From Metaphor to the “Mental Sketchpad”: Literary Macrostructure and Compound Image Schemas in Heart of Darkness Michael Kimmel Austrian Academy of Sciences Institute for European Integration Research, Vienna My case study of Heart of Darkness analyzes the role of image schemas in shaping narrative macrostructures and in organizing literary metaphor systems. Assuming that we can reconstruct global story meaning from local image-schematic metaphors, I propose a model in which compound gestalts represent major aspects of the plot-de- fining macrostructure. It emerges as salient textual cues progressively add up to a scaffold of image-schematic elements that represent the event’s overall texture, its “plot-gene”. The rich metaphor system of Heart of Darkness throws into relief the amazing range of literary functions rooted in this image-schematic plot-gene, includ- ing plot mnemonics, inference, metaphor networks, and clustering of propositional knowledge, megametaphor, focalizing and viewpoint effects, irony, as well as mood contours. Progressing toward a cognitive model of narrative, I will argue that reading involves a mental simulation of how image schemas interact topologically to produce emergent effects. I dub the imagistic substrate of this simulation the “mental (story) sketchpad,” following Baddeley (1986). Story comprehension involves a level of macrostructure representing a story’s global meaning, that is, what we may call its plot, theme, or gist (Zwaan, Radvansky & Whitten, 2002). Discourse psychology, building on van Dijk and Kintsch (1983), has a long tradition of modeling macrostructures and global text coherence through propositional analysis. This view sees meaning as a complex hierarchy of propositions and has recently spawned sophisticated vector-mathe- METAPHOR AND SYMBOL, 20(3), 199–238 Copyright © 2005, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Requests for reprints should be sent to Michael Kimmel, Schallergasse 39/30, A-1120 Vienna, Aus- tria. E-mail: michael.kimmel@gmx.at Do Not Copy