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October 3, 2005
Turner, Mark. “Double Scope Stories” (2003)
Turner continues his investigation into narrative conceptual blending; here, he breaks with his (and Fauconnier’s) usual accounts of character and thematic fixations and moves into the ways in which conflicting, counterfactual narratives can occur simultaneously and, within this simultaneity, a new, projected blend is formed through seemingly irrevocable strands
Turner offers little in the way of biological cognitive structures like Joseph Tabbi’s Cognitive Fictions does; however, this essay is quite a bit like Tabbi’s book in that it attempts to detail the small, often indistinguishable structures that certain narratives take on in order to account for larger systems—of human relations, of cosmic significance, of connections to history and space
Turner mentions the case of a wedding party member who, while taking part in a friend’s wedding, is also imagining himself with a girlfriend on vacation and then, in projection, imagines them getting married at the same place as the wedding he is participating in
According to Turner, this paradoxical simultaneity of consciousness, of time and place, is a feature unique to human cognition
Uses the example of Racine’s Phedre as a story which involves double–scope blending—Phaedra, in conversation with Hippolytus, calls up her memory of Theseus and also the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. Phaedra, in conversation with Hippolytus, blends the roles of Theseus and Hippolytus (Theseus’s son) and, in doing so, betrays her affections for him. According to Turner, this story is a true narrative blend, replete with meanings both belonging to previous narratives and evolving from their combination.
Three features of blended stories:
Mapping between elements of the two stories:
“Blending two stories usually involves at least a provisional mapping between them. The mapping typically involves connections of identity, analogy, similarity, causality, change, time, intentionality, space, role, part-whole, or representation. In Phedre, the mapping involves analogy and time. There is a casual link as well, because Phaedra’s existence in Theseus’s household is a result of his earlier trip to Crete and his vanquishing of the Minotaur.” (127)
Selective projection:
“Different elements of the stories are projected to the blended story. In Phedre, we take from the historical story of the myth of the scene of the labyrinth, the Minotaur and the roles of both the hero and the daughter of Minos who helps him, but now we bring Hippolytus and Phaedra in from the other story as the values of those roles. In the story of the Minotaur, the daughter of Minos who helps Theseus is Ariadne, not Phaedra.” (127)
Emergent structure:
“In the blended story of Pahedra and Hippolytus as lovers, we have the astonishing emergent structure. Now it is Hippolytus who conquers the Minotaur, and it is Phaedra who helps him. Moreover, Phaedra goes into the labyrinth because of great love. Emergent structure in integrating stories comes from three sources: composition, completion, and elaboration. Composition is putting together elements from different conceptual arrays. Completion is the filling in of partial patterns in the blend. Elaborating the blended story occurs when we develop it according to its principles. In the case of Phaedra, elaboration of the blend leads to a great range of new meaning.” (127)
Turner’s theories seem to work on two levels: how a narrative is constructed and why certain features of the narrative appear as they do. What they do not account for, however, is any sort of Jamesonian consciousness of media. Tabbi pronounces media at this stage of capitalism as something that he feels, like Jameson, that disrupts a sort of unifying impulse in the human mind for completion and comprehensiveness of the systematic awareness of language and cognitive structures (artifacts included).
A couple of questions on this point:
How can we begin to incorporate specific media into a theory of blending?
What impact would medium-specific and transmedial narrative theories have on the projections of this blend? For instance, do we draw out certain materialities in mapping and projection? What happens if the emergent structure is multimedial?
Again, Turner works out the hows and whys of a single (print) medium—does this necessarily mean that say, in a film which is as infinitely subject to emergent meaning as a book, we can detach the narrative from the medium and focus solely on the mapped/ projected/ emergent story?
Posted by marcusrp at October 3, 2005 12:30 AM
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