by Mark Turner
BEDTIME WITH SHAHRAZAD Q. 7
and projection. Even stories exceptionally specific in their setting, character, and dialogue submit to projection. Often a short story will contain no overt mark that it stands for anything but what it purports to represent, and yet we will interpret it as projecting to a much larger abstract narrative, one that applies to our own specific lives, however far our lives are removed from the detail of the story. Such an emblematic story, however unyieldingly specific in its references, can seem pregnant with general meaning.
The projection of story operates throughout everyday life and throughout the most elite and sacred literature. Literary critics, observing it at work in excep- tional literary inventions such as the Faerie Queene or The Rime of the Ancient Mariner or Through the Looking Glass or The Wasteland, have from time to time proposed that these spectacular inventions are not essentially exotic, but rather represent the carefully worked products of a fundamental mode of thought that is universal and indispensable. Parable—defined by the Oagford English Dictio- nary as the expression of one story through another—has seemed to literary crit- ics to belong not merely to expression and not exclusively to literature, but rather, as C. S. Lewis observed in 1936, to mind in general. If we want to study the everyday mind, we can begin by turning to the literary mind exactly because the everyday mind is essentially literary.
Parable is today understood as a certain kind of exotic and inventive literary story, a subcategory within the special worlds of fiction. The original Greek word—1totpot[3o}t1'1 (parahole), from the verb nupufidkketv (parahallein)—had a much wider, schematic meaning: the tossing or projecting of one thing along- side another. The Greek word could be used of placing one thing against another, staking one thing to another, even tossing fodder beside a horse, toss- ing dice alongside each other, or turning one’s eyes to the side. In these mean- ings, nupufidkketv is the equivalent of Latin projieere, from which we get the English “to project” and “projection.”
I will use the word parahle more narrowly than its Greek root but much more widely than the common English term: Parahle is the projection of story. Parable, defined this way, refers to a general and indispensable instrument of everyday thought that shows up everywhere, from telling time to reading Proust. I use the word parahle in this unconventional way to draw attention to a mis- conception I hope to correct, that the everyday mind has little to do with lit- erature. Although literary texts may be special, the instruments of thought used to invent and interpret them are basic to everyday thought. Written works called narratives or stories may be shelved in a special section of the bookstore, but the mental instrument I call narrative or story is basic to human thinking. Lit- erary works known as parables may reside within fiction, but the mental instru- ment I call parable has the widest utility in the everyday mind.
8 .6 THE LITERARY MIND
We can learn a surprising amount about story, projection, and parable in everyday life by considering for a moment the fictional lives of the fictional vizier and Shahrazad. The vizier is in a terrible position, on the edge of dealing with his daughter’s life or death, the complex mind of his king, and the fate of his country. He is called on to foresee, a basic human mental activity, and he is supposedly the national master at foresight. He is the vizier. He has had unpar- alleled experience in crucial foresight when there is no second chance. He is fully exposed in his roles as both father and adviser. A failure at this moment will destroy absolutely everything. He turns, naturally, to the most powerful and basic instruments he possesses: story and projection. His motivation is absolute, since he knows that to succeed at her scheme, Shahrazad will have to outperform him at his own professional practice her first time out, under conditions more unfa- miliar and dramatic than anything that has accompanied his own feats of fore- thought and persuasion. Yet the contest is unequal: She is a rank novice while he is the reigning grand master.
Shahrazad sees everything at stake, too, but from a different viewpoint: It is her country, her king, her father, her sisters (literally and figuratively), and sooner or later, no doubt, her own virginity and life, whether she volunteers them or not. It is also, potentially, in narrative imagination, her marriage, her children, her future, her genius, her life story. A failure will destroy absolutely everything. She too turns naturally to the most powerful and basic instruments she possesses: story and projection. These are the powers of mind she will live by, not only in the drama of her execution or reprieve, but also in the minute details of her storytelling nights.
It is a recurrent tale: The cautious parent sees all the danger while the adven- turous child sees all the opportunity. They stand in conflict atjust that moment in their lives when the parent’s power is ebbing and the child’s capacity is rising. The child, of course, will have her way. Her father must step back into the condition of hope. Shahrazad has always been in his hands. Now he will be in hers. In this story, repeated in every generation, the child is confident and ambivalently thrilled at the prospect of having her capacity put to the test in action, to see whether she can succeed where her parent has failed, while the parent is nearly overcome with fear yet sustained by the secret thought that if anyone can do it, it’s his kid.
I imagine Shahrazad at this moment as prescient, knowing just how good she is and just what powers and opportunities she possesses that are beyond her father’s capacity to imagine. Her presentiment comes from her own use of fore- sight through narrative imagining. But not even she, for all her looking into the future, can know that her performance during the next thousand and one nights will bring her a reputation as the greatest literary mind ever. Along with that
BEDTIME WITH SHAHRAZAD Q. 9
other fictional author, the Homer of the Odyssey, she will become a paragon of human imaginative superiority.
If Shahrazad and the vizier could know of her fame down to our age, it would probably mean less to them than would its implication that her daring idea suc- ceeds, which further implies that tomorrow morning her head will not fall beneath her father’s sword. She will live, not happily ever after—this is an adult story—but for the appropriate temporal space of risk and terror, intimacy and pleasure, until she and Shahriyar are visited by the Destroyer of all earthly plea- sures, the Leveler of kings and peasants, the Annihilator of women and men.
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The story of Shahrazad presents to us in miniature the mental patterns of parable:
Prediction. The vizier imagines the consequences of an event, namely the story that follows the donkey's intrusion into the affairs of the ox and the farmer. By projection, he is at the same time imagining the story that would follow Shahrazad’s proposed intrusion into the affairs of the virgins and Shahriyar. Narrative imagining is prediction.
Evaluation. If the event whose consequences we imagine is an intentional act, we can evaluate the wisdom of that act by evaluating those consequences. The vizier not only predicts the consequences of Shahrazad’s proposed intru- sion, he thereby evaluates its wisdom. Narrative imagining is evaluation.
Planning. Shahrazad imagines a goal: to stop Shahriyar. She intends to “suc- ceed in saving the people or perish and die like the rest.” It so happens that she has a second goal: to establish a sound marriage with King Shahriyar. It is convenient that achieving the second goal automatically achieves the first. She constructs in imagination a narrative path of action that leads from the present situation to the sound marriage. This story is her plan. Narrative imagining is planning.
Explanation. We often need to explain how something “came about.” We appear to do this by constructing a narrative path from a prior understood state to the state we need to explain. Shahrazad’s plan to change Shahriyar depends upon a prior explanation, of how Shahriyar the happily married king became Shahriyar the destroyer of women. This explanation consists of the narrative that starts with Shahriyar the happily married king and ends with Shahriyar the de- stroyer of women. Narrative imagining is explanation.
10 .8 THE LITERARY MIND
Actors. We recognize certain objects in stories as actors. This raises another problem: The world does not come labeled with little category signs that say “This is an actor.” How do we form conceptual categories of actors?
Stories. We recognize stories as complex dynamic integrations of objects, actors, and events. But again, we do not recognize each story as wholly unique. Instead, we know abstract stories that apply to ranges of specific situations. How do we form conceptual categories of stories?
Projection. The tale of the ox and the donkey, in which the donkey helps the ox but then suffers in the ox’s place, is offered as a source tale to be projected onto the story of what will happen should Shahrazad be foolish enough to try to help the suffering virgins. The power of this projection is obvious, but how it works is a mystery. How do we project one story onto another? VVhat is the cog- nitive mechanism of parable?
Metonymy. In the tale of the ox and the donkey, the sifted straw is metonymic for luxury—that is, it stands for luxury—and the plough and the millstone are metonymic for labor and suffering. We know this without conscious evalua- tion. We know, for example, not to take the sifted straw as metonymic for yellow things, or the plough and millstone as metonymic for man-made artifacts. This seems obvious and even automatic, but how we make metonymic associations is mysterious.
Emélem. The vizier and his daughter stand as emblems or instances of" par- ent and child; their conflict stands as an emblem or instance of generational conflict. What is an emblematic narrative?
Image schemas. VVhen we think of one thing, for example, the donkey’s pride and nosiness, as “leading to” another, such as his suffering, we are thinking image-schematically. This particular image schema—“leading to”—is basic to story. It consists of movement along a directed path. The points on the path correspond to stages of the story: We say, “VVhat point have we reached in the story?” The “path” of the story “leads from” its “beginning” “to” its “end.” What are image schemas and what are their roles in the literary mind?
Counterparts in imaginative domains. The vizier, in warning his daughter, has a mental model of the present. He imaginatively blends it with a hypotheti- cal scenario in which Shahrazad goes to Shahriyar. Mentally, he develops that blend into a robust picture of a hypothetical future. These two narrative mental spaces, of the vizier’s present reality and the hypothetical future, are separated in time and in potential. But there are conceptual connections between them as well as differences. In the mental space of the present, the role of vizier’ s elder daughter and the role of Shahriyar’s wife do not have the same inhabitant. But in the mental space of the hypothetical future, they do, which is to say, the vizier is imagining a future in which the person who happens to inhabit the role of vizier’s elder
BEDTIME WITH SHAHRAZAD Q. 11
daughter also happens to inhabit the role of Shahriyar’s (temporary) wife. The vizier, expressing these connections, could say, “If you marry Shahriyar, I will have to kill you,” and we would know that the cause of the killing would not be his anger at his daughter for having disobeyed him but instead his obligation as vizier to execute whoever inhabits the role of Shahriyar’s wife. We understand these mental space connections as well as the vizier, instantly, despite their com- plexity. If Shahrazad were to say, “If I marry Shahriyar, you will be surprised; you will be grandfather to the next king,” we as well as the vizier would know immediately the connections between Shahrazad’s mental space of the present and her mental space of the future. Constructing these mental space connec- tions is amazingly literary and complicated. Shahrazad’s mental space of the future, for example, includes a father who remembers his previous mental space of the future and who knows that it does not accord with his mental space of the present reality in the way it was supposed to. How do we construct narra- tive mental spaces and establish such connections between them?
Conceptual Blending. The ox and the donkey talk. Talking animals are so common in stories as to seem natural. VVhy do they arise in imagination and why should they seem natural? This apparently idle question turns out to be both essential to the investigation of mind and profoundly difficult to answer. Con- ceptual b1ending—in this case, the blending of talking people with mute ani- mals to produce talking animals—is a basic process of thought. How does it work? VVhat is its range?
Language. The parable of the ox and the donkey is expressed in language. VVhere does the structure of our language “come from” and what is its relation to parable?
We imagine realities and construct meanings. The everyday mind performs these feats by means of mental processes that are literary and that have always been judged to be literary. Cultural meanings peculiar to a society often fail to migrate intact across anthropological or historical boundaries, but the basic mental processes that make these meanings possible are universal. Parable is one of them.
.59 2 (2.. HUMAN MEANING
Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius: By th’mass, and ’tis like a camel indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius.- It is backed like a weasel.
Hamlet: Or like a whale.
Polon ius: Very like a whale.
VVilliam Shakespeare, Hamlet
IN T H E TALE of the ox and the donkey, it is easy to see that we are dealing with story, projection, and paraéle. It is harder to see these capacities at work in everyday life, but we always use them. The rest of this book explores how the human mind is always at work constructing small stories and projecting them.
Story, projection, and parable do work for us; they make everyday life pos- sible; they are the root of human thought; they are not primarily—or even importantly-—entertainment. To be sure, the kinds of stories we are apt to notice draw attention to their status as the product of storytelling, and they often have an entertaining side. We might therefore think that storytelling is a special per- formance rather than a constant mental activity. But story as a mental activity is essential to human thought. The kinds of stories that are most essential to human thought produce experience that is completely absorbing, but we rarely notice those stories themselves or the way they work because they are always present.
This conjunction of what is absorbing but unnoticed is not as weird as it sounds. Human vision, for example, produces content that is always psychologi- cally absorbing to everyone—we are absorbed in our visual field, no matter what it contains—but only a neurobiologist is likely to notice the constant mechanisms of vision that create our visual field. What everyone notices are some exceptional
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HUMAN MEANING Q. 13
products of vision: A fireworks display seems more interesting than an empty parking lot, even though vision uses the same mechanisms to see both of them. We almost never notice the activity of vision or think of vision as an activity, but ifwe do, we must recognize that the activity of vision is constant and more im- portant than anything we may happen to see.
Story as a mental activity is similarly constant yet unnoticed, and more im- portant than any particular story. In the next three chapters, we will analyze some very basic abstract stories and some very basic patterns of their projection. We will find that the same basic mechanisms of parable underlie a great range of examples, from the everyday to the literary.
The basic stories we know best are small stories of events in space: The wind blows clouds through the sky, a child throws a rock, a mother pours milk into a glass, a whale swims through the water. These stories constitute our world and they are completely absorbing—we cannot resist watching the volley of the ten- nis ball. Our adult experience
actually revolves around pouring the drink into the cup, carrying it, watching the bird soar, watching the plane descend, track- ing the small stick as the stream carries it away.
As subjects of our prolonged conscious investigation, however, these small spatial stories may seem hopelessly boring. We are highly interested in our coherent personal experiences, which are the product of thinking with small spatial stories, but we are not interested in the small spatial stories themselves. VVhen someone says, “Tell me a story,” he means something unusual and inter- esting. King Lear is a “story”; Peter Rabbit is a “story.” Someone pouring coffee into a cup is not a “story.” VVhy waste time thinking about a human being pour- ing liquid into a container? This small spatial story takes place billions of times a day, all over the world, with numbing repetition. No one who pours the liquid thinks it is an interesting story; what is the point?
We must adopt a scientific perspective to see why something we already know how to do without effort or conscious attention can pose an extremely difficult and important scientific puzzle. The capacity for recognizing and executing small spatial stories is—like the capacity to speak, to see color, or to distinguish sounds— an obvious and deceptively easy capacity. In fact, it presents the chief puzzle of cognitive science. How can five billion different human beings all recognize and execute small spatial stories?
Even the most boring person can do it, so we have a hard time imagining that the capacity can be interesting. We devalue it as we devalue any plentiful resource. Since it is universal instead of scarce, the calculus of supply and demand must fix its price at zero. But it is actually worth whatever it is worth to be a human being because if you do not have this capacity, you do not have a human mind.