THE EYE IS THE PHALLUS, Part Three

[Note: this is the third installment of an essay, "Coppelius, Oedipus, and the Phallic Stare: a rare instance of bidirectional cognitive metaphor?" being posted serially. Below Dunster recommends that the reader scroll down and view the sections in ascending order.]

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Some linguistic manifestations: phonosemantic evidence
A number of linguistic expressions relate the eyes and the phallus to each other. Of course, we don’t consciously think of them as indicating this relation. But how are we to account for phrases like “a piercing gaze” and “a penetrating glance”? Penetration is prototypically a phallic event. It is true that other things penetrate and pierce, but a look into the history of the accounts of visual perception lends our case some force.

Before the eye was understood as a lens and a receptor of light into a person, it was thought that the eye actually emitted rays or beams that extended from their origin at the eye to their target, the object looked at. There was thought to be an invisible, but physical, spear of sorts connecting the eye to the object of the gaze. Thus, it was actually possible for a look, i.e., the physical protrusion from the eye, to penetrate a person. The superstitious notion of the evil eye, for instance, derived from this idea.

How the phallus relates to this protrusion is easily understandable, and it is no large leap to extend this relation from the gaze to the eye itself, allowing it to stand even after the notion of the spearlike look became less fashionable.[1] But the eye-phallus metaphor penetrates deeper than fashion; in fact, it occupies an impregnable position in the structure and even the sound of the English language itself. Rather than an affair of fashion, then, we might call the phallic metaphor a matter of style.

This is not pedantry; it is phonosemantics—the study of the relationship between the sounds of words and their meanings. Saussure declared this relationship to be arbitrary, but there is evidence that in at least some cases there is a patterned connection. In English, it is most salient in word-initial consonant clusters; for instance, words beginning with gl- are often related to reflected light, e.g. gleam, glint, glow, glare, etc. Though counter-examples abound, the percentage of gl- words that fit the pattern should not be passed off as coincidental. Little formal work has been done in phonosemantics compared to other linguistic subdisciplines—the term itself is rather new—but one piece is of particular interest to us. In his paper “Style Stands Still” (in press), John Lawler categorizes the semantic features of English words that begin with the consonant cluster st-. He has found that about 70% of words beginning with this cluster possess or indicate the property “1-dimensional rigid,” enough to label the st- cluster as a classifier of that property.[2] Examples of words demonstrating this classification include stick, staff, stem, stab, stake, stave, stiff, and stilt. The word style itself, according to Lawler, is confusingly derived from the name of the ancient pen-like apparatus, stilus (Latin), and often related to the Greek stylus, which is a vertical column or pillar.

It is clear enough that the referents of these words have a phallic association, but what do they have to do with eyes? We have already seen the primitive (as Freud would call it) notion of the pole-like look, and its phallic connotation. It is compelling, but not linguistically. Here phonosemantics flies in with a crucial set of linguistic data. Consider the English verb stare, as in “he stared at the wall for several minutes.” It is a common alternative of look, with the more specific connotation of being prolonged and intense. Few starers realize, however, that it derives etymologically from the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root *ster-, meaning “stiff.” The relevant present-day German word, starren, means both "stare" as well as "to be rigid" (the word for rigid is simply starr). In fact, the “stare” sense of the word has come to be considered not a different meaning of the same word, but rather simply a special case of the “rigid” meaning (OED).

The English adjective stern comes from the same PIE root (*ster-) as stare, and has as one of its OED definitions the term “unbending.” When we hear the phrase “a stern look,” we tend to interpret it as “a look from a person who is (being) stern.” Could it be, though, that the word modifies the look itself much more directly, even physically? The look, that is, in the sense of the protruding beam; thus, His stare was stern = The rigid beam protruding from him was unbending.

These linguistic expressions are immensely supportive of the eye-phallus metaphor. Of course, they rely on the nonlinguistic conception of the gaze as a physical projection and on that conception’s congruity with the phallus. We turn next to some more different types of nonlinguistic manifestations of the relation.

[1] Many cultures, especially non-western ones, retain the concept of the look as a protrusion from the eye, either lacking scientific understanding of the actual process of visual perception, or disregarding it for the sake of tradition, utility, or poetry. Anglo-American English, as we have been observing, retains the notion largely for the sake of metaphorical linguistic expression, as in formal or poetic diction.
[2] For further examples, see e.g. Margaret Magnus, Gods of the Word: Archetypes in the Consonants, Kirksville, MO: Thomas Jefferson Univ. Press, 1999.