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

If conceptual integration does not account for Auden's personification, then we might ask what rival hypothesis can account for it. Perhaps one explanation would be to elide the personification problem altogether by simply calling Auden's persona a good old fashioned literary character. As Ralf Schneider successfully argued recently in this journal, a literary character is "a mental model that the reader construes in the reading process through a combination of information from textual and mental sources" (2). Essentially, as Schneider cogently argues, to take a view like this would be an exercise in categorization (5) since we would situate something like Our Weakness in the category of person based on similarities we find between people and personae like Auden's. According to Schneider, "categorization" is a top-down cognitive process for mentally construing a literary character, while "personalizing" (seeing the character as a specific entity) would be a bottom-up process (14). In this fashion, one rival h ypothesis might call Our Weakness nothing more than a character (categorization) narrating in the context of Auden's poem (personalization). As a character, it would have human qualities since we assume characters are simulations of humans. As a personalization, it would have the specific traits of those characters that Auden alludes to.

A rival hypothesis like this of characterization seems adequate, but it rehearses the problem mentioned earlier in reference to the rhetorical tradition. To categorize Our Weakness as a character or a characterization or a personalization does not explain the cognitive mechanisms involved in such procedures. Additionally, Lakoff and his colleagues insist contra Sam Glucksberg and Matthew McGlone that metaphor is not categorization, while Fauconnier and Turner might add that a character in Schneider's terms is a blend created by blending a mental source with a textual source from the bottom-up and from the top-down. Clearly, then, arguing against the conceptual integration hypothesis is a real challenge. As Fauconnier and Turner state, "In one sense, everybody knows everything about blending and is a complete master of the operation, in just the sense that each of us has complete unconscious 'knowledge' about vision but almost no conscious knowledge of our unconscious ability" (Way 54). In essence, the researc h program on blending is an effort to make explicit an operation that usually escapes our notice. As Turner has argued about talking animals found in children's books ("Blending"), personifications of such characters are blends that even toddlers produce rather effortlessly. However, personification's simplicity does not mean that the process itself is simple to explain or that it is unworthy of explanation. Of course, to revamp conceptual integration theory means finding ways to falsify it. That is no easy task. Like other prominent theories, arguments are always already available for countering rival hypotheses by showing that the countering claims themselves arise somehow from conceptual integration at grammatical, figurative, or literal levels.