To Make You Hear, Make You Feel, Make You See: Representing Sense-Perceptions in Narrative Fiction

Sense-perception of the world around us is foundational to our making sense of that world. Sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell are not our only sources of information with which we can understand and interpret what’s going on, but as processes and products they are central to everything we know. In creative story-worlds, narrative literature can be expected to draw heavily on what is or was seen, heard, touched, and so on. And yet stylisticians do not seem to have focussed on sense-perception narration all that systematically. Stylisticians seem not to have devoted much attention to sense-perceptions in fictional narratives, so it may be useful to consider the topic here. A search of the stylistics journal Language and Literature yielded only one paper that had much to do with verbs of perception: Yanna B. Popova’s article of 2003, a study of the metaphoric mappings in Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume, where she notes that the novel exploits many mappings from smell to cognition, rather than the more common sight to cognition mapping. Popova argues that ordinarily we tend to see and know through our eyes, but in a world focussed on the alternative modality of smell, alternative ways of expression are understandably deployed. Taking just the traditional five senses as my topic of interest, how large a role do they play in representing story-worlds in contemporary literary narratives? More specifically, how overtly lexicalised, in the narration of successive situations in a novel or story, are the observable sights, sounds, smells, etc. of those situations? This chapter explores such questions in relation to a sample of contemporary fiction, and ponders some of the implications that arise.