The Literary Mind.pdf

146 THE LITERARY MIND
so long as what we are looking at seems like background: a tree and a lawn on a
quiet day. But if a lightning bolt strikes the tree, it looks very different, and
becomes reportable. We believe that the same laws of physics and biology hold
for both scenes and that in a scientific sense a great deal is going on in both scenes.
Yet the lightning strike looks like a little story and the other scene looks like
background, nothing remarkable.
This distinction of story as opposed to no story projects to the distinction of
speech as opposed to no speech. Silence is part of grammar and is the counterpart
of no story. We grant to certain elements of our perceptual experience special
distinguished status. We think of things as happening against a background.
Analogously, we think of speech as happening against a background of silence.
The silence reports the background; the speech reports whatever is distinguished
against the background. This is not always the case, of course: modern languages
have developed many highly intricate instruments that go far beyond the basic
grammatical constructions for basic stories. But radically, we report that the lightning
struck the tree or that one person hugged another or that the rains flooded
the tunnel or that the branch waved back and forth in the heavy wind. Reporting
a nonevent is less common, unless the event was expected, in which case the
nonevent is itself conceived of as an event. The form of reporting nonevents—
"The lightning did not strike the tree"—is also much less prototypical. It would
be odd to make this report if the event had not been expected; the negation pays
homage to the story that did not happen rather than the nonevent that did.
Narrative imagining partitions and categorizes wholes into related elements,
as when the small spatial story of Mary throwing a stone is perceived and categorized
as involving different elements in different categories that stand in narrative
relationships. Narrative partitioning, categorizing, and relating project to
create grammatical partitioning, categorizing, and relating. The result is grammatical
categories and grammatical relations.
Story groups elements. For example, the image schema path-to-goa/ groups
the elements in the motion of the stone toward the window into a single unit.
Story grouping projects to create grammatical grouping: "Toward the window"
is a grammatical group. In English, this grammatical grouping is not simply a
matter of sound adjacency. "Mary threw the rock toward the—if I'm not mistaken
—window" still has "toward the window" as a grammatical group. Nonadjacency
in grammatical grouping is even more evident in a language like Latin.
Narrative imagining combines finite elements into infinitely many products—Mary,
John, throws, catches, pushes, flips, stone, ball, and coin, as conceptual
elements of narrative imagining, combine into a great number of particular
stories: Mary throws the stone, John throws the stone, Mary throws the ball,
John catches the ball, John flips the coin, Mary pushes the coin, and so on. This