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

Style, Fall, 2002 by Craig A. Hamilton

First, the source domain of actions is a subcategory of the target category of events; that is, every action is an event, though the converse is not true. Indeed, it is exactly the events without agents that the EVENTS ARE ACTIONS metaphor applies to. [...] Second, because actions are events, the mapping from actions to events has a structure somewhat different from the other mappings. Each action consists of an event plus the agency which brings that event about. The mapping thus adds structure to the event domain making the event the result of an action and introducing the agent who brings that action about.

(75; my emphasis)

In this story, a personification's source domain is an ACTION and its target domain is an EVENT. Lakoff and Turner's best evidence for this mapping is Death as the Grim Reaper. Personification of Death the Grim Reaper is due to the fact that an EVENT (dying) is understood as an ACTION (reaping) done by an agent (reaper). As my italics above suggest, the issue of agency is vital because personification occurs when an action's agent becomes an event's causal agent. (1) On this view, personification is a way to describe events. It also suggests one way out of the confusion caused by contrasting personification to metaphor when we fail to see that agency is a human trait we map from source to target. That is, agency is not just a property of the source domain: it is mapped to the target to make causal agency a crucial property of the personified entity in the target domain. This suggests that Knapp's contrast between personifications and agents is misguided. People are always already agents because of our intenti onal stance towards them in this world.

When we personify we bring events like death down to human scale so as to understand them concretely as personified agents analogous to human beings. With the Grim Reaper, we transform death from an event into an action caused by an agent. On this view, agency, is inherent to personification and not exclusive of it. In sum, we personify to make the world make sense to us on human scale. (2)

2. Auden's Personifications of Mind and Body

Bergonzi and others noticed Auden personifying abstractions. "Reason's depravity that takes / The useful concepts that she makes I As universals" (Collected 231), as Auden wrote in "New Year Letter," is just one example. But there is a difference between personifying "Reason" and personifying the body or the mind. The difference is that a person entails both a body and a mind. To personify a non-human target like Reason is one thing, but to personify a human mind or body is another thing. Why? The nature of the mind and the body involves their special relation to a personified source domain. That relation in simple terms is our understanding of bodies and minds as comprising people. Lakoff and Johnson refer to "motivations, characteristics, and activities" (Metaphors 33) as inherent to personification's source domain. However, corporeality is just as central to the domain as is having ontological characteristics like feelings, desires, emotions, and the will to act. That is, the source domain of "person" take s as given essential elements like mind and body. However, when we map these elements into target domains, then we sense a difference between, say, personifying history and personifying the flesh. Of course, to consider a "person" as more than the sum of a mind and a body is part of our normal mental development. What the developmental psychologist Peter Hobson calls our "concept of a bodily-cum-mental person" (211) suggests that our default notion of "person" in childhood encapsulates something that has a mind and a body. Still, this does not prevent Auden from separating the two in dualistic fashion. Indeed, what are we to make of Auden's habit of splitting the mind from the body in poems that include, among others, "1929," "The Quest," "The Sea and The Mirror," "Horae Canonicae," "For the Time Being," "The Age of Anxiety," "Friday's Child," "You," "Ode to Terminus," and "Talking to Myself"? (3) Something odd appears to be happening when Auden turns from personifying abstractions to personifying minds and b odies.