by Mark Turner
Those were her precise words, so there can be no denying that it was she who first tempted him.
He came back, and there was a greedy look in his eyes now which ought to have alarmed her, but did not.
“Oh, the stories I could tell to the boys!” she cried, and then Peter gripped her and began to draw her toward the window.
Trying to make sense of a life as a pattern of character running across roles in stories leads to a clear problem: People often drop out of roles in stories and often decline to inhabit the roles we expect of them on the basis of what we thought we knew about their character. People appear to perform in different ways that do not seem to belong to the same character. One way to respond to this inconstancy is to work all the harder to rebuild constancy across these spaces, on the view that of course this kind of constancy must hold. This is a mainstay of psychology, psychiatry, biography, and detective novels. If an agent seems to have the character attribute of “giving” in the role of donor in one space but the opposed character attribute of “grasping” in the role of thief in another space, we might respond to the inconstancy by trying to reconstruct the roles and infer a stable character: Ah—ha! in the case of “apparent” giving, the agent really had his own interest at heart; or ah—ha! in the case of “apparent” grasping, the agent was really trying to save the owner from some danger.
Alternatively, inconstancy across spaces can be read as a sign of the real, on the view that in reality people are uncontrolled, unpredictable, singular, inscru- table. Novelists often use inconstancy to convey objectivity and realism: if con- stancy reveals the narrative imagination of the author at work, then, so the simple logic goes, inconstancy should demonstrate that the narrator has not “invented” this story. It never works that way. In The Rhetoric ofFz'rtion, Wayne Booth shows that novelists often try to meet various requirements like “Novels Should Be Realistic” and “Authors Should Be Objective” by tossing in variation and incon- stancy—random singularities that have no role in the structure of the general
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story, specific events unrelated to the causal structure of the story, conflicted action by a single agent to frustrate the reader’s attempt to infer underlying character, and so on. The underlying assumption is that such inconstancies can come only from the realities of individual life. Booth shows that all these techniques in fact reveal the heavy hand of the manipulative author.
Stories and the connections between them are the chief cognitive instru- ment for biography. A mental space that concerns a person’s life seems to us to be a slice of her biography. In the slice, she has a certain role and a certain char— acter. When we try to run connections across all these mental spaces—as when we try to predict what she will do in this case on the basis of what we already know of a previous space; or as when we try to imagine what she must have been like as a child on the basis of the stories she inhabits as an adult—we may encounter all sorts of incompatibilities, which therefore cannot reside in a generic space that would apply to all these mental spaces. As we run connections across all the story spaces--all these slices of biography, synchronic and diachronic—- the generic space may become ever more abstract, approaching the minimum information that this human being has the role animate agent.
But we can get much more help from blended spaces. Blended spaces can absorb incompatibilities from the spaces they blend. In a blended space, a human being can be both donor and thief, giving and grasping. As the connections build over narrative mental spaces, the generic space becomes thinner but the blended space becomes ever more robust, intricate, and conflicted.
We do not live in a single narrative mental space, but rather dynamically and variably distributed over Very many. If any one space must be selected as the place we reside, it is the blend of all these spaces. For biography, these impos— sible blended spaces are the most “realistic” because they come closest to signal— ing that life, like meaning, is not bounded in any one mental space, but involves the operations of proj ection, blending, and integration that run over indefinitely many activated mental spaces. “Realism” can never be the representation of uniqueness, for the simple reason that it is impossible for the everyday mind to think of the unique-—the everyday mind is always, unavoidably, and fundamen- tally geared to constructing constancy over variation. But realism can indicate that a specific life is never contained within a single story space or even a collec- tion of such spaces whose corresponding generic space tells us everything we want to know. The real is in the blend.
BLENDED CHARACTERS
We have seen that character can be conceived by backward inference from be- havior, on the logic that people do what they do because they are a particular kind of person. Once we have a notion of an actor’s character, we can try to use
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it to project that actor into roles in new stories. We can try to predict what she will do in this story. This is an identity projection: the actor is connected to her- self identically across all these stories.
But character can also be developed through metapboric projection: “Achil- les is a lion” projects the lion not to itself identically but rather, metaphorically, to something quite different—a human being. This projection is meant to im- bue Achilles with a character and consequent behavior.
There is an extremely productive conceptual template that serves this type of projection. It is the GREAT CHAIN METAPHOR, which depends upon the folk notion of the Great Chain. The Great Chain is a hierarchy of attributes by type. A being can have, in ascending order, attributes of mere physical existence, attributes of part—whole functional structure, attributes of simple biology, and attributes of mental capacity. This hierarchy induces a corresponding hierarchy of kinds of beings: the category to which the being belongs is determined by the highest type of attribute it possesses. For example, barbed wire has part—whole functional structure as its highest kind of attribute, so it falls into the correspond- ing category of complex physical objects; but a spider, which also has part-whole functional structure, has instinct as its highest attribute, and therefore falls into the higher category of simple animals.
The folk notion of the Great Chain includes the further structure that a being at a given level in the hierarchy possesses all the kinds of attribute possessed by lower orders: For example, a spider has, in addition to instinct, simple biology (such as metabolism), part-whole functional structure (like legs and body), and simple physical attributes (like color).
The GREAT CHAIN METAPHOR is a pattern for projecting conceptual structure from something at one level of the Great Chain to something at another. “Max is a spider,” for example, evokes a projection between what spiders do and what Max does. Max has social behavior; the spider has instinctual behavior. Max has certain roles in certain stories; the spider has certain roles in certain stories. We connect the two agents, their roles, their characters, and their typical stories. We connect them according to the Great Chain: “Max is a spider” is not interpreted to mean that Max is black, even though the prototypical spider is black. We assume that it asks us to make a connection between the highest attributes of the two agents: The spider’s instinctual behavior projects to Max’s intentional and mental behavior.
Whenever the GREAT CHAIN METAPHOR is at work, we are primed to acti- vate a blended space in which the counterparts are blended, as in a political car- toon that portrays a corrupt politician as a spider with a human face who spins webs to catch political opponents.
Consider the tale of the ox and the donkey. The vizier creates a blend of Shahrazad and the donkey in which Shahrazad’s human conviction and the donkey’s unreflecting instinctive stubbornness are the same thing, so as to suggest that
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Shahrazad is behaving like an ass. She should think about her plan, reconsider it, listen to his wisdom. Human beings can do these things, and she should act like a human being, not like a donkey. Shahrazad’
s immediate reaction to his story is so absolute and lacking in reflection as to seem to confirm his blending of the donkey’s instinctive “stubbornness” and Shahrazad’s intentional stubbornness:
When she heard her father’s story, Shahrazad said: “Nothing will shake my faith in the mission I am destined to fulfil.”
The blend works because we have previously conceived of all donkeys by blend- ing them with human beings. We say they are “stubborn,” but they aren’t. Only human beings can be stubborn. The instinctual behavior of a donkey is not at all the same thing as human stubbornness: For example, all donkeys have. this behavior, notjust some, and it is not subject to rational persuasion. We have con- ceived of this particular instinctual behavior by blending it with human stub- bornness, and even given it the name “stubbornness.” The conceptual ground has already prepared for blending the donkey with stubborn Shahrazad.
Douglas Sun has analyzed blended character in Thurber’s story “The Moth and the Star.” Ayoung moth sets his heart on a certain star; his mother and father tell him he should instead hang around lamp bridges; they shame him for not having so much as a scorched wing:
The moth thought [the star] was just caught in the branches of an elm. He never did reach the star, but he went right on trying, night after night, and when he was a very, very old moth he began to think that he really had reached the star and he went around saying so. This gave him deep and lasting pleasure, and he lived to a great old age. His parents and his brothers and his sisters had all been burned to death when they were quite young.
As Sun remarks, there is a central inference in this tale. If your goal is not the common goal, there may be some unpredicted benefits that outweigh the insults. This inference cannot come from the source because moths do not choose, do not know about sorrow, do not insult, do not weigh benefits, do not talk., and do not fly toward stars. The inference is not at all required of the target. In the source, it is a fixed instinctual necessity that all moths must fly toward light; but it is not true in the target that all people must instinctively strive toward a single common goal.
The moth’s intentionality, his selection of his particular goal, his delusion, his pleasure, and so on all come from the target, where they are part of the human
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character. In the blend, the instinct of the moth from the source is blended with the character of the human being from the target to establish central inferences that are then projected to the target.
Talking animals—or, in general, blends of the human and the animal-are a principle feature of folktales and children’s literature. The wolves in The jungle Book, for example, are a blend of human social character and the pack instincts of wolves; even their unforgettable utterance—“Look well! Look well! Oh, wolves!”—is a blend of human language and lupine yelping. Such blends popu— late our imagination and memory: Sheer—Khan and Rikki—Tikki—Tavi,' the lion and the hedgehog from Aesop’: Fable: (“The hedgehog twitted the lion for hav- ing only one cub in her litter; ‘One,’ she replied, ‘but a lion”’); the _serpent in the garden of Eden; and an indefinite range of cartoon characters from which read- ers draw homely philosophy. Talking animals seem whimsical and exotic, but they are not. They come from blending in parable, a phenomenon so basic as to be indispensable to our conception of what it means to have a human character and a human life.
£3 8 Ca. LANGUAGE
Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers, philologists, psychologists, biologists, and neurologists, along with whatever blood can be got out of grammarians.
Russ Rymer in The New Yorker
Light, heat, gravity, chemical affinity, human will, have this in common, that they redistribute force. Their unit of process can be represented as: term from which, transfer- ence of force, term to which. If we regard this transference as the conscious or unconscious act of an agent we can translate the diagram into: agent, act, object.
Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium far Poetry
T H E DOMINANT CONTEMPORARY TH E0 RY of the origin of language proposes that genetic change produced genetic instructions for building a special module for grammar in the human brain. Before genetic specialization for grammar, people had no grammar at all: no grammatical speech, no parsing of grammar, no concept of grammar. To be sure, they communicated (birds and bees communicate), but their communication was totally ungrammatical. It was not language. This grammar module was autonomous: it borrowed no structure or processes from any other capacities like vision, spatial navigation, understand- ing of force dynamics, parable, and so on. Adherents of this theory—who form a large group of distinguished scholars that includes Noam Chomsky, Steven
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Pinker, and Paul Bloom—disagree only about which evolutionary mechanisms were responsible for the genetic specialization for grammar.
Naturally, it is a corollary of this theory that the development of language in any modern human child comes entirely from the autonomous grammar mod- ule in the child’s brain, which is built entirely from the special instructions in its genes. The language the child hears prompts it to shut down the parts of the language module it does not need.
I think this theory of the historical origin of language is wrong. A carefully adjusted version of it might not in principle be absolutely impossible, but at best it offers a hypothesis of desperate last resort: Since we cannot discover a straight- forward way in which language might have arisen, let us postulate the mysteri- ous origin of a special, autonomous black box that mysteriously does everything we need to explain language, including everything we don’t yet know we need.
If we reject the hypothesis that genetic specialization for grammar was the origin of language, what can we propose instead? Let us consider the possibility that parable was the origin of language, that parable preceded grammar.
Occam’s razor is a basic principle of theory building, named after the man who expressed it: Make no unnecessary hypotheses. We have seen that, inde- pendently of questions of grammar, we must concede that human beings have the mental capacities I call parable. Is it necessary to add to parable something new? Is it necessary to make the additional hypothesis that special autonomous instructions arose in human genetic material for building an autonomous black box in the brain that does the entire ob? Not if we consider that parable already gives us what we need. Cognitive mechanisms whose existence we must grant independently of any analysis of grammar can account for the origin of gram- mar. The linguistic mind is a consequence and subcategory of the literary mind.
Stories have structure that human vocal sound—as sound, not language— does not have. Stories have objects and events, actors and movements, viewpoint and focus, image schemas and force dynamics, and so on. Roughly, parable takes structure from story and gives it to voice (or bodily signs in the case of sign lan- guage). Parable creates structure for voice by projecting structure from story. The structure it creates is grammar. Grammar results from the projection of story structure. Sentences come from stories by way of parable.
Parable draws on the full range of cognitive processes involved in story. Story involves spatiality, motor capacities, the sensory modalities (sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste) and submodalities, patterns that run across sensory modalities and submodalities, perceptual and conceptual categorization, image schemas, and our other basic cognitive instruments. Parable draws on all of this structure to create grammatical structure for vocal sound. Grammar, built from such structure, coheres with it.
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Grammar arose in a community that already had parable. The members of that community used parable to project structure from story to create rudimen- tary grammatical structure for vocal sound.
Consider the following analogy. Imagine a community of people who have trained themselves in rudimentary marti
al arts. All members of the community have it. No genetic instruction for specialization in martial arts exists; the competence is assembled by directing to its use preexisting capacities of muscle control, balance, walking, vision, and so on, combined with arduous work to acquire it. But once it is acquired, it seems entirely natural, and, with a little practice, inevitable.
Now suppose that into this community a special infant is born with just a little genetic structure that helps it direct these preexisting capacities to this community’ s martial artistry. The members of the community are better martial artists than the child and devote time to training and coaching the child, but the child has a secret edge. If the community is structured so that better martial art- istry confers reproductive advantage, then the community provides an environ- ment of evolutionary adaptiveness for the genetic change: the “martial artistry” trait is adaptive. This situation could plausibly give rise to a kind of genetic arms race in which each increment of further genetic specialization brings an incre- ment of relative reproductive advantage. But martial artistry itself arose without genetic specialization for martial artistry.
Now imagine a community of people who use parable to create rudimen- tary grammatical structure for vocal sound. Everyone in this community devel- ops story and projection, has voice, receives training from his parents, and is assimilated into the work of creating grammar through parable. Suppose that into this community a special infant is born with just a little genetic structure that helps it project story onto voice. The members of the community are better at rudimentary language than the child and devote time to training and coach- ing the child, but the child has a secret edge. If the community is structured so that greater facility with grammar confers reproductive advantage, then the com- munity provides an environment of evolutionary adaptiveness for the genetic change: the “grammar” trait is adaptive. This situation could plausibly give rise to a kind of genetic arms race in which each increment of further genetic spe- cialization brings an increment of relative reproductive advantage. But grammar itself arose without genetic instruction for grammar. It arose by parable.