THE EYE IS THE PHALLUS, Part One

For unknown reasons I became inclined, about fifteen minutes ago, to post at Below Dunster the text of an essay I once wrote, entitled "Coppelius, Oedipus, and the Phallic Stare: A rare instance of a bidirectional cognitive metaphor?" It will follow in daily installments, just as the tales of Dickens were once published (though this is not a work of fiction); I encourage the reader to peruse the sections in order. By the way, although peruse is commonly thought to mean something like skim, it actually means the opposite: to read or examine thoroughly, with great care. In fact, sixty-six percent of the American Heritage Usage Panel finds the former use unacceptable; I am not so anti-philistine, but it is in the latter sense that I intend the recommendation of the previous sentence. You are, of course, authorized to skim, especially if the alternative is to shun.

If you are interested in language, cognition, psychoanalysis, film, literature, gender studies, animism, or what is called everyday life, you should find at least something of interest to you in the excerpts that follow.

It can be amusing to note, when reading old writings of one's own, what stupid things one once found fit to say. No doubt such things found their way into this essay; they do not necessarily depict my current views.

Enjoy, and comment copiously!



Coppelius, Oedipus, and the Phallic Stare:
A rare instance of a bidirectional cognitive metaphor?

Summary
Work in the area of cognitive metaphor over the last 20 or so years has assumed that metaphors, as a rule, are unidirectional (e.g., Kövecses 2002); that is, a metaphor’s source and target domains cannot be reversed without forfeiting the salience of the metaphor. Indeed, this is generally the case, but no research I know of has even seriously considered bidirectional conceptual metaphors as a category. This essay discusses a specific conceptual metaphor, THE EYE IS THE PHALLUS, and its arguable bidirectionality, and seeks to draw some conclusions about the nature of and basis for bidirectional metaphors in general. Along the way, I will explore a number of other peculiarities, justifications, and implications of the eye-phallus relationship.

Introduction to cognitive metaphor
In the discipline of cognitive linguistics, metaphor is defined as a mapping of qualities from a source domain to a target domain. In print, these mappings are written as A IS B (always in small caps), where B is the source domain and A is the target domain. An example is A LIFETIME IS A DAY, where properties of A DAY are mapped onto A LIFETIME. The purpose of this mapping, and of cognitive metaphors, is to help us understand a relatively abstract concept by considering a more concrete one. Death (the end of a lifetime) is difficult to grasp, but practically everyone is familiar with a sunset (the end of a day). Thus, the metaphor helps us conceptualize death in a less alien way.

Such a conceptual metaphor may or may not manifest itself linguistically in an expression that a poet would call metaphor. In fact, a major contention of the discipline is that metaphor is not primarily a linguistic phenomenon, but a cognitive one, originating and primarily transpiring in the mind. Our already considered conception of death, as well as instances like Oedipus’s reasoning out of the riddle of the Sphinx, would be considered nonlinguistic manifestations of A LIFETIME IS A DAY, while such expressions as “his life's sun is at its zenith” are linguistic manifestations of the same conceptual metaphor; we will call these “metaphorical linguistic expressions.” Other conceptual metaphors may not have corresponding metaphorical linguistic expressions, but all metaphorical expressions rely on some conceptual metaphor, whether it is a common one or one established by the speaker or writer.[1]

Another consideration with regard to conceptual metaphors is whether they are universal or culture-specific. One is always wary of classifying anything as universal, but studies from several cultures and languages suggest that some metaphors, especially ones relying on the human anatomy, light/dark, and up/down as target domains, are near-universal. In any case, the claim that conceptual metaphors are based in the mind and not in language is strong enough to merit study regardless of their universality, which can be investigated separately. One of the upshots of regarding a comparison as a conceptual metaphor, then, is that the validity of the comparison is greatly supported by its mental basis (as opposed to the supposedly more transient nature of language).[2]

[1] See Kövecses (2002, pp. 42-55) for a brief discussion of metaphors in literature and their relation to conceptual metaphors; they will also be addressed in a different light later in this paper.
[2] The question of the degree of the human mind’s stability is a troubling one, but being scrutinized by greater minds in different papers.