How do we become immersed in stories, and what enables us to inhabit the bodies of characters who may differ greatly from ourselves? According to 4E (embodied, enactive, embedded, extended) narratology—which pays particular attention to the bodily dimension of reading and imagination—meaning arises primarily through a form of embodied resonance rather than through abstract interpretation. We understand the sensory, bodily, and emotional experiences of characters by imaginatively placing ourselves in their position. To do so, we combine our own memories of similar experiences with cues provided by the text. In this way, we are able to fill narrative gaps in our own creative ways. For instance, when we read about a character who is running, we may imagine the sensation of the ground beneath their feet or the quickening of their breath, because we have experienced something similar ourselves. What becomes especially intriguing, however, is to explore how literature can also evoke experiences that are unfamiliar to its readers. What strategies can narratives employ to convey, for example, animal or supernatural modes of experiencing the world?
Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny lend themselves particularly well to investigating such questions. Both novels feature non-human narrators who share their experiences with the reader. In Grief, Crow challenges readers to imagine how a crow might perceive the world. Lanny’s Dead Papa Toothwort, in turn, invites a mode of imagination in which seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting take precedence over interpretation. To evoke such unusual bodily movements and sensory impressions, Porter mobilizes both language and material form (layout, typography, images, and so on). In doing so, his work demonstrates that readers rely not only on linguistic but also on material aspects of narrative in the process of meaning-making.
While especially well-equipped to study engagements between embodied readers and narrative texts, 4E narratology often overlooks the materiality of that narrative. However, the ways in which Grief and Lanny invite readers to imagine unfamiliar bodies, movements and perception can only be fully grasped by simultaneously accounting for textual and non-textual devices. Through close readings of Max Porter’s work, I posit that readers make sense of narratives through sensory imagination, combining experiential traces with cues in various modalities to enact perceptual experiences.
In this reading group session, we will explore how these novels combine textual and material modalities to convey unfamiliar experiences. We will examine some selected excerpts, which will be shared alongside an article draft (in English) for the Cahier voor Literatuurwetenschappen.
Nils Van den Keybus studied History at the University of Antwerp and Literature at KU Leuven. His interdisciplinary research connects enactivist philosophy, narratology, materialism and multimodality studies, focusing in particular on the interplay between perception, memory, and imagination during the reading process. He currently works as an editor at Larcier-Intersentia in Antwerp.
If you wish to participate in this Reading Group, and get access to the article draft, please contact Stefka G. Eriksen.