A.V.Kryshtof
Kamianets-Podilsky Ivan Ohienko National University
Scientific Supervisor: PhD,associate professor O.V. Halaibida
TEXTUAL EMBODIMENT OF CONCEPTUAL SITUATION “DEATH AS A DEPARTURE” IN POETICAL LANGUAGE OF EMILY DICKINSON
The paper highlights the issue of relations between human thought and perception; structuring the experience of the world through the metaphor. The author presents the analysis of concept DEATH and means of its verbalization. The dominant means of verbalization are personification and metaphor.
Key words: metaphorical structure, conceptual metaphor, death.
Recent work in cognitive linguistics, especially in the area of metaphor, has developed a much more sophisticated view of the relations between human thought and perception.
Researchers George Lakoff, Mark Johnson and Mark Turner have shown how the metaphorical structures of everyday language are embodied in our physical experience of the world and have given us an opportunity to identify and recognize the idealized cognitive models that underlie our common everyday understanding of the world in which we live [3; 4].
If we are to understand how a poet like Emily Dickinson structures her experience of the world, we need to look at the way she structures her metaphors of that world.
Recent research in cognitive linguistics, has also shown, that we organize our knowledge according to prototypes, and that we assign membership to categories, not on the basis of inherent similarity in concepts or objects, but according to how tightly or loosely they conform to the prototypes.
The aim of the article is to analyse the textual embodiment of conceptual situation “DEATH AS A DEPARTURE” in the poems by Emily Dickinson. The research will focus on the study of metaphors for Death from the poem “Because I Could Not Stop For Death”.
The supposed basic “operations” of “extending”, “elaborating”, “composing”, “questioning” of conventionalized conceptual metaphors are in fact poetic semantic strategies oriented towards “contradicting” the “parameters of generic-level structure” of metaphors and, consequently, our ordinary experience in the world. E. Dickinson develops the poem by using poetic devices of repetition, personification, metaphor, epithets, pun, irony, capitalizing letters and alliteration. It gives the massage that while one is never prepared to meet death but one should happily face the fact that death is the real destiny of man.
Lakoff and Turner assume that ever since the first stanza, the poem introduces the idea of death-as-departure with no return [4].
According to this the first stanza is a poetic elaboration of the DEATH IS DEPARTURE metaphor. The personification of Death in the first stanza, second line, as “a coachman coming to take away someone who is dying” and “the details” of the Death’s journey, i.e. in a carriage (first stanza, third line), are not supposed to “contradict” our ordinary metaphorical conception of Death. This is supposed to be the case because the conventionalized metaphors are not very specific with respect to “the details” of the metaphorical mappings.
The problem with this interpretation arises however when we consider the third companion to the journey of Death: the Immortality. As one can easily notice, the way in which Dickinson puts together the two incompatible images of Death in order to construct her poetic metaphor demonstrates already a turn. Although Dickinson makes use of the same image-schema as the conventionalized metaphor DEATH IS DEPARTURE, her metaphor is different from the metaphor of our ordinary language [5, p. 39].
More specifically, if Dickinson’s metaphor for Death really originates in the DEATH IS DEPARTURE metaphor of our ordinary language, she uses this metaphor only as a “departure” point in building up her poetic vision. In this way, the DEATH IS DEPARTURE conventionalized metaphor is used by the poetic thought as a semantic strategy that brings in collision incompatible “facts” or images in order to trigger the semantic process of the poetic vision’s construction. Furthermore, in the emergence of Dickinson’s “metaphoric world” it is obvious that the generic-level parameters of Death are not preserved at all, as claimed by Lakoff and Turner. Rather, these parameters for Death are “completely changed” to the extent that they are subordinated to the specific poetic function.
Thus, Lakoff and Turner argue that Dickinson’s metaphor faces us with a case of “extension” from death-as-departure metaphor, where “the departure is seen as the beginning of a journey to a final destination” [4]. The final destination “can be, for example, God the Father’s house, punishment in hell, an assigned spot in the underworld, final rest, or the place of one’s origin, which can be one’s home”. Yet, neither the explanation of Dickinson’s metaphor as a sort of “extension” from death-as-departure metaphor within the religious tradition, nor the reductive view of interpreting it in terms of “a journey toward a final destination, namely the grave” is supported by Dickinson’s poem.
Freeman, for example, demonstrates that Dickinson’s poetic universe neglects the cultural model of Calvinist theology, underlying the usual understanding of the world in the 19th century and creates rather a “scientific” model, uncommon to the Calvinist based society in which she has lived [1].
Thus, the author demonstrates that Dickinson’s metaphors for Death avoid any possible interpretation of life as “a path that has a specific, predetermined destination”, namely “the heaven”, on the one side. On the other side, as Freeman argues, “Dickinson found it difficult, if not impossible, to accept the notion that «death» was at the «end» of a linear progression of a «lifetime» and that «Eternity» somehow came after. For Dickinson, Eternity was «in time»”.
So, Death is not the end of life. Death appears as the start or the beginning of “eternity”. It means that when we die we are going to a better place far away that is believed to be the place full of joy. It is a bigger and more beautiful place for us than the one on earth. The process of death will take us to the way where we become closer to attain freedom from this worldly place and from the dictates of the senses, the service of the body, and the impression in the mind.
References
- Freeman M.H. Metaphor making meaning: Dickinson’s conceptual universe / M.H. Freeman. Journal of Pragmatics, 24, 1995. 643-666.
- Johnson Mark. The body in the mind: the bodily basis of meaning, imagination, and reason / Mark Johnson. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. 268 p.
- Lakoff George. Johnson Mark. Metaphors we live by / G. Lakoff, M. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1980. 192 p.
- Lakoff Turner Mark. More than cool reason: a field guide to poetic metaphor / G. Lakoff, M. Turner. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1980. 240 p.
- Lakoff George. The invariance hypothesis: is abstract reason based on image schemas in Cognitive linguistics / G. Lakoff. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990. 39-74.
- The complete poems of Emily Dickinson. [Ed. by Thomas H. Johnson]. Little, Brown and Company, 2014. 784 p.