Race and Narrative in Italian Women's Writing Since Unification by Coburn Melissa;

Author:Coburn, Melissa;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Like the journalists cited by Wong, Serao accuses the southern nobility of responsibility for the squandered wealth of the south using the metaphorical figure of don Carlo, melodramatically closing the metaphor with the unusual entailment at the novel’s end: Bianca Maria’s death.

These political uses of metaphor are consistent with those theorized by Lakoff and Johnson, and also by Musolff. Their linguistic studies offer further explanations of metaphor that are useful in developing some of the tendencies which may be expected in such metaphorical reasoning within race discourse. For Lakoff and Johnson, metaphors do not exist in language, but as conceptual models. Language then “refers back” to these conceptual models that already exist elsewhere, commonly, across a given society, and differing somewhat from one society to another. In contrast with their predecessors, Lakoff and Johnson do not see metaphors as primarily lying in the realm of poetic or literary speech; rather, for Lakoff and Johnson, metaphors are commonly found in everyday speech and serve common cognitive functions. Literary metaphors, then, often seize on a common metaphor, and develop some uncommon metaphorical entailments.

These qualities seem quite consistent with Serao’s uses as gradually delineated above. Serao seems to be “referring back” to metaphors preexisting in society more broadly—for example, the metaphors of the marriage or the idea of the doctor/patient relationship as images of national unification. While she “refers back” to these preexisting metaphors, she also incorporates novel entailments, including the combination of the metaphor of marriage with the metaphor of the doctor/patient relationship, the idea that such a wedding would have healing consequences, the idea that both of these characters are equally southern, or the idea that their marriage is in some way fated, natural, or willed by God.

I see in this example a series of ways in which such tropes mask race discourse when it happens, providing a type of alibi against critical analysis. For example, the novel entailments that are a constant quality of metaphorical speech serve to hide what might otherwise be recognized as common racializing tropes. The recognition of tropological references also requires foreknowledge of preexisting tropes: except that I had read works summarizing and analyzing the common contemporary use of these two metaphors in public discourse, I do not believe that I would have seen these metaphors as such. There is a third way in which tropes might further mask race discourse when it happens. Lakoff and Johnson observe that “metaphorical thought, in the form of cross-domain mapping, is primary; metaphorical language is secondary.”[42] This quality creates particular difficulties in recognizing exactly when such metaphors are invoked. The recent corpus study by Musolff demonstrates exactly how very difficult it was to track such metaphors in political speech: no computer program could effectively identify the metaphors he sought to study, as no specific keywords could be relied upon to indicate them.[43] The fact that such metaphorical references can be altogether missed, and as a consequence altogether denied, is a problem for those seeking to find ways to identify and root out hate speech.

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