The Literary Mind
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THE
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MARK TURN ER
NEW YORK OXFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1996
Oxford University Press
Oxford NewYork Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Bombay Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence HongKong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto
and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1996 by Mark Turner
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library ofCongress Cataloging—in—Publication Data Turner, Mark. The literary mind / Mark Turner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0—19—510411—0 (cloth) 1. Literature—Philosophy. 2. Cognitive science. I. Title. PN49.T77 1996 801'.92-—dc20 95-50366
135798642
Printed in the United States ofAmerica on acid—free paper
.33 PREFACE 6;.
IF YOU ARE B ROWSING this paragraph in a bookstore, glance at the people around you. They are thinking, searching, planning, deciding, watching the clock, walking to the register, buying books, talking to friends, and wondering why you are looking at them. None of this seems literary.
But to do these things, they (and you) are using principles of mind we mis- takenly classify as “literary”—story, projection, and poroéle. We notice these prin- ciples so rarely in operation, when a literary style puts them on display, that we think of them as special and separate from everyday life. On the contrary, they make everyday life possible. The literary mind is not a separate kind of mind. It is our mind. The literary mind is the fundamental mind. Although cognitive science is associated with mechanical technologies like robots and computer in- struments that seem unliterary, the central issues for cognitive science are in fact the issues of the literary mind.
Story is a basic principle of mind. Most of our experience, our knowledge, and our thinking is organized as stories. The mental scope of story is magnified by projectz'on—one story helps us make sense of another. The projection of one story onto another is poroole, a basic cognitive principle that shows up every- where, from simple actions like telling time to complex literary creations like Proust’s 1? la recherche du tempsperdu.
We interpret every level of our experience by means of parable. In this book, I investigate the mechanisms of parable. I explore technical details of the brain sciences and the mind sciences that cast light on our use of parable as we think, invent, plan, decide, reason, imagine, and persuade. I analyze the activity of par- able, inquire into its origin, speculate about its biological and developmental bases, and demonstrate its range. In the final chapter, I explore the possibility that lan- guage is not the source of parable but instead its complex product.
Parable is the root of the human mind—of thinking, knowing, acting, cre- ating, and plausibly even of speaking. But the common view, firmly in place for
V1.6 PREFACE
two and a half millennia, sees the everyday mind as unliterary and the literary mind as optional. This book is an attempt to show how wrong the common view is and to replace it with a view of the mind that is more scientific, more accurate, more inclusive, and more interesting, a view that no longer misrepresents every- day thought and action as divorced from the literary mind.
College Park, Ma’. M. T. Noweméer 1995
.33 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 6;.
THE JOHN S1MON GUGGENHEIM MEMORIAL FOUNDATION and the University of Maryland supported the writing of this book during 1992- 1993, while Iwas a visiting scholar of the Department of Cognitive Science, the Department of Linguistics, and the Center for Research in Language at the Uni- versity of California, San Diego. Their support made it possible for me to pre- pare for publication re search I had presented in public lectures during earlier years. The book was completed during my year as a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, in 1994-1995. I am grateful for financial sup- port provided during that period by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Scholars at the University of California, San Diego, to whom I am indebted include Seana Coulson, Jeff Lansing, Gilles Fauconnier, Adele Goldberg, Rob- ert Kluender, Ronald Langacker, Jean Mandler, and Nili Mandelblit. I am also indebted to Claudia Brugman,Jane Espenson, Charles Fillmore, MarkJohnson, Paul Kay, George Lakoff, Eve Sweetser, and Leonard Talmy.
Gilles Fauconnier and I discovered independently a range of problems in conceptual projection that convinced us of the need for a new approach. Our collaboration resulted in the theory of conceptual blending. We presented its elements at the October 1993 Cognitive Linguistics Workshop and later in a technical report and articles. I thank Gilles Fauconnier for permission to include in chapters 5 and 6 some of our results. Anyone who knows the extreme velocity of Fauconnier’s intellect will understand why credit for insights achieved during our collaboration cannot be partitioned (especially since many other people have been involved in the discussions), but also why I owe a net intellectual debt. I take responsibility for the version of the theoryI present here.
I am grateful to Antonio Damasio, Hanna Damasio, and Gerald Edelman for conversations on the relationship of the study of language to the study of the brain. I also thank Hallgjerd Aksnes, David Collier, Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr.,
Vlll .6 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Edward Haertel, Mardi Horowitz, Suzanne Kemmer, Robert Keohane, Tanya Luhrmann, and Francis—No'e‘l Thomas for comments. Kathleen Much, staff editor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, made help- ful suggestions on some of the chapters. It has been my good fortune to have Cynthia Read as my editor at Oxford University Press.
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.3) CONTENTS 9;.
Bedtime with Shahrazad Human Meaning
Body Action
Figured Tales
Creative Blends
Many Spaces
Single Lives
Language
Notes
Further Reading on Image Schemas Index
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.59 1 Ca. BEDTIME WITH SHAHRAZAD
T HERE WAS ON CE a wealthy farmer who owned many herds of cattle. He knew the languages of beasts and birds. In one of his stalls he kept an ox and a donkey. At the end of each day, the ox came to the place where the donkey was tied and found it well swept and watered; the manger filled with sifted straw and well-winnowed bar- ley; and the donkey lying at his ease, for the master seldom rode him.
It chanced that one day the farmer heard the ox say to the donkey: “How fortunate you are! I am worn out with toil, while you rest here in comfort. You eat well—sifted barley and lack nothing. It is only occa- sionally that your master rides you. As for me, my life is perpetual drudg- ery at the plough and the millstone.”
The donkey answered: “When you go out into the fi
eld and the yoke is placed upon your neck, pretend to be ill and drop down on your belly. Do not rise even if they beat you; or if you do rise, lie down again. When they take you back and place the fodder before you, do not eat it. Ab- stain for a day or two; and thus shall you find a rest from toil.”
Remember that the farmer was there and heard what passed between them.
And so when the ploughman came to the ox with his fodder, he ate scarcely any of it. And when the ploughman came the following morn- ing to take him out into the field, the ox appeared to be far from well. Then the farmer said to the ploughman: “Take the donkey and use him at the plough all day!”
With this story, the vizier, counselor to the great Sassanid king, Shahriyar, begins to advise his daughter. The vizier’s daughter is Shahrazad, known to us
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as the gifted and erotic storyteller of the thousand and one nights, whose genius and beauty will make her famous. But at the moment, she has told no tales. She has not offered herself to Shahriyar as a wife or given him any of the multiple pleasures of her bed. She is merely the vizier’s daughter, and her father would like to keep it that way. For the last three years, it has been his grim daily task to execute Shahriyar’s queen of the day before and procure for him another
The trouble began when Shahriyar discovered that his first wife was un- faithful. In sorrow, he abandoned his throne to roam the world. He unwill- ingly became involved in a distasteful episode that convinced him that no woman can be trusted. He returned to his kingdom, ordered his wife to be slain, and redefined “married life.”
The situation in the kingdom is very bad; rebellion is simmering, and the vizier is running out of virgins. Shahrazad offers herself as the next bride, but not as the next victim. She is far too well bred ever to place her father in the awkward position of having to execute his own child. Instead, she will marry King Shahriyar and by telling him marvelous stories free him of the need to behead each morning the woman he had taken as his virgin bride the preceding after- noon. Her hope is to begin once again the daily royal wedding tale, but this time to replace its local, twisted finish with the more common and traditional ending.
Her image of her wedding night is unusual, in keeping with her circum- stances: After sex with the king, she will begin a story, supposedly for her younger sister Dinarzad, but really meant for the king’s ears. She will time its climax to be interrupted by the breaking of dawn so that the king, to hear the rest of the story, will have to postpone her execution by a day. She hopes to repeat this trick for as many days as it takes. Some of her stories will be veiled parables. Some will carry King Shahriyar beyond his bleak interior landscape. Some will be sym- bols of what could be. All will have an amazing and wonderful surface.
The vizier fears that his daughter will merely suffer. True to his character and to his role, he does not say so directly, but instead tells her a story of a don- key who, proud of his intelligence, schemes to trick the master of the farm into excusing the sweet, simple ox from labor. The scheme works, but not as the donkey expected. The wealthy farmer orders the donkey driven into the field to work in the ox’s place.
In using a story to warn Shahrazad, the vizier engages in narrative imagin- ing, a form of thinking before acting. In trying to change her mind through story, he unwittingly endorses the very strategy he asks her to reject—to try to change the king’s mind through stories.
Narrative imagining—story—is the fundamental instrument of thought. Rational capacities depend upon it. It is our chief means of looking into the
BEDTIME WITH SHAHRAZAD Q. 5
future, of predicting, of planning, and of explaining. It is a literary capacity in- dispensable to human cognition generally. This is the first way in which the mind is essentially literary.
The vizier asks Shahrazad to think before acting by imagining a story and then evaluating it. He traces the consequence of her action forward to disaster, implying that Shahrazad should abandon her plan. In doing so, he puts to do- mestic use a fundamental cognitive activity: story.
But there is something odd here. The vizier does not say, “Look, daughter, this is your current situation: You are comfortable, so comfortable that you have the leisure to get interested in other people’s problems. But if you keep this up, you will end in pain.” Instead, he says, “Once upon a time there was a comfort- able donkey who got interested in the problems of the ox. The donkey, who thought he was the sharpest thing ever, gave some clever advice to the dullard ox. It worked amazingly well, at least for the ox, but it had unfortunate conse- quences for the donkey. Before you know it, the ox was lolling about in the hay of contentment while the donkey was sweating and groaning at the ox’s labor.”
The vizier presents one story that projects to another story whose principal character is Shahrazad. We, and Shahrazad, are to understand the possible future story of Shahrazad by projecting onto it the story of the ox and the donkey. The punch line is that Shahrazad is the donkey. This projection of one story onto another may seem exotic and literary, and it is—but it is also, like story, a fundamental instrument of the mind. Rational capacities depend upon it. It is a literary capacity indispensable to human cognition generally. This is the second way in which the human mind is essentially literary.
One special kind of literature, parable, conveniently combines story and projection. Parable serves as a laboratory where great things are condensed in a small space. To understand parable is to understand root capacities of the every- day mind, and conversely.
Parable begins with narrative imagining—the understanding of a complex of objects, events, and actors as organized by our knowledge of story. It then combines story with projection: one story is projected onto another. The essence of parable is its intricate combining of two of our basic forms of knowledge— story and projection. This classic combination produces one of our keenest mental processes for constructing meaning. The evolution of the genre of parable is thus neither accidental nor exclusively literary: it follows inevitably from the nature of our conceptual systems. The motivations for parable are as strong as the moti- vations for color vision or sentence structure or the ability to hit a distant object with a stone.
Literary parables are only one artifact of the mental process of parable. Prov- erbs frequently present a condensed, implicit story to be interpreted through
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projection: “When the cat’ s away, the mice will play,” “Once burned, twice shy,” “A poor workman blames his tools,” “Don’t get between a dog and his bone.” In cases like these, the target story—the story we are to understand—is not even mentioned overtly, but through our agile capacity to use both story and projec- tion, we project the overt source story onto a covert target story. “When the cat’s away, the mice will play,” said at the office, can be projected onto a story of boss and workers. Said in the classroom, it can be projected onto a story of teacher and students. Said of sexual relationships, it can be projected onto a story of infidelity. With equal ease, we can project it onto stories of a congressional over- sight committee and the industries regulated by that committee, a police force and the local thieves, or a computer security device and the computer viruses it was intended to control. If we find “When the cat’ s away, the mice will play” out of context, in a book of proverbs or in a fortune cookie, we can project it onto an abstract story that might cover a great range of specific target stories and muse over the possible targets to which it might apply. “Look before you leap” simi— larly suggests an abstract story that applies to indefinitely many target stories.
The ease with which we interpret statements and construct meanings in this fashion is absolutely misleading: we feel as if we are doing no work at all. It is like listening to a speaker of English utter scores of syllables a minute: We use complicated unconscious knowledge to understand the speech but feel as if we are passive, as if we merely listen while the understanding happens
by magic. With parables and proverbs, just as with language itself, we must see past our apparent ease of understanding if we are to locate the intricate unconscious work involved in arriving at these interpretations.
To study mind, we must become comfortable with the fact that mind gen- erally does not work the way it appears to. This sound paradoxical. We expect our introspective sense of mind to serve as a reasonable guide to the actual nature of mind. We expect it to give us a loose picture that, once enhanced by science, will represent the workings of mind. But it is instead badly deceptive. Our loose picture of mind is a loose fantasy. Consciousness is a wonderful instrument for helping us to focus, to make certain kinds of decisions and discriminations, and to create certain kinds of memories, but it is a liar about mind. It shamelessly represents itself as comprehensive and all-governing, when in fact the real work is often done elsewhere, in ways too fast and too smart and too effective for slow, stupid, unreliable consciousness to do more than glimpse, dream of, and envy.
Fables like Aesop’s, cautionary tales like the vizier’s to his daughter Shahrazad, veiled indictments like the one the prophet Nathan delivers to King David in 2 Samuel 12:1—7 (“You are the man”), epithets like “wing—footed Hermes,” conceits in metaphysical poetry, and extended allegories like Everyman or Pilgrim ’sProgress or the Divine Comedy all consist of the combination of story