Page 136 - Costellazioni 5

MARCO CARACCIOLO, A Walk Through Deep History

23
reasoning powers on his experience.” At one level, then, readers have
to make up for the limitations of Lok’s thinking through conceptual
inferences; but at another level they are asked to draw on the resources
of their own embodied minds to project themselves into Lok’s body.
This embodied resonance is an involuntary process, which applies to
all readers who read Golding’s prose with comprehension. For those
who are willing to go one step further and reflect, as I do here, on the
larger stakes of their embodied involvement, the gap between humans
and Neanderthals becomes bridgeable.
In part, this connection between readers and Lok is an effect of
the internally focalized depiction of the character’s inner experience;
for instance, Lok “flared his nostrils and immediately was rewarded
with a whole mixture of smells, for the mist from the fall magnified
any smell incredibly, as rain will deepen and distinguish the colours
of a field of flowers. There were the smells of the people too, individual
but each engaged to the smell of the muddy path where they had
24
been.” Clearly, Lok’s proficiency at picking out each of his group
members’ smell exceeds the sensory abilities of modern humans. As
the narrator puts it in a later passage, Lok “performed miracles of per-
ception in the cavern of his nose. The scent was the smallest possible
25
trace.” The “miracle” of Lok’s sense of smell is, of course, difficult to
grasp for readers. Yet consider the comparison with a field of flowers
whose colors are intensified by the rain: this simile builds on a sense
of (chromatic and not olfactory) differentiation readers are closely fa-
miliar with; it is what I called in the previous section a “phenomeno-
logical simile,” helping readers imagine the variety of smells that Lok
is able to identify. But because smell is, unlike vision, a proximal sen-
sory modality—in that its range is relatively limited—the simile
prompts us to construct a detailed embodied simulation centered on
Lok’s body.

23 Ian Gregor and Mark Kinkead-Weekes, William Golding: A Critical Study of
the Novels (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 48.
24 William Golding, The Inheritors (London: Faber and Faber, 1955), 15-16.
25 Ibid., 40.

135