O Lord… Your years neither go nor come, but our years pass and others come after them, so that they all may come in their turn. Your years are completely present to you all at once, because they are at a permanent standstill Your years are one day, yet your day does not come daily but is always today, because your today does not give place to any tomorrow nor does it take the place of any yesterday. Your today is eternity.
Augustine, Confessions
A PERSON has a single life, by which I mean not that we live only once, true as that is, but that a human being—a mind in a brain in a body—leads a singular rather than a general existence. A God’s-eye view is a general view—it can belong only to a being whose existence is without limit or locale. Since God’s eye is everywhere, eternal, and all-seeing, it is undifferentiated. To the eye of God, there would not be alternative ways of seeing, but only seeing pure and absolute and permanent. A human being does not have a God’s-eye view. A human being has always only a single view, which is always local. This is so unacceptable as to have been sufficient reason for the invention of God.
It is astonishing that we forget so easily that we have only a single, local view. What we see of an event may look entirely unlike what a person on the other side of the event may see or entirely unlike what we ourselves actually do see when we walk to the other side, but we imagine that these views from either side are nonetheless views of the same story, despite the manifest differences in perceptions. This is evidence of our considerable mental capacity to integrate fragmentary information, to blend it into one mental construction.
Our sensory apparatus is located in space. We necessarily recognize a small spatial story from a particular spatial location. We can direct our sensory apparatus, and we can move our body so that our sensory apparatus is in a different location. To recognize a small spatial story—a baby shaking a rattle—is always to do so with a single focus and from a single viewpoint.
There is a basic human story here—the story of a person recognizing a story. This basic human story shows us a new aspect of parable. In this general story, there is a recognizing agent who has a single focus and a single viewpoint. Let us consider some of the structure of this story. Suppose we see a baby shaking a rattle. Sequentially, we can focus on the smile, the nose, the jerky movement of the shoulder, the frozen elbow, the hand, the rattle. Our focus changes, but we feel that, regardless, we continue to look at the same story: The child is playing with the rattle. We are able to unify all of these perceptions, all of these different foci. The mental spaces corresponding to the different foci will all have a child, a ratde, a rattling motion, and so on, and we connect these elements in each space to their counterparts in the other spaces. We conceive of these various spaces as all attached to a single story.
Now imagine that we walk around to the other side of the baby. Our visual experience may change substantially. It is even possible that we will see none of what we saw before, strictly speaking. Yet our new view will not seem entirely new. The space of the new viewpoint will have a baby, a shoulder, a hand, a rattle, a rattling motion, and so on, and we will connect these elements to their counterparts in the spaces of other viewpoints and other foci, allowing us to think of the different small spatial stories we see as one story, viewed from different viewpoints and with different foci.
As sensory beings, our view is always single and local because we have a single life and not a general life. As imaginative beings, we constandy construct meaning designed to transcend that singularity. We integrate over singularities. If we are on one side of a small spatial story, viewing “it,” and a friend is on the other side, viewing “it,” we can construct, mentally, a space that contains what the friend sees and connect that space to the space that contains what we see, to create an integrated space that is meant to be transcendent and unitary.
It is part of our notion of the story of someone recognizing a story with a single focus and from a single viewpoint that there are other foci and other viewpoints, and that the spaces corresponding to all the different foci and different viewpoints are connected as having the same story as their object. We expect correspondences to run across all these spaces. The general story of a person recognizing a small spatial story is, in these details, considerably more complicated than it seemed at first: There are many foci and many viewpoints, and the agent perceiving the story just happens to have this particular focus and this particular viewpoint.
As sensory beings, we are subject to obvious constraints on actually switching focus and viewpoint because to change them actually requires bodily movement. But once we have the story in imagination, we are not subject to these constraints. We can mentally focus on this part or that part, and move around, perceiving it from this angle or that. Subjects asked to draw an imagined event (a surfer wiping out on a wave, for example) from the front, the back, the side, above, below, and so on will all produce drawings with the expected regularities.
In imagination, we can construct spaces of what we take to be someone else’s focus and viewpoint. We can, for example, in imagination, take the spatial viewpoint of one of the actors in the story. Consider a story with some actors: Grandmother watches father hand mother clothes as she dresses her son; grandmother is an observer, father is an accessory agent, mother is the principal agent, and the child is the patient—in the sense that he is the object on which the action is performed, not in the sense that he is patient as it happens! In imagination, we can switch viewpoint from grandmother to father to mother to son in the story. Consider another story: Father watches mother watch the son shake a rattle. We can take the focus and viewpoint of father, mother, son, even rattle (try it). We have single lives, but in imagination, we are suddenly free of the consequent singularity.
In the literary mind, parable projects stories onto other stories. The story in which a person with a particular focus and a particular viewpoint recognizes a story is a skeletal story of spatial perception. It, too, is projected. Most notably, it is projected onto the skeletal story of perception in time. For example, if we are in the second day of our three-day trip, we can “focus” on yesterday from the “viewpoint” of today, or “focus” on tomorrow from the “viewpoint” of today. We can do much more: Suppose our companion says, as we are traveling, “Imagine it’s the end of the trip; how do you feel?” and we respond, “I feel sleepy. I had plenty of energy at the beginning of the trip, but now I am exhausted.” Of course, the person saying this does not at the moment of speaking want to go to sleep. Instead, he is taking as his “viewpoint” in time the end of the trip and as his “focus” in time first the end of the trip (“I feel sleepy”), then the beginning of the trip (“I had plenty of energy”), and then the end of the trip again (“now I am exhausted”). He could, however, have said, “I will feel sleepy.” In that case, his “viewpoint” in time is the moment of speaking (during the second day of the trip) and his “focus” in time is the end of the trip.
Projecting the story of perception in space (with spatial focus and spatial viewpoint) onto the story of perception in time gives us temporal focus and temporal viewpoint. Someone recognizing a story in time has, by means of this projection, a particular temporal focus and a particular temporal viewpoint.
We saw above that it is part of our notion of the story of someone recognizing a story with a single spatial focus and from a single spatial viewpoint that there are other foci and viewpoints, and that we connect the spaces that correspond to the different foci and viewpoints as all having the same story as their object. The same is true of perceiving a story with a single temporal focus and from a single temporal viewpoint. There are other temporal foci and temporal viewpoints; we connect the spaces that correspond to the different foci and viewpoints as all having the same story as their object. For example, the person “viewing” the story of his three-day trip, who shifts his temporal focus from yesterday to tomorrow, has shifted mental spaces, but he is still “viewing” the same story from those different spaces.
All stories take place in time. Counterfactual stories, stories about heaven before time was invented, imagined stories, stories about repetitive habitual events—even these stories involve temporal sequence. Although we can only perceive a story from a unique moment in time, namely the present, once that story is in imagination, we can understand different temporal moments of the story as if they belong to different temporal “spaces.” Spaces are defined relative to spatial focus and spatial viewpoint; by projection, spaces are defined relative to temporal focus and temporal viewpoint. As we can focus on this or that spatial component of the story, so, by projection, we can “focus” on this or that temporal component of the story. Spatially, we may focus on the rattle, the eyes, the hand. Temporally, we may “focus” on the moment the baby picked the ratde up, the temporal period of rattling, or the moment the baby dropped the rattle. As we can view a story from this or that spatial viewpoint, so, by projection, we can “view” a story from this or that temporal “viewpoint.” We may imagine the small spatial story of the baby’s shaking the rattle from the viewpoint of the future of the story (“The baby shook the rattle”), from the viewpoint of the present of the story (“The baby is shaking the rattle”), or from the viewpoint of the past of the story (“The baby will shake the rattle”).
By projecting the basic abstract story of spatial perceiving onto the basic abstract story of temporal perceiving, we understand ourselves as able to focus on one or another temporal space from one or another temporal “location” or “viewpoint.” We can “focus” on the temporal space of “yesterday” from the viewpoint of “today”: “I did it yesterday.” We can “focus” on the temporal space of 1066 from the temporal “viewpoint” of 1066: “It’s raining as William lands on English shores.” We can “focus” on the temporal space of the day after tomorrow from the temporal space of today, and in the space of the day after tomorrow, there can be someone who is focusing on his yesterday (our tomorrow) from the viewpoint of our day after tomorrow, as in “He will come home tomorrow night and we will ask him the following morning whether he has made the phone call, but he will say he did it as soon as he came home.” The complexities of this everyday competence in narrative imagining have been surveyed by rhetoricians and literary critics for many centuries—the body of research in literary theory on focus and viewpoint is large. Focus and viewpoint have emerged relatively recendy as fundamental topics in linguistics.
Let us take one small example of the phenomena of temporal focus and viewpoint. Proust begins A la recherche du temps perdu, “For a long time I used to go to bed early” (“Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure”). This sets up a space of narration. The temporal viewpoint at the opening of the book is from this space of narration. This opening sentence also sets up a space of habitually going to bed early, this space is the temporal focus. The temporal viewpoint, in the space of narration, lies in the future of the temporal focus—the space of habitually going to bed early. From the temporal viewpoint of the space of narration, the narrator begins to describe various phenomena of memory and dreaming that belong to the space of temporal focus, like the following:
Then the memory of a new position would recur, and the wall would slide away in another direction—I was in my room at Mme de Saint-Loup’s, in the country: Good Heavens, it is at least ten o’clock, they must have finished dinner! I must have overslept myself in the little nap that I always take when I come in from my walk with Mme de Saint-Loup, before dressing for the evening. For many years have now passed since Combray when, upon our tardiest homecomings, I saw the glowing reflections of the sunset on the panes of my bedroom window.
Puis renaissait le souvenir d’une nouvelle attitude: le mur filait dans une autre direction: j’étais dans ma chambre chez Mme de Saint-Loup, à la campagne; mon Dieu! il est au moins dix heures, on doit avoir fini de diner! J’aurai trop prolongé la sieste queje fais tous les soirs en rentrant de ma promenade avec Mme de Saint-Loup, avant d’endosser mon habit. Car bien des années ont passé depuis Combray, où, dans nos retours les plus tardifs, c’étaient les reflets rouges du couchant que je voyais sur le vitrage de ma fenêtre.
In the beginning of this passage, the temporal viewpoint is the space of narration. The temporal focus is the general habitual space of nightly perception and dreaming. The temporal focus lies in the past of the temporal viewpoint. At the phrase “I was in my room,” the temporal viewpoint remains in the space of narration, but the temporal focus shifts to the more local temporal space of the dreamer experiencing the particular dream of being in his room at Mme de Saint-Loup’s. This more local temporal space is a specific space that is an instance of the general habitual space of nightly perception and dreaming. At “Good Heavens!” there is a double shift. Temporal viewpoint and temporal focus both shift to the space of the dream itself. At the phrase “they must have finished dinner,” temporal viewpoint is inside the dream as the dreamer (who, in this space, does not know he is dreaming) uses narrative imagination to make sense of his immediately relevant past. It is important to see that it would have been entirely possible for the mental viewpoint to be the dreamer’s while the temporal viewpoint lay with his counterpart in a different and later temporal space, as in “I concluded that they had finished dinner and that I had overslept.” At “they must have finished dinner; I must have overslept myself,” the temporal viewpoint is the moment of reaching these conclusions, but the temporal focus is the space of the events that are the subject of those conclusions (the finishing of dinner, the oversleeping of the appropriate moment to awaken), which the dreamer takes to lie temporally in his immediately relevant past. He marks his knowledge explicitly as resulting from his mental reasoning by saying “They must have finished dinner” rather than “They have finished dinner,” and “I must have overslept” rather than “I have overslept.” At “in the little nap that I always take,” the temporal viewpoint and the temporal focus both float up to the temporal habitual space we might call “life at Mme de Saint-Loup’s, in the country: in its function as dreamed inclusive background of the specific dreamed event of waking up in the room at Mme de Saint-Loup’s. At “For many years have now passed,” the temporal viewpoint remains inside that temporal space of “life at Mme de Saint-Loup’s, in the country,” but the temporal focus now shifts to the temporal space we might call “life at Combray,” which lies “many years” in the past of the temporal viewpoint. Needless to say, by the end of the passage, temporal viewpoint and temporal focus are both extremely far from the space of narration.
Proust’s report is distributed over different temporal spaces. Temporal viewpoint and focus can shift variously over such spaces. As they shift in this manner, we maintain an account of how each of these temporal spaces connects to the particular distinguished temporal space we might label “the moment of narration by Proust.” The tense of the verb is an instrument for indicating temporal viewpoint and temporal focus on a story partitioned over temporal spaces. All the spaces Proust narrates lie in the past of the space of narration, but it would be a misconception to expect that his verbs would therefore have past tenses. Tense is an instrument for indicating temporal focus and viewpoint; it is to be expected that, in narrating events that lie in his past, the narrator will of course use a great range of tenses, including present tense and future tense, to indicate focus and viewpoint. The everyday mind is very good at shifting temporal focus and temporal viewpoint; this capacity leaves its mark on the structure of language and on the artifacts of literature.
Just as the everyday mind is extremely adept at coordinating different mental spaces distinguished by spatial viewpoint and focus, so it is extremely adept at coordinating different mental spaces distinguished by temporal viewpoint and focus. We have seen many times that different spaces can be connected by structure they share; in particular, we have seen that structure shared by two input spaces, contained in a generic space that applies to both of them, establishes counterpart connections between them. One kind of shared structure can be identity. We saw that the two monks in the two input spaces in the riddle of the Buddhist monk were counterparts in two ways: First, each has the role of “traveler” in the frame for traveling along a path; second, they are viewed as the identical person. Following Fauconnier, we say that identity counterparts like these in different spaces are connected by an “identity connector.” An identity connector does not imply that the counterparts are the same in every respect—the monk in one space is a day older than the monk in the other, for example—but rather that the counterparts share an identity.
Identity connections tie together spaces of different viewpoint and focus, whether spatial or temporal. This tying together of mental spaces by identity connectors—making them all spaces that concern the same story—gready reduces the amount of work that needs to be done in conceiving, imagining, or telling a story. If we think of all the mental spaces involved in the story of Shahrazad, we expect that Shahriyar in any one of them connects identically to Shahriyar in any other. When we shift viewpoint or focus to a different temporal space, we do not have to build up everything in that space explicitly. For example, in imagining the marriage of Shahrazad to Shahriyar, we do not have to build explicitly into that imagined space the vizier, the relation between the vizier and Shahrazad, the relation between King Shahriyar and the vizier, and so on. All of that flows forward through identity connectors. An event established in one space as temporally ongoing flows forward through identity connectors to the appropriate future spaces.
These identity connections are assumed rather than reported. Consequently, narrative imagining operates with a huge assumed background. It operates with an immense unstated framework of whatever goes without saying. Narration typically reports changes in causal structure, event shape, role relations, or, in general, information that is not immediately established through identity connectors. It does not “interrupt” itself to report that Shahrazad is still Shahrazad, still the vizier’s daughter, still lovely and intelligent. When a bit of information is reported that we assumed to have been provided through identity connectors, we often take it as a signal that the narrator means for that information to count as something extra; for if building that information into a new space were the narrator’s sole purpose, he would not have reported it.
We think of a story as unitary, and of various mental spaces that are defined relative to different spatial and temporal viewpoints as simply different “perspectives” on that story, naturally belonging to a whole. There are some very interesting consequences of this thinking. Consider again that something in one of these spaces can be described by giving the description that belongs to its counterpart in another space. For example, if you are in the dark and are asked what you are looking for, you may say, “The red ball.” Of course, within the spatiotemporal space of speaking, the ball cannot appear to be red because there is no light. “Red” is not a possible descriptor of the ball in this spatiotemporal space of narration. But that ball is connected, in imagination, to its counterparts in other spaces, and in those other spaces, “red” is a possible descriptor. The “red” of “red ball” spoken in darkness comes from a different mental space. When you are giving directions to someone over the telephone, you may say, “Go past the café on the right,” even though the café is not presently on your right and is not presently on the right of the person you are speaking to and is indeed not universally “on the right” but is only “on the right” from the spatial viewpoint of someone driving down the street in the direction you have indicated. You and the person receiving directions can both imagine a mental space that is constructed with a certain spatial viewpoint on the street in an imagined story—namely, the story of someone making this particular journey in this particular way—and in that mental space, the café is on the right of the journeyer. Because of identity connectors, you may later say, “We are now sitting in the café on the right.”
The use of descriptions from one space for counterparts in other spaces is subtly demonstrated in the passage from Proust:
I was in my room at Mme de Saint-Loup’s, in the country Good Heavens, it is at least ten o’clock, they must have finished dinner! I must have overslept myself in the little nap that I always take when I come in from my walk with Mme de Saint-Loup, before dressing for the evening.
The temporal viewpoint of “Good Heavens, it is at least ten o’clock” is the moment of making this observation, a punctual moment. Much of the description given from this temporal viewpoint is indeed possible for the mental space of this viewpoint: “Good Heavens, it is at least ten o’clock, they must have finished dinner! I must have overslept myself.…” But the phrase that describes his nap does not belong to the space of this temporally punctual viewpoint. It belongs instead to the larger remembered habitual temporal space of “Ufe at Mme de Saint-Loup’s, in the country,” in its function as dreamed inclusive background of the dreamed event of waking after having overslept. “The little nap that I always take when I come in from my walk with Mme de Saint-Loup, before dressing for the evening” is a description of the role nap as it exists in that remembered and dreamed habitual temporal space. The role nap lies in this habitual temporal space. The particular nap that fills that general role lies in the temporal space of having these thoughts in this dream of having awakened after oversleeping. The general role in one space and its particular filler in another are connected not by an identity connector but by a role connector. The descriptor Proust uses for the particular nap in a punctual temporal space can come only from its corresponding general role in the habitual temporal space.
It is natural that the literary mind should be adept at such connections across spatial and temporal spaces. A small spatial story is always recognized or executed from a single viewpoint and with a single focus. Part of our most basic cognitive capacity is to consider the spatial story as a single unit despite evident and transforming shifts of viewpoint and focus. When we see someone startle as he looks in some direction with what we assume to be some focus, we must be able to look immediately not in the same direction and not with the same focus but in the corresponding direction from our location, and with the corresponding focus from our location, so as to see what he sees, even though we do not yet know what he sees but merely hope to find out what it is. To do this, we must be able to imagine his spatial viewpoint and then calculate backward to the appropriate bearing and distance from our own spatial location. We do this instantly, as a survival capacity. The case is the same with temporal focus and viewpoint: To learn small spatial stories in a way that allows us to recognize them or execute them, we must be able to recognize the entire story from the viewpoint of any particular temporal slice or frame; we therefore require the capacity to hold various things constant, through connectors, as we switch temporal viewpoint and temporal focus from mental space to mental space.
We have seen that the basic human story of spatial viewing is projected parabolically to the story of temporal “viewing.” Of course, these two stories combine into the basic human story of spatiotemporal viewing. But this story too is projected. It is projected to the schematic story of mentalvieming. There are various kinds of mental “viewpoint” and “focus” that arise from this parabolic projection: Philosophical, political, and ideological viewpoints and foci are only some of the possibilities. Someone who inhabits a certain role in a story will have a mental “viewpoint” and “focus” appropriate to that role. In the projection of spatial stories of movement and manipulation onto stories of mental events, spatial locations and objects correspond to ideas, assertions, and thoughts. The mind “sees” or “views” ideas, assertions, and thoughts from a particular location and with a particular posture. The mind may then “move toward” an idea or “away” from a belief, “grasp” an idea or leave it “behind,” and so on. Locations can also be projected onto features or states. We may think of “true” ideas as located in one place, “false” in another, “crazy but perhaps suggestive” in another, “counter-factual” in another, “hypothetical” in another, and so on. We may say that we have been “looking in the wrong places for the ideas we need” or that we have “not been positioned properly until now to see the idea clearly.” We may “focus” on hypothetical reality from a particular political “viewpoint.” We may “focus” on the economic story of California from the “viewpoint” of a potential investor or the alternative “viewpoint” of the governor of California.
Literary narratives are extraordinarily accomplished at indicating such mental viewpoints. The first words of The Thousand and One Nights read,
It is related—but Allah alone is wise and all-knowing—that long ago there lived in the lands of India and China a Sassanid king who commanded great armies and had numerous courtiers, followers, and servants. He left two sons.…
The narrator takes certain mental viewpoints. First, there is the space of what the narrator relates. There is only one thing in this space that he is certain of— namely, people do tell the story of the thousand and one nights (“it is related”). This space is a parent space; what people in this space relate belongs to a child space. The child space is viewed by the narrator as a space of possibility only, the narrator will not vouch for its certainty (“but Allah alone is wise and all-knowing”). The parent space takes a temporal viewpoint on the child space: It is “long ago.”
Once we decide to pay attention to these parabolic viewpoints on story spaces, we see them everywhere, in almost every phrase of a literary work. One kind of mental viewpoint concerns viewing the story space as real, unreal, or indeterminate. Shahrazad imagines a predictive story in which she marries King Shahriyar; she and her father view it as a hypothetical space and therefore unreal. But it becomes, in their mental viewpoint as characters in the narrator’s story, real. The vizier imagines a predictive story space of the marriage; he and his daughter view it as hypothetical and unreal. He hopes it does not become real. In fact, part of it becomes (from his mental viewpoint as a character) real, the part it shares with Shahrazad’s hypothetical space: Shahrazad marries Shahriyar and spends the night with him. The rest of his predictive space does not become real: Shahriyar does not order her execution. Other kinds of spaces, such as spaces viewed as both counterfactual and past (“If Shahrazad had visited England”) are viewed as constrained to be permanently unreal if they are meant to correspond to conventional conceptions of reality. Of course, there are many cases of imaginative literature in which these constraints are removed, so that in an alternative universe or a reengineered past or a world in which a time machine has appeared from the future, Shahrazad does visit England, for example.
A story space that is conditional upon another story space can be viewed as counterfactual because of the condition (“If Shahrazad had visited England…”), as counterfactual because of the consequence (“If Shahrazad had not married Shahriyar, the kingdom would have fallen, but it didn’t fall, so I know she must have married him”), or as unreal but potentially real (“If Shahrazad marries Shahriyar, we will be saved”).
A mental viewpoint can be defined by a role. When we comment on the story of Shahrazad “from the viewpoint of” Shahrazad, or the vizier, or Shahriyar, or Dinarzad, we are concerned not with their spatial or temporal viewpoints, but rather with their mental viewpoints, defined relative to their roles. Imagine the spatial and temporal viewpoint and focus on the wedding night that belong to the vizier, or Shahrazad, or Shahriyar, or Dinarzad. Now imagine, by contrast, the very different mental viewpoint and focus on the wedding night that belong to the vizier, or Shahrazad, or Shahriyar, or Dinarzad as they inhabit their roles. A given character in the story may shift mental viewpoint, so that, for example, Shahrazad may try to see the story she is engaged in “from the viewpoint” of King Shahriyar.
The Thousand and One Nights explores as a continual and basic theme the influence of one’s relation to a story upon one’s mental viewpoint and focus on that story. My favorite such exploration is the tale of the barber’s fifth brother, Al-Ashar, who narrates (to himself) a daydream he imagines of his future prosperity. While he is imagining the story, he is sitting on a corner with a basket of glassware to sell. He has invested his entire patrimony in this merchandise. He imagines that he sells all his glassware and with the profit buys twice as much. In his elaborate and absorbing daydream, it does not take him long to become very rich. By the middle of the daydream, he is marrying the lovely daughter of the vizier. Throughout the entire daydream, he imagines himself not as sitting at a crossroads, but as lordly. In the daydream, the vizier bows to him, and Al-Ashar conducts himself with the greatest magnificence and generosity, like a king. His new wife wants his love, but his pride keeps him aloof:
“I will neither speak to her nor even look at her. Presently the bride’s mother will come in, kissing my head and hand, and saying: ‘My lord, look upon your slave-girl, who yearns for your favour; speak to her and heal her broken spirit.’ I will make no answer. She will throw herself down at my feet, kissing them again and again, and saying: Your slave is a beautiful virgin and she has seen no man but you. On my knees I beg you to cease humbling her, or her heart will break!’ Then the bride’s mother will rise, and, filling a cup with wine, will give it to her daughter, who will offer it to me with all submission. But I, leaning idly upon my elbow among the gold-embroidered cushions, will take no notice of her. With a trembling voice she will say: ‘I beg you, my lord, to take this cup from the hand of your slave and servant.’ But I will maintain my dignified silence. She will raise the cup to my mouth, pressing me to drink from it. Then I will wave it away with my hand, and spurn her with my foot, thus—”
So saying, Al-Ashar kicked against the basket of glassware, knocking over the contents and crashing them in fragments to the ground.
Al-Ashar narrates his daydream from the viewpoint of one who wishes to inhabit the central role of its story. But the story of Al-Ashar’s internal narration is being told by Al-Ashar’s brother, the barber, as one of the stories about his brothers that he tells in the court of the caliph, to impress the caliph with the wisdom the barber displays as an actor in each story the barber relates and also with his ability as a wise storyteller.
But, one step up in this nesting, this story of the barber’s telling stories to the caliph is being told by someone—the barber again!—at a dinner party, so that he may impress the dinner guests. He is telling a story of himself telling stories. At this dinner party, the barber is attempting to discredit the lame young man who has just told a devastating story about the barber’s garrulousness, fraud, and incompetence and has left in a huff, refusing to stay in the same room as the barber. So the barber’s role at the dinner party gives him a certain oudook on the story he is now narrating of his earlier narration.
The entire narrative space within which the barber does all his storytelling at the dinner party is being related by the tailor in the court of the king. The tailor has reason to tell a very long story, the longest story he can imagine, and he does this by finding a way to include as an embedded story the tale of what he comes to call the “exceptionally garrulous” barber who considers himself fabulously smart when in fact everyone else thinks he is a charlatan and a blatherer. The barber, relating at the dinner party the story of his narration of several stories to the caliph, views that story from the “mental position” of one who thinks well of the central character, himself. But the tailor, telling the story of the barber doing the telling of his previous telling, does so in such a way that anyone with a different “mental position” must see that the barber is “exceptionally garrulous.” The barber, in the tailor’s narration, is made to condemn himself out of his own mouth:
When he had heard the tale of my sixth brother (continued the barber to the guests), the Caliph Al-Muntasir Billah burst out laughing and said: “I can well see, my silent friend, that you are a man of few words, who knows neither curiosity nor indiscretion. Yet I must ask you to leave this city at once and go to live elsewhere.”
Thus, for no conceivable reason, the Caliph banished me from Baghdad.
By making the barber ridiculous but funny, the tailor makes the tedium of the barber’s protracted stories hilarious. This is extraordinarily amusing to the king to whom the tailor is relating the long story, and a good thing, too, because the tailor has been brought to the king from the gallows at the moment of his hanging. At the moment of the tailor’s narrating, the tailor and everyone else involved believe that the tailor killed a hunchback and is to hang for it. Everyone involved in the story of this hunchback’s death has been brought before the king to explain to the king how it is that the governor has condemned and then pardoned in a row first the Christian, then the king’s steward, then the Jewish doctor, before condemning the tailor for the murder of the hunchback. The tailor is telling these stories of stories of stories in order to stay alive! His narration provides, in the character of the caliph, a model of a reasonable kingly judge who maintains all civility, loves humor, has a good sense of satire, and punishes by banishing, not hanging. The tailor is providing this model in the hope that the king, who is hearing the tailor’s story, will conform to it and spare the tailor.
The king to whom the tailor is telling the story is extraordinarily wonderful and cultivated and just. He marvels greatly at stories and admires them. Before the tailor begins speaking, the king hears the story of all the condemnations and the pardons; he gives “orders that the story be inscribed on parchment in letters of gold. The king asked those who were present: ‘Have you ever heard a story more marvellous than that of the hunchback?’” It is this question that gives the tailor his opening to tell the longest story of stories of stories of stories you ever heard, and so to distract the king and put him into a better humor.
It certainly works. At the end of the nearly interminable story, “the King of Basrah was much amused by the tailor’s story, and said: The young man’s adventure with the Barber certainly surpasses in wonder the story of the hunchback.’” The king then orders both the barber and the corpse of the hunchback brought before him. When the king sees the barber, he bursts into a fit of laughter and says, “Silent One, we wish to hear some of your stories.”
But then something very interesting, and perhaps unexpected, happens. The barber does indeed speak with great reserve and brevity. He asks to be told why the hunchback is lying dead before him. He listens to the entire explanatory story without saying a word. He asks to examine the body, and when he has done so, he says cryptically that the death of the hunchback is a wonder that should be recorded for all time. The king asks for an explanation, and the barber responds with all brevity that the hunchback is alive. Then the barber expertly revives the hunchback by extracting a piece of fish and bone from his throat. Before long, the king observes that this all makes a great story and orders that it be recorded on scrolls of parchment and saved in the royal library. He bestows honor upon everybody and raises the barber to a position of companionship and authority in his court.
The tailor, of course, in telling his stories, has been trying to lead the king to project from stories he has been telling onto the king’s own situation. The caliph of the tailor’s narration is cultivated, civilized, temperate, merciful, and loves a good story. This could be an emblem for the king, who could conform to that model. The person telling long tales in the narration (the barber) is merely banished by the caliph; perhaps the person telling long stories to the king (the tailor) could be merely banished, too. It is not the place of the tailor to tell the king what the king ought to do, but through the projection of stories, he can put the king in mind of a way to carry out the particular story whose ending the king will now determine.
Of course, the entire story of the hunchback, with its embedded stories of the tailor and the king, and the tailor’s story of the barber, and the barber’s many stories of his brothers, and the fifth brother’s narration of his daydream, is being told to Dinarzad by Shahrazad, with Shahriyar listening. Shahrazad’s “mental position” includes the goal of leading Shahriyar to think of ending the story of Shahriyar and Shahrazad in the way she has in mind. Her ability to use viewpoint to accomplish this is unsurpassed. She cannot flady assault Shahriyar with her advice and opinions. Doing so might simply trigger in him the worst confirmation of the horrid views he professed when he began his practice of killing wives. But she can work through elaborate indirection. All the kings and caliphs and governors and authorities in the elaborate tale of the hunchback—the very first tale she tells Shahriyar—are thoughtful, rational, and equable. They are in no hurry, they are secure, and they love stories. They all think stories are the most worthy things in the world, and they all are certain that there is nothing more worthy for a king to do than to listen to stories, preserve them, and seek out new stories. All these kings and caliphs and governors and authorities are also marvelously well-disposed toward storytellers. Bad situations that are brought before them are transformed by their royal prudence into good for everyone involved.
However indirecdy, Shahrazad cuts increasingly close to the bone. It is clear in the story of the hunchback that the tailor is motivated to tell long stories in order to entertain the king, to put him into a good humor, and thus to save his own life. If King Shahriyar can merely project this onto his own present story, he will see an extraordinarily honest admission from Shahrazad of what she is doing and how she hopes he will respond. On that reading, she is actually hoping for a lot out of him; she is hoping that he holds a reservoir of humanity and civility that can be tapped. Some of her stories are even sharper and push deeper: The barber’s sixth brother has his penis and lips cut off by an enraged chieftain whose wife is discovered “dallying” with the sixth brother, and in that story, the sex is clearly initiated by the wife. Now, the big causal event of The Thousand and One Nights was Shahriyar’s discovery of his own wife’s “dallying” with a slave. Shahrazad clearly means to acknowledge the reality of stories of the sort that led Shahriyar to his practice. Does this projection justify the rage and violence of Shahriyar, by making him the counterpart of the chieftain? No, because Shahrazad, who makes it clear that the chieftain’s rage is understandable, also makes it clear that something better is expected of Shahriyar: the chieftain is an uncultivated and discreditable oudaw, while Shahriyar is a king.
To my mind, Shahrazad’s riskiest story is the deeply embedded story of the barber’s fifth brother, Al-Ashar. Al-Ashar—he with the basket of glassware to sell—is a jerk in the opinion of everyone, possibly even himself. He is profoundly insecure about his masculinity. To feed his vanity, he daydreams about the complete submission of women to him, about his aloof command and indifference to all affection, about women who are perfect and lovely and who beg, with trembling voice, to submit to him, women who can imagine nothing better than to fall at his feet. He imagines women who have never had a thought of any man but him and who are obviously not equipped ever to have any thought of any man but him. Al-Ashar imagines a life in which there is no chance of any sort of parity between himself and his wife, and he imagines that such a life could be desirable. In his mind and story, he represents such a life as kingly. Of course, he destroys everything, losing even the little he has. Yet when he does so, neither the reader nor Shahrazad despises him. We are amused. It is a funny story. Maybe there is some hope for him. We pity him a little. We recognize how juvenile his ambitions are.
This is a daring story to be telling to a king who is a jerk, profoundly insecure about his masculinity, and who, to satisfy his obsession for control over women, has instituted an ingenious and apparendy successful zero-defects program, at the cost of ever having anything like affection, companionship, or parity. It is more daring still: The woman Al-Ashar spurns with his foot in his indifference is his wife and the daughter of the vizier, which is of course exacdy Shahrazad’s double role. It is just possible that the reader who is engrossed in the story could miss for a moment this connection, but surely Shahriyar could not. Al-Ashar is portrayed as an absolute idiot for his action. The only possible mitigation in Al-Ashar’s case is the fact that the woman he spurns doesn’t amount to much anyway, but this fact only brings forcibly into the foreground how incomparably superior Shahrazad is in everyway. Shahrazad might even be presenting the woman in Al-Ashar’s daydream to Shahriyar as a portrait of what Shahriyar imagined to be his ideal woman, as a way of helping him see that he really wouldn’t want her after all. From every viewpoint in the nested chain of parent narrative spaces above that of Al-Ashar, beginning with the barber, Al-Ashar is regarded as an idiot within the story he is imagining. And even Al-Ashar, along with everyone else, regards himself as an idiot within the completed story of his selling glassware at the crossroads.
By nesting these viewpoints so that the story of Al-Ashar stands at an elaborate distance from her own situation, Shahrazad is giving King Shahriyar some time to begin to work around to her mental viewpoint. Of equal importance, she is making it possible for Shahriyar to accept, if he chooses to do so, that she is just telling stories to her sister Dinarzad, and not challenging his authority at all. She is not necessarily requiring him to believe that she does not know what she is doing. She is instead providing him with a way out of the story he has set up for himself, if he wants one, and a set of compelling motives for taking that way out. She is trying to make it possible for him to desist from his practice and to take a wife. He needs an excuse for doing so, he needs persuasion, and he needs some models. But she has to provide these in a way that can pass for mere entertainment. Her elaborate manipulation of viewpoint allows her to perform this sleight of hand. It gives her a cover from which she is permitted to suggest to him an altogether different path toward the future of his own story. She does this through parable, prompting him to project from the stories he is hearing onto the story of his own life.
The stories she tells will be many. Some will portray civilized life at a court. Some will tell of terrible genies bottled up with nothing but their own torment, who, once the cork is popped, spew out in a black rage, intending to kill for revenge, but who finally get talked out of it by ingenious people who seem to have nothing with which to oppose the genie’s power but their shrewdness and their gift for stories. Many of Shahrazad’s stories will acknowledge the phenomenon of deep psychic injury. Men and women will be portrayed unblinkingly as capable of honor or perfidy, driven by virtues and lusts. This is an adult narrative: Death destroys everything. Nonetheless, what Death destroys is Delight—which presupposes that life can have some delight.
Shahrazad’s manipulation of viewpoints is pyrotechnic and literary in the extreme, but it is simply a sophisticated use of indispensable and fundamental capacities of the everyday mind. We take spatial viewpoints on spatial stories. We project the story of someone’s viewing a story from a spatial viewpoint onto the story of someone’s viewing a story from a temporal viewpoint. We project in general the story of someone’s viewing a story in space and time onto the story of someone’s viewing a story from a mental position. From that mental position, we may view the story as conditional, hypothetical, nonactual, and so on. We may view it from the “viewpoint” of a particular role. We may view it, in imagination, from someone else’s mental “viewpoint.” We could not operate in our environment, physical or social, without extremely sophisticated imaginative abilities of viewpoint and focus on stories in imagination. The narrator of The Thousand and One Nights is merely asking us to use a capacity we already have, just as Shahrazad is asking Shahriyar to use a capacity he already has.
We may become engrossed, in Erving Goffman’s phrase, and forget that this is a story, and get angry, and claim that Shahriyar does not deserve to be rehabilitated, that it is perfectly horrible that Shahrazad should have to go through this humiliation just because some pig is on the throne, and that the story of her life merely reconfirms all the old patterns of patriarchy. Of course. But the story makes some of those claims itself. Shahriyar never comes off well in The Thousand and One Nights. He is your run-of-the-mill insecure male who has only just enough intelligence to be able to see, when it is laid out masterfully before him, that he has it good and would be a fool to keep his old psychology. Shahrazad, by contrast, is an absolute genius. She is convincingly portrayed as starting from a position of no institutional power at all and bringing about what no one else of any institutional authority could possibly have done. It is Shahrazad that we admire and remember.
She accomplishes all this through parable: the conjunction of story and projection. She may have other ways for helping Shahriyar change his mind, but it is parable that we hear about and parable that she invites us to apply to our own life stories.
To be quite accurate, I ought to give a different name to each of the “me’s” who were to think about Albertine in time to come; I ought still more to give a different name to each of the Albertines who appeared before me, never the same.…
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
For any story, we can develop a great variety of mental spaces. For the extremely simple story of the first time a baby shakes the rattle, for example, we can imagine the mental spaces of the story as viewed spatially from above, behind, ahead, or either side; as viewed temporally by his mother on his sixteenth birthday, as viewed from his mother’s psychological viewpoint as opposed to the baby’s psychological viewpoint; and so on indefinitely. One way to develop constancy over this great variation is, as we have seen, through identity connectors. Although all these different mental spaces of the baby shaking the rattle might look quite different, we unify them as simply different viewpoint spaces all connected by identity connectors to the same single small spatial story. The baby in any viewpoint mental space is connected identically to the baby in any other.
Role connectors are another way of developing constancy over a great variety of mental spaces. When we recognize the baby who shakes the rattle as an instance of the role animate agent, and the shaking as the kind of motion that animate agents cause, we are using the roles to create constancy over variation: the story of the baby shaking the rattle becomes connected to every other story in which an animate agent causes the motion of an object.
Any small spatial story comes with roles: The story of the woman throwing the stone to smash the window has roles for thrower (a more specific role than animate agent) and missile and target. To recognize a story requires recognizing its roles.
Character can be formed by backward inference from such a role, according to the folk theory of “The Nature of Things,” otherwise known as “Being Leads to Doing.” In this folk theory, glass shatters because it is brittle and fragile. Water pours because it is liquid. Someone forgives because she is forgiving. A dogguards the house because it is watchful. A fool acts like a fool because he is foolish. In general, doing follows from being; being leads to doing; something behaves in a certain way because its being leads it to behave in that way.
Someone who is typically in the role of adversary can, by the Nature of Things, be thought of as “adversarial.” He acquires a character: adversarial. We develop an expectation that he will be “true to his character”: his character will guide his action; his being will lead to his doing. We become primed to see him inhabit similar roles in other stories. “That’s just like him,” we say. Our sense of someone’s general character guides our expectations of which roles he will play in which stories. For example, we know what Sherlock Holmes is likely to do in any story in which he exists. The influence of character upon assignment to role is so strong that the mere appearance of a person with a certain character in a story can induce the creation of the role: As soon as Sherlock Holmes enters the scene, we expect the story to develop a role for detective or puzzle solver even if the story has not previously had one.
Character is a pattern of connections we expect to operate across stories about a particular individual with that character or across stories about a group of individuals with that character. People of a particular character are expected to inhabit similar roles in different stories. We can develop a categorization of kinds of character—generous, selfish, brave, submissive, and so on. There are famous explicit surveys of character, such as Theophrastus’s Characters and La Bruyére’s Les Caracteres. Theophrastus gives us quick sketches of the boor, the liar, the grouch, the sponge, and so on, while La Bruyére presents intricate and refined analyses of highly specific aspects of character.
Once character is established as a general pattern of connections across potential story spaces, it can serve as a generator of those spaces. As Jerome Bruner has observed, “Perhaps the greatest feat in the history of narrative art was the leap from the folktale to the psychological novel that places the engine of action in the characters rather than in the plot.” Kenneth Burke made a lifelong study of the ways in which any general aspect of a story space—character, action, goal, setting, and means—could serve as the basis for building up the rest of the space. Character can generate story.
Focus, viewpoint, role, and character are concepts useful in constructing constancy across variation. They all assume that mental spaces can be connected. We have single lives, but whenever we see ourselves as having a focus or a viewpoint, inhabiting a role, or possessing a character that runs across roles in stories, we see ourselves as transcending our singularities. Our focus and our viewpoint become not singular or isolated; they connect to a central story and all its other focus and viewpoint spaces. A role in one story is not isolated but connects to the same role in other stories. A complex of roles, such as “the eternal triangle,” connects to the same complex in other stories. Character is a concept that guides us in assigning an actor to the same or similar roles across multiple story spaces.
Focus, viewpoint, role, and character in narrative imagining give us ways of constructing our own meaning, which is to say, ways of understanding who we are, what it means to be us, to have a particular life. The inability to locate one’s own focus, viewpoint, role, and character with respect to conventional stories of leading a life is thought to be pathological and deeply distressing. It is a principal reason for recommending psychotherapy to people not obviously insane.
There is a touchstone text for the view that knowing how to inhabit stories is the essential requirement of mature life. Peter Pan is the leader of the lost boys in Neverland. The lost boys will always be boys, and always lost, as long as they don’t know stories. They can’t grow up because they cannot understand how to inhabit roles in stories, how to belong to categories of characters running across story spaces, how to have lives. Peter Pan persuades Wendy to go with him to Neverland exactly by telling her that the lost boys don’t know any stories:
“You see I don’t know any stories. None of the lost boys know any stories.”
“How perfectly awful,” Wendy said.
“Do you know,” Peter asked, “why swallows build in the eaves of houses? It is to listen to the stories. O Wendy, your mother was telling you such a lovely story.”
“About the prince who couldn’t find the lady who wore the glass slipper.”
“Peter,” said Wendy excitedly, “that was Cinderella, and he found her, and they lived happily ever after.”
Peter was so glad that he rose from the floor, where they had been sitting, and hurried to the window. “Where are you going?” she cried with misgiving.
“To tell the other boys.”
“Don’t go, Peter,” she entreated, “I know such lots of stories.”
Those were her precise words, so there can be no denying that it was she who first tempted him.
He came back, and there was a greedy look in his eyes now which ought to have alarmed her, but did not.
“Oh, the stories I could tell to the boys!” she cried, and then Peter gripped her and began to draw her toward the window.
Trying to make sense of a life as a pattern of character running across roles in stories leads to a clear problem: People often drop out of roles in stories and often decline to inhabit the roles we expect of them on the basis of what we thought we knew about their character. People appear to perform in different ways that do not seem to belong to the same character. One way to respond to this inconstancy is to work all the harder to rebuild constancy across these spaces, on the view that of course this kind of constancy must hold. This is a mainstay of psychology, psychiatry, biography, and detective novels. If an agent seems to have the character attribute of “giving” in the role of donor in one space but the opposed character attribute of “grasping” in the role of thief in another space, we might respond to the inconstancy by trying to reconstruct the roles and infer a stable character: Ah-ha! in the case of “apparent” giving, the agent really had his own interest at heart; or ah-ha! in the case of “apparent” grasping, the agent was really trying to save the owner from some danger.
Alternatively, inconstancy across spaces can be read as a sign of the real, on the view that in reality people are uncontrolled, unpredictable, singular, inscrutable. Novelists often use inconstancy to convey objectivity and realism: if constancy reveals the narrative imagination of the author at work, then, so the simple logic goes, inconstancy should demonstrate that the narrator has not “invented” this story. It never works thatway. In The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne Booth shows that novelists often try to meet various requirements like “Novels Should Be Realistic” and “Authors Should Be Objective” by tossing in variation and inconstancy—random singularities that have no role in the structure of the general story, specific events unrelated to the causal structure of the story, conflicted action by a single agent to frustrate the reader’s attempt to infer underlying character, and so on. The underlying assumption is that such inconstancies can come only from the realities of individual life. Booth shows that all these techniques in fact reveal the heavy hand of the manipulative author.
Stories and the connections between them are the chief cognitive instrument for biography. A mental space that concerns a person’s life seems to us to be a slice of her biography. In the slice, she has a certain role and a certain character. When we try to run connections across all these mental spaces—as when we try to predict what she will do in this case on the basis of what we already know of a previous space; or as when we try to imagine what she must have been like as a child on the basis of the stories she inhabits as an adult—we may encounter all sorts of incompatibilities, which therefore cannot reside in a generic space that would apply to all these mental spaces. As we run connections across all the story spaces—all these slices of biography, synchronic and diachronic—the generic space may become ever more abstract, approaching the minimum information that this human being has the role animate agent.
But we can get much more help from blended spaces. Blended spaces can absorb incompatibilities from the spaces they blend. In a blended space, a human being can be both donor and thief, giving and grasping. As the connections build over narrative mental spaces, the generic space becomes thinner but the blended space becomes ever more robust, intricate, and conflicted.
We do not live in a single narrative mental space, but rather dynamically and variably distributed over very many. If any one space must be selected as the place we reside, it is the blend of all these spaces. For biography, these impossible blended spaces are the most “realistic” because they come closest to signaling that life, like meaning, is not bounded in any one mental space, but involves the operations of projection, blending, and integration that run over indefinitely many activated mental spaces. “Realism” can never be the representation of uniqueness, for the simple reason that it is impossible for the everyday mind to think of the unique—the everyday mind is always, unavoidably, and fundamentally geared to constructing constancy over variation. But realism can indicate that a specific life is never contained within a single story space or even a collection of such spaces whose corresponding generic space tells us everything we want to know. The real is in the blend.
We have seen that character can be conceived by backward inference from behavior, on the logic that people do what they do because they are a particular kind of person. Once we have a notion of an actor’s character, we can try to use it to project that actor into roles in new stories. We can try to predict what she will do in this story. This is an identity projection: the actor is connected to herself identically across all these stories.
But character can also be developed through metaphoric projection: “Achilles is a lion” projects the lion not to itself identically but rather, metaphorically, to something quite different—a human being. This projection is meant to imbue Achilles with a character and consequent behavior.
There is an extremely productive conceptual template that serves this type of projection. It is the GREAT CHAIN METAPHOR, which depends upon the folk notion of the Great Chain. The Great Chain is a hierarchy of attributes by type. A being can have, in ascending order, attributes of mere physical existence, attributes of part-whole functional structure, attributes of simple biology, and attributes of mental capacity. This hierarchy induces a corresponding hierarchy of kinds of beings: the category to which the being belongs is determined by the highest type of attribute it possesses. For example, barbed wire has part-whole functional structure as its highest kind of attribute, so it falls into the corresponding category of complex physical objects; but a spider, which also has part-whole functional structure, has instinct as its highest attribute, and therefore falls into the higher category of simple animals.
The folk notion of the Great Chain includes the further structure that a being at a given level in the hierarchy possesses all the kinds of attribute possessed by lower orders: For example, a spider has, in addition to instinct, simple biology (such as metabolism), part-whole functional structure (like legs and body), and simple physical attributes (like color).
The GREAT CHAIN METAPHOR is a pattern for projecting conceptual structure from something at one level of the Great Chain to something at another. “Max is a spider,” for example, evokes a projection between what spiders do and what Max does. Max has social behavior, the spider has instinctual behavior. Max has certain roles in certain stories; the spider has certain roles in certain stories. We connect the two agents, their roles, their characters, and their typical stories. We connect them according to the Great Chain: “Max is a spider” is not interpreted to mean that Max is black, even though the prototypical spider is black. We assume that it asks us to make a connection between the highest attributes of the two agents: The spider’s instinctual behavior projects to Max’s intentional and mental behavior.
Whenever the GREAT CHAIN METAPHOR is at work, we are primed to activate a blended space in which the counterparts are blended, as in a political cartoon that portrays a corrupt politician as a spider with a human face who spins webs to catch political opponents.
Consider the tale of the ox and the donkey. The vizier creates a blend of Shahrazad and the donkey in which Shahrazad’s human conviction and the donkey’s unreflecting instinctive stubbornness are the same thing, so as to suggest that Shahrazad is behaving like an ass. She should think about her plan, reconsider it, listen to his wisdom. Human beings can do these things, and she should act like a human being, not like a donkey. Shahrazad’s immediate reaction to his story is so absolute and lacking in reflection as to seem to confirm his blending of the donkey’s instinctive “stubbornness” and Shahrazad’s intentional stubbornness:
When she heard her father’s story, Shahrazad said: “Nothing will shake my faith in the mission I am destined to fulfil.”
The blend works because we have previously conceived of all donkeys by blending them with human beings. We say they are “stubborn,” but they aren’t. Only human beings can be stubborn. The instinctual behavior of a donkey is not at all the same thing as human stubbornness: For example, all donkeys have this behavior, not just some, and it is not subject to rational persuasion. We have conceived of this particular instinctual behavior by blending it with human stubbornness, and even given it the name “stubbornness.” The conceptual ground has already prepared for blending the donkey with stubborn Shahrazad.
Douglas Sun has analyzed blended character in Thurber’s story “The Moth and the Star.” A young moth sets his heart on a certain star, his mother and father tell him he should instead hang around lamp bridges; they shame him for not having so much as a scorched wing:
The moth thought [the star] was just caught in the branches of an elm. He never did reach the star, but he went right on trying, night after night, and when he was a very, very old moth he began to think that he really had reached the star and he went around saying so. This gave him deep and lasting pleasure, and he lived to a great old age. His parents and his brothers and his sisters had all been burned to death when they were quite young.
As Sun remarks, there is a central inference in this tale. If your goal is not the common goal, there may be some unpredicted benefits that outweigh the insults. This inference cannot come from the source because moths do not choose, do not know about sorrow, do not insult, do not weigh benefits, do not talk, and do not fly toward stars. The inference is not at all required of the target. In the source, it is a fixed instinctual necessity that all moths must fly toward light; but it is not true in the target that all people must instinctively strive toward a single common goal.
The moth’s intentionality, his selection of his particular goal, his delusion, his pleasure, and so on all come from the target, where they are part of the human character. In the blend, the instinct of the moth from the source is blended with the character of the human being from the target to establish central inferences that are then projected to the target.
Talking animals—or, in general, blends of the human and the animal—are a principal feature of folktales and children’s literature. The wolves in The Jungle Book, for example, are a blend of human social character and the pack instincts of wolves; even their unforgettable utterance—“Look well! Look well! Oh, wolves!”—is a blend of human language and lupine yelping. Such blends populate our imagination and memory: Sheer-Khan and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi; the lion and the hedgehog forn Aesop’s Fables (“The hedgehog twitted the lion for having only one cub in her litter; ‘One,’ she replied, ‘but a lion’”); the serpent in the garden of Eden; and an indefinite range of cartoon characters from which readers draw homely philosophy. Talking animals seem whimsical and exotic, but they are not. They come from blending in parable, a phenomenon so basic as to be indispensable to our conception of what it means to have a human character and a human life.