The Literary Mind.pdf

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CREATIVE BLENDS
... nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to
hear the Rabbit say to itself, "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be
too late!" (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred
to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the
time it all seemed quite natural).
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
TYPICALLY CONCEIVE of concepts as packets of meaning. We give them
labels: marriage, birth, death, force, electricity, time, tomorrow. Meanings
seem localized and stable.
But parable gives us a different view of meaning as arising from connections
across more than one mental space. Meaning is not a deposit in a conceptcontainer.
It is alive and active, dynamic and distributed, constructed for local
purposes of knowing and acting. Meanings are not mental objects bounded in
conceptual places but rather complex operations of projection, binding, linking,
blending, and integration over multiple spaces. Meaning is parabolic and literary.
We have seen that parable carries narrative meaning across at least two mental
spaces. In fact, other spaces are involved, and their involvement is not a modest
addition to parable, but instead its most important aspect. We can detect a hint
of this new aspect of parable by looking at a curious event in the tale of the ox
and the donkey: The ox and the donkey, like Alice's hurried rabbit, talk.
Talking animals are a conceptual blend. The talking ox and the talking donkey
do not reside in the space that treats everyday farm labor and mute beasts of
burden, nor do they reside in the hypothetical space that treats the vizier's apprehension
of Shahrazad's future disaster. Where, conceptually, do they reside? It
may seem perverse to ask this question. Talking animals are as natural as the
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