"Revelling in Dissolving Views": Conceptual Integration and Blending in Ford's 'Mister Bosphorus and the Muses'

Ford’s Mister Bosphorus and the Muses is an extremely interesting text to analyse from a cognitive perspective. In particular, Conceptual Integration Theory seems to offer the best theoretical tools to account for its linguistic and narratological complexity: the hallucinatory techniques, dream-like transformations and metanarrative devices produce a mind-oriented text, and Blending can be fruitfully used to appreciate how voices, perspectives, characters, genres and meanings contribute to the production of impossible storytelling scenarios. The analysis of mental spaces also sheds light on the many implications triggered by the emergent structure of the blends and on the way they repeatedly differ the idea of ‘understanding’ the text in order to create new mental representations. Such a study also throws new light on Ford’s poetic production, since it demonstrates that in fact Mister Bosphorus is not only an idiosyncratic work of art, but a sort of theoretical statement under the guise of poetic experimentation, which confirms Ford’s paramount role as a major prose theorist but also as an accomplished modernist poet.