Experiencing Mind Style: From Iconicity to Sensory Simulation

Abstract

In this chapter, I consider the way in which texts featuring a distinctive “mind style” (Fowler, Linguistics and The Novel. London: Methuen, 1977) can invite readers to simulate the felt, embodied or sensed experiences of fictional characters.

One explanation for how the experience of mind style comes about describes it as an enactment arising from iconicity. Lugea (Dementia Mind Styles in Contemporary Narrative Fiction. Language and Literature 31(2): 168–195, 2021) proposes that iconicity is an essential part of mind style’s definition, which invites readers to simulate the way of thinking represented in the text. However, the way in which readers “enact” this experience, or the nature of the “simulation” involved, requires further explanation. Starting with stylistic accounts of the emotive effects of iconicity, I draw on research into “mental simulation” in cognitive linguistics and psychology to explain the ways in which iconic linguistic choices bring about embodied effects during reading, or “an ‘enactment’ […] capable of coercing readers into the emotive world” (Burke, Iconicity and Literary Emotion. European Journal of English Studies 5(1): 31–46, 2001, 32).

To explore these effects, I analyse an extract from the novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride (A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. London: Faber & Faber, 2014) in light of reader reviews on Goodreads.com. This novel adopts a “stream of consciousness” narrative style (Steinberg, The Stream-of-Consciousness Technique in the Modern Novel. New York: Kennikat Press, 1979) to represent the experiences of its unnamed female narrator from infancy through to adulthood. Addressing themes of childhood cancer and sexual abuse, the novel’s experimental, fragmented style can be seen to invite readers to experience the psychological consequences of such trauma for themselves, through what one reader refers to as “traumatised syntax”. I argue that the uncomfortable experience of reading this novel is an example of the power of mind style to invite readers to share the felt experience of being someone else.