'According to my bond': King Lear and re-cognition

Abstract

The theory of cognitive metaphor, applied in an analysis of King Lear's opening scene, shows that the scene's figurative language depends upon metaphoric projection from the schemata — skeletalised structures of knowledge — of BALANCE and LINKS into the abstractions of filial love and family relationships. The metaphors arising from the BALANCE schema, in particular, are organised into a scenario, an interpretive framework, of financial accounting. Lear understands his relationships with his daughters in terms of the debits and credits of fiscal accounts; the Fool identifies him as 'an 0 without a figure'; Regan and Goneril destroy their father by the very numbers he so relishes. Cordelia tries and fails to get Lear to 'recognise' parental love and filial duty in terms of the LINKS schema, beginning with language interpretable within both ('I love you according to my bond', where 'bond' is both a financial obligation and a linking medium). Lear must learn to understand the world in terms of LINKS through action, most strikingly portrayed when he strips off his clothes and joins Tom o'Bedlam in nakedness. We understand this and other dramatic action, the plot structure, and the play's other abstract elements through the same cognitive apparatus that we use to understand its textual metaphors: projection into those abstract entities from schematised bodily experience. In the theory of cognitive metaphor, 'interpretive communities' are constrained by the embodied imagination.