STUDY IN SOCIALITY: THE FUNCTION OF "PRIMARY" METAPHOR IN THE STORIES BY HERMAN MELVILLE AND LEO TOLSTOY

Herman Melville's `The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids' (1855) and Leo Tolstoy's `Master and Man' (1895) are considered in this article as studies in human sociality with special attention to the similarity of receptive strategies and reactions that the two texts provoke.The reader's aesthetic experience in both these cases is determined by the pronounced presence and power of "primary" metaphors: the warmth of human togetherness and the cold of alienation. The palpable sensuality of these metaphors and their distribution in the text (with greater concentration in the opening and the final parts) provide for the coherence of the two "metaphoric fields" (N. Babuts), their internal tension and dynamic. Textual micro-analysis makes it possible to recognize the universal nature of social connectivity as well as the variety of its cultural forms and individual authors' priorities. Readerly participation in the act of embodied cognition makes reduction to allegory impossible, such that the drama of moral and social choice becomes experientially concrete. The presupposed correlation of aesthetic and social forms may give access to the otherwise unattainable terrain where intersubjective experience is constituted, recognized as a culturally relevant model, problematized. (c) 2024 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.