It is also similar to allegory, but distinct from it, as I will discuss below. (2003: 239 n26) My list of authors suggests that the technique is often satirical. The stable society at the end of Gulliver seems to me to have a similar status. he has Gulliver urinate on the royal palace and land in excrement when he tries too ambitious a leap and the government of Laputa oppresses its subjects by hovering over them or physically crushing their rebellion. Paul Hunter notes the centrality of the technique in Gulliver’s Travels: Swift is especially fond of literalizing metaphors and turning them into narrative events he has, for example, courtiers walk tightropes, dance before the king, etc. Essentially, the author takes a conceptual connection implicit in linguistic metaphor and uses it to structure an imagined scene or story. Thus spatial modeling is essential to narrative understanding: stories prompt readers to “spatialize storyworlds into evolving confi gurations of participants, objects, and places”2 (2002: 263).3 The technique of spatializing metaphors in storyworlds (sometimes called “realization” or literalization) goes back to Aristophanes (Whitman 1981), and continues in postmodernists like Pynchon.
David Herman defines storyworlds as “mental models of who did what to and with whom, when, where, why, and in what fashion in the world to which recipients relocate as they work to comprehend a narrative” (2002: 5). I would like to bring together cognitive narratology and conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) by examining how metaphors enter into the spatial structure of the storyworld of Swift’s A Tale of a Tub.
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