Mimesis, artistic inspiration and the blends we live by

Abstract

The cognitive linguists Fauconnier and Turner [Fauconnier, Gilles, Turner, Mark, 1998. Conceptual integration networks. Cognitive Science 22, 133–187; Fauconnier, Gilles, Turner, Mark, 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind's Hidden Complexities. Basic Books, New York] have proposed that human creativity may be modeled by their theory of conceptual blending (conceptual integration). I apply blending theory to the pragmatics of fiction, showing how blending theory explains the mechanics of literary mimesis. I investigate how conceptual blends are iteratively chained, arguing that a mimetic blend can be defined as a blend that self-referentially embeds itself into subsequent blends. Using examples from Mario Vargas Llosa's novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter and its cinematic adaptation as Tune in Tomorrow, I show how these mimetic blends can be a literary device whereby an author may offer metafictional social commentary on issues such as the ability of art to incite fictive emotion or even violence on the part of the art-viewer. However, blending theorists typically fail to note important methodological issues raised by whether they are modeling the person who is interpreting (as opposed to who is creating) the conceptual blends. This shortcoming leads me to propose a “space-swapping” hypothesis which argues that the differences between creativity and interpretation can be at least partly explained by the differing roles played by highly similar mental spaces.