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MARCO CARACCIOLO, A Walk Through Deep History

emplify and test out these claims, I will turn to another narrative that,
like Salopek’s, a empts to flesh out humanity’s embedding in evolution-
ary history; unlike Salopek’s, this is a fictional narrative, William Gold-
ing’s late modernist novel The Inheritors (1955). This text focuses on one
of the dead ends of evolution—a Neanderthal man—and is able to depict
through highly embodied language both the cognitive difference and
the common ground between modern humans and Neanderthals. Gold-
ing’s engagement with a group of Neanderthals brings to the fore the
conceptual challenges involved in moving beyond divisions between
‘us’ (modern humans) and ‘them’ (Neanderthals); at the same time, The
Inheritors suggests that embodied resonance with a nonhuman other may
be key to reducing this divide. In the final, concluding section, I will re-
turn to the big picture issue of how narrative can deploy embodied
strategies to project a sense of interweaving with the nonhuman world.

Embodied Involvement and Thick Simulations

In fields ranging from psycholinguistics to neuroscience, substantial ev-
idence is emerging that language comprehension is not divorced from
language users’ bodies. On the contrary, language and embodiment are
tightly coupled. In a 2013 experiment, psychologist Raymond Gibbs
asked two groups of blindfolded participants to walk towards an object
6
after listening to a story. Both groups stood at the same distance from
the object, which they had seen before being blindfolded. Essentially, the
participants had to guess how far the object was, by walking towards it.
The stories the participants listened to were the same except for one cru-
cial detail: one version of the story contained an embodied metaphor,
“Your relationship was moving along in a good direction”—where the
abstract state of the relationship was described in terms of physical mo-
tion in space. The other version of the story contained a more general

6
Raymond W. Gibbs, “Walking the Walk While Thinking About the Talk:
Embodied Interpretation of Metaphorical Narratives,” Journal of Psycholin-
guistic Research 42, no. 4 (2013): 363-78.

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