Law and Narrative

JLS 39 (2010), 1–27 0341-7638/10/039–1DOI 10.1515/jlse.2010.001 © Walter de Gruyter

Naturalizing the unnatural: A view from blending theory

MONIKA FLUDERNIK

Abstract

In Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996), I presented the process of nat-uralization as a strategy of converting not-naturally-occurring storytelling scenarios into familiarized models of narration. In order to map this pro-cess, this paper resorts to the most recent version of blending theory (con-ceptual integration networks) as proposed by Mark Turner and Gilles Fau-connier. The analysis will be prefaced by a few framing remarks on the cognitive approach in the study of narrative and will conclude with an outlook on further possible applications of blending theory.1

1. The cognitive approach: Cognitive poetics, narrative and cognitive narratology

In recent years, it has become fashionable to speak of a ‘cognitive turn’ in various areas of the humanities. Several journals have undertaken to pub-lish special issues on the subject; for instance Poetics Today brought out a hefty, nearly 400-page long issue entitled “The Cognitive Turn? A Debate on Interdisciplinarity” (24.2, 2003), as well as publishing an issue on “Lit-erature and the Cognitive Revolution” (23.1, 2002). See also issues of Cognitive Linguistics (11.34, 2000), Style (36.3, 2003), the European Journal of English Studies (EJES 9.2, 2005), the Journal of Pragmatics (37.10, 2005) and Language and Literature (15.1, 2006). Arguably, the cognitive approach has currently become the leading paradigm in linguis-tics. It started out with frame and prototype theory, expanded into cogni-tive metaphor and integrational network (blending) theory, and has been taking over almost all areas of linguistics with applications to syntax, mor-phology, phonetics and phonemics (see, e.g., Dressler’s grammaticaliza-tion model, work on prepositions, scripts and semantics in general, all the

2 Monika Fludernik

way to construction grammar). The cognitive approach could be seen as providing a hard-science core to pragmatics, which in a sense had devel-oped away from more abstract and mathematical models in linguistics. Current cognitive studies in linguistics are returning with a vengeance to increasingly complex models and a heavy emphasis on statistics, corpus studies and empirical testing.

In literature and literary theory, cognitive approaches have been promi-nent for quite some time. Indeed, one could argue that the Russian For-malist notion of defamiliarization (ostranenie) anticipates later cognitive concerns. Much earlier than others, literary critics like Moshe Ron, Benja-min Harshav (Hrushovski) and Reuven Tsur began to absorb the lessons of frame theory and other cognitive approaches in psychology, and to turn to their application to the reading process. Framing, primacy and recency ef-fects and stylistic management of foregrounding and backgrounding began to play a role in a wide range of work, particularly work focussing on narrative (see Harshav 1976; Ron 1979; Tsur 2008 [1992]). Jäkel (1999) proposes that cognitive metaphor theory has been largely anticipated by nineteenth-century German linguists and by Harald Weinrich.

As Peter Stockwell’s now almost classic Cognitive Poetics (2002) de-monstrates, the cognitive approach uses a large variety of different cogni-tive models and is applicable to all genres, to stylistic, grammatical, reader-response-related and genre-related issues. Gavins and Steen’s Cognitive Poetics in Practice (2003) complements Stockwell’s volume and adds new items to the list of applications. Besides expanding on the fi gure/ground pattern and the central importance of prototypes, Gavins and Steen in-clude essays on deixis, syntax, cognitive metaphor theory, possible worlds theory, text worlds, parable, and plot reversals. (Stockwell’s list of genres had included parable and allegory, and Michael Sinding in a number of articles [2002a, 2004, 2005] has expanded this analysis of allegory to in-clude satire as well as considerations of genre itself.)

Narratology, in its overlap with stylistics and cognitive linguistics, has also been extensively infl uenced by models derived from cognitive studies. Foremost among those working with a cognitive toolkit is Manfred Jahn, whose articles (e.g., 1997, 1999, 2003) applied insights from the distinc-tion between primacy/recency effects to the narrative reading process. I myself favored a constructivist approach, and eventually started to apply prototype theory to the analysis of narrative viewpoint (see Fludernik 1996). David Herman, in a series of articles, an edited volume and a major monograph, has been moving into a cognitive narratology and is exten-sively applying aspects of a variety of cognitive paradigms to the study of narrative, particularly to production and reception issues (Herman 1997, 2002, 2003, 2007, 2009). Besides Herman, a number of other scholars

Naturalizing the unnatural 3

have recently left their mark on narratology by focusing on cognitive is-sues (see especially Spolsky 2001; Richardson and Steen 2002; Hogan 2003a, 2003b; Richardson and Spolsky 2004; Zunshine 2006, 2008; and Abbott 2009.)

Of particular interest are studies that have proposed what they call a “cognitive poetics” since these promise a fuller analysis of the relationship between cognitive studies and literature. As we have seen above, Stock-well (2002) and Gavins and Steen (2003) survey a fi eld in which several types of cognitive methods and insights are applied to literary texts and is-sues in literary studies. Their spectrum is extremely broad both in its range of ‘cognitive’ models and in the extent of applications. As with these two books, a strong eclecticism can be observed also in the work of Lisa Zunshine and some of the members of the Stanford group on cognitive research (John Bender, Jonathan Kramnick, Natalie Phillips, Blakey Vermeule). All of these applications to literature argue that the way we write or read refl ects features of our cognitive predispositions, or can be explained by resorting to an analysis of the mind. The types of cognitive theory involved are, however, very diverse and perhaps not compatible. Scholars working in metaphor theory and integrational networks are clearly concerned with different processes from those scholars looking at the dynamics of plot construction or the interplay of genre and cognition.

In alignment with these quite heterogeneous uses of the term cognitive, defi nitions of a cognitive poetics likewise vary. Thus, Reuven Tsur defi nes cognitive poetics as an update on the semiotics of literature: “Cognitive poetics, as practiced in the present work, offers cognitive theories that sys-tematically account for the relationship between the structure of literary texts and their perceived effects” (1992 [2008]: 1). Tsur’s work is reso-lutely empirical and tries to account for why literature means what it means to us. By contrast, Peter Stockwell’s defi nition (2002), besides un-derscoring Tsur’s explanatory focus on our reading of literature, addition-ally emphasizes the role of context and the similarities between language use in literature and non-literary texts:

It [cognitive poetics] offers a means of describing and delineating different types of knowledge and belief in a systematic way, and a model of how to connect these matters of circumstance and use to the language of the literature. It also demonstrates the continuities between creative literary language and creative language in everyday use. In short, cognitive poetics takes context seriously. Furthermore, it has a broad view of context that encompasses both social and personal circumstances. (Stockwell 2002: 4)

Stockwell goes on to distinguish the literary and aesthetic focus of cogni-tive poetics from cognitive linguistics:

4 Monika Fludernik

In my view, treating literature only as another piece of data would not be cogni-tive poetics at all. This is simply cognitive linguistics. [ . . . ] As I said, taking ‘the cognitive turn’ seriously means more than simply being interested in the psychology of reading. It means a thorough re-evaluation of all of the categories with which we understand literary reading and analysis. In doing this, however, we do not have to throw away all of the insights from literary criticism and lin-guistic analysis that have been drawn out in the past. Many of those patterns of understanding form very useful starting points for cognitive poetic investigation. (Stockwell 2002: 6)

Stockwell is therefore aiming at reconceptualizing the toolbox of literary criticism by retuning it with a cognitive tuning fork. The thrust of his anal-yses (and of Gavins and Steen’s) therefore tends to dissipate the unitary model that Tsur is envisaging because it turns to individual aspects and is-sues within literary analysis and attempts to reevaluate them from the per-spective of cognitive linguistics. Even Stockwell admits in the context of his analysis that

[T]here is no direct link between linguistic form and the categories of cognitive grammar since each slot can be seen as being prototypically related to all the others. Furthermore, the fi gure and ground distinction can be construed in many different ways by readers. This would seem to suggest that the ‘rules’ of cogni-tive grammar are different from linguistic rules as they are traditionally under-stood, in that they do not absolutely constrain linguistic expressions. If you treat the prototypical models produced in cognitive grammar as producing a sort of ‘most natural’ reading, where does this leave the status of other, interesting read-ings? (Stockwell 2002: 67)

It is, therefore, worth pondering whether the term cognitive poetics should not be replaced by cognitive literary studies, as Brandt and Brandt (2005) suggest in a special issue of EJES:

Perhaps ‘cognitive literary studies’ is a more apt term for the enterprise, as sug-gested by the title of the present issue. Alternatively, cognitive poetics could be viewed as a specialized branch within cognitive literary studies, dealing specifi -cally with analyses of poems. However, it seems sensible to include in our no-tion of ‘poetics’ all literary forms of writing, in the spirit of the etymological root of the word (thus, the Greek word poiesis, creation, refers to all creative uses of language). Adopting this latter view, the term ‘cognitive poetics’ refers to cognitively-oriented generalizations on creative (read: literary) writing as such and can be used interchangeably with ‘cognitive literary studies’ to indicate the study of literary creations in a cognitive perspective. (Brandt and Brandt 2005: 124)

There are other overlaps as well, especially with semiotics and Paul Werth’s text world theory (1999) or with contextual frame theory:


Contextual frame theory is a cognitive poetic theory because it shows that texts can be studied not only for their style, but also to provide clues to the amount of work that a reader has to do to process the language. In this respect, a detailed analysis of a text can reveal the extent to which a reader’s knowledge, beliefs, assumptions and inference-making ability are necessary to supplement (and in some cases override) the words on the page. Contextual frame theory is similar to Text World Theory (Werth 1999), but it focuses particularly on how contexts within fi ctional worlds are constructed. In the plot reversals discussed in this chapter, readers and/or characters are ‘led up the garden path’, making erroneous inferences about a context because key information is omitted or because they are placed in a position where they wrongly assess a situation. (Emmott 2003: 146)

Tsur’s global theoretical horizons, on the other hand, are taken up by Mar-garet Freeman (2000) in her extremely insightful paper “Poetry and the Scope of Metaphor: Toward a Cognitive Theory of Literature”. Unfortu-nately, owing to its publication in a volume on metaphor and metonymy, in which it is not really a good fi t, this essay has been much neglected. Freeman’s main argument is that blending theory provides a unique model for the analysis of how we process literary texts:

I therefore propose a theory of literature that is grounded in cognitive linguistic theory: namely, that literary texts are the products of cognizing minds and their interpretations the products of other cognizing minds in the context of the physi-cal and sociocultural worlds in which they have been created and are read. This is the argument that underlies this paper. The theory I call cognitive poetics is a powerful tool for making explicit our reasoning processes and for illuminating the structure and content of literary texts. It provides a theory of literature that is both grounded in the language of literary texts and grounded in the cognitive linguistic strategies readers use to understand them. (Freeman 2000: 253254)

Freeman in particular demonstrates how the poems she analyses refl ect mapping structures that are accessed by readers; she also notes the draw-backs or limitations of non-cognitive literary analysis because it fails to show up the systematic structures behind our reading of metaphor (and literature in general). She ends by suggesting that different readings of poems can be “considered members of a radial category, with some read-ings being more prototypical, or central, to the category than others” (278, n. 7).

Of special interest as a caveat is the lively exchange on the cognitive revolution between the editors of the Poetics Today 23.1 (2002) special issue, Alan Richardson and Francis F. Steen, and Hans Adler and Sabine Gross in Poetics Today 23.2, which in turn led to a second special issue of Poetics Today on the cognitive turn (24.2, 2003), edited by Meir Sternberg. The criticism voiced in this special issue, especially by Meir

6 Monika Fludernik

Sternberg, concerns the failed interdisciplinarity of cognitivism. However, what I would like to emphasize here is, rather, the lack of agreement on a specifi c aim of cognitive approaches within literary studies. It seems to me that, despite Margaret Freeman’s very courageous call for a streamlining of cognitivism within literary theory and criticism, the actually existing criticism – as briefl y noted above – spreads out over a variety of foci and themes and is not necessarily geared towards subordinating literary analy-sis to an overall cognitivist paradigm. On the contrary, what cognitive sty-listics (Semino and Culpeper 2002) and cognitive literary studies (Toolan and Weber 2005) have been doing is to use elements from cognitive stud-ies to corroborate, modify and frame their own terminology and practices. Cognitivism is employed either to prove how well-founded one’s analyses are since they can be explained within the separately existing cognitive paradigm; or to generate new exciting insights into specifi c texts or aspects of narrative that cognitive analysis is opening up to the critic. Thus, cogni-tivism is indeed a ‘cognitive turn’ since it is used as a new – but not nec-essarily more truthful – theoretical method to generate new readings and to provide original insights into texts. For some critics, it helps to explain or underscore certain aspects of their interpretative practice or narratological/feminist/deconstructive, etc. theoretical analysis. Despite being a fairly ab-stract and variegated fi eld, cognitive studies have therefore proved to be a rich hunting ground for many different applications. Except in Tsur’s and Margaret Freeman’s leading statements, however, little distinctive unity can be glimpsed; and Freeman only achieves such unity at the expense of excluding much that has proved stimulating within the cognitive studies fi eld. My own approach below is an application quite on the eclectic lines of much other cognitivist literary research, though it perhaps has the bene-fi t of expanding an already cognitivist model by further resort to additional elements from the same toolbox.

2. Blending theory – what is it?

Blending theory is a development from cognitive metaphor theory as fi rst devised by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson and Mark Turner in the 1970s and 1980s. Taking their cue from prototype theory (Eleanor Rosch), fuzzy set theory and issues of categorization, Lakoff and his collaborators devel-oped a theory of language as intrinsically metaphorical. Rather than seeing metaphor as an ornament or as a supplement to the literal, these linguists recognized that almost all our language is ultimately metaphoric (“ubiqui-tous” and “indispensable”) since we can only talk about abstract entities or relations by categorizing them in terms of what we intimately know: our bodies and extensions of our bodies in immediate physical reality (Semino


and Steen 2008: 235). Thus, expressions like He blew up conceptualize anger as a boiling liquid that blows the lid (mind is a container) and connect with experiences of perspiration and reddening foreheads. Like-wise, the use of prepositions like English on in I met him on the train to Newcastle can be explained by reference to the visual image of dots on lines, which is applied to the train as a long object moving along the line of the train tracks. Other languages, like German, conceptualize the same scenario in terms of a container frame (referring to the train carriage or compartment), and therefore use in to relate passengers and trains.

In particular, cognitive linguistics started to see these all-pervasive met-aphors as cognitively grounded, as refl ecting the way in which we think, thereby initiating a shift from earlier metaphor theories that saw metaphor as a facet of speech, as a rhetorical ploy, as ornamental trimming added to the (literal) meaning or, worse, deliberately falsifying what is the case (metaphor as untruthful proposition). Like deconstructivist literary criti-cism (de Man 1979 [1973], 1978; Derrida 1982), cognitive metaphor theo-rists assert that the supposedly literal is metaphoric, or that there is (al-most) no such thing as a literal sentence.

In the wake of Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (1980), the projection of one concept on another emerged as an important aspect of metaphor creation. Rather than positing similarities on the basis of a com-mon ground, a common denominator, cognitive metaphor theory empha-sized that one area of experience was seen in the framework of another, and that meant that one frame was imposed on another. Cognitive meta-phor theory therefore introduced a new terminology in which there is pro-jection of a source domain onto the target domain. This terminology sup-planted that of I. A. Richards and others, such as vehicle and tenor, which looked at metaphor from the reader’s or listener’s perspective. Encounter-ing a seemingly illogical word in a sentence, one reinterpreted (or ‘natural-ized’) it by resorting to a metaphorical reading that, on the basis of the actual referent (tenor) deduced from the context, tried to explain the de-parture from literal meaning by fi nding a common ground between the tenor (referent) and the vehicle (metaphor expression).2

Thus, in the standard example sentence “Achilles is a lion”, the connec-tion between the tenor (Achilles) and the vehicle (lion) is variously conjec-tured to be courage or ferocity, or maybe dignity, a royal behavior, a fear-inspiring aspect or cruelty and carnivorous voracity. One notes how the ‘meaning’ of the metaphor cannot be easily pinned down, while in the new terminology, the meaning does not need to be spelled out since it is left open – the source domain ‘lion’ is projected on the target, the hero Achil-les, and what the result of this projection will be remains negotiable. Simi-larly, in Robert Burns’s famous poem “A Red, Red Rose” (1794),

8 Monika Fludernik

My love is like a red, red rose That’s newly sprung in June:My love is like the melody That’s sweetly played in tune. (Gardner 1975: 491)

the beloved (tenor) is fi gured fi rst in terms of a rose (because she is sweet-smelling? or because of her rosy cheeks and red lips?) and later as a melo-dy (this vehicle seems to target her beautiful voice) when one applies I.A. Richards’s terminology. The cognitive metaphor model, by contrast, sees the beloved woman fi rst as a rose and then as a melody, without needing to stipulate a common ground, thus endorsing the wide range of interpreta-tive options.

The advantages of the cognitive metaphor approach are particularly striking when one turns to metaphors that are lexicalized as verbs or adjec-tives rather than as nouns, or that relate to more complex and especially mixed metaphors. In the two lines from Wordsworth and Hopkins cited below, it is extremely diffi cult to apply Richards’s tenor and vehicle model. In This city now doth like a garment wear / The beauty of the morning, the metaphor vehicles wear and beauty anthropomorphize the city and the morning, yet morning cannot be the tenor; the literal expression “is shrouded in”, itself a metaphor, and “glow of sunlight” correspond to the tenors, but this explanation fails to clarify the syntax of the sentence.3 When one uses Richards’s model, it is more convincing to see garment and beauty as the key terms, dispensing with wear, and to rewrite the line as ‘The beauty of the morning is a garment of the city’. Yet the relation of

Figure 1. Projection of source domain on target domain


city to morning in the formula remains off limits (is the morning to its beauty what the garment is to the city?), and the anthropomorphic frame of the metaphor then disappears from view. The same is true of Hopkins’s line cited below. Like the example from “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802”, the fi nal two lines from Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur”,

Because the Holy Ghost over the bentWorld broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

immediately clear to the reader, become quite unwieldy when they have to be explicated in the frame of vehicle, tenor and common ground because the recognizable equation of the Holy Ghost with a dove is lexicalized in verbal shape (broods) and metonymically conjoined with warm breast and bright wings. If these are taken to be the vehicle, the question which parts of the Holy Spirit correspond to breast and wings causes quite insoluble problems; yet it is only through these metonyms that the vehicle dove can be intuited.

All of these issues are happily avoided by the cognitive metaphormodel, which reanalyzes the two passages as projections, as shown in Fig-ure 2.

What the original model by Lakoff, Johnson and Turner did not yet fully bring out was how the projection of analogies works in a way that allows one to read the metaphor as a semantically enriched construct. How does the resultant semiotic unit (to be called a blend) create new meanings not

Figure 2. Cognitive metaphor analysis of Wordsworth and Hopkins

10 Monika Fludernik

contained in either the source or the target domains? Blending theory, de-veloped by Gilles Fauconnier (1994, 1997) in collaboration with Mark Turner (Fauconnier and Turner 1998, 1999, 2002, 2008; see also Turner 1996, 2007, 2008), is able to improve on the shortcomings of classical cognitive metaphor theory and additionally posits some much more funda-mental theses about the human mind.

As depicted in Figure 3, a blend – more precisely, what Fauconnier and Turner call a single-scope blend – introduces the notion of a generic space (the circle on top) which determines the structure of the analogies between source and target domains. As the dotted lines indicate, in the blend of a cartoon in which the presidential candidates Obama and McCain are shown in cowboy gear shooting at one another with pistols, the campaign for the presidency – conducted in a battle of words – is reconfi gured as a battle of weapons. The two cowboys in the picture correspond to the real-life gen-tlemen in suits; the pistol duel corresponds to verbal competition, for in-stance in a TV debate; and in the blend the same constellation of two men exchanging hits emerges from a blended cowboy Obama facing cowboy McCain with their pistols aimed at one another. The source domain is thus preserved in the paraphernalia of the Wild West scenario, whereas the tar-get domain appears in the faces of the cowboys, which are recognizable caricatures of the two political antagonists. By means of the blend, some additional semantic surplus is introduced, hinting at the aggressive tenden-cy of the polemics and perhaps also at McCain’s ‘Western’ background (as senator from Arizona). The blend slyly alludes to the genre of the Western,

Figure 3. Obama and McCain as two cowboys duelling with pistols – metaphor as single-scope network


in which cowboys shoot Indians or members of criminal gangs, thus put-ting Obama into these two roles. The cartoon could therefore be read con-servatively as an implied denigration of Obama (qua villain cowboy or In-dian), or ironically and liberally as a criticism of McCain’s subconsciously racist attitude towards his antagonist.

Another very common example of a single-scope blend is the sentence My surgeon is a butcher (Grady et al. 1999: 103106; Crisp 2003: 110). In this blend, the source domain of the butcher is projected onto the target domain of the surgeon. In order to make sense of the projection, a generic space is activated which focuses on a person wielding an instrument on an immovable corpse-like object. In this scenario, the butcher’s cleaver be-gins to be analogized with the surgeon’s scalpel, and the slab of pork, beef or lamb metamorphoses into the anaesthetized patient on the operating table.

In the blend, the surgeon-as-butcher produces additional meaning by im-plicitly converting the senseless patient into a corpse (suggesting that the surgeon hacks into the patient as if s/he were a slab of meat, or even hint-ing that the surgeon may end up turning the patient into a corpse because he lacks the requisite delicacy and skill for treating humans). These addi-tional proliferations of meaning arising from the source domain are in fact unlimited: the surgeon in the blend could also be read as cruel, ineffi cient, heartless, or even murderous – all associations that may be activated in different contexts of use. Brandt and Brandt (2005: 119) propose an addi-tional meaning space and relevance space for blends, which solves some of

Figure 4. My surgeon is a butcher

12 Monika Fludernik

the problems that arise from the double status of the blend in Fauconnier and Turner’s model (where it is both a surface structure expression and an imaginative mental entity).

What this model achieves is an explanation of the fairly obvious analo-gies that the metaphor gives rise to, as well as providing for the additional surplus meanings which shade off into individually and contextually-motivated suggestions that can no longer claim general validity.

In more recent work, Fauconnier and Turner have moved on to discuss what they call double-scope networks. In these blends two input-spaces create a new meaning structure that can no longer be reduced to a single-direction projection from source to target domain:

One of Turner’s examples (Turner 2007: 220) for double-scope blending is the mythological fi gure of the so-called selkie, a seal which moves out of the water to live on land in the shape of a human being. This fi gure arises from the blending of two input spaces, that of the seal (which lives in the water and has fur) and that of the human woman, who lives on land and wears clothes. The blend is a seal-turned-human who/which has shed its fur to become human, thus analogizing seal fur and human clothes. With-out the fur, the selkie can no longer swim and thus cannot escape into the water. In order to become a seal again, it puts on its seal skin. In many tales, the selkie has her pelt stolen by her lover or husband and is thus forced to stay human, losing all her magic power.

Figure 5. Double-scope blending


3. Applications of blending theory to literature

Before producing my own application of blending theory to natural narra-tology, I would like to briefl y sketch the bewildering range of uses that blending theory has been put to in literary studies so far. The blending model has been used for both more theoretical and more practical pur-poses, in the analysis of genre as well as the interpretation of particular poems, plays and narratives, as well as in the elucidation of one single metaphor in its specifi c contexts.

Perhaps the most immediately useful of all the articles that I have read is Freeman’s “Cognitive Mapping in Literary Analysis” (2002), which combines some theoretical propositions with numerous illustrations from the poetry of Emily Dickinson. The article has the additional advantage of demonstrating by means of responses to a discussion group list exactly how different readings of the same lines of poetry arise. Not only does Freeman provide a valuable introduction to the cognitive mapping of attri-butes, relations and systems (in reference to Holyoak and Thagard 1995); she also shows how different readers use different mappings in their analy-ses of the same text and therefore arrive at different readings of the same poem. Freeman has applied blending in numerous other articles on poetry (e.g. 1995, 2000).

Applications to drama, as Semino and Steen note, have been mostly to the works of Shakespeare, and Donald Freeman’s essays are particularly to be noted in this area (Semino and Steen 2008: 240241; D. Freeman 1995, 1999). In fact, the application is to specifi c metaphors and blends in the

Figure 6. Turner’s example of Selkie (werewolf-like seal)

14 Monika Fludernik

dialogue of Shakespeare’s plays. No application exists to my knowledge that treats more complex dramatic issues such as visual blends, past/present blends in dream plays, or spatial blends in fantasy. (The same goes for fi lm.)

Much interesting work has, however, been done concerning narrative. Semino and Steen correctly note some excellent applications of metaphor analysis in literary narratives, such as Popova’s work (2002, 2003). The elucidation of metaphor in a text, whether that text is a poem, play, short story or novel, perhaps properly belongs to what Semino and Culpeper call “cognitive stylistics” (2002).

More interesting from a methodological perspective are applications of blending theory to other aspects of narrative or poetry. I would particularly like to draw attention to Craig Hamilton’s essay on personifi cation (2002), in which the function of personifi cation in the poems of Auden is ana-lyzed. Another exciting piece of criticism is Barbara Dancygier’s essay on Jonathan Raban’s travel narratives (2005), which outlines a large number of blending (compression) and decompression strategies in Raban’s work. Although the link between blending and viewpoint proposed in the title of that paper may not be fully convincing from a narratological perspective on point of view, it hints at a possible extension of blending theory to nar-ratological issues such as focalization and analepsis.

A particularly innovative paper is Sinding’s application of blending the-ory to Joyce’s Ulysses (Sinding 2005). Sinding discusses the drama-in-novel blend of the “Circe” chapter of Ulysses and focuses on the novel’s hallucination techniques, which result in the dream-like or fantastic ele-ments of that chapter. He uses three input frames and the structure of transformations (Circe transforms men into swine) as generic space (611). This research opens a number of interesting prospects for the analysis of science fi ction and fantasy literature (one could very fruitfully apply it to the Harry Potter books, for instance).

4. ‘Natural’ narratology and blending theory

How can one apply blending theory within narratology? During a lecture by Mark Turner in Aarhus at the ESSE conference in 2008, I was struck by the idea that blending could be used to explain a particular process that I had described in Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996). In that book I had developed a model of four levels of cognitively-based prototypes to which narrative resorts in the process of reception and production (1996: 4345). Level I was the level of basic cognitive concepts or frames such as goal or intention, which we access in order to explain everyday hu-


man reality. (It corresponds to Ricoeur’s Mimesis I.) Level II concerns the narrative scenarios which I had described as the narrative frames of tell-ing, viewing, experiencing, reflecting and acting. Level III, the one relevant here, corresponds to the generic prototypes that determine our reading frames in literature (such as the action fi lm, the bildungsroman, etc.). On Level III one would also place concepts such as that of the au-thorial narrator and unreliable narration. Level IV was the level of natural-ization on which readers actively interpret the text in hand as a narrative text by resorting to the frames from the other three levels.

The big question asked in some reviews of Towards a ‘Natural’ Narra-tology was how new frames arise if everything is cognitively based.4 Blending theory provides some very good answers to this question.

My proposal is, in short, to use blending theory as an explanation for how we are able to understand naturally impossible storytelling scenarios, and to account for why they are so easily accommodated by readers once the original oddity has worn off through repeated exposure to the new form. My basic contention is that non-natural storytelling frames arise from the blending of previously familiar natural or naturalized storytelling scenarios. This, I maintain, makes the resultant blend cognitively readable and can result in its eventual naturalization as a new prototype once the new form has been reused suffi ciently often to become a recognizable frame, a frame to which the reader then resorts subconsciously when en-countering a new text or narrative.

As Figure 7 illustrates, one can, for instance, explain omniscient nar-rative as a metaphoric transfer of godly powers to the textual narrator

Figure 7. Omniscient narrator as metaphor

16 Monika Fludernik

persona. Omniscience is a metaphor (narrator is god-like) which en-tails a number of parallels between divinity and the narratorial position. Thus the narrator, like God, seems to invent or create the fi ctional world and rules or watches over it; in addition, the narrator can therefore look into characters’ minds just as God can look into humans’ souls. Other as-pects of divinity of course do not transfer to the narrator, such as moral strictures, the Last Judgment or punishment of sinners in Hell. The proto-typical image of God used in this metaphor is that of God as father, watch-ing over humans and monitoring them.

One could therefore argue that the familiar template of the omniscient narrator frame relies on a blend in which the human narrator persona qua ‘his’ role of creator acquires superhuman or divine abilities. Note, though, that the narrator does not regularly claim to have created the tale, even if some authorial narrators like Diderot’s in Jacques le fataliste (fi rst pub-lished 1796) do just that. Because God is the creator (and, in some ver-sions of Christianity, predestines the fate of humanity), He also knows everything, and, in popular lore, can ‘look into people’s souls’. As a con-sequence, the narrator-as-God comes to stand in a position of divine knowledge and can see into characters’ minds.

I would like to emphasize that this metaphor – like all metaphors – is of course literally wrong. The knowledge of the narrator is equivalent to the knowledge of evangelists rather than that of God himself. Evangelists seem to know a good deal more than they humanly could, and their ac-count of Jesus’ life, passion and ascension corresponds in large measure to an omniscient narrative. It is the Old Testament books, which have suppos-edly been dictated to their writers by God, and in which God is the narra-tor although He talks about Himself in the third person, that refl ect the situation of the author of fi ction. Note, though, that the narrator in an au-thorial novel does not write about its creator; that indeed would be meta-lepsis. To say that omniscient narrative models itself on a blend is not to say that this is what omniscient narrative is really like; it merely explains the folk-psychological manner in which the desire for complete knowledge acts itself out in metaphoric transfer.5

A different model to explain the rise of omniscience might be by way of a double-scope network, as delineated in Figure 8.

In this blend, the transfer occurs through the generic frame of people having minds and narrators having insight into their own minds. The blend would grant that privilege to the narrator by confl ating his own mental world with that of the characters. This is a double-scope blend since one can also map out the transfer from the side of the fi ctional world, looking at characters of fi ctional narrative and giving them readable minds by pro-jecting their story onto narrators’ ability to read (their own) mind. Whereas


the fi rst single-scope blend addresses our intuitions about the result of the blend and explains the term omniscient narrator, the double-scope net-work does more to explain the structure of desire in the blend. The reader wants to have his cake and eat it; s/he wants to have a story and to know what the characters are thinking – a fantasy that the omniscient narrator blend allows them to enjoy.

One can now go over a number of different non-naturally occurring story-telling situations and suggest how they arise from blends. Figure 9, for instance, tries to show how epistolary fi ction emerges from a correspon-dence in letters blended with a love story (not the topic of a normal ex-change of letters). Figure 10 maps the odd situation of ‘dying in the fi rst person’ (Stanzel 1984: 229232) by blending omniscience (describing the death experience of a character) with an inside view of the narrator’s pass-ing away. In Figure 11, I try to sketch the blend on which second-person narrative relies when it models itself on an instruction manual or guide book format. This is not the only way in which to explain second-person fi ction.6 Other variants of second-person fi ction use the format of episto-lary exchange (e.g., Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, 1988) and still others op-erate on the basis of self-address, or simply on implicit reader-address merged with the reader’s immersion in the consciousness of a fi ctional per-sona (see Fludernik 1994a, 1994c, and forthcoming). This points the way towards the realization that new storytelling scenarios may rely on a com-bination of different blends until a new generic prototype has become con-ventionalized (cf. Fludernik 2003a).

Figure 8. Omniscient narrator as double-scope network

18 Monika Fludernik

Finally Figure 12 tries to illustrate the blend on which fi rst-person omni-science relies. This form, recently introduced to the readers of Narrative by Rüdiger Heinze (2008), has been around for some time, certainly since Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), and is currently fl ourishing, for instance in Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex (2002). Figure 12 can be read as a single or double-scope network. In the case of a single projection from source to target domain, omniscient narration would be imposed on the target fi rst-person narrative. This, in fact, makes most sense. However, one could conceivably treat fi rst-person omniscience as a case of double-

Figure 9. Epistolary fi ction

Figure 10. Dying in the fi rst person (Stanzel 1984)


scope blending in which fi rst-person narrative is also a source domain, yielding Figure 12.

Having introduced the idea of blending to map out unfamiliar story-telling scenarios, let me address some of the problems arising from this approach.7 One may distinguish between two types of problems. On the one hand, there are issues raised by blending theory itself; on the other hand, its application to narratology and to the cognitive frames of story-telling needs to be analyzed in more detail. Since the two issues relate to one another, let me start with the fi rst.

Figure 11. Second-person fi ction

Figure 12. First-person omniscient narrative as double-scope network

20 Monika Fludernik

Blending theory’s main problems clearly arise from the claims that it refl ects mental processes that distinguish human cognition from that of animals and that determine much of our creative thinking.8 Since I am not a cognitive scientist and do not do experiments on brain functions, these problems are not relevant to me here. As with the Freudian model of the psyche, which has proved to be extremely fertile for literary analy-sis though psychoanalysts today apparently fi nd it no longer useful, blend-ing theory may be problematic from the standpoint of the cognitive sci-ences, but that in no way detracts from its attractiveness as an explicatory model in the humanities. On the other hand, should blending theory turn out to be a scientifi cally good explanation of brain function, such ad-ditional authority would tend to boost the use of the theory in literary practice.

My main reservations with the model as far as I am able to understand it concern the assumption of a generic frame in double-scope blending. Whereas it seemed very easy to fi nd a generic frame for single-scope blends, the generation of one for double-scope blends was often very ten-tative, and I found it very diffi cult to see any common structure of analo-gies, at least in the extensive format used in blending theory.

This immediately links to the problem with the blending model in its application to storytelling scenarios such as I have attempted it. As was severally noted in the discussions after my presentation of the paper,9 I was reconstructing the blend from the bottom upwards. What I started out from was the result, the blend, e.g. second-person narrative, and the trick was to come up with two input spaces and a generic space that would de-scribe the relevant mappings. This situation is very different from the ex-ample of a textual metaphor, in which at least the source domain is clearly articulated in the language. Thus, in My surgeon is a butcher, the source and target domains are given and allow a fairly good reconstruction of the generic frame. Most important of all, the blend is what we deduce from the two domains by way of interpretation. The operation therefore works top downwards.

Starting with the fi gure of the selkie and even more clearly in my appli-cations to storytelling situations, the direction is reversed since one starts out from the blend and works one’s way up to the generic frame, venturing on the thin ice of speculation. Although I believe that the model does make sense, it has to be admitted that the input spaces are obviously extrapola-tions from the results and cannot in any way assume a validity that is borne out by external evidence. In short, although blending theory allows me to map out the possible mechanism of naturalization, it does not lend any scientifi c authority to the process. In fact, even if blending became a standard of cognitive science and had been proved to exist in experiments,


this would not entirely resolve the problem with speculative extrapolation, since on the level that I am dealing with there could not be any experimen-tal proof, or, if there could, I am not aware of it since I lack the relevant background in cognitive science.

Having expanded on the various problems raised by the application, it has to be noted, however, that the model for a mechanism of creativity (cf. Fauconnier and Turner 1999), which is what blending theory is, does help to provide a possible explanation for the development of new non-naturally occurring storytelling scenarios within the framework of natural-ization as delineated in Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. What makes the model in Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology convincing is its reliance on the prototype of conversational narrative, from which the frames of acting, telling, viewing, experiencing and reflecting were deduced. On the assumption that blending theory will consolidate itself as an accepted aca-demic theory of the mind, the application that I have proposed might be equally convincing as a complementary piece of the jigsaw puzzle of how narrative functions.

5. Outlook

In this fi nal section I would like to indicate what I believe cognitive ap-proaches to narrative could achieve in the future and what the lessons to be learned from my attempt to apply them are.

One issue that strikes me as particularly promising for the application of blending theory to narrative is free indirect discourse (FID). The mapping of narrator’s and character’s voices so often apostrophized in dual voice theories of free indirect discourse could be explained as a blend at least in the reader’s reading experience. The same is true for metalepsis. As Dancygier says in reference to Fauconnier and Turner’s example of the Debate-with-Kant blend: “When a contemporary philosopher [says] Kant disagrees with me on this, he has to construct a mental space in which he (our contemporary [ . . . ]) is sharing a spatial and temporal space with Kant [ . . . ] and is exchanging opinions with him” (2005: 101). The blend has the philosopher engage in face-to-face conversation with the dead sage. Similarly, in rhetorical metalepsis (Fludernik 2003b; Ryan 2005) and even some cases of ontological metalepsis, blending theory could be used to great effect. Thus, when Charlotte Brontë in Shirley (1849) invites read-ers to enter the fi ctional scene, she is performing a blend, literalizing a virtual scenario, in which the reader’s current situation and that of his/her immersive dipping into the fi ctional world are blended:

22 Monika Fludernik

Yet even in those days of scarcity there were curates: the precious plant was rare, but it might be found. [ . . . ] You shall see them, reader. Step into this neat garden-house on the skirts of Whinbury, walk forward into the little parlour – there they are at dinner. Allow me to introduce them to you: – Mr Donne, curate of Whin-bury; Mr Malone, curate of Briarfi eld; Mr Sweeting, curate of Nunnely. These are Mr Dunne’s lodgings, being the habitation of one John Gale, a small clothier. Mr Donne has kindly invited his brethren to regale with him. You and I will join the party, see what is to be seen, and hear what is to be heard. At present, however, they are only eating; and while they eat we will talk aside.(Shirley, i; Brontë 2006: 6)

A subject that has attracted particular attention in blending study is the genre of allegory (Crisp 2001, 2008; Sinding 2002b). However, both au-thors use the term allegory in a rather loose sense. Crisp illustrates al-legory on the example of Blake’s “A Poison Tree”, where its distinction from a symbol may be debatable; Sinding analyzes Kafka’s Castle, a narrative whose identifi cation as an allegory he himself problematizes. Blending and allegory do, however, clearly share a number of interesting features. Thus, allegory acquires its meanings through the extended meta-phor of personifi cation and the application of personhood parameters to abstract concepts. Death, as in Everyman, not only arrives to grab his vic-tim, he sets his prey on a journey of religious self-analysis and self-criticism, which further involves Everyman’s interaction with characters like Faithful or Good Dedes. The theological pattern of sin, repentance and remission of sins is thereby enacted allegorically in the fi ctional world of the soul, which corresponds to a blend of our real world (in which peo-ple talk and walk from one place to another) with the requirements of soul-searching. That the individual abstracta as characters act out their inherent qualities makes this blend particularly attractive: Fellowship is only interested in good fellowship and does not wish to take on any re-sponsibilities; Goodes (possessions) likewise goes his own way and does not want to take a trip to the other world; Beaute, Dyscrecyon and Strength fail to keep up their support; whereas Knowledge and Good Dedes accompany Everyman to the door of Death. As with many other al-legories, most typically in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), the life is a journey cognitive metaphor is combined with personifi cation to pro-duce allegory.

There is, therefore, much work still to do, not only in extending the cog-nitive approach to further literary pastures, but especially to ponder more generally the theoretical bases for such applications within literary theory and within cognitive linguistics and cognitive narratology.

University of Freiburg


Notes

Correspondence address: monika.fl [email protected]. This essay is based on a paper given at a conference on “Unnatural Narratives” held at

the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies in November 2008.2. I recognize that this depiction of Richards and pre-Lakoffi an metaphor theory is ex-

tremely simplifi ed and in a proper history of metaphor study would need to be deepened and modifi ed extensively, taking account of the very variegated approaches represented, for instance, in Ortony (1979).

3. Steen (1999) proposes the terms metaphor focus, metaphor frame and metaphor idea to accommodate some of these problems.

4. A fi rst theoretical answer was given in Fludernik (2003a). See also Gibbs (1999: 162), who illustrates how metaphors can be culturally infl ected and yet cognitively universal in the way they operate.

5. This sentence replies to Meir Sternberg, the critic of ‘package deals’, who noted at the Narrative Conference in Birmingham in June 2009 that the blending model of omniscient narration suggested that this is what omniscience amounts to, an illegitimate package deal (Sternberg 2007, 2009).

6. On second-person fi ction see Richardson (1991), Margolin (1994) and Fludernik (1994a, 1994b).

7. For a very balanced critical account see Jackson (2002).8. Gibbs (2001) argues that “it remains unclear exactly what kinds of empirical data can

falsify it [blending theory]” (2001: 323). A good example of the problems spawned by the cognitive metaphors construed by cognitive metaphor theoreticians is provided by Grady et al. (1999: 109) when they cite a series of metaphorical mappings underlying the ship of state metaphor that includes the reasonable courses of action are paths as well as the rather odd (because specifi c) circumstances are weather. For a criticism of cognitive metaphor theory, see Haser (2005).

9. After the initial Freiburg conference, for which the paper was written, the model was presented in different thematic contexts at three further conferences, the fi rst ENN Con-ference in Hamburg in January 2009; the “Contemporary Narratology” Conference of the ISSN in Birmingham, UK, in June, 2009; and the “Minds and Narrative” Conference in Leuven, Belgium, also in June 2009.

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