Image schemas across modes and across cultures: Communicating horror in Philip Roth’s Nemesis and Ridley Scott’s Alien

1 Introduction

At first glance, Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and Philip Roth’s Nemesis (2010), the two texts that will be analysed in this paper, appear to have little or nothing in common. Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) is one of the most prominent science fiction horror films, critically acclaimed for its creation of suspense through lighting, camera work and special effects, its (at the time) revolutionary idea to feature a female protagonist as the heroine of an action film, and its rich Freudian symbolism that surrounds the name-giving alien monster (e.g. Cobbs, 1990; Davis, 2000). The plot is simple: a space ship crew exploring a foreign planet is attacked by an alien life form that feeds on and breeds in human bodies. The fight against this most uncanny, uncontrollable enemy, and the problem of how to contain the alien, to prevent it from multiplying, spreading, and ultimately reaching Earth represent the core plot drivers in this survival-horror/science-fiction classic.

Philip Roth’s novel Nemesis (2010) is a relatively short, yet significant and commercially successful contribution to Roth’s imaginative cosmos surrounding American life (particularly Jewish-American life) in all its facets throughout the 20^th century. It is set in 1944 Newark, New Jersey, a city suffering from a polio epidemic that kills or cripples many theretofore strong, healthy children, and describes the panic and hysteria that ensues within the community. Roth’s protagonist is a 23-year-old, energetic and courageous sports teacher, who attempts to resist and mitigate the polio hysteria and becomes the community’s bulwark and moral compass in the polio crisis, until the unavoidably catastrophic ending of the narrative. Tragically, he himself contracts the disease and infects some of the children he sought to protect.

In other words, these two texts appear to be hardly comparable: the medium, genre, setting, time frame, narrative style, and most other elements clearly differ. Still, in this paper, I attempt to compare the cognitive and cultural work of Alien and Nemesis, not in spite of, but rather because they appear so dissimilar at first glance. I argue that an analysis from the perspective of recent theories and methods from cognitive linguistics, enriched by a discourse-oriented interpretation of literary texts as communication between authors and highly diverse audiences, reveals that these two texts are much more similar than they appear. I will particularly focus on the communicative function and the persuasive and artistic power of rudimentary (proto-)metaphors, also known as image schemas.

My study of these cultural texts is thus based on the cognitive approach to the use of figurative language in communication that has its roots in cognitive metaphor theory (CMT) with Lakoff and colleagues (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, 1999; Lakoff and Turner, 1989), embedded in both a cognitive and pragmatic linguistic paradigm that has been recently defined and extended by Semino (2008), Schmid (2012), Dancygier (2012), and Dancygier and Sweetser (2014), among many others. The results of the analysis in this paper are then embedded in a larger argument about metaphoric universality and variation across modes of cultural texts (here, particularly literature and film) and, in extrapolation, across cultures in different parts of the world. Because this (inter-)cultural perspective will provide a framework for my argument, this paper will adopt a – broadly speaking – Cultural Studies perspective, particularly in terms of recent theories on inter- and transculturality that have the highest currency in that discipline (cf. for example Storey, 2009; Welsch, 1999). As Musolff et al. (2014) have shown, an interdisciplinary integration of the linguistic study of metaphors in discourse with a state-of-the-art definition of culture and interculturality is possible and can deliver insights that advance perspectives in both fields. This opens a triangular multidisciplinary plane of theoretical and methodological roots (cognitive metaphor theory, pragmatics, intercultural studies), which deserves careful explanation.

2 Theoretical foundations and methods

The continuing popularity of CMT in the tradition of Lakoff et al., its later extensions and adaptations such as the theory of the embodied mind (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999), and Fauconnier and Turner’s blending theory (2003) can be observed particularly in the collection of recent influential publications that reach far beyond cognitive linguistics and into disciplines that – traditionally – have dealt with their subjects without any cognitive or linguistic focus. CMT and its relatives have recently influenced and advanced literary studies (e.g. Burke and Troscianko, 2013; Dancygier, 2012; Nünning, 2014, to name only some of the key publications from this growing field), narratology (e.g. Fludernik, 1996; Herman, 2003), film studies (e.g. Coëgnarts and Kravanja, 2015; Forceville and Renckens, 2013; Winter, 2014), musicology (e.g. Zbigowski, 2009), intercultural communication studies (e.g. Musolff et al., 2014), and discourse analysis (e.g. Semino, 2008) – though for the latter disciplines, rooted in pragmalinguistics, figurative language was never a ‘foreign’ topic to begin with, as for example Schmid’s Cognitive Pragmatics (2012) shows. The above-mentioned publications have in common that they raise awareness of the deep entrenchment of metaphor in thought (rather than merely in language) and that they highlight its centrality for all forms of human communication, and thus society, and culture (cf. Gibbs, 1999). Moreover, they show and make empirically accessible the power of metaphor to shape readers’, listeners’, or viewers’ worldviews – independently of the mode and medium that is used. Many CMT-based studies are hence, implicitly or explicitly, drawing on the fundamental pragmalinguistic assumption that the meaning of any communicative act is always co-constructed by both speaker/writer and listener/reader (cf. Bublitz and Norrick, 2011, and many others). This in turn resonates with modern reader-centred approaches in cultural studies and literary studies, which take into account how any mass-produced cultural text is embedded in an intertextual network and in a culture industry that strongly influences both its production and reception process (cf. Storey, 2009). In that sense, popular films and novels, such as the ones examined in this paper, can still be understood as expressions of their authors’ creativity and ‘art’. But their actual communicative function, cultural gravity and potential impact are defined by their reception by a (broad) readership that decodes – or co-constructs (depending on which branch of pragmatics one follows, cf. Huang, 2007) – the meaning of the texts in diverse ways, depending on a variety of individual and socio-cultural factors. To fully understand how complex cultural texts function, that is, to achieve a ‘cognitive-based understanding of art’, requires in Dancygier’s words (2012: 15) ‘that the properties of the brain and our core skills of symbolic representation be put in the context both of a social network which gives validity and purpose to the creative acts, and of the lower-level cognitive operations.’

One of those ‘lower-level cognitive operations’ is our mind’s ability to process online even the most ‘compositionally complex’ (Dancygier and Sweetser, 2014: 47) metaphoric expressions while reading, listening, or watching. What readers of literature experience as extraordinarily creative, emotionally engaging, or intellectually stimulating passages in a novel or poem are usually instances of particularly well-crafted compositionally complex metaphors by the author. These compositionally complex metaphors are usually combined of, and can hence be deconstructed into, small, simpler, and usually rather conventional primary metaphors (e.g. Grady, 1997). Metaphor analysts who examine narrative structures argue that at the lowest level of any complex, rich play with metaphors in literature and other forms of art, the success of the artistic communication usually relies on universal skeletal conceptual structures, ‘image schemas’, based on the spatial and force-dynamic embeddedness of our minds and bodies in the world (cf. Cienki, 1997; Hampe and Grady, 2005; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999, Johnson 2009). Central examples of image schemas, for instance discussed in Dancygier and Sweetser (2014: 23) include the Up/Down-orientation, the In/Out dichotomy of the container metaphor, and the ‘movement along a path’-schema, to name only a few. Most (if not all) cognitive- and particularly CMT-based scholars interested in literary narratives have in one way or another mentioned the importance of image schemas for their interpretative work (e.g. Freeman, 1995; Popova, 2003, to name two early examples). Kimmel, however, advises methodological caution and terminological precision, and suggests a clear differentiation of image schemas that function on a local, textual level from those that shape the global narrative macrostructure (Kimmel, 2008, 2009). My study of Alien and Nemesis hence echoes Kimmel’s suggestion that image schema analyses on narratives should extend their focus from the micro-textual analysis of linguistic metaphors in ‘image-schematic mini-scenes’ (Kimmel, 2009: 161) on the text surface towards their function as ‘narrative structuring devices readers use to scaffold the story’s events meso- and macrostructure’ (Kimmel, 2009: 183). Such image schemas – or rather: combinations of image schemas into more complex compound schemas, or ‘megametaphors’ (as for example Kövecses and Benczes, 2010, call them) – may be ‘neither linguistically signalled, nor tied to one specific [metaphoric] expression’ (Kimmel, 2009: 181), but are realized on the plot level through a combination of communicative means and modes. This is particularly true for narratives in film, in which all communication with the audience/‘reader’ is per se multimodal (cf. Forceville and Renckens, 2013; Forceville and Urios-Aparisi, 2009). In Alien, for example, the linguistic data (i.e. the dialogues between characters) is much less noteworthy and less ‘metaphorical’ on the surface than the plot meso- and macrostructure, as a more detailed discussion of one particular scene, and its meaning for the entire film, will show later in this paper.

Since the first attempts to apply CMT’s fundamental ideas to the study of fictional texts (Lakoff and Turner, 1989) most scholars have emphasized that literary authors who craft interesting, thought-provoking metaphoric landscapes within a narrative, more often than not do so by creating highly elaborate metaphoric ‘subcases’ and combinations of conventions, rather than ‘inventing’ absolutely new metaphors (cf. Dancygier and Sweetser, 2014: 45–46). Creativity, particularly when this creativity is accepted as interesting or ‘beautiful’ by a large audience, hinges on a skilful enrichment, extension, and potentially renegotiation of highly conventional metaphoric patterns (see Senkbeil and Hoppe, 2016, for an example of such extensions and renegotiations). Usually, these enrichments of relatively standardized patterns mostly do not decidedly contradict or intend to change the conventional metaphoric mapping, but ‘they do, interestingly, add viewpoint’ (Dancygier and Sweetser, 2014: 46). They also are, we may add, motivated communicative choices by authors to create a certain effect in their audience, such as the playful, some say cathartic form of dread and anxiety when watching a horror film (cf. Morgan, 2002; Mulvey-Roberts, 1998) or reading a novel with a tragic theme and a catastrophic ending. The reading/viewing pleasure of a large critical audience, including literary critics and serious film reviewers, and hence the success of a novel or film in the market, thus depends on balancing two aspects. On the one hand, a critical readership demands fresh and original perspectives on the world, not only regarding the use of metaphors of course. On the other hand, the figurative language (and everything else) must be easily accessible by a vast, culturally diverse audience. Without anticipating too much, I would like to argue that world-famous writers and filmmakers such as Roth and Scott would not be ‘world-famous’ if they produced their profound and often metaphoric narratives exclusively for an Anglophone US American audience.

Thus, any argument that deals with the communicative function and power of cognitive metaphor in internationally successful cultural texts reaches a point at which it needs to discuss the question of metaphoric universality (across languages and across cultures) and/versus cultural variation. Classically, CMT relies on the assumption that conceptual metaphors ‘work’ in communication largely because all human beings share a universal – or at least very similar – body and thus cognitive and sensorimotor apparatus with which to process language, other semiotic systems, and the world we live in. At the same time, metaphoric variation across languages, socio-cultural groups, and whole cultures obviously exists; this has repeatedly been shown empirically (cf. Deignan, 2003; Yu, 2003, 2008, to name only a few examples from an extensive library of studies), and must not be neglected. Traditionally, many studies of metaphors and/in culture focused on contrastive analyses of differences, and hence tended to emphasize (potential) intercultural misunderstandings based on different metaphorical expressions (which they undoubtedly are in many contexts). The recent trend in this field, however, calls for a closer look at how metaphors can ‘empower’ intercultural communication (cf. Musolff, 2014: 55), for example as a source for explanations for varying worldviews, helping make difference acceptable, or as ‘anchors’ (Dancygier, 2012: 42) and ‘scaffolding’ devices (Kimmel, 2009: 171) that help us understand complex texts even if they were produced in a different place, time, and language (i.e. ‘culture’, in a simple sense). Kimmel (2004), Kövecses (2007, 2015), Musolff (2014) and Musolff et al. (2014) are some of the key publications that explore the immensely complex question of culture-dependence or -independence of metaphors in communication. While we remain far from a definitive answer to the question of how cultural patterns influence cognition and vice versa, all the above-mentioned scholars agree that neither a ‘radical’ Whorfian perspective nor a hasty declaration of omnipresent universalism of metaphors in human communication does justice to the complex interplay between the cognitive and the cultural (see also Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 2013).

Both Nemesis and Alien have been critically acclaimed around the world, analysed and interpreted by scholars and critics from many countries/cultures (see for example the positive reviews of Nemesis in the French Le Monde, Finkielkraut, 2012, and the German Die Zeit, Greiner, 2011, to name only two). Acquiring total sales statistics for a certain novel around the world, including all editions and translations, is difficult if not impossible, but a cursory review of Amazon’s sales statistics and bestseller lists from the larger European and English-speaking markets should suffice to demonstrate that Nemesis was, in fact, also a commercial international success. For films, the Internet Movie Database offers more helpful statistics, in that it catalogues the success at box offices worldwide, and differentiates between ‘US-’ and ‘non-US users’ rating the film. This makes it reasonably safe to say that Alien has been watched (and positively evaluated) by non-Americans more often than by Americans, and, in all probability, consumed by more viewers who do not have English as their native language.

These texts hence represent prime examples of a successful intercultural transfer of mass-mediated cultural products. Such transfer entails linguistic translation, but often much more than that (cf. Lüsebrink, 2012). While an exhaustive study of the intercultural transfer processes of these two works is not the central aim of this paper, the methodology of intercultural transfer studies can add valuable perspectives to textual and other linguistic analyses, in that it takes into account the motivatedness of any active effort to ‘transfer meaning’ to another culture, processes of adaption, and to potential changes to the communicative function(s) of texts during the transfer (Scollon et al. 2012; Ang, 1996; Lüsebrink, 2012).

The international success of these two works in particular of course entailed translations and dubbing into dozens of other languages, which, we can assume a posteriori, was unproblematic, in the sense that the ‘language barrier’ was not an obstacle for successful communication across cultures. This fact is congruent with Musolff et al.’s assumption that ‘all [conceptual] metaphors are “translatable”’ (2014: 1) if certain preconditions are met. They cite evidence suggesting that listeners and readers effortlessly understand a concept as metaphorical if they ‘realize that this is what they are being invited to do’ (2014: 7). This appears to be true despite the fact that a literal translation of its linguistic expression may be awkward or even impossible in the target language. Intercultural misunderstandings are much more likely if conceptual metaphors are ‘unsignalled’ on the linguistic surface, for example by explicit cues in the direct vicinity of the metaphorical expression (‘x is like y’ instead of just ‘x is y’, or pragmatic markers in spoken conversations such as ‘so to say’, ‘so-called’, etc). Understanding fictional narratives as a communicative act that takes into account contextual factors such as the readers’ assumptions and background knowledge, we may then argue that the readers’ expectations of a Philip Roth novel include a general readiness and willingness to be confronted with symbolism, allegory, and metaphor. The same is particularly true for a science fiction film featuring – for the contemporary audience – highly unrealistic space ships, alien monsters, artificial intelligence, androids, etc. Most members of the audience will certainly expect that, if these fantastic elements are supposed to ‘mean something’, this meaning must be figurative. In other words, I argue that metaphors (particularly plot metaphors or ‘megametaphors’) in texts such as Nemesis or Alien are ‘signalled’ from the outset of the reading/viewing process.

The transcultural character of literature today is repeatedly emphasized by scholars, and the transnational character of larger film productions is a well-known phenomenon since the mid-20^th century. Alien is no exception, as a US American production based on an American script, but intended for international publication from the outset, shot in London by the Englishman Ridley Scott, with strong creative input by the Swiss HR Giger. But not only the producers and organizers of an intercultural transfer are aware of the fact that the text ‘crosses cultural boundaries’: a communication-based perspective reminds us of the transcultural character of audiences, too. A large part of the international audience of Alien and Nemesis was/is probably aware of the fact that they are invited to share symbolism and metaphoricity that they may find (or even expect to be), in a way, both ‘typically Anglo-American’ and universally relevant.

In the following, I intend to show that the success and translatability of these texts across languages and cultures can be explained by the power of conceptual metaphors, and particularly their use of image schemas to communicate a quite specific, yet universal human fear. As already mentioned, it will turn out that neither Scott nor Roth applies large amounts of linguistic metaphorical expressions, though their plots are conceptually highly metaphorical and share central schemas.

3 Repetitive schemas in Roth’s Nemesis: Invasions and infections

Most readers of Nemesis react towards the narrative of Bucky Cantor, who first fights steadfastly against, then tragically falls prey to polio, not only with a feeling of empathy with its protagonist and the children he teaches and protects, but also with a feeling of dread and horror (e.g. Greiner, 2011; Martyris, 2014). Nemesis haunts its readers long after they have finished reading, surprisingly so, some may say, considering that none of its readers has to actually worry about polio anymore. Roth’s short novel, critics seem to agree (e.g. Aarons, 2013; Cheuse, 2010; Docx, 2010), is an allegory – or, in CMT terms, a multilayered, compositionally complex megametaphor – of how human beings deal with suffering, and whether the belief in God (or fate, or any other form of teleology) is a relief or rather a burden when we face the seemingly random cruelties that befall our lives. This profound philosophical question – which has become typical for Roth over the course of his career – is, so to speak, the target frame on which the concrete narrative around one man’s fate during a polio epidemic as a source frame is metaphorically mapped.

Within this ‘surface narrative’, Roth vividly paints the picture of an urban community that, when faced with a vague, mysterious threat, slowly but unavoidably descends into panic. This panic is centrally based on one central concept: infection. The characters in Nemesis are aware of the fact that polio is an infectious disease, but the actual virus and the way it spreads had not been discovered by 1944. So throughout the largest part of the narrative, anything or anybody is considered a potential carrier of the germ, which intensifies the local hysteria. The Jewish community in Newark moulds into an increasingly solid, increasingly homosocial and religious group, based on their fear of the unknown. In that climate, all outside influences are soon considered threats; the fear of infection develops into a fear of invasion by any form of cultural Other. Considering that the summer of 1944 was the year in which American troops began to win the upper hand both in Europe and the Pacific, but also the year in which Jewish people in Europe faced horrors far greater than polio, most readers understand that Roth’s book can be read as a socio-cultural commentary that exceeds far beyond the surface narrative surrounding the disease. In other words, infection can be considered a macro source frame that is mapped on various targets throughout the novel.

A few examples are in order to demonstrate this central schema that structures the story. One episode in Nemesis is particularly emblematic for this fear of the Other that is rationalized through (pseudo-)medical knowledge about contagiousness and infection on the part of the characters, particularly the teenage boys that Cantor works with, and their paranoid mothers. One afternoon, a group of young Italians from another part of town, the ‘industrial slum that had reported the most cases of polio in the city so far’ (13), drive their car to the Jewish neighbourhood playground. They taunt and scare the Jewish boys, who spend their afternoons playing baseball, by insisting: ‘We’re spreading polio … We got it and you don’t’ (13–14). As the playground supervisor and only adult around, Cantor is able to deescalate the situation and deflect the Italians, but not before their ring leader spits out and leaves ‘a gob of viscous sputum splattered … inches from … Mr. Cantor’s sneakers’ (14). Even after the Italians have driven away, that area of the sidewalk, the ‘wet, slimy, disgusting mess that certainly appeared to be an ideal breeding ground for disease’ (16) becomes a localized anchor for the boys’ fear. Even among their parents, the legend spreads that ‘the Italians had driven across town … intending to infect the Jews with polio and that they had succeeded’ (19).

While this episode early in the narrative may appear rather unmetaphorical at first glance, it provides all the ingredients of the larger infection schema that governs the whole narrative. Let me expand on that idea by looking at other ‘invaders’ and ‘infectors’ of the Jewish space, apart from the Italian hooligans from the poor part of town.

Because nobody knows how polio is contracted, the citizens of Newark suspect ‘almost anything, including the bony alley cats that invaded our backyard garbage cans and the haggard stray dogs that … defecated all over the sidewalk … and the pigeons that … dirtied front stoops’ (5, my emphasis). The children are ‘warned not … to play with strangers or to borrow books from the public library’ (6). A panicky mother demands: ‘“They should inspect the milk that kids drink – polio comes from dirty cows …” “No,” said someone else, “it isn’t the cows – it’s the bottles. They don’t sterilize those milk bottles right”’ (36).

Interestingly, the people of New Jersey are not only afraid of germs to invade their space. When Cantor considers leaving Newark and going to the shore, he muses about ‘the danger of German U-boats in nearby waters [and] of waterborne German saboteurs coming ashore after dark’ (129). These U-boats do not exist, are irrelevant for the plot, and – with today’s knowledge – most readers will understand that this fear was largely unjustified. Also, we know today that neither a gob of spit, nor stray animals, nor milk bottles were relevant factors for the spread of polio during the epidemics in the 20^th century. Poliomyelitis is a virus infection that spreads quickly in human communities via the faecal-oral and oral-oral routes (including droplet infection), but it causes very few or no symptoms in 90–95% of those infected; 5–10% develop mild, often unremarkable symptoms, only 0.5–1 % suffer from the serious symptoms that the illness is known for (temporary or permanent paralysis, respiratory failure, sometimes death) (cf. Hamborsky et al., 2015). Statistically, during an epidemic such as the one portrayed in Nemesis, practically all members of the community must have been in contact with the virus in one way or another. Though every character in this book, including Cantor, in the end try to rationalize the infection by attempting to isolate one particular reason, incident, or responsible person to blame, polio used to be almost impossible to contain before the vaccine was invented in the 1950s.

Why, then, does Roth go through such lengths to establish the infection or invasion schema as the central recurrent theme in this narrative? The answer to this question lies in the final act, the catastrophe in Roth’s novel, which is not coincidentally structured like a traditional Greek drama (in which the audience also knew at the beginning of the play that disaster was looming no matter how characters chose to act). Towards the end of the second third of the novel, Cantor must decide whether he stays in the summer heat of fear- and polio-ridden Newark, or whether he follows up on the invitation of his fiancée to join her at a summer camp by the coast, where he is offered a summer job. The summer camp promises a cooler climate, a reunion with his girlfriend, and, particularly, the freedom from the worries and fears of hysterical Newark, since there have been no cases of polio reported at the summer camp until then. The decision does not come easy to Cantor, due to his strong sense of duty and responsibility towards the boys who look up to him for guidance and protection. Still, Cantor leaves Newark.

The narrative follows Cantor to the summer camp, where he experiences a few blissful, pastoral days surrounded by picturesque nature, teaching sports to healthy, enthusiastic kids enjoying their summer, and with his fiancée nearby. Roth skilfully crafts the image of an innocent, idyllic paradise by the coast, while at the same time preparing the reader for its imminent, unavoidable destruction. Within a few hours, two of the most athletic boys contract polio with the severest symptoms, and can only breathe with the help of an iron lung; the camp is closed shortly after. Cantor himself falls ill, too, and spends months in grim pain in a hospital. Polio leaves him paralysed, loveless, bitter, and with a broken will for the rest of his life. The downfall of this character primarily rests on his (unrealistic) assumption that he himself has brought the polio virus to the summer camp. For the rest of his life he feels guilty for killing and/or crippling those children, who were – as Cantor believes – safe from the illness until he showed up, simply because he was too selfish, ‘abandoning his post’ in the city. His ultimate tragedy – and the horror that the readers of his story share – lies in the fact that after fending off all other carriers of the illness, Cantor himself became the ‘shuttle’ to deliver the deadly germ to ‘paradise’. He muses: ‘I was the Typhoid Mary of the Chancellor playground. I was the playground polio carrier. I was the Indian hill polio carrier’ (248), and later adds: ‘I wanted to help kids and make them strong … and instead I did them irrevocable harm.’ (271).

As all the above episodes – including the tragic ending of the narrative – have shown, within the infection schema in Nemesis, the germ that invades the community to bring death and destruction is said to require ‘carrier’ or a shuttle (e.g. the car of the Italians, stray animals, milk bottles, but also the U-boats, etc.) to travel from an already infected place to a place of (theretofore) health, youth, and innocence. The content of the shuttle is menacing, and it often metaphorically takes the form of a liquid and/or disgusting mass; yet the characters in Nemesis mostly worry about stopping the carrier to protect their allegedly healthy community. In other words, the narrative centrally makes use of the ‘shuttle schema’, which has been identified as central in how people (classically) conceptualize communication (cf. Grady, 1998, on the so-called conduit metaphor), the transfer of knowledge, and (sometimes) diplomacy (cf. Benczes, 2006: 116). On a conceptual level, the shuttle schema can be deconstructed into smaller, highly conventional metaphoric units: it consists of two ontological entities A and B, one of which has the characteristics of a container, and thus a clearly defined inside/outside orientation. After the ontological element A has entered the container B in a place X, B moves and transports A along a path P (a linear movement in both space and time) towards a different place Y, where it releases A. All of these steps rely on primary cognitive concepts, ‘image schemas’ in the standard CMT-sense; the shuttle schema should thus be considered a universal, culture- and language-independent compound schema.

The concrete narrative makes use of a conventional schema, yet its appeal to the readership is based on enrichment: Roth’s narrative about Bucky Cantor adds viewpoint and evaluative aspects (indicated by terms in italics in Figure 1), and connects different narrative spaces with affects and rudimentary emotions, roughly corresponding to the similarly universal, rudimentary binaries health/illness, safety/danger, and clean/dirty (see for example ‘dirty’ cows vs. ‘sterile’ bottles, 36). The horror of Cantor’s story is that he himself, unwillingly and unwittingly, became the shuttle for the germ of destruction. One of our ultimate, and, I argue, culturally universal fears is hence metaphorically portrayed: when we ourselves become the ‘shuttle’ that delivers doom to places of innocence, to our homes and our loved ones.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

The ‘inadvertent infector schema’ in Nemesis.

Figure 1 represents a preliminary conclusion to the question why Nemesis ‘works’ across cultures and across languages. The ‘infection-by-shuttle schema’, and its narrative enrichment (an ‘Edenic’ pastoral place of health and innocence, germs that deliver death, and the person as shuttle extension) that stand at the centre of the narrative are certainly complex, but universally understandable. All metaphorical elements from which it is combined are primary ones, that is, image schemas rooted in basic ontological and embodied experiences.

Simultaneously, Figure 1 will serve as a working hypothesis for the second part of this analysis, the examination of the communication of horror in Alien.

4 Compound schemas in Scott’s Alien: Quarantine and unwanted pregnancy

Ridley Scott’s Alien has been hugely successful not only at box offices around the world but also with scholars, who have been fascinated with the film and its sequels for various reasons (cf. Davis, 2000; Kuhn, 1990; Vaughn, 1995, Hurley 1995, to name only a small fraction from the canon of Alien scholarship). All critics (academic or otherwise) agree that both the plot of Alien and particularly HR Giger’s artwork clearly signify more than ‘just another’ science fiction monster movie. The design of the alien’s body rather obviously involves sexualized visual metaphorical mappings, most famously the tooth-bearing ‘tongue-phallus’ extruding from the alien’s mouth. In many scenes, the camera work and editing leave it to the viewer’s imagination what happens to the victims of the alien, implying that it not only kills but also rapes its prey. Alien relates to homophobic and transphobic sentiments in contemporary mainstream society, as the monster also ‘penetrates’ male victims in painful, gruesome ways, and in that the artwork implies both male and female reproductive organs. Finally, the only survivor who is brave and cunning enough to avoid being raped by the alien, defeat it, and thus protect mankind from its doom, is a young woman wearing – in the final climactic scene – only ‘innocent white’ underwear.

This symbolism surrounding sex, gender ambiguity and (sexual) taboos has a long tradition in the Gothic/horror genre (cf. Morgan, 2002; Mulvey-Roberts, 1998), but these particular ideological undertones – for example, Alien has been criticized as anti-feminist and thus somewhat typical for American cinema in the 1970s (cf. Davis, 2000; Newton, 1990) – are not culturally or historically universal. It belongs to the definition of taboo in that what it defines as ‘forbidden’ places, objects or activities are culturally and socially defined and do not have a logical, for example, biological or embodied reason. However, as Musolff et al. (2014) argue, ‘cultural specificity is not a contradiction but a complementary characteristic in the acquisition … and understanding’ (4) of conceptual metaphors in intercultural communication. In fact, I hold that the sexuality-related metaphorical imagery is only a function of deeper cognitive structures that Scott et al. skilfully employ to create horror.

The crew of the spaceship Nostromo (and the audience, too) experience one of their most terrifying moments, when they realize that the alien life form not only kills humans (which genre aficionados expected anyway) but also that it leaves some of them alive to breed its offspring in their stomachs. The alien ‘facehugger’ impregnates crewman Kane by ramming a tube-shaped insemination organ down his throat, a rather unsubtle metaphoric image, one may add. Kane continues to live until, in what has since become a classic, widely discussed, and often satirized motif in the science fiction genre, a pinkish baby alien bursts from his chest after having matured and fed on Kane’s intestines for a few hours. From that point on, both the crew and the audience are aware that the true horror in this narrative does not lie in being killed by the alien: an unwanted pregnancy with its offspring is much worse. For some critics, Alien is an ‘abortion parable’ (Cobbs, 1990: 198).

This is where, I hold, the narrative develops its culture-independent thrill. Pregnancy is, of course, a universal human concept, and in a way, a primitive understanding of pregnancy resembles a subcase of the shuttle schema (though here, the movement along the path P is more of a linear movement through time). At the same time, pregnancy, when used as a metaphoric source frame, represents a prime example for an exception to the rule that has been assumed by many who explore image schemas and cultural universality/variation: that ‘compound schemas are usually culturally unique’ (Kimmel, 2009: 287), and that only ‘primary metaphors are likely to be universal, whereas the complex ones that are formed from them are much less likely to be so’ (Kövecses, 2007: 4). Pregnancy is a highly complex embodied process and thus a complicated compound of primary elements when used metaphorically; but it is undoubtedly a process known and understood by virtually all adult humans, independently of their culture. If, for example, personified entities are metaphorically ‘pregnant with meaning’ (an expression that works in many languages, compare for example the German bedeutungsschwanger), or – in the case of Alien and Nemesis – ‘pregnant with disaster’, these metaphoric expressions are at the same time compositionally complex and universally understandable across cultures.

Scott et al.’s creative input to craft a memorable horror scene lies in the extension and renegotiation of the standard evaluative and affective patterns surrounding the concept pregnancy. Conventionally, the ‘object’ inside the womb as container is harmless, cute, needs protection, warmth, and care. Though birth is of course known to involve undesirable elements such as pain and loss of control, essentially all human communities commonly interpret the process and its result as sources of joy and wonder, particularly when the ‘ontological element’ has finally left its ‘shuttle’. Alien uses that convention and confronts its viewers with a radically renegotiated, we may say ‘perverted’ version.

Moreover, Kane’s pregnancy blends with the infection-by-shuttle metaphor that has been outlined above. After all, Kane is contaminated by the alien seed when on a mission outside of the spaceship, then returns to the theretofore safe and homey living quarters, where the crew is usually shown eating, chatting and joking around the spaceship-version of a dinner table. The terrifying ‘birth’ of the alien on said dinner table means that now, even within the Nostromo, everyone is in danger. Not coincidentally, this scene is preceded by a discussion between the story’s heroine, Ripley, and her superiors Dallas and Ash. Ripley argues for the seemingly heartless strategy to keep crew members, who explored the planet and were injured by the alien, off the ship: ‘If we let it in, the ship could be infected, you know the quarantine procedures! … if we break quarantine, we could all die’ (Alien, 1979: 36:32). During this discussion, the editing emphasizes the significance of the heavy airlock door, with a brightly lit, calm, sterile inside and a dark, stormy, grimy outside. In other words, both linguistically and visually the director prepares the audience to think in terms of infection and protective layers in the sense of the container metaphor. This anticipates the rupture of the ‘protective layer’ of Kane’s body (his abdomen) in the emblematic scene described above.

Kane’s suffering, as he dies in agony while giving birth to the baby alien, is thus very similar to that of Bucky Cantor: he unwillingly and unknowingly became the shuttle to bring the spawn of destruction into the sphere of health and safety, a fate that has impressed and haunted viewers and readers around the world. The differences between Scott’s film and Roth’s novel concern the communicative mode, the genre, setting, subtlety of execution, and the amount of blood and gore (though we should remind ourselves that also Roth’s characters faced unpleasant body fluids in the shape of a ‘gob of viscous sputum’ and a ‘wet, disgusting mess’ when the Italian rowdies entered their space). Fundamentally though, the horror derives from the same compound schema.

Towards the end of the movie, after the alien has further decimated the crew of the Nostromo in – true to the form of the horror genre – increasingly violent ways, the last survivor Ripley understands that she has to cut her losses and escape. Unfortunately, the alien is able to also enter the lifeboat shuttle with which she escapes from the self-destructing ship.

Here, and in many other instances that cannot be fully embraced in this paper, the authors communicate metaphorically on various, sometimes independent levels: for example, the computer system that runs most routines on board the Nostromo is a developed form of artificial intelligence called ‘MOTHER’. During the film, it turns out that MOTHER has an agenda of her own and withholds vital information from her ‘children’. Finally, ‘she’ self-destructs while her one remaining ‘daughter’ Ripley must escape and fend for herself. This may be a rather ‘on the nose’ metaphor, but certainly represents another case in point of those who argue that Alien is fundamentally a Freudian narrative. Resolving whether it ultimately has a feminist or anti-feminist thrust (both arguments exist, cf. Kavanaugh, 1980; Newton, 1990) is beyond the scope of this paper.

On a second level, the ‘inadvertent infection by shuttle’ compound schema remains active all the way until the ending of the film. In the climactic final scene, not only Ripley’s life is on the line: should a specimen of the quickly multiplying, hermaphrodite predator reach Earth, all mankind would be in danger. So here, the storyworld involves an actual, literal shuttle (a space ship) that might unintentionally be the vehicle that spreads death and destruction among innocents. Obeying the conventions of a Hollywood action film though, the heroine succeeds in outsmarting the monster in the final battle, blowing it into outer space by depressurizing the shuttle at the right moment. Among Alien aficionados, rumour has it that an alternative version of the script proposed a very different final scene: the alien was to kill Ripley by biting her head off, then mimic Ripley’s voice for a log book entry to disguise its identity while approaching human settlements (McIntee, 2005). This finale is said to have been favoured by Ridley Scott but rejected by studio executives, who feared that such a dark, pessimistic ending would be too horrifying for a mainstream audience. Rumour or not, the ‘infection by shuttle’ schema would have been remarkably extended with this alternative ending, and effectively combined with the impostor motif, a related megametaphor with high salience in the science fiction genre (see for example Rosenthal and Schäfer, 2014).

5 Conclusion

I hope to have shown on the example of two rather dissimilar texts that a CMT-based, and particularly an image-schema-based approach to a variety of narratives can reveal parallels across very diverse text types and genres. This study has indicated that these two internationally successful, critically acclaimed fictional narratives with a horror theme use (compound) schemas in a cognitive linguistic sense to stimulate deeply psychological types of fear (which have been called ‘angst’ or ‘Gothic horror’ in other contexts, e.g. Morgan, 2002). In that respect, they function allegorically, and hence differently than many simple, off-the-rack horror films or novels, which often utilize a rather repetitive metaphoric ‘standard toolkit’ to create anxiety, as Winter (2014) shows. Alien and Nemesis allude to complex but universal human fears. Though our mortality and our bodies’ vulnerability to disease and injury are parts of the narratives, their lasting effect hinges on how they display the lack of control over the consequences of our actions, and the disaster we may bring to places of safety and innocence without intending to.

What I call the ‘inadvertent infector schema’, sketched in Figure 1, can thus be understood as an example of a skeletal narrative structure (or ‘scaffold’ in Kimmel’s words, 2009: 161) underlying complex literary texts. This schematic narrative macrostructure is, I argue, (a) recurring across genres, modes, and styles, and (b) simpler than it appears at first glance, once we consider that it consists exclusively of rudimentary ontological and force-dynamic image schemas, and basic emotions. The embodied nature of the image-schematic structure exploited by these texts offers an explanation for the ‘visceral’ dread experienced by many readers in many different cultures. Obviously, a data set of only two cultural texts precludes far-reaching conclusions about whether the ‘inadvertent infector schema’ is typical for literature and film of a certain shape, era, or origin. We may hypothesize though that Alien and Nemesis are somewhat representative for a particular type of horror narrative in the postmodern world, as infection, contagiousness, and virality seem to have become buzz topics (and central fears) in the globalized information age (cf. Mitchell, 2012); but of course, more research would be necessary to bolster this speculation.

Furthermore, considering that internationally successful cultural texts since the 20^th century have become mass-mediated communication across cultures and languages, I argue that a focus on the comparatively simple image schemas that underlie many creative, compositionally complex metaphors in popular art can train a cultural or literary studies scholar’s eye for why some intercultural transfers work, while other narratives remain largely exclusive for a certain cultural or historical context. Inter- and transcultural studies have a long tradition of emphasizing cultural diversity and of arguing how difficult, if not impossible, it is to simply ‘transfer meaning’ from one culture to another. At the same time, intercultural transfers have happened and worked for centuries, and increase in volume and scope by the decade. Neither rash conclusions about an omnipresent, hegemonic Americanization of culture(s) since the 1950s, nor a radical cultural relativist perspective can account for the global success of some, but certainly not all products from Hollywood and a particular type of literary narrative (as, for example, the ‘Roth style’). Instead, a connection of the linguistic, the cognitive, and the cultural may provide a key to differentiate the complexities and nuances of successful intercultural communication and transcultural art. With this paper and its sample analysis of two noteworthy cultural texts I hope to have contributed a small fragment to that interdisciplinary endeavour.