“The Place Where My Body Longed to Go”: Metaphors of Sexual Desire in André Aciman’s Prose

Abstract

Sexual desire is one of the fundamental components of human personality and is seen as an important research object in contemporary Humanities. Its relevance for Linguistics lies in the increasing interest in the verbal representation of various forms of subjective experience, as well as in a large-scale discursivization of sexuality in contemporary culture and the need for developing a highly promising line of research known as ‘Language and Sexuality’. The present research focuses on metaphor with the aim of proving that it is an efficient mechanism of objectifying, structuring, interpreting, and verbalizing the subjective experience of sexual desire. The research is carried out on the basis of three thematically relevant novels by the contemporary American writer André Aciman (“Call Me by Your Name”, “Enigma Variations”, and “Find Me”). It is based on a sample of 364 contexts. Methodologically the research rests upon the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which facilitates the analysis of the ways fragments of subjective experience are comprehended and provides systematicity in the study of this phenomenon. The specific methodological instruments employed in this research include: the career of metaphor theory, which substantiates the inclusion of similes in metaphor analysis; the metaphoric landscape theory, which enables us to systematize metaphors by identifying central and peripheral elements and defining their conceptual load; the metaphorical creativity theory, which proves the possibility of metaphorical innovations both at the conceptual and verbal levels. The paper identifies and analyzes ten groups of metaphors, nine of which regularly occur in Aciman’s prose and one of which is made up of unique isolated forms. It has been shown that contrary to the popular belief that sexuality discourse is dominated by the fire metaphor, the central element of the metaphoric landscape of sexual desire in Aciman’s texts turned out to besexual desire is movement in space. Among the most creative and regularly occurring ones are the metaphorssexual desire is a financial transactionandsexual desire is music. Within each of the identified groups the paper pinpoints the properties of the source domain that are being profiled, analyzes ways of their verbal representation, and discusses the possibility of conceptual and verbal variation. The research is qualitative and does not presuppose a statistical analysis of the metaphors.