Language is a magical and mysterious world. Who can guess at all the secrets it holds? Who can touch its real source? Some have therefore declared that only God could have made the miracle of language. Within the world of language, poetic language is more bewildering still. Its ever-changing face, its soul-seizing allure — even as one marvels and stands amazed — drive one to ask again and again: What is language? What is poetic language?
1. Poetry, the “Mother Tongue of Mankind”
Language is not the gift of God to man. Language is man’s own creation, born together with man. The moment man created language, he truly became man. From then on, language has grown alongside the human being, has become the indispensable “air” that wraps around him. Man is no longer left naked in nature; he lives first of all within the world of language and engages with nature through language. Language is the indispensable mediator by which man builds a relation with the world; the starting-point from which man learns to think; and so the earliest pattern of human cultural creation. From this angle, language is the mother of culture.
As the womb of culture, language has given birth to logic, history, literature, philosophy, religion, science, and the other branches of human culture. At the same time, language itself has developed and evolved, hatching out, from the original primal language, many languages with their differing features and functions, each becoming increasingly specialized. Poetic language is one of the fine fruits of the evolution of primal language.
A number of Western scholars, on the basis that language moves from the concrete toward the abstract and from the sensuous toward the logical, have put forward the view that poetic language is a lower stage of language’s development — that poetic language is just primal language.
Setting out from a large body of anthropological research, Vico was the first to put forward this judgment:
We have found that the origins of all kinds of language and writing share one principle: the primal pagan peoples were, by a necessity confirmed in their very nature, poets who spoke in “poetic characters.” This discovery is the master-key to a science that has cost me the unbroken labor of nearly the whole of my literary life — for, given our civilized nature, we moderns simply cannot imagine, and only with effort can come to understand, the poetic nature these primal men possessed. Our [poetic] characters have been found to be certain “imaginative genera,” into which primal humans cast every species and every particular case of their own kind — just as the fables of the age of men do . . . These imaginative genera (which, in essence, the fables are) were formed by the most lively imaginations. It is among those of feeblest reasoning power that we find truly poetic phrases. Such phrases had to express the most intense passion, and so they take on, throughout, a sublime style that calls forth wonder. [1]
On the “poetic wisdom” of primal man, every thing is imagined as a divine entity; like men, they have feeling and passion. Jove is small and light, so an eagle can carry him on its back across the sky; the sea-god rides a chariot across the waves; the earth-god gallops on the back of a lion . . . In the primal age, the “first poets” treated every thing as a living, substantial god and
by treating things in the manner of the self made them too have feeling and passion, and so used them to form fables. [2]
These fables became the etymological source of poetic language, became metaphor.
From the mid-eighteenth century on, the question of the origin of language drew the ardent attention of European scholars. The Berlin Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences offered a prize for the best answer to this question. Herder offered his famous Essay on the Origin of Language, in which he argued eloquently that language is the product of the inner force of man — his “understanding” — and not the gift of God. He inherited Vico’s view and held that in the earliest language all of nature is divine: things are gods, are acting living beings; so language — the names of the gods — is full of sensuous life-force. With his special ardor and insight, Herder writes:
Was not the earliest language an assembly of poetic elements? Poetry was born of the imitation of the sounds given by the active and living things of nature; it includes the sighs of every living thing, and the sighs of the human being himself. Poetry is the natural language of every living thing, only that reason then recites it through language and depicts it through vivid pictures of action and passion. Poetry, as the lexicon of the soul, is at once myth and a wondrous narrative epic that tells the movement and history of so many things. That is, it is the eternal fable-poetry (Fabeldichtung), full of passion, full of gripping incident. [3]
Unlike Vico, who entered the question of the origin of language directly from human wisdom and thought, Herder begins his thinking from a still more primal psychological content: feeling. He holds that, when the human being was still an animal, he already had a “language.” The strong, painful feelings the body undergoes, the rising fervor of passion, were given direct expression through cries, tones, and rough, vague sounds. Though these “natural sounds” are no longer the main component of human language, are not the root-stalk, they are the sap that nourishes the root. With the development of the powers of the soul, the human being came to pick out a stream from the great mass of sensation rushing in through the sense-organs, to focus attention upon it, to observe it consciously, and so to distinguish its features and condense them into a sound given off by the thing. This first conscious sound, condensing the features, is the “word” of the soul. With the word, language was invented. Because man built close relations with all the things around him, all the things seemed to be speaking to him, acting for his benefit or against him, and he responded with strong feelings. In the human manner, he gave free rein to imagination, projecting human features into things. So every thing came to be a god with human passion and desire. The ancient vocabulary is the “sounding pantheon.” These ancient words, infused with human passion and condensing the sensuous features of things, and through personification turned into gods, carry a mysterious moving power. So ancient language naturally became an
assembly of poetic elements,
became poetic language.
The more primal the language, the less the abstract and the more the sensuous within it. [4]
Herder’s account represents a current view of the mid- and late-eighteenth-century Enlightenment and its aftermath. Writers and scholars such as Rousseau, Blair, William Duff, Ferguson, and Monboddo all leaned toward tying the origin of language to the origin of poetry, and tried to disclose the poetic element within primal language. [5] Even into the twentieth century, this view found heirs and developers in Heidegger, Cassirer, Martin Buber, Northrop Frye, and Jacques Maritain. Frye, for instance, set out his account chiefly from myth-and-archetype studies. In his view, the demands that literary form be perfect and that content be persuasive always tend to pull against each other. Literary form must therefore have a deeper root: it cannot come from life alone but only from literary legend — and, in the last analysis, from myth. It is myth that most fiercely, deeply, and repeatedly stirred the heart of primal forebears, condensed and sedimented into archetypes at the base of the heart, and so governs the creation of writers and poets. This view is not only related to Vico; it also comes directly from Jung. Building on his critique of Freud’s theory of the unconscious, Jung proposed the views of collective unconscious, primal sedimentation, and archetype. He held that the true masterpieces of art are accepted by all humankind and are seen as the common wealth that links human souls because they are founded on the collective unconscious shaped in remote antiquity, common to humankind. Artistic creation comes from the primal experience that mythic imagination has given form to: this primal experience
grasps everything within reach and, in lifting it up, forms a visible shape. [6]
How does this turn into linguistic expression? For Jung, the necessary path is symbol; Frye proposes a solution from a more basic linguistic mode — metaphor:
The associative quality of poetic language exceeds its descriptive quality. The primal function of poetry (which poetry has not lost but to which it often returns) seems to be tied to treating the human and the non-human worlds as one. We see this function clearly from the fact that large bodies of literature have come out of mythic systems: the gods in their stories are, in idea and in personality, human, but also of one with several aspects of nature — and so we have sun-gods, forest-gods, and gods of the heavenly kingdom. This unit of identity — in which two things are said to be one and yet keep their twofoldness — appears in poetry in the form of metaphor. I take this to be the basic unit of language and design in literature. [7]
Linguistic metaphor thus shows how the human and the natural, the subjective and the objective, tend to blend within a complex picture of the soul. Frye calls this metaphorical mode of thinking the “primary thinking of humankind,” the essence of language.
Maritain’s view, though somewhat different, still treats the poetic level as a relatively low and primal thing. Maritain divides cognition into three levels: abstract cognition, the poetic level, and the magical level — and holds that the poetic level is the transitional bridge between the abstract and the magical. Although Maritain holds that poetry should not yield to the temptation of magic and slide into it, but should counter the magical temptation by human reason in order to gain freedom of will in the spiritual realm, he still treats the poetic level as a more primal something, lower than the abstract level — something
more or less similar to the activity of primal man’s thought, and more or less similar to magical method in the broad sense. [8]
Poetic cognition is a more primal cognition. Poetic language is a more primal language, or is itself the residue of primal language. And the earliest form of primal language is the metaphor that contains within itself a myth. This is the view of many Western literary scholars, linguists, philosophers, and anthropologists. They declare: language is not rooted in the prose of life but in its poetic quality. Poetry is the “mother tongue of mankind.”
2. Primitive Metaphor and Poetic Metaphor
A large body of anthropological data shows that the earliest language of humankind does indeed seem to have carried the features of the poetic. It was soaked in strong feeling, ridden with strange ideas; in its sensuous concreteness and its peculiar magic it seems not to differ from poetic language. Especially since the roots of language go down into metaphor, and metaphor is the very feature of poetry, there is a natural link between poetic metaphor and primal metaphor. This alone seems to be enough to argue that poetic language is the initial stage of language — that it is primal metaphor, primal language.
Man knows nature by reference to himself and knows himself by reference to nature. Man and nature are originally fused, and can never be wholly separated. Even as he gradually distinguishes himself from nature and tells one thing from another, he in fact also turns himself into nature and into all things, and so builds the unbreakable bond of feeling. The myth of Pangu opening up heaven and earth records:
Pangu, to this day a dragon-head and a snake-body, exhales as wind and rain, blows as thunder and lightning; opening his eyes is the day, closing them is the night. After his death, his bones become mountains and forests, his entrails become rivers and seas, his blood becomes the Huai and the Du, and his hair becomes the grasses and trees. [9]
Heaven-and-man are one; heaven-and-man are mingled. Nature bore and nurtured man, and this not only decreed that man is structured alike to nature and in communion with it — that he is attached to the womb of nature, that he longs for the primal undifferentiated state — but also leaves, on man, the permanent imprint of nature, and on nature the permanent imprint of the human. Man is nature; man is the ten thousand things. Deep within him lies the impulse to return to nature, to be one with the ten thousand things. As Emerson said in setting forth his transcendentalist thought:
The universe is composed of nature and soul . . . Nature and art, all the men and my own body — all are gathered under this name, nature. [10]
Yet when Emerson made these statements, he also clearly used the “not-me” to mark off man’s self-presence. On the road by which man parts from nature and from the ten thousand things and gradually establishes his own subjectivity, language plays an indispensable, even a decisive role. Without language to condense human experience, experience would remain a vague, unbroken stream of sensation and would never gain determinacy. Man could not tell apart the things of the world; the world would still be undifferentiated chaos. Without language as a support for human thinking, man could not think — much less reflect on himself; human self-consciousness and human reason could not form; man could not become the independent subject that stands out above nature, but would still be only an animal lacking autonomy — still a fetus within nature’s womb, not yet born. As Ernst Cassirer well puts it:
The word, like the god or the spirit, is not a product of itself; it appears before man as something that, by virtue of itself, exists and has significance, as an objective reality. The moment the electric arc breaks through the medium, the moment passing power and feeling find their outlet in word or in mythic image, a certain shift takes place in the human mind: what was once a merely subjective inner stir now vanishes, transmuted into the objective form of myth or speech. [11]
And for Maritain, the meaning of poetry is just a poetic intuition — an artistic creation that fuses poetic feeling and inspiration. If one holds that poetry and language are inwardly and organically tied, then language, by condensing man’s subjective experience, lets the things appear as things and lets the world appear as the world. Even as language tells man and nature apart, even as it tells one thing from another, it joins man with nature and gathers them together. Before this, although nature and the things were mingled with man, they had always been strange, non-humanized. It is precisely language that makes it possible for man to rise above nature, to roam among the things — and at the same time to be in heart-to-heart communion with nature and the things, in spirit and in vein. So language becomes a substance, becomes a god; becomes that which mediates and contains nature and man — that is, metaphor. The generative process of language decrees that primal language can only be metaphor — a metaphor that contains within itself a myth.
The “law of participation” (la loi de participation) that Lévy-Bruhl set forth in How Natives Think also supports this view. On the road from the chaotic world of sensation to rational cognition, primal humankind had to go through a long, gradual process of development. In that course, primal humankind’s sensuous cognition was still in a not-yet-clear state, and his relation with nature was still in an intermediate stage of gradual but not-yet-completed differentiation. This gives us Lévy-Bruhl’s “participation” of primal thinking, or what Frazer called “sympathetic magic.” Primal humankind seems to have pulled himself off from nature and the ten thousand things, yet is not yet truly independent; the world seems to grow more distinct for him, yet still mingles, links, and resonates back and forth. So the ten thousand things and the whole of nature take on human spirit, and even a numinous, bewildering, astonishing divinity. This not-yet-fully-divided relation between man and nature decrees that primal language could only be myth — embodying this relation — could only be metaphor in which subject and object are not yet fully separated and are still tangled together. Primal metaphor is the earliest effort man makes to climb out of natural chaos, the key but still very imperfect, faltering step by which man becomes man. Language is linked and fused with nature and with man. The ten thousand things have spirit; language is myth, is the name of the gods; language is sacred. Language contains nature, gods, and man himself. Language, nature, the divine, and man are a four-in-one.
Metaphor is the foundation of poetry and the root of poetic language.
Without metaphor there is no poetry. [12]
Without metaphor in the broad sense, there is no poetic language. Unlike scientific language and everyday language, which point at objective things, poetic language is an independent world that contains both subject and object — that is, a metaphor that links man and nature. On the point of the identity of man and nature, poetic metaphor and primal metaphor agree. One may say: poetic metaphor is founded on primal metaphor.
Yet poetic metaphor differs in kind from primal metaphor. Primal metaphor is the product of human intellect just sprouted — at the transitional stage from undifferentiated chaos to the gradual formation of rational cognition. When the sun of wisdom had just broken into the dark cave of man’s ignorance, man, in the dizziness, could not yet tell the thing from its shadow; within his field of view, man and thing, thing and thing, were at once distinct and mingled. Man labored to call out their names — and these names could only be metaphors that linked subject and object. Primal metaphor is the fruit of man’s ignorance. Man gave his own spirit to nature and to things, and in turn took nature and things to be spiritual gods, and took metaphor to be the name of the gods. So man fell prostrate before the gods, prostrate before the sacred names of the gods — language. Metaphor is a step forward in man’s reaching for his own freedom, but it is not yet his freedom. Primal metaphor gives man the experience of mystery. Man’s attitude toward language is contradictory: on the one side, he treats language as a mysterious sacred object and worships it; on the other side, he wracks his brain to bend language into a tool for his use. Primal magic, for instance, is man trying, by various “tricks” of deception, to take possession of the gods’ language for his own use. In fact, primal metaphor is the “sacred tool,” a self-contradictory unity. What can hold this contradiction together as one is the “participation” of primal thinking.
Poetic metaphor, by contrast, is the creation of man after he has come to a certain developed reason. As Todorov approves it, the rise of “artistic function” in Novalis is just a “genetic mimesis,” to be distinguished from mere mechanical surface mimesis. [13] As human cognitive power keeps expanding — when Apollo at last falls from his speeding fire-chariot, when Athena no longer breathes a soul into man, and when the gods of Olympus are dismissed and dispersed — myth and primal metaphor become things at odds with human reason and are set aside and forgotten. The dying of metaphor means estrangement between man and nature, a wall — means the betrayal of the gods.
Yet once man has left nature’s womb and won freedom for himself, he suddenly finds that he has become Gorky’s “Larra,” a forever-drifting solitary shadow. Once he has driven out the gods and seated himself in the sacred hall, he loses his faith and feels at once a strange loss and ache. Man is truly homeless.
What is lost is always the most beautiful. The primal state — when man and nature were one and yet had no freedom — became in the memory of later ages an ideal of free union of man and nature. This is the complex that lies dormant in the deep psychology of humankind after the primal age, and that cannot be driven away. Man falls again from the newly-seized hall. Facing the boundless cosmos and the bright stars, man at last realizes the brevity of life and his own smallness. Poetic metaphor is man’s resistance to his own solitude and limitation; the effort he makes to shake off the orphan loneliness of having left nature, to break through his finitude, and to throw himself into nature’s vast and warm embrace; the recollection of the primal blended state. Metaphor no longer contains myth, is no longer the idol worshipped, no longer the tool used; it is the spiritual home man builds for himself. After man has left nature’s womb and lost the gods’ shelter, he tries with poetic metaphor to build for himself a refuge for the soul, a quiet harbor, a free spiritual home. In poetic metaphor, man experiences again his communion with nature. Roaming among the things of the universe, he shakes off his own finitude and the bonds of utilitarian custom and wins what is truly human freedom. Through metaphor, man casts aside the determinacy of linguistic concept and lays aside his present-day predicament. Before his eye opens another universe, a free space at once novel and intimate; through metaphor, man — long bound to the ground — at last unfolds wings and lets his soul rise to Mount Olympus where once the gods dwelt.
The most basic distinction between poetic metaphor and primal metaphor is the presence or absence of subjectivity. Primal metaphor itself is evidence that man’s subject-consciousness was not yet set. Because man was still nestled in nature’s embrace, his self-consciousness not yet clear, he could not yet consciously distinguish himself from nature in full. He could only name nature in metaphorical language; there is no question, at this stage, of human subjectivity or of individual autonomy — even personal experience had to bow wholly to collective representation. At this point, the individual was still submerged in the group, and the group was blended with nature, not yet fully differentiated or standing out. Primal metaphor is the very embodiment of the transitional state from chaos to clarity. Poetic metaphor, by contrast, is man’s re-naming of the world after he has set up his own subjectivity. He has now become an independent individual that stands above nature and is distinguished from every other person — an unrepeatable “I myself.” Poetic metaphor is just this: the independent individual, in his own unique way, re-naming the world, communing with nature in his own way. In poetic metaphor, though the subject seems lost within the object he creates, entering a self-forgetting realm “without thing, without me,” yet — as in Martin Buber’s “I — Thou” relation — within this realm, I am I, an independent subject; you are you; and I and you also blend intimately into one. I am “self-forgetting” because I forget myself in “you,” dwelling in your radiance. By the same token, you are “without thing” because you live and stir within my heart, soaked in my passion.
One must utter the primal word “I — Thou” with the whole fullness of one’s being. To gather human life into this fullness can never be done apart from me, nor only by me. I bring forth “I” in approaching “Thou”; in the very bringing-forth of “I” I speak “Thou” . . . The relation with you is direct and unmediated; no system of concept, no innate good sense, no dream-imagination stands between “I” and “Thou.” [14]
In poetic metaphor, every obstacle has collapsed; every desire has dissolved. I, in the encounter with you, in the mutual rousing and giving-birth with you, become richer and more substantial. The “forgetting of the self” yields a renewed and uplifted new I, a freer subject. Yet Buber’s calling the “I — Thou” the primal word and treating it as the primal state is plainly inappropriate, and goes against his own account of the self. Just as one cannot step into the same river twice, a man who has gained subjectivity can no longer return to the primal state. Although the impulse to return to the primal blended relation stirs in the human unconscious, it can only drive man to remember that ageless dream — a filtered, idealized dream of the primal chaos.
The radical distinction between poetic metaphor and primal metaphor shows that the mother tongue of humankind can only be primal metaphor — and not poetic metaphor, not poetry.
3. The Historical Differentiation of Language and the Birth of Poetic Metaphor
The development of man and the development of language drive each other. The birth of language lifted man out of the animal kingdom and into the human kingdom; he took a decisive step across the threshold of reason. The development of man and the diversification of his states of existence in turn drove the development of language, so that the relation among language, man, and the world gradually differentiated and evolved. The richness of man and the manifoldness of his relation with language determine the richness of language and the richness of the humanized world. Conversely, the richness of language and the manifoldness of its relation with man also shape man and widen his inner and outer worlds.
The manifold relation among man, language, and the world is historically formed. Between man and language, between man and the world, there are many complex relations — the practical and the non-practical, the referential and the expressive, the oral and the written, the everyday and the specialized, the philosophical, the religious, the literary, and so on. But these manifold relations are not a sudden gift bestowed by God; they have been gradually differentiated and formed alongside practice and the development of man and the diversification of his states of existence. In the primal period, the relation between man and language and the world had not yet been fully differentiated; many relations were blended, with their lines not yet clear. Primal metaphor built the “earliest model” of the relations among man, language, and world. Within it lay the seeds of many relations between man and language, between man and the world, and out of it gradually grew the magical, the religious, the poetic, the philosophical, and the scientific. So primal metaphor laid a deep primal imprint on human culture. Primal metaphor is not only the pattern of poetic language; it is the earliest pattern of human culture.
Although primal metaphor differs at root from poetic metaphor, the form by which it links and gathers man and nature is the foundation that later poetry, indeed the whole of literature and art, will draw on. The god-stories within metaphor and the divine character of language itself become the precursor of magic and of religion. For primal metaphor is not merely a linguistic mode; it embodies the primal man’s relation with the world, his view of the world, and pre-logical thinking — embodies the “man-god” or the “man-spirit” relation, that is, the religious and the magical relation.
In Language and Myth, Cassirer writes:
The original link between linguistic consciousness and mythic-religious consciousness is shown above all in this: every speech-structure appears at the same time as a mythic entity endowed with mythic power. The word (logos) is in fact a first power; the whole of “being” and of “doing” takes its source from it. In all mythic cosmogonies, however far back, however deep one traces, one finds without exception the supreme position of the word (logos). [15]
Language is the earliest and most basic precondition of man’s being man, the basic mark of the human being’s engaging in human activity as a member of a social group. Language and myth are of one source and one body; the earliest language is myth — that is, the metaphor about the story of myth. To use language is to engage with the gods; it is the experience of the mysterious “man-god” relation. Such a relation naturally contains within it the content of magic and religion.
Through primal metaphor, man for the first time links himself, in thought, to nature. Although this thinking is still pre-logical and this link is still vague and tangled, it is, after all, the beginning of man’s grasping nature in thought, embodies man’s effort to know nature. From this beginning, human logical thinking could then take shape, the powers of cognition could develop, nature could become the object of human knowledge, and at last science and philosophy could be born. So primal metaphor itself contains within it the seeds of the manifoldness of human culture; it is the mother tongue of humankind. [note]
From the angle of language alone: as the field of human practice expanded and as man developed, primal language and primal metaphor set out on a road of no return.
Because, among all human activities, the activity of existence is the overriding and most basic, and human survival need is the most urgent and the strongest need, the practical relation has run through the development of the relation between man and language as the dominant. In the background of primal thinking, man did not think by logic but by pre-logic; he could pull mutually contradictory things together. So language, as the names of the gods — a mysterious sacred object — was at once revered and worshipped and at the same time used as a “tool.” With the development of human knowledge, primal thinking at last dissolved; the gods were sent down from heaven; myth died; the sacred bond that held the mysterious link between man and nature was broken. Metaphor, having lost the moisture of divine grace, gradually withered and fell into being a dry corpse. With the demotion of the gods, man too was exiled from nature; language no longer linked man and nature but became, on the contrary, the medium that walled them off. The receding of divinity made language a thoroughly tamed tool. To use it more easily, man hammered, refined, condensed, and standardized it, drove it down the road of abstract concept and, by man-made rule, restricted and combed it, forced it into the cage of logic and grammar. Between man and language, the tool-relation of use and being-used, of enslaving and being-enslaved, became the most prominent feature and cast the everyday character of language. On this everyday character as base, language has further split into various features in specialized use. Yet, even as man uses and orders language about, language secretly steers and toys with man and likewise throws him into the linguistic prison-house that man himself has built.
Language has also kept open a short-cut of natural continuation. Along this short-cut, primal metaphor still contains the god-story, and the divinity and magic of language have not been lost. This is the spell-words and prophecies used by the shamans. Language becomes a tool and a trick of magic power, used by the shamans to commune between gods and man and to ward off calamity. Yet when man is not using a cheating-and-deceiving sleight to take possession of the gods and of their language but, with devotion, faiths the gods and places himself under their shelter, language becomes praise and prayer. Religion is the sublation and the spiritual elevation of the short-sighted utilitarian view of magic. Language thereby preserves its own purity and sacredness; it needs no painted face and tolerates no double mind. Primal metaphor is itself a hymn: the joyful and devout praise of the primal man for the ten thousand things and for the gods; primal metaphor is also the oldest Bible: it stores up the experience and the mysterious feeling that the earliest peoples gained in the hardship of survival.
Yet when language has fallen from the “sacred tool” into the merely-tool, when the divinity of language quietly recedes, when metaphor is gradually emptied out and pressed flat, and when man is exiled from nature, returning to the primal — returning to nature, keeping with nature a kindred spiritual bond — becomes the realm of which man dreams. But primal thinking has dissolved; the mysterious link between man and nature has been mercilessly cut; primal metaphor has lost its ground. Man is forced to use his creative insight to seek anew the points of resonance between man and nature, and so with poetic metaphor to rebuild man’s kindred relation with nature.
From another angle: once primal thinking dissolves, the “utility” of primal metaphor — which had been founded on the workings of participation and sympathy — also loses its support. Primal metaphor without “utility” is no longer the “sacred tool,” and is no longer primal metaphor. There remains only the shell of primal metaphor, a form without practical use. Yet it is precisely this casting-off of “utility” that lets metaphor slough off from being a magical tool of everyday survival-activity and rise as something purely spiritual. The man-nature corresponding structural relation that metaphor carries is then treasured up. Man at last preserves for himself a hidden path back to nature, and within that path recovers the primal experience of fusing with the ten thousand things — realizing the desire to return to the maternal womb. This is the poetic metaphor that humankind has sought a thousand-and-one times in dream. If primal metaphor, weighed down with the burden of “utility,” could only crawl on the earth of the real and could not rise toward the spiritual heaven, then poetic metaphor opens, before man, a boundless cosmos.
The human spiritual world depends on real-life practice and at the same time gradually transcends it. It becomes an indispensable second domain of existence for man, ever more important alongside human activity. Within this process, the transformation of primal metaphor into poetic metaphor is the decisive step that humankind takes. One may say: it is precisely in the process of primal metaphor’s “shedding the skin” into poetic metaphor that the human spiritual world is truly built and extended. Without this metamorphosis, man could only have a single, real-existence world. Although the gods also lived in that world, and although it now looks as if primal man had great “imagination,” he could not have possessed another, limitless spiritual world set over against the phenomenal world. Poetic metaphor is the human spiritual cosmos; every new creation is a new spiritual adventure, an unforeseen encounter; it widens the human capacity to dialogue with the cosmos, and the time-and-space reach of that interchange. Upon the phenomenal world, it builds a spiritual world; and poetic metaphor is at the same time the dew and breeze that nourish the heart, raising man with the pure and clear feeling of nature, feeding him with the milk of nature, so that human nature is spared paralysis and lopsidedness.
The return of poetic language and poetic metaphor to the primal is only a formal return — a return on an altogether new level and in an altogether new sense. The anthropologist Sahlins, in his rethinking of Western epistemology, has criticized the limitations of Morgan’s primitive classifications: he holds that Morgan did not recognize the cultural propositions in language but took them as
cognition that only plays an expressive role . . . to pass from nature to culture is, at most, like rewriting the Odyssey from oral form into written form. [16]
He stresses the meaning of human practice, including language, and places human practice under the canopy of culture — that is,
the multi-layered interplay of culture and history. [17]
Whether it be the symbolic meaning that Jung discovered, or the semantic function that hermeneutics explores, the essence in either case can show the rich, necessary link between the primal — or the authentic — and meaning. Under the head of human practice, the essence of poetic cognition shows itself in the rich experience of art criticism. The American philosopher George Santayana held that
to return to the modes of thought of our remote ancestors is a sad fallacy,
while creative return — that is, within the historical experience of humankind — is the case in which
poetry draws its life-sap, and because it has soaked into the essence of things, it transforms our practical language into another face, liberates us from a state of imaginal poverty. Poetry reminds us of an instant in the past; it invites us to fancy; it cherishes the fleeting phenomenon of feeling. [18]
Contemporary poetic theory has focused on the rich poetic experience and meaning that arise in the transformation of primal metaphor into poetic metaphor; the historical exploration of pre-literate literature, as it has been said,
is what can disclose the meaning of natural and cultural form on a worldwide and even trans-cultural scale. [19]
For instance, W. J. T. Mitchell of the University of Chicago has offered a new interpretation of Romantic theory, holding that the Romantic recognition of primal things runs through modern and contemporary literary and art theory from Marx down to the postmodern:
All roads lead to Romanticism.
And Romanticism endows things — especially the totems and fossils that are themselves primal metaphors — with a second nature.
“Fossilism,” in a certain sense, endows natural history with practical meaning and endows the history of human practice with natural meaning. [20]
All this represents the contemporary discrimination of poetic metaphor and primal metaphor by poetic theory and literary criticism.
In poetic metaphor, the ten thousand things are no longer gods; language is no longer the name of the gods; and man himself has become an independent subject with creative power. Man no longer needs to bow weeping before the gods and before the names of the gods. The relation of man and nature, of man and language, has shifted from inequality toward equality, from un-freedom toward freedom. Poetic metaphor contains and rules man and nature, mediates man and nature, opening between them a free, unfettered intercourse. Poetic metaphor unfolds itself into a boundless spiritual cosmos, letting man and language meet face to face, fusing them. Man roams freely in this language-built spiritual cosmos. So the divinity and the magic of primal metaphor are transformed into the soul-seizing allure of poetic language.
Between man and language there is an extraordinarily complex set of relations. Within primal language already lie the seeds of nearly all of them — like an egg whose sex is not yet clear, the relations are tangled together, not yet differentiated. When primal metaphor hatches out poetic metaphor, the poetic relation between man and language is built. Primal metaphor breeds the poetic relation between man and language, and breeds out a poetic language far wider than itself.