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MARCO CARACCIOLO, A Walk Through Deep History

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David Bryant and colleagues shows. One way to thicken simulations
is, therefore, to evoke characters’ embodied engagement with their
surroundings, or to foreground their affective responses. Creative
metaphorical language can also help flesh out simulations by captur-
ing a character’s experience with more clarity and nuance than would
17
be possible through conventional, nonmetaphorical language. The
tropes that punctuate Salopek’s account of walking are what I call
‘phenomenological’ metaphors and similes: they bring readers closer
to the lived experience (or phenomenology) of a particular character—
in this case, the storyteller’s. 18
Not all thickening strategies are character-directed, of course.
We have seen that Salopek’s passage foregrounds (and thematizes)
the iambic rhythm of “a holding on and le ing go”; along similar lines,
style may also involve readers’ bodies by creating a certain kind of
stylistic pa erning that they experience in sensory terms. Moreover,
moving now to the macro-level of plot, the progression of narrative
itself may take on quasi-rhythmic qualities. Cognitive linguist Michael
Kimmel talks about the “affective contour” of narrative to refer to the

16 David J. Bryant, Barbara Tversky, and Nancy Franklin, “Internal and Ex-
ternal Spatial Frameworks for Representing Described Scenes,” Journal of
Memory and Language 31, no. 1 (1992): 74-98.
17 For more on this, see Marco Caracciolo, “Phenomenological Metaphors in
Readers’ Engagement with Characters: The Case of Ian McEwan’s Saturday,”
Language and Literature 22, no. 1 (2013): 60-76.
18
A few more examples of phenomenological metaphors and similes from
Salopek’s 2013 article (I’m italicizing the relevant portion of the quotation):
“I awoke before dawn and saw snow: thick, dense, choking, blinding. Like
plankton suspended at the bo om of a sunless sea, swirling white in the beam of
my headlamp. It was the dust.” “We plod across an acacia plain darkened to
the color of chocolate by the warm raindrops.” “The world changes when you
are thirsty […] The desert tightens around you like a noose.” Note that I’m not
making a distinction between metaphor and simile here, based on the as-
sumption that both figures involve “cross-domain mapping,” or the compar-
ison between different semantic domains; see Elena Semino and Gerard
Steen, “Metaphor in Literature,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and
Thought, ed. Raymond W. Gibbs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008), 232-46.

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