CONCEPTUAL MAPPINGS OF LOVE IN ELIF SHAFFAK’S “THE ISLAND OF MISSING TREES”
CONCEPTUAL MAPPINGS OF LOVE IN ELIF SHAFFAK’S “THE ISLAND OF MISSING TREES”

Summary/Abstract: This scientific endeavour explores the conceptual mappings of human experiences as perceived by a plant character endowed with human features, and it relies on the prominent theme in cognitive semantics. Following the theoretical cognitive-semantic studies of George Lakoff, Mark Johnson and others, the article depicts the conceptual metaphors of love in the discourse of the arboreal character – Fig Tree – in the most recent novel “The Island of the Missing Trees”. This poetic novel is written by the well-known and rewarded British-Turkish writer Elif Shafak – a book of love, war, migration and adventure, a psychological exploration of the human experience on two territories, whose story is told by a Fig Tree, which impersonates the protagonists’ dramatic experiences, dilemmas, anxieties and love relationships. The stylistic analysis tries to trace the directions in which the conceptual metaphors can lead us to explore the possible interpretations of the novel, as well as the various narrative paths connected to plant life, environmental current issues, interconnectivity in the natural environment, and their effects upon our human history. The research observes the conceptualisations of parental love, friendly love and romantic love, love conceptualised as vertical space with reference to the underground life of plants, and also as horizontal space, when we take into account the characters’ migration. It is the story of a mixed Greek-Turkish Cypriot couple, a future biologist and a future archaeologist, who face the challenges of war and take different stances – one is forced to run away, the other decides to stay and face life as it comes. The novel highly explores the paradigm of love in its various forms, and follows a deeply metaphoric narrative string to portray human feeling through the diary of a fig tree. Throughout the novel, the plant kingdom projects conceptualizations of migration, transplantation and rebirth, which are all metaphors for survival.

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