[to Kent] Prithee tell him, so much the rent of his land comes to:he will not believe a Fool.The connection between these
entities and the balance-based metaphors in the text is not accidental, fortuitous,
or the product of what Fish (1980: 251) criticises as responsive only to 'the
pressure of the question "how do they relate?" and a relation will always be found'. The connection results from the same process, metaphoric projection from the BALANCE schema, into many distinct domains of the play: into the abstractions of Lear's idea of paternal love, and the ways in which his daughters' responses play into and resist it; into the abstractions of plot-construction,character relations, and narrative sequence; into psychological and social settings, and into many other structural elements (for discussion of these elements and cognitive-metaphoric analysis, see Wye 1992 chapters 3 and4). The second part of my claim for cognitive metaphor is perhaps more important. The metaphoric impulse is grounded not in intellectual abstractions but in the body that is in the mind. Because cognitive-metaphoric analysis proceeds from the elements and structure of schematised bodily experience to
their projection into such abstractions as (for King Lear) family relationships and parental and filial love, these analytical claims can be confirmed or disconfirmed according to the accuracy with which those elements and structure and their projection are articulated. The same falsifiability applies, mutatis nutandis, to claims made for metaphoric projection into larger abstract structural units. In short, this analysis can be falsified if its topological analysis proves to be wrong. It can be invalidated if the patterns it posits exist only at the level of text and not
in larger structural units, or if a competing candidate source domain and
metaphoric projection better explains these patterns at all levels of the literary
Work. On this second point, we can, for example, trace a pattern of textual metaphors in King Lear that depend on the core metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY,which is based on the PATH schema: 'we came crying hither' (IV.vi.176);'I have no way, and therefore want no eyes;I stumbled when I saw'(IV.i.18-19);'she's
[Cordelia] gone for ever . . . Thou'lt come no more'(V.iii.258, 306),and many
others.But very little connects this pattern of metaphoric projection in the text
with larger structural elements in the play. The PATH schema entails such salient
aspects as starting and terminal points and a sequence of locations that connect the beginning and the end (for discussion, see Johnson 1987: 113-17).The lives
of all of King Lear's major characters have terminal points: most of them die.But we see little of the source points of these paths, the beginning of these journeys. A contrasting example, Macbeth, is not only replete with textual metaphors based on the PATH schema, but the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphoric
projection dominates the play's plot and characters (the extreme case is Macduff,
who begins the journey of his life by an alternate route to the conventional birth
canal-for discussion, see D.C. Freeman forthcoming). Thus for King Lear we
can make a principled argument for two candidate source domains, BALANCE
and LINKS (they exist independently and the play manifests both a pattern of projections from them at the textual level and an equally rich pattern of the same projections at different levels) and against a third, the PATH (the play manifests a pattern of projections from it at the same level, but few if any at different
levels), as the defining 'conceptual universe' (M.H. Freeman forthcoming) of the
play. Of course te choice of dominant source domains and hence of the abstract
entities into which they are projected is interpretive, even if we grant the
currently all-encompassing sense of that term (see Fish 1989: 320).These
choices can change over time: for me, they liave changed in 35 years of
watching,reading and teaching King Lear from the SCALE schema ("Thy life's a
miracle.(I.i.112-15)
Later,when Goneril begins the process of stripping him of his retainers,Lear seeks to destroy not only the father-daughter link, but the link of common membership in the human race -'degenerate bastard'- and to extend this curse into the next generation, so that Goneril either may have the mother-child link denied her or have the parental link become for her an instrument of exquisite torture.Lear prays that the gods may give his own daughter a 'child of spleen'who will be 'thwart disnatured torment' to her, yet linked to her by the very constitutive linking structures that she has denied her father: nature, honour,pains and benefits, and thanks.Lear demonstrates this same patter-from physical sensation to mental feeling,
from concrete to abstract, from his own physical suffering to a spiritual empathy
with the suffering of another-as he begins to reverse the operative definition of
kingship that has so far dominated the play: a status in which the links between
a king and his subjects (and a father and his daughters) are constituted by the
abstractions of courtly ceremony, of debits and credits.He then recognises and rebuilds his place in that world in terms of
these links, bonding himself first with physical feeling (cold), then with spiritual
feeling (empathy), then with individuals (the Fool), then with the rags and
hunger of his kingdom's subjects ('the poor naked wretches' with 'houseless
heads and unfed sides' (III.iv.28, 30)), and finally with the irreducibly human,
unaccommodated, primal human condition figured in Mad Tom.Historically, 'reason' had as one of its nominal meanings a monetary reckoning.The term 'need' bespeaks a link of desperate desire between Lear and 'th' name and addition of a king', represented for this king by the number of his retainers, which defines for Lear
the nature of kingship beyond what a debit-credit, accounts-book,cost-benefit
analysis would show, and represented for human beings by more than the entitlement of their mere physical requirements.When Lear's understanding of the world in terms
of the empty abstractions of the balance sheet and kingly ceremony fails him,he
progressively denies first the abstract and then the physical links of fatherhood,
his own marriage, his ungrateful daughters' legitimacy, their humanity and their
progeny, and finally the linking structures of the created world and the human
species.When he strips off his garments in the play's climactic scene
and stands naked against the elements, he is clothed in his solidarity with the
physical nakedness of Tom o'Bedlam, linked to him in spiritual nakedness and
vulnerability of 'unaccommodated man' before the random cruelties of the gods.The same concept, or 'activated pattern inhering
in thought' (Turner 1991: 45), underlies both the dozens of examples in King
Lear of metaphors of financial accounting that instantiate the BALANCE schema
and many larger structures in the play.These would include, by way of example,
the Gloucester-Edmund-Edgar subplot balanced against the main plot, and the
play's balanced sets of characters: the 'unnatural' children - Edmund on one
side, Goneril and Regan on the other; the rejected, despised, and then redeemed
fathers-Gloucester and Lear; the 'natural' children - Edgar and Cordelia; and
the good and bad servants-the Fool and Oswald.What I would claim for this article as an analysis from the standpoint of cognitive metaphor is that this theory enables us not merely to describe, but to explain patterns of this kind, and to explainthem and their interconnections at different structural levels of the play using the same theoretical apparatus.As his daughters reduce his retainers - and with them,his humanity-
from the number one hundred to the number zero, it dawns on Lear that in
family relationships, a deal is not necessarily a deal, irrespective of what the
account-books say or what reservations are spelled out in contractual visiting
arrangements:
I gave you all -Made you my guardians my depositaries,
But kept a reservation 4 to be follow'd
With such a number.'True need' cannot be reasoned,accounted for, reckoned up.
3 The LINKS schema
Early in the play, the links-based metaphors involving Lear have to do more
with breaking links than with creating them.Instead,Lear both physically and spiritually breaks the filial bond and denies the
bonding structures of both ownership and family:
Here I disclaim all my paternal care,
Propinquity and property of blood,
And as a stranger to my heart and me
Hold thee from this for ever.Lear seeks the ground of
human community and kingship in the concrete links of shared physical
suffering in the storm, between his nakedness and his subjects' 'loop'd and
window'd raggedness' (III.iv.31), between man and man, and between a King
and his subjects.This severing of links is carried even further in Act II: Lear threatens to deny
the bond of marriage with Regan's mother and thus his bond of fatherhood to
Regan, and turns this destruction of human bonds upon himself.Lear, the
great valuer, is now without value, an '0', a zero, 'without a figure'
(I.iv.189-90), a king with no kingdom, a father with no daughters, a man with
no standing, a cipher without a number to give it value, to whom the Fool
applies Lear's own principle of accounting: 'I am better than thou art now: I am
a fool,thou art nothing' (I.iv.190-1).The currency in which Lear will repay his
older daughters' professions of love comes at a much higher rate of exchange
than he anticipated:
Fool
But for all this,thou shalt have as many dolours for thy daughters as thou canst tell in a year.(II.iv.52-3)
Lear's world is destroyed in the same terms of balance and numbers in which he sought to build it, as Goneril and Regan strip him of the numbers of his retainers:
Regan                                                                ...I have hope
You [Lear] less know how to value her [Goneril's] desert
Than she to scant her duty...Lear does not 'tax [the] elements with unkindness' (III.ii.16) because they are not of Lear's kind, they are not linked to him as his daughters should be, by gratitude, by blood, by the duty of subjects to their king.(II.iv.248,249-51)
We recall that the Fool has already told Lear that he is 'an 0 without a figure';
now,Lear begins to realise that the 'all' he has given Regan and Goneril is being
balanced-if that is the word - by nothing at all (and will come to know that
Cordelia's 'nothing' is everything).The bonds that link Lear with
Goneril now are only those of 'disease', 'plague', and 'corrupted blood'
(II.iv.220,222,223).ten?....