Stylistics routledge English Language Introductions

interanimating
. [. . .]
Let me give a couple of examples to illustrate this. The first is a phrase from a
Paul Simon song, ‘Diamonds on the Soles of His Shoes’, in which a poor boy is
walking down the street, ‘empty as a pocket’. Here the ICMs of the boy’s 
EMPTY LIFE
and the general notion of 
POCKETS
are mapped together. However, what results from
this phrase is two ideas: the boy’s life is like a pocket (a small insignificant container
personal to him), but the type of pocket that is evoked by this mapping with 
the poor boy is an empty one. 
Both
domains of the mapping have been altered (or
specified) in the mapping.
The second example is of a different sort, and demonstrates what I have elsewhere
(Stockwell 1996: 13) called ‘flashpoint reference’. This is when a noun phrase invokes
a referent but the utterance (usually through the predicate or a negation particle)
immediately revokes or cancels the referent from active memory (see Stockwell (1994,
1996) for a fuller account of this). This happens in T.S. Eliot’s poem 
The Waste Land
:
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are 
departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of City directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.
(Eliot 1963: 70)
11
111
11
111
C O G N I T I V E S T Y L I S T I C S A N D T H E T H E O R Y O F M E T A P H O R
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Here, the 16th century Elizabethan River Thames is invoked, firstly by the quotation
of the coda to each stanza of Spenser’s 
Prothalamion
(1596), and then by the descrip-
tion of the river in its pre-industrial pre-urbanised state, clean and unpolluted by
social rubbish. Of course, in describing the non-existence of the litter, the poem
simultaneously invokes the image of the modern, dirty, degraded river as well, even
in the act of denying it all. The two image-schemas of Elizabethan river and 20th
century river are mapped together dialectically to suggest a comment on the degra-
dation of the modern world; and the movement from the high art of the Elizabethan
Renaissance to the rather tawdry and sleazy mundane concerns of modern times is
further suggested. The mapping itself, in other words, can be 
thematised
, in this
literary context, and this action involves moving 
beyond
the simple mapped restruc-
turing of image-schemas.
When discussing ‘image metaphors’, Lakoff (1990: 66) cites several poetic exam-
ples as ‘one-shot metaphors’, in which both image-schemas are conventional, but the
mapping is novel or striking [. . .]. Lakoff cites the surrealist writer André Breton’s
line: ‘My wife . . . whose waist is an hourglass’, to argue that such ‘part-whole’
mappings can be explained using the Invariance Hypothesis. He suggests it provides
an answer to the question of which parts of the source domain are mapped to the
target (and which parts of image-schematic structure are left behind). In this example,
the curvy shape of the hourglass is mapped onto the poet’s wife’s body, but presum-
ably the flowing sand inside, the glass coldness and perhaps the notion of time
running out (literalised and dramatised in the hourglass) are not mapped. It is from
such literary examples that Lakoff and Turner generalise the Invariance Hypothesis.
Let’s look at the Breton example in detail. The line is most commonly found 
in English in the translation by Edouard Roditi of Breton’s poem ‘Freedom of Love’.
[. . .] It begins:
My wife with the hair of a wood fire
With the thoughts of heat lightning
With the waist of an hourglass
With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger
My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last
magnitude
With the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth
With the tongue of rubbed amber and glass
My wife with the tongue of a stabbed host
With the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes
With the tongue of an unbelievable stone [. . .]
(Breton/Roditi in Germain 1978: 69)
This is a poem generated by surrealism. A multi-media art movement flourishing in
Europe in the 1920s and ’30s, surrealism had as one of its main objectives the destruc-
tion of rationalist and bourgeois thought by unusual juxtaposition. This collage tech-
nique manifested itself in verbal art mainly in the form of highly striking and deviant
metaphor, of which the Breton passage above provides several good examples. [. . .]
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E X T E N S I O N

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Verbal art in surrealism is founded on isomorphism, but it is a very different
conception from that posed within cognitive linguistics through the Invariance
Hypothesis. Here is a perception of language that is transcendental and uses metaphor
to go beyond everyday meaning, in order to reframe fundamentally our view of the
world and ourselves. In other terms, here is a perception of language that is dialec-
tical and uses metaphor to go beyond the familiar understandings of ICMs, in order
to recast all our ICMs and retroactively alter our perceptions of base 
and
target in
our conceptual experience. This is metaphor as interanimation, in which the process
of ‘metaphoring’ encourages us to see the familiar world in a new light as a synthesis
of base and target mapping.
Let me demonstrate this by returning to the opening of Breton’s poem quoted
above. Each line contains a single metaphorical mapping, except the fifth which maps
the wife’s lips with two bases (a ‘cockade’ and ‘stars’). Her ‘waist’ is mapped with
two ICMs, and lines 7–10 map her ‘tongue’ with four different things. Applying the
Invariance Hypothesis to a reading of this would predict only incoherence, as Turner
points out (Turner 1990: 248) [. . .]. On first inspection the Breton passage is not
exactly like this: in the line, ‘My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of
stars of the last magnitude’, two distinct sources are mapped onto one target; and in
the last four lines of the quoted passage, four distinct sources (‘rubbed amber and
glass’, ‘a stabbed host’, ‘a doll’ and ‘an unbelievable stone’) are mapped onto one
target (‘tongue’). However, if the whole poem is read as a general conceptual mapping
in which the poet’s wife is the target ICM, then there are possibly 75 distinct compo-
nents of very diverse ICMs, and there are 11 source ICMs even just in the passage
from the beginning of the poem I quoted above. All of these map, sometimes sever-
ally, onto particular components of the ‘wife’. If the passage is to be read as surrealism,
then simple incoherence does not seem an adequate account of this poem.
This paper began by noting that ICMs are radial structures that display prototype
effects. They are built up by accumulated experience and are constantly being revised
and altered to a greater or lesser degree. Those ICMs that are revised the least consti-
tute the individual’s relatively stable view of the world and the things in it. Those
that are revised the most encompass new experiences, unfamiliar things, items of
debate or uncertainty, or perhaps areas of which the person does not have a strong
opinion and has been swayed by the arguments in various incoming bits of language.
The aspect of cognitive linguistics that is essential here is the notion of prototype
effects: categories are not absolutes but are fluid continua of knowledge. Together
with the notion of radiality, this means that ICMs have central, secondary and periph-
eral elements in their structures. The central problem which the Invariance
Hypothesis was invented to solve is a consequence of the question of how to decide
which elements are mapped and which are left behind. This question can be answered
directly, without any need for Invariance.
The key idea here is