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Honeymoons and Pilgrimages:Conceptual Integration and Allegory inOld and New MediaTodd Oakley a & Peter Crisp ba Case Western Reserve Universityb The Chinese University of Hong Kong

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Metaphor and Symbol, 26: 152–159, 2011Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1092-6488 print / 1532-7868 onlineDOI: 10.1080/10508406.2011.556507

Honeymoons and Pilgrimages: Conceptual Integrationand Allegory in Old and New Media

Todd Oakley

Case Western Reserve University

Peter CrispThe Chinese University of Hong Kong

The cultural-historical manifestations of allegory are extensive and varied. We present detailedanalyses of two allegorical texts from disparate historical formations: a Prudentian allegory from17th century England and a short, 21st century viral video uploaded to YouTube. Despite ver-tiginous differences, a common conceptual core is identifiable and, we argue, best modeled byConceptual Integration Networks. These networks, however, vary in systematic ways. While in theviral video attention is focused primarily upon its blended space, in the Prudentian allegory attentionis distributed more uniformly over the entire Integration Network.

THE BASIC FRAMEWORK

Since the late 18th century in Europe, allegory has mainly been seen as a superannuated modeof expression in the arts. From a cognitive science perspective, however, allegory seems to bebasic to our mental tool kit. As Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., argues in his contribution to this volume,the allegorical impulse to map one story onto another is likely a permanent facet of humanscale reasoning. In this article, we examine two instances of allegory—one contemporary, theother early-modern—as manifestations of a similar impulse to conceptual integration. These twomanifestations of the allegorical impulse are “texts” dislocated in time, space, and media. Thefirst is a 1:16 video titled Third Race at the Honeymoon is Over Downs; the second is JohnBunyan’s 17th Century, religiously didactic, narrative, The Pilgrim’s Progress (2003/1678). Thispairing may seem at first incongruous. Yet these texts share basic conceptual operations thatenable their viewers/readers to understand and construct them as allegories.

An allegory in the generic tradition may be thought of as a kind of super extendedmetaphor/metonymy. As Randy Allen Harris and Sarah Tolmie sketch in their introduction tothis special issue, and Madeleine Kasten and Curtis Gruenler discuss in their contribution, thelexeme allegory has been and still is subject to a range of varying construals. Since the early 19th

Address correspondence to Todd Oakley, Cognitive Science, Case Western Reserve University, 10900 Euclid Avenue,Cleveland, OH 44106-7068. E-mail: todd.oakley@case.edu

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century, however, it has frequently been used in literary and rhetorical contexts to refer to works,such as The Pilgrim’s Progress, whose metaphoric/metonymic extension is so systematic thatovert, literal reference to the underlying topic is eliminated. An allegory thus directly refers toand characterizes a fictional situation, in The Pilgrim’s Progress that of an extended journey. Thelanguage used to refer to and describe this situation is thus either literal or, if it is figurative, itstopic/referent is still the fictional situation itself rather than the underlying allegorical subject.“Metaphor gives us y with a hint of x,” Herbert Eveleth Greene (1893, p. 442) tells us; “pureallegory gives us y without the barest hint of x.” This fictional situation itself then presents theunderlying allegorical subject, in The Pilgrim’s Progress the Christian life. This underlying alle-gorical subject is pragmatically inferred but never directly referenced. (See Crisp, 2005 for morediscussion.)

Allegory is not of course an exclusively linguistic matter. There is a long and rich traditionof allegorical painting and sculpture. An allegory’s fictional situation may be presented linguis-tically, visually, or by a combination of the two—as in our other text, Honeymoon is Over. Thisviral video presents what is in fact a visual record of an actual, non-fictional, horse race. Thereis, however, no clear identification of which race this was, and the names given for its horses inthe race commentary are certainly not the names of horses in any actual race. This visual recordof an actual race thus constitutes a fictional race functioning as the allegorical presenter of theunderlying topic of marriage breakdown. Both Pilgrim’s Progress and Honeymoon is Over usefictional situations to present underlying, pragmatically inferred, allegorical topics.

So far we have talked only of fictional situations and metaphoric/metonymic mapping, ofnothing, that is, which would necessarily take us beyond a conceptualization simply in terms ofsource and target domain relations. Our analysis will draw upon the full resources of ConceptualIntegration (aka, Conceptual Blending) theory, positing that the conceptual processes underlyingallegory are better understood in terms of a network of mental spaces. An allegory’s fictionalsituation is accessed directly from one particular space in this network—what we, followingBrandt and Brandt (2005), term the presentation space. The role of this presentation space, how-ever, can only be understood in terms of its position in, and interaction with, the whole network.Consequently, the allegory effect is the emergent property of a whole mental space network, notthe sole product of any one mental space. This argument is highly consonant with the claimsof Madeleine Kasten and Curtis Gruenler, in this special issue, the principal difference beingtheir emphasis on the hermeneutical implications of the network, while ours is on its systemicproperties.

A Conceptual Integration (or mental space network) will normally include a blended space.The term blend is often used to refer to any mental space that integrates conceptual materialfrom at least two other spaces. In the context of allegory however, the kind of conceptual inte-gration we are primarily interested in is figurative integration. In this article therefore, when werefer to blends or blended spaces, we will be referring to specifically figurative blends. Thisspecification, we will see, is important because figurative blends have certain highly distinctive,cognitive semantic, properties. Figurative blending plays a vital role in both Honeymoon is Overand Pilgrim’s Progress. In Honeymoon blending is intense and continuous. No simple source-to-target mapping model, with the race as source and marriage breakdown as target, could accountfor Honeymoon’s effects. The situation is not so clear cut with Pilgrim’s Progress. But heretoo, we find that, at moments of especial intensity, there is a mixing of presumed “source” and“target” elements: a symptom of the underlying presence of blending.

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Given the presence of blending in both our allegories, Fauconnier and Turner’s (2002)Conceptual Integration Theory provides the framework for our analysis. Both allegories involvenetworks of mental spaces with selective projections into an integrated or blended space thatin turn “feeds” inferences back to the other mental spaces. Meaning and understanding arisefrom the interaction of mental spaces, scenes and scenarios set up as we think, talk, watch orread. In addition to catching this dynamic, “online,” aspect of thought, Conceptual IntegrationTheory also operates according to the key insight that thought operates optimally and habitu-ally at human scale, even when the scale of thought extends well beyond it, as in the case ofChristian allegory. The effect of conceptual integration is compression of vital relations of time,space, agency, cause-effect, role and value, and representation; in some cases, the only purposefor a blended mental space is to facilitate such compressions. No other model takes the com-pression of vital relations and human scale reasoning into account, at least not explicitly andsystematically.

Another virtue of Conceptual Integration Theory is that the same mental operations can beseen as operating at different levels of granularity. These different levels of granularity, cru-cially, often entail different blending operations and network configurations. For our purposes,we adopt a mode of analysis developed by Oakley and Kaufer (2008), whereby different con-ceptual integration networks capture the constraints on meaning construction according to thegenre-, artifact-, and grammar/discourse -layers of integration, respectively. That is to say, oneway to impose order on a text is to treat it as a kind of text (e.g., Prudentian allegory); anotherway is to treat it as a seamless whole (e.g., Pilgrim’s Progress) with a unified message or point;still another way is to treat it as a seamed whole, focusing in on the salient parts that compriseit (e.g., Faithful’s encounter with Adam the First in Pilgrim’s Progress). We find this mode ofanalysis heuristically useful for thinking about conceptual integration in allegory.

Honeymoon and Pilgrim’s Progress reflect different manifestations of blending. These dif-ferences do not seem to be primarily related to their differences of historical and culturalcontext but rather to different, general, cognitive constraints on them, the most obvious dif-ference being length. This probably more than anything else accounts for the different natureof their allegorical effects. These differences are of a kind probably inherent to blending in allhistorical and cultural contexts, being partially accountable for by the fact that the two “wholeartifacts” are governed by different types of integration network: double-scope, in the case ofHoneymoon; single-scope in the case of Pilgrim’s Progress. Both require blended spaces andcompressions of vital relations, but only in the former does attention narrow to the blend,while in the latter attention diffuses throughout the network (cf. Fauconnier & Turner, 2002,pp. 83–84).

HORSES AND MARRIAGES

Third Race at the Honeymoon is Over Downs is an example of allegory gone viral. Initiallydisseminated as an audio file by Nick Sanabria (2005) and later synched to video by Marc Boltonand disseminated via YouTube and viewed over 230,000 times as of October 2010, this piecefollows a narrative schema of a marriage going sour as if it were a horse race.

We offer a portion of the transcript below, presenting the beginning and ending of the race:

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Welcome to the third race,at the Honeymoon-is-Over-Downs. . .and they’re off!jumping out in the lead is Romance-and-Affection with Domestic Bliss in close behind.It’s Romance and Affection and Domestic Bliss.Here comes Marriage Vows followed by Immediate Child,Romance and Affection falling off quickly. . .And here comes Nasty Attitude,followed by More Childrenand Drinking Heavily. . .and down the stretch they comeUp-Yours-Keith is pulling away from I-Don’t-Give-A-Shit by a length.Coming on strong is I-Am-Outta-Here!. . .At the wire,it’s Up-Yours,Keep-The-Fucking-House,I-Don’t-Give-A-Shit,and I-Am-Outta-Here.

This is an example of what Fauconnier and Turner classify as a double-scope blend: to understandwhat is going on and to get the joke one must integrate two very distinct organizing frames, bothof which are easily accessible and part of the assumed audience’s noetic resources. In otherwords, our default knowledge of horse racing and, more to the point, what it means to “call arace,” has to be easily identifiable and accessible. In addition, we need to have internalized thenarrative of a marriage that begins one way and ends another.

But blending theory is not just about the blended mental space. It is about the whole network ofmental spaces and its effects. Let us, therefore, look closely at this example and how its networkof mental spaces comes into being, does its work, amuses audiences, and leaves theorists ofallegory with a subtle and complex artifact to analyze.

There are three mental spaces. The first, the presentation space, is that of the Horse Race.A presentation space corresponds to the organizing frame of a scenario (cf. Brandt & Brandt,2005). When specifically metaphorical blending is involved, this functions roughly as what istraditionally referred to as the metaphorical source. The blend’s immediate imaginative impact isa consequence of the race frame, with its spatial and temporal structure, being projected from thepresentation space. This frame presents the blend, rather in the manner of a remembered present.The creators of this text, and its viewers/auditors, moreover, recruit very specific features fromthe frame of horse racing, most notably, the means and manner of “calling the race,” where theannouncer uses the register of sports-announcer talk, with its persistent use of present tense andimperfective aspect, along with the general tendency of vocal pacing to parallel iconically thepace of the race, while calling out the horses’ names in sequence (again iconically) to update thehearers on the race status. In short, the producers of the text capture the cultural stereotype ofcalling a race.

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The object of the blend (in metaphoric terms, the target) is a relationship gone sour. This isaccessed via the reference space, which provides the narrative scheme onto which the structureof the race is ultimately going to map. The reference space of Marriage and Divorce provides thelogic of the names in the race. An important point is that all the names come from the domesticdomain, and point to states, actions or commonplaces associated with that domain.

The blended scenario is a seamless integration of these two spaces that enables the produc-tion by the whole mental space network of a unified, dramatic scene lasting one minute, sixteenseconds. The presentation space both presents a fictional horse race that the viewer watches and,together with the reference space, projects into a blended space that fuses horse race and mar-riage. This blend so dominates the viewer’s consciousness that she “dwells” in it, experiencingthe fictional race from and through it. In the blend, the marriage goes from romance and affectionto the hurling of epithets in about the time it takes the horses to hit the clubhouse turn. Notice thatthe default narrative scheme of the reference space has a timescale in years, not seconds. In theblend, however, the temporal structure of the reference space gets compressed into the temporalscale of a single race, the third of the day, in fact. A day at the races is a day of many unhappyendings! While the temporal scale and dramatic tempo of events come from the presentationspace, the naming conventions of the participants come exclusively from the domestic domainstructuring the reference space.

The last point we wish to make about Honeymoon relates to the announcement of namesand their order. Aside from the fact that Romance-And-Affection and Domestic Bliss “fall offquickly,” as fits our stereotypical expectations about marriage generally, and that the horses withnames for euphoric states get passed by horses with names for responsibility, burdens, low behav-ior, and distressing states, such as “Credit-in-Shambles” and “Drinking Heavily,” the horses atthe wire all correspond to epithets one would hurl at the domestic partner (“Up Yours,” and“I-Am-Outta-Here”), thereby metonymically evoking the “final marital row.”

PILGRIMS AND PREDESTINATION

To turn from Honeymoon to The Pilgrim’s Progress involves a radical shift of historical, culturaland technological context. What is striking however is that despite this shift the 21st centuryvideo recreates some of the most basic cognitive structure of the late 17th century, written, pro-totypical allegory. To recognize this is not to downplay the cultural and historical discontinuitiesinvolved but rather to emphasize the constants of human cognition, specifically, in this case, thoseof metaphorical mapping and blending. The creators of the 21st century video spontaneouslyrecreate important aspects of the 17th century allegory’s cognitive structure, almost certainlywithout any kind of direct influence from medieval or post-medieval allegory, because they sharea common set of conceptual structures with John Bunyan and his readers.

The Pilgrim’s Progress, first published in 1678, was the last major allegory written in English.There are many successful later allegorical texts, like George Orwell’s dystopian beast fable,Animal Farm and Thomas Pynchon’s post-modernist pageant, Gravity’s Rainbow, but alle-gories, in the prototypical generic sense, largely disappeared by the late 17th century. Theirdemise as a major literary genre seems to have been part of the cultural transition to modernity,being followed by the emergence of the novel as the major, modern, literary genre. Comingat the end of the tradition of medieval and post-medieval allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress

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belongs to one of its most important sub-genres, Prudentian allegory. Prudentius, a 4th centuryChristian, in his Psychomachia, roughly translatable as “war in the soul,” presents a fictional bat-tle between armies of Vices and Virtues, with paired combatants such as Pride and Humility,Love and Hate, Lust and Chastity. The fictional war of the Psychomachia emphasizes themetaphorical conflict between desire and temptation, on the one hand, and conscience and God’scommands on the other. It is the large-scale expression of that corrupt and radically dividedsoul that St. Augustine bequeathed to the medieval and post-medieval West. The Pilgrim’sProgress is one of the last major instances of Prudentian allegory, with its allegorical narra-tive unfolding within the framework of a dream vision. In terms of the Oakley and Kaufer(2008) model, the allegorical dream vision constitutes the genre layer of conceptual integration inBunyan’s work.

The ethos of Honeymoon seems very far from that of Prudentian allegory. Its sharing of sig-nificant conceptual structure with Prudentian allegory thus calls for an explanation bridging thecultural and historical gulf between its creator(s) and the earlier, medieval and post-medieval, tra-dition. The use of comparable naming strategies is particularly striking. What function in the firstinstance as the names of fictional, allegorical, characters designate in their primary senses vari-ous kinds of abstract entities onto which these characters are to be mapped. Thus, Christian is tobe mapped onto the set of all members of the Calvinist elect, Giant Despair onto the property ofreligious despair, Domestic Bliss onto the property of romance, and Keep-The-Fucking-Houseonto the scenario of the final marital row. The horses of Honeymoon are not, strictly speak-ing, personifications of course. They are reifications (equusifications, perhaps?), and barely eventhat, since it is the naming alone, with no other characteristics beyond vague race-horsinessand position in the race to give them substance. They are of a piece with what Coleridge deni-grated as “mere printer’s devils’ personification” (1884, p. 275) and James Russell Lowell called“alphabetic personifications” which function solely by the “easy magic of an initial capital”(1870, p. 2). But that capital letter, or, in this case, the context that situates the phrase “I amoutta here” as a name, is enough to activate the reference space. As noted earlier, in an allegoryinvolving personification the reference space is the main site of naming strategies, and the sameis true of reification. This is explained by the inherent conceptual possibilities of mental spacenetworks.

Whereas the relatively brief Honeymoon is intense in effect throughout, The Pilgrim’sProgress has both more and less intense passages. A major part of Honeymoon’s intensity,we have seen, is due to the vivid sense of compressed vital relations of time, space, identity,cause-effect, and uniqueness associated with the online construction of a new blended space.There certainly are passages in The Pilgrim’s Progress with a similar intensity of effect origi-nating in similar kinds of figurative blends, but these passages involve blends operating at thegrammar/discourse layer of analysis and are themselves, in turn, beholden to an integration net-work operating at the level of the entire narrative, that is, at the artifact layer of conceptualintegration. At this level, the reader’s attention tends to focus on the interplay between the fictionof Christian’s city-to-city journey and the drama of personal salvation.

We suggest that the integration network for Bunyan’s allegory at the artifact layer of analy-sis is a single scope network as described by Fauconnier and Turner (2002, pp. 135–139), withlittle clash between the frames governing both input spaces. Its presentation space does not sim-ply provide general concepts to be projected directly into reference and/or blended spaces aswith “normal” linguistic metaphors. Rather, it allows the reader to construct a fictional situation

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that the presentation space refers to and characterizes. The presentation space of The Pilgrim’sProgress is based on the scenario of a man leaving his wife and children and traveling across thecountryside to another city. In the reference space, what the man corresponds to is the Calvinistelect; the city he leaves corresponds to the state of prospective damnation; his journey across theEnglish countryside, to the Christian life in this world; the city he arrives at, to heaven.

At the artifact layer of analysis, the space of conceptual integration, or blended space, haslittle by way of scenic material of its own. It functions rather as a mental space of emergentinferences based on compression. It develops the story of salvation by fusing the Elect in generalwith a particular, fictional, member of the Elect (identity), the state of prospective damnation ingeneral with the fictionally particular City of Destruction, the Christian life in general with a par-ticular journey through the countryside. The resultant both/and structure is however experiencedprimarily through awareness of the fictional journey. There is little of that vivid, conscious aware-ness of blending of Honeymoon. Rather, the reader experiences a series of fictional scenes with asense of their underlying significance, any blended space present simply facilitating compressionof vital relations. In short, the blend feeds inferences and significances back to the presentationspace that then functions like a “virtual reality” simulator where the human scale elements of ajourney play out before our senses while being theologically and morally marked according to thelogic of the reference space. Although the compression of identity, time, and cause/effect emergefrom a blended space, our attention toggles back and forth between the events of Christian’s jour-ney and the theological implications thereof. There is little experiential clash between the framesof the city-to-city journey and that journey’s own literal frames. The seamless whole of the arti-fact layer of The Pilgrim’s Progress is experienced as a coherent fiction with an implicit ratherthan directly experienced significance.

There are however crucial moments of visionary intensity in The Pilgrim’s Progress generat-ing figurative blends. Thus, in Faithful’s tale of Adam the First, a biblical text appearing on theforehead of the fictional Old Man must have its ultimate source in a blended space’s fusion of thecounterparts of the biblical text and the Old Man. Detailed analysis of this and like scenes is notour concern here. Our general point is simply to suggest that these blends move our level of anal-ysis down to the seamed whole of the grammar/discourse layer. At any subsequent moment afterthe opening clause of discourse, this layer can only exist in relation to the seamless whole of theartifact layer. The moments of visionary intensity in The Pilgrim’s Progress therefore presupposethe general framework of the artifact layer that we have just analyzed.

We have evidence, that is, for several layers of conceptual integration processes happening inparallel (cf. Oakley & Kaufer, 2008): the genre-layer that gives us the naming strategies useful inbuilding the network; the artifact-layer that gives us the underlying narrative structure of a visionof eternal damnation and salvation compressed within the human-scale logic of a city-to-citytrek; and finally a grammar/discourse layer, whereby episodes in the fused journey to salvationare excerpted out and construed according to a novel conceptual integration network. Whenconsidered according to the three layers of analysis, blending theory offers a more completemodel of the allegorical impulse, and provides a useful heuristic for thinking about differentvarious manifestations of that impulse. Honeymoon is experienced as a single, compact, andspectacularly humorous conceit where all three layers of blending are themselves compressedinto a one-minute conceit. The Pilgrim’s Progress shares common conceptual operations butdiffuses readerly attention over three different networks.

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