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

Style, Fall, 2002 by Craig A. Hamilton

The rhetorical tradition suggests that personification is merely a categorization issue. All we need to do to deal with it is simply label it either prosopographia or prosopopoeia and move on. But such a task overlooks how we personify, why we personify, or what metaphorical domains are involved. To simply call "Our Weakness" an instance of prosopopoeia is not just wrong: it does not explain how the personification occurs when we read Auden' s poem. If we are to study metaphor at all it must be studied as a joint venture of our thought and our language because the same domains hold for them both. Of course, it is too late for us to question Erasmus or his predecessors, but classical rhetorical categories are limiting when we find examples like Auden' s that do not fit nicely into them. In that case, the story of personification in cognitive linguistics, which begins in 1980 with Lakoff and Johnson, can be useful for clarifying the issue.

For Lakoff and Johnson, personification is an ontological metaphor that "allows us to comprehend a wide variety of experiences with non-human entities in terms of human motivations, characteristics, and activities" (Metaphors 33). Since "motivations, characteristics, and activities" are central to our basic notion of a human being, when we use these traits in source domains to construct a target domain via metaphor, the product of this cognitive process is a personification. As Lakoff and Johnson claim, in personification generally "we are imputing human qualities to things that are not human-theories, diseases, inflation, etc. In such cases, there are no actual human beings referred to. When we say 'Inflation robbed me of my savings,' we are not using the term 'inflation' tQ refer to a person" (Metaphors 35). The target of this expression is inflation, while the source is not a single specific person per se but human traits that become salient for the mapping. in this case, we have personal motivations and a ctions, such as the greedy act of robbing that we map onto "inflation," and the resulting state of affairs whereby money is inevitably or unexpectedly lost. Figure 1 represents this mapping.

"Inflation robbed me of my savings" is meant to convey that money was lost unexpectedly. That is, a certain state of affairs in the target domain results from a certain source domain activity (i.e., robbing). We map a personal trait like having a motive (greed) to carry out an action (rob) onto "inflation," which helps us to personify it. So when Edgecombe states that "Incarnation involves the assumption not only of a human form, but also of a personality" (6), the "assumption" of "personality" results from active cross-domain mapping from a source to a target rather than a passive encounter with the metaphor. On this view, Knapp's idea of the reversible nature of personification does not hold since cross-domain mapping principles, as Lakoff and Johnson would argue, mean that metaphor is neither arbitrary nor reversible. To clarify conceptual domains, and clearly recognize corresponding elements within those domains, is just one advantage of the cognitive approach to metaphor.