The Literary Mind.pdf

CREATIVE BLENDS 75
their towns, and their residences are not part of the space of narration. But in
the blended space, the narrator and readers can journey to the locales of the characters,
to have a look at them.
Before I introduce my Readers into the Company of Miss Charlotte
Summers, I must make them acquainted with some of her Friends . . .
for which Purpose, I must beg their Company as far as Carmarthenshire,
in Wales. Tho' the Journey is pretty long, and, in the ordinary Way of
travelling, may take up some Days, yet we Authors are always provided
with an easy flying Carriage, which can waft our Readers in an Instant,
much longer Journeys than this we are now setting out on.
In the space of the story narrated, the narrator does not exist and necessarily
has no special powers there. In the space of narration, the narrator does exist.
He has no special powers with respect to most of that space, but he does have
special powers with respect to the story he is telling: He can shift the focus of
time and place in the narration. In the blend, the narrator, the readers, and the
characters can inhabit one world. In the blend, shifting spatial focus is identical
to actually moving bodily from one place to another, shifting temporal focus is
identical to moving bodily from one time to another. The power to shift spatial
and temporal focus is identical to the power to move in superhuman ways from
one place to another, or one time to another, and to move readers as well. We
keep distinct the space of the story narrated, the space of narration, and their
blend.
This flying "Carriage" is a specific blend derived from the general blend.
Some of the features of the carriage come from the story narrated: It is a carriage
like the carriages in the story narrated—it is a container, makes spatial journeys,
and so on. But some of its features come from the space of narration, specifically,
from the way the author's mind operates in that space—the "event shape"
of the event performed by this blended carriage and the various "modal" relationships
of what it can do and how it can do it are taken from the way the author's
mind moves in the space of narration. In the blend, this carriage has features
from both spaces.
Booth's Rhetoric of Fiction can be read (between the lines) as a taxonomy of
such blends. Often these blends are easily noticed. The more interesting blends,
however, are covert, and they are nearly ubiquitous in literature: Whenever a
narrator moves in and out of a character's mind, shifts point of view from character
to character, or provides an inside view of any sort, she is doing something
impossible for the space of the story narrated, and she is doing it to a world that
is not real inside the space of narration. Similarly, whenever anyone in the story,