Phenomenological metaphors in readers’ engagement with characters: The case of Ian McEwan’s Saturday

Abstract

Internally focalized passages in narrative often employ metaphors to capture the experiential states of the focalizing character. My investigation of these metaphors – ‘phenomenological metaphors’, as I call them – has two important precedents in the fields of narratology and literary stylistics: Dorrit Cohn’s (1978) treatment of ‘psycho-analogies’ and Semino and Swindlehurst’s (1996) approach to metaphor and ‘mind style’. After positioning phenomenological metaphors vis-à-vis these related concepts, I put forward the central claim of this article: metaphorical language plays a role in readers’ engagement with focalizing characters because it can sustain readers’ illusion of experiencing a storyworld through the consciousness of a fictional being. But what is it about metaphorical language that makes it especially suited to bring about this effect on readers? In order to answer this question, I use Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005) as a case study, presenting two different lines of argument. First, I contend that metaphors reflect, at a linguistic level, the seamless integration of perception, emotion and language that characterizes our everyday transactions with the world. Second, I look at the relationship between understanding metaphorical language and readers’ empathy for characters, arguing that the continuity between these psychological processes is grounded in their perspectival nature: just as metaphors invite recipients to adopt a new perspective on a conceptual domain, engaging with a focalizing character encourages readers to ‘try on’ his or her experiential perspective and worldview. Taken together, these hypotheses provide an explanation for the effectiveness of phenomenological metaphors at conveying to readers the qualitative ‘feel’ of characters’ experiences.

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