For a deconstructionist critic such as Paul de Man, personifications signal the haunting potential of language to undo the category of the human: “They can dismember the texture of reality and reassemble it in the most capricious of ways, pairing man with woman or human being with beast in the most unnatural shapes. Something monstrous lurks in the most innocent of catachreses: when one speaks of the legs of the table or the face of the mountain, catachresis is already turning into prosopopeia, and one begins to perceive a world of potential ghosts and monsters.”
Not all modern assessments of the dehumanizing effect of personification find it reductive or haunted, however. Some recent commentators see a productive dimension in the prosopopoetic confusion of people and things. The sociologist Bruno Latour has celebrated the degree to which prosopopoeia give agency to nonhuman objects under the rubric of the “Parliament of Things.” Heather Keenleyside suggests that the poetry of James Thomson, by imbuing the features of the landscape with personified agency, “works to conceive of a social order that would include everything under the sun, and to imagine an ethics that could serve such an expanded system.” Sheryl Hamilton has surveyed examples of modern personifications in legal discourse—corporations, computer bots, genetic clones, property—and she concludes that such instances help us see that personhood is “an always incomplete normative project” and that personification supplements the naturalized person with the socially constructed persona, toward which “we can productively refocus our gaze.”
The modern response to personification, then, is not univocal: it ranges from accusations of moral obfuscation and bad literary taste to praise for its beneficial decentering of the human. All these assessments, however, tend to share the assumption that personification is a derivation of or foil to the person. The person is the full, autonomous, and morally responsible agent, and personification— by dint of its refusal to respect the boundary between humans and things—produces a distortion within this agent. This distortion may be decried as a corporate legal evasion or as a caricature of literary character, or it may be welcomed as a talisman against the illusion of autonomous human agency or unmediated consciousness. Yet either way, in the modern view, personification has the effect of leading us away from the realm of the person and toward the realm of nonhuman things.
This impression reflects a vast sea change in literary sensibilities. In the premodern world, personification works in the reverse direction: it starts with ostensibly inanimate things, such as passions, ideas, and rivers, and imbues them with animation and vitality. Nearly all the ancient and early modern commentators claim that prosopopoeia creates force, energy, and emotional intensification. Like de Man, these commentators understand personification to enact a commerce between living and the nonliving, but unlike him, as we will see in chapter 1, they emphasize the movement from death to life, from stasis to animation. And personifications maintain this energy in premodern literary narratives, racing across the landscape in pursuit of their single-minded projects, drawing affect and action out of otherwise insentient or motionless things. The fact that the term personification is an eighteenth-century coinage suggests the degree to which the dialectic between personification and personhood is a peculiarly modern one. In premodern fictions, by contrast, personifications are not trying (and failing) to resemble real human beings or psychologically complex literary characters. Instead, they are channeling energy.
It is not the point of this book to argue that the premoderns got personification right and the moderns got it wrong. Literary art does what a given culture or era needs it to do. Rather, the point is to see what happens if we suspend the anachronistic imposition of the modern template onto premodern literary personification and try to get a clearer picture of what premodern writers and readers thought personification was doing.
Volition’s Face argues that the energy characteristic of premodern literary personification is best understood, not as a derivation of personhood, but rather as an expression of will. Figures such as Joy, Fear, Rumor, and War emerge from the agent or from the landscape and take action in the world. They dramatize the transformation of affect or concept into volition: as a character exercises reason or feels fear, Reason and Fear extend from that character into the landscape, augmenting the scope of her agency. By the same token, however, by becoming partly independent of the agent, personifications deny that agent complete control of her will. Personifications are trajectories of volitional energy that have taken on a life of their own.
Literary prosopopoeia thus captures a distinctly premodern intuition about the human will, namely, that the will is both mover and moved, the origin of our actions and the effect of prior determinisms. It will be the burden of chapter 2 to make this interpretation of premodern volition, but at the outset I can say that the medieval and Renaissance understanding of the will offered especially fertile ground for prosopopoetic representation. As the will emerges as an isolatable faculty in the Christian Middle Ages, commentators come to see it as the instrument of human agency but also as partly independent of other human capacities, such as intellect and moral character. Renaissance accounts of the will amplify this independence, conceiving of volition both as the means to self creation and as the faculty by which people lose control of themselves. The will does not express the self in some fundamental way but rather is a faculty that sometimes undermines the self.
excerpted from the introduction
