Much more than money

John Benjamins Publishing Company

This is a contribution from Pragmatics & Cognition 20:3 © 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company This electronic file may not be altered in any way. The author(s) of this article is/are permitted to use this PDF file to generate printed copies to be used by way of offprints, for their personal use only. Permission is granted by the publishers to post this file on a closed server which is accessible to members (students and staff) only of the author’s/s’ institute, it is not permitted to post this PDF on the open internet. For any other use of this material prior written permission should be obtained from the publishers or through the Copyright Clearance Center (for USA: www.copyright.com). Please contact [email protected] or consult our website: www.benjamins.com Tables of Contents, abstracts and guidelines are available at www.benjamins.com

Much more than money Conceptual integration and the materialization of time in Michael Ende’s Momo and the social sciences Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas and Ursina Teuscher

Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies / Portland State University

We analyze conceptual patterns shared by Michael Ende’s novel about time, Momo, and examples of time conceptualization from psychology, sociology, economics, conventional language, and real social practices. We study three major mappings in the materialization of time: time as money in relation with time banking, time units as objects produced by an internal clock, and time as a substance that flows. We show that binary projections between experiential domains are not enough to model the complexity of meaning construction in these widely successful examples. To account for the intricacies of time materialization in context, we use generic integration templates, models for conceptual templates based on Fauconnier and Turner’s Blending Theory. The interplay of such detailed patterns with pragmatic and cultural factors, including diachronic aspects, is crucial to identify the cognitive models at work, and the factors that guide their instantiations as a variety of surface products. The blending model for the spatialized time can be refined and extended to the materialization of time. Keywords: conceptual integration, conceptual metaphor, generic integration template, materialization of time, poetics of time, time metaphor

1. Conceptual mappings and the materialization of time. Representing time is a great challenge for the human mind. To develop time concepts, we need to import knowledge from domains that are easier to organize: motion through space, interaction with objects, measurement of substances, etc. In conceptual mappings research, time metaphors, especially space-to-time projections, have been a favorite object of study for over thirty years (Casasanto 2008). For Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999), including its recent neural version (Lakoff 2008, Gallese and Lakoff 2005), time metaphors have

Pragmatics & Cognition 20:3 (2012), 546–569. doi 10.1075/pc.20.3.05pag issn 0929–0907 / e-issn 1569–9943 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

Much more than money: The materialization of time 547

become a classical example of the direct transfer of conceptual structure from basic experiential domains to more abstract or perceptually fuzzy domains (Lakoff 1993). According to this theory, a time is space conceptual metaphor underlies linguistic expressions such as: “Sunday is getting closer”, “We are approaching Christmas”, “The lecture will be followed by a reception”, etc. More recently, Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner have drawn a more complex picture of spatialized time (Fauconnier and Turner 2008). They identify numerous emergent meanings, point at the role of cultural and communicative factors, and show how a complex system of conceptual integration networks (Fauconnier and Turner 2002) is necessary to account for what may look like binary space-to-time projections. According to the conceptual integration analysis: a. Spatialized time is not the result of direct projection from space: it emerges from a conceptual blend that presents structure not available from its inputs. b. Unlike in conceptual metaphors, the inputs to this blend are more than two. c. These inputs are not vast experiential domains, such as space, but smaller conceptual packets (motion from A to B, the cyclic day, etc.). d. The main objective of the spatialized-time blend is to create a cognitively manageable scene, in which the complexity of spatial relations is reduced to a simple, familiar event of motion through space. e. The process combines entrenched conceptual mappings with ad-hoc processes related to context and goals. f. All the above results in a flexible model, which allows great creativity in the use of the “conceptual integration recipe” for spatialized time. These postulates are congruent with further work showing that time-space mappings are not entirely unidirectional (Teuscher et al. 2008), and that they give rise to emergent meanings not present in the inputs, such as the computational properties of the timeline (Coulson and Pagán Cánovas, forthcoming; Pagán Cánovas and Jensen 2013). A model including selective projection to a middle or hybrid mental space is more appropriate to account for spatialized time. We propose to extend conclusions a-f above to another classic of metaphor research: the materialization of time. Besides the integration of temporal relations with motion events, another major tool for thinking about time is the mental organization in which time becomes substantial, suitable for being counted, spent, wasted, traded or — as our case study shows — even stolen. We focus on three major mappings: time is money (“You owe me one hour”), time units are objects (“They have given me five extra days”), and time is a substance (“We have a little time left”). We compare the fantasies created by Michael Ende for his children’s novel Momo with texts about temporal cognition from the social sciences and philosophy, as well as with conventional language and established cultural practices. © 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

548 Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas and Ursina Teuscher

Our analysis shows that the complexity of the creative examples cannot be explained as merely the result of conceptual metaphors. Nevertheless, Momo’s intricate models of materialized time are largely entrenched. Not only the same mappings and inputs, but also similar emergent meanings and creative procedures can recur in texts with very different goals. Both the spatialization and the materialization of time indicate that generalized templates for creating conceptual blends reappear systematically, across very different usages and contexts. These generalized or generic integration networks (Fauconnier 2009, Pagán Cánovas 2010) are much more complex than binary mappings such as time is money, time units are objects, or time is a substance. Goals defined by cultural diachrony and communicative context shape these conceptualizations in particular ways. Nevertheless, the underlying patterns, with their main emergent structures and alternatives in the directionality of the mappings, are still recognizable upon a close comparison of individual cases. We also show that time metaphors are to a great extent driven by affect. Representing time is, more often than not, representing emotions towards temporal experience, be it for aesthetic or scientific purposes, or to communicate in everyday situations. In all our examples, the materialization of time seeks to structure emotional attitudes towards temporal experience. Literary texts are particularly relevant for the study of this conceptual pattern because they expose it by taking it to its limits. The comparison with non-poetic materials also shows how the poetic usage creates its powerful meanings, by endowing entrenched mental models with affective and moral significance. 2. Michael Ende’s Momo. Along with The Neverending Story (1979), Momo (1973) is Michael Ende’s most celebrated novel. It has had numerous adaptations, including a film (1986, with John Houston as Professor Hora). It has been very successful in Europe, the Spanish-speaking world, and Japan. Momo’s readership probably includes as many adults as children. Millions of people of different ages and cultures have understood — and enjoyed — its complex time metaphors. Momo is an orphan living in the ruins of an ancient amphitheater. By merely listening, she is able to boost people’s imagination and joy for life. Sinister gray men, wearing gray suits and smoking gray cigars, start appearing in this old town. They steal people’s time by exploiting their fear of death and failure, convincing them of the need to “save time.” Momo discovers their activities, and becomes their main target. Cassiopeia, a tortoise who talks through words appearing on

© 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


her shell, comes to rescue Momo and takes her to Nowhere House, beyond the frontiers of time, where Professor Minutus Secundus Hora dwells. Hora is the custodian of all time. He explains to Momo that each person has a certain amount of time assigned, in the form of hour-lilies, beautiful flowers that blossom and wilt in one hour. The men in gray steal those flowers from their owners and make cigars out of their petals. They need to smoke those cigars at all times in order to exist. In fact, they consist entirely of this stolen time. When Momo returns to the amphitheater after her stay with Master Hora, the men in gray isolate her from her friends and try to blackmail her into leading them to Hora, so that they can control all the time supply in the world. Cassiopeia comes again to the rescue, but this time the gray men follow Momo and Cassiopeia to Nowhere House and besiege it. Hora decides to stop the supply of time by going to sleep: this will cause a panic among the gray men and force them to give up the siege and retreat to their storage of cigars. Before he goes to sleep though, Master Hora gives Momo an hour-lily, which assigns her exactly one hour of time, so that she can go to the bank where the men in gray keep the stolen flowers, and release them. Momo accomplishes her mission and both time and the ability to enjoy it return to mankind. As it is apparent from this summary, the materialization of time is central to Momo. It is also quite evident that a story like this needs to build on entrenched concepts, and that its success is at least partially based on its ability to communicate within those mental structures. However, we will argue that these patterns for conceptual integration are more complex and flexible than what conceptual metaphor research suggests. We focus on the time banking of the men in gray (time is money), the hour-lilies from the pendulum (time units are objects), and the supply of time from Nowhere House (time is a substance). 3. Time banking and the men in gray. From the first formulations of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the understanding of time as money has been identified as a major product of labor organization in Western industrialized societies (since Lakoff and Johnson1980: 7–9, 145). This analysis claims that there is a projection from the more concrete source domain, money, to the target domain, time, more abstract and less clearly delineated in our experience. The inferences produced by this mapping are systematic and result in analogous expressions across languages: time is structured in terms of labor and salary, it is valuable, people can have/spend/waste it, etc. There is one immediate problem with this account: in experiential, conceptual and historical terms, time is more primary than money. © 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


At the neural level, temporal windows maintain the identity of percepts and concepts at intervals of 2–3 seconds (Pöppel 2009). “Temporal integration”, as Pöppel calls it, is necessary for perceptual and cognitive processing. Time itself might be as experientially basic as some aspects of spatial cognition (as argued by Evans 2003). But even if time needs to be experienced in spatial terms, it is quite evident that perception of at least certain temporal elements, such as onset, duration, or conclusion, is necessary for event structure, and must at any rate precede the manipulation of objects, so limited during the first months of life. Needless to say, when the infant starts conceptualizing temporal relations and mastering the earliest linguistic expressions of time, monetary transactions still lie far ahead in conceptual development. In fact, having a concept of money is not indispensable at all, while it is hard to imagine human beings that never think and talk about time. Historically, the conceptualization of time in monetary terms precedes Western capitalism by thousands of years. Moreover, money is not even necessary for the appearance of materialized time based on labor costs: barter is quite enough (evidence for both arguments in Cribb 2007: 362–364). The conceptual integration template for materialized time is older than the metaphoric projection time is money. The conceptual blend in which time can be owned or spent does not use money as “source domain”, at least not initially. Instead, the integration template for materialized time relies on something much more basic: a familiar scene in which at least two participants jointly attend to the manipulation of objects or substances. This organizing frame provides the basis for a great variety of meanings, such as those of the verbs give or take, and is also essential for building the concepts of barter and money themselves. The “joint manipulation frame” structures most representations of materialized time, and will be found in the metaphoric expressions that structure time as money as well as in those that materialize it as something else. Time can become substantial without any metaphoric projection from the concept of money. The integration is not between time and money, but between the conceptual template for building the materialized-time blend and the template for building the concept of money. Money emerges from a very different conceptual recipe, but one that also has joint manipulation as its organizing frame. Once the conceptual blends for materialized time and money are available, money, as an instance of joint manipulation, can be imported to expand and enrich the concept of materialized time. The concept of money is more complex and surely appears later than both spatialized and materialized time. Money is emergent from an intricate integration network that needed significant historical evolution to develop. The concept of money requires, at the very least, the cognitively complex notion of property, a © 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


sophisticated exchange of goods, fluent manipulation of tokens (based on the joint manipulation frame), promises of future services or valuable items, and a consolidated political structure that backs up the whole system. As can be seen from this preliminary description of the inputs to the money blend, a sophisticated time concept, including considerable planning capacities and reliance on temporal continuity, is an indispensable component of money (Cribb 2007: 367–368). Money is not available from any of these inputs (time, property, exchange of goods, tokens, promised services, political guarantees), but results from their integration. The degree of sophistication achieved by time-money integrations is subject to historical factors. Time banking — a system of exchange that uses time units as currency — does not seem to have been invented before the 19th century, even if its components had been available for hundreds of years. Time banking results from a network integrating an elaborate concept of materialized time with elements from at least two other concepts: banking and paid labor. Time relations already play an important role in both of them. Banking presupposes a somewhat sophisticated market economy and a well developed money blend, with key counterfactual elements used for planning, such as loans, interests, checks, estimative accounting, etc. This conceptual domain relies on estimations of future values, actions and exchanges. In the labor domain, time becomes actual money by a standard compression of cause and effect, which gives rise to the metonymy of “procedure stands for product”. Work hours are exchanged for a salary, and we can have a hybrid measure integrating salary and labor time (“That costs two years of my salary”). In both banking and paid labor, the relation between money and time is mainly based on offer and demand. Everything costs what buyers are willing to pay for it. The same amount of money in the bank has a different value in different moments, depending on market conditions. Different services are paid with different salaries, depending on degree of qualification and demand. In time banking, on the other hand, time constitutes the actual currency, the ultimate basis of monetary value, replacing the gold standard or the fiat currency. The tokens for economic exchange are not based on the control of resources and regulations by a political structure, such as a central bank, but on estimations of time labor agreed upon by a specific community. This makes time be money in a very different way: money has been replaced by time. One of the earliest practical applications of this blend was the Cincinnati Time Store, run by the anarchist Josiah Warren from 1827 to 1830. In Warren’s store, customers purchased goods with labor notes, which constituted commitments to work for a number of hours. In this system, one hour’s labor has always the same value, independently from the task to be performed or the qualifications of the



laborer. “Time is the real and natural standard of value” (Warren 1829). A similar system is the basis of much more modern organizations, such as TimeBanks: For every hour you spend doing something for someone in your community, you earn one Time Dollar. Then you have a Time Dollar to spend on having someone do something for you. It’s that simple. Yet it also has profound effects. Time Banks change neighborhoods and whole communities. Time Banking is a social change movement in 22 countries and six continents. (Emphasis in the original. Source: www.timebanks.org).

The capacity of storing time for later is a novel meaning that emerges from time banking. Time storage is not available from the inputs of materialized time or conventional banking, and clashes with our knowledge of temporal experience. Nevertheless, in the way it is practiced in these examples, time storage can be a powerful tool: it allows people to exchange services that they could not have purchased otherwise, and to share activities without having to spend and earn money. Saving time for future use can be a good thing too. You might want to take up intensive German tutoring this summer, when you are on holiday, so now you babysit to accumulate those hours for later. No time gets lost in this system. If for some reason you fail to exchange your Time Dollars, then you have simply volunteered to help other people. The time banking that the men in gray do in Momo is quite different. Here is how they work. One day Figaro, the barber, starts feeling that his life is meaningless, and wishes for “the right kind of life,” although he is not sure of what that means exactly. Immediately, a limousine appears and a man in gray gets out. He presents Figaro with impressive figures that show the huge amount of hours he has been “wasting” in sleep, in doing his work carefully, in meals, in visiting his mother or friends. He draws a savings plan for Figaro and promises to pay him interest. He tells Figaro that he will be able to accumulate ten times his life span by just saving two hours a day for forty years. Shivering with fear, Figaro agrees. The gray man disappears, and the encounter is immediately forgotten by the barber. Here is how he feels from then on: Er wurde immer nervöser und ruheloser, denn eines war seltsam: Von all der Zeit, die er einsparte, blieb ihm tatsächlich niemals etwas übrig. Sie verschwand einfach auf rätselhafte Weise und war nicht mehr da. Seine Tage wurden erst unmerklich, dann aber deutlich spürbar kürzer und kürzer. He became increasingly restless and irritable, because one thing was odd: no matter how much time he saved, he never had any to spare. In some mysterious way it simply vanished. Imperceptibly at first, but then quite unmistakably, his days grew shorter and shorter (Chapter 6; all translations are ours).



So the more time people save, the less they have, and the more worried they are about it. This is quite commonplace: the organization of time in industrialized societies raises the expectations of performance, packing life with more and more activities, and thus forces people to a higher pace with less free time — as shown empirically by Levine 1997, and surely suspected by many of us. But beyond the accuracy of the statement, Ende’s exposition is very particular: he does not merely wish to let us know, but is rather inviting us to feel about it in a certain way. For this he creates a conceptual blend that prompts us to feel anger, fear, or indignation. The fraud and the feelings that go with it do not belong to any of the isolated components of time banking. They are emergent from the literary time-banking blend in which the men in gray operate. In this perverse version of time banking, concepts from the banking input that are incompatible with time exchange, such as interest payment, are imported to the blend. This gives rise to emergent meanings, such as having ten times your life span at your disposal when you retire. This flagrant fallacy, absolutely incompatible with our knowledge of time, enhances the falsehood of the conceptual blend. By “running the blend” to this extreme, the literary text exploits the conventional conceptual structures to create a novel situation that prompts for a particular affective response. Even the youngest readers can build the emergent meaning of “stealing time” within the story. More advanced readers easily project their own everyday reality onto the paradox in Momo, and come up with a new mental framework within which they can ask themselves whether they are prisoners of the same fears and mistakes as characters such as Figaro. This novel, creative conceptualization serves ad-hoc aesthetic and rhetorical goals. Despite its complexity, it has become meaningful for millions of readers. The set of inferences known as the time is money conceptual metaphor is insufficient to account for these emergent meanings and the affective responses they trigger. Ende is relying on the complex system of integrations that gives rise to the time banking blend. When we compare with non-literary examples, we see that social scientists examining the way people reason and feel about time come up with conceptual blends that bear striking similarities to some of the poetic creations in Momo. In the psychology and economics literature, a complex frame of investment is recurrently invoked to analyze people’s attitudes towards time. In lifespan psychology, for example, Carstensen and colleagues suggest that people become increasingly aware that time is in some sense “running out,” and that it “becomes increasingly important to make the “right” choice, not to waste time on gradually diminishing future payoffs.” They argue that the perception of time as limited, as opposed to expansive or open-ended, has wide reaching consequences for people’s experiences and decisions (Carstensen, Isaacowitz, and Charles, 1999). © 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


The Swedish economist Stephen Linder pointed out that as income and therefore the value of one’s time increases, it becomes less and less “rational” to spend it on anything besides making money (Linder 1970). The opportunity costs of leisurely and social activities become too high, and so one stops doing such “irrational” things. The monetary payoffs of time are so high, that the hours with no profit are seen through a counterfactual scenario in which they could result in more money, but do not. Within this counterfactual blend, time units stand in metonymic relation with the money that gets earned during their duration. Time without profit is wasted time. Just like in the case of Figaro the Barber, a person who only responds to material rewards becomes blind to motivations of any other kind and loses the ability to derive happiness from other sources. Csikszentmihalyi (1999) interprets this process as an addiction. This type of reasoning presupposes a novel inference that is also emergent from the time banking blend of the men in gray: the idea that time is an investment with potential profit. The difference between the scientific and the literary examples is the nature of the payoffs. In Momo’s time banking, the only currency available is time, so what is gained by the investor is more time, instead of money, enjoyment, or the happiness of others. Warren’s idea that “Time is the real and natural standard of value” has been taken to an extreme, and perverted. Time banking enhances the intrinsic value of time, above that of money, or anything else, and thus the necessity to administer it well. This is a central issue in social psychology. Zimbardo and Boyd, in their book The Time Paradox, use very similar economic metaphors for time. Their message is that we should be even more aware of the scarceness and value of time as a resource, in order to lead fulfilling lives. They discuss possible reasons why people are often less mindful about how they spend their time than their money, despite its higher intrinsic value: Perhaps it’s because we cannot save time; it passes whether we choose to spend it or not. Or perhaps it’s because spending time can be intangible. In contrast, financial transactions involve deliberate action with material objects. For instance, you pay for your new alarm clock with a twenty-dollar bill and, in return, gain a material possession. But spending time seems less costly, and is less closely associated with fungible assets. You can’t bottle time and exchange it for an object or event (Zimbardo and Boyd 2008: 9–10).

This is precisely what the men in gray do: they “bottle” time, because they are aware of its intrinsic value: Niemand kannte den Wert einer Stunde, einer Minute, ja einer einzigen Sekunde Leben so wie sie. Freilich verstanden sie sich auf ihre Weise darauf, so wie Blutegel sich aufs Blut verstehen, und auf ihre Weise handelten sie danach.



Nobody knew the value of an hour, a minute, yes, even of a single second, as well as they did. Of course they were experts on time in their own way, just as leeches are experts on blood, and in their way they acted accordingly (Chapter 6).

Their perverted version of the time banking blend allows the men in gray to bring to life exactly those emergent meanings that Zimbardo and Boyd present as impossible: bottling time, saving it, turning it into something tangible that can be counted and consumed with absolute precision. Even if it is presented in negated form, this frame of time materialization is necessary for the social psychology analysis. In order to say that these things cannot be done, Zimbardo & Boyd first need to conceptualize them, to create a mental framework in which these impossibilities can be imagined. To conduct their reasoning, they have used quite the same conceptual integration pattern as Ende. Zimbardo and Boyd point at the flaws of joint manipulation as an organizing frame for time. Ende’s fantasy shows, by reductio ad absurdum, how inadequate and dangerous emergent meanings can arise from running this conceptual blend to an extreme, so that it violates essential aspects of our knowledge of time. Constructing time as a valuable and irreplaceable resource that can be stored, administered and invested has the power to elicit strong affect. We can feel fear of running out of it and dying, and consequently regret for not making the best of it. Moreover, we can feel hostile towards others who “waste our time”. The horrifying prospect of our time being stolen from us by gangsters through a fraudulent time-banking system is a coherent development of this framework. This extreme “literary blend” exposes the fictionality of the whole conceptual network: the men in gray — who are really nothing, a creation of human fear — are just as unreal as the idea that time can be spent and saved like money. But by adopting this conceptualization, by believing in it too much, we run the risk of summoning the time thieves, the “leeches” that can become all too real and drain our life from us. Taking the entrenched conceptualizations to an extreme, to a reductio ad absurdum, the literary text exposes their flaws and suggests moral and affective responses towards them. 4. Time units as objects: the internal clock and the hour-lilies. In Chapter 12, Hora explains to Momo that all time comes from Nowhere House, and that his job is to see that all human beings receive their allotted span. What they do with it is their own business. Hora then takes Momo to the place where time comes from. She is standing beneath a huge dome made of gold. From an opening in its center a powerful light shines. The light falls onto the surface of a



circular lake. Just above the lake there is a gigantic pendulum. As the pendulum approaches one of the edges, a huge water lily emerges, with beautiful, unknown colors, and a wonderful scent. As the pendulum moves away, the lily wilts, and then another lily, even more beautiful, emerges on the other edge. Momo is overwhelmed. When she is back, Hora tells her that she has been in her own heart: all human souls have a place like that. The “internal clock” is a prominent metaphor for human time perception in psychology too. As in Momo, this conceptual blend allows for the existence of a vast number of internal mechanisms for measuring time. These mechanisms reside “inside” every person. In Ende’s version, the focus is on people as containers of time: the internal clock generates a number of time units, the hour lilies, which constitute the amount of time assigned to one person’s life. In psychology, the focus is on how individual time perception arises, and thus the fiction of the clock mechanism is developed in much more detail. In psychology, the “internal clock” metaphor seeks to explain the cognitive mechanisms that underlie temporal performance (e.g., Treisman 1963; Treisman, Naish, and Brogan 1990). According to a model by Treisman et al. (1990), the pacemaker itself consists of two components, a temporal oscillator and a calibration unit. The temporal oscillator emits, like the pendulum in Momo, a regular series of pulses, which are transmitted to the calibration unit. The calibration unit in turn emits the final output of the pacemaker, a series of pulses at a specific frequency. Sensory inputs may act on the calibration unit to increase or decrease this output frequency. The output frequency provides timing information to the temporal processing mechanisms. Even if “only a metaphor”, the internal clock has been quite useful for the investigation of temporal behavior (Droit-Volet and Gil 2009: 1950). As we are seeing, the internal clock can both yield insights in psychology and support strong poetic effects. The internal clock blend integrates already complex inputs: the universal time measuring mechanism, subjective time experience (see Fauconnier and Turner 2008), time supply, and people as simultaneously containers of time and of the time measuring mechanism. Ende envisages an internal clock that includes the pendulum and the regular growing of the flowers. The flowers incorporate their archetypical affective properties to universal hours. These hour-lilies, the most important time symbol in Momo, are inextricably intertwined with the other time blends: the light and the pendulum make them blossom, the men in gray smoke their petals, mankind owns them, they constitute people’s lives, Professor Hora guards them, etc. The hour-lilies, perhaps initially inspired in Zen philosophy (Goodhew and Loy 2002) may be a compression of the daylily. They are an example of an objective time blend with strong affective meaning. The integration of the lily with the © 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


hour is a development from the conceptual integration template for materialized time. Just like in Warren’s store, in Time Banks, or in time-based salaries from Mesopotamia to our days, time units are turned into material tokens in this blend. By presenting these tokens as the products of the internal clock, Ende further blends materialized time with individual time. However, this does not mean that the hour-lilies are subjective measures. On the contrary, they inherit the objectivity of the tokens in materialized time: they are hours, universal time units as measurable as the Time Dollars from Time Banks. One of the inputs to the hour-lily blend is the hour, a time measure that results from integrating the cyclic day (already a blend compressing multiple days into one; see Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 195–198) with a natural or technical dynamic mechanism, such as a pendulum, a sundial, the observation of shade lengths, or the positions of the sun and the stars. There are no universal time measures in the cyclic day or in the regular repetitions of physical phenomena. Time measures emerge from the integration of these two inputs into a new mental framework, where many regular repetitions are compressed into one single universal event. The hour is one of those universal events (Fauconnier and Turner 2008). The other input is the lily. It takes much more than an hour for a lily to blossom and wilt, but the beginning, middle and end of the process can be mapped onto a mental space containing the lapse of an hour. In the blend, these relations between different mental spaces become relations within the same mental space, thus rendering a compression of the flower’s life span into one hour. The result is a new category, lilies that last for an hour only. A conceptual integration template is not an ontological mapping, but a flexible recipe to build a blend from which goal-oriented emergent meanings can emerge. The hour-lily network can also be used to represent subjective time, just by reversing some of the projections. In principle, one can use this blend to think about the lilies, which can be a metonymy for any other living creature. By compressing the life span of the lily to an hour, we have an emergent, hyperbolic meaning conceptualizing the lily — or, metonymically, life itself — as more ephemeral than it really is. This emergent conceptualization is inherently affective. It implies a reaction to a simple scene at human scale, by means of which we identify with the flower. This archetypical “life is brief ” meaning is always there as a possibility available to the reader, if she chooses to privilege the hour topology in the blend, and, so to speak, understand the lily in terms of the hour. Momo herself feels that way when she sees the first flower wither: “it was as if something unutterably dear to her were vanishing beyond recal”. For most of the story, though, the directionality of these mappings is rather the opposite. We do not have to stop feeling the transience of the lilies, but we are mainly invited to privilege the flower topology, to understand the hour in terms of © 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


the lily. This allows us to import many significant conceptual materials typically associated to the flower, and to maximize certain correspondences between the inputs, leading to affective implications. Each hour-lily is beautiful if you are able to appreciate it, and it can be more beautiful than the preceding one. It is pointless to try to save it or to do anything with it but enjoy it right now, because it will inevitably wilt. You should never let the men in gray steal your hour-lilies to freeze them and turn them into cigars, into smoke, into nothing. While differing in directionality, both versions of the network share the same compressed scene: a flower blossoming and fading in an hour. In the first version we can identify with the lily framed as an hour, and the second one prompts us to feel that our time consists of hours framed as lilies. The second version constitutes an objective time experience. Saying that an hour took ages to pass or disappeared in a flash is out of the point here. There is no way to speed up or slow down the pendulum under the dome. Hour-lilies strictly privilege the mechanistic input, and hence constitute universal events, just like regular hours. When Hora gives Momo an hour-lily to find the time bank and release the stolen flowers, that is exactly all the time Momo has. Momo cannot do anything to the flower to make it last longer. In order to use their petals as cigars, the men in gray freeze hour-lilies because they have been saved, not enjoyed. But these frozen lilies are still hours, which the men in gray can count with extreme precision. The hour-lilies are linked to both the subjective and the objective time experiences conceptualized by the internal clock. As individual experiences, they can be owned — or even stolen and stored — by different people, and used in very different ways. But in both versions of the internal clock, by Ende and by psychologists, the intricate machinery produces regular beats that represent objective time. Since the hour-lilies result from these regular beats, they constitute objective time units. The different ways in which Momo and the men in gray use the flowers represent different attitudes towards the same objective reality. Turning time units into beautiful objects is a further step taken by Ende for his poetic purposes, and is not a necessary development of the internal clock in psychology. Nevertheless, the hour-lilies presuppose the same detailed, precise internal mechanism that psychology has been using to analyze objective and subjective time experience across different individuals. 5. Time supply: Sending time from Nowhere House So far we have seen examples in which objects become integrated with time measures. But in the joint manipulation frame, substances are just as familiar as objects. Just like years, hours, or minutes can be owned, given, or spent, we can © 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


do the same with time itself, which then acquires the properties of a noncount (e.g., “We have little time left”, “I want to spend more time with you”). Time units emerge from our mechanisms to observe cyclic regularities, and this allows for an especially felicitous conceptual blend in Momo: the hour-lilies “literally” emerge from the internal clock. On the other hand, when the focus in the joint manipulation frame is on time as a substance rather than on time units as objects, integration with a regular mechanism is less appropriate. Rather than discrete measures, less definite notions such as more-less and much-little become more relevant. We call this version of the materialized-time template Time supply. Time supply blends with time as motion through space, yielding Time flow. In one of the conventional versions of the spatialized-time template, time travels towards an observer along a path (e.g. “April is approaching”, “Better times will come”). The integration of time in motion and time supply results in a further blend in which time is a substance that flows into the observer, who is often also integrated with a container. We have seen examples in which people become containers for time units and internal clocks. The same can happen with time as a constant flow: the supply of time can accumulate in the receivers, making them older and older. In Momo’s version of time supply, each person has an allotted amount of time, which flows to them from Nowhere House. This particular instantiation of time flow has interesting emergent properties, which allow us to connect entrenched networks through further conceptual work. The best examples are the poisoning of time and the liberation of the stolen hour-lilies. When the men in gray try to force Master Hora to surrender all time, they surround Nowhere House, with the intention of poisoning time with the smoke of their cigars. As he sees this, Master Hora explains to Momo: Ja, diese Mauer von Rauch, die sie dort draußen rund um das Nirgend-Haus wachsen lassen, besteht aus toter Zeit. Noch ist genügend freier Himmel da, noch kann ich den Menschen ihre Zeit unversehrt zusenden. Aber wenn die finstere Qualmglocke sich rundherum und über uns geschlossen haben wird, dann mischt sich in jede Stunde, die von mir ausgeschickt wird, etwas von der abgestorbenen, gespenstischen Zeit der grauen Herren. Und wenn die Menschen die empfangen, dann werden sie krank davon. Yes, this wall of smoke that they are erecting around our house is built of dead time. There’s still enough open sky above for me to send people their time in good condition, but once that dark pall of smoke closes all around and over our heads, every hour I send them will be contaminated with the dead, ghostly time of the gray men. When people receive this time, it will make them ill (Chapter 19).



The disease caused by the smoke is called tödliche Langeweile: deadly tedium or boredom. Here Ende opportunistically instantiates the generic network of timeflow, using the air as channel. If you go to the source of the supply, you can poison the flow itself, and that will have lethal consequences on its receivers. This poisoned time easily connects with more conventional concepts, and can be used as a metaphor for apathy, depression, and so many other illnesses related to how the passing of life is felt. Boredom, within this conceptual template, is indeed the feeling that the time we have at hand is “too much” and unwelcome, rather than a valuable resource. People who are more prone to boredom do in fact appear to perceive time as passing more slowly during a given task than other people (Watt 1991). The experience of boredom has been discussed by various philosophers. In particular Heidegger’s description resonates strikingly with Ende’s image of time that is contaminated by a poisonous smoke: Die tiefe Langeweile, in den Abgründen des Daseins wie ein schweigender Nebel hin- und herziehend, rückt alle Dinge, Menschen und einen selbst mit ihnen in eine merkwürdige Gleichgültigkeit zusammen. Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a silent fog, pulls together all things, humans, and oneself with them, into a remarkable indifference (Heidegger 1929: 33).

Temporal flow and the fog of tedium are structured by a schema of emission. This spatial schema is very productive in conceptualizations of emotion causation (Pagán Cánovas 2010). A emits x towards B, and B undergoes a significant change upon the reception of x. The thing emitted is seldom a mere vehicle. It usually incorporates some of its salient features to its affective consequences. For example, it is not the same to receive light from someone and be blinded with love for that person, than to receive an arrow from Eros. Heidegger opportunistically builds on the prototypical properties of fog to frame boredom as something that reaches the receiver from outside and blocks the perception — and the appreciation — of our surroundings. Ende is framing boredom in pretty much the same way, with the same implications, but he is also giving the reader the source of the fog, because specifying causality is crucial for his purposes. Note that it is not just any kind of poison that the gray men are using: their smoke is the toxic waste of the victim’s very own — but now stolen, dead and smoked — time. The smoking frame provides the causal structure. Ende then links the poisoning to illness, which is also a standard way to conceptualize what the victims of tedium are experiencing. The boredom-as-illness metaphor is extremely productive in psychological research. Erich Fromm speaks of boredom as a serious pathology, leading to crime



(1972). A large body of research has investigated boredom by conceptualizing it as a pathology (e.g., Sommers and Vodanovich 2000). Its symptoms are problematic traits and behaviors such as substance abuse (Iso-Ahola and Crowley 1991); anger and aggression (Dahlen, Martin, Ragan, and Kuhlman 2004); gambling problems (Mercer and Eastwood 2010); negative affect (Vodanovich, Verner, and Gilbride 1991); depression, hopelessness, loneliness, and amotivational orientation (Farmer and Sundberg 1986). Thus the ability to poison the source of time, which is an emergent property of Ende’s blend, opportunistically connects two widely shared conceptualizations: boredom as illness and time flow. Just like you can poison the source of time supply, you can also stop the flow. Just like we know that time cannot be poisoned, we also know that it never stops. These emergent structures in the blend produce inferences that contradict our experience of time. It is by exploring the affective and moral implications of such clashes that the literary text achieves its poetic effects. Near the end of the story, Hora cuts the flow of time to provoke a crisis among the gray men. They end up killing one another, as they compete for the cigars that are left. When Momo liberates the stolen hour-lilies, time supply is restored. The world is back into motion. The flowers fly back to their owners and, now that the gray men do not exist anymore, people have plenty of time again. This “return of time”, only possible within the fantastic conceptualization of time in the tale, has strong moral and affective implications. Now people treat each other better, as they have time to enjoy both labor and leisure. They feel very differently about life. This ending inevitably raises certain questions: Can this happen to us? Do we need to be saved? Do we need to get our stolen time back? The feeling that you could have been deprived of your time, that you should find it and get it back, that it is imprisoned and should be liberated, is absolutely impossible in any of the inputs to the time-supply network. It can only arise from inferences in this particular blend. This reasoning within the blended space is entirely fictional, but the emotions are completely real, and they can lead to very important truths. 6. Towards a more complex model of materialized time and its creative uses. Momo prompts us to build an extremely intricate system of conceptual mappings for the materialization of time. A vast number of readers, many of them very young, seem to be doing this effortlessly. They also seem to find pleasure in it. Naturally, the complexity of the conceptual networks that readers build will differ, depending on age and experience. This conceptual architecture is, of course, completely imaginary: perhaps not even the youngest readers will be inclined to © 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


believe that hours can really be beautiful flowers sent to each person from a distant palace, and that they can be stolen, frozen, and smoked by time thieves. However, this fiction is also extremely powerful, both for representational and, more importantly, for rhetorical purposes. Since its fantastic world has been so easily constructed and appreciated by millions of readers of all ages, it does not come as a surprise that widely shared conceptual structures underlie time concepts in Momo. We make sense of the men in gray and their time bank, the hour-lilies flowering and wilting under the internal pendulum, and the time supply coming through the air from Nowhere House, because we possess deeply entrenched patterns for conceptual integration. We should at least envisage the intricacy of these conceptual integration templates, which goes well beyond what binary projections between conceptual domains could possibly account for. It is also important to realize that these intricate conceptualizations of affective time, including their emergent properties, can bear striking similarities across very different pragmatic settings: a novel, research in psychology, philosophy or economics, a business model, or even an NGO. Time banking in Momo preserves the essential structure of its counterparts from real economic practice and theory. The affective and poetic properties of Ende’s particular version of the conceptual template come, as often happens in creative usages, from a radicalization of the emergent properties, attained by running the conceptual blend to its utmost consequences. A standard procedure for achieving this effect is to import too much structure from one of the inputs, thus violating some of the connections and creating strong conceptual clashes in the blend. Interest payment is a very good example of a conceptual structure that will provoke a conflict if imported to a time-money blend. The incongruity produced by this projection contributes to expose the falsity of this type of time banking, and the treacherous scheme of the men in gray. This intricate integration network, with its emergent structure of saving time for a payoff, is by no means unique to Ende. Researchers in the social sciences work with a very similar conceptual network, which allows them to examine people’s behavior in terms of time investment. Many linguistic expressions from this time-investment framework have now become conventional in industrialized societies, although the very concepts of time investment and time banking would have sounded quite strange in previous epochs, and still today they feel unfamiliar in many cultures around the world. A time-banking blend in which time can be bottled, stored, spent, or invested with payoffs, is necessary for theories of time behavior in psychology, as in the case of Zimbardo and Boyd. Both Zimbardo and Boyd and Ende deny the validity of that world-view, but they do so in different ways: the psychologists negate it, presenting it as impossible; the literary author enacts it, depicting it as extremely plausible, thus exposing its fallacy in an even © 2012. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved


more convincing way (for questioning and poetic metaphor see Lakoff and Turner 1989: 67–72). The hour-lilies are material anchors (Hutchins 2005) for the hour as a universal event. In this respect, they are used to conceptualize objective time experience, and they function just like so many other material anchors for the same blend, including sundials, hourglasses, or clocks. This does not prevent the hour-lilies from being full of emotional meaning, partly imported from standard connotations of flowers and humans-as-plants mappings, but mainly because they are linked to the internal-clock blend. In this blend, which is so productive in psychology, every person is a container where complex time measuring mechanisms are at work. The internal clock produces a personal experience of time, which is nonetheless linked to the regular pace of universal events of a biological or physical nature, that is, to time as a reality independent from subjective experience. Turning this temporal experience into something tangible is perhaps not necessary in psychology, but it is very adequate for Ende’s poetic goals. The hour-lilies are a material anchor, not merely for the universal hour, but for the hour as experienced by means of the internal clock. They are living organisms, all different and unique, each one potentially more beautiful than its predecessors. But they are still subject to the regular passage of time, which can be directly perceived just by looking at them. Thus, in the final chapter, Momo keeps observing the hour-lily she has been granted, which loses its petals at regular intervals, one by one, relentlessly. Time flow, a type of time supply blend, results from the integration of materialized time (as a substance) and time as motion through a path. Once we have time flow, we can exploit the affordances of the blended simulation for emotional and rhetorical purposes, such as in the framing of tedium as poisoned time in the shape of polluted air or fog, which provokes a very serious illness, found both in Momo and in psychology and philosophy texts. Ende exploits the fact that time flow can recruit an emission image-schema, with an emitter, a receiver, a channel and a thing emitted, to develop his system of universal time supply, sent by Master Hora from Nowhere House. The main difference with more conventional examples of time flow is precisely this identification of the source. Again, poetic effects are attained by importing “extra” elements from one of the inputs, beyond the primary function of the blend. Saying that time flows fast or slow, or even that it is ever-flowing, like the Heracleitan river in whose waters we cannot bathe twice, does not sound too challenging. Asking where the river comes from, or who sends the stream down its course, adds quite a different dimension. Stopping this continuous flow of time is yet another even stronger, conceptual clash, which becomes possible within this blend, and is exploited by Ende for the final twist at the end of the tale.



The data we have presented reflect the particular solutions found by individual creativity, as it strives to comply with specific goals as well as with principles established by culture and context. Nevertheless, creativity is also exploiting entrenched conceptual integration templates, widely shared within a culture or across cultures, and replicated in detail with very different purposes, such as engaging the readers of a novel or explaining temporal behavior in psychology research. To compare these different situations, cultural diachrony is crucial: none of the examples we study can be understood out of its cultural context, from mutualist time-banking to Ende’s criticism of the lifestyle and greed of industrialized societies. The timemoney, internal clock and time-supply blends in the story, as well as their nonfictional counterparts, all have a history. A-historical systems of inferences, like time is money or anger is heat, say very little if they are not connected to their patterns of instantiation in the rich contexts within which people usually operate (Geeraerts and Gevaert 1995; Geeraerts and Grondelaerts 2008). Our comparison of Momo, research from the social sciences, and entrenched linguistic and cultural practices, serves as a study of the intricate conceptual integration templates underlying the materialization of time, and their possibilities for creativity and expansion. This would have not been feasible if we had relied solely on binary metaphorical projections such as time is money. From our analysis we can draw the following theoretical conclusions: 1. The findings of Fauconnier and Turner (2008) about spatialized time also apply to materialized time. Materialized time is not the result of direct projection from money or other material concepts: it emerges from a conceptual blend that presents structure that conflicts with its inputs, such as storing time, wasting it, giving it away, growing it at an interest rate, and so on. The inputs to this blend are more than two, and, rather than as vast experiential domains, they are better understood as smaller conceptual packets. The main objective of the materialization of time is to create a cognitively manageable scene. The process combines entrenched conceptual mappings with ad-hoc processes related to context and goals. This more flexible model allows great room for goal-driven creativity. 2. The organizing frame of the conceptual integration template for materialized time is the basic scene of joint attention to the manipulation of objects or substances. The time is money metaphoric projection is just one possible instantiation of this frame. Joint manipulation and materialized time necessarily precede time is money. A previous concept of money is not necessary for the materialization of time. We predict that this will be confirmed by historical data on time concepts in societies that lack money, as well as by developmental research on the acquisition of time expressions in infancy.



3. The joint manipulation scene can involve objects or substances. This introduces a relevant count/non-count distinction. This distinction gives rise to different variants of the template, which should be studied in detail. 4. Materialized time and spatialized time can blend in sophisticated and productive ways, as in the case of time flow. The integration of generic templates is crucial to our understanding of many emergent meanings. 5. The emergence of new meanings in the materialization of time is driven by the pressure to think of time as material rather than insubstantial. There is a cognitive goal underlying this pressure: materialized time is much more manageable in mental terms. There are also strong cultural and historical factors influencing the degree of sophistication in the materialization of time: we would expect that societies with more organized time (e.g., structured schedules) would show stronger tendencies to materialize time. 6. There are general templates for creating blending networks. These templates recur again and again. We show that many emergent meanings related to the materialization of time, which do indeed require sophisticated mappings and integrations, reappear systematically across very different usages and contexts. Many aspects of emergent meaning are recurrent, because the recipes to build them are to some extent entrenched. 7. These templates are too complex to be described by conceptual metaphors and their binary projections, but also, for that matter, too complex to be described exclusively in terms of conceptual mappings. The origins of the patterns, their historical development, their goals, and the communicative context for each particular instantiation need to be examined in detail. 8. In the case of time, we also need to add emotion. The blends for materialized time that we have studied are instantiated in different ways, depending on the emotional attitudes towards time that they intend to represent or induce. 9. The literary examples expose the templates by exploring their limitations, by questioning them, by playing within their constraints and possibilities. This material is crucial to envisage what creativity can do with entrenched templates. Also, we need to reach a better understanding of how the poetic use enriches these templates with affective and moral significance. Research in conceptual mappings has offered very useful models for how temporal meanings are constructed. But this is just the beginning. Our observations of the interplay between entrenched conceptual patterns and creativity, between diachronic and communicative factors, are constantly challenging us to refine our analyses. We need more flexible and sophisticated models. Understanding figurative language and thought requires much more than just modeling projections



from the concrete to the abstract. The materialization of time is a good example of this. As Momo teaches us, in so many ways, time is much more than money.

Acknowledgements Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas’ work was supported by a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship from the European Commission (NARLYR project: 235129). We would like to thank the three anonymous Pragmatics and Cognition reviewers for the helpful comments and bibliographical references they provided.

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Authors’ addresses Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas Research Fellow, Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Murcia Departamento de Filología Clásica, Facultad de Letras 30001 Murcia, Spain [email protected]

Ursina Teuscher Adjunct Assistant Professor, Psychology Department, Portland State University Visiting Scholar, Department of Behavioral Neuroscience, Oregon Health & Science University 317 Cramer Hall Portland, OR 97207–075 U.S.A. [email protected]

About the authors Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas is a research fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (2012–2013) in the project Towards a Cognitive Oral Poetics: Traditional Epic and Cognitive Linguistics, as well as research fellow at the ERC group “Emotions: The Greek Paradigm” (University of Oxford), in the project Cognitive Patterns in Greek Emotion Metaphors. In 2009– 2012 he was a Marie Curie Fellow (funded by the European Comission) in the project: The Narrative Lyric: Conceptual Blending of Spatial Schemata with Emotion in Poetry and beyond. The project was hosted by the University of Oxford, the University of Murcia, Case Western Reserve University, and the University of California San Diego. PhD in Classics, BA+MA in Classics, BA+MA in English, University of Murcia, Spain. MA in classics, University College London.



Ursina Teuscher is, in addition to her work in Oregon, a research scientist at the Mind Research Network, and adjunct assistant professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico, Alburquerque. She has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Cognitive Science Department, University of California San Diego. BA+MA (lizentiat), Career Counselor Diploma, PhD in psychology, University of Freibourg, Switzerland.
