The Literary Mind.pdf

SINGLE LIVES 137
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 herself
identically across all these stories.
But character can also be developed through metaphoric projection: "Achilles
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 imbue
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 corresponding
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 activate
a blended space in which the counterparts are blended, as in a political cartoon
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