The Literary Mind.pdf

80 THE LITERARY MIND
must take a grim view of Death-the-Reaper. We can now see a reason for this
constraint: We project to the blend our view of the event, including its cause. In
the case of the Grim Reaper, we also project to the blend an action story of killing
consistent with our feelings about the event of death. The reaper in the blend
is simultaneously a cause we feel grimly about and a killer we feel grimly about.
The Reaper must therefore actually have these features.
If we look at the linguistic elements involved in referring to Death-the-Grim-
Reaper, we see that the terms reflect the conceptual blending. The definite article
"the" comes from the causal tautology, since it picks out a single general cause.
The name "Death" comes from the blending of the causal tautology with the
individual event of dying. The adjective "Grim" comes from both the space with
the prototypical killer and the space with the individual event of human dying.
The noun "Reaper" comes from the input space of harvest.
The Grim Reaper shows us again that combining in the blend is not restricted
to counterparts. Reapers and skeletons are not counterparts in the input spaces:
PEOPLE ARE PLANTS does not connect them, nor does EVENTS ARE ACTIONS. But
Death as a cause is metonymically associated with skeleton as an effect. In the
blend, the reaper is combined with both Death and the skeleton. Similarly, priests,
monks, mourners, and members of lay brotherhoods that are associated with
dying, funerals, burial, and afterlife are metonymically associated with Death.
They are not counterparts of Death, but in the blend, the attire we associate with
them—robe and cowl—can be the attire of the Grim Reaper. The cowl, pulled
over the head of the Grim Reaper, at once evokes both connotations of death
and the impression of Death as mysterious, unknown, and set apart from human
society. This cognitive construction of meaning is independent of historical
and scientific accuracy: maybe priests, monks, or lay brethren in fact never
wore robes with cowls. What matters is only that we know the conceptual association,
from any source, including cartoons. Someone who knows that association
can use it to make sense of the attire of the Grim Reaper.
The possibility of combining metonymic elements—like Death and a skeleton—gives
blending a great power: The blend can combine elements that contribute
to the desired effect even though those elements are not counterparts. The
combined elements "go together" in evoking the same effect even if they do not
"go together" according to the counterpart connections between the input stories.
Consider for example the personification of Heroism. Blending a story of
heroic behavior with the abstract story of causal tautology yields a blended story
in which heroic behavior is caused by an abstract cause, Heroism-in-general. Just
as we use EVENTS ARE ACTIONS to personify Death-in-general as a reaper, so we
can use it to personify Heroism-in-general as a human actor who causes heroic
behavior. Nothing so far requires that this human actor be a hero. Moreover,