Narrative Anchors and the Processes of Story Construction: The Case of Margaret

Atwood's The Blind Assassin

Author(s): Barbara Dancygier
Source: Style , Vol. 41, No. 2, Style in Fiction (Summer 2007), pp. 133-151
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.41.2.133

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 Barbara Dancygier
The University of British Columbia

Narrative Anchors and

the Processes of Story Construction:
The Case of Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin
Linguistic theory has often prompted new ways of addressing some of the central
questions of stylistic analysis (to mention only the emergence of discourse analysis
or pragmatics). The issues of correlations between form and function, which have
been crucial to analyses of style, have recently been given a new form through the
cognitive linguists’ focus on the mechanisms of meaning construction. The term
was coined to represent the fact that describing the senses of simple linguistic forms
cannot fully account for the resulting interpretation of a complex expression which
contains them. Instead, words and other linguistic forms can be treated as prompts
for the construction of meaning, and the analyst’s task is both to identify the mean-
ing chunks the expressions prompt, and, perhaps more importantly, to describe the
processes which explain the construction of the higher levels of meaning.
Recent proposals have also extended stylistic analysis in ways which give more
focus to cognitive considerations (cf. Semino and Culpeper, Stockwell), enriching our
understanding of how vocabulary and sentence structure choices reflect conceptual
constructs (consider the work on metaphor and blending, schemas, poetic forms, or
speech and thought representation). It appears, then, that cognitive considerations
are enhancing our understanding of both specific linguistic choices and general
conceptual strategies involved in the construction of meaning.
In retrospect, the definitive works on stylistic analysis, such as Leech and
Short’s Style in Fiction, were the first to talk in clear theoretical terms about meaning
construction in a literary text. And indeed, literary discourse is a perfect example of
an expression mode where the emerging interpretation relies on the use of specific
expressions, but cannot be fully explained through those expressions alone. The
processes of the emergence of meaning have been described differently, primarily
with respect to the level of linguistic form which is considered basic (a word, a
category, a sentence, a construction, etc.), but few of the frameworks available can
be naturally applied to narrative discourse. However, two interlocking frameworks
which have emerged in the last twenty years, mental spaces and blending theories,

Style: Volume 41, No. 2, Summer 2007 133

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134 Barbara Dancygier

show significant promise in this respect (see, for example, Sanders and Redeker;
Oakley; Turner “Double-scope Stories;” Semino “A Cognitive Stylistic Approach,”
“Blending and Characters,” “Text worlds,” Dancygier “Identity and Perspective,”
“Visual Viewpoint,” “Blending and Narrative”).
In this paper, I extend the basic concepts of mental spaces theory to identify some
of the aspects of meaning construction in fragmented narratives. Using Margaret
Atwood’s The Blind Assassin as an example, I introduce the concept of narrative
anchors to describe some of the mechanisms which underlie the construction of a
coherent story out of several substories and explain some of the sources of various
understandings of the text individual readers may arrive at.

1. Story Structure
The authorial choices in sequencing the presentation of the story may rely on dif-
ferent organizational principles. While time seems to be invariably important in
those choices, other factors often disturb the temporal sequence. In fact, contem-
porary fiction often experiments with the presentation of the story in ways which
deliberately make the reader’s task harder. Disruptions affect all areas of story
construction — temporal organization, continued identity of characters, boundar-
ies between fact and imagination, etc. And yet, in spite of all the intricacy, most
readers have no difficulty in understanding the underlying story, and often enjoy
solving the puzzles presented by the text.
The disrupted form of many contemporary narratives and the resulting chal-
lenges to narrative comprehension call for an elaboration of one of the primary
categories of classical narratology — the distinction between the story on the one
hand and text and discourse on the other.1
While the various aspects of the textual “surface” have been discussed in much
detail, the “story” remains an under-defined concept, in spite of emerging research
in cognitive narratology where the underlying nature of story-telling is in focus.
Recent work by Herman (“Stories as a Tool”), for example, discusses “stories” as
tools supporting important aspects of conceptualizing experience. The narrative
form, in Herman’s discussion, prompts for structuring experiences in specific
ways, such as distinguishing parts, or “chunks,” seeking causal explanations and
sequential organization, or considering new situations in the context of known event
types. Stories, in this view, are tools for conceptualizing the flow of experiences
as a coherent structure.
In classical narratology, for comparison, a story is a largely intuitive concept,
defined primarily by a sequence of events (Chatman Story and Discourse; Com-
ing to Terms). The sequentiality of the story as a concept builds on the most basic

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Narrative Anchors 135

understanding of narrativity as a temporal series of connected events, leading

from some initial state to the final one. What is not discussed too often, though, is
the very complexity of the mental leap from such a sequence to the story as it is
told in the text, with its coherence and causal organization. Furthermore, the very
concept of what constitutes a narrative event is an important issue, in view of
significant differences among agentive acts, mental states, experiential events, etc.
What emerges from the discussions is the ambiguity of the term “story,” between
the characteristics of a story as a conceptualization device in Herman’s sense, and
the specific story as it emerges from the text telling it. I will refer to the former
generic concept as story-G, and to the narrative construct emerging from a specific
text as story-S, and attempt to clarify the processes which yield story-S from the
interaction of the text and the principles of story-G.
There are numerous questions regarding the cognitive aspects of story-S. The
primary one is what we might metaphorically refer to as the “location” of the story.
It can reside only in two “places”: the text or the reader’s mind. The text seems
to be the assumed default choice, very much in the same way as folk semantics
has meaning residing “in” the words. The “words as containers for meaning” idea
is central to what is now known as the Conduit Metaphor (cf. Reddy, Lakoff and
Johnson), whereby speakers package the intended meaning into language expres-
sions for hearers to receive. If, alternately, we claim that the story resides in the
reader’s mind, then how did it get there? The text (or texts) should be responsible
for its construction, though there is no one-to-one correspondence between textual
fragments and story elements. As an example, consider The Great Gatsby’s crucial
“event” — Myrtle Wilson’s death. The “story-S” makes Daisy responsible for it,
since she drove the car that hit Myrtle, but the text does not describe her doing it.
There is clearly enough in the text to let the reader “figure it out,” but it is not part
of what is communicated. The story is thus richer than the text.
The specific processes which guide the reader in creating the story-S are not very
well investigated, with notable exceptions of the discussion of contextual frames in
Emmott’s Narrative Comprehension, and Herman’s general framework Story Logic.
Some of these processes, as I argue below, are similar to the processes involved in
the on-line setting up, elaboration and manipulation of conceptual “packets” called
mental spaces. Fauconnier (Mental Spaces; Mappings) defines mental spaces as
cognitive domains activated or set up by the use of linguistic forms for the purposes
of on-line meaning construction; they are further described as not being a part of
language itself, or a hidden level of representation, but as having an indispensable
role in the construction of meaning. The role of linguistic expressions is thus seen

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136 Barbara Dancygier

not as “containers” for meaning, but as prompts which guide its construction. If
we assume, somewhat loosely, I admit, that the “story-S” is the meaning of the
text, then we might learn more about the nature of the story by looking at the role
specific textual choices play in its emergence.
The concept of emergent meaning is most transparently described in terms of
the blending of mental spaces, or conceptual integration (Fauconnier and Turner
“Blending as a Central Process,” “Conceptual Integration,” “Principles,” “The Way
we Think,” Coulson). For example, when the author Jonathan Raban recalls his
childhood experience of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, he describes it as living inside
the book and goes on to elaborate on the fantasy world thus set up. The expression
cannot be understood literally (the narrator lived in an English village) and is not
conventional, so we can assume that the reader has to undertake mental work to
arrive at its meaning. A skeletal description of the blending processes is given in
Figure 1.

There are two input spaces, that of Jonathan Raban’s childhood (with its temporal
and spatial features and the narrator as a child) and that of the novel Huck Finn
(with different setting, characters, etc.). Each space has its own structure (or topol-
ogy), which we can describe in terms of time, space, participants, etc. The spaces
Childhood Book
English village ▲ ▲America
boy Huck Finn
stream ▲ ▲ the Mississippi River
no adventure adventure

Input 1 Input 2
-America▲
-Huck Finn ▲
▲
-boy
▲
-the Mississippi River
-adventure ▲
Blend

Fig. 1

are linked via cross-mappings, which reveal and/or construct counterpart elements
in the inputs (e.g., the stream in the village and the Mississippi river). Blending
these inputs selectively projects Raban’s childhood persona into the temporal and
spatial setting of the novel. The emergent structure of the blend is not simply a

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Narrative Anchors 137

combination of these elements, but an emergent mental space where a child living
in 20th century England can experience adventure on the Mississippi. The blend
thus creates its own topology and yields meanings not available in the inputs. At
the same time, the blend may inform its inputs, via backward projection, so that we
can understand the ways in which reading made the boy’s village experience richer.
The analysis of this example applies to a narrative fragment, but the mecha-
nisms underlying its comprehension seem to work in similar ways when a broader
narrative context is considered. The novel as a whole can be talked about in terms
of narrative spaces, which can be defined as cognitive domains activated or set
up in the reader’s mind by the use of linguistic forms, for the purposes of on-line
story construction. A narrative space, once set up, is maintained throughout the
story and serves as input to blends which will be constructed. The final “story-S”
(with its event structure, sequential organization, cause-effect organization, and
other generic story-like features, and also its text-induced specificity) results from
subsequent blending of lower level narrative spaces, and can be referred to as the
emergent story. As a blended construct, it relies on selective projection from lower
level spaces, but creates narrative structure of its own (roughly equivalent to an
idealized reader’s version of “what happened”). Like other blended constructs, it
also projects new structure back to its input narrative spaces, thus enriching their
content with new topology (especially, new cause-effect relations).
The specific aspect of story-S construction which I elaborate here is the privi-
leged status of selected linguistic forms in the setting up and maintenance of narrative
spaces, and in prompting cross-space mappings further used in the blends leading
to the emergent story. Such expressions will be referred to as narrative anchors.

2. Narrative Spaces and Narrative Anchors

An example of the scope of meaning construction simple expressions can accom-
plish is the first sentence of Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Blind Assassin, given
in (1) below.
(1) Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.

The sentence seems to be a straightforward description of a tragic event, reported

by Laura’s sister, Iris. The highly specific description of the time of Laura’s death,
however, suggests that it is not simply an instance of temporal framing. Further-
more, the choice of the verb drive implies agenthood, and, consequently, intentional
behavior, so that it is unlikely that Laura’s death was a result of an accident. The
policeman’s report in the next paragraph also mentions two witnesses who testified
that Laura “had turned the car sharply and deliberately.” In the third paragraph, Iris

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138 Barbara Dancygier

herself comments: “It wasn’t the brakes, I thought. She had her reasons.”
The novel is a fragmented narrative, with Iris’s pseudo-autobiographical
confession as its central element. It is the core of The Blind Assassin narrative
(I will refer to it as BA) and is the “framing” story of all the remaining narrative
fragments. She starts her writing as an old woman, describing her daily tasks and
walks, and using them as prompts for reminiscing about her earlier life — thus
the actual autobiography proceeds chronologically from her childhood to old age.
The initial paragraphs, where Laura’s death is described in the terms quoted above,
however, are taken out of the temporal sequence of the memoirs. The viewpoint of
this section (called The bridge) is unclear — it is a part of the autobiography, but
Iris is also announcing herself as the primary narrator. The double role is reflected
in the discourse. For example, Iris introduces Laura as “her sister” while disre-
garding any description of other characters mentioned — her husband Richard or
her caregiver, Reenie. And yet, the fragment’s main role is not to start Iris’s nar-
rative, but to set up the space of the focal event of Laura’s death, while breaking
the temporal sequence and further suggesting that it was suicide. The fact that The
bridge violates temporal order is not remarkable in itself, given that many texts do
just that, but it does pose a question with regard to the role of temporal sequence
in the coherence of the story.
The primary role of The bridge is to set the theme of the novel as a whole —
what Laura really did and why, and the event’s role in the sequence is significantly
less relevant. We should probably note that among all the patterns of “presentation”
mentioned in Leech and Short, the chronological may be the most obvious, but nei-
ther the most common nor the most interesting stylistically. Classical narratological
accounts (e.g., Genette, Bal, Toolan) argue further that a chronological presentation
is never really just chronological, given that there are typically numerous cases of
omissions, changes of pace, or concurrent narration in any chronological narrative.
From the point of view of narrative comprehension, what makes chronological
disruptions interesting is not that they occur, but how they affect the understand-
ing of the story. A flashback does not just break the sequence, but breaks it so that
important aspects of story construction are highlighted — such as the character’s
current psychological state or the way in which past actions affect future choices.
Assuming that BA starts the way it does in order to establish the main theme
of the novel allows us to also see how the main narrative spaces are initially set up.
We have already looked at the way in which the text signals the “suicide” space,
along with its twin, the “accident” space. Later, towards the end of the section Iris
refers to notebooks which Laura left for her to read:

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Narrative Anchors 139

(2) . . .the stack of cheap school exercise books that she must have hidden that very
morning . . ., knowing I would be the one to find them.

The reader can assume that the notebooks contain information explaining Laura’s
decision to kill herself, which only Iris, the narrator, can have access to. Another
space is thus set-up, the “notebooks” space, subordinate to the “suicide”-space. It
is structured similarly to the “book” space in the Huck Finn example above — in
both spaces the written text contains information (fictional story, letter, testimony,
etc.) which may be available to a person if the physical object containing the
information can be accessed. The novel makes it clear that the content of the
“notebooks”-space is now known to Iris and that it may explain Laura’s reasons.
But the space, similarly to the “suicide”-space, is merely signaled, and is expected
to be elaborated throughout the narrative. In spite of their skeletal topology, the
spaces will continue to structure the reader’s understanding of the unfolding text,
as new information is added.
The “accident”-space, which is initially introduced in The bridge, is further
elaborated on the next page, in a clipping from The Toronto Star which describes
Laura’s death as an accident. Many of such clippings are spread throughout the
text, creating a running commentary on the events narrated by Iris, presented from
the “official” or “public” point of view (which the reader will gradually learn to
associate with Iris’s husband, Richard Griffen). Together, the clippings structure
a shared viewpoint space, where no new information is added, but the story told
by Iris is given its public dimension. Just as an example, the first fragment talks
about accidental death of Miss Laura Chase and adds that her car swerved. The
choice of words here avoids attributing any intention to Laura, in contrast to The
bridge earlier describing her as driving the car off a bridge.
The expressions such as drove, the car swerved, or exercise books function
as narrative “place-holders” for mental spaces which can only be signaled at this
point in the narrative. They are expected to be expanded in the ensuing narrative and
are presented as contributing to the topology or framing of other narrative spaces.
Such “place-holder” or “portal” expressions can be called narrative anchors, since
they open access to spaces which are only partially set up. As further examples
will show, narrative anchors may not only set up spaces to be elaborated later, but
they also build cross-mappings that link different narrative spaces, add structure to
them, and prompt projections which set up subsequent levels of narrative blends.
They are, then, expressions which contribute in specific ways to the construction
of constituent spaces and the resulting network. As I will argue, any story relies
on a number of narrative spaces and, while it may eventually yield a chronological

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140 Barbara Dancygier

understanding of the events, it develops its structure on the basis of developing

links and cross-mappings. The setting up of the specific input narrative spaces and
the overall organization of the network constructed through the text depend in a
crucial way on narrative anchors.
The concept of conceptual anchors emerges first in Hutchins’ discussion of
the role material objects may play in blending. In order to play a role, they have
to be perceived, but, as Hutchins suggests, (selectively) perceiving objects is a
step which does not need to be treated separately from (also selectively) project-
ing them into blends. Hutchins comments further that material objects as anchors
have the stability required to serve in further computations, since they are capable
of “holding” conceptual elements “in place.” The discussion of material anchors
such as clocks or calendars makes it clear that anchors do not have any intrinsic
quality, but rather have to be used in a certain way, so that material elements are
used as proxies for conceptual elements.
Narrative anchors, as I discuss them here, share some features with material
anchors. They have a “material” form in some sense, since they are written ex-
pressions in the text. They are used in connecting or representing conceptual ele-
ments (narrative spaces and aspects of their structure) and they are not inherently
predestined to play the role of anchors, but narrative structure may select them to
“hold” parts of narrative structure and cross-space links “in place.” In other words,
they participate in blending processes in ways somewhat similar to their material
counterparts.

3. The Story Network

The next major narrative space introduced in BA is a novella presumably written by
Laura (also titled The Blind Assassin), and published by Iris after Laura’s death. The
novella (which will be termed BA1-space, as a sub-pace of the overall BA story)
is much more elaborate than other spaces in the network — it is an independent
text — but its links to the rest of the text of BA are not obvious. There are numerous
aspects of the BA1 wording which give it a special place in the overall narrative.
First, there are no proper names in the text. There are two characters, referred
to throughout via third person pronouns — he and she. Personal pronouns may
play very significant roles in texts (see Emmott, “Constructing Social Space”), and
there are some narratives where pronouns are the only referring expressions. But
in the case of BA1, which is situated within the context of the rest of the novel,
establishing the referents of the pronouns is a necessary part of understanding the
whole story. The question of how closely BA1 needs to be blended into the network
starts with these pronouns.
It is possible to assume that the text constructing the BA1 narrative space

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Narrative Anchors 141

could be just what it ostensibly is — a post-modern romance, and any resemblance

between the characters in BA1 to other characters in BA counts merely as playfully
teasing the reader. On closer inspection, though, the links between BA1 and other
narrative spaces are most certainly meaningful. The logical chain which starts with
discovering the identities of the lovers referred to as he and she leads to the discovery
of crucial aspects of the story as a whole, such as the identity of the author of the
novella constituting the BA1 space, and, perhaps most importantly, the explanation
of Laura’s “reasons.” In other words, the final story cannot be constructed without
incorporating the structure of the BA1-space. At the end of her autobiographical
narrative, Iris explicitly fills some (but not all) gaps, but she also adds that the
reader could have discovered the untold facts without her help. Indeed, the reader
can only do this by recognizing the anchors that link BA1 to other spaces, and it is
unlikely that all these links were purely coincidental.
As I will show below, approaching the text as a network of interconnected
narrative spaces reveals unexpected richness of meaning, while at the same time
giving coherence to various narrative devices which could otherwise be construed
as impediments.
The text of BA1 starts with a Prologue:
(3) She has a single photograph of him. She tucked it into a brown envelope . . . between
the pages of Perennials for the Rock Garden, where no one else would ever look. . . . . the
photo is of the two of them together, her and this man, on a picnic. . . . he’s holding up his
hand, as if to fend her off in play, or else to protect himself from the camera. . . . Over to
one side — you wouldn’t see it at first - there’s a hand, cut by the margin . . . .

In reality, photographs, like books, are material anchors for representation spaces.
The image in a photograph is like a timeless window to the specific time and space
represented, whether identifiable or not. In the novel space, the photo plays a simi-
lar role for the characters, but its description also works as a narrative anchor for
readers. The photograph is in fact the most ambiguous of the anchors in BA, for
a number of reasons. First, it is the only record of “her” and “him” together, but
there is the “hand” of yet another, anonymous, person. So the story involves three
participants, not just two — the “hand” is an anchor to the construction of another
participant in the story. Also, the photograph is hidden in another book — so that
by discovering the owner of the book the reader can work out who “she” is.
In fact, the Prologue to BA1 mimics the role The bridge plays in BA — it pro-
vides the narrative anchors needed. But there is an important difference. While The
bridge sets up the narrative spaces the novel as a whole will elaborate and explore,
the Prologue opens up spaces needed to fill in the narrative structure of its higher

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142 Barbara Dancygier

narrative, the BA, not BA1 space. Everything captured in the photo – the picnic, the
man with a cigarette, or the hand cut off by the margin — belongs in the structure
of BA, but the woman in BA1 holding the photograph is the link between the two
spaces. In spite of ostensibly writing the BA story as an autobiography, Iris does
not tell the reader all that she knows, so the rest is said through BA1.
A reader who explores The bridge and the Prologue carefully enough will then
receive plenty of opportunities to understand the role BA1 plays in the story as a
whole. Just as an example, the identity of the man in BA1 is easily established by
cross-links such as the following description of the events at the Button Factory
picnic:
(4) Then he took a picture for the paper with his camera. . . . Alex Thomas raised his
hand as if to fend him off. (BA)

The BA1 anchor of the photograph, representing the picnic and the man’s ges-
ture, now links the man to a character in BA. The story-structuring power of such
anchors is quite substantial. Once the reader recognizes the man in the picture as
Alex, all that is known about both Alex and “him” begins to characterize Alex and
his participation in the events. The story being told in BA is not coherent without
the added inputs, though it remains very traditionally chronological, and in order
to construct the complete story the reader has to incorporate information from
BA1 into BA. Since this is a pattern affecting most of the events that can explain
Laura’s suicide, we have to conclude that the story told in the novel as a whole is
not structured sequentially. What appears to be more significant than chronology
is causal links and deeper understanding of the characters and their motivations
— not a surprising observation at all, but often back-grounded in narratological
discussions of the “story.”
Another anchor of crucial importance is the identity of the woman in BA1. Here
the narrative prompts are significantly more misleading, as they point alternately
to Laura and to Iris. Indeed, they are intentionally misleading. The interesting
question here is why the reader follows the prompts and assumes one or the other
of the women to be the “she” character in BA1, without explicitly being asked to
do so. The text, in whichever sense, does not require such a conscious enquiry,
and, as the comments by some critics suggest (cf. Roy), BA1 could be treated as
an independent story, simply elaborating some of the themes. Without the nar-
rative structuring work that the reader does, however, the novel would be rather
incoherent. Narrative anchors are story-level devices relying on the reader’s search
for coherence — the descriptions of identical gestures in identical situations have
to be considered relevant when the identity of one of the (gesturing) characters

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Narrative Anchors 143

is unclear, or the whole text becomes a mess of conflicting story snippets and no
coherence is possible. The cross-space links established and the plot elements “read
into” narrative spaces establish narrative coherence across different spaces, which,
as the goal of story-construction, leads to narrative comprehension.
Though literary critics writing about The Blind Assassin have much to say
about the significance of, let’s say, use of color or the recurring theme of violated
women’s bodies (Perrakis, Roy) in search for the more abstract levels of interpreta-
tion, narrative structure is not included in these considerations. The fragmentation
and deliberate deception are treated as components of “post-modern” style, while
they are, in this case, features of narration. They require that the participating narra-
tive spaces be integrated, via narrative anchors and cross-space projection, into the
final emergent story. The emergent blend is not dependent on any of the individual
spaces alone, but on the story-construction mechanisms.
The last of the major narrative spaces in The Blind Assassin is another piece
of fiction, embedded in BA1. It is a pulp science-fiction story, composed during
the secret meetings of the lovers. As the reader can conclude, the man, who is in
hiding through most of the story, makes a living publishing such popular fiction.
Not surprisingly, the literary quality of the text so produced stands in stark contrast
to the rest of the novel. The role of the Sci-Fi text, with all its simplistic faithful-
ness to the genre, is murky. The only obvious indication of the link with the main
story world is the character of a blind assassin — I will refer to it, then, as BA2.
The story told in the BA2-space, which is in fact never finished, takes place on
the planet of Zycron, where blinded children weave carpets and young women, with
their tongues cut out, are sacrificed on the ceremonial altar, after being raped by the
lord of the underworld. With its style, themes, and genre the story constituting the
BA2 space seems out of place in the novel as a whole. While critics carefully pick
out some of the themes (blindness, rape, practices equivalent to sacrificing young
women by marrying them off to rich but cruel husbands, etc.), they do not mention
any of the important narrative contributions the BA2-space makes by filling in the
gaps in the main story line.
According to the mental spaces analysis proposed by Schnepf, BA2 sets up a
set of roles, to be matched with values in other spaces. Role-value links are among
the most salient mechanisms of mental space networks. In the most standard case,
the frame of the US political system profiles the role of the President, (with its at-
tendant duties and privileges), but also demands that a specific individual (the value)
is determined by elections every four years. The role-value link, once established,
allows speakers to access the value-individual through the role, and vice versa. If

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144 Barbara Dancygier

a speaker says George Bush was the governor of Texas, she might be referring to
the role (the current president held a different political office before), or the value
(the man called George Bush held a political office before). The roles are typi-
cally established within an appropriate frame, and the frame may be constructed in
spontaneous discourse, supported by an understanding of what lexical items mean
(the buyer and seller roles in the scenario evoked by the verb sell), or determined
socially (the President). Proper names typically represent values, rather than roles,
while specific phrases designate roles rather than values.
Establishing the role-value links across spaces thus gives mental access from
one space to the other. If the roles designated by the story in BA2 (the king, the mute
girl to be sacrificed, the blind assassin, the lord of the underworld) are matched
with the names of characters in BA, the cross-space links thus set up are of the
most common and inconspicuous kind, but there is a significant narrative gain, as
access across narrative spaces fills more gaps in Iris’s story. Let us consider just
one example, as discussed by Schnepf. In BA2, the lord of the underworld plots
against the king. He hires a professional (blind) assassin to kill the king, and also
gives a bribe to get the sacrificial girl. But the blind assassin and the mute girl fall
in love and escape from his power. The anchors which Schnepf discusses in detail
suggest that the king is linked across spaces to Iris’s father as his counterpart, that
Iris is the mute girl, and that the lord of the underworld is Iris’s husband, Richard,
and, finally, that the blind assassin is Alex. The events leading to Iris’s encounter
with Alex and to her marriage to Richard now become known. It is clear that it was
Richard who hired Alex to set Iris’s father’s factory on fire, and that Iris was forced
to marry Richard in exchange for financial help for the family. Most importantly,
we could not find out about Richard’s role in the fire and the resulting damage to
the Chase family from Iris alone. She does not know about all this. But when it is
framed into the story that Alex tells her (under the pretence of BA2), overall coher-
ence is preserved, since he is the only person who knows what really happened
then. Consequently, the gaps in the plot of BA could not be filled in any other way.
At the same time we should note that coding the real story into what Alex
writes is not as artificial a narrative device at it might seem — Alex could not
simply tell Iris about his role in the fire and thus admit to have ruined her family
and her own life in the process. Instead, Alex makes this convoluted confession
as if he were inviting Iris to do what the reader does — blend the narrative spaces
into a coherent story.
This aspect of story construction is also particularly interesting from the
linguistic and stylistic point of view. The main characters of BA, Alex and Iris,

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Narrative Anchors 145

are referred to in different narrative spaces via different referring expressions:

proper names in BA, pronouns in BA1, and role descriptors in BA2. Since there
are hardly any other ways to refer to people, the BA1 and BA2 narratives exhaust
all the available options of identifying a character, without coming up with other
proper names. The linguistic construction is dauntingly simple, but the results
spread through the entire story.
Most surprisingly, the critical work on the novel that I have seen does not ac-
knowledge the role of BA2 as a story-constructing factor, instead focusing on the
aspects of the character’s construction (such as blindness or mutilation) which do
not quite work without the rest of what BA2 contributes (cf. Perrakis, Roy, Wilson).
For example, when these critics notice that Iris describes the marks of violence on
her body and that the sacrificial virgin in BA2 is also mutilated and is meant to be
raped, they use these observations to talk about the treatment of women’s bodies
as one of the themes of the novel. The critics’ focus on such themes effectively
allows them to ignore narrative structure. But the links between the roles in BA2
and the values in BA1 and BA reveal the important irony of Iris’s situation: she
loves a man who helped bring about the demise of her father, which in turn made
her a “sacrificial bride” and forced her to marry the man she is now betraying; she
does not know (though perhaps guesses) that, even more ironically, her lover’s
leftist views have destroyed her father, a fair employer, only to supplant him with
a ruthless business magnate. The inclusion of BA2 is also crucial with respect to
viewpoint management. Given that BA and BA1 are told from Iris’s viewpoint, BA2
is the only part of the narrative that can provide parts of the story not available
to her, and so Atwood creates a masterly construction where Alex’s viewpoint is
blended into the rest of the text. Again, the major contribution a narrative space
makes to the story is not related to its temporal sequence, but to its coherence and
focus on character motivation.
The links among the major spaces prompt an explanation of the title — The
Blind Assassin. The phrase, while ostensibly coined to refer to the group of profes-
sional killers in BA2, acquires a specific metaphorical meaning on the basis of the
KNOWING IS SEEING mapping, whereby expressions such as unclear, transpar-
ent, vision, being in the dark, being illuminated, etc. are used to describe epistemic
states. It is also metaphorically conventional to call a person blind when they lack
understanding. Building on this easily accessible mapping, many critics assume
that the blind assassin in the title is Iris (cf. Wilson, Bouson) — she unknowingly
causes her sister’s death, by casually informing her that the man Laura loved died,
and thus removing her reason for living. But it is possible to use the same meta-

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146 Barbara Dancygier

phorical argument in combination with the actual narrative, and then Alex emerges
as an even better candidate for the role. Like the blind assassin in BA2, he is paid
to commit a crime, and he does what he is paid for, but then falls in love and steals
the precious bride from his employer. But he is also metaphorically blind, for he
could not foresee that the knowledge of his affair with Iris will kill Laura in the end.
Furthermore, in the story in BA2 both lovers are mutilated — he is blind, but
she is mute. As Schnepf shows in detail, being a sacrificial bride and being made
unable to talk applies to Iris in a straightforward way. Iris matches the description
of the girl in BA2 as “swollen” with words and describes her own forced silence in
similar terms. In BA she is telling her story for the first time, and still hides much
of it, even though she is the framing narrator. The role of the “blind assassin” is
thus ambiguous, but the interpretation suggested in BA2 seems better supported.

4. Conclusion
As was noted in the introduction, cognitive approaches to the narrative are
beginning to uncover many of the mental mechanisms involved in narrative con-
struction and comprehension. Recent research contributes significantly to our
understanding of how stories create their own logic, and how that logic is then
extended over other mental domains. What I have argued in this article, though, is
that the search for cognitive underpinnings of the narrative can and indeed should
include renewed focus on the text.
As the discussion above suggests, linguistically relevant choices of referential
expressions, verbs, or mental space builders can influence the understanding of the
narrative in ways which affect both the very interpretation of events and charac-
ters’ minds, and the narrative structure as such. These choices matter for specific
elements of the story-S the text tells, the identity of the characters, and the very
understanding of its main themes. They do not do so, however, by directly add-
ing information in the way we expect all texts to do, but by prompting meaning
construction beyond the text as such through setting up narrative spaces and links
across those spaces. In other words, mental space structure mediates between the
meaning contributed directly by the text and the meaning emerging from generic
principles of narrative construction as such.
The questions regarding the mental status of story-S which I posed at the
beginning cannot yet be answered in full, but the concepts introduced here answer
some of them. The story emerging from any particular text is the intermediate level
of meaning, with its own characteristics. On the one hand, the construct builds on
the more specific meaning contributions of textual devices, while being framed on
the other hand by the general narrative concepts such as chunking or search for

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Narrative Anchors 147

causation. While the text prompts a myriad of mental spaces, it also uses narra-
tive anchors to privilege those which participate in story construction — I called
them narrative spaces. The readers’ search for overall story coherence helps in
recognizing the signals given textually, hence some (often significant) differences
in the readers’ responses.
The sequential nature of the story (traditionally treated as its defining charac-
teristic) is a result, not the constitutive feature. Furthermore, events do not form a
linear chronological sequence — instead, they cluster together to form larger and
larger hierarchically organized blended structures. The resulting story is therefore
a multi-layered network of narrative spaces which yields a sequence, even if only
a roughly conceived one, as a consequence of its organization.
The final narrative structure of The Blind Assassin can be roughly represented
in Figure 2, with the emergent story being the final product of the integrated
network of spaces set up in the course of the text. Some of its spaces (like the
“clippings” or the “accident” space) are linked only loosely to the whole network,
while maintaining the independent “public” view of the events described. For
comparison, the spaces participating in the central blend (BA, BA1 and BA2) are
effectively telling the same story — and they do so by prompting for cross-space
connections, for identity blends (Iris is “she” and the mute girl) and for the overall
integration of various aspects of the story presented in the input spaces in the guise
of independent narratives. BA remains the main narrative space which projects
most of its structure into the emergent blend (as indicated, among others, by its
reliance on proper names), in contrast to BA1 and BA2, which contribute plot and
characterization pieces to fill in the gaps in BA. It might not be accurate, however,
to call BA a “framing” narrative (for example in the sense described by Herman in
“Genette meets Vygotsky”). The relationship among the various spaces is much
less that of embedding, and is more appropriately described as integration, which
poses a further question of the cognitive “benefit” of such stories (in contrast to
framed stories, which Herman discusses in terms of distributed cognition).
The Blind Assassin is a thought-provoking laboratory experiment in narrative
spaces construction and blending, but the process is, I argue, the same in fictional
narratives of all kinds, even though they may be ostensibly less fragmented. In
the analysis above, I have focused on selected aspects of story-construction, and
the role of narrative anchors in the emergence of stories as blends of participant
narrative spaces. Numerous questions, however, are still not formulated, let alone
answered. How do narratives distinguish various kinds of narrative space interac-
tions? How is viewpoint established and maintained? How are the different spatial

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148 Barbara Dancygier

suicide Iris remembers accident

▲ ▲
BA
v-point: Iris ▲ ▲ v-point: Iris
v-point: Iris

▲ BA1
▼
v-point: Iris
notebooks
BA2
v-point: Laura
v-point: Alex

▼ ▼ ▼
Emergent Story

Fig 2.

and temporal features of the inputs reconciled in the blend? How is intersubjectivity
achieved in the emergent structure? The levels of narrative structure which operate
between the text and the specific story or the story as a conceptualization device
are numerous and intricate. It seems, however, that conceptual integration offers
tools which might help us propose more and more accurate answers.

Note
Narratologists use a number of two-fold or three-fold distinctions here (fabula
1

/ sjuzhet, story / text, story / text / narration, etc). Because the focus of my discussion
is on the tension between the story and everything else, I will stick to the ‘story’
versus ‘text,’ while elaborating the concept of ‘story-S.’

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