The Literary Mind.pdf

FIGURED TALES 47
Stories of our interaction with other actors can be projected onto event-stories
that include us. Events can help us, hinder us, hurt us. Events can assist someone,
give her a boost, throw her into a situation she isn't prepared for. Unemployment
can knock somebody flat. Jealousy becomes a green-eyed monster to
be confronted, addiction an opponent to be wrestled. The farmer can steal land
from the desert, and every summer the desert can try to take it back. The sailor
can fight a murderous sea that tries to steal his life and his livelihood.
The most ubiquitous special case of EVENTS ARE MOVERS AND MANIPULA-
TORS is DEATH IS A MOVER AND MANIPULATOR: it comes upon you, and you
become a physical object it manipulates. It takes you away, unless, of course, your
friend Heracles owes you a favor, which he repays by physically preventing death
from reaching you and seizing you and taking you away.
Time, too, can be understood as a mover and manipulator. Time catches up
with you, wears you down, races against you, stops you, takes your youth away,
your beauty away, your friends away, and your family away. Time may also, of
course, be on your side and bring you comfort and success.
PROJECTING SPATIAL STORIES
Action is not the only kind of story. Everywhere we look, we see spatial stories
that do not contain animate actors. We see a wall collapse from age, water run
downhill, leaves blowing in the wind. These are spatial stories.
They also can be projected. I call the general pattern of their projections
EVENTS ARE SPATIAL STORIES. It naturally overlaps with EVENTS ARE ACTIONS
to such an extent that they may appear to be identical. But EVENTS ARE ACTIONS
can project nonspatial action-stories (like a story of thinking or dreaming or suffering),
and EVENTS ARE SPATIAL STORIES can project stories without actors, so
neither is entirely contained in the other.
Leonard Talmy showed in a series of papers in the 1970s and 1980s that we
frequently project spatial stories—especially force-dynamic stories—onto stories
of nonspatial events. Eve Sweetser, in an analysis compatible with Talmy's, considered
the special case in which we project spatial stories onto stories of mental
events. Some of Talmy's and Sweetser's results are incorporated into the work
George Lakoff and I did on EVENTS ARE ACTIONS and into the further analysis
of what I call EVENTS ARE SPATIAL STORIES. Some individual facets of EVENTS
ARE SPATIAL STORIES were first noticed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in
1980. The results summarized below come from many scholars, including, among
others, Leonard Talmy, Eve Sweetser, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Jane
Espenson, and me.
EVENTS ARE SPATIAL STORIES includes all the projections of spatial actionstories
we saw in EVENTS ARE ACTIONS, but it also includes projections of spatial