More Reviews of My Book

By Brad Pasanek Posted in Book

I’m collecting here several more reviews of my book — with thanks to the authors for these incisive and interesting responses.

3morereviews

  • Walter Mimms, “Ctrl-F Enlightenment,” The New Criterion (January 2016). Link to www.newcriterion.com
  • Michael Falk, “Metaphors of Mind,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 48:1 (January 2017): 161-3. Link to Project Muse
  • Sean Silver, “Metaphors of Mind,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 29:4, (Summer 2017): 672-675. Link to ECF
  • Donald R. Wehrs, “Metaphors of Mind: An Eighteenth-Century Dictionary by Brad Pasanek (review)“ The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats 50:1 (Autumn 2017): 78-81. Link to Project Muse. 
  • Collin Jennings, “Mindful Matter,“ Eighteenth-Century Life, 42:1 (Jan 2018): 124-129. Link to ECL

A Review in TLS

By Brad Pasanek Posted in Book

A review by Freya Johnston in The Times Literary Supplement.

Times_Literary_Supplement_logo

You may or may not be able to hear the “harrumph” through the paywall. Still, I like the following judgment: “The author’s proposed distinctions and definitions are forever on the verge of evaporating, or of being retracted.”

Reviews of “Metaphors of Mind, An Eighteenth-Century Dictionary”

By Brad Pasanek Posted in Book

ThreeCovers

I have been very fortunate in responses and in my reviewers—and have been happily paired with Sean Silver in three of the essays below. Many thanks to all for reading carefully and critically:

  • Rosalind Powell, reviewing for The British Society for Literature and Science (January 2016). Link.
  • Jack Lynch for Choice 53:6 (February 2016). doi: 10.5860/CHOICE.193583
  • Tina Lupton, “The Searcher of Patterns and the Keeper of Things” LARB (March 5, 2016). Link.
  • Sayre Greenfield, reviewing for Modern Philology (August 2016). Link.
  • Jess Keiser, reviewing for Eighteenth Century Studies 49:4 (Summer 2016). Link.
  • Jenny Davidson, “Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century,“ Studies in English Literature (Summer 2016). Link.

Brain Tumor

By Brad Pasanek Posted in Body Metaphors

The doctor says, “The tumor is just like the brain here, that’s the problem.”

I draw this diagnosis from last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose ongoing literary project opposes “monumental aesthetics” with ordinary-language sensibilities, reports on “The Terrible Beauty of Brain Surgery” in Albania. At New Republic, Alex Shepard assesses the essay as “peak Knausgaard.” And because I’ve been indexing Knausgaard’s metaphors, I will set down a short consideration here.

In reading I responded to the dualisms organizing the magazine piece. They reflect the mind-body problem (brain and tumor, “that’s the problem”). Among other contrasts: life and death, subject and object, doctor and patient, Soviet and post-Soviet. Knausgaard would resolve the tensions by mediating them.

For thirteen pages Knausgaard instructs the reader in the greatness1 of Henry Marsh, the neurosurgeon profiled. Marsh will not let his profession and its institutions render his patients small, faceless. The doctor is commended, in the closing pages of the essay, for meeting with the family of an infant he had operated on. He admits to the parents a fatal mistake and cries with them.

The basic formal dichotomy of the author and his subject stands out among the effected contrasts. We are invited to take one as the type of the other and close a gap.

The surgeon cuts into the brain, cutting out part of the brain that is not part of the brain. That is the handiwork. Compare the extraction of anecdote from experience. Compare the excision of metaphors from prose. The difficulty of knowing where to cut.

Mistakes are made. The knife’s edge locates a person’s body that is yet abstract and only part of a system. Figures are left behind, marked in the text. Writes Knausgaard, memorably, in My Struggle, “I took the biggest shard I could find and started cutting my face … I wiped away the blood with a towel. Kept cutting.”

In the Albanian operating room, Knausgaard looks through a microscope at the brain’s landscape and startles at the distance between figure and ground: “I struggled to unite the two perspectives; it felt as if I were on two different levels of reality at the same time, as when I walked in my sleep, and dream and reality struggled for ascendancy.”

Knausgaard’s dichotomies are given political tone in reflections on what’s wrong with our world and what is “the truth” (his word, favored at the end). Knausgaard expresses opposition to any “veneration of the collective” even as he registers his attraction to the totalities imagined in the communist era. The self-images of Soviet Albania are “full of joy and hope … Everything was clear, pure, simple and forceful” (52). Knausgaard’s caricatures of collectivity are, too, a problem. Solidarity must unite competing perspectives and make common cause.

It is as if, in representing familiar pain, the artist cannot join with the grieving family and remain an artist. Living at a distance, he comes to suffer acutely from nostalgia, a kind of “social disease.”2 Writing exacerbates the condition. In the second volume of My Struggle, Knausgaard contrasts the empathy that annihilates him in social situations with the lonely self-fulfillment of writing: “The life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle.”

I find little self-solace in the alienation of writing. In the strong identifications reading affords, perhaps, there is what Knausgaard calls “lonely self-fulfillment,” but what satisfaction I take in writing results from looking over a sentence I have written and feeling that it must have been composed by another, an author.

Notes

1. “His greatness was that he didn’t hide the smallness but instead used his insight into it to fight against everything that concealed it, the institutionalization of hospitals, the dehumanization of patients, all the rituals established by the medical profession to create distance and to turn the body into something abstract, general, a part of a system.” Karl Ove Knausgaard, “The Terrible Beauty of Brain Surgery,” New York Times Magazine (December 30, 2015). Link to NYTimes.com.

2. Susan Stewart, On Longing (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1984), 23.

The 10,000

By Brad Pasanek Posted in Impression Metaphors

This morning I added to the database what, by my best count, looks to be the ten-thousandth metaphor. The occasion is (wearily) observed here.


The metaphor was found in David Hume’s Natural History of Religion, a text I was looking at again while proofing a revision of my book manuscript.


Hume writes,

Since, therefore, the mind of man appears of so loose and unsteddy a contexture, that, even at present, when so many persons find an interest in continually employing on it the chissel and the hammer, yet are they not able to engrave theological tenets with any lasting impression; how much more must this have been the case in antient times, when the retainers to the holy function were so much fewer in comparison? (84)

Hume reworks the metaphorics of engraving, which figure importantly in devotional writing.


Contexture, conjuncture,
Hammer and chisel, hammer and tongs…


More here: http://metaphors.lib.virginia.edu/metaphors/19903

Synonymy

By Brad Pasanek Posted in Rhetorical-Figures

Look up “lexicographer” in Johnson’s Dictionary or “Encyclopedia” in the Encyclopédie. Look into the Aleph. “What’s another word for ‘thesaurus’?”

In the first volume of her British Synonymy (1794), Hester Lynch Piozzi, née Thrale, takes up the pairing “IDENTITY and SAMENESS.” Again, we feel we are at the hub or heart of the matter, the core, the center. The two headwords, she explains, “would be nearly synonymous in conversation” only that as “the first is a word pregnant with metaphysical controversy, we avoid it in common daily use, or at best take it up merely as a stronger expression of unchangeable SAMENESS” (295).

The metaphysical controversy alluded to first appears in Locke’s Essay.1 The pregnancy must be laid at his door. Personal identity is an eighteenth-century problem. To paraphrase Piozzi: identity and sameness would be nearly the same, nearly identical, in meaning, were it not for metaphysical controversy.

Sameness is as Sameness does. What then of identity? Is it not the same? In Piozzi I hear Paul de Man’s “repetitive stutter of tautology” (16). We are at the edge or verge of something: synonym as limit case.

Piozzi collects synonyms and, in that sense, pursues synonymy, the study of synonyms. Hers is, as advertised, a British synonymy, one composed for “Foreign Friends” and published at the height of The Terror. Revolutionary politics promise radical equality. Citizens are treated all the same before the law.

Anti-Jacobin Piozzi would preserve distinctions and patrols the borders of English. And so Piozzi does more than alphabetize terms: synonymy is the rhetorical figure by which synonyms are used for the sake of amplification. It is her avowed purpose to “rescue that pleasing rhetorical figure from the imputation of tautology” (vii). She turns up the volume, increasing the distance between the same and the identical as she increases the distance between French and British, between philosopher and patriot.

British Synonymy is a reactionary project. She throws Hume and Lovelace together in the entry on “IDENTITY and SAMENESS.” The philosopher and the fiction, the skeptic and the libertine, are rakish twins. First she cites Richardson, “Mowbray and Tourville with their everlasting IDENTITY are complained of by Lovelace in his anxious agony of mind” (295).2 Piozzi then imagines David Hume reading Clarissa. Hume, notes Piozzi, would correct Lovelace’s usage. The resemblance of Mowbray and Tourville is “no proof of IDENTITY, however it might give a SAMENESS of their character” (295).

Piozzi’s entries are relentlessly moral and political. The sameness of character that comprehends the rakes Mowbray, Tourville, and Lovelace is attributed to Hume as well. The skeptic, she warns, is best despised; “some of them may possibly have a real interest in considering their existence to be dubious, that escape may be effected from accounting for its errors and crimes” (296). Lead us not into sameness, but deliver us through synonymy.

Like Samuel Johnson, Piozzi knows that close work with words is more than “harmless drudgery.” Like the ordinary language philosopher J. L. Austin worrying the difference between nearly allied terms, Piozzi resituates inquiry in the disappearing space between two synonyms. For all the harmlessness and humility rehearsed in the opening pages of British Synonymy, the study of synonymy is promoted as first philosophy.

The short entry on identity and sameness closes by reversing its headwords: “We should therefore be aware of these scepticks, and as little possible I think dip into their books; from whence little amusement or instruction can be derived, but much SAMENESS, particularly in their discourse upon IDENTITY” (296).

Piozzi’s dismissal of metaphysics is punctuated by the subsequent heading, “IDIOTISM, FOLLY, SIMPLICITY, FATUITY.”

Notes

1 In 1694 Locke added a new chapter, “Of Identity and Diversity,” to the second edition of the Essay.


2 See Letter 372 (VI.78). At M. Hall, Lovelace imagines having a “young Lovelace by such an angel” as Clarissa, but his tone soon changes (p. 1147). He is “Tired with Lord M.,” “tired with my cousins Montague,” “tired with Mowbray and Tourville, and their everlasting identity—tired with the country—tired of myself; longing for what I have not” (pp. 1150-1)

Furniture of the Mind

By Brad Pasanek Posted in Rhetorical-Figures, Room Metaphors

— for Jay Fliegelman

Standing about are pots, pulleys, lids, bottles of oil, and chairs. I conjure a room of the sort conjured for us in Tristram Shandy (III.xx). The room is a fiction, a perspicuous representation, every point and particle made up of sunbeams. It is a room that we might call, hewing here to Wittgenstein more than Sterne, a “visual room,” a room inhabited by no one in particular. It is not mine, not Tristram’s.

It is in this room that we discover the author seated in his cane chair. It is here we learn that wit and judgment, are like two knobs on a chair back, stuck in their gimlet holes. Here we consider the significance of mental furniture.

Wit and judgment. But “one cannot couple any two nouns at random and be sure to produce an effective metaphor,” so claims Max Black. He continues, “If the reader doubts this, let him try to make sense of ‘a chair is a syllogism’” (23).

The chair is a syllogism. Wit will try, in spite of judgment. But no, I suppose I don’t doubt Black’s claim. And the chair cannot be both an emblem of the faculties and a syllogism; — at least not the same chair. At least not in the same paragraph.

Sterne: “an illustration is no argument—nor do I maintain the wiping of a looking-glass clean, to be a syllogism” (III.xx). How then is a chair like a syllogism? — Like a raven to a writing desk? Is a chair finely made tragic or comic? What is needed is an example, by way of illustration.

Major premise: All men are mortal.
Minor premise: Socrates is a man.
Conclusion: Socrates is mortal.

This piece of text, just as Tristram Shandy, is haunted by mortality. Haunted like all text.

In his essay, “The Superannuated Man,” Charles Lamb complains, “I had grown to my desk, as it were; and the wood had entered into my soul.” Philosophy has its furnishings, and the philosophical are invested in furniture. Melancholic and sedentary, they sit and they think and they write to the moment.

Hume conjures a room in his Treatise:

The table is beyond the paper. The walls of the chamber beyond the table. And in casting my eye towards the window, I perceive a great extent of fields and buildings beyond my chamber … I lose sight of them by shutting my eyes or turning my head, I soon find them return upon me without the least alteration. My bed and table, my books and papers, present themselves in the same uniform manner, and change not upon account of any interruption in my seeing or perceiving them. (I.iv.2)

Interiority is the aspect of an interior. This page. This desk. This chair. These knobs. These books and papers. A glimpse of something outside. A room furnished by writing to this moment. Hume’s room is as much a fiction as Tristram’s. But that syllogism, it is something else. Inexorable. I can’t lose sight of it by shutting my eyes or turning my head.

This chair. My chair. In lectures and textbooks, the chair is the ready-made illustration of Aristotle’s four causes (formal, material, efficient, and final): a chair’s form is its structure. This chair. Aristotle, who favored walking and looking about, is made available to undergraduates in the example of an armchair.

But A is B. The chair is a syllogism, of a kind. Here, come look. I will prove it. The seat, a major premise; the back, the minor; by way of conclusion we are seated. In “our armchair of an afternoon,” we murder Socrates over and over again in hopes of grasping the fatal, ineluctable logic of C is B.

What a company of chairs are here! The learned lumber and furniture of the mind, no one will pack it up when it is time to go. No one will insure it. It will not return without alteration. Who will unload it and put it where it belongs?

All chairs are syllogisms. Black: “In the absence of some specially constructed context, this must surely count as a failed metaphor” (23). Could a metaphor fail and still be a metaphor? Is my prose context enough?

When we are to be informed of the death of a loved one, we are made, first, to sit down.

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