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MARCO CARACCIOLO, A Walk Through Deep History

mean by the ‘thickening’ of embodied simulations. Salopek’s passage
(quoted above) is quite effective at this, because of how it evokes—re-
peatedly—the arrested quality of the walking, which disrupts expecta-
tions and elicits affect. Readers are much more likely to experience em-
bodied involvement in response to Salopek’s conceit than to an ordinary
sentence such as “I walked to the grocery store,” even as embodied sim-
ulation will be implicated in both cases.
It is important to keep in mind that these claims about the thick-
ening of simulations are based on intuitions about reader-response,
not on direct empirical evidence. Clearly, more research is needed to
substantiate and specify my notion of thickening. But, conceptually
speaking, distinguishing between different kinds of simulations seems
inevitable; in a similar vein, linguist David Ritchie argues:

[A] robust concept of simulation […] may range across several levels of
detail, from a subtle muscle contraction the individual is scarcely
aware of or a fleeting emotion that barely registers, to a detailed imag-
inative reconstruction of the experience of being lost in a dark cave [in
Ritchie’s example], all the way up to a reader’s empathetic imaginative
reconstruction of a writer’s experience. 15

Thick simulations are defined both by their level of detail (as Ritchie
suggests) and by the salience of the affective responses and ethical judg-
ments that accompany them, which will obviously depend on both the
features of a certain narrative and readers’ interests and predispositions.
The link between textual features and thickness of simulations
is, of course, easier to generalize about than readers’ individual re-
sponses. Narratives typically focus on a character (a narrator or pro-
tagonist) who is present on the verbally evoked scene; readers’ em-
bodied simulations tend to center on that character and reflect his or
her spatio-temporal perspective, as an early psycholinguistic study by

15 L. David Ritchie, “X IS A JOURNEY: Embodied Simulation in Metaphor
Interpretation,” Metaphor and Symbol 23, no. 3 (2008): 193.

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