The Literary Mind.pdf

FIGURED TALES 53
led to another," "Health is linked to diet," and "The problem is growing." These
image schemas associated with causation are all contained in the story of birth
and combined there in a coherent manner. This convenient combination makes
the story of birth highly useful in thinking about causation. The story of birth
moreover has an additional feature useful in thinking about causation—inheritance.
We say that a figurine "inherits" its shape from the mold or that a computer
program "inherits" its slowness from the language in which it is written.
In Death Is the Mother of Beauty, I listed the ways in which we routinely
project stories of birth onto other stories, in everyday language and elite literary
texts. Milton presents the story of the origin of Satan, Sin, and Death as a primordial
history in which Sin—Satan's daughter—springs from his brow. Satan
later fathers a son, Death, incestuously upon his daughter Sin. Gower adds to
this odd family extra offspring—the vices. The Bible and therefore Gower and
Milton all present the curse on humanity as a story of progeneration and inheritance:
We all inherit the curse from Adam and Eve. Blake explains human psychology
and emotions through an elaborate and exquisite story of a family tree.
Spenser explains human psychological dispositions through stories of births.
Hesiod's history of the cosmos, like nearly all early cosmogonies, is a story of
progenerations. The list of such texts is long.
In Death Is the Mother of Beauty, I discussed constraints—later generalized
into the invariance principle—on the projection of progeneration. A parent and
a child have a spatial distinction and an aspectual duration over time, and this
structure can be projected onto only those stories that can have compatible imageschematic
structure. For example, given default conceptions of basketball or
baseball, it would be infelicitous to say that a woman basketball player was the
mother of the basket she just sank or that a baseball player was the father of the
home run he just hit. These events are not thought of as having a suitable aspectual
duration. Betsy Ross, however, could be called the mother of the American flag.
A mother and a child are also thought of as acquiring high spatial distinction
at birth. If we watch a cloud as it shifts nearly imperceptibly into a slightly
different shape and are asked to project the story of birth onto the story of the
cloud, it would take considerable invention to do so in a way that projected this
distinction between parent and child.
The spatial distinction between mother and child is also thought of as arising
in a manner that is relatively singular and punctual. The moment of birth is
distinguished from what comes before and what comes after. If the shifting of
the cloud appears continuous, with no points of singularity, it would be even more
difficult to project the story of birth onto it.
In these and a variety of related ways, parable is constrained: Not just anything
can be projected in just any way. We have choice in our conception of the