Then the LORD answered Job out of the storm. He said: "Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me. Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone -- while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy? Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb, when I made the clouds its garment and wrapped it in thick darkness, when I fixed limits for it and set its doors and bars in place, when I said, 'This far you may come and no farther; here is where your proud waves halt'"(Job 38:1-11)
Ever since I read "Surprised by Joy" (C.S. Lewis) last year, I've been fascinated by the device of personification.
In high school English class, we all learned that personification is a "literary device" whereby the author attributes human qualities to something inanimate or non-human.
For example: "The clouds breathed a sigh of relief after the heavy rain." The personification, in this case, gives the clouds a personality -- it brings us beyond the objective fact (i.e. the clouds no longer hold the density of water that they previously did) and into a world where clouds have thoughts and feelings. The personification helps us visualize the clouds reacting the way we might react in a similar situation. That is, if we were clouds, we might feel happy after a heavy rain. We can all relate, of course. When my bladder is full, I'm quite relieved and happy to empty it.
As a literary device, personification can be very, very effective. And I can't help but wonder -- why? Why do we, as human beings, feel the need to project our own experience of the world onto our surroundings? Does it help us make sense out of it all?
(If I were a psychologist, by the way, I think it would be an interesting study to undertake. What areas of the brain are stimulated by personification? What other experiences stimulate those same areas? My hypothesis is that it would stimulate the same pleasure centers that are active when someone figures out a puzzle, makes a connection, or otherwise makes sense out of something that didn't make sense beforehand. The brain loves to understand and make sense out of the world, and it has a tendency to "reward" itself when a connection is made.)
It's a deceptively complex question. Why do we find it pleasurable and sensible to project human qualities onto the world around us?
My simple answer: Personification is much, much more than a mere literary device. It's something that corresponds deeply to the way we understand the world. Personification happens in our deepest parts, in our souls. There's a "truth" in personification that runs against the stream of scientism in our society. In fact, the personification is often much more true than the counterpart scientific statement.
For example, which of the following statements is more true?
(a) The sea is calm tonight.
(b) The tidal waves are 30% smaller tonight than the average of historical measurements.
(check one)
Our society has sold us a lie. What lie? The lie that everything boils down to matter and energy. After all, that's what Einstein's general relativity tells us, right? Anybody remember "e = mc^2" from physics class?) EVERYTHING is essentially particles and energy. That includes the sun, the moon, the grass, you, me, everything. We are little more than walking solar systems -- my body is a big collection of cells in orbit, interacting with each other in complex ways to give the illusion of meaning and intelligence.
Why do we rebel? Why do we insist on drawing connections between the conscious and the unconscious? Why do we refuse to live in a world that is governed strictly by physical interactions?
Surprisingly, this very question enraptured C.S. Lewis. In fact, it was one of the strongest factors in his conversion to Christianity. (To understand fully, you would have to read "Surprised by Joy".) Lewis was drawn to fantasy literature -- mythology, fairy stories, Norse folk-legends. One day he picked up a book called "Phantastes" by George MacDonald. Later, he wrote this:
It must be more than thirty years ago that I bought... Phantastes. A few hours later I knew that I had crossed a great frontier. I had already been waist deep in Romanticism, and likely enough, at any moment, to flounder into its darker and more evil forms, slithering down the steep descent that leads from the love of strangeness to that of eccentricity and thence to that of perversity... What it actually did to me was to convert, even to baptise (that was where the Death came in) my imagination. It did nothing to my intellect nor (at that time) to my conscience... the quality which had enchanted me in his imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic reality in which we all live."C.S.Lewis had found a secret. The universe is alive.(foreword by C. S. Lewis to Lilith by George MacDonald)
He had finally discovered what he always knew to be true. His intellect and his education had protected him from the truth. For him, the truth had been shrouded in a cloak of modernism and scientism.
No, the "real universe" is a "divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic reality in which we all live". The universe of scientism is a false universe. The "real universe" is one in which personification makes perfect sense to us. Even when our intellects fail us, our souls know the truth. That's why personification is found throughout our literature, and, indeed, throughout everything that we do. We not only write in personification; we think, communicate, and reason using this same device.
Personification is more than mere "projection". In some sense, we are not "projecting" anything. We are describing the world as it really is, with at least as much truthfulness as science could ever hope to communicate.
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