Mapping the mind and the body: on W.H. Auden's personifications - Critical Essay

Style, Fall, 2002 by Craig A. Hamilton

Some of the danger implicit in the transformation of rhetorical personifications into agents [...] lies in its apparent reversibility. "Imaginary" agents disrupt the realistic texture of epic partly because they represent an alien mode, but also because they call into question the status of ostensibly "real" or "historical" agents. If personifications are animated through the intensification of metaphor (or more precisely, through the intensification of a metaphoric vehicle at the expense of its supposed "tenor"), then mimetic agents may have a converse tendency to slide "back" into metaphor (that is, the agent may turn out to be the vehicle of a previously unsuspected or forgotten tenor). The reversibility of personifications thus makes the boundary between rhetoric and agency less secure than it might have seemed. As figurative language seems more violent and opaque, agents seem more transparent and abstract. (60)

Those familiar with research into metaphor by cognitive linguists will find the "reversibility of personification," its "alien mode," and differentiation between agents and personifications somewhat odd. George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Mark Turner have argued for two decades that personification cannot be described in such ways. These researchers would argue that Knapp's passing mention of tenors and vehicles seems to take for granted that which he could be accounting for, in the same way that they would find Katherine Hayles's recent remark about "simple anthropomorphic projection" (2) onto objects in art to be overlooking the fundamental cognitive mechanisms behind personification. Of course, Knapp and Hayles are not cognitive linguists, so taking them to task for ignoring the cognitive dimensions of personification may be unfair. However, because accounting for our mappings of the human onto the nonhuman inherently involves metaphor in a way that is far from simple, the mappings merit explaining. For exam ple, Knapp's remark about "personifications on vacation from allegory" (128) in Wordsworth's poetry is witty, but it only adds confusion where clarity is needed because of long misunderstandings in literary history over allegory (Crisp 6-8). Love, History, Luck, and so on, are probably better understood by personification than by any other source domain. Because we are hard pressed to imagine these target domains literally, it seems we cannot avoid metaphor to imagine them. If so, Auden's personifications are justifiable. That said, literary critics still need a story about personification that makes sense and accounts for examples that include the talking bodies and talking minds found in some of Auden's greatest poems. A story like this no doubt begins with the rhetorical tradition before cognitive linguistics arrives on the scene.

Perhaps the oldest view of personification that literary scholars are familiar with comes from the rhetorical tradition. For instance, in the sixteenth century, Erasmus (d. 1536) referred to two types of personification: "prosopographia" and "prosopopoeia" (51). He classified prosopographia with the personification and description of abstractions such as Justice or Calumny (52). By turning an abstract entity into an agent embodying a moral value, the value was understood through its personification. To combine the agent with the moral value represented creates a fictive character (e.g., Justice), which we understand as standing for the ideal of the same name. Erasmus also classified prosopopoeia as a figure that either described people or presented "a man far away, or long since dead, speaking" (53). For Erasmus, prosopopoeia could be used to "bring back to life the ancient noblemen" who would "rightly exhort us with [...] words" when rhetoricians repeated the words of those they envoiced in an argument or sp eech (53). In essence, Erasmus's distinction of prosopopoeia (i.e., envoicing) from prosopographia (i.e., personification) is one that persists. For example, Richard Lanham's definitions of prosopographia as that which "vividly describes the appearance of a person, imaginary or real, quick or dead" (123), and of prosopopoeia as first and foremost occurring when an "animal or an inanimate object is represented as having human attributes and addressed or made to speak as if it were human" (123), are problematic. As we will see below, "Our Weakness" (the persona of part IV of Auden's "Memorial for the City") is a talking body that is both an instance of prosopographia and an instance of prosopopoeia. That is, Our Weakness personifies an abstract body incapable of speaking although the body is staged by Auden as someone speaking. Even Rodney Edgecombe's recent efforts in this journal "to tidy" (4) the confusion caused by many terms that are synonymous with personification assumes categorical differences based on the targets personified while ignoring the similarity of the source domains involved. Other literary critics who simply equate personification with prosopopoeia alone (Paxson 1) also reveal the limitations of classical rhetoric to handle figures like Auden's.