by Mark Turner
Body Action —-> Social Action (Exerting Force Against) (Informing)
Social Action -> Events (Informing) (All Occasions)
Multiple projections of this sort are nearly trivial for us, since they arise from common procedures of everyday thought. Hamlet’s phrase is not a puzzle to these modern readers, but rather a particularly lucid and compelling expression.
Multiple projection often arises when body action is projected onto mental action (A THINKER IS A MOVER AND A MANIPULATOR) and the mental action is then projected to an event-story. If someone observes, “The sky has been think- ing about raining all day, and now it looks as if it’s finally getting around to it,” we have a projection of the spatial story of movement (getting around to it) onto
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the nonspatial story of mental action (deciding) and we have additionally a pro- jection of the nonspatial story of mental action (deciding) onto the spatial story of an event without actors (mining). Through concatenated projection, the sky becomes a thinking actor, and its thinking is understood as a spatial getting around to deciding to rain, even though it is possible that we have not seen a single thing move in the sky all day.
EVIDENCE AND LIMITS
It might seem plausible to abstract from these analyses a general claim: Nonspatial stories and their further projections are always grounded in spatial and bodily stories. The extreme form of this claim is that abstract thought and reasoning are always grounded, through a kind of archeology of the mind, in spatial and bodily stories. Although not clearly false, this claim is too extreme for the avail- able evidence.
We may say comfortably that our understanding of spatial and bodily sto- ries is so rich, and our powers of parable so developed, that imagination can project spatial and bodily stories at will to any point of the conceptual compass. We may also say comfortably that for many abstract concepts, the spatial and bodily instances are the archetypes. Everyday thought contains conventional projections of spatial and bodily stories onto stories of society and mind and onto abstract reasoning. Their traces are routinely carried in language. Preliminary models are beginning to take shape of how the brain might develop both perceptual and conceptual categories of spatial and bodily stories. No equally specific prelimi- nary models are at hand of how the brain might develop categories of stories of society and mind that are independent of the categories of spatial and bodily stories. These facts make it plausible that our understanding of social, mental, and abstract domains is formed on our understanding of spatial and bodily sto- ries. But plausibility is the most we can assert on this evidence.
It is impressive and remarkable that we can always project from spatial and bodily stories onto social, mental, and abstract stories. It is equally impressive and remarkable that conversation about social, mental, and abstract stories will almost always elicit spatial and bodily projections (“He is cracking up,” “I letgo of that option a long time ago”). In contrast, conversation about spatial and bodily stories (“The house paint is flaking”) may extend indefinitely without ever elic- iting projections from social, mental, or abstract stories.
And yet no one ever has any difficulty projecting social, mental, or abstract stories onto spatial and bodily stories. We can say easily that the flaking paint is “losing its nerve” in the face of the storm; that our lunch is “disagreeing” with our stomach; that the floorboards are “conspiring” to break free of the under-
S2 .8 THE LITERARY MIND
flooring. Nonetheless, these expressions seem less idiomatic than those based in spatial and bodily stories.
Given our robust capacity to project from stories of society or the mind, how would we know whether spatial and bodily stories are always basic to understand- ing? This appears to be one of the profoundly tantalizing and difficult open questions in the study of the mind.
THE STORY OF BIRTH
The story of birth is complex, universal, and familiar. It is found at the core of both secular and holy literature. It is a spatial story in which one physical body comes out of another. It is equally a spatial story of action in which the mother is an intentional actor. It is also a biological if not spatial story in which mother and father are biological causes. Birth, or more accurately, progeneration, is a story with several acts, from conception through gestation to birth. Extra acts are often added: courtship, nurturing, bonding, early development.
Various parts of the story of birth are structured by spatial image schemas. The first image schema in the story of birth is one thing coming out of another. The mother is conceived of as a container that has a body inside it. The interior body exits, creating two distinct bodies where only one existed before. The sec- ond image schema is an object emerging from its source material. The mother’s body is conceived of as a biological source material; the child emerges from it. A third image schema is motion along a pat}; from a source to a goal. The child, at birth, departs its point of origin along a bodily way to a point outside the mother’s body. A fourth is link: The spatial path from mother to child is statically realized in the form of an umbilical cord, which is understood as an asymmetric spatial link between mother and child. A fifth is spatialgrowtlx The body that is interior to the mother-container begins from next to nothing, and grows, forcing its mother- container to become convex.
The extraordinary richness of the story of birth has made it perhaps the premier example of a familiar and powerful story that is projected onto other stories. Stories of progeneration are often projected onto causal stories, in accord with the invariance principle. We may speak of a “brainchild” or say, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” We may say, with Wallace Stevens, “The moon is the mother of pathos and pity,” or simply, “Ignorance is the mother of suspi- cion.” We may say, “Italian is the eldest daughter of Latin.” This range of causal projections is to be expected: the story of birth happens to include a set of image schemas that are, quite independently of the story of birth itself, routinely pro- jected to causation. It is easy to think of nonbirth sources for “The tax cut came out of desperation,” “His ambitions emerge directly from his greed,” “One thing
FIGURED TALES Q. 53
lea’ to another,” “Health is linked to diet,” and “The problem is growing.” These image schemas associated with causation are all contained in the story of birth and combined there in a coherent manner. This convenient combination makes the story of birth highly useful in thinking about causation. The story of birth moreover has an additional feature useful in thinking about causation—inherit- ante. We say that a figurine “inherits” its shape from the mold or that a com- puter program “inherits” its slowness from the language in which it is written.
In Death Is the Mother of Beaug, I listed the ways in which we routinely project stories of birth onto other stories, in everyday language and elite literary texts. Milton presents the story of the origin of Satan, Sin, and Death as a pri- mordial history in which Sin—Satan’s daughter—springs from his brow. Satan later fathers a son, Death, incestuously upon his daughter Sin. Gower adds to this odd family extra offspring——the vices. The Bible and therefore Gower and Milton all present the curse on humanity as a story of progeneration and inher- itance: We all inherit the curse from Adam and Eve. Blake explains human psy- chology and emotions through an elaborate and exquisite story of a family tree. Spenser explains human psychological dispositions through stories of births. Hesiod’s history of the cosmos, like nearly all early cosmogonies, is a story of progenerations. The list of such texts is long.
In Death Is the Mother of Beauty, I discussed constraints—later generalized into the invariance principle—on the projection of progeneration. A parent and a child have a spatial distinction and an aspectual duration over time, and this structure can be projected onto only those stories that can have compatible image- schematic structure. For example, given default conceptions of basketball or baseball, it would be infelicitous to say that a woman basketball player was the
mother of the basket she just sank or that a baseball player was the father of the home run he just hit. These events are not thought of as having a suitable aspectual duration. Betsy Ross, however, could be called the mother of the American flag.
A mother and a child are also thought of as acquiring high spatial distinc- tion at birth. If we watch a cloud as it shifts nearly imperceptibly into a slightly different shape and are asked to project the story of birth onto the story of the cloud, it would take considerable invention to do so in a way that projected this distinction between parent and child.
The spatial distinction between mother and child is also thought of as aris- ing in a manner that is relatively singular and punctual. The moment of birth is distinguished from what comes before and what comes after. If the shifting of the cloud appears continuous, with no points of singularity, it would be even more difficult to project the story of birth onto it.
In these and a variety of related ways, parable is constrained: Not just any- thing can be projected in just any way. We have choice in our conception of the
S4 .8 THE LITERARY MIND
source, in our conception of the target, and in what is to be projected from one to the other. We are constrained to line these choices up so as to avoid an image- schematic clash in the target.
We are free to project image-schematic structure onto the target where the target is indeterminate. If we wish to convey a causal link between A and B where the relation between A and B is indeterminate, we may say, “B is the child of A.” We may say, “Violence is the child of fear,” or we may claim with Blake that ignorance is the child of sloth. In these cases, we do not violate image-schematic structure in the target, but we do create new image-schematic structure there.
An expression like “Italian is the daughter of Latin” raises no objection because projecting onto Latin and Italian the causal progenerative link between mother and daughter is compatible with our conception of the historical rela- tionship of these languages. But if someone says, “Italian is the mother of Latin,” and we project causal link from the source story of birth, it will take extraordi- nary invention to find a way in which something we can refer to as “Italian” can be viewed as causally prior to something we can refer to as “Latin.” Stretching our imaginations, we might come to consider that the study of Italian can lead to the study of Latin, so that [earn ingflalian can be the mother of learn in gliatin. Had we failed to locate this causal connection from “Italian” to “Latin,” we would have been obliged to backtrack to reconsider how some other, noncausal struc- ture could be projected from the story of birth onto the story of Latin and Italian so as to arrive at a meaning that could plausibly have been suggested by “Italian is the mother of Latin.” The boundaries of our invention in conceiving the source, conceiving the target, and projecting from one to the other are governed by the invariance principle: we are constrained to avoid creating an image-schematic clash in the target.
The story of birth involves inheritance of physical attributes and character traits. We project these stories of inheritance parabolically onto stories of how features came to exist. We say, “Italian inherits many things from Latin, includ- ing vocabulary and gender.”
We can conceive of members of a family as sharing attributes and traits: not every member of a family shares a given attribute or trait, but attributes and traits run through families according to the intricate logic of inheritance. We com- monly project this logic onto other stories. We call someone a “child of the Age of Reason” to imply that he shares features with his personified parent. When we describe someone as “a child of Nature,” “a child of the modern age,” or “a daughter of the hills,” we are projecting in/Jeritance from the story of progeneration onto stories having nothing to do with progeneration.
These projections take literary form only because the everyday mind is fun- damentally literary. We can see the continuity between everyday thought and
FIGURED TALES Q. 55
literary thought by looking at expressions of popular culture, like the following. lnjanuary 1993, a major computer corporation launched an intensive advertise- ment campaign for a new laptop computer. Ads for the laptop appeared in many markets and in many media. An airline passenger might have opened Delta’s glossy in-flight magazine to a slick two-page ad for the machine. In-flight maga- zines are designed, of course, to appeal to thousands of potential customers from all social stations, many of whom have never read a poem except at the point of a pedagogical gun, and even then hated it. In-flight magazines hawk cologne, cruises, air cleaners, anti-wrinkle suitbags, nightlife in Vegas, medicines to restore hair or prevent it from falling out, gift notions, personalized mailing labels, lin- gerie, ingenious labor-saving devices for every imaginable pointless activity in the home or the office, alcohol, retirement communities, and an eerie assort- ment of richly vulgar and sometimes hysterically colored consumer items. The advertisement in this in-flight magazine carries a picture of the laptop in the center, and underneath, in large type,
Its mother was a mainframe. Its father was a Maserati.
Everyone, of course, understands immediately that the laptop is being de- scribed as having the power and range we associate with a mainframe computer, and the sleek design, speed, and excitement we associate with a Maserati racing car. The laptop in/Jerits these attributes. The logic of inheritance as part of the story of birth is so routinely projected onto other stories that it has its own con- ventional joke construction: “VVhat do you get when you cross a such-and-such with a so-and-so?” In most instances of this construction, such-and-such and so-and-so are not reproductive organisms, and when they are, they usually do not mate naturally. Milton uses the projection of inheritance onto theology when he conceives of Sin as inheriting what he imagines to be the “feminine” aspects of Satan (beauty, seduction, persuasion, blandishment) and of Death as inherit- ing what he imagines to be the “masculine” aspects of Satan (direct power, abso- lute courage, arrogance, violence, strength). Later, when Satan intends to exit the gates of Hell, which are guarded by Sin and Death, Sin with honeyed speech endeavors to dissuade him, while Death laconically threatens to destroy him.
The ad copy for the laptop widens the story of progeneration to include genetics and evolution. Its opening sentence reads, “As they say, it’s all in the genes.” The laptop’s button for moving a pointer on the screen is described as doing “what a mouse would do with a few million more years of evolution.” We are asked to project a detailed story of progeneration onto an extraordinarily complex story of technological development.
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The ad for the laptop evokes inherited attributes quite unlike those Milton found useful. The slick, sleek Maserati, powerful and mobile, unbelievably quick, welcome everywhere but never tied down, driven by its driver and responsive to its driver’s every wish, is, in this parable, a father who passes these attributes by inheritance to the laptop. The ad wants you to understand that the laptop gets around and takes you with it: it “begs you to take it anywhere. And once you own one, that’s exactly what you’ll do.” It “blows the doors off its competition.” It “sports a screaming 486 processor,” but “it’s built for comfort too.” Its button for moving the pointer is described as the “world’s smallest stick shift.”
The awesome mainframe, conceived of as a machine of great potential and scope, can be understood as a mother who passes these attributes on to her laptop- offspring. These may be more common associations of mother than one might think. They help to explain the aptness of expressions such as “mother lode” and “motherboard." Saddam Hussein of Iraq made a statement before the Gulf War that was translated as a threat to the allied forces: if they attacked Iraq, theywould suffer “the mother of all battles.” Although there was considerable confusion over how to interpret this threat, many Americans understood mother in this phrase as connoting tremendous power and potential, something not to be trifled with. That a mainframe might be tho
ught of as a mother seems appropriate for any number of reasons. This particular electronic mother passes her power and potential to her offspring, the laptop, by inheritance.
The corporation that made the new laptop risked its image, the success of its new product, and an immense amount of money on the expectation that everyday readers of this ad would understand a detailed and complicated projec- tion, carrying a robust story of birth parabolically onto a sophisticated story of computer research and development. For the ad to be effective, its readers would have to understand this projection instantly and recognize it as singularly apt. The corporation gambled that parable is a fundamental human cognitive capac- ity, universal, powerful, and familiar. Of course, as we have seen by now, this is no gamble at all.
.59 5 Ca. CREATIVE BLENDS
. . . nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!" (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural).
Lewis Carroll, Aliee’5Aa'ruentures in Wonderland
WT]-3 TYP I CALLY c ON C E 1 VE of concepts as packets of meaning. We give them labels: marriage, birth, a'eat}J,force, electricity, time, tomorrow. Meanings seem localized and stable.
But parable gives us a different view of meaning as arising from connec- tions across more than one mental space. Meaning is not a deposit in a concept- container. It is alive and active, dynamic and distributed, constructed for local purposes of knowing and acting. Meanings are not mental objects bounded in conceptual places but rather complex operations of proj ection, binding, linking, blending, and integration over multiple spaces. Meaning is parabolic and literary.