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SIRI HUSTVEDT, Pace, Space and the Other in the Making of Fiction

human experiences could then be symbolized in art in “nondiscursive”
terms, by which Langer meant the ways human beings create meaning
beyond the reductive sender-receiver model in linguistics, a set of ex-
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plicit symbols transmi ed from one person to another. The language
of the arts includes affect, ambiguity, and intuition. Langer regarded
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music as “the tonal analogue of emotive life.” Indeed, Langer sought
to explicate a philosophy founded on insights harmonious with Woolf’s.
Although her book on music, Philosophy in a New Key (1942), gained a
popular following in its day, her work was harshly received by her col-
leagues in analytical philosophy and her name has been shunted into
the shadows ever since. (The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has ap-
parently determined that her thought does not deserve an entry.)
Nevertheless, Langer’s work anticipates the break in cognitive
science initiated years later by Lakoff and Johnson in their book
Metaphors We Live By (1980) and the subsequent movement in second-
generation cognitive science to rethink the nature of human con-
sciousness and locate metaphor in bodily experience. There are innu-
merable other precedents for this shift, perhaps most conspicuously
Giamba ista Vico who argued that metaphor was rooted in the body
in The New Science (1725 and 1744), his sustained a ack on the ideas
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of René Descartes. In Feeling and Form, Langer writes, “The running
mouse seems to cover a path on the floor and the still painted line
seems to run. The reason is that they both embody the abstract idea
of direction by virtue of which they are logically congruent enough
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to be symbols for one another.” The temporal trajectory and spatial
path of the running mouse become the animated spatial image of a

10 Ibid., 385.
11 Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and
Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942), 36.
12 Ibid.
13 Giamba ista Vico, The New Science: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edi-
tion (1744) with the Addition of “Practic of the New Science,” trans. Thomas God-
dard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995),
402.
14 Langer, Feeling and Form, 66.

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