice the difference of logographs used as indicated in Figure 3.6 (Matsuo 1997 [1690]: 75). The repetitive use of the same logograph signals diagrammatically that the texts written by the use of this logograph represent similar (or repetitive) content. Therefore, it is clear that ‘passing spring’ and ‘passing autumn’ are a recapitulation of Basho’s philosophy as expressed metaphorically in the beginning passage of the sketch. In other words, the metaphor in the micro-structure, NATURAL SEASON as A TRAVELLER, is motivated by the prior textual metaphors in the macro-structure, TIME IS A TRAVELLER and LIFE IS A JOURNEY. In sum, the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor is not only the metaphor which navigates the interpretation of the haiku texts which frame the travel sketch, but also the metaphor which represents the guiding philosophy of the entire sketch’s interpretation. The double function of this conceptual metaphor is reinforced by the iconic use of the logograph, . LIFE AND DEATH IS A CYCLE The fact that Basho sees life as an endless journey in the illusory world leads to the next conceptual metaphor, LIFE AND DEATH IS A CYCLE, which recurs in the travel sketch and which is epitomised in the two haiku texts as in Figure 3.7. The paralleled phrases, ‘passing spring’ and ‘passing autumn’, spelled in the identical logograph for ‘passing’, , function as an iconic frame of the whole sketch. The sameness of the logograph in the paralleled phrases at the beginning and the ending of the text mirrors the thematic unity. At the same time, this parallelism iconically hints at the grand cycle of being in the world, that is, a beginning is an ending; an ending is a beginning.

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Yuku haru ya

tori naki uo no

me wa namida

Hamaguri no

futami ni wakare

yuku aki zo

Figure 3.7 Use of the logograph

in the paralleled texts

As mentioned earlier, spring is a season of birth and autumn is a season of decay and dying in the cognitive cultural model. It is therefore not far-fetched to read a cycle of life and death in the pairing of these two texts. In addition, the last haiku, the one that actually concludes the entire sketch, substantiates a fusion of death and life, or a death and rebirth. There is a double image of death and life. The death of the separated clam-shell and clam-meat is mapped onto the traveller who was departing for another new journey, while the dying autumn season is mapped onto the renovation of the Ise Shrine. The reading of death and birth in the paired texts in general, and in the last haiku in particular, is also consonant with the cyclic reading of the larger text: an end is a new beginning in life as in the journey. This is diagrammatically represented again by the use of the logograph, . The last word of the last poem, , iconically directs the reader back to the beginning, to the first line on the initial page of the travel sketch that bears the same logograph, , as in Figure 3.8.

The last poem and the conclusion of the travel sketch

Hamaguri no

futami ni wakare

yuku ah zo

The first passage of the travel sketch

Tsukihi wa hyakudai no kakyaku ni shi-te, yukikau toshi mo mata tabibito nari. ‘the months and days are wayfarers of a hundred generations, and the years that come and go are also travelers’ (Matsuo 1996[1694]: 41) Figure 3.8 Use of the logograph travel sketch

in the beginning and the conclusion of the

Manifestation of Metaphor–Icon Links 89 The first passage of the travel sketch

The first poem of the journey

The last poem of the journey and the conclusion of the travel sketch

Figure 3.9 Use of the logograph

in the macro-structure of text

Consequently, the above discussion makes it clear that Basho’s choice of the logograph, , was a crucial one in both the micro-structure and the macro-structure. Figure 3.9 illustrates the use of in the macrostructure of text. The LIFE IS A JOURNEY and the LIFE AND DEATH IS A CYCLE metaphors navigate the iconic interpretation of the architecture of the entire sketch, and of the importance of the logograph, , in particular. The interplay of metaphor and iconicity shows up here. Without being guided by the conceptual metaphors detected from the thematic haiku and from the conventional metaphors in the culture, it is difficult to read ‘in’ the diagrammatic iconicity of the structure of the text. Also, the iconic reading of the structure of the text reinforces the metaphorical interpretation of the blended text as a whole.

3.4 Concluding remarks This chapter has shown that the model of blending offers a useful analytical tool to explain the mechanism of iconic and metaphorical mapping in cognitive terms. An original contribution of this chapter is the demonstration of the effectiveness of this model for clarifying the complex interrelationship between metaphor and iconicity in the dynamic production of meaning in poetic texts. It has been demonstrated that close metaphor–icon links are manifest in two ways: that there are iconic (both imagic and diagrammatic) moments in metaphor; and that a form acquires an iconic meaning by metaphors. The analysis of the interplay between metaphor and iconicity has illustrated that the model of blending can specify which parts of the metaphorical process – whether the input, generic or blended spaces – relate to the diagrammatic iconic mapping of form and meaning.

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Poems can be varied in their metaphor–icon structure. ‘The Easter Wings’ is dominantly iconic and has a much less rich use of metaphor, while ‘Love’s Philosophy’ is particularly rich and complex in its metaphor with respect to cognitive, image and grammatical aspects. These two poems are believed to be at relatively extreme ends of the spectrum and, to some extent, can be used as measuring standards for other poems to be analysed. The third text looked at two haiku in Oku no Hosomichi. The analysis illustrates that the interplay of metaphor and iconicity not only governs the micro-structure but also the macro-structure of a literary text. Some poems show metaphor–icon links in the visual and syntactic modalities. Others display such links in the auditory modality. Metaphor–icon links are not simple. In order to see the complexity and dynamism of the interplay between metaphor and iconicity, a detailed reading of the texts is needed in their various aspects – visual and auditory forms, structure of meaning, pragmatic and cultural contexts and background information. The following two chapters will attempt such detailed reading with special reference to the visual and the auditory manifestations of metaphor–icon links.

4 Vision as Meaning

Not a line is drawn without intention & that most discriminate & particular. As Poetry admits not a Letter that is Insignificant So Painting admits not a Grain of Sand or a Blade of Grass Insignificant, much less an Insignificant Blur or Mark. William Blake (1978 [1810])

4.1 Poetry and visual representation As William Blake (1978 [1810]: 1019), the poet and visual artist, wrote, both in painting and in poetry, the visual form can represent the conscious intention of the artist. The writing system, as I am going to argue in this study, not only refers to the conventions which record semantic and phonological content, but also covers a wider range of semiotic representations. These include the use of different kinds of typeface, spacing, indentation and layout, and they all have visual, graphic and conceptual effects. This wider sense of the writing system plays a crucial role in the way a poem is put on the page. Not only does it provide resources for the visual shape and structure of the poem, it can also influence the interpretation of the poem.1 This chapter will claim that visual iconicity, a link based on similarity between visible form and semantic content, is an important motivation in the generation and interpretation of poetic texts. The analytical potential of metaphor and iconicity will be examined in several illustrations of visual elements in Japanese and English poetry. Visual elements are roughly divided into two kinds: visible units such as letters, symbols and characters; and configurations of units, such as the line length, spacing, indentation, sectioning and general layout. To what extent poets exploit these visual options and how they actually 91

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employ them in their own work depends on each poetic text. Also, the degree of awareness of the visual elements varies according to the poetic traditions and the status of written language in literary cultures. A comparative analysis of English and Japanese texts will present differing degrees of awareness due to differences between the status and nature of writing systems in these two languages and poetic traditions. The chapter, therefore, argues that regardless of the subtlety or prominence of iconic manifestations, once the iconic link is uncovered, it often directs or reinforces an interpretation of the text in that orientation. This is particularly noticeable in Japanese poetry where paying attention to the choice of character types and their layout in the text is a constant operation for both poets and readers. Furthermore, a comparison of English and Japanese poetic texts in visual terms renders greater awareness of, and more critical sensibility towards, the ‘neglected’ issue of the written language in the theory of poetry. Firstly, this chapter points out how English and Japanese differ from each other in their writing systems, and how their differences relate to the visual representation of English and Japanese poetry in general. Secondly, the chapter offers several illustrative analyses of the manifestations of the interplay between metaphor and iconicity in ‘visual poetry’ such as pattern poetry, concrete poetry and free verse. Lastly, more subtle manifestations of metaphor–icon links in conventional poetry are investigated with special reference to the relationship of orthographical revisions and the written language in haiku. 4.1.1 The writing systems of English and Japanese In order to achieve certain visual effects, poetry exploits various options in writing: for example, the size of letters, fonts, styles, the use of symbols and punctuation marks; the configuration of the line, linelength, line-grouping, indentation, spacing and the layout on the page. Roughly speaking, these visual devices of poetry are divided into two kinds: units and configurations. The characteristics of units in writing is the focus of this section, whereas the following two sections (4.2 and 4.3) present a discussion of the configurations of these units, illustrated in the analyses of actual poetic texts. The visual units in writing used in English and Japanese are different in quality and quantity. English basically uses the phonographic alphabet system, whereas Japanese uses a mixed system of phonographic and logographic2 units.3 A closer look, however, reveals that both languages use both phonographic and logographic units, but to a differing degree.

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Modern English has two sets of phonographic units, i.e. 26 alphabetic symbols, in lower-case and upper-case letters, in addition to about a dozen logographic symbols such as @, #, &, and punctuation marks such as ‘, “, !, ?, ), ], <, :, ;, /, -, and a full stop. By contrast, modern Japanese uses two sets4 of phonographic units, i.e. 48 moraic characters, called hiragana (syllabary for words of Japanese origin and grammatical inflections and particles), katakana (syllabary for foreign words), which are extended to 71 by the use of diacritics,5 and a set of logographic units, i.e. several thousand Chinese characters, called kanji. Japanese also uses punctuation marks such as È˚ (‘single quotation’), (‘double quotation’), (‘full stop’), (‘comma’), and so forth. ° Not only because it is a mixed system of two different types of writing, phonographic and logographic, but also because it has an inventory of several thousand characters, the complexity of the Japanese writing system and the effect of this complexity on the visual associations of meaning deserve special attention in the examination of iconicity in poetry. As mentioned earlier, the Japanese language provides us with three character choices, i.e. kanji, hiragana and katakana as basic visual units. Each type of character has its own grammatical characteristics as shown in Table 4.1. Kanji, the Chinese logographic characters, are used mainly for words of Chinese origin as well as for the roots of such content words as nouns, verbs and adjectives of Japanese origin. Most kanji characters are built up from a limited number of basic constituents, called ‘radicals’. For example, the kanji for ‘rocks’ consists of two radicals, (‘mountain’) and (‘stone’). How radicals are put together is related to the meaning

Table 4.1 Characteristics of character types Character types

Characteristics

Kanji (Chinese logographic characters)

For words of Chinese origin and for the roots of such content words as nouns, verbs and adjectives of Japanese origin For words of Japanese origin for which there are no kanji, conjugated endings, conjunctions, particles, auxiliary verbs, and so on For words of foreign origin other than Chinese and for onomatopoeia

Hiragana (syllabary)

Katakana (syllabary)

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and the pronunciation of the kanji. Hiragana characters, the Japanese moraic alphabet, are used mainly for words of Japanese origin, conjugated endings, conjunctions, particles and auxiliary verbs. Katakana characters, another moraic alphabet, are mainly used for words of foreign origin other than Chinese and for onomatopoeia. All three modes of representation – kanji, hiragana and katakana – are ordinarily combined in the written language. Each of these three types of character is different in nature and shape, and so each has different associations. In particular, kanji and hiragana, used to write Japanese words, have contrasting associations. Historically, kanji characters are the oldest and were used mainly by men. By the ninth century, a simplified form of kanji characters was devised as a set of syllabary, which became known as hiragana. Whereas men used both kanji and hiragana, women mainly used hiragana, which were called onna-de (‘female hand’). This historical fact has contributed to male/female associations of the character types, namely that kanji is masculine and hiragana feminine.6 Perhaps more significant in terms of direct visual impact is the different shape of the characters. Kanji tend to have an angular form with more strokes and a distinctive shape, which gives rise to associations of sharpness, strength and tension, which many consider more masculine. On the other hand, hiragana characters tend to have a flowing form with curved strokes, evoking associations of gentleness, softness and smoothness, which might be taken as more feminine. Hiragana and katakana are different in use and shape, too. Katakana characters have a more angular and distinctive shape than hiragana, and therefore give more masculine associations than feminine. In terms of visual effect, probably the difference between hiragana and katakana is comparable to the difference between lower-case and upper-case letters in the English alphabet. Like hiragana in Japanese, lower-case letters have curlier and smaller shapes than upper-case letters as in ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘h’, ‘m’, ‘n’ and ‘t’ vs. ‘A’, ‘E’, ‘H’, ‘M’, ‘N’ and ‘T’. The same word will look different when it is written in lower-case letters rather than upper-case letters, such as ‘time’ and ‘TIME’, or (in hiragana) and (in katakana). In addition to the psychological associations of their visual images, the two character types, logographic units (such as kanji) and phonographic units (such as hiragana, katakana and the English alphabet), have a different semantic integrity and expressiveness. Their major difference is that the former convey meaning itself in a presentational mode, whereas the latter do not as they are linear discursive signs.

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English and Japanese writing systems are markedly different, both in number and in configuration of the units of representation. English uses considerably fewer phonographic letters in combination, while Japanese has at least three different systems of writing in operation on both the phonographic and logographic levels. Moreover, Japanese utilises a stock of several thousand characters. There is another important graphic difference relating to the configuration of the units. In English, words and sentences are laid out with spaces in between, so that each word is processed graphically as a set unit. By contrast, Japanese words are written with no interval. However, those words written in kanji stand out as a set unit in a sentence, because of the density of their shape and the dominance of their visual–semantic link. The following examples, 4.1(a) and (b), illustrate the difference in the sentence, ‘Time is money’, in English and Japanese. Example 4.1 (a) Time is money. (b) The first and the third characters, and , in Example 4.1(b) are kanji, representing ‘time’ and ‘money’ respectively. The other characters are hiragana, functioning as a topic marking particle, [wa], and a copula, [nari]. It can be said that in Japanese writing, words written in kanji are perceived as the figure and those in hiragana as the ground. Hence, the writer is always tasked with deciding whether to use kanji or hiragana to spell out the words, as the character choice gives different perceptions to the reader. A comparison of Example 4.1(b) (‘time’ and ‘money’ written in kanji) and 4.1(c) (all written in hiragana) demonstrates this point. Example 4.1 (b) (c) In 4.1(b), the two words, ‘time’ and ‘money’, are readily perceived and processed by the reader, whereas in 4.1(c), all the characters are perceived somewhat similarly so that the reader has to pay more attention to the phonological reading of the characters.7 In short, English and Japanese employ contrastive resources with respect to the basic units and configurations for visual effects. Bearing

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these basic differences in mind, the following section experiments with possible variations of such visual resources in poetry. 4.1.2 Visual representation in poetry The haiku-like poem entitled, ‘In a Station of the Metro’, by Ezra Pound (1928 [1916]: 53) is used here to examine how different visual representations, created by the manipulation of letters, sizes, fonts and layouts, can affect impressions of the poem: Example 4.2

Example 4.3

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

THE APPARITION OF THESE FACES IN THE CROWD PETALS ON A WET, BLACK BOUGH. Example 4.4

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. Example 4.5

IN A STATION OF THE METRO The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.

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Example 4.6

IN A STATION OF THE METRO The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. Example 4.7

IN A STATION OF THE METRO The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. Example 4.2 is a reproduction of the extract from the Faber edition of Selected Poems of Ezra Pound (1928 [1916]: 53). Example 4.3 uses uppercase letters. If this passage were pasted on a bulletin board, it might give an impression of a notice rather than a poem because of the emphatic visual tone of the capital letters. Example 4.4, written in 11-point Courier font, has a likely association with a typewritten script. Example 4.5 uses

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a much larger size of Helvetica font in boldface, which may convey a sense of graphic sophistication, or of commercial advertisement. Examples 4.2–4.5, in spite of differences in font size and style, are faithful to the original line configuration. Examples 4.6 and 4.7, on the other hand, experiment with different layouts of lines. Example 4.6 is a 3-line configuration of 5- and 7-syllable lines, an attempt to make the poem resemble the appearance of Japanese haiku poems on the page. Together with the Monaco font in italics, which suggests a non-ordinary print form, this example may convey something distinct and foreign. Example 4.7 is even more radical in the way each line is laid out on the page. The vertical shape of the poem tries to capture the shape of a black bough. The scattered words represent petals on the wet bough, which are a metaphor for the apparition of faces in a crowd.8 By comparison, a haiku can be presented visually in three different writing systems by the use of hiragana (syllabary for words of Japanese origin and grammatical inflections and particles), katakana (syllabary for foreign words) and kanji (Chinese characters), written either horizontally or vertically, in addition to a variety of font, size, style, layout, etc. For example, a haiku, ‘shizukasa ya, iwa ni shimiiru, semi no koe’ (‘Quietness: seeping into the rocks, the cicada’s voice’) (Matsuo 1996 [1694]: 95) can be represented in many different ways: Example 4.8 Example 4.9 Example 4.10 Examples 4.8–4.10 horizontally reproduce the original text in three different fonts. Example 4.8 is an approximate reproduction of the standard Japanese printed texts, written in Mincho font in plain style. The use of a Gothic font in boldface in Example 4.9 conveys a somewhat contemporary atmosphere because this font often appears in modern advertisements of industrial design. In contrast, Example 4.10 simulates the handwritten version done by calligraphy, and gives a sense of antique authenticity. It is clear that the visual impression is affected by the use of different sizes, fonts, etc. in both English and Japanese. Example 4.11 Example 4.12 Example 4.13 Example 4.14

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Examples 4.11–4.14 display the possibilities unique to Japanese. These examples use the same font in the same size and style; however, they are written in different character types. Example 4.11 is written entirely in hiragana, while Example 4.12 is written entirely in katakana. Example 4.13 uses hiragana for the first word, shizukasa (‘quietness’), instead of kanji in the original version, while Example 4.14 uses katakana for the second last word, semi (‘cicada’), instead of kanji, , in the original. As explained in the previous section, hiragana notation is primarily perceived as ground against figure. In Example 4.11, there is no kanji to be perceived as figure, and hence, the sequence in hiragana is hard to read at first glance. Likewise, in Example 4.12, katakana notation is also perceived as ground. In Example 4.13, as shizukasa (‘quietness’) is written in hiragana, it gives a sense of gentleness or softness, whereas semi (‘cicada’) written in katakana in Example 4.14 may give emphasis or a foreign connotation to the word, as katakana is primarily used for the words of foreign origin. Moreover, the first word in Example 4.14 is written in a different kanji, , than the original, , in order to show that the same idea (‘quietness’ in this case) can be represented in several different kanji characters. Each character has a different etymology and thereby subtly differing nuances. For example, the kanji, , in Examples 4.8–4.10 etymologically means to put the bar on the gate. The idea is that serenity comes when the place is closed. On the other hand, the etymology of the kanji, , in Example 4.14 means to stop the fight. The idea is a peaceful silence. The choice of kanji is dependent on the content of the text in which it is used, the overall context, style of writing and the preference of the writer (for further discussion, see Section 4.3.2; also Chapters 3 and 7). It should also be noted here that a vertical layout is more common in Japanese writing. A text is written from the top of the page downward and from right to left. Literary works in particular are written vertically. Example 4.15 shows the vertical representation of the text of the poem in Example 4.8. Example 4.15

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It becomes clear from the above observation that in Japanese writing, the choice of character type or of a certain kanji character is a constant operation for any Japanese writer. Poets, however, are highly conscious of this selection process; indeed they deliberately exploit a wide range of potential combinations. Thus, the complexity of the Japanese writing system affords a dynamism and freedom to the visual representation of Japanese poetry. The following analysis shows how poetic form visually embodies meaning in overt manifestations of iconicity in ‘visual poetry’ and more subtle manifestations in traditional poetry in English and Japanese.

4.2 Visual poetry The phrase ‘vision as meaning’ in poetry is most likely to cue associations of ‘visual poetry’. In visual poetry, how the poems are laid out on the page, i.e. their shape and structure, is a primary means of conveying formal effects concurrently with the lexical content of the poems. Visual poetry embraces several kinds of poems such as pattern poetry, concrete poetry and free verse. The poems mark different poetic movements in history as well as differing degrees of dependence on the concrete visual shape of poetic texts.9 Pattern poetry is straightforwardly mimetic of the shape of objects that the poems describe, while concrete poetry and some attempts in the tradition of free verse display geometric figures or structural patterns which render the theme or the subject of the poem only indirectly in an abstract analogy. The purpose of this section is to illustrate and analyse the function of visible representations in covert manifestations of metaphor–icon links in a few sample visual poems in English and Japanese. 4.2.1 Imagic manifestations As stated before, poems show up iconicity and metaphor in a complex way so that it is difficult to single out ‘imagic’ iconicity alone. However, it can safely be said that there are visual poems, particularly pattern poems, in which imagic iconicity is a dominant factor, and that it is such imagic iconicity that leads to or reinforces the semantic content of the poems.10 ‘Swan and Shadow’ Example 4.16 (Hollander 1991[1969]: 35)

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John Hollander’s ‘Swan and Shadow’ is perhaps one of the best-known modern efforts to entertain the eyes, along with the same tradition of pattern poetry as seen in ‘Easter Wings’ by George Herbert (1880 [1633]: 34–5) (for a detailed analysis of ‘Easter Wings’, see Chapter 3). The shape and layout, and the title of the poem are so compelling that it is almost impossible to interpret this poem irrespectively of ‘swan and shadow’. Even when one reads the text at first, one’s attention goes to the choice of words which is constrained by the form rather than to the lexical contents. For example, the neck requires short words, and the reflection requires careful choice to ensure that it is an exact replica of the object. The question/answer format of the upper neck/wing is repeated in the reflection, even including the use of capital letters. It is not easy to read this poem naturally, because its shape is so striking. Therefore, if the text is written as below in a prosaic version, the original impact of the poem as an icon is completely lost.

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Example 4.17 Dusk Above the water hang the loud flies Here O so gray then What A pale signal will appear When Soon before its shadow fades Where Here in this pool of opened eye In us No Upon us As at the very edges of where we take shape in the dark air this object bares its image awakening ripples of recognition that will brush darkness up into light even after this bird this hour both drift by atop the perfect sad instant now already passing out of sight toward yet-untroubled reflection this image bears its object darkening into memorial shades Scattered bits of light No of water Or something across water Breaking up No Being regathered soon Yet by then a swan will have gone Yes out of mind into what vast pale hush of a place past sudden dark as if a swan sang Semantically, the poem points to the fleeting existence of a swan and its shadow on the surface of water. The shape of this poem seems to capture this essential moment of the poem’s content. In this sense, the poem’s shape is a strong imagic manifestation of its content. However, the experience of the poem goes even deeper if we slowly turn our attention to the meaning of the poem. This is an intriguing poem in which the narrator is in fact a personified tiny droplet of water on the surface of a pond. It is dusk, silent and peaceful apart from the evening buzzing of flies above the surface, until the grey monotony is broken by the shadow/reflection of a passing swan and the accompanying ripples.

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The drop as an individual is intimately joined with the millions of other droplets in the pool that is their world, and that is also an eye opening onto the dark air above – but an eye of what we are not quite sure. At the same time, cleverly evoking the effect of ripples on a reflection, the poem suggests that the passing swan’s reflection, perhaps some magical or unfathomable event, brings lightness, happiness and interest into the otherwise melancholic and dull present. But even if the swan was recognised for what it is, it is soon forgotten as the perfect calm surface returns and the short hour of dusk drifts on into night. At night, the eye is closed and the droplets appear to have little conception of this mysterious calm. This simple scene reflects the transient beauty or fleeting truth of nature observed from the perspective of a surface drop of water in personification. Suppose this poem as a global metaphor has two input spaces: the swan and its reflection in the source input space, and the fleeting moment of perfect sadness felt by the personified droplet in the target as illustrated in Figure 4.1. The shape of the swan, of its shadow and of the surface of the water is mapped onto the source input space by imagic iconicity. In the blended space, there is an emergent image of the sudden grasp of this moment of perfect sadness or the ‘nowness’ of the present instant, in addition to the passing swan and its reflection and the fleeting motion of time. There is a contradictory force mediating between moving objects (the swan, its shadow, and time) and the cessation of such movement (the moment of sadness). This grasp of the frozen moment of sadness then navigates the reading of the visual representation. Mediated by the grammatical metaphor, A STATE IS NON-LINEARITY, or A PICTURE FREEZES MOVEMENT (OF TIME AND OF OBJECTS), the blended space is mapped diagrammatically onto the visual form of the poem. The picture of the swan and the shadow captures the ‘perfect sad instant now’ on paper as a movement capturing the flow of time, something more difficult to achieve by the conventional poetic form which, by the nature of language itself, is linear and discursive. Another diagrammatic mapping occurs between the form and the blend. The central line in the form, ‘even after this bird this hour both drift by atop the perfect sad instant now’, is the punchline of the poem. Namely, it is the line which materialises the blend – the bird, the time, the perfect sadness, the surface of the water. Thus, one can detect a diagrammatic manifestation of the grammatical metaphor, IMPORTANT IS CENTRE. Likewise, the longest sentence of the poem starts in the middle of the body of the swan, continues to the surface of a pool, and forms

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Iconic Mapping

Metaphorical Mapping

Target

Source Visual Shape Swan Surface Shadow

IMAGIC MAPPING

DIAGRAMMATIC MAPPING

Blend FORM

MEANING

A STATE IS NON-LINEARITY IMPORTANT IS CENTRE Grammatical Metaphors Figure 4.1 Metaphor–icon links in ‘Swan and Shadow’

a part of the swan’s shadow. The extraordinary length of this sentence makes one wonder if the poet deliberately prolongs the sentence to mean graphically and analogically that there is no clear separation between the swan, the surface and the shadow; that there is a continuum of object and image, light and darkness, present and past. In a way, it is perhaps ‘the perfect sad instant now’ that is just happening momentarily. It is clear that, in a pattern poem of a very distinct shape such as Example 4.16, the interplay of metaphor and iconicity is manifested most predominantly in imagic mapping between form and meaning. It is the form that navigates the interpretation in the direction of the visual shape. Nonetheless, a closer reading of the poem reveals that metaphor–icon links are of a more complex nature even in a seemingly simple example of pattern poetry.

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‘40–Love’ The next example is somewhat more obscure in shape; but it neatly displays the interplay between metaphor and iconicity. Example 4.18 (McGough 1989 [1971]: 84–5) 4o–

Love

middle

aged

couple

playing

ten

nis

when

the

game

ends

and

they

go

home

the

net

will

still

be tween

be them

Most readers are likely to ask why it is laid out in the way it is. The shape and layout alone may suggest some ‘figurative’ interpretation of the visual text; but, what kind of ‘figurative’ meaning can be drawn out depends predominantly on the content (both the title and the text) of the poem. So, the next step is to read the words. The poem reads as in Example 4.19. Example 4.19 40–Love middle-aged couple play tennis when the game ends and they go home the net will still be between them Although the original strength of the poem’s iconicity disappears in the prosaic presentation in Example 4.19, the reader is drawn to its semantics. The poem is about tennis. It is about a middle-aged couple. It is about the net between the two players, between the couple. The middle-aged couple is compared to tennis players. They are not doubles

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partners. They are playing against each other. The score of the game is 40–love. One is about to win the game. At the same time, it is a pun: love at the age of forty, the relationship of a middle-aged couple. The game of tennis is over. But their real game (of love) is not over, because there is still the net between them. The relationship of this couple is further compared to the net dividing the tennis court. This text can be seen as a metaphor in which a love relationship is understood in terms of a game of tennis. Images of tennis players, the game they are playing, and the net dividing them are mapped onto the images of the couple, their love relationship. The correspondence of these images constitutes a schematic or diagrammatic mapping of the metaphorical process, which in turn enhances the blend, a fused structure of the one-sided, tired relationship of a middleaged couple. With this metaphorical reading, the visual configuration of the text shows up its iconic meaning. The facing two pages are the tennis court, and the binding line of the pages is the net. Words in the text are either monosyllabic or disyllabic. Besides, some disyllabic words are cut into two monosyllabic units and displayed across the binding line. These small lexical elements are repeated in pairs 12 times in a row over the two pages as if they were the monotonous movement of a tennis ball across the net. It is important to note that this imagic iconicity is guided by the metaphorical reading of the poem, rather than that the image of the poem on the page guides the interpretation of the poem as it has been seen in the previous examples of pattern poetry (‘Easter Wings’ and ‘Swan and Shadow’). Hence, as indicated in Figure 4.2, the interplay of metaphor and iconicity in ‘40–Love’, consists of three major processes: the metaphorical mapping between the source and the target input spaces; the diagrammatic mapping of the blended space (metaphorical reading of the poem) onto the visual form of the poem; and the imagic mapping of the visual text onto the source input space of a tennis court and tennis game. In short, the metaphor of tennis navigates the iconic interpretation of the structure of the text.

4.2.2 Diagrammatic manifestations The next group of examples of visual poetry is classified as ‘concrete poetry’, which displays a more abstract structure than pattern poetry. Brogan (1994: 43) defines concrete poetry as

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Iconic Mapping

Metaphorical Mapping

Source Visual Shape

(3)

(1)

tennis net

tennis IMAGIC MAPPING ball game net

couple

game

DIAGRAMMATIC MAPPING (2)

barrier

Target relationship love

middle-aged one-sided Blend

FORM

MEANING

Figure 4.2 Metaphor–icon links in ‘40–Love’

visual poetry . . . , in which (1) each work defines its own form and is visually and, if possible, structurally original or even unique; (2) the piece is without any major allusion to any previously existing poem; and (3) the visual shape is wherever possible abstract, the words or letters within it behaving as ideograms. The poetic challenge of concrete poetry is to mediate between visual art and verbal art. In fact, the dominant proportion of concrete poems in the major anthologies (Williams 1967, Wildman 1969, Solt 1970, among others) shows an orientation towards visual abstract art. The individual letters or words give a poem its basic textural material, just as pigments – their colour and material – do for painting. The abstract configurations of visible linguistic elements provide an overall structure as the arrangements of colour, line and shape give paintings their perspective and composition, which match with the theme of the work. Concrete poetry is thus ‘concrete’ in the sense of its visibility; but the relation of its form with its content is of an abstract nature. Due to this abstract and structural orientation, diagrammatic iconicity predominates in this type of poetry. What is common in the manifestation of metaphor–icon links in concrete poetry is that the abstract visual shape and configuration of

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Metaphorical Mapping

Iconic Mapping

Source

(2)

Target

Visual Shape

DIAGRAMMATIC MAPPING (1)

Blend FORM

MEANING

Grammatical Metaphors Figure 4.3 Metaphor–icon links in concrete poetry

elements provide the main force for the interpretation of the text. Although the lexical and sentential meanings constitute the source to be mapped onto the target in metaphorical mapping, this metaphorical mapping seems to be a result of the diagrammatic mapping from the form onto the target in concrete poetry. It can be said that unlike the other forms of visual poetic texts analysed above, the diagrammatic configuration of concrete poetry is initially mapped onto the target rather than the source, as illustrated in Figure 4.3, by a variety of grammatical metaphors such as MORE MEANING IS MORE FORM, DIFFERENCE (SIMILARITY) IN MEANING IS DIFFERENCE (SIMILARITY) IN FORM, and so on. Grammatical metaphors navigating the interpretation of the abstract form differ according to each poetic text; but the basic mapping structure in terms of diagrammatic iconicity is the same in the following examples analysed.

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‘l(a’ The following example by E. E. Cummings (1972 [1958]: 673) presents a radical poetic challenge, experimenting with a novel use of letters, symbols and words, and succeeds in evoking powerful images and readings. Example 4.20 (Cummings 1972 [1958]: 673) l(a le af fa ll s) one l iness

This poem is predominantly visual and structural, and even enigmatic at first glance. There is only one line, Line 7, which looks grammatically English by containing the word ‘one’ as such; but later the reader will discover that it is a disguise, as it is only a part of another word ‘loneliness’. The poem has two parts: a word ‘loneliness’, spread over four lines, Lines 1, 7, 8 and 9; and a sentence, ‘a leaf falls’, put in parentheses, laid out vertically. These two parts are juxtaposed in a novel fashion, and suggest a metaphorical reading of the poem. Namely, there are two input spaces, NATURE and MIND, as epitomised in the images of a falling leaf and a feeling of loneliness. These spaces are ‘blended’11 in the juxtaposition in a way that a falling leaf is mapped onto loneliness. Just one leaf falls, a metaphor of solitude. The only ‘readable’ English line, ‘one’ in Line 7, is consonant with this metaphorical reading. Notice also that the word ‘one’ is a part of the word ‘loneliness’, as if it were one of the radicals constituting a Chinese character of ‘loneliness’.12 It is a leaf which is falling, a metaphor of decline, which is also visually presented by the vertical layout of letters and symbols.

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This graphic play with letters and symbols is particularly characteristic of this poem. There are several manifestations of imagic iconicity in the poem: 1. The shape of the poem forms a single vertical line, which resembles the fall of a leaf, on the one hand; and on the other hand, it resembles a Roman numeral ‘one’, which conceptually represents ‘singularity’, which in turn leads to ‘loneliness’; 2. The use of l’s and f’s (vertically longer letters) reinforces the verticality of the fall; 3. Five sections of the poem, consisting of one or three lines alternating, may suggest a leaf floating down to the ground gradually; 4. The flat shape of the last section ‘iness’ may suggest a leaf on the ground, the final stage of the fall; 5. The shape of the parentheses represents the shape of a leaf; and 6. The seventh line is the only line that looks English, although it is a part of the word ‘loneliness’. This line could be intended to give the double meaning of ‘singularity’ and ‘loneliness’. The following line, Line 8, resembles an Arabic numeral ‘one’ rather than an alphabetic ‘l’ if we see it graphically, which again conceptually represents ‘singularity’ that leads to ‘loneliness’. On the more abstract level, the poem can be further read as a structured diagrammatic icon at least in the following three aspects: 1. The use of parentheses graphically represents the unified and yet suspended image of a falling leaf and loneliness; 2. At the same time, the use of parentheses forces the reader to go back to the first line after the sixth line. The reader has to discover a connection between the first ‘l’ and the ‘one’ in Line 7, which follows the parenthesis. The two themes of the poem are mediated by this discovery; and 3. The central section, which consists of two l’s, graphically unites the upper part and the lower part of the poem, a falling leaf and loneliness, as if a mathematical equation symbol ‘=’ were drawn vertically. As the analysis above demonstrates, the poem visually manifests imagic and diagrammatic iconicity. Yet it is also a creative attempt to indicate a visual metaphor, which embodies the juxtaposition of two

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images, or two conceptual domains, put in tension, in order to offer a new way of seeing the world. It is interesting to see that there are a number of parallels to English in the diagrammatic manifestations of Japanese visual poetry. The graphics of the Japanese examples dominate the reading experience because of the use of different character types, particularly the logographic kanji characters. Nevertheless, the basic manifestations of iconicity are the same, as seen in the following analyses. ‘Ame (rain)’ Example 4.21 (Niikuni 1985 [1966]: 21)

This poem, entitled ‘Ame (rain)’, is probably one of the best-known examples of Japanese concrete poetry. It is simple, and yet very powerful in its composition. There are 19 repetitions per line and 24 lines of the ‘four dots’, which are part of the logograph, (‘rain’), in the bottom line. The abundance of the repetition of the dots with the white background appears to signify the endless movement of rain. The poem is

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a mimetic image of falling raindrops. The recognition of the kanji, , as a moment of change into non-repetition precedes the recognition of the repetitive background against which it is foregrounded. The process of the eye movement, from the bottom to the top, is also iconic to our actual recognition of rain. What is intriguing to me in this particular example, however, is its diagrammatic iconicity, namely, that the poem is a challenge to our recognition of the kanji, and as such is an example of the technique of defamiliarisation. For this poem shows us in a totally estranged context – a mass of repetitive ‘four dots’. This estranged presentation converts the transparency of into an opaque entity, which in turn serves as an opportunity to revive its etymological reading, that is raindrops and a heaven where raindrops originate. In the same manner, the very presence of in the poem gives meaning to the repetition of ‘four dots’, which would otherwise be interpreted as graphical dots and not as raindrops. Therefore, the poem displays itself as a diagram, too, iconically representing a change from an ordinary to an extraordinary recognition of , which is foregrounded against the extraordinary context – the repetition of ‘its parts’. It seems obvious that the dominant repetition of ‘four dots’ displays an iconic meaning, signifying the endless, continuous abundance of raindrops. Likewise, the change from the repetition of ‘four dots’ to non-repetition iconically signals the foregrounding or the distinctiveness of the kanji . In this example, the effect of this foregrounding is multiplied because the repetitive unit is a part of a character and the non-repetitive unit is a character. In other words, the difference in visual density and semantic weight between the ‘four dots’ and the kanji iconically emphasises the distinctiveness of the latter, which etymologically means a heaven and raindrops.

‘Fuukei (scenery)’ The next example (Yamamura 1989 [1915]: 89–90) illustrates a repetition of larger units in similar manifestation types, but with different semantic effects. Example 4.22 (Yamamura 1989 [1915]: 89–90)

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‘Fuukei (Scenery)’ Transcription

Word-for-word translation

I 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Ichimen no nanohana Ichimen no nanohan Ichimen no nanohana Ichimen no nanohana Ichimen no nanohana Ichimen no nanohana Kasukanaru mugibue Ichimen no nanohana

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

A field of turnip.flowers13 A field of turnip.flowers A field of turnip.flowers A field of turnip.flowers A field of turnip.flowers A field of turnip.flowers Faint straw.flute A field of turnip.flowers

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Ichimen no nanohana Ichimen no nanohana Ichimen no nanohana Ichimen no nanohana Ichimen no nanohana Ichimen no nanohana Hibari no oshaberi Ichimen no nanohana

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

A field of turnip.flowers A field of turnip.flowers A field of turnip.flowers A field of turnip.flowers A field of turnip.flowers A field of turnip.flowers Lark of chattering A field of turnip.flowers

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Ichimen no nanohana Ichimen no nanohana Ichimen no nanohana Ichimen no nanohana Ichimen no nanohana Ichimen no nanohana Yameru wa hiru no tsuki Ichimen no nanohana

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

A field of turnip.flowers A field of turnip.flowers A field of turnip.flowers A field of turnip.flowers A field of turnip.flowers A field of turnip.flowers Pallid TOP day of moon A field of turnip.flowers

II

III

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This visual poem describes a scene of countless nanohana (‘turnip flowers’) blooming in a field. A massive yellow stretch of innumerable tiny flowers spreads before our eyes. The faint sound of a straw flute is heard in our ears. The larks are chattering over our head. When we turn our eyes up to the sky, we see the pale figure of the moon hanging in the sunny sky. The repetitions characteristic of this poem use imagic and diagrammatic iconicity. Firstly, the poem consists of three stanzas of eight lines. Each stanza has seven repetitions of ichimen no nanohana (‘a field of turnip flowers’) with a single variant on the seventh line. Each line has nine morae, written in nine hiragana. Hence, iconically the repetition of the same character type gives a monotonous, or a levelling graphic effect (diagrammatic manifestation); the repetition of the same number of lines with the same number of characters of the same type gives each stanza an exact rectangular shape, which resembles a patch of turnip flowers (imagic manifestation). Secondly, the use of moraic hiragana instead of logographic kanji is particularly important to this poem, because it not only gives an exact rectangular shape to each stanza but also deceives our eyes into overlooking the difference of the seventh line from the repetitious lines due to its similarity of shape and number. The content of the seventh line in each stanza – the faint sounds of a straw flute, the chattering of larks and a pale moon in the day sky – is what we might assume to be buried in the strong and massive yellowness of the flowers. The way the poem displays the seventh line in a kind of disguise is diagrammatically iconic to its meaning. Thirdly, the overwhelming sequence repetition of ichimen no nanohana emphatically suggests the dominance of the turnip flowers in the scenery. At the same time, the change from repetition to non-repetition occurs on the seventh line. Once we have recognised the seventh line as distinct, it is foregrounded and catches our attention. Yet, because it is less dominant than the background of sequence repetition, it can slip from our attention in the same way as do its semantic referents cognitively. Fourthly, the placement of the distinctive line seventh among the eight lines of stanzaic composition also has an iconic meaning. It is necessary to have six lines of repetition to create ‘mass’ in order to emphasise the continuation of ‘the field of turnip flowers’. It could not occur in the last line of the stanza, because it would frame the stanza and would stand out too much to be disguised. The framing lines of each stanza – the first and the last – are repeated, and provide framing to the

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stanza. The framing lines also have a cyclic effect, which suggests iconically an indefinite continuation of the framing elements – namely, the fields of turnip flowers. Lastly, the fact that each stanza has a variant seventh line is another manifestation of repetition – repetition at similar intervals. It shows that the stanzaic structures are equated to each other, having a regular recurrence of a similar theme by the repetition of a variant line in the same stanzaic position. Therefore, the following becomes clear: that repetition in quantity conveys dominance, continuation, monotony, a levelling effect, background and the like as iconic meanings; that a change to non-repetition conveys foregrounding; that repetition at the beginning and the end gives a framing or a cyclic effect; and that repetition at similar intervals conveys regularity and/or unity. 4.2.3 Remarks on comparison There are two major conclusions to be drawn from the comparison of iconic manifestations in ‘visual poetry’ in English and Japanese. Beginning with what they have in common, since visual poetry is, by definition, characterised by its orientation towards the ‘visible’ shape, configuration and structure in relation to the semantic content of the texts, those poems classified in this category of poetry in English and Japanese both visually display imagic and diagrammatic iconic manifestations. In general, pattern poetry is dominantly imagic, whereas concrete poetry and free verse manifest more diagrammatic iconicity in the structural analogy between the visual form and the semantic content. If we look at the poems as global metaphors, iconicity interacts with the metaphorical content of the poem. The complexity of the interplay between metaphor and iconicity varies from poem to poem. However simple it may look, the poetic text is a complex piece of artwork, which condenses multiple manifestations of iconicity in most intricate and exquisite ways. In terms of the configurations of the units, the poetic texts looked at in both languages show a remarkable similarity. It should be noted, however, that such a striking similarity is partly due to modern crosscultural influences. As mentioned above, pattern poetry in Japanese is indebted to European pattern poetry. The concrete poems in English are in the Imagist tradition of japonaiserie. Nonetheless, the point made with regard to visual iconic manifestations is that the visual poets exploit in their linguistic and semiotic resources every conceivable combination and repetition, which not only reveal novel and unique ways

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of understanding the objects described in the poetic texts, but also create new ways of appreciating the poetry itself. Visual poets cross the boundaries between visual art and verbal art. Visual poetry is thus motivated towards presenting a new way of ‘looking at’ poetry. That which distinguishes English from Japanese visual poetry depends largely on the nature of the written scripts each language employs. As mentioned in Section 4.1, the English writing system is dominantly phonographic, whereas the Japanese system is a mixture of logographic and phonographic units. The logographic orientation of the writing system itself seems to generate a stronger visual iconic motivation, which materialises in Japanese poetry in both imagic and diagrammatic forms. Japanese poets, not only visual poets but poets in general, are consciously aware of the choice of characters in the writing of poetry;14 unless they compose their poems entirely for oral presentation. Rich resources are available, particularly in the inventory of kanji characters. In Japanese concrete poetry (such as Example 4.21), kanji are a dominant element. Precisely because kanji are logographic, the main interest of visual poetry in Japanese rests more on the configurations. Such poets do not have to produce a new unit which functions as another ideogram. They can use what they already have. By contrast, English visual poets, particularly concrete poets, try to create their own units to be configured as if they were ideograms. Cummings is one of those poets who challenge their own writing systems to create radical and innovative ideograms of their own. Cummings, for example, dissects English words into smaller units, in either a letter or a group of letters, and arranges them in an iconic order so that some of them visually represent certain ideas. Because of the phonographic nature of the writing system, English visual poets have to make a more conscious effort to create visible units, compared to their Japanese counterparts.

4.3 Subtle manifestations of visual iconicity in poetry Visual poetry is the extreme case but not the only case in which the visual shape or visual configuration of poetry conveys the meaning iconically. Even traditional poetry written in closed form (cf. Kennedy 1986: 157–67) uses graphic space in certain ways to produce abstract effects when printed on the page. Generally, the written form of poetry follows certain conventions. Such conventions include how the line is marked, the section is divided, the indentation is made, and so forth. For example, in traditional English poetry with rhyme and metre, a new

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line of a poem often starts with a capitalised word. A section is marked by a blank line. These conventions are not normally regarded as iconic, because they are taken for granted as conventions. However, a closer examination of the relationship of such formal appearances with the semantic content often leads to the realisation of some abstract diagrammatic correspondences between the form and meaning in grammatical metaphors. In this section, visual diagrammatic manifestations in traditional poetry in English and Japanese will be looked at with special reference to Japanese haiku. The peculiarity of the writing system of Japanese makes both writers and readers more aware of the appearance of the text, and hence, there are more visual iconic motivations both in the generation and the interpretation of the conventional Japanese poetic text than there are in English.15 4.3.1 General diagrammatic features Diagrammatic icon by grammatical metaphors There are general diagrammatic features of a visual nature embedded in the conventions of poetry. Capitalisation, indentation, punctuation, line length, visual parallelism and sectioning will be considered. Example 4.23 (Wordsworth 1983 [1804]: 206) My heart leaps up when I behold A Rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a Man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! The Child is Father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

In Example 4.23, the first word in every line is capitalised to mark the start of a new line. Because capitalised letters are larger and more noticeable, the repetition of ‘So’ in Lines 3, 4 and 5, is more distinct than the repetition of ‘when’ in the body of the text in Lines 1, 3 and 5. ‘So’ is a pro-form, substituting for the first sentence, ‘my heart leaps up’. Hence, the repetition of ‘so’ is semantically as well as visually charged. This is a diagrammatic manifestation drawn from the grammatical metaphor, MORE CONTENT IS MORE FORM.

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Capitalised words are also used in poetry to express something extraordinary, unique or important. It is a case of DIFFERENCE OF MEANING IS DIFFERENCE OF FORM. In this particular poem, there are several capitalised words, ‘Rainbow’, ‘Man’, ‘Child’, ‘Father’ and ‘Man’ in Lines 2, 4 and 7. Particularly, all the nouns in Line 7 are capitalised. Their emphasis by capitalisation makes this the key line of the poem. Semantic content may also be suggested by indentation; the indented lines, 2 and 6, are thus foregrounded. Indentation, another diagrammatic manifestation of iconicity, distinguishes lines of central and focal importance. ‘A Rainbow in the sky’ is the only concrete image in the poem; ‘let me die’ is an index of the poet’s passion, which is also strengthened by the use of an exclamation mark. The power of blank space should never be taken lightly. When a poem is laid out on the page, it is the blank space which divides the stanzas or sections.16 It visually signals that the stanza (or the section) is a group of words and sentences. The form of the stanza (or the section) suggests a cohesive content, thus representing an abstract diagrammatic correspondence between form and content. This holds true in both English and Japanese poetry. 4.3.2 Orthographical revisions of haiku When a language, such as Japanese, has different writing systems to represent a single phonetic text, how a poem looks is as crucial as how it sounds. Both traditional and modern poets explore various possibilities in the visual presentation of their works. Some make overt attempts; others make covert ones. Haiku texts, written in one vertical line, for example, are the most plain-looking with respect to the graphic shape. And yet as will be seen, they also display rich iconic motivations in visual terms. This section, therefore, looks at different orthographical versions of the same poetic texts in order to speculate as to what motivations are behind the different versions and what visual effects they have. I have chosen as data the revisions of haiku made by Basho Matsuo himself in one of his collections, Oku no Hosomichi (Matsuo (1996 [1694]).17 It is interesting to see how the poet experiments intentionally with possibilities before hitting on the combination of scripts which best represents his conception. I will discuss how the process of changing characters in textual revisions achieves various semantic and structural effects. This analysis concerns particular visual revisions the poet made in changing between kanji and hiragana. As discussed in Section 4.1,

Vision as Meaning 119 Table 4.2 Different types of revisions Types of revision

No. of poems

% out of the total of 48

Orthography Phonology Semantics Syntax

45 31 24 14

94 65 50 29

kanji and hiragana give contrasting visual effects in two major ways: the angularity of the kanji leads to masculine associations such as sharpness, strength and tension, while the cursive shape of the hiragana leads to feminine associations such as gentleness, softness and smoothness; and the integrity of the visual–semantic link is much stronger in the logographic unit of kanji than in the phonographic unit of hiragana. Comparison of several drafts and copies of Oku no Hosomichi shows that Basho revised 48 poems out of 50, and in each of these he tended to revise more than once before arriving at the final version. Table 4.2 shows the distribution of different types of revisions, including changes to orthography, phonology, semantics and syntax. The dominance of orthographical revision is obvious as 94 per cent (or 45) of the poems have at least some revisions pertaining to orthography, whereas the corresponding figures are variably less for the other types of revision. Furthermore, a total of 86 items in 45 poems were orthographically revised. This means that in each poem an average of approximately two items had their character changed. In examining the revisions, three factors have been taken into consideration: the correspondence between the semantic content of a word and the visual association of the character(s) changed; the relationship between the semantic content of the text and the visual association of the character(s) changed; and the positions of the character revisions in the structure of the text. Although these three factors seem to work jointly rather than independently in the visual revisions, I will point out the general tendencies of respective factors in this section.18

Character choice and the meaning of the word Firstly, Basho has a general tendency throughout Oku no Hosomichi to spell the names of creatures in kanji rather than hiragana. Actually 77

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per cent (23 items out of 30) of the names of living creatures were spelled in kanji in the final version. Eight items were revised from hiragana to kanji, and only three items from kanji to hiragana. The compactness and tension of kanji are perhaps more appropriate as the mode of representation of delineated objects like animals, fish, birds and insects described in Basho’s poems. Secondly, items referring to time and place tended to be written in kanji (80 per cent, 25 out of 29 items) such as names of the seasons, months and places. Similarly, items describing natural phenomena such as the sun, the moon, clouds, wind and rain were written entirely in kanji (14 out of 14) and so were the natural objects such as a waterfall, fields, rocks, mountains, ocean, beaches, waves and sands (13 out of 14 items). Note that in Oku no Hosomichi, those items written in kanji about time, place and nature are ‘masculine’ objects such as ‘summer’, ‘the sun’, ‘rapid rain’, ‘rough sea’, ‘mountains’ and ‘rocks’. Here, we can point out an iconic correspondence on the image level between the semantic content of the words and the visual association of kanji characters.

Character choice and the meaning of the text Each word is an integral part of the haiku text, and each haiku is an integral part of the entire travel sketch. Thus, it will be fruitful to consider the relationships between the character choice and the meaning of the text, and then between the character choice and the structure of the whole work. Revisions of character types with respect to the verbs offer interesting examples. Although it is a subtle tendency as is seen in 6 items through 6 revisions, Basho tended to revise kanji to hiragana when describing actions such as breaking, collecting, tearing and winning. Interestingly enough, there was no revision in the reverse direction, hiragana to kanji. The revised verbs have semantically more masculine connotations than feminine, which are seemingly contradictory to associations inherent in hiragana. These counter-examples make us wonder if there are some motivations overriding the iconic correspondence between the character choice and the meaning of the words. Examples 4.24 and 4.25 indicate that some of the revised verbs with masculine connotations were used in negation in the text, so that the textual meaning (i.e. negation of masculinity in the action described by the verb) does not contradict the implied connotation of the revision from kanji to hiragana.

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Example 4.2419 (a) (b) kitsutsuki mo Woodpecker even

iwo wa yabura -zu cottage TOP break-NEG

natsu kodachi summer grove

‘Even woodpeckers don’t tear at the hut in summer trees’ (Matsuo 1996 [1694]: 57) The verb in question, which was revised from 4.24(a) to 4.24(b), is boxed. Note that the verb, yaburu (‘to break, to tear’), is used in a negative form yabura-zu (‘not to be broken’), and the entire text reads ‘even the woodpeckers haven’t pecked a cottage in the summer grove’. It is interpreted as if the woodpeckers did not dare to disturb the peaceful and humble cottage in the serenity of the summer grove. The smoothness and softness associated with hiragana evoke this serenity better than kanji. In Example 4.25, the verb of motion, oru (‘to pluck, to break’), was revised from kanji (4.25(a)) to hiragana (4.25(b)). Example 4.25 (a) (b) Yamanaka ya Yamanaka:

kiku wa taora-nu chrysanthemum TOP pluck -NEG

yu no nioi hot.water of smell

‘In Yamanaka I don’t break mums off in hot water’s scent’ (Matsuo 1996 [1694]: 119). The haiku praises the good smell of hot springs in Yamanaka. Because the scent is so good, it is not necessary to pluck the chrysanthemum for any additional fragrance. A Chinese legend says that the dew on the chrysanthemum is a life-prolonging drink. Alluding to this legend, the poem also compares the effectiveness of the chrysanthemum and the hot water, suggesting that one could live as long by taking this hot bath rather than plucking the chrysanthemum for its dew. The overall semantic tone of the text is gentle, smooth and soft. The verb oru (‘to pluck’) was used in negation, and revised into hiragana. The change of character type is consonant with the semantic content of the text. Notice also that the last word, nioi (‘smell’) was revised from to as

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boxed in Example 4.25(a) and (b). Both characters are kanji, but have different density and angularity. (4.25(a)) is visually more dense and tense than (4.25(b)). This change also contributes to evoking the soft and gentle association of the poem. The structural meaning of character choice Character choice not only reinforces the meaning of a poem but also affects the visual structure of the poem. This means that the position of kanji or hiragana, the sequential order of the character types and repetition in general, suggest the structural orientations of the poem, which navigate the reading of the text in a certain direction. Possible structural effects derived from the revision of the character are: (1) intensifying; (2) foregrounding; and (3) bracketing. It should be noted that these effects are derived by grammatical metaphors of repetition discussed in Chapter 2 (Sections 2.4.2 and 2.4.3 in particular). (1) Intensifying. Using the same character, or the same character type, repeatedly creates certain effects. Abundance and intensity are notable iconic effects produced by such repetitions as the grammatical metaphors of MORE CONTENT IS MORE FORM and MORE STRENGTH IS MORE FORM (for further discussion on repetitions, see Hiraga 1993). Example 4.26 illustrates the use of repetition of the same character. Example 4.26 (a) (b) ara tooto alas, in awe

aoba wakaba no green leaves fresh leaves of

hi no hikari sun of light

‘Look, so holy: green leaves young leaves in the light of the sun’ (Matsuo 1996 [1694]: 47). The poem describes the beauty of young green leaves in the sunlight. The poet is in awe not only in looking at rich natural beauty, but also in respecting the magnificent temple which houses the Tokugawa Shogun in Nikko. Hi no hikari written mainly in kanji is a visual pun, meaning ‘the light of the sun’ and the place name, Nikko ( ). In order to convey these rich connotations, perhaps the structural revision was preferred. A change occurred in the word wakaba (‘young leaves’) initially written in hiragana (4.26(a)) and revised to kanji (4.26(b)). Connotations of ‘young leaves’ such as a pale green colour, soft texture and tender

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smell, are all feminine. However, in the revision, the repetition of ‘leaves’ (underlined in Example 4.26(b)) appears to have been preferable to the hiragana spelling despite the obvious iconicity of smoothness and softness evoked by the hiragana, with the semantic content of ‘young leaves’. The structural effect created by the diagrammatic manifestation of the abundance of the ‘leaves’ overrides the correspondence between character choice and the word. The more characters of the same sort ( in this example), the greater the focus on the abundance of the ‘leaves’. Showing ‘more leaves’ iconically leads to a richer appreciation of natural beauty. This change also affects the overall appearance of the poem. Now the first five morae, ara tooto (‘alas, in awe’) in hiragana is put in tension with the latter part of the poem mainly written in kanji. There is a reason for creating this tension. For ara tooto shows the poet’s admiration of the prosperity of the Tokugawa Shogunate, hinted at by the place name, as well as his obvious admiration of the leaves. (2) Foregrounding. Another important structural effect of kanji is foregrounding. As explained earlier, kanji have a distinct form and semantic integrity, which differentiate them visually as the figure while the remaining hiragana function as the ground. The following haiku describes the grandeur of the Milky Way, which arches over the rough waves of the Sea of Japan towards Sado Island (for a more elaborated analysis of this haiku, see Chapter 1).

Example 4.27 (a) (b) araumi ya rough sea:

Sado ni yoko tou Sado in lie

ama no gawa heaven of river

‘Rough sea: lying toward Sado Island the River of Heaven’ (Matsuo 1996 [1694]: 109). In Example 4.27, words put into semantic tension, i.e. (‘rough sea’) and (‘milky way’), were spelled in kanji. Sado , a place name, is also written in kanji. The main effect of changing the character type in the verb yokotou (‘to lie’) from kanji to hiragana is to make that part of the text a ground for the conspicuous profile of (‘rough sea’), (Sado) and (‘milky way’). Thus, the foregrounded visual elements signal the foregrounding of the meanings expressed.

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Notice also that the three nouns, araumi (‘rough sea’), Sado and ama no gawa (‘milky way’), are all in two kanji. Also, (‘sea’), (‘to cross water’) and (‘river’) in these three nouns (underlined in Example 4.27) share the same radical signifying water. Both (‘rough sea’) and (‘milky way’) relate to water, because the Milky Way in Japanese is called ‘the river of heaven’. Therefore, the repetitive use of similar visual elements – two-character nouns and the same radical – further intensifies the meaning of the elements visually foregrounded by the use of kanji. (3) Bracketing. Bracketing is a structural effect produced by the use of the same type of linguistic units at the beginning and the end of the text. One may detect here the grammatical metaphor of A FRAME IS SAMENESS OF BEGINNING AND ENDING. For auditory bracketing, a poem may begin with the same sound, syllable, word or syntactic structure (such as question, negation, relative clause, etc.), whereas for visual bracketing, it may begin with the same letter, character or shape as it ends with. Visual bracketing is observed in 68 per cent of haiku in Oku no Hosomichi; 31 (62 per cent) out of 50 poems begin and end with kanji, while 3 poems (6 per cent) begin and end with hiragana. Many of the orthographical revisions by Basho work towards this bracketing effect. It would appear that he consciously used this iconic device. Example 4.28 is an instance where the type of the final character is changed from hiragana to kanji to bracket the poem with kanji. Example 4.28 (a) (b) hai-ide yo crawl.out

kaiya ga shita no silkworm.nursery SUB under of

hiki no koe toad of voice

‘Crawl out, toad: your voice under the silkworm shed’ (Matsuo 1996 [1694]: 93). The poem addresses a toad, which is hidden under the silkworm shed. It is hot and humid. So, when the poet hears the voice of the toad, he tells it to crawl out for fresh and cool air. The word koe (‘voice’) was first spelled in hiragana, possibly because of the internal structural uniformity with hiki (‘toad’), which was also spelled in hiragana. In the revision, the external structural bracketing perhaps overrode the internal structural uniformity.

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It is also notable that bracketing with kanji is a characteristic distinctive to the poems in Oku no Hosomichi. Bracketing the poems with the angular and distinctive shape of kanji visually delineates the haiku texts from the body of the travel sketch, and thereby lends them independence. At the same time, the repetition of this structural trait of bracketing in more than 60 per cent of the poems gives a sense of continuity to the haiku texts as a whole.

4.4 Concluding remarks This chapter demonstrates that iconicity is an important motivation in both the construction and interpretation of poetry with special reference to the visual elements in the texts. Some poems display an iconic link between the visual forms and their meanings overtly; but most of the poems show the link more subtly. Visual poetry provides samples of an overt manifestation as it uses iconicity in concrete and exaggerated ways so that the principles of iconicity can be clearly delineated. On the other hand, by looking at certain abstract and hidden patterns in the distribution of visible linguistic elements, the analyses also demonstrate that a discovery of such subliminal iconic links between the form and meaning yields new interpretations of poetic texts. Poets are bound to their own visual resources and the use of visual space on the page. Nonetheless, each poetic text defines the variety of visual options and the extent to which the poet utilises them. Generally, visual poetry shows more iconic motivations in the use of graphic space as has been seen in the examples of pattern poetry. Concrete poetry and free verse, on the other hand, experiment with the creation of new visible units (especially Examples 4.20 and 4.21) and new configurations of visual linguistic elements. In conventional poetry, too, poets are conscious about the use of graphic space and the appearance of the poem on the page. There are structural reasons why they use indentation, sectioning and the repetition of certain linguistic patterns to describe certain things, and if we approach the texts with iconicity in mind, we can often explain why. Subtle iconic effects provide insight; once we uncover the link between the visual form and the meaning it expresses, this link often directs or reinforces our interpretation of the text in that way. As has been seen in Basho’s use of kanji logographs in his revisions, visual images and diagrams revealed by the analyses are so powerful that it is often difficult to escape from their spell. This says something about the power of the written language, which has been neglected in modern theories of language and poetry.

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A comparison of English and Japanese poetic texts in visual terms also generates a greater awareness of the written language, because both languages employ very different writing systems. The writing system of English is dominantly phonographic, while the writing system of Japanese is a mixture of phonographic and logographic units. Firstly, the difference appears in the degree of consciousness about the written language. For the Japanese poets, it is a conscious effort to choose which character type, hiragana, katakana or kanji, to spell out the sounds and the contents they want to represent. Similarly, it is a conscious practice on the part of the reader to read what is represented in the poems not only by the semantic meaning conveyed but also by character choice and layout. Secondly, because kanji characters are distinct in form and integrated in meaning, they are generally perceived as the figure rather than the ground in the process of reading. Being logographs, many kanji convey their meanings iconically, too.20 Therefore, the choice of a particular kanji to represent what the poets want to convey is also crucial in the making of poetry (for further discussion, see Section 7.2.2). Likewise, experienced readers read implied meanings in the choice of certain kanji characters.21 Consequently, it can be said that Japanese poetry is more conscious about the visual representation than English poetry. It is no wonder that visual iconicity is generally more noticeable and prevalent in Japanese poetry, not only in visual poetry but also in conventional and traditional poetry. The poetic forms, whether they are as immediate as images, as structural as diagrams or as conceptual as metaphors, display iconic elements to varying degrees. This also depends on the nature of the written language and the writing systems that the poetic text employs. Nonetheless, the point is that far from being subordinated to meaning, the visual form of poetic text in both English and Japanese plays a leading role in conveying and creating meaning. Metaphor–icon links manifest themselves at this very point where the form contributes to a reinforcement or creation of meaning.

5 Sound as Meaning

The sound must seem an echo to the sense. Alexander Pope (1709)

5.1 Poetry and auditory representation Sound as well as vision has a rich tradition in poetic analysis. It can constitute the form of a poem, offering shape and material. The quality inherent in sounds gives texture to a poem, whereas the pattern of sounds gives it architecture. Sound may not only be essential in terms of its formal qualities, but also important in terms of its intimate relationship with the meaning of a poem. The relationship between sound and meaning in poetry is an extremely close one. For example, Shapiro and Beum have said that usually a poet ‘creates a form that “says” the same thing as the words themselves say’ (1965: 2). This wedding of sound and sense – how sound contributes to complementing the whole experience of a poem – has been the focus of an enormous amount of endeavour in poetic research. Traditionally it has been studied in the field of prosody or metrics. The phonetic analysis in this chapter is based on linguistic poetics, which incorporates traditional metrics with linguistics and semiotics (cf. Jakobson 1960, 1971, 1981, 1985, Jakobson and Waugh 1979, among others). The immediacy of the relationship between sound and sense is reinterpreted by using the concept of ‘iconicity’. After discussing the basic characteristics of the sound systems of modern standard Japanese1 in comparison with those of British English, the chapter will present an analysis of auditory manifestations of the interplay between metaphor and iconicity in some illustrative poetic texts in both languages. It can be speculated that differences in the sound structures may 127

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affect the kinds of metaphor–icon links manifested in Japanese and English poetic texts. English has more complex sound structures, and thereby has developed a more sophisticated set of phonological devices for poetic creation. Japanese, on the other hand, has relatively simple sound structures and less elaborate phonological devices for poetry. Despite these possible phonological differences, however, I would like to claim the following two points: the ubiquity of metaphor–icon links motivating poetic texts; and the usefulness of the concept of iconicity as a methodological tool for analysis. 5.1.1 The sound systems of English and Japanese Just as poetry exploits various options in the writing system for its visual effects, it also explores possibilities in the sound system to achieve certain auditory effects. Such possibilities include sound qualities inherent in each sound, as well as configurations or patterns of sounds employed in the text. This section looks at the differences in Japanese and English phonemic and syllabic structures, and relates them to their differing writing systems. More specific issues concerning the auditory representations of poetry are discussed in the following section with special reference to onomatopoeia, sound-symbolism and general features of rhyme and rhythm. It is not the aim of this chapter, however, to offer an exhaustive comparison of Japanese and English sound systems nor to provide a detailed analysis of their metrics. The purpose is to cover the basic aspects of their differences in order to discuss the auditory manifestations of imagic and diagrammatic iconicity in Japanese and English texts. Sound units in Japanese and English: syllable and mora The essential difference between English and Japanese concerns the sound units, syllable and mora. Although both English and Japanese have phonemes as the smallest sound unit, the way they formulate the units larger than phonemes is different. A mora is a unit of ‘timing’ (Ladefoged 1982: 226), whereas a syllable2 is defined in terms of the inherent sonority of each sound. The sonority of a sound is its loudness relative to that of other sounds with the same length, stress and pitch (Ladefoged 1982: 221). Therefore, the number of peaks of sonority in a word decides the number of the syllables of the word. Generally, vowels have a higher degree of sonority than consonants; and that is where the peaks of sonority in a word often reside.

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A native speaker of English might think of a word such as Nippon (‘Japan’) having two syllables, [niQ] and [pon]; but a native speaker of Japanese further divides the word into the four units, [ni], [Q ], [po] and [N].3 These four units take about the same length of time to pronounce, and constitute four morae. The most common type of Japanese mora consists of a consonant followed by a vowel (a [CV] mora). Another type is a vowel by itself, as in the word [a-i] (‘love’). This word has two morae. A long vowel is counted as having two morae. So a word such as [o-o-ki-i] (‘big’) has four morae. A consonant cannot occur after a vowel within a mora; but it too can form a mora by itself. A glottal stop [Q ] and a moraic nasal [N] are of this kind. Therefore, [V] in a [V-V] sequence, [Q ] and [N] are all pronounced with the same length of time as a [CV] mora.4 The unit of mora is of particular importance in the discussion of Japanese poetic texts in two ways: its relation to the Japanese writing system; and its function as a rhythmic unit. Firstly, each mora in Japanese is represented by one letter in kana syllabaries. Unlike an alphabetic writing system in which syllables are systematically split into their components, in the Japanese syllabaries there is one letter for each mora in each of the hiragana and katakana writing systems. Hence, a one-mora word like [ki] (‘tree’) can be written in one letter such as (in hiragana) or (in katakana); and a two-mora word like [i-ki] (‘breath’) in two letters such as (in hiragana) or (in katakana). It is widely observed that people who have not been educated in an alphabetic writing system find it more difficult to consider syllables as being made up of segments such as consonants and vowels (Ladefoged 1982: 220). This is the case with Japanese speakers, who do not consciously decompose the morae into smaller segments when they speak or hear the sounds in their natural utterances. Indeed, the mora, being a unit of both speech and writing, seems to be a dominant unit in the mental organisation and production of utterances in Japanese. Secondly, the mora is important in the rhythm of poetic texts. Japanese poetic texts are mora-timed, whereas English texts are stress-andsyllable-timed. The mora-timed texts have a rhythm in which each mora tends to have the same duration. The most prominent poetic forms in Japanese literature, haiku and tanka, have 17 and 31 morae respectively, with an alternation of the 5-mora line and the 7-mora line. This rhythm pattern is called goshichi-cho (‘5–7 melody’) or shichigo-cho (‘7–5 melody’), and is dominant not only in poetry but also in copyscripts, slogans and popular song lyrics.

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By contrast, in English, the number and the configuration of stressed and unstressed syllables are important factors in metrics. In other words, it is a combination of the unit of the syllable and the suprasegmental phenomenon of stress that determines the rhythm of English poetry in which stressed syllables tend to recur at regular intervals of time. In short, both English and Japanese have a specific way of measuring the poetic rhythm unit. English uses most predominantly the stressed syllable, while Japanese uses the mora. The crucial difference between the two languages seems to be in the perception of individual sounds or sound units in relation to the writing systems. Using an alphabetic writing system, English speakers find it comparatively easy to identify syllables and their sound make-up, whereas Japanese speakers, largely influenced by their kana syllabaries, are more tuned in to hearing the mora sequence rather than the sequence of each sound. Here again, the evidence from Japanese indicates that the written language can play a role in guiding the auditory perception of literate speakers, and this is particularly dominant in reading and composing poetic texts in Japanese (cf. Shibatani 1990: 158). The phonemic structures of Japanese and English Having said that the unit of the mora and syllable is perhaps more crucial than the unit of the phoneme when Japanese texts are compared to those of English, however, it is worth discussing briefly the phonemic structures of Japanese and English. As an inherent quality of sounds, phonemes relate closely to the sound materials of poetic texts, particularly onomatopoeia and sound-symbolism. They also count in terms of the quantity of the auditory materials available in both languages. Japanese and English differ in the number of phonemes each language has. English has a greater variety of vowels and consonants. Japanese has only five vowels, [i], [u], [e], [o], [a], while English has more than a dozen. Compared to 18 consonants in Japanese, English has 22.5 English and Japanese differ not only in the number of phonemes, but also in the make-up of syllables or morae. As discussed above, Japanese morae have rather simple constructions, compared to those of English syllables in which English allows consonant clusters, diphthongs, long vowels, and so on. In Japanese, most words end with a vowel, whereas English words can end either with a vowel, a consonant or a combination of consonants. English has three times as many vowels as Japanese. This is perhaps a major differing factor in the rhyming potential of each language. For example, Japanese traditional poetry does not seek to effect assonance

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or rhymed feet in the way that European poetry does. Alliteration can occur in Japanese poetry; but, again influenced by moraic perception, it is not as strongly felt as in European poetry. It can be concluded that the major phonological differences between Japanese and English are drawn from two sources: the sound unit of mora; and the inventory of phonemes. With regard to both sources, Japanese has a far simpler sound structure than English. My tentative prediction from this conclusion is that English poetry perhaps exploits phonological resources and effects more readily and widely than Japanese poetry. 5.1.2 Auditory representation in poetry It has been claimed that poetry exploits the resources of sound more subtly and more thoroughly than any other kind of discourse to produce effects which often reinforce the meaning (e.g. Shapiro and Beum 1965, Leech 1969, among others). The devices utilised for such auditory effects include onomatopoeia, sound-symbolism, rhyme and rhythm (metre). The former two devices concern the inherent qualities of sounds, whereas the latter two concern the configuration of sound units. This section attempts to offer a new outlook on these devices from the perspective of auditory iconicity. Onomatopoeia and sound-symbolism In a rigorous analysis, onomatopoeia and sound-symbolism are different in nature: onomatopoeia occurs when speech sounds imitate other physical sounds; and sound-symbolism when sounds are associated with other sensual or conceptual dimensions. Onomatopoeia occurs most typically in words, whereas sound-symbolism occurs in both words and in particular sounds, or more technically in distinctive features. Onomatopoeia can be understood in two major ways. Its narrowest and most literal definition is the purely mimetic use of speech sounds to describe other non-linguistic physical sounds. This definition of onomatopoeia includes, for example, the ‘cries’ of animals and birds, the natural sounds of wind and raindrops, the mechanical sounds of objects such as clocks, cars, trains, and so on. A wider interpretation of onomatopoeia concerns the phonological patterns that represent not just the sound of what they describe but the activity as a whole. For example, when Tennyson says, ‘the murmuring of innumerable bees’, the repetitive pattern of bilabials and nasals, [m], [n] and [b], connotes the humming sound of the bees and an activity of countless bees (cf. Wellek

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and Warren 1963[1949]: 162) together with the onomatopoeic word, ‘murmuring’. This second interpretation of onomatopoeia is perhaps an area in which a clear division from sound-symbolism is difficult; however, this tends to be the area that poets are more interested in exploring than the narrow sense of onomatopoeia. Sound-symbolism, ‘the tendency of particular sounds, usually irrespective of the language in which they occur, to correlate with aspects of the meaning of words containing these sounds’ (Kakehi et al. 1996: xxii) is far more exploited in poetry than onomatopoeia, possibly because it has more subtle effects and because it can appear in individual sounds as well as in words rather than just in particular words alone. Shapiro and Beum (1965: 10–12) categorise the possible soundsymbolism of consonants utilised by English poets as below. This categorisation can also apply to Japanese poetry:6 1. Resonance. In the present book we use this term stipulatively to mean prolongation and fullness of sounds. The sounds n, m, N , z and Z (none, maim, ring, nose, rouge) usually produce lingering droning, vibrant effects. The nasals (n, m, N ) are sometimes called hums. 2. Harshness. Includes throaty sounds, usually called velars, made by putting the tongue back toward the soft palate: k and hard g, as in kick and jug; or hard k, as in cough. Synonyms are dissonance and cacophony. 3. Plosiveness. Sounds articulated by a sudden release, and then an interruption, of breath: b, p, t, d, g and k are often plosive. 4. Breathiness. There is a wide range of sounds – it includes the groups known to linguists as aspirates, sibilants and fricatives – that are especially suitable in contexts that seek to create images of such qualities as breathlessness or hissing or whispering. The aspirate h perhaps should be considered separately. It may be employed to create a suggestion of breathlessness, as in fatigue or wonder or exaltation. 5. Liquidity. This is the effect of certain non-frictional and vowel-like consonants, chiefly l and r. W is another mild consonantal sound. These melodic consonants can help a poet build a resonant musical line. They are frequently conjoined with resonants. . . . The voiced sounds l, r, y, w, m and n may be grouped together and called sonorants. Leech (1969: 98–9) also lists classes of English consonants on a scale of increasing hardness:

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1. 2. 3. 4.

Liquids and nasals: /l/, /r/, /n/, /N/ (as in ‘thing’). Fricatives and aspirates: /v/, /Q/ (as in ‘there’), /f/, /s/, etc. Affricates: /tS/ (as in ‘church’), /dZ/ (as in ‘judge’). Plosives: /b/, /d/, /g/, /p/, /t/, /k/.

The presence of voice is another factor which affects soundsymbolism. Voiced consonants (/v/, /Q/, /z/, etc.) have a more relaxed articulation than their voiceless counterparts (/f/, /q/, /s/, etc.). They tend to suggest softness in English, whereas in Japanese voiced consonants tend to indicate one or more of the following effects when used in describing the manner of actions or states (Kakehi et al. 1996: xxiv): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

larger size greater quantity or volume more rigorous actions more intense degree of action or state negative meanings or associations, caused by the association of excessiveness in terms of 1 to 4 above.

Vowels are voiced sounds and have a great preponderance over consonants. In particular, long and open vowels and long diphthongs often produce a kind of softness somewhat different in quality from the softness that may be created by resonant or breathy or liquid consonants. [a] and [o] tend to suggest largeness and slowness, while [i] has the opposite tendency. These onomatopoeic and sound-symbolic factors play an important role in the imagic mapping of the auditory form onto the meaning. It seems that each sound-symbolic factor can be mapped onto different spaces in the meaning content of the text. This point will be elaborated further in the analysis of each poetic text in this chapter. Rhyme and rhythm It has often been claimed that there is a rich array of techniques in poetry that enhance auditory iconicity in terms of images and diagrams. The distinction between imagic iconicity and diagrammatic iconicity corresponds neatly with the inherent element and the relational element of sound in poetry (cf. Wellek and Warren 1963 [1949]: 159). The former is the peculiar individuality of the sound, or an independent quality inherent in the sound itself, whereas the latter is determined in relation to other sounds, for example the pitch, the duration of the sounds, the stress, the rhyme, the repetition, and so on, which are the basis of rhythm and metre.

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In contrast to imagic iconicity, auditory diagrammatic iconicity is prevalent in many poems, in which similarity relations in the phonological form are used as cues to the meaning through rhyme, semi-rhyme, alliteration, assonance, metre and all the other kinds of repetition of sounds, syllables, words, and so on. When words are brought together by rhyme, linked up or contrasted, it is often the case that readers are navigated by the sound make-up of the rhyme to read in the text something similar, something linked up or something contrasted into the text.

Summary In summary, the differences in the sound structures covered in this section affect the possible phonological representations manifested in Japanese and English poetic texts. Obviously English, having a greater number of sounds and more ways of combining these sounds, has developed more sophisticated and elaborate phonological devices for poetry than Japanese, which has a far