The Literary Mind.pdf

82 THE LITERARY MIND
or old age. The conventional metaphoric connection in PEOPLE ARE PLANTS
between the final stage of plant-death (in the declining plant's life cycle) and the
final stage of person-death (in the declining person's life cycle) is kept out of
the blend. Similarly, the fact that reaping takes place only at the middle stage in
the plant's life cycle is kept out of the blend. In the blend, the stages of human
life and the stages of plant life are not fused. Instead in the blend, the moment
of harvest is fused with the moment of death, but that moment can occur at any
point in the cycle: the Grim Reaper is a bad farmer.
Interestingly, although in principle blending could make more use of the
person-plant correspondence—a painting might portray the Grim Reaper as
mowing down a field of people-as-wheat (there are historical examples of this
sort)—in fact the modern conventional blend does not emphasize this connection.
The Grim Reaper simply arrives, and his arrival causes the dying. In this
way, the Grim Reaper acts not at all like a reaper, but like any herald of death.
The person who dies of course does not act like a plant.
Not just any specific information from input spaces is likely to be projected
to the blended space. Prototypical information that cannot be avoided unexceptionably,
given the medium of representation, is always likely to appear: In a
picture of the blend, the talking donkey would probably have four legs and donkey
ears, regardless of the conceptual use of this information in the parable. Much
more important, however, the blended space typically includes specific details
that serve as cues for projecting to the topic input space. The plough and the
millstone in the tale of the ox and the donkey are specific details that do not project
as specific details onto the story of Shahrazad. But they are metonymic for generic
conditions of servitude and suffering, which do appear in the blend and do ultimately
project onto the virgins who suffer in the story of Shahrazad. The sifted
straw and the well-winnowed barley do not project as specific details onto the
story of Shahrazad. But they are metonymic for generic conditions of luxury and
comfort, which do appear in the blend and do ultimately project onto Shahrazad's
current situation.
The varied examples we have considered make it clear that blended spaces
are useful for inferential work. When we widen our scope yet further, we find
blended spaces not only in literature and everyday linguistic utterances, but: also
in dreams and in our attempts to make sense of anything new by blending its
specific details with structure from something we already know, so as to categorize
it provisionally and act accordingly. The various figural projections we
encountered in earlier chapters all reveal blended spaces, once we look for them.
Proust's ouverture to A la recherche du temps perdu, for example, which is a projection
of the spatial onto the mental, works through a fantastic blended space.
In that blended space, spatial events of change, including body action, are blended
with mental events of memory in strikingly impossible ways. As memories come