by Mark Turner
For example, personif1cation—or even the minimal projection of intention- ality according to EVENTS ARE Ac'r1oNs—resu1ts in a blended space whose “truth” we hold quite distinct from the “truth” of the target space, yet inferences are clearly projected from the blended space to the all-important target space. In Heming- way’ s The Ola’ Man and the Sea, the f1sherman’s hand cramps. He speaks to his hand as if it is his enemy in the struggle to bring in the fish. He taunts it. The fisherman is not demented. He does not for a moment actually believe that his hand is an intentional adversarial agent. Relative to the blended space, it is true that his hand is an intentional adversarial agent. Relative to the target space of his fishing and the work of his body in that scenario, it is not true that his hand is an intentional adversarial agent, and he has not the slightest confusion regarding the difference. He keeps the two spaces quite distinct. Nonetheless, there are certain inferences from the blended space that he does project to the target space and believe of that target space, most salient among them that he will do best to adopt the emotions and strategy of the blended space. This is an inference that bears on the target space: He, the undemented fisherman, should in the target space of what he actually believes apply himself to dealing with his hand as if it were his intentional opponent while understanding fully the weight of as He should work to an extent in the blended space, without believing it. Useful con- struction of meaning is not the same as adoption of belief.
This is the stance we all take when we are dealing with a recalcitrant prob- lem or task and construct the extraordinarily useful blended space in which this problem or task is our opponent--a tax fiddle to be worked, a tire to be changed,
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a tent to be staked down. If in analyzing the construction of inference we restrict our focus to what we really believe to be true, we will be blind to the indispens- able blended spaces in these cases. If we ask someone cursing at a tire she is try- ing to change whether the tire really has an intention to frustrate her, she will think we are making ajoke. In the all-important target space, she understands the tire as not intentional. But her useful attitude depends upon a blended space she does not believe.
On the other hand, a blend need not be considered false or fantastic. It can come to be regarded as compatible with the source. “Working mother,” “provi- sional government,” “independent scholar,” and so on might be explainable as cases where one general narrative (mothering, government, scholarship) is com- bined with another (working, provisional activity, independent activity) into a blended space. The hypothesis that the linguistic construction represents con- ceptual blending is radical. It is traditional to assume that the modifier-noun construction represents propositional expression (“red shoe”) but can be adapted or stretched for exotic purposes like blending (“Irish tvvins”—said of two sib- lings born less than twelve months apart). The radical view reverses the tradi- tional direction: The modifier-noun construction represents blending, but in special minimal circumstances, the blending can become invisible, misleading us into thinking we are dealing only with propositional structure. Consider “fire station.” This is a very common noun phrase that evokes no surprise. But if we think about it, a fire station does not have fire, provide fire, or receive fire‘, fire is not part of it or the category that includes it. In fact, fire is in no way a feature of a fire station. But we have one general story of fire and another general story of people and equipment being stationed at astation for a purpose, and we can blend them into a story in which fire is not a feature of the station or a counterpart of the station. “Fire station” asks us to do just this.
Charts, diagrams, coins, and maps frequently provide visual representations of blended conceptual spaces. Consider the projection from magnitude of size to magnitude of importance, as in “Let’s attend to the larger issues.” A blended space is available in which the more important things appear spatially larger. A tourist map of a city may include perspectival drawings of major attractions that are inset here and there in the map—the more important the real attraction, the larger its inset picture, regardless of the relative physical size of the actual attrac- tion. A map to literary sites of Paris might feature a drawing of Hemingway’ s tiny apartment that dwarfs the drawing of the huge Arc de Triomphe.
Maps are visual representations that bring together information from many different mental spaces associated with what the map represents. These spaces include street topography, names of places, latitude and longitude, appearance, water versus land, distances, directions, number of hours it takes to travel from
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city to city, quality of food, availability of services, hours during which events take place or buildings are open, dates of construction, weather, temperature variation, altitude, and so on. The fact that the map gives simultaneous access to these very different spaces does not automatically indicate that there is mental blending at work. An outline of the landmass of the United States filled in with colored bands to indicate temperature ranges combines spatial position and color so as to give us access simultaneously to the mental space of geographical loca- tion and the mental space of weather, and it gives us a mental space tomzettor from the mental space of geographical location to the mental space of weather; but it does not signify a mental blend in which geographical locations are simul- taneously colored. The combination in the map signifies mental space connec- tion, not mental space blending. However, such representations of mental space connections will recruit conventional blends whenever possible. For example, there is a conventional mental blend of temperature and color (hotter is redder), and it would be infelicitous to contravene that blend in the visual representa- tion, using for example red to indicate cold and blue to indicate hot. Maps are an interesting case: They are representations that give us access to many mental spaces. Combinations of symbols on the map indicate mental space connections and correspondences. But these maps also slide, where possible, into visual rep- resentations of mental blends.
Visual representations of mental blends are often immediately intelligible. We seem to recognize their meaning passively, as if they pose no puzzle and require no work. However, once analysis detects the inferential role of the blend, it can be surprising to see how much work we actually did to interpret the draw- ing. The New York Times Magazine ofAug11st 22, 1993, carries an illustration by Brian Cronin of an article by Thomas L. Friedman, “Cold War without End.” In this illustration, a bicyclist is riding a bicycle; the front half of the bicycle frame is blue with a small American flag attached; the front wheel is the globe of the world, with lines of latitude and longitude; the back half of the bicycle frame is a red hammer and sickle—the sign of Soviet political control. The back fender is the sickle blade, and the pedal is the sickle handle; the strut to the center of the rear wheel is the hammer. But there is no rear wheel! The rider is looking at the place where it should be. He is understandably dismayed.
The illustration accompanies an article that suggests that the makers of American foreign and domestic policy are troubled over how to proceed now that Soviet control has disappeared. The foundation of American policy had been conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. That foundation is gone, and nobody seems to know what to do. The article depends on the metaphor that the making of policy is bodily movement; that the cold war was an instru- ment for bodily movement. This metaphor is an instance of the universal pro-
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jection of stories of body movement onto stories that are not bodily or even spatial. It is clear to anyone looking at the bicycle illustration that the vehicle is flawed and that normal progress cannot be made. This inference can arise in the source space of bicycling—a bicycle without a wheel won’t go. It is also clear that some- thing that previously existed has disappeared in a dismaying fashion. This infer- ence can arise in the target space—Soviet control over republics and satellites has simply vanished. But these two
conceptual structures from the source and the target are blended into a fantastic and impossible space.
The central inference of the illustration is that Soviet control has disappeared in a way that automatically and inevitably brings a grave and manifest crisis to America, and that something must be done immediately, before the whole show comes crashing down. This inference is impossible for the source space of bicy- cling. Magic aside, a bicycle wheel cannot simply disappear, leaving the rider suspended in midair for a vertiginous moment that lasts long enough for him to notice the missing wheel and feel dismay. The inference is not necessary in the target—indeed, it is so counterintuitive to imagine that the disappearance of Soviet political control should be bad for American policy making that the writer must spend the entire article trotting out evidence. Yet in the blended space, the wheel that is Soviet dominion can disappear, and the disappearance of the wheel that is Soviet dominion must have inevitable, unmistakable, and incontrovert- ibly bad effects upon the bicycle that is the vehicle of American foreign policy. The central inference is constructed in the blended space and projected from there to the target.
Every newspaper and news magazine carries editorial columns. A cursory survey of them will reveal that a favorite routine for writing a column is to churn out a blended space, often labored. Once we see how this works, it is very easy to do, as we can show by fabricating an example. At the end of President Bill Clinton’s first one hundred days in office, The New York Timesreported that Clinton seemed unable to accomplish anything in Washington, D.C., despite his promise to hit the ground running. Not a single undersecretary had been appointed. Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, the ranking Republican on the hill, had just handed President Clinton a major defeat on ajobs bill. Clinton had lacked four votes in the Senate and had seemed ignorant of how to get them. New York Times columnist Russell Baker, not a fan of the often abrasive Dole, compared Clinton to Presidentjimmy Carter, saying essentially that a president who doesn’t know how to use the pow- ers of his office to buy four lousy votes in the Senate is simply incompetent—this would never have happened to President Lyndon Johnson.
Russell Baker frames Clinton and Dole as opponents, and that is allwe need, since it gives us a generic space for opposition and a target space of Clinton and Dole’s political opposition. Avivid source space might be a gunfight. In the blended
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space, Bob Dole becomes the Kansas gunslinger with the big iron on his hip, who, like his counterpart in the movie S/Jane, is cool, confident, utterly profes- sional, wastes no energy, picks his fights, and knows his ground. Something like this: “Dole is the ranking gunslinger in Dodge-City-on-the- Potomac, rough at the edges but smooth on the legislative draw. When the sun of deficit negotia- tions got in C1inton’s eyes, Dole made his move and Clinton never cleared leather. Hillary Clinton is sure to come running out with her health-care initiative to try to plug the wound, but Sheriff Clinton is bleeding his heart out on Main Street U.S.A., and Doc Greenspan at the Fed, with a barely recovering economy to protect from inflation infection, isn’t about to remove the bullet so Clinton can pull himself up and go spend another ton of money. . . . ”
It is not only on the editorial page that such blends are allowed. A lead sentence on page 1 of The New York Times for May 13, 1993, reads, “An unex- pected surge in wholesale prices last month, the latest of a string of higher price reports, left many economists and investors wondering whether the inflation genie was starting to slip out of the bottle.” Immediately after reading this news- paper, I called United Airlines and received the recorded while-you-wait--for- an-agent message, “Now you can tango on down to Rio, with less fancy foot- work"—presumably an ad for a new nonstop flight. “Tango” and “fancy footwork" come from the source space but “on down to Rio” comes from the target space, since intercontinental travel is not possible by means of tango. I am told that the phrase also blends in elements of a Fred Astaire movie about flying on down
to Rio.
THE NATHAN BOOMERANG
In 2 Samuel 12, the prophet Nathan comes to King David. David is ajudge, and Nathan approaches David in that role. Nathan presents David with the case of a certain rich man and a certain poor man.
The rich man had very many flocks and herds; but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought. And he brought‘ it up, and it grew up with him and with his children; it used to eat of his morsel, and drink from his cup, and lie in his bosom, and it was like a daughter to him. Now there came a traveler to the rich man, and he was unwilling to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the wayfarer who had come to him, but he took the poor man’s lamb, and prepared it for the man who had come to him.
Then David’s anger was greatly kindled against the man; and he said to Nathan, “As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to
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die; and he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.” Nathan said to David, “You are the man.”
The projection must be immediately obvious to David. David had been anointed king over Israel and enjoyed many wives. Had this been too little, the Lord would have added to him as much again. But Uriah the Hittite, one of David’s subjects, had only his one wife, Bathsheba. David took Bathsheba for his temporary pleasure, and she conceived a son by David, and David arranged for Uriah to be placed in the front ranks of the battle and abandoned, so as to be killed. Thejudgment proclaimed by David upon the rich man comes down upon his own head.
In telling his story, Nathan has pretended that it is the space of the rich man and poor man that is the target, and the space of family domesticity and affec- tion that is the source (the ewe lamb “was like a daughter to him”). In doing so, Nathan has led David to construct a strong blended space that contains specifics of both the story of the rich man and the poor man and the story of relations between members of a family (especially “eat of his morsel, and drink of his cup, and lie in his bosom”). David thinks he knows where all this information is directed, and why: It is to clarify the iniquity of the rich man and ensure his con- demnation. But then Nathan announces that the target of the projection of this blended space is not the story of the poor man and the rich man, but the story of David, Uriah, and Bathsheba.
This is veiled parable: In order to prevent the listener from resisting the projection, the storyteller veils the intended target while building up a blend with the right structure for his real purposes. In the case described by Nathan, that blend includes family affection, relations of power and its abuse, and categories of just and unjust behavior. Once this slightly blended space is fully constructed, Nathan lifts the veil from the real target and conjures David to project infer- ences from this blended space to it. The fit is extraordinarily compelling: The final target strongly resembles the source—bo1h source (“it was like a daughter to him”) and final target (Uriah, Bathsheba, and David) concern the destruction of a family. The establishment of counterparts has been so carefully developed by Nathan that David has no escape.
EMBLEM
An emblem is a parable that starts from one story and projects from it a generic story that covers other stories belonging to the same conceptual domain. A story about a boy’ s adventures at summer camp can be interpreted as an emblem of
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childhood adventure. I have interpreted the story of Shahrazad and her father the vizier as an emblem: we project from it a common and abstract story of con- frontation between child and parent. That generic story applies to many other stories belonging to the same domain as the original story.
When the generic space applies to a story in a different conceptual domain, we have metaphor or analogy instead of emblem. This reveals something interest- ing: Whether a given parable is emblematic or metaphoric depends upon what constitutes a division between conceptual domains, which is to say, upon what conceptual connections are already in place when
the parable becomes active.
For example, The Thousand and One Night: begins with a story that can be read as either emblem or metaphor. King Shahzaman is called from his kingdom by his elder brother King Shahriyar to pay a visit. Shahzaman departs, leaving his kingdom in the hands of his vizier. But out of deep love for his wife, he finds a pretext for returning, so he may see her once more. He discovers her making love to a slave and kills them both instantly before departing on his journey. He is desolate when he arrives, declines to reveal the cause to his brother Shahriyar, and remains behind in the palace when King Shahriyar goes out to hunt. Acci- dentally, Shahzaman witnesses a marvelous sight: His brother Shahriyar’s queen enters the courtyard with twenty slave-girls, ten of whom turn out to be slave boys who make love to the other ten slave girls, while the queen calls to herself a spe- cial slave to do the act. Shahzaman realizes he is not the only one to suffer. His mood improves. That night, Shahriyar, recognizing the change in his brother, manages to extract from him the reason for his initial despondency but not for his recovery. But at last, Shahzaman tells his brother everything. Alarrned, filled with doubt, Shahriyar spies on his wife, discovers the truth, and “half demented at the sight,” says to his brother, “Let us renounce our royal state and roam the world until we find out if any other king has ever metwith such disgrace.”