The Literary Mind.pdf

CREATIVE BLENDS 71
"barely maintaining" also shows a trace of blending, since it presupposes intentionality:
The crew of Great America II is trying to maintain a lead. By contrast,
If Northern Light-were ahead by a day in the blend, it would be strange to say,
"The captain of Northern Light is barely maintaining his one-day lead," since the
presupposed intentionality could not be projected back to the space of 1853
without some work to make it possible there, like the following: "Historically,
the captain of Northern Light took the view that he had the fastest ship imaginable
and that his record would stand forever. But now, he is barely maintaining
a tiny lead over Great America II and may be proved wrong." It is important to see
that the construction of the blend is not meant to erase or dispense with the input
spaces. Blending provides a way to integrate efficiently and effectively over many
spaces while maintaining the network of connections across all those spaces.
The same constraints of landmark and intentionality can be shown to operate
in a case that involves metaphor. To understand, "President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt accomplished a great deal in his first one hundred days, but President
Clinton has accomplished by comparison little," we must build two mental spaces
and an intricate comparison between them. Both of these mental spaces can
themselves be understood through a conceptual metaphor according to which
accomplishment is travel along a path. We might then say, "FDR covered a lot of
ground during his first one hundred days. President Clinton by comparison has
only just started to move." In one blended space, FDR is moving along a path
whose locations are goals; reaching the location is accomplishing the goal. In
the other blended space, President Clinton is beginning to move along a similar
path. These two blends are conventional and share the identical generic space.
These two blends can themselves be the input spaces to a new blended space, as
when we say, two months after President Clinton has taken office, "Clinton was
supposed to hit the ground running. He implied that he was going to accomplish
as much in his first one hundred days as FDR accomplished in his. So far,
Clinton has failed completely to keep pace with FDR."
"To keep pace with" requires the construction of a conventional blend that
has both agents competing simultaneously along the same track. For most readers,
this conventional blend will have been constructed and used entirely unconsciously.
The construction of that conventional blend includes the connection
of structures in the blend to corresponding structures in all of the spaces that led
to it, so that we know the implications for Clinton in the space of 1992 of the
fact that Clinton in the FDR-versus-Clinton blend does not "keep pace with" FDR
in that blend.
We can force the blend into consciousness by drawing attention to it: "Clinton
is in a race with the ghost of FDR"; alternatively, "At this rate, Clinton's term
will be over before he gets anywhere near the finish line." We know implicitly