Conceptual Metaphors.


What is reading?
There is definitely something to be offered by a study of Cognitive Poetics. I am quite intrigued by Conceptual Metaphor, the basic images beneath how we feel and respond. Behind “The book was like a banquet” or the “The book was a wholesome stew for many readers”—simile and metaphor—is a conceptual metaphor: READING NOURISHES. Conceptual metaphor underlies how we perceive the world, certainly how we read. It is the basis, in many ways, for poetics or making. Peter Stockwell, in his introduction to cognitive poetics, takes up one conceptual metaphor for reading: READING IS A JOURNEY. This notion lies obviously behind such books as The Lord of the Rings or Gulliver’s Travels, where the story, as with a journey, grows with the telling.

Reading is transportation (says Stockwell): we cross into a new land; we track characters; we pursue the bends of a plot. Often, this metaphorical journey influences our immediate responses to a book. “It didn’t really go anywhere, for me.” “I just couldn’t see where the author was going.” "It is a journey that the reader takes on with the main protagonist Ka to his homeland Kars...."  This way of looking at a book comes to mind readily and suggests something else. Readers store obvious conceptual metaphors and writers who write works outside these frames of reference do so at their peril—at the risk of being seriously misunderstood.
Transportation into another world leads to other expectations: the world and the book will be bridged, there will be minimal departure between this and that, and the bridging will allow the reader to make a participatory resonse through characters—apply this to that.
Reading is inclusion.

Marechera’s novels, however, do not rest upon READING IS A JOURNEY. That it why his absence of endings is seen as a lack: every journey goes somewhere.

Some further obvious conceptual metaphors might be:

THE BOOK IS A MIRROR (which portrays human life).
THE BOOK IS A MACHINE (which is ordered like a clock).

Of which there are deliberate anti-types: Beckett’s The Unnameable; Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.
THE BOOK IS MEMORY. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Umberto Eco.
THE BOOK IS A DEBATE. The Trial of Christopher Okigbo, Ali A Mazrui.
But what about stranger ones?

THE NOVEL IS A WEB.
“And the House of Hunger clung firmly to its own: after all, the skeletons in its web still had sparks of life in their minute bones”. Marechera.

THE POEM IS AN ANIMAL. Ted Hughes.
THE STORY IS A BUBBLE. Eskimo myth.

I wonder what conceptual metaphors are behind blogging?

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