William Shakespeare's Sonnet 130: a Conceptual

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William Shakespeare's Sonnet 130: a Conceptual WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S SONNET 130 : A CONCEPTUAL INTEGRATION ANALYSIS OF PARODY ANNA KĘDRA-KARDELA Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin Abstract: The paper develops a Cognitive Poetics analysis of William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130”, which is a clear parody of the Elizabethan sonnet. Based on the insights of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s (2002) conceptual blending theory, combined with Ronald Langacker’s (2008) theory of the Current Discourse Space, an attempt is made to account for the mechanism underlying the parody and its inversion in the sonnet. Key words: Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130”, parody, Cognitive Poetics, Current Discourse Space, Conceptual Integration Theory 1. Introduction The aim of this paper is to develop a cognitive analysis of William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 (see Appendix ), believed to be a parody, by using the Conceptual Integration Theory (CIT) as proposed by Fauconnier and Turner (2002), combined with Langacker’s (2008) theory of the Current Discourse Space (CDS). The parody developed in the sonnet’s quatrains is inverted in the sonnet’s final couplet, which, unexpectedly, offers a conventional ending, in agreement with the Elizabethan sonnet convention. 2. Fauconnier and Turner’s Conceptual Integration Theory—CIT CIT is based on the idea of mental spaces , defined by Fauconnier and Turner (2003:40; henceforth F&T) as small conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk, for purposes of local understanding and action. […] Mental spaces are connected to long-term schematic knowledge called “frames,” […] and to long-term specific knowledge […]. Mental spaces are very partial. They contain elements and are typically structured by frames. They are interconnected, and can be modified as thought and discourse unfold. Mental spaces can be used generally to model dynamic mappings in thought and language. According to F&T, conceptual blending involves the construction of two or more input spaces , a generic space , which contains elements the input spaces have in common, and the blend . The blend includes selected elements from the input spaces which, when combined, ultimately create a new conceptual structure. It is important to note that not all elements of the input spaces are projected onto the blend, which, being an emergent structure, recruits only some elements of the input spaces. One of the most important cognitive processes involved in conceptual integration is elaboration , also known as running the blend , a process which creates a parody effect. Figure 1 shows a conceptual integration network for the B.A.S. , vol. XXI, 2015 174 expression smog (the box in the blend contains new information, absent in either of the input spaces): Generic Space Lack of visibility Input Space 1 Input Space 2 FOG SMOKE Lack of visibility Lack of visibility White cloud Grey, white or black Weather phenomenon cloud produced by something that is burning Grey or black cloud Mixture of fog and smoke Blend SMOG Polluted air . Figure 1. Conceptual Integration Network The capacity of the blend to be “run” accounts for the dynamicity of categorization: the blend can be modified, or elaborated, after it has been created. As we shall presently see, the running of the blend process applies to Sonnet 130 and can be viewed as a principal mechanism accounting for interpretation processes, in the case at hand - for a parody effect. Sonnet 130 is no doubt a parody and it is precisely this ‘sense of parody’ that, I claim, appears as the emergent structure of the blend and is recognized as such by the sonnet’s reader. Although the reader’s recognition of parody is legitimate here – the sonnet’s three quatrains appear to support the reader’s conjecture – the lines “And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she 175 WORDS IN CONTEXT belied with false compare” appear to “undo” the parody effect. The question is: how to account for this “interpretational inversion”? In my attempt to do this, I will make use of the Current Discourse Space, combining it with the Conceptual Integration Network. 3. Current Discourse Space The term CDS is used by Langacker to refer to all facets of a situation which are “shared by the speaker and hearer as the basis for communication at a given moment” (cf. Langacker 2008: 466; also see Langacker 2008:59, 281). CDS comprises a wide body of background knowledge and when the discourse unfolds, the successive utterances are interpreted, continually updating CDS (Langacker 2008:281). The CDS, can be presented diagrammatically as follows (Langacker 2008:466): PREVIOUS USAGE EVENT CURRENT USAGE EVENT ANTICIPATED USAGE EVENT Objective Content > > S H Ground CURRENT DISCOURSE SPACE —CDS TRANSIENT CONTEXT STABLE KNOWLEDGE Figure 2. Current Discourse Space As the discourse develops, its interlocutors, the speaker (S), and the hearer (H), negotiate the content of the discourse frames, each of which is the actualization of the preceding frame. For example, in Sonnet 130, each new aspect of the lady’s appearance evokes a new frame. The information accumulates, ultimately yielding a “complete” portrait of the woman. (See Section 5; for a discussion of the CDS, see Langacker (2008:466; cf. Kędra-Kardela 2013.) The CDS contains a series of so-called usage events , i.e. instances of language use which embrace the expression’s understanding determined by the context. Generally, the CDS includes the Current Usage Event (CUE), the Previous Usage Event (UE), and the Anticipated Usage Event (AUE). Although a usage event is never the same for the speaker and the hearer, a considerable overlap between them guarantees “successful communication” (Langacker 2008:457-458; 465-466). B.A.S. , vol. XXI, 2015 176 In Langacker’s theory, the CUE is what the conceptualizer most immediately relates to. The so-called objective content represents the central facet of CUE; it is an entity, a thing or a situation which the conceptualizer recognizes or identifies (Langacker 2008:462; cf. Kędra-Kardela 2013:344). The objective content is, to a great extent, shared by the speaker and hearer. For example, in the case of Shakespeare’s sonnet, the objective content includes features of the lady’s appearance. Appropriate language units encode the objective content, playing the role of “instructions” for the conceptualizer/reader to construct a given conceptualization. Transient context, Langacker (2008:464) posits, “comprises […] the immediate transient circumstances in which a usage event occurs. Understood in a broader sense, it further includes more stable arrangements and shared knowledge in terms of which we apprehend the immediate circumstances.” Shared knowledge may involve social, cultural and linguistic aspects (Langacker 2008: 465). A literary text can thus also be treated as a series of usage events, whose interpretation is going to depend on the convention, on the context, on what is said openly and on what is merely suggested. Viewed in this light, a literary text – just like all linguistic structures – plays a similar role: it provides instruction for the reader as to how a literary text is to be read and interpreted. In the case of the parody in Sonnet 130, the reader has to rely not only on what Shakespeare’s sonnet tells us, but, to a great extent, also on what the sonnet does not say explicitly but only suggests, thus referring the reader to the information derived from the transient context and from the stable knowledge s/he possesses. In order to perform the readerly “reconstruction” of the “world” represented in the sonnet, we first have to briefly address the problem of the literary convention which the conceptualizer has to identify in order to be able to recognize elements of parody in the poem. Otherwise the interpretation of Shakespeare’s sonnet in parody terms would not be possible: after all, what the text tells us is that the speaker of the sonnet loves a woman who is not beautiful. Naturally, there is nothing strange in loving somebody whose appearance does not match the ideal of beauty, but it is not this kind of love that the genre of the sonnet extols. In order to read the sonnet as a parody, the conceptualizer (speaker/hearer) has to make use of the frames of knowledge which constitute the background knowledge on which CDS is based. As is generally claimed, in literary communication such signals as those which indicate the convention employed have an impact on the way a text is going to be read, i.e. interpreted. Now, what I wish to claim is that the CDS determines the creation of mental spaces which combine to yield the so-called blend, where the meaning of the poem is held to reside. 4. The sonnet as a source of background information As Tom Furniss and Michael Bath (1996:280; henceforth F&B) write: The sonnet […] is […] [an] example of a fixed or ‘closed’ form because its defining characteristics are largely formal. In conclusion, they observe that 177 WORDS IN CONTEXT Arguably, it is possible to make sense of many poems without consciously identifying their genres, but to read a sonnet without recognizing that it is a sonnet is likely to frustrate any competent understanding. (ibid.) Indeed, it is even more important to be able to identify the genre in the case of parody, where the understanding of the poem’s message hinges on the recognition of the genre and on the comparison of the actual poem with the model. As the detailed discussion of the sonnet as a literary genre in the Elizabethan tradition is beyond the scope of this study, I limit the description of the sonnet to its most important features. The sonnet was traditionally addressed to a woman (though a vast part of Shakespeare’s sonnets is addressed to a “fair youth”). The celebrated objects of platonic love were beautiful women or ideas of perfection and beauty (e.g.
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