Another fusion taking place: Blending and interpretation

This article offers an allegorical reading of the conclusion of Don DeLillo's sprawling novel, Underworld. In my view, this passage blends together Internet browsing and the reader's making sense of the novel itself. I use Fauconnier and Turner's blending theory to tease out the complex conceptual operations that readers are asked to perform while reading this passage, which maps a character's interaction with the links and nodes of the World Wide Web onto interpretation. On a more theoretical note, DeLillo's allegory seems to suggest that the spatial framework adopted by cognitive linguists and poeticians could be extended to interpretation – defined, along the lines of Peter Lamarque's philosophy of literature, as the extraction of the relevance or “human interest” of a work. The metaphor of the “interpretive space,” I conclude, captures neatly the way interpretation mediates between a text and the reader's worldview, providing a backdrop for constructs such as mental spaces and blends.