The Literary Mind.pdf

MANY SPACES 93
of President Bill Clinton, implicitly acknowledging that she had been asked to
leave because she had been associated with the federal ban on the use of fetal
tissue in scientific research paid for with federal funds. She expressed regret that
the agency had been drawn into the political debate by saying, "NIH has become
a bit of the Beirut of abortion and fetal tissue."
A reader who uses the popular notion of Beirut as suffering terribly and
innocently because conflicting factions war over it might interpret this blend so
thinly as to make it seem like no blend at all: Healy is simply saying that the NIH
has suffered innocently by being caught in the "political crossfire," where again
the noun comes from the source and the adjective from the target but in a phrase
so conventional as to seem as normal as "intellectual progress."
But it is equally easy to imagine Healy in a bullet-scarred NIH building (the
one in Bethesda, Maryland, just outside the District of Columbia) taking political
rounds of ammunition, lobbed at her alternately by Republican and Democratic
presidents and their political factions, from the White House and Congress,
located on the Mall a few miles away. A political cartoon supporting her
point of view might picture her in a helmet, ducking the incoming fire. There is
a gradient of specificity between the generic space and the blended space, and
we have latitude in moving along that gradient as we interpret expressions.
CATEGORIES AND ANALOGIES
Conceptual blending is a fundamental instrument of the everyday mind, used in
our basic construal of all our realities, from the social to the scientific. Let us
consider some examples of social and scientific blending originally treated by
Fauconnier and me.
Analogy places pressure upon conventional category structures. A successful
analogy can, through entrenchment, earn a place among our category structures.
The assault of an analogy on conventional categories is often expressed in
the early stages by a blend-construction that draws its noun from the source and
its modifier from the target. "Same-sex marriage," for example, asks us to project
the scenario of marriage onto an alternative domestic scenario. People of violently
opposed ideological belief will freely agree that the generic space of this
projection carries information applicable to both scenarios. It might include
people living in a household, dividing labor, protecting each other in various ways,
and planning together.
What is at issue is not the existence of this information but rather its status.
Those whose conception of conventional marriage has as a requisite component
"heterosexual union" and has as its prototype "for the sake of children" will regard
this abstract generic information as merely incidental or derivative in the story