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MARCO CARACCIOLO, A Walk Through Deep History

A related strategy that also serves to thicken readers’ embodied
simulations is synesthetic metaphor. For instance, when Lok hears a
group of Homo sapiens speaking, he experiences sound in terms of
visual pa ern: “The sounds made a picture in his head of interlacing
shapes, thin, and complex, voluble and silly, not like the long curve
of a hawk’s cry, but tangled like line weed on the beach after a storm,
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muddled as water.” The metaphorical association emphasizes the in-
comprehensibility of the language of Homo sapiens, whose qualities
strike Lok as novel and perplexing (“tangled” and “muddled”). At the
same time, the synesthetic connection points to Lok’s capacity to ap-
preciate the interrelatedness of sensory input, before concepts and lan-
guage break it down into separate sensory streams. As Lawrence
Marks puts it in an article on the physiological basis of synesthesia,
“there are natural correspondences between experiences in different
sensory modalities, and […] these seem to be nothing less than ‘hard
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wired.’” Synesthetic metaphor as a linguistic device contributes to
the sense that the narrator is recording Lok’s experience at a raw, un-
mediated level; readers are thus asked to construct simulations that
mirror the interconnectedness of sensory stimuli.
In two intriguing passages, the narrator depicts Lok’s body as
capable of sensory ‘thinking’ that does not require full consciousness.
Here the embodied thought process is conveyed not through explicit
verbal language, but through a mere, and yet highly suggestive, ques-
tion mark: “There came a noise from the foot of the fall, a noise that
the thunder robbed of echo and resonance, the form of a noise. Lok’s
ears twitched in the moonlight so that the frost that lay along their
upper edges shivered. Lok’s ears spoke to Lok. ‘?’ But Lok was

26 Ibid., 40. For more on synesthesia and embodiment, see Cristina Cacciari,
“Crossing the Senses in Metaphorical Language,” in The Cambridge Handbook
of Metaphor and Thought, ed. Raymond W. Gibbs (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2008), 425-43.
27 Lawrence E. Marks, “On Perceptual Metaphors,” Metaphor & Symbolic Ac-
tivity 11, no. 1 (1996): 61.

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