What Is Embodied Language?
Some of my favorite works of fiction make use of embodied language. By embodied, I mean that they include sensory language that is so visceral, so palpable that I can feel the sun cutting through a swamp’s humidity to sear the back of my own neck (I see you, On Sundays She Picked Flowers). I can feel the lurgy sensation of falling in love.
Embodied language, of course, benefits genres that converse with bodily experience—horror and romance come to mind—but the narrative style can also do magical things to even the most interior or navel-gazing of genres. It takes the specific feeling a character is experiencing and converts it not only to a general emotion or experience the audience can intellectually understand (e.g., grief, fear) but also to a specific sensation the audience can feel for themselves (e.g., the stone-in-the-gut, shallow-breathing-only churning of grief).
Perhaps this magic comes from the very physicality of the language used. Reading is largely a disembodied experience, so when we are reminded out of the blue that we have bodies—by the thing doing our disembodying, no less—the result makes our immersion in the work all the stronger. I think of this incredible passage from House of Leaves. It makes the act suddenly physical.
What Is Embodied Metaphor?
When embodied language is bound up in metaphor or simile, it can become startling and, by virtue of this startling, an even more delicious experience. By virtue of their definitions, comparing like to like (simile) or saying that like is like (metaphor), these literary devices are self-selecting with an almost semiotic significance. By choosing to bring certain aspects of an object or situation into a nuanced light while eschewing other bits of information about it, they empower your narrator to steer your audience’s focus by impacting tone, mood, foreshadowing, and so on.
Consider the following line from Dennis Lehane’s thriller, Shutter Island: “[T]hey reached a paved road that crossed their path like a grin.” Without that simile, it would be challenging to evoke the same level of dread in your reader. You might have to go on at length, offering up a few breathless sentences describing the pall that hangs over an isolated mental institution. Instead, this unexpectedly embodied simile startles, for what road looks like a grin but a curved one, and what grin has those curves besides a gash of a smile?
When used in an unexpected way like this (i.e., “like a grin”), that unexpected quality unsettles, unbalances, and therefore lands something either otherworldly or perhaps even darkling right in the reader’s lap.
The Writing Challenge.
Ready to give this engaging narrative technique a go? Let’s do it! Write as many embodied metaphors or similes as you can think of, with the body itself being described or the description itself involving a body. For instance, “Her body was a half-drawn knife,” (The Priory of the Orange Tree) or the title of My Heart Is a Chainsaw. Keep this list handy the next time you’re writing a scene and want to build mood.
Here are a few examples I scribbled out the first time this exercise occurred to me:
Their eyes were sparrows on the wing.
The pen scritched across the notebook, nail thin.
She found she did not care for the rain. It sluiced the gutters into rancid, edematous things that should have been lanced.
Want More Prompts Like This One?
There are some great prompt newsletters out there; Reedsy’s springs to mind.
I would love, however, to do a series in which I explain the mechanics of a literary device or narrative structure, then provide a writing challenge related to it. If that’s of interest to you, leave your interest in the form below.