The Literary Mind.pdf

136 THE LITERARY MIND
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 instrument
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 character.
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 impossible
blended spaces are the most "realistic" because they come closest to signaling
that life, like meaning, is not bounded in any one mental space, but involves
the operations of projection, 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 fundamentally
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 collection
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 behavior,
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