The Literary Mind.pdf

76 THE LITERARY MIND
including the author, makes a statement that, given the logic of the narration,
we must take to be absolutely reliable, or whenever the author confers a badge of
reliability on a character, or alters "durational realism" or sequence, or tells us
exactly how intensely a character experienced certain emotions, the author is
thereby doing something impossible in the space of the story narrated and doing
it to a world that is not real in the space of narration. The space with respect to
which these actions are both possible and real is the blend.
Mental images to accompany blended spaces are easy to imagine. An advertisement
for a tax consultant might talk about "tax bite" in voice-over while a
visual image of an anthropomorphized Internal Revenue Service Form 1040 sinks
its teeth into a terrified paycheck. Allegories and political cartoons make routine
use of these impossible blendings. Gluttony is an anthropomorphized banana
cream pie, Study a walking and talking dictionary.
One of the most common uses of blending is in counterfactual expressions
such as "If I were you, I would have done it," said by a man to a woman who
declined earlier to become pregnant: the woman did not do it, the man cannot
do it, but the blend combines the man's judgment with the woman's conditions,
enabling the man-woman to become pregnant in the counterfactual blend.
Personification is perhaps the most thoroughly analyzed consequence of
blended spaces. If we revisit the various personifications we have considered—
of the wind as a torturer, of Death as Thanatos, of the rain as a violent and spiteful
destroyer, of situations we are trying to master as intentional adversaries, and
so on—we will detect instantly the impossible blendings of specific information
from source and target.
Let us consider a case of personification that shows these complexities of
parable as well as some new complexities: Death the Grim Reaper. This personification
involves robust impossible blending: The biological cause of death
is simultaneously an animate, intentional skeleton who walks, carries a scythe,
wears a robe with a cowl, and comes with the goal of killing you in particular.
We do not confuse this interesting blend with the input space of death: no one
ever actually confuses the Grim Reaper with the biological event of death. But
the Grim Reaper blend is usefully connected to its input spaces and helps us think
about them.
What are those input spaces? Here we make the crucial observation that
nothing limits blending to only two input spaces. A blend can have as many input
spaces as can be mentally juggled. Blending can also be recursive, happening in
steps, so that a blend can be an input space to another blend. In the case of the
Grim Reaper, there are at least four input spaces. Let us begin with two of them,
which have a partial source-target relationship. They are (1) a space with an
individual dying human being and (2) a space with reapers in the scenario of