‘The bodie and the letters both’: ‘blending’ the rules of early modern religion
Patricia Canning, Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Abstract
The role of conceptual integration or blending has featured significantly in analyses of contemporary texts. To date, no-one to my knowledge has applied this theory in an early modern context. In the sixteenth century, a historical juncture rich in innovative forms of textual expression, the Reformation generated cognitive and ideological discordances between conceptions of the spiritual and the material, or more specifically, between word and image. These tensions were made manifest in physical acts of iconoclasm by Reformers in response to the ‘idolatry’ of early modern Catholicism. Many poetic texts of the period attempted to validate and perpetuate the Reformed position, denouncing carnal representations of divinity, focusing instead on the spiritual incarnation of Christ as the ‘Word’. Taking one such text, Herbert’s poem ‘JESU’, as the focus of my analysis, I trace the path of a blend through to its emergent structure. I will argue that while the blend coheres conceptually in that it appears to make ‘plausible’ the Reformed worldview, the reality is that it generates an ideological implausibility. As such, this article aims to demonstrate the greater efficacy and scope of blending than would otherwise be available through strictly metaphorical analyses. I will focus specifically on the correspondence between conceptual and formal integration of expression and meaning. My analysis leads to insights that more impressionistic, literary analyses of the period have not addressed, and that stylistic analyses have only briefly outlined, in that I will consider the material effects of this cognitive linguistic phenomenon in the significantly literary theological context of early modern England.
In his groundbreaking work, The Literary Mind (1996), Turner proposes that ‘story’, traditionally conceived of as a literary phenomenon, is in fact a central function of the everyday mind. In addition to their salient role in conceptualizing experience, stories can be perceived to be more or less plausible, particularly when considered as emanating from or structuring a specific worldview. In this article, I will examine how it is that stories, specifically those contained within George Herbert’s poem ‘JESU’, achieve their ideological and conceptual coherence in the context of an early modern English worldview.1
Writing on the ideology of coherence in his essay on William Shakespeare’s Othello, Sinfield (1992) proposes that the way we conceive of experience, the manner by which we make it cohere, is through the construction and invocation
of ‘plausible stories’. Sinfield (1992: 30) writes, ‘the action [in Othello] advances through a contest of stories, and the conditions of plausibility are therefore crucial – they determine which stories will be believed’. Othello is both a figure in and the product of a ‘story’. Cast as a ‘lascivious Moor’ he assumes the role of the ‘erring barbarian’, so that he, like the society that has composed this ideologically coherent ‘story’, reiterates it by consistently reliving it, and in so doing, attests to its ‘plausibility’ (1992: 30). Explaining why these stories are so ideologically significant, Sinfield (1992: 32) writes: ‘Ideology produces, makes plausible, concepts and systems to explain who we are, who the others are, how the world works.’ Plausible stories, then, are central to the internalization and perpetuation of ideology; as Sinfield (1992: 31) argues, ‘it is very difficult not to be influenced by a story, even about yourself, when everyone else is insisting upon it’. This article proposes that conceptual integration theory (as espoused principally in, for example, Fauconnier and Turner, 1995, 2002; Fauconnier, 1997; see also Dancygier, 2006), the process of ‘blending’ what are essentially different ‘stories’, creates the ‘conditions of plausibility’ that enable the story of Reformation Protestantism to cohere. More specifically, I propose that blending is the means by which the disparate incremental stories within Herbert’s poem ‘JESU’, can, like the story of the Reformation itself to which it is metonymically related, be cognitively, if not ideologically, reconciled.2
2 Idolatry vs Iconoclasm: The ‘story’ of Reformed religion
Published posthumously in 1633, Herbert’s The Temple from which ‘JESU’ is derived emerged against a backdrop of religious change that was dominated by major theological debates over the means by which God could and should be represented. For Reformers, Christ’s incarnation as Logos or the ‘Word’ meant that the ‘word’ of Scripture was imbued with a divine spirituality that contrasted sharply with the imagistic material objects or empty signs of Catholic veneration. Reformed theology decreed that the image was nothing but a crass representation of God, frequently espoused as a dilution of divinity, a mere vessel of false, and thus blasphemous, worship. Freedberg (1991: 245) writes: ‘the response to all images, and not only ones perceived as being more or less realistic, is predicated on the progressive reconstitution of the material object as living’. In terms of idolatry, this is made manifest in the construal of the image for that which it represents generating a plethora of (blasphemous) copies or simulacra as a result. Idolatry, then, in cognitive terms, can be understood through a conceptual ‘blend’ of form (sign) and content (referent) in which the counterpart relations of ‘representation’ and ‘identity’ are compressed into ‘uniqueness’. For Reformers, this compression yields an unwelcome ideological incongruity; yet it is a natural conceptual process that can be expressed through what Fauconnier terms the Access Principle (1997: 41), by which he states ‘an element in one mental space can be used to access a counterpart of that element in another mental space’. In contradistinction, Hawkes (2001: 64) observes that ‘iconoclasts used immanent teleology to argue that no merely nominal identity can be true’.
The conception of signs as vehicles or pointers to referents can be traced back to Aristotle (1938) who holds that the ‘proper’ telos of signs lies in their capacity to function as representations: no sign has value in itself, rather, signs operate as a means to an end. Conceiving of written signs as representing an inner discourse of the soul, Aristotelian logic (1938: 13) proposes a theory of ‘equivocation’:
Things are equivocally named, when they have the name only in common, the definition (or statement of essence) corresponding with the name being different. For instance, while a man and a portrait can properly both be called animals, these are equivocally named. For they have the name only in common, the definitions (or statements of essence) corresponding with the name being different.
Aristotle’s parenthetical remark distinguishes between ‘essence’ and the sign or ‘statement’ of essence so that the ‘name’ is essentially linguistic matter projected onto a conceptual ‘impression’, a theory that finds modern expression in Turner (1996). Calvin, a key Reformer, espouses a similar distinction between signs and their divine referents in his consideration of the ‘visible’ sacraments: ‘even in the [sacramental] union itself the matter must always be distinguished from the sign, that we may not transfer to the one what belongs to the other’ (1960: 15). To compress or confuse the two was to imbue the sign with false ontological value, which was for Reformation Protestantism a reversal of natural teleology and tantamount to idolatry. Crucially, such cognitive compression also governs Reformers’ own theology. This can be summarized through the blended formulation ‘W/word’, which distinguishes between the divine conception of Christ as the ‘Word’, or Logos, and the ‘word’ as a lexical sign or medium of representation. As Christ finds expression in Reformed doctrine through Scripture, the configuration ‘W/word’ denotes the compression of form and identity in accordance with early modern theology. Therefore, as my article will show, by focusing in poetic and exegetical discourse on the W/word as the only true manifestation of the divine, Reformers also inverted natural teleology, the telos of signs, consequently annulling the central theological principle upon which their iconoclastic argument was predicated – the conceptual distinction between words and their referents.
3 Indoctrination via integration: Translating ‘JESU’ into a plausible story
Herbert’s ‘JESU’ (1974: 125) draws the readers’ attention to the textual incarnation of Christ as the ‘Word’ by invoking a chain of conceptual metaphors that interact with grammatical and phonological puns, all of which operate on the name ‘JESU’. The poem is reproduced below:
J E S U is in my heart, his sacred nameI deeply carved there: but th’other weekA great affliction broke the little frame,
Ev’n all to pieces: which I went to seek:And first I found the corner, where was J, 5After, where E S, and next where U was graved.When I had got these parcels, instantlyI sat me down to spell them, and perceivedThat to my broken heart he was I ease you,And to my whole is J E S U. 10
The point of the poem is to document the speaker’s temporary loss and restoration of faith in Christ after an epiphanic moment described through the conceptual metaphor EVENTS ARE ACTIONS. The target domain, faith, correlates to the source domain, heart, which is itself construed as a fragile object, a ‘little frame’. Through the conceptual metaphor THE BODY IS A CONTAINER, ‘JESU’, a metonymic representation of the abstract state, faith, is conceived to be ‘in’ the speaker’s ‘heart’. The heart/frame is subsequently broken by an abstract agent ‘affliction’, invoking the conceptual metaphors BODY PARTS ARE OBJECTS and EVENTS ARE ACTIONS respectively (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Lakoff and Turner, 1989). As our own experiences of ‘hearts’, ‘frames’ and Christ are activated during the metaphorical mappings, we selectively project just enough information to allow these three specific ‘stories’ to cohere. Thus, when we conceive of a ‘broken’ heart through the metaphorical broken ‘frame’ mapping, we do not believe the speaker to be suffering from, for example, an abnormality of the atrial septum or hypoplastic left heart syndrome. Instead, we invoke the folk belief of ‘heart’ as locus of spirituality, faith, love, and so on, aided by our contextual awareness of the poem as a religious eulogy. Similarly, the speaker’s restoration of faith is figuratively described through the KNOWING IS SEEING conceptual metaphor – his loss of faith requires him to ‘seek’ the broken pieces of the heart/frame, and having ‘found’ them, put them back together, yielding a hidden message. Having ‘perceived’ this message, the speaker’s faith is both restored and strengthened. Cognizant of the conceptual metaphors at work in the poem we now understand the mappings in ‘JESU’ in the manner outlined in Figure 1.
Yet there is more going on in this poem than can be fully explicated through the framework of conceptual metaphor theory. Conceptual metaphor theory permits mappings unidirectionally; thus, information projected from the source to the target cannot operate coherently in the other direction (Lakoff and Turner, 1989: 131–3; Grady et al,, 1999: 115, 120; but cf. Black, 1962, 1979).
Figure 1 Metaphoric counterpart mappings from source domain to target domain
For example, information about fragile material objects and their propensity to break into pieces is mapped onto an abstract bodily organ; information about bodily organs is not mapped onto what we know of ‘frames’. An effective interpretation of ‘JESU’, however, necessitates a more complex network of mappings in which information and the relationships that connect the information is projected bidirectionally not just from one, but many domains, creating more elaborative and comprehensive understandings of the terms.3 As such, the reader is better equipped to reconcile conceptual anomalies that result from the coexistence of multiple metaphors that, for example, create clashes between the various manifestations of Christ in the poem as a nominal entity, a syntactic unit, a metonymic signifier of faith, a lexical engraving, a physical object, and so on. Furthermore, the nuances and inferences embedded not only within each metaphorical instantiation, but in their integration throughout the poem, that is, their collective emergence as the ‘whole’ story, have not yet been accounted for. In short, throughout the poem, networks of mappings are constructed that conceptual metaphor theory can neither comprehensively maintain nor fully integrate. I propose that ‘blending’ creates the conditions of plausibility that allow the disparate stories embedded within Herbert’s poem to cohere.
4 ‘Blending’ over backwards: Reversing the relation between meaning and form
Fauconnier and Turner’s extensive work on conceptual integration theory (1995, 1998, 2000, 2002) aptly demonstrates the role of the mind in the generation and interpretation of meaning. By selectively projecting information frequently (but not always) connected by counterpart relations from a range of input spaces into a blended space, we can make sense of concepts and structures ranging from the most basic to the deeply anomalous. While Fauconnier and Turner have provided a comprehensive working model of the processes of blending, the concept is not new. Studies from the eighteenth century involving psychometric experimentation have investigated the phenomena of what we now know to be blending for many years. Specifically, Galton’s work (1879) on ‘generic images’ and ‘automatic representation’ has led him to conclude that:
Two or more portraits that have many points of likeness in common and especially characteristics of a medium quality rather than such as deviate widely, may, if they are of the same size and taken in the same attitude, be combined into one by converging their images from different magical lanterns on the same screen, or through an arrangement of cameras whereby their images are thrown simultaneously in the same photographic plate, or again with one camera by throwing their images, carefully adjusted, upon the same plate successively (which last process best illustrates the blending of memories). The resulting composite portrait is identical with no one of the components, but comprises them all, each having its own share in the total effect; and it is a full picture. (1879: 551, my italics)
The ‘composite portrait’ of Galton’s analysis is akin to the blended space of Fauconnier and Turner’s model. The emergent structure or the new information made possible by the blend is itself ‘a full picture’ derived from the selective projections of existing information from the input spaces. In the example from Herbert, the composite parts of the poem signify equally with the ‘full picture’, the rich complexities of which are only attainable through a blended analysis from which the emergent structure has deep implications for Reformed theology.
In the case of ‘JESU’, there are six input spaces. Input 1, the ‘JESU’ space, has its own structure incorporating the proper noun, the individual letters of which the lexical term is comprised, and its metonymic part–whole relationship to Christianity. The acoustic properties of the graphemes also feature in the blended space of the poem and so form part of the input structure. The ‘JESU’ space is an ‘entrenched mental space’ (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002: 103) in that it invokes properties inherent in the ‘Faith’ space, which it metonymically represents in addition to our own experiences of religion. The second input space is the ‘Faith’ space, in which we understand faith to have properties of transience, strength, weakness, loss and restoration. The third input space is the ‘Frame’ space, whose structure includes properties such as object, fragility, and materiality. As the particular ‘Frame’ of the poem is engraved, this information features in the input space along with the other more generic information about frames. There is a fourth space, the ‘Heart’ space, the structure of which corresponds to its figurative properties such as locus of emotion, morality and faith. In addition to these figurative properties, the ‘Heart’ space contains the biological properties of ‘vital organ’ and ‘life-sustaining’. However, we are only interested in the figurative properties of the heart; as these salient properties are not contextually relevant they are overridden in the blend. Diagrammatically, then, the input spaces to the blend are structured as in Figure 2. The generic space in the centre links the information contained in the input spaces by providing a coherent but skeletal structure that maps onto the poem’s structure; there is an event (the temporary loss of faith), there are participants incorporating both ‘agent’ and ‘affected’ (‘affliction’ and the speaker respectively); and a ‘change’ of state (the restoration of faith). This information is represented in the following:
The input ‘Frame’ acts as a source domain for the target domain ‘Faith’, and also for the target domain ‘Heart’ in the poem. Thus, ‘vital relations’ (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002: 92–102) of representation and analogy are established between these domains. Input 1 is, strictly speaking, a metonymic structure and as such would not participate in a metaphoric mapping. Therefore, the relevance of this information cannot be effectively accommodated via conceptual metaphor theory. It is, however, vital to the blend. Throughout the blend, structure from some or each of the inputs is mapped according to counterpart relations across the input spaces. These relations or cross-space mappings are as follows: the relation of representation connects information in the ‘JESU’ space to the ‘Faith’ space given that the word ‘JESU’ is typically denotative of the Christian faith. It is for this reason that both spaces are also linked by the relation of ‘part–whole’, as are the
‘Heart’, ‘Frame’ and ‘Speaker’ inputs. The relation of ‘cause–effect’ links the properties ‘loss’ and ‘break’ in inputs 2,3, and 4. As these inputs are understood to represent each other by their analogous configurations, they also are linked by relations of representation and analogy: the ‘broken heart’ is analogous to the broken ‘Frame’, which is analogous to the loss of faith. These counterpart connections are represented by the coded lines and arrows in Figure 2 above. As the ‘Agent’ space is itself a blend into which is projected a sorrowful event (affliction) together with the agency implicit in the personification effected through the conceptual metaphor EVENTS ARE ACTIONS, it becomes, in Turner’s terms, a ‘hyper-blend’; that is, a blend that serves as an input to another blend (Turner, 2006: 23). As such, the ‘Agent’ space informs the blended network having already compressed its internal structure, namely the relations of ‘identity’ and ‘cause–effect’ in that ‘affliction’ is both the causative ‘Agent’ and ‘effect’ of a
sorrowful event. Only the causative relation is projected from the ‘Agent’ input to the ‘Faith’ space, which by analogy extends to the ‘Heart’, ‘Frame’, and ‘Speaker’ inputs. Not all the properties have counterparts; indeed, some properties are completely overridden in the construction of the blended space.
Each of the inputs represent different and, at times, clashing ‘stories’ that collectively cohere in the blended space. Taking the first two lines as a starting point, the path of the blend is as follows. The lines read: ‘J E S U is in my heart, his sacred name / I deeply carved there’. The relationship between ‘JESU’ and the speaker is a complex one that can only be partially described via metaphor. For instance, ‘JESU’ is an entity that is locatable in the speaker’s body part, his ‘Heart’, a conceptual feat that is achieved through a conflation of the conceptual metaphor THE BODY IS A CONTAINER, ‘Jesu is in my heart’, and STATES ARE LOCATIONS, ‘his sacred name I deeply carved there’. Yet, taken together, these metaphors create a clash between the existence of Christ as an ‘entity’ who resides in the heart of the speaker in the opening line, and as a collection of letters fashioned by the speaker/carver whose agency makes his resulting ‘state’ of faith much more complex than the conceptual metaphor suggests. As such, the metaphors cannot account for the inferences and nuances that allow us to deduce that divinity resides not only in the entity JESU but in his ‘sacred name’, itself a metonymic representation of the speaker’s faith and simultaneously a series of graphemes metaphorically transposed onto the speaker’s heart/frame. Only in the blended space can these various representations interact and reach their full ‘meaning potential’ (Fauconnier, 1997: 37). To that end, specific information is selected from the ‘JESU’ input, in the form of the proper noun, accounting for the personification ‘his’, and the graphemes that the speaker has ‘carved’. The ‘entity’ is also selected at this stage of the blend, given that ‘he’ is ‘in’ the heart of the speaker. As ‘he’ metonymically refers to the speaker’s faith, the ‘metonym’ property is also projected. In addition, information is selected from Input 4, ‘Heart’, in the form of its figurative attributes as the locus of spirituality. From the ‘Faith’ input, the ‘strength’ property is selected, as at this point we infer from the speaker’s unequivocal agency in ‘carving’ Christ’s name that his faith is strong.4 As the carving on the ‘Heart’ is of the ‘name’ of Christ the ‘lexical’ property from Input 1 is added to the blend. The elements combine in the blended space, B1, to make plausible the concept of a ‘carved heart’. The blend allows us to reconcile the multifarious instantiations of the lexical term ‘JESU’ as a signifier for faith as well as the entity Christ, and as a composite of linguistic units. The blend is constructed in Figure 3.
‘Outer-space’ links between inputs become compressed into ‘inner-space’ relations in the blend (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002: 92–3). In the specific instance of the ‘Carved heart’ blend, B1, the presence of the entity JESU, along with the metonymic figurative carving on the speaker’s heart equally represent and are analogous with the concept of ‘Faith’: thus, there is a cross-space connection between the ‘JESU’, ‘Heart’, and ‘Faith’ spaces along the relations of representation,5 analogy and part–whole. This is demonstrable in the Figure 3 through the coded lines and arrows.
The blended space, B1, now participates in a hyper-blend as it operates as an input to the next blend, maintaining the network established from the inputs in the first few lines of the poem. This allows the reader to make sense of the next lines, ‘but th’other week/ A great affliction broke the little frame,/ Ev’n all to pieces’. We can establish through the metaphor BODY PARTS ARE OBJECTS that the ‘Frame’ is the speaker’s heart; its ‘broken’ status derives from the conceptual metaphor EVENTS ARE ACTIONS. Yet through the blended network we import additional information to make plausible the breaking of a frame by a sorrowful event. The ‘spirituality’ property projected from Input 4 posits the ‘Heart’ as the locus of faith as we have seen from B1. In the next blend, this knowledge is combined with new information, specifically its ability to be figuratively broken. In order to conceive of such an abstract idea, we import an analogous event, the breaking of a frame, from the ‘Frame’ input space. Therefore, the property ‘a material object that can be broken’ is blended with the figurative ‘breaking’ of a life-sustaining biological organ. From the context, we do not import the biological properties of the heart to the blend, as it is contextually anomalous. As a result, it is overridden. We select and map the above information to what we know of the speaker’s faith from B1, namely that it was strong prior to the event of the
heart/frame ‘breaking’. Thus, a change of state occurs. The agent responsible for this change from ‘fixed’ to ‘broken’ is the event ‘a great affliction’, itself a blend deriving from the metaphor EVENTS ARE ACTIONS. This information is imported from the ‘Agent’ input as outlined in Figure 4.
There are a number of cross-space connections established between the inputs in order to generate this blend noted in Figure 4 by coded lines and arrows. The agent ‘affliction’ is perceived to be the cause of the speaker’s loss of faith so that the relation of identity (derived from the metaphoric personification of affliction) is compressed into cause–effect in Input 6. The cause–effect/identity compression is mapped across Inputs 4,3, and 2 as a consequence of their analogical status. This is represented in Figure 4 by the formulation → •. This fusion of relations is projected into the blended space. The speaker’s temporary loss of faith and its analogues, the ‘broken’ properties of the ‘Frame’ and ‘Heart’, is caused by a ‘sorrowful event’. Thus, the agent ‘affliction’ institutes a ‘change’ in the subject (and the ‘part–whole’ analogues of ‘Heart’, ‘Faith’ and ‘Frame’). These multifaceted changes are mapped to the ‘loss’ property in the ‘Faith’ space; this in turn is mapped onto the ‘broken’ element in the ‘Frame’ space and by extension, the corresponding property in the ‘Heart’ input. Thus relations of ‘identity’, ‘analogy’, ‘change’, and ‘cause–effect’ are established and compressed in the blended space B2.
The fragmentation of the frame into four engraved pieces in lines 5–8 blend the imagistic properties of the graphical components <J>, <E>, <S>, and <U> with the broken pieces of the frame and the speaker’s heart with the crisis of faith from Inputs 1, 3, 4, and 2 respectively. The proper noun ‘JESU’ is not projected into the blend at this stage so the individual letters create confusion as distinct
Figure 4 ‘Affliction broke the little frame’: Construction of hyper-blend, B2
graphemes, as incoherent parts of a whole. Like the speaker, the broken frame/heart is incomplete; linguistic disunification mirrors spiritual disunification in a blend of form and meaning – once again, ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’ intersect, not least because both are engaged in a process of ‘imitation’. Yet, in the next lines, as the speaker ‘seeks’ out the pieces to make a coherent whole from the disparate linguistic parts, he blends their physical and graphical/phonological properties, the material engravings with their acoustic counterparts achieving a doubled message in the final lines of the poem. Playing on the orthographical ambiguity of the J/I grapheme, I, ES, and U ‘spell’ both ‘JESU’ and (via their acoustic and phonological properties) ‘I ease you’. Figure 5 outlines this blend.
Putting the ‘parcels’ of the broken ‘Frame’ back together prompts the speaker’s epiphany in which he translates the re-formed lexical term into a syntactic unit bearing the meaning of Christ so that, in the words of Elsky (1989: 149), meaning is ‘divinely ordained’ in both the word and its component parts. Indeed, this is part of the poem’s emergent structure.
The blend is completed through the decompression of the relation of ‘identity’ (of Jesu) into ‘representation’ and ‘property’ enabling the conceptual integration of the metonymic signifier – the name Jesu – with the properties intrinsic to the referent denoted by the signifier. Put another way, through blending form and meaning, the linguistic units <J>, <E>, <S> and <U> compositely spell what the word in its unified form means, generating a kind of linguistic transubstantiation. This ‘transubstantiating’ Christ parallels the form of the poem itself: the speaker’s
Figure 5 Blend B3: JESU as both ‘spirit’ and ‘matter’
faith metaphorically transforms into the speaker’s ‘Heart’, which metamorphoses into the concrete image/object ‘Frame’.
A further elaboration of the formal blend allows the opportunistic integration of orthographical and grammatical ambiguities: the consonantal <J> is ‘read’ as a vocalic <I>, a propitious linguistic manipulation of the early modern script noted by Fish (1978: 31–3) and subsequently referred to by Elsky (1989: 151) in their respective analyses of ‘JESU’. In Fish’s interpretation of the poem (1978: 34) he proposes that, as readers, we are guilty of the same mistake as the speaker: ‘It would seem’ he notes, ‘that we have not only “misspelled” Jesu, but misread the situation of the speaker (these two mistakes are finally one) by imitating in our experience his misreading (he too had failed to see the “I ease you” in Jesu)’. Fish’s first parenthetical remark is crucial: ‘misreading’ and ‘misspelling’ are compressed into the singular cognitive – and blended – act of misinterpretation. Collapsing ‘two mistakes’ into one is only made possible by the doubled signification derived from the phonological pun of the composite parts of ‘JESU’, an interpretive act permitted, and made plausible, by the blend. This is made more interesting when one considers the etymology of the word ‘spell’, which, according to Elsky (1989: 151), ‘in Herbert’s English, to spell had not only its present sense, it could also mean to read’ – ‘misspelling’ and ‘misreading’ are indeed, finally ‘one’. The component parts, therefore, no longer function metonymically as part–whole relations – they each have their own independent ‘readable’ existence, each grapheme becoming a simulacrum of its lexical parent, further subdividing the prototypicality of the divine entity, Jesu. This is achieved in the blended space through decompressing relations of ‘representation’ and ‘identity’ into ‘property’ on the one hand, and on the other, compressing relations of ‘analogy’, ‘identity’, ‘representation’, ‘property’ and ‘part–whole’, which combine the material, the linguistic, the imagistic, the semantic, the grammatical and the allegorical properties of language and meaning. Herbert has created, in the words of Elsky (1989: 149), ‘a textual space in which words could be simultaneously icons and significant sounds and thus be both acoustically and visually meaningful’. Perhaps more importantly, Herbert has created a textual space in which words and the characters of which they are composed can also be conceptually meaningful, revealed throughout the path of the blend. In the blended network, these properties both preserve their input structure and simultaneously combine creating their own emergent structure as in the box in Figure 6, namely, that signs and their composite parts have an ontological reality that can supposit for each other. In other words, sign and referent, spirit and matter, are fused into uniqueness: to quote from Herbert’s ‘Love-Joy’ (1974: 128), they are the ‘bodie and the letters both’. As a direct result of the blend, the ‘conditions of plausibility’ that permit the conceptual coherence of the divine incarnation of the ‘W/word’ are met. Figure 6 shows how the emergent structure projects this synchronicity back to the inputs.
This backward projection from the blend to the inputs allows the final lines of the poem to ‘cohere’. The formulation provided above splits the component parts
of the lexical term into three units as evidenced by the broken arrows that project from the blend back to the inputs reflecting the ‘attributive’ qualities of Christ (‘I ES U’ = I ease you). The formal structure, or ‘named elements’ (Fauconnier, and Turner, 2002: 356), in this case the proper noun ‘JESU’, not only parallels, but crucially, becomes part of the conceptual structure within the blended network. This suggests a view that runs counter to the perception that ‘formal expression in language is a way of prompting hearer and reader to assemble and develop conceptual constructions … there is no encoding of concepts into words or decoding of words into concepts’ (Fauconnier and Turner, 1995: 183, 2002: 360). In ‘JESU’, the form of the word can be construed as representing one concept holistically, as in the proper noun ‘Christ’, or other concepts when decompressed into individual letters, such as what ‘Christ’ effectively means. The coordinated arrows project the relationship of these component parts to the speaker’s ‘part’, as in line 9 of the poem, ‘to my broken heart he was I ease you’. Completing the formal blend, the single black arrow from B3 to Input 5 denotes the relationship of the ‘whole’ Christ to the speaker’s ‘whole’, in line 10: ‘and to my whole is JESU’. Thus, the ‘JESU’ of the emergent structure is now fully restored to its nominal form, the configuration adopted at the poem’s opening. Yet the various instantiations of the term, established throughout the poem’s blended network, have become part of the term’s structure, making this particular JESU significantly more complex and polysemous than that of the poem’s opening. Consequently,
the Christ reconfigured at the close of the poem is a multiplicative representation of Himself, that ‘means’ both literally and figuratively. Such a revelation raises questions about the status of the W/word in the context of early modern England in which the poem is set. Reformers believed that the proliferation of ‘spurious relics’ and ‘pious frauds’ entailed an ‘infinite sub-division’ of divinity (Eire, 1986: 14–16). It could be argued that attributing value to the constituent elements of the lexical term ‘JESU’ subdivides the essence of Christ and equates Him conceptually with the fetishized objects of Catholic worship. Thus, by foregrounding the spirituality of the ‘sacred name’ of Christ through the graphemic and phonological puns as part of a formal blended network, I would suggest that Herbert inadvertently portrays a fetishistic consciousness by objectifying the sign. That this ‘sign’ is the ‘W/word’ translates Herbert’s ‘JESU’, as both sign and referent, into an ‘idol’.
Herbert’s polysemous space is achieved through blending an array of conceptual networks that compress a range of vital relations across input spaces, thus integrating many disparate properties of thought, language, and meaning. Herbert’s ‘signs’ have value not only as signifiers of something else, but crucially, as ends in themselves. These wider ideological implications can only be fully appreciated on considering the poem’s theological context – specifically, the fetishism of idolatry – itself part of the input structure projected to the blended space in which the various meanings coalesce.
5 Conclusion: How blending ‘matters’
I propose that the ideological (rather than the conceptual) coherence achieved through the ‘JESU’ blend is radically undermined through a consideration of the material effects of its emergent structure. In Aristotelian terms, written and spoken signs functions as secondary means of signification as they represent ‘inner discourse’, the language of the soul (Aristotle, 1938: 115). Developing Aristotelian philosophy, Ockham writes: ‘the ‘sign’… is not the natural sign of anything’ (1974: 51). In Herbert’s ‘JESU’, the internal discourse of the soul combines with the secondary significations, the ‘subordinated’ acoustic properties of the letters <J>, <E>, <S> and <U>. Yet, Herbert does not promote subordination of form, nor does he conceive of any division between form and matter. The ‘form’, that which is alluded to by the linguistic units, inheres in each configuration in the emergent structure. The point of the poem is that there can be no separation.6 Refuting Calvin’s assertion that ‘we may not transfer to the one what belongs to the other’ inadvertently appears to be Herbert’s point. By compressing the relations of signification, Herbert transfers to the ‘word’ what belongs to that designated by it. Through the form/meaning blend the emergent structure of Herbert’s ‘JESU’ effectively generates a doubled form of signification: form and meaning intersect so that the sign not only denotes but becomes the referent. In contradistinction to the Ockham logic that posits the external or spoken sign as ‘not the natural sign of anything’, Herbert’s external sign is the natural sign of everything: every material
incarnation has its own intrinsic value transposing the W/word to the status of ‘idol’. Conceiving of signs in this way eradicates the theological gulf between the material and the divine so that language is both material and divine. Highlighting the double function of the sign, Elsky writes, ‘Herbert’s language is man-made, and its basic units, letters, also contain in their material being the basis of its spiritual meaning’ (Elsky, 1989: 151). Like the ‘man-made’ carnal representations of Christ that Reformers sought to obliterate through a systematic process of iconoclasm, the word itself ‘figures’ as idolatrous: issuing forth as the ‘substance’ embodying both form and matter, sign and signified, the word not only writes, but actually is its own ‘story’.
Ideology is both informed and constituted by plausible ‘stories’. Cognitive poetics is a useful tool for analysing the conditions of plausibility that must be established if these (often discordant) ‘stories’ are to cohere. What this article has attempted to show is that what is plausible conceptually is not always ‘plausible’ ideologically. Blending exploits this asymmetry by making plausible the very ‘stories’ that a particular ideology desires to remain incoherent. For example, recent research on iconicity, particularly the iconicity inherent in metaphor (Hiraga, 1994, 1998, 1999), and more explicitly in pattern poetry (Gross, 1997; Longrée, 1976; Tsur, 1997, 2000) would certainly contribute to this study by introducing a theologically implausible concept of the word as an image. Such integration of form and meaning would uncover much deeper contradictions in Reformed theology than those explored here. Cognitive poetics also provides the framework through which these contradictions can be made explicit and understood. However, although this area of research invites and deserves further analysis, it is beyond the scope of my current argument. As Tsur (2000: 751) puts it:
Cognitive poetics suggests that in the response to poetry, adaptive devices are turned to an aesthetic end. In a universe in which ‘the centre cannot hold’, readers of poetry find pleasure not so much in the emotional disorientation caused by manneristic devices, but rather in the reassertion that their adaptive devices, when disrupted, function properly.
I have suggested in this article that blending creates the conditions in which these poetic disruptions are reconciled. In so doing, I hope to have shown how blending operates, not just at the cognitive and linguistic levels in my analysis of form/meaning integration, but also at the level of ideology. In doing this, I have made an attempt to provide one answer to Dancygier’s titular question, ‘What Can Blending Do for You?’ (2006: 5). By taking account of the historical and theological context, the blending network recruits many inferences and nuances not available in the unidirectional mappings permitted through a conceptual metaphor analytical framework. With this contextual background knowledge, we can go beyond the textual realm to the realm of ideology where the conditions of plausibility are satisfied: to avail of one last pun, we need to know the rules before we can blend the rules. Only then can we fully appreciate the efficacy and scope of blending.
I am extremely grateful to the two anonymous reviewers of an earlier version of this article, whose insightful comments helped fine-tune the final version. Any errors or oversights that remain are my own.
Notes
1 Brian Cummings (2002) advances an excellent argument attesting to the literariness of Reformation theology.
2 I use the term ‘ideology’ in its basic sense as a system of beliefs or particular world-view shared by a specific group or community.
3 In blending terms, this bidirectionality refers to the forward and backward projection of information between the input spaces and the blended space. Both trajectories are discrete in that different things are projected.
4 Fish (1978: 31) makes this observation through the poet’s use of ‘deeply’ in the poem: ‘the adverb … is read as a claim by the speaker that his happy state is stable’. In his analysis of Herbert’s The Temple, Fish takes for granted much of the cognitive work involved in achieving contextual coherence. My analysis aims to show what this work is and how the reader arrives at, what Fish calls, the ‘obvious’ (1978: 28) interpretation of Herbert’s work.
5 The concept of representation is perhaps the most frequently contested issue in early modern theological polemics. In blending terms, Turner and Fauconnier typically consider the relation of representation to refer to a visual representation of a particular entity thus represented, as in the case of a photograph of a person. I consider representation here to be used in its broader context wherein any ‘sign’ may be perceived as a representation of its signified. In this way, the name of an entity, for example, whether visually presented as it is in the poem (albeit metaphorically as a frame), or otherwise, represents the entity itself.
6 I do not propose that Herbert intended to collapse the distinction between sign and referent. Intentionality does not enter into my argument. Moreover, I suggest that the poem can be interpreted as inculcating a counter-ideological position to the iconoclastic doctrine of Reformation theology. Such a reading is only possible, I argue, through a blending framework.
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Patricia Canning, School of English, Queen’s University Belfast, University Road, Belfast, BT7 1NN, UK. [email: [email protected]]
