The Literary Mind.pdf

CREATIVE BLENDS 65
John is becoming something other than king, increasingly represented as having
never been king. He is a king who is not a king. The activities and economies
King John normally commands are rapidly escaping him. He tries to command
what he no longer commands. He may appear to be in command, events may
happen that seem to conform to his command, but his command is losing status.
He is not naive—he realizes that his command is a conundrum. This is a
subtle reading. To arrive at this reading requires a blended space, in which the
messenger, the prime example of something absolutely under the king's command,
is also nature, the prime example of something that is absolutely above
the king's command. This is a combination of contraries impossible outside the
blend. King John is commanding what he can command, but what he can command
turns out to be simultaneously what he cannot command. The tension and
instability in King John's command is presented symbolically. It is a powerful
and significant paradox.
The blend necessary for this reading combines, from the source, the inevitable
release of weather that is subject to no one's control, and, from the target,
King John's intentional control over the intentional messenger. The manifest
tension between the lack of control and the exercise of control provides the central
inference of the subtle reading. But the tension is not in the source: in the
source space that includes nature, human command plays no role at all, and King
John is not mad like Lear and would not dream of trying to command the weather.
The tension is not present in the target, either: King John can indeed command
messengers absolutely to deliver their bad news. The tension cannot be imported
to the target directly from the source because the target would defeat it: the
messenger is absolutely and rigidly under the command of King John. Indeed,
the messenger's complete subordination to the king in the target is reinforced by
this very scene in which John commands and the messenger performs accordingly.
We do not construe this passage as saying of the target that just as King
John cannot command nature, so he cannot command the messenger. That is
clearly false: He can and does command the messenger.
It is only in the blended space that King John is revealed in a situation of
conflict: He both commands and lacks command at the same moment and in
the identical respect. In the blended space, he is giving commands that are simultaneously
appropriate and inappropriate, simultaneously routine and absurd. This
is a fundamentally unstable position. It is the basis of the sophisticated reading
that King John's command is profoundly troubled and conflicted.
The tension of the blended space is reinforced by a corollary blending of
impossibilities. King John is above the messenger metaphorically, in the sense
of having power over him. He is probably above him spatially: The messenger
may be kneeling. By contrast, any human being on earth is below a raining sky