Metaphor in Illness Writing

Front matter

ANITA WOHLMANN

EDINBURGH

FIGHT AND BATTLE REUSED

Introduction

1. Metaphor Use: Strategies and Methods

2. Susan Sontag: Using Metaphor ‘to see more, to hear more, to feel more’

3. Audre Lorde: Stretching, Risks and Difference

4. Anatole Broyard: A Style for Being Ill; or, Metaphor ‘Light’

5. David Foster Wallace’s Troubled Little Soldier: Narrative and Irony

6. From Theory to Practice: A Method for Using Metaphor

Conclusion

Bibliography Index

132 158 188

194 273

Acknowledgements

My interest in metaphors started with literary representations of the female body by nineteenth-century North American women writers. Located at the Obama Institute of Transnational American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, and in collaboration with the research programme ‘Life Sciences — Life Writing’, the project developed under the energetic and inspiring guidance of Mita Banerjee and Alfred Hornung into a research project supported by the German Research Foundation (grant no. WO 2139/2-1). I will always be profoundly grateful for the support I have received from colleagues in Mainz, including among many others my PhD supervisor Oliver Scheiding.

When I was invited to join the research project ‘Uses of Literature: The Social Dimensions of Literature’? at the University of Southern Denmark in 2017 (grant no. DNRF127), a new phase began in every point of view. I found a generous, warm-hearted and intellectually stimulating home, and my research project on metaphors took a decisive turn: the varied uses of literature that we studied under the guidance of Niels Bohr Professor Rita Felski profoundly influenced my approach to metaphors. I am eternally grateful to Rita Felski, Anne-Marie Mai and Peter Simonsen for their trust and kindness, their continuously productive feedback, and their support and guidance every step of the way.

Each chapter specifies the individuals to whom I owe particular thanks. In addition, my profound gratitude goes to everyone who read excerpts of the book, commented on articles I wrote alongside, listened to early and more developed thoughts, inspired me with new ideas, challenged my often too simplistic arguments — and to everyone who was there to cheer me up when writing was tedious and, too often, felt overwhelming: Alan Bleakley, Alastair Morrison, Anders Juhl Langscheidel Rasmussen, Arthur Frank, Bryan Yazell, Christina Gerlach, Christine Marks, Cindie Aaen Maagard, Daniel Teufel, Danielle Spencer, Elin Abrahamsson, Ella Fegitz, Emily Hogg, Johanne vi

Acknowledgements vii

Gormsen Schmidt, Klaus Petersen, Maura Spiegel, Marie-Elizabeth Lei Holm, Miriam Halstein, Moritz Schramm, Patrick Fessenbecker, Pernille Hasselsteen, Sophy Kohler and Susanne Michl. (My apologies to everyone who should be part of this list and isn’t.)

At Edinburgh University Press, I want to thank Michelle Houston, Susannah Butler and Fiona Conn as well as series editor Gavin Miller and copyeditor Robert Anderson for their consistent support and the incredibly encouraging spirit along the way.

Anna Fenton-Hathaway’s extraordinary skills at copyediting provided not only the most generous and warm-hearted moral boost along the way, but our collaboration is also the reason why this book is, despite its focus on theory and detailed close readings, relatively readable. Anna, I cannot thank you enough.

I am also very grateful to Horacio Salinas who kindly provided one of his stunning photographs for the cover image of this book.

Lastly, what would I do without you, friends and family, in my old and new home? You know who you are.

Series Editor’s Preface

Contemporary Cultural Studies in Illness, Health and Medicine Series Editor: Gavin Miller

Over the last fifty years or so, texts and other cultural productions on illness, health and medicine have flourished across a variety of genres and media. This book series fosters critical readings of such cultural productions, with an openness to variety in genre, medium and cultural capital. The series expects scholarly rigour and theoretical acumen, but no single theoretical or methodological standpoint is stipulated. Readers will encounter innovative and sustained critical readings that respond to the cutting — or bleeding — edge of contemporary cultures of illness, health and medicine.

viii

Introduction

Metaphors are never inherently harmful, stigmatising or prescriptive; nor are they per se healing, inviting or generative. Such verdicts reveal the binaries through which metaphors are often conceptualised. Metaphor in Illness Writing: Fight and Battle Reused reaches past these binaries to explore the varied usability of common, conventionalised metaphors, arguing that, even when a metaphor appears problematic and limiting, it can in fact be reused and reimagined in unexpected and creative ways.

The terms ‘reuse’ and ‘reusable’ quickly evoke the environmental discourse of sustainability and with it concepts like recycling, upcycling and downcycling, second-hand economies and repair. These concepts are more timely than ever in our world; they also speak to what is at the heart of this book, namely the assumption that metaphors — though seemingly abundant — are precious resources that we can and need to work with rather than throw away. Practices of reuse are especially relevant when a metaphor has become internalised, when it seems worn-out, or when it starts to be considered a risk. Rather than considering such metaphors useless or expendable, this book proposes other options: we can extend a metaphor’s longevity, we can repair it, or we can repurpose it (if need be) and thereby — in the spirit of upcycling - discover new value.

Both the varied usability of metaphor and the value of reuse is demonstrated by contemporary North American! writers including Susan Sontag, Audre Lorde, Anatole Broyard, David Foster Wallace and Arthur Frank — whose work I discuss alongside that of Siri Hustvedt, Joan Didion, Eve Ensler and Sarah Manguso. In their writing on illness, all work with the multiple entailments of an extremely common metaphor: illness is a fight or battle. All of these writers echo the criticism that this metaphor has provoked: it justifies brutality and extreme measures in the treatment of illness; its martial associations can be intimidating; it considers the body (and its illness) an enemy, thus supporting a problematic body—mind duality; and it suggests only one desirable outcome (victory) and associates losing the fight or capitulating with failure and humiliation.

And yet, despite all its problematic implications, these patientwriters continue to use the metaphor. In remaining attached to notions of battle, fight and warfare, these accomplished writers are not alone. The militaristic metaphor is one of the most frequently used metaphors for cancer and other illnesses (Semino et al., ‘Online Use’; Hommerberg et al.). Patients and health professionals alike make references to fight and battle unconsciously by way of ubiquitous and clichéd, internalised expressions. Yet the metaphor is also used deliberately, as it seems to express what illness, to many, actually feels like.

Sontag, Lorde, Broyard, Wallace and Frank use the fight metaphor self-reflexively and purposefully: they ponder its benefits and harms, tinker with the notion of battle, elaborate it by drawing out more and more meanings, combine it with other metaphors and stretch the metaphor until it fits their life stories, individual circumstances and worldviews. In the process, they activate the metaphor’s generative potential in ingenious, creative and empowering ways. The controversial fight metaphor, in their hands, constitutes a space for agency, resistance, self-knowledge, repair — even pleasure.

How can we understand the malleability of metaphors when metaphors are so often (and often for good reasons) considered prescriptive, normative and even stigmatising? By which specific strategies and practices do the writer-patients I mention exploit that malleability to accommodate active reuse, maybe even creative misuse? Are such practices transferable from literary writing to other contexts? And if so, how can that process be enabled and conceptualised?

Metaphor in Illness Writing offers some answers to these questions by promoting a more capacious understanding of metaphors and their role in illness writing — as well as in health care more generally. Rather than locking metaphors into either/or categories and assuming default qualities, the case studies I examine in the following chapters decouple metaphor from too-rigidly defined functions. My analysis focuses on aesthetic choices that can activate and amplify metaphor’s varied usability (the first premise of this book). In examining practices of usability, I foreground metaphor analysis and offer close readings of manifest practices of remaking, restoration and repair. As will become clear, practices of reusing metaphor are not restricted to the ingenuity of internationally recognised literary writers. Patients and health professionals, too, continually rethink and reuse metaphors in creative, defiant and playful ways. Such imaginative uses are the result of distinct strategies, from which we can learn (the second premise of this book) to expand our own uses of metaphors.

In analysing the varied usability of metaphor in literary writing and health care more generally, this book advances existing approaches to metaphor and contributes to the work being done in the areas of Medical Humanities? and Narrative Medicine,’ where cross-fertilisations between literary studies and health care practice are studied.

WRITING ABOUT ILLNESS: NARRATIVE AND METAPHOR

Illness narratives have been an ample resource in Medical Humanities, Narrative Medicine and literary studies. Alternatively labelled ‘illness narrative’ or ‘(auto)pathography’, the genre has been dated back to the 1950s, when it emerged out of or alongside the contexts of patient advocacy activism, civil rights movements, a changing doctor-patient relationship and the general boom of life writing and self-help literature (e.g. Hawkins). Psychiatrist and anthropologist Arthur Kleinman has demonstrated the importance of subjective narratives of illness as opposed to (or complementary with) biomedical definitions of diseases. In didactically oriented illness narratives, writers want to share their knowledge with other patients in order to encourage and empower (e.g. Hawkins). Other writers construct illness narratives as socio-cultural critique, to call for protest against prevailing policies, norms and values in health care and beyond (e.g. Lorde, Cancer Journals).

Typologies of illness narratives such as journey, rebirth, restitution, chaos and triumph have been identified across the genre (e.g. Hawkins; Frank, Wounded). Although sometimes problematically oversimplified (for a critique, see Woods, ‘Beyond’), these conceptual frames are used to make sense of an experience in the face of meaninglessness and disruption. Indeed, it has been argued that writing about lifealtering disease is not only a means of ordering experience but also of symbolic repair (Brody; Frank, Wounded). That is, the ill experience a form of healing through storytelling because ‘Narrative form alters experience, giving it a definite shape, organising events into a beginning, a middle and an end, and adding drama — heightening feelings and seeing the individuals involved as characters in a therapeutic plot’ (Hawkins 15).

While largely analysed in terms of autobiographical writing, scholars have also examined the genre’s entanglement with other narrative forms such as conversion or redemption narratives or adventure stories (Couser, Recovering; Hawkins; Hunter). With their recognisably literary plots and frames, illness narratives raise challenging questions for literary criticism, where approaches informed by critique and suspicion are dominant: ‘For scholars trained in such habits of reading’, Jurecic claims, ‘the idea of trusting a narrative to provide access to the experience of another person indicates a naive understanding of how such texts function’ (Illness 3). How is one to critically challenge these texts while still affirming the claims they make to their own truth and lived experience?

In foregrounding the narrative dimensions of illness writing, researchers have echoed the predominant focus on narrative in the field of Medical Humanities more generally. Since the ‘narrative turn’ in the latter part of the twentieth century, narrative has been considered not only a literary form but also a social discourse, a speech act and a cognitive schema (Tammi). As an essential ‘part of the fabric of our lived experience’ (Eakin 2), narrative has also been studied as a cognitive instrument which we use to construct reality and through which we understand ourselves — our identities, experiences and lives — in time (e.g. Bruner; Eakin; Mink; Ricoeur, Time and ‘Narrative’). Moreover, researchers have demonstrated how medical information and caregiving are structured and enriched by stories (e.g. Greenhalgh and Hurwitz; Hunter). The umbrella term ‘narrative’ brings together scholars and researchers from multiple disciplinary backgrounds and has become a productive and unifying reference point in Medical Humanities and Narrative(-based) Medicine.

This predominance has also attracted criticism. Narrative, it has been argued, has mattered both too much and for the wrong reasons, namely when a normative, overly broad, overly enthusiastic yet limited understanding of narrative is employed (e.g. Garden; Tammi; Woods, ‘Limits’ and ‘Beyond’). Typical assumptions about narrative consider its hallmarks to be ‘sequence, succession, causality, or closure’ (Tammi 22). But whether or not these features adequately define narrative — and to what extent they can provide access to our own stories, let alone those of others (Butler) — remains in question. Do human beings really live by the diachronic continuity that narrative seems to impose?, critics ask (e.g. Strawson). (Chronic) pain, disability, dementia or trauma and their representations seem to resist narratibility and narrativisation (Conway; Garden; Kirmayer; Marks, ‘Metaphors’). Angela Woods identifies an additional blind spot in granting primary status to narrative: narrative coherence can be harmful when it forces inchoate experiences into a false or constraining order, or when it promotes decidedly Western conceptualisations of the self as an autonomous agent (‘Limits’ 73-4).

Partly in response to such critiques, the ‘Critical Medical Humanities’ have taken up a more self-reflexive and sceptical stance towards some of the premises and tenets of the field (e.g. Viney et al.). While some scholars have tried to bypass ‘narrative’ by using other terms — such as ‘illness writing’ (Schmidt) — or have ventured into adjacent genres — such as the illness essay (Jurecic, ‘Illness Essay’), others have retained the term and have clarified their postclassical (and thus much broader) understanding of what narrative encompasses, including paintings, dance, music or comics (e.g. Spencer). As Stella Bolaki wonders in Illness as Many Narratives, would ‘moving beyond narrative ... be necessary or desired if we were to define narrativity more broadly and multiply existing narratives’ (6)? Bolaki ultimately concludes that ‘there is room to challenge and expand narrative’s conception and role within the medical humanities field’ (6). In fact, there is intriguing research in narrative theory that confounds the traditional alignment of narrative with qualities such as order, coherence and linearity; this line of research has generated notions of the disnarrated, the unnarratable and non-narration (Abbott; Prince; Warhol). And, of course, narrative techniques such as stream-of-consciousness, gaps, silences, leaps and fragments challenge simplistic conceptualisations of narrative. In other words, narrative is not necessarily a natural, all-encompassing and always available structure that automatically implies a subjugation of chaos and complexity into neat, culturally legitimised forms.

Controversy around narrative’s limitations has produced intriguing new perspectives on what may lie beyond narrative. Of the field of Medical Humanities, Woods asks: ‘What place is there for formlessness, for meaninglessness, for silence?’ (‘Beyond’ 125). She suggests that there is both fascinating material and applicable concepts the Medical Humanities might borrow from visual media such as photography and drawing, as well as from music and haiku poetry (124). Phenomenology and philosophy more generally, also offers an alternative to the teleology of narrative by foregrounding the present moment (e.g. Carel, Illness). Catherine Belling makes a plea for the ‘lyric mode’, which does not rely on plot and temporal succession but on moments of reflection and contemplation, where the time is ‘always “now”’ and ‘the mind is to itself? (2). And Sara Wasson proposes a focus on the episodic, which foregrounds open-endedness and fragmentary states rather than closure or telos. She suggests ‘dwelling with the scene as a moment in itself, not only implying future decline, not only about a temporal trajectory, but about something instant, present, embodied and now” (6; original emphasis). As Belling notes, metaphor, too, foregrounds the present moment by yanking us ‘outside the current of plot’ through tiny shocks of surprise and flashes of immediate, seemingly inevitable insight (5; also see Wood, How 202, 209). Such jolts to consciousness are particularly prevalent in new, vivid metaphors, which are often associated with atemporality and sensory experiences rather than causality and linearity (see Chapter 4).

Metaphor is, of course, not a cure-all to the limits of narrative, nor is it a shiny new thing in Medical Humanities research. Susan Sontag’s essays on illness metaphors are ground zero for critical inquiries into metaphors and presumably the most cited sources in the field on this topic. More recently, Alan Bleakley’s comprehensive survey Thinking with Metaphors in Medicine offers a book-length account of metaphor in health care.+ Numerous other studies have discussed the role of metaphor in health care as a central element in, for example, psychotherapy (Agstner; Kirmayer); doctor-patient and science communication (e.g. Casarett et al.; Kendall-Taylor and Haydon); and in the expression of illness experiences more generally (Conway; Woolf). From the perspective of literary studies, Christine Marks has found metaphor to be a contributing factor to the healing process some people find in writing their illness narratives: metaphors, she argues, are agents of transformation but also help create connection (‘Metaphor’ 14, 18). Medical anthropologist Gay Becker sees metaphors as fulfilling a similar function as narrative, namely as a tool for people trying to mend a severe disruption in their lives and both locate new meanings and re-establish a sense of continuity (‘Metaphors’ 404). In moments of existential loss (such as strokes or infertility), Becker’s interviewees used metaphor as a cultural resource ‘to create linkages between past and future’ but also ‘to create bridges back to normalising ideologies’ (Disrupted 189).°

Other scholars have been less sanguine about the role of metaphor. Their critiques echo, in some ways, those brought against narrative. Elaine Scarry, Lisa Diedrich and Kathlyn Conway, for example, question the capacity of language, whether literal or figurative, to share the experience and meanings of serious pain and suffering. Conway asserts that many writers struggle intensely to express something that is, in fact, ‘unmanageable and beyond language’ (95). “They try direct language. They try metaphor. They quote other famous writers’ (95). Despite these efforts, ‘Words fail in the face of suffering. Language intrudes itself between the sufferer and the listener, creating a distance from the felt experience’ (97).° This scepticism about language is an important reminder that metaphor is not, of course, a solution to problems of narrative and to what is inexpressible in illness. Moreover, especially in view of metaphor’s darker side — its potential to prescribe and stigmatise — we should neither over- nor underestimate its power. And yet, as Marks argues, however insufficient metaphors may be in giving ‘direct expression to pain’, they ‘open up new ways, new dimensions, and new landscapes in which we may never actually come into direct contact with the referent, but may feel its presence with a new force’ (‘Metaphors’ 305). In The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison reaffirms the creative and transcendent qualities of metaphorical language when she maintains that ‘Metaphors translate emotion into surprising and sublime language’ (123). Jamison adds that metaphors ‘also help us deflect and diffuse the glare of revelation’ (123), which can be understood as metaphor’s dulling effect which may obscure and conceal, or, in a more positive light, as an escape from situations in which direct, literal words seem unbearable.’ These multiple dimensions of metaphor - connecting, generative, sensory, reflective and protecting — provide an important complementary space to the promises and limits of narrative.

Rather than pitting one against the other, though, what would happen if we thought about metaphor and narrative together? After all, to think about life or illness in terms of a journey is both a common metaphor and an often-used narrative frame. Even the literary theorist Paul Ricceur, who wrote about metaphor and narrative separately — first metaphor in 1975, followed by three volumes on narrative between 1983 and 1985 — admits that ‘these works were conceived together’ (Time ix). In his attempt to understand interpretation and meaning, metaphor and narrative were, to him, the obvious points of entry (Dowling ro9): both produce ‘semantic innovation’ either through ‘impertinent attribution’ (metaphor) or the ‘work of synthesis’ (narrative); moreover, from both metaphor and narrative, ‘a new thing springs up in language’ based on ‘a productive imagination’ that reconfigures or redescribes a ‘preunderstood order of action’ (narrative) or ‘sensory, emotional, aesthetic and axiological values’ (metaphors) (Time ix-xi). A number of researchers after Ricceur have explored how we can understand the intersections of metaphor and narrative, suggesting that metaphors do not only propel narratives of their own - variously labelled ‘metaphor scenarios’, ‘metaphorical stories’ or ‘paranarratives’; they are also often embedded in narratives and thus interact with the narrative that surrounds them (for a more elaborate discussion, see Chapter 1).

The intertwined nature of metaphor and narrative has also been examined in the context of health care, most prominently by Michael Hanne and colleagues in the special issue of Genre titled ‘Binocular Vision: Narrative and Metaphor in Medicine’. Even earlier, Anne Hunsaker Hawkins points out how ‘Over and over again, the same metaphorical paradigms are repeated in pathographies: the paradigm of regeneration, the idea of illness as battle, the athletic ideal, the journey to a distant country, and the mythos of healthy-mindedness’ (27). But even if illness narratives do not rely on such common paradigms, she finds that a central metaphor typically ‘functions as an organizational principle’ in the attempt to produce an illness narrative (26). This conceptual function of metaphors also informs Arthur Frank’s work on illness narrative typologies: suggesting that the writers of illness narratives are ‘shipwrecked’ and ‘wounded’ storytellers, he proposes narrativisation of these experiences as a life-saving rescue or reparative and healing intervention (53-5). Rita Charon, maybe inadvertently, exemplifies the importance of thinking with narrative and metaphor together, too. In relaying an encounter with a patient, she emphasises ‘how medicine and stories need one another’ (‘Novelization’ 33; my emphasis). Her account of that case is, however, filled to the brim with metaphors — the body as a home, as a garden, as a metal pipe, as a communication device. These metaphors help her explore the range and depth of meanings and experiences that her patient struggles to voice. The interpretation of the patient’s story is thus closely bound up with the work that metaphors do.

I believe these examples illustrate clearly that metaphor analysis and narrative analysis together are more productive than either one is individually; their combination can also yield more complex understandings of what happens at the boundaries of both metaphor and narrative. Despite their mutual entanglements, however, researching metaphor and narrative together is not without its challenges, as I discuss in Chapter 1. Moreover, there is good reason to focus on metaphor proper: for one, the label is often applied too broadly and treated synonymously with figurative language; for another, since this book is concerned with the reusability of metaphor, discrete definitions of metaphor and of metaphor analysis are crucial.

DEFINING METAPHOR

Metaphor is typically understood as a type of figurative language: we depart from the literal meaning of words and invoke a figurative, non-standard, surplus meaning. Aristotle defined metaphor as ‘the application of a word that belongs to another thing’ (105). And for George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, ‘the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another’ (Metaphors [1980] 5). Definitions of metaphor tend to be very broad and encompass ‘an array of forms, in all of which one thing is regarded as something that it is not’? (Cohen, Thinking 6).8 Within such loose definitions, metaphor becomes an umbrella term for figurative language in general, one that also covers symbols, similes, analogies, allegories, metonymies, synecdoches and idiomatic expressions.

In health care and Medical Humanities research, such a broad understanding of metaphor is common. For example, a simile such as stem cells are ‘like tomato seeds’ or an idiomatic expression such as ‘he or she did not lay a hand on me’ are both called metaphors (Casarett et al. 258; Verghese, ‘Linguistic Prescription’). One might dismiss such terminological distinctions as negligible or beside the point, but I am not interested in terminology for terminology’s sake. (In fact, in this book, I myself sometimes disregard the differences between metaphors and similes.) The point I wish to make is this: metaphor is a highly elusive, complex and controversial phenomenon. For example, in metaphor scholarship, it has been debated whether a simile is even making a figurative claim — whether it actually invites us to speculate about an implied, non-literal meaning (Ricoeur, Rule 220). Is there really a so-called mapping or transfer that takes place from which an additional meaning unfolds? Doesn’t a simile merely perform a comparison, suggesting, literally, that x shares similarities with y? This line of questioning does not pertain only to simile, either: the assumption that figurativeness is the defining feature of metaphor has also been contested by Donald Davidson, who famously claimed that metaphors ‘mean what the words, in their most literal interpretation, mean, and nothing more’ (32).? In other words, the notion of figurativeness, which warrants a broad definition of metaphors, might simply be too broad to be helpful for a better understanding of the inner workings of metaphor. Since this book is concerned with the varied usability of metaphors and examines strategies of rethinking them from the inside, it is important to spell out the inner functioning of metaphor proper.

A no less important reason for defining metaphor narrowly is that the distinction can actually make a difference to internal perception, mutual understanding and effective communication. Consider the case of metaphor and symbol: while both bring together two distinct ideas or concepts, a metaphor makes a statement about similarities or resemblances, whereas a symbol suggests that one thing stands for the other. Flowers at the bedside, for example, are commonly understood as a symbol of concern and sympathy, love and care; they can also be used as a metaphor that expresses an idiosyncratic, highly subjective experience of illness. Sylvia Plath exemplifies this point dexterously in the poem ‘Tulips’ in which the speaker, a woman in a hospital, compares the red tulips she received to a ‘dozen red lead sinkers round my

I0 Metaphor in Illness Writing neck’ and to ‘an awful baby’, thus expressing the speaker’s despondent, maybe even psychotic state (161). While my example is taken from the world of poetry, it is easy to imagine actual contexts in which such diverse meanings and implications may impact mutual understanding. Knowing when to treat metaphor as metaphor and by which frameworks to analyse it seem highly relevant.'°

Definitions of metaphor draw on different terminologies.'' Due to their transparency, the terms ‘source’ and ‘target’, which are common in cognitive metaphor theory, will be used here. Lakoff and Johnson write that ‘In a metaphor, there are two domains: the target domain, which is constituted by the immediate subject matter, and the source domain, in which important metaphorical reasoning takes place and that provides the source concepts used in that reasoning’ (Metaphors [2003] 265; original emphasis). For example, if one compares illness to a fight or journey, the target domain (illness) is described through the features we associate with the source domain (fight or journey). In each metaphor, a mapping or transfer takes place, in which the features of one domain, typically the source, are carried over to the other, the target. The nature of the relationship between source and target has been conceptualised in multiple ways including comparison (e.g. Fogelin; Quintilian), substitution and resemblance (e.g. Jakobson), interaction (e.g. Black; Richards), tension (e.g. Ricceur), or blending (e.g. Fauconnier and Turner).

In taking my terminology from Lakoff and Johnson, I acknowledge their study’s trailblazing function in the field of metaphor research. '* Metaphors We Live By has assumed almost a cult status in metaphor research, as well as in other contexts, and it is the reference point for arguments about the relevance and ubiquity of metaphors beyond the poetic realm. This prominence has perhaps obscured a fuller account of the field: long before Metaphors We Live By challenged the notion that metaphors are mere ornamental or stylistic devices, literary critics such as I. A. Richards, Max Black and Paul Ricoeur (‘Metaphor’ 52-3) had made the same claim. Still, Lakoff and Johnson managed to propel waves of research on the significance of metaphors by arguing that metaphors are not only a matter of everyday language but also impact how we think and act. That is, not only is there no way we cannot use metaphors, it is through metaphors that we understand the world. In doing so, our way of thinking — our ‘ordinary conceptual system’ — is metaphorical (Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors [1980] 3). As a consequence, Metaphors We Live By has animated a multidisciplinary interest in the functions and effects of metaphors, in areas from science communication, literature studies, cultural studies, linguistics and

Introduction ïi language philosophy to psychotherapy, anthropology and the cognitive sciences — including, more recently, neurology.

But research into the cognitive side of metaphors also poses challenges. Not only do its methods and study designs often favour quantitative approaches, some of the tenets in cognitive metaphor theory have also come under criticism. Scholars in disability studies, for example, have taken offense with the many references to an allegedly natural, universal human body assumed in Metaphors We Live By. Amy Vidali, for example, demonstrates the underlying ableism in Lakoff and Johnson’s approach,'* which she traces across both Metaphors We Live By and their more recent study on metaphors, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. When Lakoff and Johnson continually claim that spatial metaphors such as ‘up is good’ and ‘down is bad’ ‘arise from the fact that we have bodies of the sort we have’ (Metaphors [1980] 15-17), they posit a norm that considers other forms of embodiment deviant. Vidali illustrates the repercussions of such norms in the able-bodied metaphor ‘knowing is seeing’, which for Lakoff and Johnson is based on a prototypical and natural understanding of the human body and which also implies that blindness equals ‘misunderstanding and disorder’ (Vidali 34). Vidali shows how a disability approach to metaphor allows us to challenge the assumptions on which some of our metaphors rest.

Another problem with cognitive-inflected approaches to metaphor has been voiced by Marjorie Garber, who accuses cognitive scientists of treating metaphor as a means to an end. To better understand how the brain works, she writes, cognitive scientists ‘read through metaphor’ (235). According to Garber, this approach ‘erases the history of literary scholarship and analysis, discounts the role of interpretation and reading, and above all, denies or resists the creative, transgressive and excitingly unstable power of language. Reducing literature to concepts, even to conceptual metaphors, is a mode of appropriation that makes the literary disappear’ (252).