Reading in the Blend: Collaborative Conceptual Blending in the Silent Traveller Narratives

In The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities, cognitive scientists Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner argue that a single cognitive operation may underlie "diverse human accomplishments," be "responsible for the origins of language, art, religion, science, and other singular human feats," and be "as indispensable for basic everyday thought as it is for artistic and scientific abilities" (vi).¹ Beginning with the premise that the mind is made up of interconnected conceptual domains or mental spaces, Fauconnier and Turner posit that this fundamental cognitive operation is a process of domain mapping best understood as "conceptual blending."² In conceptual blending, elements and vital relations from two or more input domains combine in a typically unconscious process to form a new mental space with a meaning that emerges from the blend—hence termed "emergent meaning"—instead of inhering in the inputs. One of Fauconnier and Turner's first examples, chosen because it makes blending "hard to miss," blends a skiing scenario and a restaurant scenario, leading to emergent bodily movement: a ski instructor teaches a novice how to ski by getting him to imagine he is a waiter carrying a tray to a table (xi, 21–22). "The point," they argue, "is the integration of motion," not the projection of inferences from the domain of waiting on tables onto the domain of skiing, as in analogical reasoning (22, my emphasis). They emphasize the fact that this "integration of motion" is the emergent meaning generated by conceptual blending: "[t]he instructor is not suggesting that a good skier moves 'just like' a competent waiter. It's only within the blend—when the novice tries to carry the tray mentally while skiing physically—that the intended structure (the improved bodily position) emerges" (21).

The skiing waiter is obviously an example of a blend activated consciously, through the suggestion of the ski instructor, but Fauconnier and Turner go on to offer many other examples of generally unconscious blends. Every time we use computers, for instance, we blend the "technological device" and "our mental conception of the work we do on a real desktop," such as "lifting, moving, and opening" (23). Yet once we have mastered the mechanics of operating computers we perform this blend unconsciously. In other words, "our conscious apprehension is limited to the blend" (83) rather than extended to the inputs of the blend and the stages by which they combine to generate emergent meaning. The ability to live in the blend is crucial to cognitive efficiency and is therefore an important cognitive adaptation for survival: Fauconnier and Turner argue that "[i]n the face of . . . [basic environmental] threats, global and immediate insight is the priority, and there is little survival value in checking step by step how that global insight is achieved. Thus we evolved to be conscious of only the blend" (84).

While Fauconnier and Turner support their theory of living in the blend with examples drawn from a range of human endeavours, the chief example with which this essay is concerned is "the writing and reading blending network," which uses "distinctive marks on material substances" "combined with a general mapping, evolved by culture, for connecting equivalence classes of sounds to equivalence classes of marks" (211). In other words, we read as we live—in the blend, typically without being conscious that when we read a letter, for example, we are performing elaborate conceptual blends (of "someone talking" and "some medium with marks") (211). This essay examines in more detail the cognitive operations involved in reading, and specifically in reading narrative, focusing on our collaborative cognitive engagements with representations of conceptual blends in characters' or narrators' thought processes. I theorize our cognitive operations when engaging with character or narrator blends as a "higher-level" form of reading in the blend. By "higher level," I simply mean that these cognitive operations (unlike the vast majority of the mind's blends) are capable of being brought to and controlled by our conscious awareness. The following discussion identifies various possible degrees of consciousness of this form of reading in the...