Page 142 - Costellazioni 5

MARCO CARACCIOLO, A Walk Through Deep History

just a human practice, but a practice geared towards the spatio-tem-
39
poral parameters of human societies. Further, narrative accounts of
human evolution are caught up with humanity’s uneasy efforts to de-
fine its position vis-à-vis the material world, including nonhuman an-
imals and the Homo species that preceded us. In this article, I have ar-
gued that embodiment is a crucial resource for narrative as it tries to
overcome these hurdles: Salopek’s narrative project foregrounds bod-
ily movement as a stand-in for human migration over the eons of evo-
lution, while Golding’s novel confronts us with the cognitive divide
between Neanderthals and our ancestors in embodied terms. In both
cases, the body puts readers in touch with the deep history of our
species, potentially prompting them to revisit and reappraise human-
ity’s embedding in the material world. This invitation becomes par-
ticularly salient in Golding’s novel, in which somatic empathy for a
Neanderthal destabilizes notions of Homo sapiens superiority and
mastery, instead revealing our shared embodied (and biological) ‘in-
heritance,’ which binds us to other living creatures and to the material
environment in which we evolved.
Crucial to this destabilizing action is narrative’s capacity to en-
gage readers through embodied strategies. Building on research in the
mind sciences, I have argued that embodied simulation—the reenact-
ment of verbally described actions—is an important component of
narrative comprehension. However, while embodied simulations tend
to be pervasive and unconscious in everyday language, literary nar-
rative has the power to evoke simulations that are experientially tex-
tured and impactful. Various stylistic strategies, such as synesthetic
metaphor or the foregrounding of bodily movement, can contribute
to the thickening of embodied simulations. Certainly, more work—
both empirical and conceptual—is needed to deepen our understand-
ing of how literary language can resonate in readers’ bodies. But, as I

39 Monika Fludernik, Towards a “Natural” Narratology (London: Routledge,
1996), 13. On evolution’s resistance to narrativization, see also H. Porter Ab-
bo , “Unnarratable Knowledge: The Difficulty of Understanding Evolution
by Natural Selection,” in Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, ed. David
Herman (Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2003), 143-62.

141