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Emotion Metaphors and Literary Texts: the Case of Shakespeare's Kathrin Bethke Emotion Metaphors and Literary Texts: The Case of Shakespeare’s Sonnets Abstract: In More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor, George Lakoff and Mark Turner argue that poetic metaphors are simply variations and extensions of basic conceptual metaphors that structure everyday language. Based on examples from William Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence, this article reconsiders the question of poetic metaphor with a particular focus on the func- tion of emotion metaphors in literary texts. Poetic metaphors of emotion, this study argues, can capture affective states that have no stable place in the English emotion lexicon, such as the feeling of “heaviness” described in Shakespeare’s sonnet 50 or the feeling of “worthlessness” described in sonnet 87. Even though poetic metaphors may be derived from basic conceptual metaphors, they can potentially function as absolute metaphors that make historically as well as cul- turally remote affective states accessible to the intellect. Keywords: conceptual metaphor, embodiment, emotion, metaphor, prosody, Shakespeare, sonnet 1 Emotion metaphors as absolute metaphors What is the function of metaphors in the representation and description of affec- tive phenomena? How do emotion metaphors work when they are part of a literary text? And is there, in fact, any difference between the emotion concepts we use in our everyday language and poetic metaphors of emotion? Scholars from the field of cognitive linguistics have argued that metaphors are not just “a matter of word play,” but that they are an integral part of the human conceptual system (Lakoff and Turner 1989, 50; Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Zoltán Kövecses has shown in numerous studies that conceptual metaphors are frequently used in everyday discourses of emotions (Kövecses 1988, 1990, 2000). Lakoff and Turner have also argued that there is usually no qualitative difference between metaphorical expressions in literary texts and ordinary language: poetic metaphors are in most cases variations or extensions of the same basic concepts that structure our every- day language, they claim (1989, 9). The present study reconsiders the question of poetic metaphor with a special focus on figurative descriptions of affective states. Based on examples from William Shakespeare’s 1609 sonnet sequence, it argues that literary texts encode Open Access. © 2021 Kathrin Bethke, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110642032-002 16 Kathrin Bethke a historically specific knowledge of affect by means of their figurative language. Even though the conceptual metaphors that structure these poems might be basic and conventional, the way they are blended and extended makes them capable of capturing subtle and often nameless affective states: Shakespeare’s sonnets frequently describe affective phenomena that no longer occupy a stable place in the English emotion lexicon. Sonnet 50, for example, thematizes the feeling of “heaviness”, which, throughout the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, was used as a synonym for sadness and was thus associated with melancholia.1 Sonnet 87 portrays, in a cascade of metaphors from the source domains of law and trade, the sudden drop in self-esteem after being rejected by a lover. While the word “heaviness” was used widely as a signifier for an emotional state in Shakespeare’s time, it is difficult, if not impossible, to find in the catalogue of available emotion words a proper label for the emotion portrayed in sonnet 87. In texts like these, emotion metaphors become “absolute metaphors.”2 They have the capacity of not just illustrating, but actually creating nuances of emotions or affective dispositions that are either not registered in our emotion lexicon at all, or that have become marginal over time. Considering the metaphorical structure of these poems, as well as the way their figurative language interacts with their sound structure and metrical peculiarities, will show that poetic metaphors have the power of making accessible the intricate facets of emotional states that belong to historically or culturally removed affect cultures. Connected to the argument of this case study, then, is the larger argument that literary texts can serve as storage spaces of a knowledge of affect that is neither covered entirely by folk theories of emotion (as they are expressed in everyday concepts) nor by scientific discourses of emotion in any given period. 2 Theoretical perspectives on metaphor and emotion The theoretical history of emotion metaphors is as old as the theory of metaphor itself: 1 The Sonnets are cited following The Norton Shakespeare (Shakespeare 2008). 2 The concept of “absolute metaphors” as “translations” that “resist being converted back into authenticity and logicality” was introduced in 1960 by Hans Blumenberg in Paradigms of a Met- aphorology (2010, 3). Emotion Metaphors and Literary Texts 17 Let us begin then, with the commonest and by far the most beautiful of tropes, namely metaphor, the Greek term for our translatio. It is not merely so natural a turn of speech that it is often employed unconsciously or by uneducated persons […]. It adds to the copious- ness of language by the interchange of words and by borrowing, and finally succeeds in accomplishing the supremely difficult task of giving a name to everything. (Quintilian 1922, 8.6.4–5; emphasis in original) This passage from Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria mentions two characteristics of figurative speech that overlap with the core arguments of conceptual meta- phor theory. Firstly, Quintilian draws attention to the fact that metaphor is not an exclusively ornamental feature of refined speech but that we use metaphorical concepts frequently in our everyday language – without even noticing. Secondly, he argues that figurative language is able to fill lexical gaps, that it provides lin- guistic expressions wherever the so-called verbum proprium is missing: “A noun or a verb is transferred from the place to which it properly belongs to another where there is either no literal term or the transferred is better than the literal” (Quintilian 1922, 8.6.5; emphasis in original). His examples suggest that the field of human emotions and affective dispositions is one in which metaphor’s capacity to supplement our lexical system is needed most: “We speak of a hard or rough man,” he says, because there is “no literal term for these temperaments” (Quin- tilian 1922, 8.6.6; emphasis in original). The same is true for the description of the following affective states: “we say that a man is kindled to anger (‘incensum irae’) or on fire with greed (‘inflammatum cupiditatae’) or that he has fallen into error (‘lapsum errore’)” because none of these processes can be rendered better “in its own word (‘verbum proprium’) than in those we import from elsewhere” (Quintilian 1922, 8.6.7; emphasis in original). George Lakoff and his collaborators have amended and expanded Quintil- ian’s substitution theory of metaphor by insisting that metaphorical processes are not in fact based on the exchange of words or lexical positions but rather rely on the transfer of concepts and image schemas in order to make abstract phenomena accessible to our intellect in the first place. Metaphors, they argue, have a cogni- tive as well as an epistemological function, and structure the entire conceptual system on which our perception of the world is based: “human thought processes are largely metaphorical,” they claim (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 6). Their theory of conceptual metaphor can be summarized as follows: In general it can be suggested that a conceptual metaphor consists of a source and a target domain and that the source domain is, at least in the everyday cases, typically better under- stood and more concrete than the target domain. (Kövecses 2008, 381) 18 Kathrin Bethke The process of exchanging and replacing words from a paradigm of signifiers con- nected by similarity, as it is described by Quintilian, now becomes a process of conceptual mapping. According to Lakoff and Turner, the mapping process trans- fers properties and knowledge, as well as structures and relations, that belong to the concrete source domain to the abstract target domain, thereby connecting and blending both conceptual domains with one another, or even creating and inventing features of the target domain by building new properties and structures into it (Lakoff and Turner 1989, 54, 67). Like Quintilian, the Hungarian scholar of linguistics Zoltán Kövecses has shown that conceptual metaphors also pervade everyday language about emo- tions. He has identified the basic concepts from which conventional expressions regarding various emotions are derived. In his notation each conceptual meta- phor is rendered in capitals and followed by examples of its linguistic actualiza- tion in italics: LOVE IS A NUTRIENT: I am starved for love. […] LOVE IS A FLUID IN A CONTAINER: She was overflowing with love. LOVE IS FIRE: I am burning with love. LOVE IS AN ECONOMIC EXCHANGE: I’m putting more into this than you are. […] LOVE IS A NATURAL FORCE: She swept me off my feet. LOVE IS AN OPPONENT: She tried to fight her feelings of love. […] LOVE IS A SOCIAL SUPERIOR: She was completely ruled by love. (Kövecses 2000, 26) Although the capitalized concept of “LOVE” suggests that all these examples target the same phenomenon, it has to be noted that each of them actually addresses one specific
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