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MARCO CARACCIOLO, A Walk Through Deep History

a bridge towards the ‘deep history’ of our species—where deep history
includes events, such as the migration of Homo sapiens, that far pre-
ceded recorded history and whose temporal scale is incommensurable
4
with that of individual human life. I propose that the foregrounding
of bodily experience—and the resonance it can trigger in readers—can
help narrative overcome that sense of incommensurability, by offering
a human-scale equivalent to processes that unfolded on a more-than-
human scale. In Salopek’s case, thousands of years and countless
human generations are compressed into a single man’s seven-year
walk. This compression is the mechanism underlying what Gilles Fau-
connier and Mark Turner call “conceptual blending,” which typically
works by conflating an abstract, nonlinear process (such as human mi-
gration) with an embodied and much more tangible scenario, such as
5
a man moving through space. Recent developments in embodied cog-
nition (and in the related field of cognitive approaches to narrative)
provide me with empirically grounded concepts to describe the em-
bodied resonance that narrative may elicit as it a empts to convey the
deep time of evolution. Of course, we’ll have to keep in mind that this
rendering of more-than-human time periods into an embodied sce-
nario can involve a loss of important information, or a distortion of sci-
entific models. Yet the point of this translation is not scientific accuracy
per se, but affective and imaginative impact within a culturally specific
project (such as Salopek’s humanitarian narrative).
I will tackle these ideas in three steps. I will first explore the em-
bodied underpinnings of language understanding, arguing that we
make sense of language—and particularly of the creative language of
narrative—by leveraging bodily schemata and processes. In order to ex-

4
For more on deep history, see Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail, eds.,
Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2011). Mark McGurl has wri en on the challenges
that deep history raises for literary narrative (and literary theory itself): see Mark
McGurl, “The Posthuman Comedy,” Critical Inquiry 38, no. 3 (2012): 533–53.
5
See Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blend-
ing and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002); on com-
pression, esp. 117.

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