- Email: [email protected]
Emotion, metaphor and narrative
Update
154
TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences
Vol.8 No.4 April 2004
| Book Review
Emotion, metaphor and narrative The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion, by Patrick Colm Hogan. Cambridge University Press, 2003. £45.00 /$65.00 (254 pages) ISBN 0 521 82527 X
Zolta´n Ko¨vecses Department of American Studies, Eotvos Lorand University, Ajtosi Durer sor 19 –21, Budapest 1146, Hungary
For me, the main attraction of this book is that, in addition to teaching us about emotions, human cognition and literature, it taught me about unconscious aspects of our notion of life and what comes after that. After reading Patrick Colm Hogan’s deeply humanistic book, I have learned to appreciate all of these a lot more. Let me try to sum up what I take to be the main ideas of the book. To begin, Hogan proposes and provides evidence for four hypotheses. First hypothesis: Emotion terms are prototype-based in both their eliciting conditions and their expressive/ actional consequences. For example, we can define sadness in the following way: sadness is what you feel when someone you like dies and what you express through weeping. In other words, emotions are embedded in stories and emotions are defined in terms of mini-narratives. Second hypothesis: Prototypical narratives are generated largely from prototypes. They prominently include the prototype eliciting conditions for emotions. Thus, in Hogan’s view, prototypical stories are expansions of the micronarratives that define emotion terms. Third hypothesis: Romantic union and social or political power are the two predominant prototypes for the eliciting conditions of happiness. This hypothesis proposes that romantic union and social/political power are the prototypical outcomes from which prototypical literary narratives are generated. In other words, these are the goals that are most commonly sought by protagonists in prototypical narratives. The corresponding prototypes for sorrow are the death of the beloved and the complete loss of social or political power. Fourth hypothesis: Two structures of literary narrative are especially prominent cross-culturally. These are romantic and heroic tragi-comedy. Romantic tragicomedy is derived from the personal prototype of happiness (achieving romantic reunion) and heroic tragi-comedy is derived from the social prototype for happiness (achieving social/political power). In addition, Hogan suggests that prototypical narratives have a telic (purposive) structure including an agent, a goal, and a causal sequence. The causal sequence connects the agent’s actions with the achievement or non-achievement of the goal. Various emotions can be Corresponding author: Zolta´n Ko¨vecses ([email protected]). www.sciencedirect.com
defined in relation to this telic structure. Thus, there are what he calls junctural emotions. These define a certain juncture (interruption or pause) in the larger narrative. They include fear, disgust, anger, wonder and mirth. Next, there are what are termed outcome emotions. Happiness and sorrow are the dominant emotions here. They represent the final evaluation points for junctural emotions. Finally, we have sustaining emotions. The two main sustaining emotions are romantic love and heroic perseverence. They sustain the plot. They help and cause the characters to go through the various junctural emotions until they reach a final outcome. This allows us to see why the union of lovers is the outcome goal for a predominant and universal narrative structure – the comedy. It is the prototype eliciting condition for personal happiness. The sustaining emotion in this type of narrative will be romantic love. In this view, tragedy is a tranformation of comedy, and not another genre of the same type. In general, we find the same type of romantic and heroic tragi-comedies across unrelated traditions. This can be accounted for by the cross-cultural constancy of happiness. This constancy comes from the universal eliciting conditions for happiness: romantic union and social domination. One of the impressive features of the book is that the author cites evidence for all of these hypotheses and claims from a wide variety of unrelated literary traditions, including not only the Euro-American tradition but also many others, such as Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Middle Eastern, African and Oceanic. Possible extensions of the theory As the author repeatedly observes, this book outlines a research program. The test of any research program is to see if it can be extended in ways that help us better understand the phenomenon studied – in this case the relationship among emotion, narrative and human cognition in general. I believe that Hogan’s theory can be extended in a number of useful ways, as I hope to demonstrate briefly below. There are two main areas where I see a potential (and in some cases, a need) for extension: some of the analyses having to do with prototype structure, and certain aspects of emotion, narrative and cognition that, in my view, crucially involve metaphorical conceptualization. Prototype analyses I agree that the notion of prototype is justifiably an important element of the theory that Hogan builds.
Update
TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences
Prototypes are required for the characterization of the eliciting conditions for emotion, of the phenomenological tone of emotion, and of the actional aspects of emotion. Indeed, prototypes are essential for the characterization of narratives as such, as the author convincingly argues. His argument emphasizes that prototypes are more concrete and specific than other authors (such as Wierzbicka, Lakoff, and Ko¨vecses) suggested [1,2]. In a way, I both agree and disagree with this emphasis. It makes intuitive sense to suggest that, for example, the prototypical cause of anger is someone unexpectedly striking me or knocking me off my feet, rather than someone offending me, which indeed seems abstract and vague. On the other hand, however, I see a potential problem here. Categories (of emotion causes, for instance) are categories because there is something that holds the members of the categories together (such as the various ways of offending someone), hence it might be difficult to account for all the members of a particular category in the absence of systematic links among category members. If the prototype is given at a very concrete and specific level, how easy is it to find the links from the central member to all the less central and peripheral members? In order to find systematic links, shouldn’t we immediately leap from the specific, concrete prototype to a more abstract characterization? I think there is a similar situation in connection with the prototype definition of narrative. As the author himself observes, there are many works that are neither heroic nor romantic tragi-comedies. But they are narratives, and as such they belong to the same category as the prototypical ones. The question is: do we have a systematic way of accounting for non-prototypical narratives within the framework? That is, if they are non-prototypical, how can we characterize them? The main issue, as I see it, is that the category of narrative is an easily expandable category, as much of modern and especially postmodern literature testifies. What this means is that much of this literature does not conform to the prototype of narrative. But if it does not, and yet it can be considered a form a narrative, how can we account for the many possible divergences from the prototype by relying on very concrete and specific prototypes? Do we have the systematic means to cover and bring together, at least in a semi-formal way, the many nonprototypical kinds of narrative under a single category? It seems clear to me that future research in the study of emotion-based narrative prototypes must proceed in this direction. Metaphor analyses Another line of research that we could explore within this framework is the study of the role of metaphorical conceptualization in emotion-based narratives. For one thing, I wonder if we can simply assume and accept as inconsequential the presence of inherently metaphorically-constituted concepts in the theory. The particular concept that I have in mind is that of romantic union, as one of the predominant prototypes for the eliciting conditions of happiness. In other words, the theory suggests that being united with the beloved is the www.sciencedirect.com
Vol.8 No.4 April 2004
155
paradigm of happiness. But the notion of being united with someone is itself a metaphorical one. It is based on the central metaphor for love [3,4]: LOVE IS PHYSICAL UNITY (OF TWO COMPLEMENTARY PARTS ). Can cognitive literary analysis and theory-construction start, without first reflecting, with concepts that are themselves the result of prior metaphorical conceptualization? In certain types of narrative, transcendental happiness is based on happiness deriving from the more concrete concept of romantic union, that is, the relationship between God and humanity is imagined on the analogy of the relationship between two people who love each other. In other words, there are conceptual metaphors, such as LOVE IS PHYSICAL UNITY (OF TWO COMPLEMENTARY PARTS ), on which both emotions and, hence, certain types of narratives are based. Hogan offers a hierarchy for capturing this: transcendental happiness derives from romantic union, which derives from PHYSICAL UNITY (OF TWO COMPLEMENTARY PARTS ). Instead of assuming this, we could imagine the metaphorical structuring of both emotion concepts and the narratives based on them not as a vertical hierarchy, but as a single conceptual metaphor that applies to any kind of abstract unity. In other words, abstract unities of whatever kind can be seen as being conventionally conceptualized as a physical unity [5]. This might be a general structuring principle of both the conceptual system and certain narratives. Is this a peculiarity of the UNITY metaphor? Probably not. As Hogan suggests, the prototypical narrative plot also involves time and space. Consider space. The crucial distinction of space, according to the author, is ‘home’ vs. ‘away from home’. The concept of home is instantiated differently in different types of narrative. In romantic plots, home is the place where one lives with the beloved; in heroic plots, it is the nation; and in sacrificial plots, it is ‘a paradise of natural comfort and plenty’. Now we can think of these last two spaces as metaphorically constituted according to the following conceptual metaphors: NATION IS HOME and PARADISE IS HOME . They are both based on the idea that home is where we like to be most with the beloved – the literal definition of home in romantic narratives. Again, we find that the notion of HOME applies metaphorically to any abstract target domain that can be brought into correspondence with the literal concept. It seems to me that we have a tendency here that characterizes the conceptual system in general. The kind of mind involved Hogan postulates the existence of several non-specific ‘proto-emotions’. One of them is ‘sensitivity’. Its eliciting condition is an excess of stimulation and its actional response is withdrawal from stimulation. He suggests that temperature regulation is the prototypical case for this. Given this idea, he explains the source domains for some more specific emotions on this basis: heat as source for lust and anger, warmth for affection, and cold for fear. Fair enough, but I do not think that these metaphorical concepts come directly from ambient conditions that require temperature regulation; I think that these are body-based metaphors for emotions. Feelings of change in body temperature evoke the ambient temperatures as
156
Update
TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences
metaphorical source domains. This shift in the theory would result in a radically different conception of the mind that Hogan is working with. Specifically, it would give us an embodied mind that is based on experiential realism [6]. Hogan’s account comes very close to this idea, but he does not take the final step. He clearly recognizes the presence of both ‘biological givens’ and social-cultural factors in emotion and the narratives that are based on them. He also sees that ‘societes can develop in such a way as to socialize emotion in ways that seem directly contrary to the biological givens’ (p. 253). I would agree with this argument although, more generally, I would also claim that different cultures can build their conceptual systems on different aspects of bodily behavior associated with particular concepts, and that social-cultural factors can ‘override’ bodily components of a given concept. This view gives us a more refined version of what Lakoff and Johnson call ‘experiential realism’. There are several such parallels between the experientialist approach and Hogan’s theory.
Vol.8 No.4 April 2004
But despite his obvious reliance on an experientialist mind, he remains reluctant to embrace fully such a conception of the mind. References 1 Wierzbicka, A. (1972) Semantic Primitives, Atheneum Verlag, Frankfurt 2 Lakoff, G. and Ko¨vecses, Z. (1987) The cognitive model of anger inherent in American English. In Cultural Models in Language and Thought (Holland, D. and Quinn, N., eds), pp. 195– 221, Cambridge University Press 3 Ko¨vecses, Z. (1988) The Language of Love, Bucknell University Press 4 Ko¨vecses, Z. (1991) A linguist’s quest for love. J. Social Personal Relations 8, 77 – 97 5 Ko¨vecses, Z. (2000) Metaphor and Emotion, Cambridge University Press 6 Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh, Basic Books
1364-6613/$ - see front matter q 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2004.02.001
TICS Book Reviews We aim to review the best of the new books in Cognitive Science in TICS. Our book reviews are styled like short opinion pieces or mini-reviews of a subject area, with the aim of providing readers with more in-depth analysis. As well as critically appraising important new texts in the field, the authors of reviews will be encouraged to use the book as a framework for wider discussion. Publishers: – monographs and edited volumes (but not undergraduate textbooks) will be considered for review in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Please send us advance e-mails of forthcoming titles and copies of books you would like to be reviewed to the Book Review Editor at the address below. Trends in Cognitive Sciences Elsevier London, 84 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8RR, UK. e-mail: [email protected] www.sciencedirect.com
154
TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences
Vol.8 No.4 April 2004
| Book Review
Emotion, metaphor and narrative The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion, by Patrick Colm Hogan. Cambridge University Press, 2003. £45.00 /$65.00 (254 pages) ISBN 0 521 82527 X
Zolta´n Ko¨vecses Department of American Studies, Eotvos Lorand University, Ajtosi Durer sor 19 –21, Budapest 1146, Hungary
For me, the main attraction of this book is that, in addition to teaching us about emotions, human cognition and literature, it taught me about unconscious aspects of our notion of life and what comes after that. After reading Patrick Colm Hogan’s deeply humanistic book, I have learned to appreciate all of these a lot more. Let me try to sum up what I take to be the main ideas of the book. To begin, Hogan proposes and provides evidence for four hypotheses. First hypothesis: Emotion terms are prototype-based in both their eliciting conditions and their expressive/ actional consequences. For example, we can define sadness in the following way: sadness is what you feel when someone you like dies and what you express through weeping. In other words, emotions are embedded in stories and emotions are defined in terms of mini-narratives. Second hypothesis: Prototypical narratives are generated largely from prototypes. They prominently include the prototype eliciting conditions for emotions. Thus, in Hogan’s view, prototypical stories are expansions of the micronarratives that define emotion terms. Third hypothesis: Romantic union and social or political power are the two predominant prototypes for the eliciting conditions of happiness. This hypothesis proposes that romantic union and social/political power are the prototypical outcomes from which prototypical literary narratives are generated. In other words, these are the goals that are most commonly sought by protagonists in prototypical narratives. The corresponding prototypes for sorrow are the death of the beloved and the complete loss of social or political power. Fourth hypothesis: Two structures of literary narrative are especially prominent cross-culturally. These are romantic and heroic tragi-comedy. Romantic tragicomedy is derived from the personal prototype of happiness (achieving romantic reunion) and heroic tragi-comedy is derived from the social prototype for happiness (achieving social/political power). In addition, Hogan suggests that prototypical narratives have a telic (purposive) structure including an agent, a goal, and a causal sequence. The causal sequence connects the agent’s actions with the achievement or non-achievement of the goal. Various emotions can be Corresponding author: Zolta´n Ko¨vecses ([email protected]). www.sciencedirect.com
defined in relation to this telic structure. Thus, there are what he calls junctural emotions. These define a certain juncture (interruption or pause) in the larger narrative. They include fear, disgust, anger, wonder and mirth. Next, there are what are termed outcome emotions. Happiness and sorrow are the dominant emotions here. They represent the final evaluation points for junctural emotions. Finally, we have sustaining emotions. The two main sustaining emotions are romantic love and heroic perseverence. They sustain the plot. They help and cause the characters to go through the various junctural emotions until they reach a final outcome. This allows us to see why the union of lovers is the outcome goal for a predominant and universal narrative structure – the comedy. It is the prototype eliciting condition for personal happiness. The sustaining emotion in this type of narrative will be romantic love. In this view, tragedy is a tranformation of comedy, and not another genre of the same type. In general, we find the same type of romantic and heroic tragi-comedies across unrelated traditions. This can be accounted for by the cross-cultural constancy of happiness. This constancy comes from the universal eliciting conditions for happiness: romantic union and social domination. One of the impressive features of the book is that the author cites evidence for all of these hypotheses and claims from a wide variety of unrelated literary traditions, including not only the Euro-American tradition but also many others, such as Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Middle Eastern, African and Oceanic. Possible extensions of the theory As the author repeatedly observes, this book outlines a research program. The test of any research program is to see if it can be extended in ways that help us better understand the phenomenon studied – in this case the relationship among emotion, narrative and human cognition in general. I believe that Hogan’s theory can be extended in a number of useful ways, as I hope to demonstrate briefly below. There are two main areas where I see a potential (and in some cases, a need) for extension: some of the analyses having to do with prototype structure, and certain aspects of emotion, narrative and cognition that, in my view, crucially involve metaphorical conceptualization. Prototype analyses I agree that the notion of prototype is justifiably an important element of the theory that Hogan builds.
Update
TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences
Prototypes are required for the characterization of the eliciting conditions for emotion, of the phenomenological tone of emotion, and of the actional aspects of emotion. Indeed, prototypes are essential for the characterization of narratives as such, as the author convincingly argues. His argument emphasizes that prototypes are more concrete and specific than other authors (such as Wierzbicka, Lakoff, and Ko¨vecses) suggested [1,2]. In a way, I both agree and disagree with this emphasis. It makes intuitive sense to suggest that, for example, the prototypical cause of anger is someone unexpectedly striking me or knocking me off my feet, rather than someone offending me, which indeed seems abstract and vague. On the other hand, however, I see a potential problem here. Categories (of emotion causes, for instance) are categories because there is something that holds the members of the categories together (such as the various ways of offending someone), hence it might be difficult to account for all the members of a particular category in the absence of systematic links among category members. If the prototype is given at a very concrete and specific level, how easy is it to find the links from the central member to all the less central and peripheral members? In order to find systematic links, shouldn’t we immediately leap from the specific, concrete prototype to a more abstract characterization? I think there is a similar situation in connection with the prototype definition of narrative. As the author himself observes, there are many works that are neither heroic nor romantic tragi-comedies. But they are narratives, and as such they belong to the same category as the prototypical ones. The question is: do we have a systematic way of accounting for non-prototypical narratives within the framework? That is, if they are non-prototypical, how can we characterize them? The main issue, as I see it, is that the category of narrative is an easily expandable category, as much of modern and especially postmodern literature testifies. What this means is that much of this literature does not conform to the prototype of narrative. But if it does not, and yet it can be considered a form a narrative, how can we account for the many possible divergences from the prototype by relying on very concrete and specific prototypes? Do we have the systematic means to cover and bring together, at least in a semi-formal way, the many nonprototypical kinds of narrative under a single category? It seems clear to me that future research in the study of emotion-based narrative prototypes must proceed in this direction. Metaphor analyses Another line of research that we could explore within this framework is the study of the role of metaphorical conceptualization in emotion-based narratives. For one thing, I wonder if we can simply assume and accept as inconsequential the presence of inherently metaphorically-constituted concepts in the theory. The particular concept that I have in mind is that of romantic union, as one of the predominant prototypes for the eliciting conditions of happiness. In other words, the theory suggests that being united with the beloved is the www.sciencedirect.com
Vol.8 No.4 April 2004
155
paradigm of happiness. But the notion of being united with someone is itself a metaphorical one. It is based on the central metaphor for love [3,4]: LOVE IS PHYSICAL UNITY (OF TWO COMPLEMENTARY PARTS ). Can cognitive literary analysis and theory-construction start, without first reflecting, with concepts that are themselves the result of prior metaphorical conceptualization? In certain types of narrative, transcendental happiness is based on happiness deriving from the more concrete concept of romantic union, that is, the relationship between God and humanity is imagined on the analogy of the relationship between two people who love each other. In other words, there are conceptual metaphors, such as LOVE IS PHYSICAL UNITY (OF TWO COMPLEMENTARY PARTS ), on which both emotions and, hence, certain types of narratives are based. Hogan offers a hierarchy for capturing this: transcendental happiness derives from romantic union, which derives from PHYSICAL UNITY (OF TWO COMPLEMENTARY PARTS ). Instead of assuming this, we could imagine the metaphorical structuring of both emotion concepts and the narratives based on them not as a vertical hierarchy, but as a single conceptual metaphor that applies to any kind of abstract unity. In other words, abstract unities of whatever kind can be seen as being conventionally conceptualized as a physical unity [5]. This might be a general structuring principle of both the conceptual system and certain narratives. Is this a peculiarity of the UNITY metaphor? Probably not. As Hogan suggests, the prototypical narrative plot also involves time and space. Consider space. The crucial distinction of space, according to the author, is ‘home’ vs. ‘away from home’. The concept of home is instantiated differently in different types of narrative. In romantic plots, home is the place where one lives with the beloved; in heroic plots, it is the nation; and in sacrificial plots, it is ‘a paradise of natural comfort and plenty’. Now we can think of these last two spaces as metaphorically constituted according to the following conceptual metaphors: NATION IS HOME and PARADISE IS HOME . They are both based on the idea that home is where we like to be most with the beloved – the literal definition of home in romantic narratives. Again, we find that the notion of HOME applies metaphorically to any abstract target domain that can be brought into correspondence with the literal concept. It seems to me that we have a tendency here that characterizes the conceptual system in general. The kind of mind involved Hogan postulates the existence of several non-specific ‘proto-emotions’. One of them is ‘sensitivity’. Its eliciting condition is an excess of stimulation and its actional response is withdrawal from stimulation. He suggests that temperature regulation is the prototypical case for this. Given this idea, he explains the source domains for some more specific emotions on this basis: heat as source for lust and anger, warmth for affection, and cold for fear. Fair enough, but I do not think that these metaphorical concepts come directly from ambient conditions that require temperature regulation; I think that these are body-based metaphors for emotions. Feelings of change in body temperature evoke the ambient temperatures as
156
Update
TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences
metaphorical source domains. This shift in the theory would result in a radically different conception of the mind that Hogan is working with. Specifically, it would give us an embodied mind that is based on experiential realism [6]. Hogan’s account comes very close to this idea, but he does not take the final step. He clearly recognizes the presence of both ‘biological givens’ and social-cultural factors in emotion and the narratives that are based on them. He also sees that ‘societes can develop in such a way as to socialize emotion in ways that seem directly contrary to the biological givens’ (p. 253). I would agree with this argument although, more generally, I would also claim that different cultures can build their conceptual systems on different aspects of bodily behavior associated with particular concepts, and that social-cultural factors can ‘override’ bodily components of a given concept. This view gives us a more refined version of what Lakoff and Johnson call ‘experiential realism’. There are several such parallels between the experientialist approach and Hogan’s theory.
Vol.8 No.4 April 2004
But despite his obvious reliance on an experientialist mind, he remains reluctant to embrace fully such a conception of the mind. References 1 Wierzbicka, A. (1972) Semantic Primitives, Atheneum Verlag, Frankfurt 2 Lakoff, G. and Ko¨vecses, Z. (1987) The cognitive model of anger inherent in American English. In Cultural Models in Language and Thought (Holland, D. and Quinn, N., eds), pp. 195– 221, Cambridge University Press 3 Ko¨vecses, Z. (1988) The Language of Love, Bucknell University Press 4 Ko¨vecses, Z. (1991) A linguist’s quest for love. J. Social Personal Relations 8, 77 – 97 5 Ko¨vecses, Z. (2000) Metaphor and Emotion, Cambridge University Press 6 Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh, Basic Books
1364-6613/$ - see front matter q 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2004.02.001
TICS Book Reviews We aim to review the best of the new books in Cognitive Science in TICS. Our book reviews are styled like short opinion pieces or mini-reviews of a subject area, with the aim of providing readers with more in-depth analysis. As well as critically appraising important new texts in the field, the authors of reviews will be encouraged to use the book as a framework for wider discussion. Publishers: – monographs and edited volumes (but not undergraduate textbooks) will be considered for review in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Please send us advance e-mails of forthcoming titles and copies of books you would like to be reviewed to the Book Review Editor at the address below. Trends in Cognitive Sciences Elsevier London, 84 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8RR, UK. e-mail: [email protected] www.sciencedirect.com