by Mark Turner
In yet another reading, experts predict that Greatflmeriea II, given its per- formance so far, should complete its voyage to Boston in a time that is 4.5 days less than the time of the voyage for Northern Light. In yet another reading, the distance between the positions of GreatAmeriea II and Northern Light after each has sailed a certain length of time is what would be covered in 4.5 days atNorth- ern Light’: average speed made good—its overall speed actually accomplished relative to the ground along the course line. In yet another, experts compute that Northern Light, under the weather and sea conditions in the relevant area faced by Greatflmerita II during the past several days, would have covered the relevant distance in 4.5 days. In another, experts compute thatNorthern Light, under the weather and sea conditions coming up for the next several days, would cover the relevant distance in 4.5 days. And so on. Any of these constructions can be estab- lished in the blended space, all of them leading to the inference, projectable to the space of 1993, that Greatflmerita II is succeeding in its ambition.
There are evident linguistic traces of this conceptual blending. In the blended space of the boat race, there are two boats simultaneously racing, and we can refer to them accordingly, but there are vestiges of Northern Li ght’s having come from a space that provides the landmark frame, so that in the blend, Northern Light provides the landmark and Greotflmerieo II is conceived as a trajector rela- tive to that landmark: We prefer to say, “Greatflmeriea II is ahead of Northern Light," rather than “Northern Light is behind Greatflmerita II.” For a real race, we might say either because in general either boat can be the landmark. The phrase
CREATIVE BLENDS Q. 71
“barely maintaining” also shows a trace of blending, since it presupposes inten- tionality: The crew of GreatAmerica II is trying to maintain a lead. By contrast, if Northern Light were ahead by a day in the blend, it would be strange to say, “The captain ofNorthem Li ghtis barely maintaining his one-day lead,” since the presupposed intentionality could not be projected back to the space of 1853 without some work to make it possible there, like the following: “Historically, the captain of Northern Light took the view that he had the fastest ship imagin- able and that his record would stand forever. But now, he is barely maintaining a tiny lead over Greatflmerita II and may be proved wrong.” It is important to see that the construction of the blend is not meant to erase or dispense with the input spaces. Blending provides a way to integrate efficiently and effectively over many spaces while maintaining the network of connections across all those spaces.
The same constraints of landmark and intentionality can be shown to oper- ate in a case that involves metaphor. To understand, “President Franklin Delano Roosevelt accomplished a great deal in his first one hundred days, but President Clinton has accomplished by comparison little,” we must build two mental spaces and an intricate comparison between them. Both of these mental spaces can themselves be understood through a conceptual metaphor according to which accomplishment is travel along a path. We might then say, “FDR covered a lot of ground during his first one hundred days. President Clinton by comparison has only just started to move.” In one blended space, FDR is moving along a path whose locations are goals; reaching the location is accomplishing the goal. In the other blended space, President Clinton is beginning to move along a similar path. These two blends are conventional and share the identical generic space. These two blends can themselves be the input spaces to a new blended space, as when we say, two months after President Clinton has taken office, “Clinton was supposed to hit the ground running. He implied that he was going to accom- plish as much in his first one hundred days as FDR accomplished in his. So far, Clinton has failed completely to keeppace with FDR.”
“To keep pace with” requires the construction of a conventional blend that has both agents competing simultaneously along the same track. For most read- ers, this conventional blend will have been constructed and used entirely uncon- sciously. The construction of that conventional blend includes the connection of structures in the blend to corresponding structures in all of the spaces that led to it, so that we know the implications for Clinton in the space of 1992 of the fact that Clinton in the FDR-versus-Clinton blend does not “keep pace with” FDR in that blend.
We can force the blend into consciousness by drawing attention to it: “Clin- ton is in a race with the ghost of FDR”; alternatively, “At this rate, Clinton's term will be over before he gets anywhere near the finish line.” We know implicitly
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that “the finish line” in the blend corresponds to I-‘DR’s degree of accomplish- ment on his hundredth day in office in the relevant input space of “FDR’s first year in office” (beginning March 4, 1993). But protest will arise ifwe say, “So far, FDR has succeeded completely at keeping well ahead of Clinton.” We could say this of a real race, but not of this blended race, because in the blend, some aspects of intentionality from the input spaces are indispensable for the reason- ing in the blend, but only certain aspects of that intentionality are allowed to enter the blend. Yet this restriction is not simple. If we knew of a passage in President Roosevelt’s diary in which he represents himself as competing with all presidents, past and future, and then claims that he has set a record for accom- plishment in his first one hundred days that no other president will ever be able to equal, then we might be able to say without provoking protest, “So far, FDR has succeeded in staying well ahead of Clinton.”
Structure that is developed in a blended space can change our view of the input spaces, as in the following riddle, which Arthur Koestler attributed to psy- chologist Carl Dunker:
A Buddhist monk begins at dawn to walk up a mountain. He stops and starts ar1d varies his pace as he pleases, and reaches the mountaintop at sunset. There he meditates overnight. At dawn, he begins to walk back down, again moving as he pleases. He reaches the foot of the mountain at sunset. Prove that there is a place on the path that he occupies at the same hour of the day on the two separatejourneys.
The reader might pause here to try to solve the riddle before reading fur- ther. It can be solved ingeniously by imagining the Buddhist monk walking up as his double walks down on the same day. In that blended space, it is clear that there is a place on the path that the two Buddhist monks occupy at the same hour of the day: The place is where he meets himself. He must of course meet himself, since someone who traverses a path in the space of a day must meet someone who traverses the path in the opposite direction in the space of the same day, however much they both walk as they please. This inference, that there must be a place that the two travelers inhabit at the same time of day, is proj ected from the blend back to the input space: to create a point of connection between the input spaces of the two journeys, although no encounter occurs in either of them. Interestingly, people who count this blend as supplying a proof often cannot sup- ply an alternative proof that does not make use of the blend.
It is worth pausing to observe that this is another case in which the input stories to the blend are not related as source and target. Indeed, this is a projec- tion over stories that does not seem to involve metaphor or analogy in any cen-
CREATIVE BLENDS Q. 73
tral respect. There is conceptual projection from the input stories to help us cre- ate quite a different blended story—one involving two monks and an encounter. This blended space helps us to integrate the entire situation without erasing the independent input stories. It helps us organize the input stories and see relation- ships between them. It is also worth observing that both of the input stories count equally as topic spaces of the parable: we are interested in establishing for both of them that there is a place on the path that satisfies the requirement of the riddle. Notice also that this blend does not always fuse counterparts—the two monks in the two inputs stay distinct in the blend, although the two days are fused into one.
The blends in the boat race and the riddle of the Buddhist monk do not come from literar
y works, and neither can be mistaken as merely spectacular, since their purpose is to perform inferential work. They both allow the reader to reason successfully to a goal. Consider a similar case of everyday problem-solving: Sup- pose we hand a volleyball to someone who has played tennis but not volleyball and we say, “Serve it overhand the way you would a tennis ball.” The volleyball becomes, for the moment, a tennis ball in part, but only in part. Partial blending of the volleyball space with the tennis ball space produces a suitable action.
Blending, used to reason about everyday problems, often succeeds but also often fails. If we sit down late at night to a dimmed computer screen at a desk illuminated by an architect’ s lamp and attempt to brighten the screen by turning the knob on the lamp instead of on the computer, we say it is a “mistake,” but it is not an arbitrary or unmotivated mistake. We are very familiar with “absent- minded” mistakes like putting on our eyeglasses to hear better or punching a button on the television remote control device to turn the air conditioning off. Strange slips of action like these reveal the covert existence of momentary cog- nitive blends. The connections they manifest do not come from abstract analo- gies—they are not the transfer of an elaborate schema from one domain to another. Seeing and hearing are not “like” each other when we put on our eye- glasses to hear better; in the unsuccessful blend, seeing and hearing are fused, and they respond to the same corrective lenses. In the same way, the volleyball and the tennis ball are not merely similar to one another; in the blend, they are fused and respond to the same manipulation. Of course, it goes without saying that we know the difference: Seeing and hearing are different in the two input spaces; the volleyball served with the hand and the tennis ball served with a racket are different in the two input spaces. We know what is appropriate to each of these spaces. We often try to solve a problem by dealing with it as if it resides in the blend, but we know where it actually resides and we know how to move between the useful blend and the real problem.
These blends are not cases of misframing or reframing. If the actor is asked
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immediately before performing the action whether his hand and a racket are identical, or seeing and hearing are identical, or a television and an air condi- tioner are identical, he would of course say that they are not. He would give the same response after performing the action. The two spaces and their frames are kept quite distinct, but a blended space has momentarily been put together for the purpose of local problem-solving. When the blend produces a successful action, as in the case of the volleyball serve, the action may be permanently pro- jected to the target, to be developed further there.
These connections are not metaphoric, either. In the metaphoric projection of seeing onto hearing, eyeglasses would correspond to hearing aid, not identi- cally to eyeglasses. In the blend, however, eyeglasses come from one space but apply identically to the entity in the blended space that results from the fusing of seeing and hearing. These actions are essentially nonverbal and so clearly are independent of literary “deviation,” metaphoric language, or strange idioms.
Blended spaces do cognitive work in the strongest sense. They provide inferences, emotions, and novel actions, and consequently leave their mark upon the real world. In the example of the boat race, the sailors of the catamaran were able, through the blend, to live their action as a race, andLatitua'e 38 was able to cover the adventure as a race. In a series of articles in successive issues, Latitude 38reported on the preparation, the initial race, the initial failure, the rescue and salvage attempts, the second preparation, the second race, the details of the race and the victory, and, finally, the victory celebration. Readers of Latitude 38 were able to follow the “race” and to “assist,” in the French sense. Everyone involved was able to plot and compare strategies that arose from considerations of the
relative positions of the two ships. They could wonder whether Greatflmerita II '
was winning or losing, and they could, through projection from other spaces, actually find out: the blended space of the race comes with very precise, quanti- fiable truth conditions. By living as a race what is not a race, everyone involved —from the designer of the boat to the photojournalists—could feel, react, and reason differently, and perhaps more efficiently, and with more pleasure.
Wayne Booth, in The Rhetoric of Fiction, gives evidence of blends that lie between two specific kinds of spaces—the space of a story narrated and the space of narration. Booth does not recognize these blends as blends because his instru- ments of analysis include only two spaces, not a third blended space between them. Consequently, he describes the blends as “intrusions” by the space of nar- ration into the space of what is narrated. But it is important to recognize that in general we keep the space of what is narrated and the space of narration sepa- rate, while blending them in a distinct blended space.
In the anonymous novel Charlotte Summers, for example, the narrator and readers are not part of the space of the story narrated; the characters of the story,
CREATIVE BLENDS Q. 75
their towns, and their residences are not part of the space of narration. But in the blended space, the narrator and readers can journey to the locales of the char- acters, to have a look at them.
Before I introduce my Readers into the Company of Miss C/Jarlotte Summers, I must make them acquainted with some of her Friends . . . for which Purpose, I must beg their Company as far as Carmart/Jens/Jire, in Wales. Tho’ the Journey is pretty long, and, in the ordinary Way of travelling, may take up some Days, yet we Authors are always provided with an easy flying Carriage, which can waft our Readers in an Instant, much longer Journeys than this we are now setting out on.
In the space of the story narrated, the narrator does not exist and necessarily has no special powers there. In the space of narration, the narrator does exist. He has no special powers with respect to most of that space, but he does have special powers with respect to the story he is telling: He can shift the focus of time and place in the narration. In the blend, the narrator, the readers, and the characters can inhabit one world. In the blend, shifting spatial focus is identical to actually moving bodily from one place to another; shifting temporal focus is identical to moving bodily from one time to another. The power to shift spatial and temporal focus is identical to the power to move in superhuman ways from one place to another, or one time to another, and to move readers as well. We keep distinct the space of the story narrated, the space of narration, and their blend.
This flying “Carriage” is a specific blend derived from the general blend. Some of the features of the carriage come from the story narrated: It is a carriage like the carriages in the story narrated—it is a container, makes spatial journeys, and so on. But some of its features come from the space of narration, specifi- cally, from the way the author’s mind operates in that space—the “event shape” of the event performed by this blended carriage and the various “modal” rela- tionships of what it can do and how it can do it are taken from the way the author’s mind moves in the space of narration. In the blend, this carriage has features from both spaces.
Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction can be read (between the lines) as a taxonomy of such blends. Often these blends are easily noticed. The more interesting blends, however, are covert, and they are nearly ubiquitous in literature: Whenever a narrator moves in and out of a character’s mind, shifts point of view from char- acter to character, or provides an inside view of any sort, she is doing something impossible for the space of the story narrated, and she is doing it to a world that is not real inside the space of narration. Similarly, whenever anyone in the story,
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including the author, makes a statement that, given the logic of the narration, we must take to be absolutely reliable, or whenever the author confers a badge of reliability on a character, or alters “durational realism” or sequence, or tells us exactly how intensely a character experienced certain emotions, the
author is thereby doing something impossible in the space of the story narrated and doing it to a world that is not real in the space of narration. The space with respect to which these ‘actions are both possible and real is the blend.
Mental images to accompany blended spaces are easy to imagine. An adver- tisement for a tax consultant might talk about “tax bite” in voice-over while a visual image of an anthropomorphized Internal Revenue Service Form 1040 sinks its teeth into a terrified paycheck. Allegories and political cartoons make routine use of these impossible blendings. Gluttony is an anthropomorphized banana cream pie, Study a walking and talking dictionary.
One of the most common uses of blending is in counterfactual expressions such as “If I were you, I would have done it,” said by a man to a woman who declined earlier to become pregnant: the woman did not do it, the man cannot do it, but the blend combines the man’s judgment with the woman’s conditions, enabling the man-woman to become pregnant in the counterfactual blend.
Personification is perhaps the most thoroughly analyzed consequence of blended spaces. If we revisit the various personifications we have considered— of the wind as a torturer, of Death as Thanatos, of the rain as a violent and spite- ful destroyer, of situations we are trying to master as intentional adversaries, and so on—we will detect instantly the impossible blendings of specific information from source and target.