2012 paper on Blending in 'Slowness' by Milan Kundera

Blending and the Studyof Narrative

Approaches and Applications

Edited by

Ralf SchneiderMarcus Hartner

De Gruyter

CRAIG HAMILTON(Universite de Haute Alsace)

The Conceptual Blending of Time and Space:Milan Kundera's Slowness

1. Introduction

Part of the appeal of conceptual blending theory has been its explanatorypower for a vast array of examples which seem, at least superficially, to becategorically different. For example, in The Way We Think (2002), the mostcomprehensive statement on conceptual blending theory to date,Fauconnier and Turner analyze advertisements, pictures, jokes, riddles,news stories, grammatical constructions, counterfactuals, literary texts, sci-entific theories, mathematical concepts, electronic instruments and otherproducts of the human imagination. Fauconnier and Turner do so in or-der to show us that although there seem to be differences between theproducts of blending, blends nevertheless result from a single unified actof cognition: conceptual integration. Unfortunately, superficial differencesbetween blends — for example, a tachometer and a counterfactual — haveoften relegated the study of these products to different academic disci-plines, such as electrical engineering and philosophy. Even so, in The WayWe Think, Fauconnier and Turner try hard to persuade researchers inmany different disciplines that, whether or not they are aware of it, theywork with and study a rich array of conceptual blends.

Fortunately, conceptual blending theory has not gone unnoticed bysome scholars in the humanities. For example, those interested in linguis-tic approaches to literary texts, especially cognitive linguistic approaches totext analysis, have been among the first to conduct research on the roleconceptual blending plays in making meaning out of texts of all kinds. Incognitive poetics, for instance, recent articles by Canning (2008) and Crisp(2008) reveal the importance of conceptual blending in studies of 17th andIS^-century English poetry. Likewise, studies by Freeman (2002) andHamilton (2002) suggest that conceptual blending plays a vital role inareas of interest in cognitive stylistics. With respect to cognitive rhetoric,analyses of advertisements by Fauconnier and Turner (2002) and Hamilton(2003) show that conceptual blending is indispensable to certain forms ofpersuasion. Last but not least, in cognitive narratology, recent articles by

326 Craig Hamilton Conceptual Blending of Time and Space 327

Dancygier (2005, 2006), Mikkonen (2007), Hogan (2007), Copland (2008),Grishakova (2009), and Fludernik (2010) all attest to the importance ofconceptual blending in both the construction and interpretation of literarynarratives. The fact that scholars in literary linguistics have been amongthe first in the humanities to recognize the importance of blending theorymight seem unusual. However, as Fludernik sees it: "Literary texts [...]provide the scholar of language with a testing ground for the most ad-vanced theoretical models" (1996: 606). As the 'testing ground' for con-ceptual blending theory is vast, it has naturally attracted the attention ofliterary linguists.

The references above by no means comprise a comprehensive list ofliterary critics interested in conceptual blending. However, works by thosecited above do suggest that the relevance of conceptual blending theory toliterary studies has become clear by now. My discussion of Milan Kundera'sSlowness (1996) is a case in point of this development. As I aim to makeclear in this paper, conceptual blending plays a crucial role in Kundera'snovella. Many critics mention the fact that Kundera's narrative combinesspace and time, but they have not understood the combination of such asa conceptual blend. To be fair, this is rather common in literary studieswhen critics concern themselves with what questions rather than with howquestions. To call Slowness a conceptual blend is a very concise way of an-swering the question "What is this novella?" However, the primary pur-pose of my paper is to answer the question of "How does that blendwork?" Hopefully, by answering a how question rather than a what ques-tion, my paper will show how conceptual blending theory can shed morelight on Kundera's Slowness.

2. A Brief Overview of Kundera's Slowness

Kundera's novella, La lenteur, was the first work of fiction he wrote inFrench rather than Czech. Published in France in early 1995, La lenteurwas Kundera's eighth work of fiction. Slowness, Linda Asher's Englishtranslation of La lenteur, was published in mid-1996 in the United States.Although there are "critics who accuse Kundera of betraying the Czechnation by emigrating to France and then [...] pandering to western andAmerican tastes in his subsequent novels to find a wider audience"(Misurella 2007: 521), such accusations are not relevant to my discussion;nor are Kundera's reputation, or the place of Slowness in his canon. Myanalysis does not focus on Kundera's use of figurative language in Slownesseven though "[mjetaphor [...] has always been important to Kundera"

(Misurella 1993: 155). Instead, I focus on Slowness because it is a wonderfulexample of the conceptual blending of space and time in narrative.

Slowness is set in 1994 outside of Paris, in a countryside chateau thathas been turned into a hotel and conference center. The action takes placeat the chateau from the afternoon of one day to the morning of the next,focusing essentially on the evening. These facts lend a sense of temporaland spatial unity to Slowness. However, many different characters inhabitKundera's novella. What is more, Kundera essentially puts them into pairs.First, there is the first-person narrator, Milan, and his wife, Vera.1 Second,there are two characters from the 18th century: Madame de T and the Che-valier. The first story from the late 20th century "is intertwined with thestory of leisured 1 S^-cenrury French lovers from Vivant Denon's novellaPoint de lendemain" (Kovacevic 2006: 637). The Baron de Denon, Domi-nique Vivant (1747—1825), published Point de lendemain in 1777 (its Englishtide is No Tomorrow). At the end of the very first chapter of Slowness, thenarrator "Milan" begins discussing Denon's IS^-century softly porno-graphic novella, thereby introducing the reader for the first time to theIS^-century story that relates directly to the story of Slowness. Kundera im-plies that Point de lendemain, which essentially tells the story of a one-nightstand, was set in the very same chateau that the narrator and his wife arespending the night in over 200 years later in 1994.

To continue, Kundera's third pair of characters is comprised of Berck,a French public intellectual, and his rival Duberques, a politician. Thesetwo engage in what Kundera calls "moral judo" (19) in front of the media,publicly defending the rights of the downtrodden and attempting to seewho can outdo the other in his humanitarian actions. Fourth, Berck andImmaculata, one of Berck's girlfriends from his youth, form another oddcouple although their story is really only a minor one in the novella. Fifth,Immaculata, who has become a popular TV reporter, ends up at the hotelas well, with her cameraman who also happens to be her latest lover.Sixth, there is a smart librarian named Pontevin, whose circle of friendsincludes a younger man named Vincent with whom he regularly engagesin philosophical conversations in a Parisian cafe. Pontevin and Milan havea common friend named Goujard, although it is not clear if Milan knowsVincent personally. Neither Pontevin nor Goujard go to the chateau, butVincent does. Seventh, Vincent meets a young typist named Julie at thechateau, whom he seduces. Last but not least, there is Cechoripsky, aCzech scientist who attends the international entomology conference thatis. being held at the chateau. After being forced out of his research posi-tion by the communists, Cechoripsky was a construction worker for over

1 Ironically, this is the name of Kundera's actual wife.


20 years before eventually returning to science again after the Velvet Re-volution. Unlike the others, he attends the meeting by himself and so isnot really paired with anyone else.

In the middle of Slowness (chapter 26), Vera reminds Milan, "You'veoften told me you wanted to write a novel someday with not a single seri-ous word in it. A Big Piece of Nonsense for Your Own Pleasure" (91).The notion of nonsense might explain at least one implausible aspect ofSlowness: An entomology conference draws most of the characters togetherat the chateau. Milan and Vera are at the chateau for a short break fromParis (1); Berck, on the other hand, goes there because he is to be named"an honorary entomologist" by the learned society organizing the confer-ence (30). As Pontevin and his friends dislike Berck, Vincent supposedlygoes there in order to try to put Berck in his place (30). Moreover, becausethe media go wherever Berck goes, Immaculata and her cameraman aresent to the chateau in order to cover the story. Immaculata, however, ac-tually wants to see Berck since he refuses to answer her letters and theconference assignment gives her an excuse to see him. Julie is invited togo along in order to spend the evening at the famous chateau because shehas typed some documents for the chief entomologist hosting the confer-ence (71). Cechoripsky is invited because he made an international reputa-tion for himself before the communists ended his career. As for Madamede T and the Chevalier, the 18* century couple, the chateau was whereMadame de T lived with her husband. It is where she brings the Chevalierafter meeting him in a theater in Paris, and it is where they spend a nightmaking love, according to the summary Kundera provides of Denon'sPoint de lendemain.

3. Narrative Time and Narrative Space

To say that Slowness is a conceptual blend of time and space presupposesan understanding of time and space in narrative. In narratology, narrativetime is usually understood to mean at least two things: There is 'discoursetime' which can entail the time it takes to read a text, and there is 'storytime', which entails the span of time a story covers (Fludernik 2005: 608).To put it in even simpler terms, discourse may refer to 'form', while storymay refer to 'content'. In narratives, therefore, at the very least there istime as it pertains to discourse and time as it pertains to story. Accordingto Bridgeman, this discourse/story distinction can be refined even furtherif we see 'story time' as real time and 'discourse time' as the fictional rep-resentation of that so-called real time (2007: 53). While we experience dis-

course time when we read Kundera's Slowness, characters experience theso-called story time of that text.

Of course, nobody knows how many hours Kundera spent writingSlowness; even if someone did, that information would be irrelevant to ourexperience of reading the novella. For the sake of argument, however, letus assume the average adult reader can read this book at a rate of one pageper minute and thus read the 150 or so pages of Slowness in less than threehours (especially if he reads without stopping).2 That 'discourse time' ofthree hours therefore contrasts sharply with the novella's actual 'storytime'. The main action in Slowness takes place over a period that is less thantwenty-four hours long, extending from early afternoon one day untilmorning of the next. Presumably, the 'story time' of Slowness correspondsneither to the time it took Kundera to actually write the novella in French,nor to the time it fully takes us to read the novella. However, for my pur-poses here 'story time' is more important than 'discourse time'.

As for space in narration, 'narrative space' has also been defined alongthe lines of the discourse/story distinction in narratology. For example,according to Buchholz/Jahn (2005: 552), "discourse space" refers to the"narrator's current environment" while "story space" refers to the "imme-diate spatial environment" in a novel, for example. Terms such as "narra-tive space", where "story-internal characters move about and live", as wellas "framing space", the general location where a novel is set (ibid.), forexample, seem to be rather similar to the notion of 'story space'. However,while we might say that the old countryside chateau in Slowness is a 'framingspace', the parts of the chateau where scenes in the novella occur couldwell signify 'story space'. For instance, various scenes in Slowness are set inthe garden, the conference room, the lobby, the bar, the pool, and severaldifferent private rooms at the chateau.

Brief mention is also made in the novella of a certain "Cafe Gaston"(23) in Paris, where Pontevin and his friends often meet. Kundera men-tions other places as well, such as the countries to which Berck travels(16—18), with the media hot on his trail, or the institute where Cechoripskyworked in the Czech Republic (60), or the car in which Milan and Veradrive to and from the chateau (1, 155). However, it must be said thatKundera describes places in very little detail in Slowness. In fact, he tendsto describe spaces in the story in rather generic terms without much de-scriptive detail. Nevertheless, the chateau, where most of the action takesplace, is described in more detail than any other location in the novella.That is why we can say that the chateau, as a so-called framing space, is of

2 This is a fair estimate for the American Harper Collins edition of Slowness, which is 156pages long, and for the French Gallimard edition of La Senteur, which is 145 pages long.


primary importance. As we wiU see below, Kundera's suggestion that bothSlowness and Point de lendemain take place in the same chateau is crucial tothe construction of the blend.

4. How does Kundera's Blend Work?

Like many blends, the narrative in Slowness emerges from the interaction ofat least four mental spaces: a generic space, a blended space, and two in-put spaces. A generic space, according to Coulson and Oakley, "containsstructure common to all the spaces in the network" (2000: 178). However,for Fauconnier and Turner, "the structure that inputs seem to share iscaptured in a generic space" (2002: 47). The meaningful projection of in-formation from the generic space to the blend occurs via the input spaces.By definition, generic space information is generic rather than specific.More specific information appears in the input spaces and, later on, in theblend. In Slowness, the generic space contains at least five elements: a time,a location, a main couple, minor characters, and an objective.

Then there are two input spaces. In general, input spaces are "struc-tured by information from discrete cognitive domains" (Coulson/Oakley2000: 178). The first input space involves Point de lendemain, the 1777 novellaby Denon that Kundera discusses throughout Slowness. Let us call this firstinput space '1777'. According to Kundera, the 1777 story proceeds as fol-lows (4-7): Madame de T meets the Chevalier at a theatre in Paris oneevening, and she invites him to her chateau. He accepts the unexpected in-vitation and goes with her that very night in her carriage to the chateauoutside Paris. She seduces him and they "make love" until morning (5).Kundera describes the seduction as containing three stages (3Iff.): (1) flirt-ing in die garden, which ends with a kiss; (2) quickly making love once inthe pavilion after Madame de T spells out the rules the Chevalier must fol-low; and (3) making love until morning in Madame de T's private chamberin the chateau. In this 1777 input space, specific values fill the roles pro-vided by the generic space. The time is one night in 1777, the location isthe chateau, Madame de T and the young Chevalier are the couple, theirobjective is seduction, and the Marquis and Madame de T's husband fillthe roles of minor characters.

The second input space contains the story of another couple, Vincentand Julie, in Slowness. Let us call this second input space '1994', which waspresumably the year when Kundera wrote his novella given the fact that herefers openly to an October 1993 opinion poll from the Nouvel Observateurmagazine (cf. 112). First, in the 1994 story, Vincent meets Julie in the bar ofthe chateau where the entomologists are holding their conference. Second,

they flirt in the bar and then in the garden of the chateau during the eve-ning. Third, at night they swim naked in the pool of the hotel and thencopulate by the side of the pool. Vincent and Julie are the counterparts ofthe Chevalier and Madame de T. Their objective is seduction, the setting isthe chateau, and the time period is also one night, except this time it is1994 and not 1777. Many of the other characters Kundera describes inSlowness, such as Berck, fill the roles of minor characters in this inputspace.

Input spaces are not always symmetrical. This asymmetry has twoconsequences for blending. According to Coulson and Oakley, "[b]lendinginvolves the establishment of partial mappings between cognitive modelsin different spaces in the network, and the projection of conceptual struc-ture from space to space" (2000: 178). The fact that mappings between in-put spaces can be partial is one effect of asymmetrical input spaces inblending. As Fauconnier and Turner concur, "In conceptual integration,mere is partial matching between input spaces" (2002: 47). The second hasto do with selective projection in blending; selective projection means that"[n]ot all elements and relations from the inputs are projected to theblend" (ibid.). If partial mapping refers to asymmetrical relations betweenelements at the horizontal level of blending (which is to say, acrossinputs), then selective projection refers also to asymmetrical relationsbetween elements at the vertical level of blending (which is to say frominputs above to the blend below). For example, in the 1994 story, thereare no obvious counterparts for minor characters like Madame de T'shusband or the Marquis (Madame de T's primary lover). In the 1994 story,Julie is neither married nor has another lover. Additionally, in the 1994story there is no counterpart for the Comtesse, the Chevalier's primarymistress and friend of Madame de T's. Furthermore, Vincent does nothave another mistress who is Julie's friend.

Simply put, the terms partial mapping and selective projective indicatethat not all elements in all spaces have counterparts in a conceptual inte-gration network. For example, Denon narrates Point de lendemain from theChevalier's point of view, in the first person according to Kundera (142).Denon is not a named character in his own story, and it is Kundera ratherthan Denon who calls the young male protagonist "the Chevalier". Bycontrast, in Slowness Kundera is a character called "Milan"; he serves as anarrator, and relates the the story of spending a night in the chateau withhis wife, Vera, from the first person point of view. Kundera narrates thestories of other characters in Slowness from a third person point of view,which is another aspect that distinguishes Slowness from Point de lendemain.However, just as Denon focuses on the story of Madame de T and theChevalier, Kundera gradually focuses on the story of Vincent and Julie in


the last half of the novella. The two stories that come to dominate Slownessare thus those of Madame de T and the Chevalier on the one hand, andVincent and Julie on the other. In Slowness, these four characters appeareither directly or indirectly in at least twenty-four of the fifty-one chaptersthat make up Slowness. No other characters in Slowness dominate the novel-la like these four. Moreover, Kundera pays almost equal attention to thelate 18*-century couple (ten chapters) as he does to the late 20th-centurycouple (twelve chapters). Only in chapters forty-nine and fifty, where Vin-cent and the Chevalier meet, does Kundera simultaneously pay equal at-tention to two characters from the two different input spaces.

FRAME:One Person Seducing

TimeFraming SpaceMain Couple

GENERIC SPACE

Minor Chara<Objective

Point of Vi

One Night in 1777Chateau of Mme de T.Mme de T. & Chevalier

One Night in 1994Hotel/Conference Centre

Vincent & Julie

INPUT SPACE 1 INPUT SPACE 2Marquis, Husband,

ComtesseSeduction1" Person

Berck, Pontevin,others

Seduction3"1' Person

Story Time: OneEvening in 1777 &. 1994

Location: Chateau St HotelSeducer: Mme de T. & Vince

BLENDED SPACESeduced: Chevalier & Juli

Objective: Seduction:(Slow/yes # Fast/no)

Motive: Deception

Figure 1

Figure 1 statically represents the dynamic blend produced in Slowness.Kundera's overall narrative combines two main stories of seduction, onefrom 1777 and the other from 1994. A blend, according to Coulson andOakley "contains selected aspects of structure from each input space, andfrequently, emergent structure of its own" (2000: 178). That is why a

blend is often more than the sum of the inputs that bring it to life. Neitherthe 1777 story nor the 1994 story are in and of themselves blends. How-ever, by weaving them together, Slowness becomes a blend.

Slowness\.s also a "mirror network" in that "all spaces [...] share an or-ganizing frame" (Fauconnier/Turner 2002: 122). An organizing framecannot be an abstract frame "because it does specify a cognitively repre-sentable type of activity and event structure" (123). However seduction,meaning one person seducing another, can be called the organizing frame forSlowness because of the frame's well-known event structure. The seductionframe, which is to say our folk understanding of what happens in generalwhen one person seduces another, can be represented in the followingway: (1) A and B meet; (2) A desires B; (3) B reciprocates; and (4) Aseduces B. Although Cienld (2007) has recently noted that the term"frame" has taken on a wide range of meanings in cognitive linguistics, itis often used in blending theory for the concept of structuring informationthat is directly relevant to a blending network. In a mirror network, whereall spaces share a single frame, "mapping between inputs becomesstraightforward" (Fauconnier/Turner 2002: 123). Thanks to the seductionframe, in the blend we match the role of seducer with Vincent andMadame de T, and the role of the person seduced with the Chevalier andJulie. We match the times, locations, and objectives as well. We alsocompress "vital relations" such as those of space and time (96). For exam-ple, Kundera's suggestion that the chateau in the 1777 story is the samechateau in the 1994 story, despite the fact that the IS^-century chateau hassince been transformed into a 20th-century hotel/conference centre, great-ly facilitates the compression of space.

In the blend, we also match different years - 1777 and 1994 - and thisact of compression is aided by the fact that the "story time" from both in-puts is the same: from evening to morning in both stories. This is anotherexample of how Kundera facilitates our compression of time. Addition-ally, when Kundera writes that Vincent and Julie "are hearing Madame deT's river" when they are in the garden at night (Slowness, 87), he openly in-troduces the 1777 story into the 1994 narrative. The fact that he describesa surreal scene at the end of the novella where Vincent and the Chevalieractually meet, as striking as the scene is, is really rather irrelevant to themain narrative blend as a whole. That is because Kundera has alreadydone all that he needs to by that point in order to make readers under-stand Slowness as a blend of Denon's 1777 story on the one hand andMilan's 1994 story on the other.

If Slowness is indeed a mirror network, it is important to note that therecan be "clashes at more specific levels below the frame level" (Fauconnier/Turner 2002: 125), especially in the blend. There is one minor conceptual


clash and one major clash between the inputs. There is a minor cause-and-effect clash between the inputs where Madame de T seduces the Chevalierin the 1777 story while Vincent the man seduces Julie the woman in the1994 story. In the blend, different values with different genders thus fillthe generic roles of seducer and seduced, hence displaying the kind of clashbelow frame level of which Fauconnier and Turner speak, but which iscommon to blending.

That said, the most important clash in Kundera's blend is the attain-ment of the objective, which is seduction. The sexual encounter betweenJulie and Vincent is actually a failure. Vincent and Julie want to copulateby the side of the pool, but the narrator relates that "[t]he penetration didnot take place" (Slowness, 120) because of Vincent's impotence. As a resultof his dysfunction, Vincent "sets about simulating coition" (121). There issimply nothing else he can do. Julie says nothing but hastily runs awaywhen Immaculata unexpectedly shows up. After Julie leaves, Vincent can-not find her in the chateau and, as dawn breaks, he decides to return toParis. Cechoripsky and Immaculata see Vincent and Julie making love butdo not realize that Vincent and Julie are only simulating their love making.In contrast to Vincent and Julie, the Chevalier and Madame de T actuallymake love even though there are no eyewitnesses.

Nevertheless, when the Chevalier leaves the chateau, he meets theMarquis unexpectedly. The Marquis, whom the Chevalier knows to beMadame de T's lover, thanks the Chevalier for undertaking "the highly ri-diculous mission of fake lover" (6). The Chevalier thus learns he has beena pawn in a game of chess. Madame de T and the Marquis wanted to foolMadame de T's husband into thinking that the Chevalier, rather than theMarquis, was Madame de T's lover. This attempt to fool the husband whoknew that his wife had a lover, but did not know who it was, constitutedMadame de T's apparent motive for seducing the Chevalier. Now that hesuspects the Chevalier, rather than the Marquis, her husband behavesrudely toward the former and warmly toward the latter. According to theMarquis, the Chevalier was just "a fake lover" (6). However, having spentthe night making love to Madame de T, the Chevalier knows that the actwas real and not pretend; yet he cannot say anything to anyone because hehas promised Madame de T to be discreet about their encounter. TheMarquis thus thinks that their affair was "fake" when it really was not,while the people who saw Vincent and Julie by the side of the pool believethey were actually fornicating when in fact they were not.

This is where the complexity of Kundera's blend becomes clear in twoways. First, according to "the unpacking principle" in blending theory,which maintains that from a blend one "should be able to infer the structurein other spaces in the network" (Coulson/Oakley 2000: 186), we see that

the seemingly fruitful sexual encounter in the 1994 story clashes with theseemingly fruitless sexual encounter in the 1777 story. Indeed, Kundera'snovella is a kind of elegy for the past in which he praises the slow pace oflife and love in the 18th century while lamenting the fast pace of life andlove in the 20th century. He hints that Vincent's seduction of Julie fails be-cause it is too quick, whereas Madame de T's seduction of the Chevaliersucceeds because it is slow and drawn out. After complaining about the"religion of orgasm" in the contemporary world, which Kundera definesas "utilitarianism projected onto sex life; efficiency versus indolence; coi-tion reduced to an obstacle to be got past as quickly as possible in order toreach an ecstatic explosion [...]", he wonders, "Why has the pleasure ofslowness disappeared?" (Slowness, 3). The narrator returns to the problemof speed later in Slowness, when he writes:

There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forget-ting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down thestreet. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection es-capes him. Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to for-get a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speedup his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from the thing still too closeto him in time.In existential mathematics, that experience takes the form of two basic equations:the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of the memory; thedegree of speed is direcdy proportional to the intensity of forgetting. (39)

The belief in a cause and effect relation between speed and memory ex-plains why Vincent, after his bout of impotence, "feels an unquenchablethirst for speed" and "for his motorcycle" (154). The faster he leaves thechateau, the faster he can put the awful night behind him. In contrast, theChevalier leaves the chateau slowly, hoping to prolong his memory of thewonderful night he spent with Madame de T by actually prolonging his re-turn to Paris in the carriage which the Marquis lends him for that purpose.

Along with this cause and effect relationship, the second way in whichKundera's blend is complex is that blending "is neither deterministic norcompositional" (Fauconnier/Turner 2002: 254). One cannot easily predictwhat meaning will emerge in a blend based on the combination of two ap-parently unrelated inputs. For example, Kundera might not have intendedfor two disanalogical inferences to arise when reading Slowness. The disana-logical inferences have to do with the clash between the 'failed' seductionin the 1994 story and the 'successful' seduction in the 1777 story. BecauseVincent and Julie's coition was simulated rather than real, we might inferthat the seduction in the 1777 input space might also have been unsuc-cessful. Indeed, that is what the Marquis thinks based on the motive be-hind the seduction of the Chevalier. That inference from the 1994 storyarises when it is projected back to the 1777 input space from the blend. In


contrast, the 'successful' seduction in the blend yields an inference, whenit is projected back to the 1994 input space, that the seduction in the 1994story might not have been as fruitless as it at first seems. Immaculata andCechoripsky think that Vincent and Julie really make love, while the Mar-quis thinks that the Chevalier and Madame de T did not really make love.Thus Kundera plants a shadow of doubt in the mind of the reader as towhat really happened. However, this inference may be an unintended sideeffect of the blend.

5. How do we Know that Slowness is a Blend?

To be honest, the study of literary cognition often raises many questions.According to Jahn, "One of the basic difficulties in any cognitive explora-tion is that the working of cognition cannot be observed directly" (2005:68). Indeed, one criticism of conceptual blending theory has been thatwhenever we analyze blends, "one starts out from the blend and worksone's way up to the generic frame, venturing on the thin ice of specula-tion" (Fludernik 2010: 20). In other words, it is only after the fact, it isonly after we, as readers, have run the blend while reading Kundera's no-vella, that we can begin to see it as a blend and then to fully understand itas such. It is well nigh impossible as a critic to write about blending in awork of fiction without reading that work of fiction first. Otherwise, rath-er than writing a scholarly article, one could only write a response to thetext in the form of a laboratory report, which would give a blow-by-blowphenomenological account of one's reading experience. However, the mo-ment of analysis is always already post-hoc, and it often occurs only afterseveral re-readings of the text, which is to say only after a blend has beenconsciously run several times in the mind of the reader/critic.

That said, Slowness is not a blend simply because I say so. Empiricalevidence supporting this interpretation does exist. The kind of evidencewhich I have in mind can be found in reviews and responses to Kundera'snovella, published responses to the novella that corroborate my own. InFrance in early 1995, reviews of LM lenteur appeared in major magazinesand newspapers as soon as the book was published. For example, ac-cording to Anne Pons (1994), writing for the weekly magazine L'Express,"The narrator - the author himself [...] - gives into free associations thatthreaten the unity of time by the fusion of dreams and reality" (translationmine).3 According to Antoine de Gaudemar (1995), writing in Liberation, a

3 "Le recitant — 1'auteur lui-meme [...] - succombe aux libres associations qui destabilisent1'unite de temps par la fusion du reve et du reel" (Pons 1994).

national daily newspaper, "None of these stories would have anything incommon if Milan Kundera, rediscovering the unity of space while ignor-ing that of time, had not decided to bring everyone together in the samechateau, the author himself meeting the 18th century Chevalier and the 20th

century entomologist the day after an uneasy night for all concerned"(italics and translation mine).4

In the United States in mid-1996, when Slowness appeared, it too wasreviewed across the country. For example, according to Michiko Kakutani,writing in the New York Times, "Slowness is bookended with scenes featur-ing characters identified as Mr. Kundera and his wife, Vera. In the open-ing scene, they are on their way to spend the night at a chateau in theFrench countryside; in the closing scene, they are leaving the chateau toreturn home. Accounts of their visit are intercut with the stories of othercouple's visits to the same chateau." (1996; italics mine) As for DaveWood, writing in Minnesota's Star Tribune, Kundera's novel is "a commen-tary on our hurried times set in a French chateau, [which] compares a nightof pleasure in the 18th century to a less successful romantic evening in the20th" (1996; italics mine). According to another reviewer in New Hamp-shire, Slowness "is an enchanting juxtaposition of two love affairs, one fromthe late 18th century and one from the late 20th" (Toadstool 1996; italicsmine). According to Dara Grumdahl, writing in Minnesota's City "Pages, a"number of paths [...] meet in Slowness [...] travelled by [...] sets of charac-ters" (1996; italics mine). Finally, for Angeline Goreau, writing in The NewYork Times, "The action occurs in a single place and, through the novel'switty telescoping of time, over a single night — a sort of parody of the clas-sical unities." (1996; italics mine) I should add that Goreau's review hassince been parsed and used as a blurb on the dust jacket of subsequenteditions of Slowness.

Critical responses like these validate the claim that other readers haverun the same blend even if they know nothing of conceptual blendingtheory. Having said that, as we can see from this brief sample of reviews,the terms I have italicized reveal that most reviewers recognized Slmvness ablend. They understand that there are two main stories that meet or whichare fused, united, reunited, intercut, compared, and/or juxtaposed. These reactionsto Kundera's text undeniably suggest the presence of a conceptual blend,where two stories — one from 1777 and one from 1994 — are combined intoa single narrative. Reviewers tend to focus on the stories of Madame de T,

"Toutes ces histoires n'auraient rien a voir si Milan Kundera, retrouvant 1'unite de lieu maisignorant celle du temps, ne decidait de reunir tout le monde dans le meme chateau, 1'auteurlui-meme croisant le chevalier du XVIIIe siecle et Fentomologiste du XXe au iendemaind'une nuit decidement bien agitee pour tous." (Gaudemar 1995)


the Chevalier, Vincent, and Julie in their reviews; therefore, I believe thatthose two stories form the main input spaces for the blend.

6. Conclusion

Although some detractors might say that by writing this paper I have notbeen able to "resist the temptation of merely adding to the pile of casestudies" in blending theory (Forceville 2004: 88), my discussion of Slownesshas hopefully shown how Kundera combines space and time in his no-vella. Slowness blends two stories spanning more than 200 years in time,stories that take place in the same location. Kundera may thus have some-thing in common with other writers who have used the same trope oftelling stories that occur in the same place albeit in vastly different timeperiods. Slowness also blends time in interesting ways. Kundera often usesthe so-called present de narration in La lenteur, which Linda Asher has chosento translate by a mixture of present, present continuous, and present per-fect continuous tenses. Phrases in French by Kundera, such as "Le hall seremplit peu a peu" (La lenteur, 57) or "Vera dort" (92), have been trans-lated by Asher into English as "The room fills gradually" (Slowness, 53) or"Vera is sleeping" (90). These choices seem justifiable because manyevents in Slowness occur at the same time. Phrases such as "Entre-temps"or "Meanwhile" (La lenteur, 77; Slowness, 73), "Pendant tout ce temps" or"All this time" (La lenteur, 85; Slowness, 82), and "C'est a peu pres a cemoment-la" or "At just about the same time" (La lenteur, 94; Slowness, 92),are all used at the start of various chapters in order to remind readers thatmany characters in the 1994 story are engaged in actions that occur simul-taneously during the evening at the chateau.

While simultaneous narratives in present tense may be more commonin live sports broadcasts than in fiction (Fludernik 2005: 610), the narra-tive present in Slowness becomes an effect caused by blending several dif-ferent story times together, especially in the 1994 story. Indeed, that singleaspect of the novella could be studied in depth in the future as its ownconceptual blend. For my purposes here, however, the important thing isto recognize that Kundera's narrative strategies greatly facilitate the blend-ing of space and time in Slowness. When Weeks speaks of "a transcendenceof time" in Slowness (2005: 146), that impression is the product of blendingstory times simultaneously, thanks to the verbal cues Kundera providesreaders. However, just as the blending of story times in the 1994 inputspace could be studied in greater depth, there remain two other aspects ofblending in Slowness that might be explored in the future, but which I havenot discussed here.

First, narrative view point in Slowness is one topic that narratologistsmight analyze in terms of blending theory. Fludernik (2010: 16f.) definesthe construct of omniscient narration as a conceptual blend, and she sug-gests it is more fitting to consider it to be a double-scope blend ratherthan a single-scope blend. While the first person narrator, Milan, seemsomniscient, the third person point of view which Kundera adopts fortelling the stories of Vincent and Julie and other characters is not omni-scient. For example, there are many examples of what Pier (2005) wouldcall metalepsis. Fludernik (2003: 339) defines metalepsis as "a crossing ofnarrative levels that transgresses mimetic rules of verisimilitude", andKundera makes many comments about his story and his characters onseveral different occasions. Such comments may well be metanarrativecomments (Nunning 2005: 304). For example, at one point Kunderastates, "An odd youngster, this Vincent" (Slowness, 116), and at anotherpoint he wonders, "If that is so, then why in hell does he [Cechoripsky]feel so proud?" ( 61). Narrative techniques in Slowness are thus one aspectof the novella that could be analyzed in another paper in terms of concep-tual blending theory.

Second, although I call Slowness a novella throughout this paper, Imust admit that there are passages in which Kundera abandons his task oftelling a fictional story and begins instead to discuss philosophical or liter-ary historical topics in non-fictional discourse. As Dara Grumdahl askedin her review of Slowness, "If you take the 'entertainment' out of a novel, isit still a novel, or just a long essay?" (1996). Some readers — even thosewho like Kundera's work in general — do not like Slowness, but this mightbe because Kundera's text may not be easy to categorize into any singlegenre of writing. In fact, it often combines fictional storytelling passageswith passages that are essentially written in non-fictional essay mode. Ofcourse, these frequent interruptions in the main narrative reinforceKundera's belief in the value of slowness, and they suggest an interestinguse of form in order to communicate certain content to the reader. Thatsaid, texts which defy genre boundaries are commonplace in postmodernliterature (McHale 2005: 456^-60), and the ways in which Kundera blendsgenres in Slowness could be studied in the future. Blending Theory hasbeen able to shed light on literary genres in the past (Sinding 2005), sothere is every reason to reason to believe that it could do so in this casetoo. In summary, analyzing one blend in Slowness reveals that there areother equally compelling blends in Kundera's text that one could analyzeas well.

340 Craig Hamilton

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2012 paper on Blending in 'Slowness' by Milan Kundera

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Transcript of 2012 paper on Blending in 'Slowness' by Milan Kundera