Sharing Sensory Knowledge: Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory

Abstract

Recent cognitive literary studies of fiction have begun to reveal patterns in the ways authors engage readers’ bodily and environmentally grounded imaginations. This study brings fiction writers’ craft knowledge into conversation with neuroscientific, cognitive, and literary studies of multimodal imagery and other embodied responses to fiction reading. Developed through years of literary experiments, craft knowledge involves using language not just to engage readers’ senses but to broaden their understandings of how senses work. A close analysis of Edwidge Danticat’s craft techniques in Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994) affirms some recent literary and scientific findings on how language can activate readers’ sensory and motor systems. Danticat’s cues to readers’ imaginations present a relational, environmentally engaged kind of sensorimotor experience that may widen scientific understandings of how sensory and motor systems collaboratively ground cognition. By helping diverse readers imagine a young Haitian American woman’s movements, sensations, and emotions, Danticat’s craft also does political work, depicting the inner lives of characters under-represented in widely published fiction.

1. Introduction

Through observations and experiments, fiction writers and scientists build distinct but equally valuable knowledge of human sensory and motor systems. Integrating this knowledge matters for two reasons: (1) Combined knowledge may strengthen our understanding of sensations and movements, and (2) recognizing the full range of human sensorimotor experience may have socio-political value.1 Creators of stories excel at helping readers imagine bodily impressions that readers have not experienced. Verbal description enables political representation, increasing the likelihood that experiences will be recognized as real (Scarry 1985, p. 12). Literary readings that engage scientific knowledge of human bodies need not exclude sociohistorical context (Caracciolo and Kukkonen 2021, p. 4). On the contrary, scientifically informed literary studies can reveal the work of culture by analyzing writers’ techniques for moving readers. This essay brings neuroscientific views of sensorimotor processing and mental imagery to a study of Edwidge Danticat’s craft techniques in Breath, Eyes, Memory, arguing that Danticat’s cues to readers’ imaginations can inspire scientific studies and carry out socio-political work.

Breath, Eyes, Memory tells the story of Sophie Caco, a young woman of color who at age twelve leaves rural Haiti to join her mother in Brooklyn. As a narrating protagonist, Sophie recounts her memories to take control of her life and honor the women who have enabled it. Born of a rape, Sophie struggles to live with her traumatized mother, Martine, who “tests” Sophie to ensure her virginity is intact. Through evocative writing, Danticat invites readers to imagine Sophie’s sensations and movements, and with them, her emotions and thoughts. Danticat’s craft lets readers worldwide consider how life might feel in a young, Black, female body, which, before the novel’s publication in 1994, not many publicized, widely available novels helped readers to do. Psychologist Maryanne Wolf has proposed that when people read, “the ability to see another’s thoughts makes us doubly aware—of the other’s consciousness and of our own” (Wolf 2007, p. 219). Psychologist David S. Miall, whose empirical studies offer some of the most compelling evidence for how stories engage readers, argues that in encounters with literature and other artforms, “the self is extended to accommodate what was previously an unknown way of relating to the world” (Miall 2006, p. 144). Encouraging a broad spectrum of readers to imagine Sophie’s embodied life has artistic, socio-political, and epistemological value because the call to imagine opens readers’ minds to new sensorimotor possibilities.

Literary scholars have observed that encouraging readers to feel with Sophie is central to Danticat’s artistic aims. As cognitive literary scholar, Emily T. Troscianko, contends, characters’ embodied experiences matter, and ignoring descriptions of characters’ sensations in favor of “higher” meanings results in unfounded readings (Troscianko 2014, p. 338). Danticat’s craft works to ground readers in her characters’ bodies, so that the abuse of working-class Black women occupies the foreground rather than the background (Francis 2004, p. 75). As literary scholar, Ifeona Fulani, observes, Danticat “engages the imagination of the reader through the dynamics of sympathetic response” (Fulani 2005, p. 77). If people can inhabit Sophie’s body imaginatively, the Haitian American girl becomes real. Unimaginable, unimagined, Sophie Caco does not exist. If Danticat is “recovering and reconstructing silenced histories”, she does so by crafting language that makes Haitian women’s traumas palpable (Sarthou 2010, p. 116).

Traumas cannot be recounted in steady, verbal narratives, but they can sometimes be conveyed through sensory descriptions. Danticat tells a story of abuse and survival by showing how violence affects her characters’ bodies (Glover 2015, p. 77). Psychologist Judith Herman notes that when people with little social power undergo trauma, the horrors they experience “take place outside the realm of socially validated reality” (Herman [1992] 1997, p. 8). Evocative descriptions of bodily sensations, even if fictional, can make previously unknown forms of abuse plausible and real to readers who have not experienced sexual violation or poverty.2 Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk argues that “we do not truly know ourselves unless we can feel and interpret our physical sensations” (Van der Kolk 2014, p. 274). By activating readers’ imaginations, finely crafted descriptions of fictional women’s sensory experiences may help readers understand their own bodies and minds as well as those of silenced, traumatized characters.

In some ways, Breath, Eyes, Memory presents a study of the senses from which readers across cultures and professions can learn. Analyzing how any novel engages readers’ senses might be informative, but Danticat’s critically acclaimed best-seller offers a story in whose evocativeness much lies at stake. Scientific investigators of sensory and motor systems may gain insight by examining how Danticat appeals to readers’ senses and how Sophie’s sensations diverge (if at all) from those of Western experimental participants on whose responses so much knowledge of sensory and motor systems is based.3 A novel does not investigate sensations as a controlled experiment would, but for this very reason, a skilled author’s cues to readers’ sensory and motor systems are worth exploring.4 Writers develop their craft through a lifetime of experiments, studying how words activate their own and other people’s sensorimotor imaginations.

In this essay, I analyze patterns in the sensory descriptions of Breath, Eyes, Memory with the goal of sharing scientists’ and fiction writers’ sensory knowledge, especially of the ways that sensory and motor systems interact. First, I review recent neuroscientific, cognitive, and psychological studies of sensorimotor imagery evoked by reading. I then engage with cognitive literary scholars’ studies of readers’ mental imagery and other bodily responses to literature. After introducing the concept of craft knowledge, I examine the craft techniques of Danticat’s evocative descriptions. Based on this current research and the implications of these techniques, I propose what may be gained by sharing scientific and craft knowledge. The central question of this essay, “What is Danticat doing to activate readers’ sensorimotor imaginations?” should not be asked only in literature classrooms, since its answers may have scientific and socio-political value.

2. Scientific and Literary Studies of Mental Imagery Evoked by Language

Human cognition is grounded in bodily experiences, shaped by the diverse perceptions and actions of eight billion people worldwide. As evidence for embodied cognition has grown, the concept of what “embodied” means has evolved. Psychologist Lawrence Barsalou prefers the term “grounded cognition” because “the body offers only one form of grounding” (Barsalou 2020, p. 2). Cognition enables action in an environment and reflects the possibilities and restrictions established by each person’s past environmental interactions. Philosopher Albert Newen and his colleagues characterize cognition not just as embodied but “embedded” (“dependent on extrabodily” environmental forces), “extended” (“partially constituted” by those external forces), and “enacted” (developed to enable environmental interactions) (Newen et al. 2018, p. 6). It makes more sense to think of cognition as situational: formed and activated in environmental and social contexts (Dutriaux et al. 2023, p. 2).

Like knowledge of cognition, the understanding of the sensory and motor systems that inform people of their surroundings has evolved quickly in the past two decades. The cultural concept of five distinct senses, transmitted to human brains via separate channels, is giving way to a model of interconnected sensorimotor modalities that communicate “early” (Sathian and Lacey 2007, p. 256), in some cases even as their receptors are responding to environmental stimuli.5 Philosopher Tim Bayne and psychologist Charles Spence, whose experiments have shown how every modality can influence taste, challenge the notion that a “taxonomy of the senses” should precede studies of “multisensory interactions” (Bayne and Spence 2015, p. 604). The sensory and motor systems that enable perception, action, and cognition work so closely together that even as they respond to new environmental signals, they are influencing each other’s responses.

The cerebral cortex that processes (analyzes, compares, and integrates) sensorimotor information lacks fixed boundaries defining modal turf.6 While certain regions specialize in processing information from particular modalities, cortical areas can also analyze “noncanonical” inputs. The visual cortex can process tactile and auditory information (Sathian 2012, pp. 729–30). In human central nervous systems, multimodal processing is so prevalent that “it is becoming hard to find an area beyond the first synapse or two in an ascending pathway that does not have at least some multisensory inputs” (Stein et al. 2020, p. 8). Neuroscientists Simon Lacey, Krishnankutty Sathian, and their colleagues argue that rather than mapping the brain by modality, it would be more productive to imagine a “metamodal brain” where modalities interact to enable vital functions (Lacey and Sathian 2020, p. 157). Spatial orientation, for example, requires close collaboration of the visual, auditory, somatosensory, and motor systems. As scientific studies shift their focus from modalities’ unique features to their interactions (Kern-Stähler and Robertson 2023, p. 7), it matters more than ever to study literary descriptions of sensorimotor experiences, which may spark testable hypotheses on how these interactions work.

One line of research investigates how these exchanges create multimodal images of experiences that can be activated either bottom-up (through new, relevant sensorimotor inputs), or top-down (through memory, imagination, or reading). Since the late 1970s, clinical, behavioral, and physiological evidence has accumulated that mental images, including images evoked by language, rely on some of the same brain regions that enable perceptions and actions (Barsalou 2020, p. 7; Starr 2010, pp. 281–82).7 The fact that people who suffer damage to their cerebral motor networks “invariably” have trouble using motor imagery supports the hypothesis that brains treat actions and imagined actions as “qualitatively equivalent” (Lawson and Lacey 2013, pp. 423–24). In behavioral experiments, psychologist Rolf A. Zwaan and his colleagues have found that hearing sentences about rotation affects the reaction time of participants asked to perform rotations, and that observing a rotating object affects the time needed to comprehend sentences about rotation. In both cases, a mismatch with the direction of rotation increases the reaction or comprehension time (Zwaan and Taylor 2006, pp. 4–5).8 Zwaan has hypothesized that comprehending language about actions involves “mentally simulating these actions” (Zwaan and Taylor 2006, p. 2); a simulation being the partial recreation of a neural pattern associated with a listener or reader’s own past action (Barsalou 2008, p. 618). In more recent work, Zwaan has emphasized how greatly context shapes people’s responses to language. Comprehension does not require simulation (Zwaan 2014, p. 230), and instructions on how to build furniture are more likely to evoke visuo-motor imagery than a philosophical discussion of goodness—although some readers will find the philosophy more evocative than the assembly directions.

Neuroimaging experiments have supplied some of the strongest evidence that mental imagery evoked by language involves sensorimotor activity. In an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) study, neuroscientist Friedemann Pulvermüller and his colleagues have shown that participants asked to read words about arm- or leg-related actions, such as “pick” or “kick”, experienced increased neural activity in primary motor cortical areas associated with the relevant body parts (Hauk et al. 2004, p. 303). Based on his group’s experiments, Pulvermüller has argued that “a common neural substrate is involved in the processing of actions and the meaning of action words” and that “understanding language means relating language to one’s own actions” (Pulvermüller 2005, pp. 578, 581).

Even metaphorical language that merely suggests an action can evoke sensorimotor activity. In an fMRI study, Simon Lacey, Krishnankutty Sathian, and their colleagues observed increased activity in areas of the somatosensory cortex known to process textures when their participants read sentences containing metaphors such as “she had a rough day” (Lacey et al. 2012, p. 418). This increase did not occur when their participants read literal control sentences of the same length, such as “she had a bad day” (Lacey et al. 2012, p. 419). In a more recent fMRI study, Lacey, Sathian, and their collaborators have found that participants who heard sentences with body part metaphors (involving the arm or leg) showed limb-specific activity in the extrastriate body area, a region associated with visual representations of limbs (Lacey et al. 2017, p. 1). Although, as Zwaan argues, context is all-important, sentences crafted with diverse aims can speak to listeners’ or readers’ imaginations.

These studies of imagery evoked by language help account for the experiences of fiction readers who feel as if they are sharing characters’ sensations. Readers’ responses to stories vary widely according to individual inclinations and literary context. Not all readers consciously simulate characters’ sensations, and they need not do so to appreciate stories artistically. In some cases, however, “readers enact [a] character’s consciousness … by simulating a hypothetical bodily perceptual experience on the basis of both their experiential background and the textual cues” (Caracciolo 2017, p. 104). Studies like Pulvermüller’s, which support an embodied model of language comprehension, suggest why fiction reading can evoke simulations, but reading stories constitutes a special case in the comprehension of language.

Reading an extensive text that builds an environment and develops characters differs from reading single-sentence or single-word prompts. As cognitive literary scholar Anežka Kuzmičová points out, linguistic cues in laboratory studies of mental imagery lack “the slightest resemblance to literary narrative” (Kuzmičová 2014, p. 276). The scientific prompts tend to focus on words’ meanings, overlooking the evocative possibilities of the words themselves, such as imagined sounds (Kuzmičová 2014, p. 277). Emily T. Troscianko has observed that “vivid”, a standard evaluative term on mental imagery questionnaires, has no single, clear meaning, referring sometimes to intensity, sometimes to detail (Troscianko 2013, pp. 190–91). In an empirical study of readers’ responses to a story by Franz Kafka, Troscianko found that participants’ mental imagery test scores contrasted markedly with their reported reading experiences (Troscianko 2013, p. 192). Cognitive literary scholar Renate Brosch agrees that cues crafted by fiction writers invite wide-ranging responses, urging readers “to imagine a wealth of promise without need for ‘concretization’” (Brosch 2017, p. 259). Rather than creating fixed visual images, readers’ minds may use all of their sensorimotor capacities and roam about, experimenting with emerging environments.9

When people read, semantic memory enables their perceptions of symbols to reactivate sensorimotor patterns in conformance with their past experiences and the cultural associations they have learned to make with words. Reading literary texts opens opportunities rather than communicating channeled information. In a skilled reader, “the brain doesn’t find just one simple meaning for a word; instead it stimulates a veritable trove of knowledge about that word and the many words related to it” (Wolf 2007, p. 9). To convey this principle of radial activation, neuroscientists who study language and sensorimotor processing use the “key” as a favorite metaphor. Neurologist V. S. Ramachandran and his colleagues reflect, “It’s as if a word is not merely a label but a golden key to a whole treasury of associations” (Ramachandran et al. 2020, p. 19). Investigators of mental imagery use the lock-and-key metaphor to describe how one mental image can trigger others. In the 1970s, psychologist Roger M. Shepard, who conducted some of the earliest laboratory studies of mental imagery, compared an object to a lock and an image to a key that can “reopen” the object for someone who has experienced it (Shepard 1978, p. 130). Since Shepard conducted his studies of mental rotation, experiments have revealed that mental images can trigger “cross-modal cortical recruitment”, activating images in other modalities (Sathian 2012, p. 729). Based on studies of cross-modal activation, Charles Spence and philosopher Ophelia Deroy have called for a rethinking of Shepard’s metaphor, given that “the so-called lock can be externally operated by multiple sensory keys” (Spence and Deroy 2013, p. 161). People experience life with all their working modalities, and unsurprisingly, the resulting sensorimotor patterns can be reactivated bottom-up or top-down, through any of the modalities involved.10

Although images evoked by reading rely on sensorimotor cortical regions, they differ from actual perceptions. Simulations activated by words and semantic memory diverge from patterns present during sensorimotor experiences not just because of what they lack but because of what they may contain. Neurologist Antonio Damasio has hypothesized that an “as if body loop” activated by brain regions outside the sensorimotor cortices can create “sensory road maps” of bodily changes in the absence of physical changes (Damasio 1999, p. 80). An “as if” network could explain how readers’ minds maintain representations of their own bodily sensations along with those of characters whose feelings they may be simulating (Damasio 1999, 10, p. 128).11 No matter how immersed in characters’ lives readers may feel, they know that they are not the characters and that they are imagining an absent world (Esrock 2018, pp. 191–92; Caracciolo 2017, p. 95). Cognitive literary scholar G. Gabrielle Starr suspects that experiencing multimodal imagery while reading brings pleasure “because it gives us access not to the ‘real’ complexity of experience but to certain powerfully connected aspects of the ways our minds internally represent experiences and objects” (Starr 2013, p. 91). Well-crafted stories offer insight into the wide variety of experiences enabled by human minds and bodies. As readers create absent worlds and imagine their inhabitants’ feelings, they are guided by authors (Caracciolo 2017, p. 102). Any simulations a reader may have result from craft choices a fiction writer has made.

Readers’ responses to stories need not be experienced consciously. Imagined sensations and actions constitute only some of the possible reactions writers’ words may cause. Cognitive literary scholar Ellen Esrock has proposed that readers may experience bodily changes, such as accelerated breathing, in response to stories without realizing how their bodies are “reinterpreting” writers’ descriptions (Esrock 2004, pp. 79–80). Instead of or in parallel to imitative simulations, readers may undergo “transomatizations”, visceral and motor responses that do not directly correspond to characters’ experiences (Esrock 2019, pp. 270–73). As a model for embodied responses to literature, Esrock’s transomatization hypothesis has several advantages: (1) it accounts for reactions to non-referential properties of words; (2) it opens the possibility of embodying entire scenes rather than individual characters’ sensations (Esrock 2019, p. 284); and (3) it helps account for individual readers’ vastly different responses to literature.

Any study of how fiction activates readers’ imaginations must respect how greatly individual reading experiences vary.12 In an interview study of individual differences in thought experiences, participants reported strikingly different responses to texts, from intense multimodal images to scaled maps weak in sensory detail (Otis 2015). Cultures guide the associations people make with words, but even within cultures, individual variations in cognition ensure that readers’ responses to stories diverge.13 In trying to learn how literary language stirs responses, one needs to consider “degrees and kinds of simulation” in readers (Caracciolo 2013, p. 247). The field of neuroaesthetics seeks to explain how human minds and bodies encountering artworks enable “varieties” of aesthetic experiences (Starr 2013, p. 30). The pleasure of writing, like that of reading, emerges partly from surprise. Developed experimentally, craft involves choosing words to create powerful effects without knowing what those effects will be.

Like laboratory studies of mental imagery, cognitive literary analyses have shifted from an early focus on visual images to examinations of multimodal imagery, especially those combining movement, vision, and touch. Rather than following scientific studies, cognitive literary scholars have taken the lead, conducting their own experiments, collaborating with laboratory researchers, and suggesting new lines of study.14 Elaine Scarry has argued that skilled fiction writers and poets give readers “a set of instructions for mental composition” (Scarry 1999, p. 244). Scarry has identified techniques writers use, such as describing a shadow moving over a solid surface, to help readers reproduce “the deep structure of perception” (Scarry 1999, p. 9). Comparing writers to musicians who know their instruments, Scarry has proposed that literary descriptions reveal writers’ knowledge of how human brains work (Scarry 1999, pp. 191, 244).

Whereas Scarry focused on visual mental imagery, with some attention to movement and touch, cognitive literary scholar G. Gabrielle Starr has emphasized the multimodality of most mental images. Starr has shown that in evocative writing, “even representations that seem primarily to call on a single sense … may engage broader sensory awareness or integration” (Starr 2014, p. 248). Starr’s analyses of poems have revealed the key role of motor references in coordinating multisensory cues (Starr 2013, pp. 80–82). Starr’s collaborative study with neuroscientists on responses to visual art has led to a key finding—intense, personal responses to visual artworks involve the Default Mode Network, an interconnected group of brain regions associated with reflection and the sense of self (Vessel et al. 2012, p. 9). Mental activity stirred by art can engage every modality, affecting one’s consciousness of who one is.

Recent cognitively informed studies of how literary works evoke images take multimodality as a given and focus on how cues to sensory and motor systems can suggest environmental interactions. Anežka Kuzmičová has argued that first describing a place exteroceptively (through a sense like vision, whose range exceeds the body), then showing a character interacting with that environment through movement and touch, can create a “genuine flash of sensorimotor unity” and a feeling of “presence” in a story (Kuzmičová 2012, pp. 23, 40). In a study of Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (one of whose characters is a chimpanzee), Ziqi Jin observes that “Fowler invites readers into the fictional characters’ bodies by invoking the multisensory imagery of touch and motion” (Jin 2024, p. 46). Elaine Auyoung has demonstrated how realist novels like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina engage readers by cuing them to imagine familiar movements, such as “picking up small, round objects” (Auyoung 2018, p. 24).15 In Arundhati Roy’s novel, The God of Small Things, Naomi Rokotnitz has identified recurring “image clusters”, which combine visual, somatosensory, and motor cues and work metaphorically as well as literally to build artistic meaning (Rokotnitz 2017, pp. 273–75). Mirja Lobnik has argued that multisensory, environmentally attuned descriptions like Roy’s and Danticat’s can convey the perspective of disempowered people, who experience environments bodily because they often work outdoors. Compelling depictions of their daily lives challenge oppressive schemes that divide the senses and privilege vision (Lobnik 2016, p. 117; Lobnik 2023, p. 479). Close analyses of craft, the skills fiction writers use to draw readers into stories, may open a realm of knowledge valuable to anyone who studies sensory and motor systems.

3. Craft Knowledge of How Fiction Engages Readers’ Senses

Class biases haunt assessments of craft knowledge, whose constitutive metaphor implies working with one’s hands.16 Sociologist Richard Sennett, who defines craftsmanship as “the skill of making things well”, argues that “all skills, even the most abstract, begin as bodily practices” (Sennett 2008, pp. 8, 10). Many realms of art involve physical work. Finnish architect Julani Pallasmaa, who grew up on a farm, asserts that “in creative work, both the artist and craftsman are directly engaged with their bodies” (Pallasmaa 2012, p. 13). In fiction writing in the digital age, craft is more metaphorical, though not entirely. Literary craft means the linguistic, kinesthetic, and emotional skill to tell a story that will activate readers’ imaginations and dwell in their memories, perhaps changing their perceptions of the world and their roles in it.

Craft knowledge emerges through guided observations and experiments as skilled writers show novices how authors they admire have made artistic decisions and solved problems. Craft instruction offers advice on things to do—how to fix stories that have collapsed and write more compelling ones in the future. In U. S. English departments, literary scholars and creative writers often teach their knowledge in parallel, and no clear line divides literary criticism from craft learning.17 Ziqi Jin, who is trying to “bridge the gap … between training in creative writing and in narratology”, finds that craft studies “aim to unpack what constitutes effective, meaningful story-telling and discern strategies that may stimulate the target audiences’ multidimensional participation” (Jin 2024, pp. 5, 9). Created by writers for writers, how-to craft knowledge has different aims than scholarship. It serves those trying to create fiction through imitation, experimentation, failure, self-scrutiny, and determined practice. As a source of insight into how language evokes imagery, craft knowledge has vast potential.

Novelist Charles Baxter has argued that “fiction involves a conversion: a conversion of information into experience” (Baxter 2008, p. 178). In engaging stories, linguistic cues invite readers to create imagined worlds that will vary according to the experiences readers have available to revive and blend. Craft requires choosing words and creating situations that will inspire responses, from intense multimodal images to the transomatizations Esrock describes. To maximize this engagement, many writers guide readers toward a mental state in which readers can imagine what characters are perceiving and doing before objects are identified and meaning is made. “Don’t tell readers the conclusion your character drew”, novelist Jim Grimsley advised me about my own writing. “Show them what your character saw that led her to that conclusion”.18 Through intense work, fiction writers combine words to describe events as they unfold so that diverse outcomes and interpretations can follow. Building knowledge on how to evoke transient imaginative states requires close study of how sensorimotor experiences work.

On an artistic level, some fiction writers know that mental imagery is multimodal. “There are no unisensory descriptions”, asserted one of my MFA instructors.19 In the workshop “Writing from the Senses”, novelist Janet Fitch taught that “the richest words evoke multiple senses” (Fitch 2020). In a collection of craft essays, fiction writer Flannery O’Connor advised:

The nature of fiction is in large measure determined by the nature of our perceptive apparatus. The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the senses with abstractions.

(O’Connor 1969, p. 67)

Fiction writing requires analyzing the structure of one’s own sensory imagination. O’Connor reports that a friend “learned from Flaubert that it takes at least three activated sensuous strokes to make an object real” (O’Connor 1969, p. 69). While readers vary in what activates their imaginations, the three-strokes idea is worth testing. Writers’ craft advice offers a rich source for experimental hypotheses. As writers apply each other’s craft guidance, the fiction they create may be a more valuable source still.

4. Evoking a World Through an Imagining Mind in Breath, Eyes, Memory

Not all fiction writers aim to make readers feel characters’ bodies moving through their environments. For Edwidge Danticat, engaging readers’ sensorimotor imaginations constitutes a key artistic goal. Even if readers have not been to Haiti or Brooklyn, they can sympathize with Sophie, imagining and sharing her emotions, because Danticat’s writing makes Sophie’s perceptions and actions so accessible.20 Sophie’s soul-jarring moves between Haiti and Brooklyn drive Danticat’s story. In describing these contrasting places, Danticat cues most of the readers’ modalities not just to make Sophie’s life palpable but to show how her environments shape her identity.

At age twelve, Sophie leaves Haiti for Brooklyn, where her mother Martine’s apartment brings disturbing sensations. After a night torn by Martine’s nightmares, Sophie recalls:

The sun stung my eyes as it came through the curtains. I slid my hand out of [my mother’s] to go to the bathroom. The grey linoleum felt surprisingly warm under my feet. I looked at my red eyes in the mirror while splashing cold water over my face.

(Danticat [1994] 2015, p. 46)

As Sophie’s body responds to this new space, Danticat emphasizes somatosensory sensations that do not figure in traditional sensory hierarchies—proprioception (awareness of bodily position and movement), interoception (deep bodily sensations, such as the need to urinate), and temperature contrasts (warm floor vs. cool water). Two touch sensations suggest changes in Sophie’s life—she is unused to the feel of her mother’s hand and linoleum under her bare feet. Martine’s Brooklyn apartment emerges as Sophie’s body senses its joylessness.

Years later, when Sophie returns to Haiti, once-familiar sensations strike her as assaults:

The sun, which was once god to my ancestors, slapped my face as though I had done something wrong. The fragrance of crushed mint leaves and stagnant pee alternated in the breeze. Body-raking konpa blared from the car radio as passengers hopped off the colorful van in which I had spent the last four hours. The sides of the van were painted in steaming reds, from cherry scarlet to crimson blood. Giraffes and lions were sketched over a terra cotta landscape, as though seeking a tint of green.

(p. 91)

In this blast of smells, sounds, movements, and sights, somatosensory modalities strike a keynote amplified by pain. The sun slaps Sophie, and music rakes her body. She imagines painted animals looking for relief, just as she is. Everything Sophie perceives has been influenced by the van driver’s sexual harassment of her throughout the ride. As in Martine’s apartment, Sophie’s sensations and emotions emerge together. One can hardly imagine one dimension of Sophie’s “feelings” without imagining them all.

Danticat favors particular combinations of modalities to help readers feel Sophie sensing her surroundings. Craft choices depend on literary context, and to open scenes, Danticat “zooms in”. Blending cues to long-range, exteroceptive modalities (such as vision or hearing) with appeals to intimate, interoceptive modalities (such as proprioception or touch) can summon mixed images of an environment and the inner life of a character experiencing it.21 Breath Eyes Memory opens with a recollection of twelve-year-old Sophie crushing a flower: “A flattened and drying daffodil was dangling off the little card that I had made my aunt Atie for Mother’s Day. I pressed my palm over the flower and squashed it against the plain beige cardboard” (p. 3).22 In these first two sentences, Sophie’s bodily sensations and the flower she is pressing emerge together. As in common movements, vision, touch, and somatosensory modalities collaborate to convey texture and pressure. Psychological “reminding” studies, which ask participants reading a story to mark passages that evoke personal memories and then to describe these memories, have indicated that literary reading “seems to connect particularly with knowledge that is personal in the sense that one is an agent … interacting with one’s environment” (Seilman and Larsen 1989, p. 174, qtd. in Miall 2006, p. 29). As Danticat’s novel opens, readers encounter Sophie’s active, sensing hand before they know her emotions, so that her mixed feelings grow from her action. Sophie created the card for Atie, who raised her but whom she must now leave to join her unknown mother. By cuing vision and somatosensory modalities together, Danticat lets readers imagine both the card and the way it “feels” to Sophie.

Combined cues to visual, motor, and somatosensory systems may encourage readers to experiment with fictional environments. Given the extensive connections among these systems, it may be impossible to write a description that speaks to the visual system alone. Even overtly visual references often encourage haptic exploration. In Breath, Eyes, Memory, Danticat crafts compound cues to help readers feel as well as see environments. When Sophie first enters Martine’s decrepit building, she notes that on the front door, “the thick dirty glass was covered with names written in graffiti bubbles” (p. 41). Sophie does not touch the glass, but as she narrates this memory, “thick”, “dirty”, and “bubbles” suggest she is imaginatively running her fingers over the panes. In readers, this haptic dimension of Sophie’s description may evoke the feel of a filthy surface. As Sophie imagines touch based on sight, Danticat cues readers to explore haptically along with her.

Danticat crafts multi-layered touch descriptions to tell a story of intergenerational trauma. Breath, Eyes, Memory encourages readers to imagine how the violation of a woman’s selfhood can endure in the body in which her mind is grounded.23 To help readers imagine life in Sophie’s body, Danticat spikes references to surface touch with cues to deeper somatosensory modalities. Recalling a hug from her grandmother, Sophie recounts, “Granmè Ifé wrapped her arms around my body. Her head came up to my chin, her mop of shrubby white hair tickling my lips” (p. 22). By focusing on the bodies’ positions, Danticat crafts multimodal cues. Readers may wonder how the embracing grandmother and granddaughter look visually, not just from Sophie’s perspective but from an external one (“Wait—how are they standing?”). While the tickling of Sophie’s lips stands out, the reference to wrapped arms suggests the warmth and proprioceptive feel of the hug. In this quick description of an embrace, Danticat leads readers into Sophie’s grounded mind, which is maturing by rethinking relationships with others.

The somatosensory descriptions of Breath, Eyes, Memory also lead readers to imagine some of the worst pain a person can feel. Conceived when eighteen-year-old Martine was raped, Sophie recounts the horrors her mother has told her:

He had a black bandanna over his face so she never saw anything but his hair, which was the color of eggplants. He kept pounding her until she was too stunned to make a sound. When he was done, he made her keep her face in the dirt, threatening to shoot her if she looked up.

(p. 138)

Danticat conveys Sophie’s close bond to Martine by showing how Sophie’s imagination works. The references to color, sound, and movement let readers perceive the scene through a distant camera, but “pounding”, “stunned”, and “face in the dirt” suggest that Sophie’s imagining mind is in her mother’s body—much as Martine’s mind is in Sophie’s.

Martine’s rape occurred in the context of “testing”, a violation driven by patriarchy but committed by women.24 To ensure that Martine’s hymen was intact and she was worthy of marriage, Martine’s mother (Granmè Ifé, who hugged Sophie) used to insert her finger into Martine’s vagina. After Martine was raped, the testing stopped. When eighteen-year-old Sophie becomes involved with her Brooklyn neighbor, Joseph, Martine begins to test her, reproducing the violations she once experienced. Sophie tells readers: “I closed my eyes upon the images of my mother slipping her hand under the sheets and poking her pinky at a void, hoping that it would go no further than the length of her fingernail” (p. 155). Danticat’s description of creeping movement tracks Sophie’s visual imagination of what she cannot see, but this seemingly visual view of abuse invites images of the bodily sensations on which it is based. Danticat guides readers to imagine along with Sophie, from an external viewpoint close to Martine’s. Following Danticat’s cue, any reader who uses her own pinky as a reference (“Let’s see—how far is that?”) is adopting the violator’s perspective. Danticat’s description helps readers imagine Sophie’s abuse interoceptively while showing her mind envisioning the world beyond her body.

To survive these violations, Sophie “doubles”, testing her body’s hold on her mind.25 After envisioning the abuse as Martine might see it, Sophie sends her mind beyond them both, imagining pleasant sensations such as “Tante Atie’s gentle voice blowing over a field of daffodils” (p. 155). To show Sophie’s will to regain control, Danticat calls on readers to imagine searing, interoceptive pain. With a pestle used to grind spices, Sophie ruptures her own hymen:

My flesh ripped apart as I pressed the pestle into it. I could see the blood slowly dripping onto the bed sheet. I took the pestle and the bloody sheet and stuffed them into a bag. It was gone, the veil that always held my mother’s finger back every time she tested me.

(p. 87)

Danticat describes a series of actions, each of which may evoke images—the sound of flesh tearing, the hardness of the pestle, the brightness of blood on a pale sheet. Sophie discards the tool that ripped her “veil”, but her mind returns to her mother’s finger. Through the pain Danticat works to convey, readers may sense that trauma persists in Sophie’s body.

The violation of testing disrupts the relationship between Sophie’s body and mind. Joseph proves to be a tolerant, loving partner, but Sophie “doubles” when they have sex, mentally fleeing intimacy that involves her abused parts. Both she and Martine suffer from social pressure to be thin, which contradicts core Haitian values (Loichot 2013, pp. 82–85). In Sophie, estrangement from the body that grounds her mind leads to bulimia.26 To guide readers who might have trouble imagining life in a bulimic body, Danticat works to evoke interoceptive images. To appreciate Sophie’s story, one senses, one needs to imagine on a gut level what it means to feel so disturbed by food, one would do anything to cancel its effects on one’s body. Sophie tells readers that after sex with Joseph, “I waited for him to fall asleep, then went to the kitchen. I ate every scrap of the dinner leftovers, then went to the bathroom, locked the door, and purged all the food out of my body” (p. 203). This matter-of-fact sequence of actions may not seem crafted to evoke sensations. Its power lies in its blunt rendering of what bulimia involves. By emphasizing actions, Danticat invites readers to follow Sophie’s movements right through to the painful purge. The word “body”, which ends the paragraph and chapter, leaves the keynote resonating in readers’ minds.

Danticat also encourages readers to share Martine’s bodily sensations, since Sophie’s bond with her mother shapes her identity. Martine, who has suffered an annihilating violation, does not survive the forces that abuse her body. She calls herself “a fat woman trying to pass for thin. A dark woman trying to pass for light” (p. 192). She feels insecure in her relationship with Marc, a Haitian American from a higher social class. When Martine becomes pregnant, she imagines the fetus as a reincarnation of her rapist and hears its cruel voice taunting her. “It bites at the inside of my stomach like a leech”, she tells Sophie (p. 194). Unable to bear the horror, Martine kills herself and her tormentor, stabbing her stomach seventeen times “with an old rusty knife” (p. 229). The details Danticat provides suggest the overwhelming pain that has settled in Martine’s core.

Sophie’s triumph over intergenerational pain also emerges through violent action. In Haiti, she runs from her mother’s funeral to attack stalks of cane:

I took off my shoes and began to beat a cane stalk. I pounded it until it began to lean over. I pushed over the cane stalk. It snapped back, striking my shoulder. I pulled at it, yanking it from the ground. My palm was bleeding.

(p. 238)

Martine’s rape occurred in a cane field,27 and Danticat uses the same verb, “pound”, to describe her violation and Sophie’s fight. Sophie’s brutal struggle with a living foe (which strikes back) appeals to readers’ imaginations in ways that no abstract description could. Danticat invites readers to hear the cracks, watch the stalk lean, and smell the dirt on its exposed roots. She has crafted the passage so that any sights, sounds, or smells readers imagine will likely blend with impressions of Sophie’s movements, pain, and pounding heart. “Ou libere?” asks Sophie’s grandmother. “Are you free?” (p. 238). Artistically, Breath, Eyes, Memory asks readers to feel the answer.

In its quiet moments, as in its climax, Danticat’s novel invites readers to share sensations. Sophie’s story describes not just suffering but the joy that feeds her will to live. Sophie loves glittering lights and delicious, sweet-smelling food. She describes her future husband, Joseph, in terms of the tastes she loves: “He was the color of ground coffee, with a cropped beard and a voice like molasses that turned to music when he held a saxophone to his lips” (65). In conveying Joseph’s look and sounds, Sophie reveals that she is imagining his touch and taste. Danticat shows their love for each other and their unborn daughter in one of the novel’s most evocative passages:

When I was pregnant, Joseph would play his saxophone for us, alone in the dark. He would put the horn very close to my stomach and blow in a soft whisper. Brigitte would come alive inside me, tickling like a feather under my skin. Joseph would press his ear against my stomach to hear her every move.

(p. 108)

Crafted to set sensations dancing from one’s surface to one’s core, this creative passage suggests how love feels to Sophie. As in Danticat’s depictions of Sophie’s worst moments, her sensations emerge from descriptions of actions. Sophie’s joy comes not just from her own pleasure but from her sense of what Brigitte may be feeling.

Danticat depicts Sophie as so attuned to other characters’ sensations, one can hardly say where hers end and theirs begin. As a watchful, narrating protagonist, Sophie describes expressions and movements that suggest what people near her feel. By keeping the novel grounded in actions, Danticat drives readers to imagine along with Sophie—who is also “reading”. Sophie recalls that days before she first left Haiti, “Tante Atie opened the front door and let the morning sun inside. She ran her fingers along the grilled iron as she looked up at the clear indigo sky” (p. 18). Evoking a life-like blend of movement, vision, and somatosensory sensations, Sophie’s description invites readers to enter Atie’s body and mind. Bodily, Sophie’s aunt opens the door and fingers its iron grill, which may feel cooler than the sunlight on her skin. Rooted in physical interactions, Danticat’s description also does metaphoric and emotional work. In days, Atie will lose the child she has raised for twelve years and will stay trapped in a patriarchal culture that has denied her an education, fulfilling work, and a supportive relationship. While Sophie will rise into the sky toward which Atie looks, the iron Atie rubs suggests the prison where she will remain. As an adult narrator recreating her twelve-year-old mind, Sophie leads readers to imagine Atie’s pain by showing them how young Sophie sensed it. Few literary features stimulate the imagination more than a character imagining another’s inner life.

Sophie observes her mother’s and daughter’s movements so closely, she invites readers to imagine life in their minds and bodies as well as hers. Sophie’s sensorimotor attunement to her female relatives serves the novel by showing how her sense of self emerges through family bonds. Images of her mother’s nightmares haunt Sophie long after she has left Martine’s home:

I had seen her curled up in a ball in the middle of the night, sweating and shaking as she hollered for the images of the past to leave her alone. Sometimes the fright woke her up, but most of the time, I had to shake her awake before she bit her finger off, ripped her nightgown, or threw herself out of a window.

(pp. 195–96)

Sophie’s description of these night horrors starts with vision but comes alive through movement, sound, and somatosensory modalities. Sophie does not just watch; she intervenes, so that the wetness, thrashing, and biting come to be grounded in her own bodily experiences. In many senses, Martine’s nightmares are also Sophie’s (Rossi 2005–2006, p. 210).

Sophie’s keen awareness of Brigitte’s movements drives the novel in a different way. Sophie notices her child’s hunger, her pleasure and rage, her habit of sucking her fingers and toes. As in Sophie’s descriptions of Martine, exteroceptive impressions turn interoceptive through real or imagined body contact. When Sophie hands Brigitte to Atie, she recalls that her daughter “shrieked loudly, her face tied up in tear-soaked knots” (p. 114). In cuing readers to hear the scream, Danticat invites them to feel the wet, contorted face, since the scream’s imagined quality depends on inferences of the baby’s inner state. Physically attuned to her daughter’s feelings, Sophie may be mentally stroking Brigitte’s face. This sensorimotor awareness works both ways, as can be seen when Sophie confronts Martine and “Brigitte’s body tightened, as though she could sense the tension in mine” (p. 160). Sophie narrates and matures by sharing sensations with the people around her.

Danticat crafts descriptions so that readers can follow Sophie’s imagining mind not just into bodies she knows but those of everyone she encounters. In Haiti, she observes people working and considers how their labor affects their bodies. Near a cane field, she watches boys walk past who are “bare-chested and soaked with sweat, with no protection from the sun except old straw hats” (p. 21). While riding to the airport, she notes that an “old hunchback lowered her body onto a sack of charcoal to sleep, as though it were a feather mattress” (p. 179). Hard as Sophie’s life is, she seems open to the sensations of people whose experiences are more grueling. Readers may join her as she wonders what kind of life would make a bag of charcoal feel like a soft bed. Even in the unfamiliar environment of Brooklyn, Sophie seems curious about the inner lives at which bodies hint. On the subway, she studies “listless faces, people clutching the straps, hanging on” (p. 75). She seems to sense how the straps feel in their gripping hands, which show a determination of which their faces reveal little. By creating a character who imagines everyone’s sensations, Danticat conveys the communal nature of Sophie’s story.

Danticat crafts Breath, Eyes, Memory so that imagining one young woman’s sensorimotor experiences opens the way to imagining many people’s inner lives. Addressing Sophie in an Afterword written five years after the novel’s publication, Danticat tells her character, “… your body is now being asked to represent a larger space than your flesh” (p. 244). Responding to harsh criticism that her novel negatively depicted Haitian culture (Glover 2015, pp. 73–74), Danticat explains to Sophie, “you are being asked … to represent every girl child, every woman from this land”, a prospect Danticat never intended (p. 244). Readers often falsely presume that characters from cultures under-represented in best-selling fiction enact a whole population’s experiences. Danticat assures Sophie that the story she has written “is yours, and only yours” (p. 244). But it is not—not because Sophie is a “typical” Haitian American woman but because Danticat depicts Sophie’s emerging identity as a storyteller as grounded in her family’s experiences of their environment.28 The self-concept Sophie builds supports the Caribbean notion that “persons cannot be whole alone” (Berry 1977, p. 103, qtd. in Loichot 2013, p. 82).

Sophie’s story is hers, but she does not mature into a detached, bounded individual. By having Sophie channel other people’s sensations, Danticat shows Sophie’s identity developing through her bonds to others.29 Sophie’s friends and family describe their affinity through bodily metaphors. Atie’s friend Louise compares herself and Atie to “lips and tongue … two fingers on the same hand. Two eyes on the same head” (p. 95). Admiring Brigitte, Sophie’s grandmother asks, “Isn’t it a miracle that we can visit with all our kin, simply by looking into this face?” (p. 103). In Granmè Ifé’s eyes, her great-granddaughter embodies the entire family. The freedom Sophie achieves at the novel’s climax thrives on family bonds rather than being restricted by them. “I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one”, Sophie tells readers, “a place from which you carry your past like the hair on your head” (p. 239). Danticat’s grounded simile shows the unity of interoceptive breath, exteroceptive vision, and cognition that emerges as a breathing, seeing body confronts the world. By narrating through a character attuned to other people’s sensations, Danticat opens new perspectives on sensorimotor experiences.

5. The Value of Craft Knowledge for Scientific Research

To understand sensory and motor systems experienced differently across individuals and cultures, researchers need to survey fields that build knowledge in divergent ways.30 As more fiction depicting disempowered, non-Western people’s inner lives is widely published, fictional accounts may reveal varieties of sensorimotor experiences that contrast with those of “WEIRD” (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) experimental participants (Henrich et al. 2010, p. 61). Analysis of literary techniques cannot replace controlled studies, but observations drawn from literature can complement and inform laboratory research, suggesting future experiments.

Craft knowledge may prove transformative because calls to imagine crafted by fiction writers differ from most experimental prompts (Kuzmičová 2014, p. 276; Brosch 2017, p. 258). Literary cues form parts of patterns designed to help readers construct fictional worlds, and these cues may engage sensorimotor systems differently than single sentences or words. When psychologists Moniek M. Kuijpers and David S. Miall asked experimental participants to mark any passages in a story that evoked bodily sensations, their readers responded most strongly to writing with “foregrounding”, unusual language that calls attention to itself (Miall 2015, p. 24). Psycholinguist Roel M. Willems believes that experimenters who design prompts to study words’ evocative powers show their own “craftsmanship”, but in lived experience, people rarely encounter phrases out of context (Willems 2013, p. 218). Literature offers long-term “guided imagining” designed to evoke diverse responses to rich, ever-changing contexts (Burke and Troscianko 2013, p. 143).

To a large degree, literary craft consists of learning how to guide imagining minds. Elaine Scarry argues that a seasoned writer “does not decide what motions he wants and then struggles in vain to make the mind carry them out. He has figured out what motions we can compose and shapes the narrative around those moveable pictures” (Scarry 1999, p. 137). Based on years of experimentation, skilled writers learn how minds may respond to language. With the caveat that no two human minds think alike, fiction writers offer “a transcript of how the brain works because they look at the images turning up in their own minds with such concentration and dedication” (Scarry 1999, p. 244). Scientists investigating sensorimotor systems can learn from the cues writers design.

Fiction can inspire profound, abstract thought, but to stir cognition that is itself grounded, stories need to suggest sensorimotor interactions with environments. O’Connor’s advice to engage readers’ senses affirms literary scholars’ observations that “writing can forcefully return us to the body” (Hillman and Maude 2015, p. 4). Evocative fiction enthralls readers not just because it recalls familiar experiences but because it highlights aspects of sensorimotor experiences that readers recognize but may have overlooked (Kuzmičová 2012, p. 32). Many people read to explore the unfamiliar, to imagine life in bodies and environments different from their own. Craft thus requires using language to evoke sensations that readers have not experienced, to show them sensorimotor possibilities they had not known existed. From fiction, as from any well-crafted art, readers can learn how to use their senses to perceive the world in new ways.31

From a craft perspective, writing involves finding language that will draw readers’ attention to perception’s mechanisms. The intense focus demanded by craft may reveal aspects of sensorimotor experience that investigative fields have not yet observed, articulated, or explained (Kern-Stähler and Robertson 2023, p. 27). Critic Terence Cave proposes that literature offers “a reservoir of potential insights into the embodied interconnectivity of cognitive processes” (Cave 2017, p. 235). Descriptions designed to engage readers, such as Danticat’s blended appeals to visual, motor, and somatosensory modalities, may suggest ways that sensory and motor systems collaborate.

Analyzing evocative fiction may reveal patterns in how stimuli to one modality can cross-modally engage others. Current studies indicate that cross-modal recruitment is “asymmetrical”: participants who explore an object haptically without seeing it often visualize its shape, for instance, while participants who see an object without touching it less often imagine how it feels (Spence and Deroy 2013, p. 172). Collaboratively, with languages and cultures in mind, researchers might examine fictional descriptions to see which combinations of modalities are referenced with modality-specific cues, and which are implied without direct references, as though anticipating cross-modal responses. Investigators might compare these findings to laboratory observations of which modalities most often recruit which. Danticat’s visual descriptions may so often invite haptic exploration not just because imagining environmental interaction engages readers but because readers need guidance to infer touch from sight. Appreciating the craft of Breath, Eyes, Memory matters socially and scientifically because skilled descriptions of under-represented people’s inner lives may broaden understandings of how human perception works.

6. Conclusions

To immerse readers in Breath, Eyes, Memory, Danticat crafts patterns likely to engage familiar combinations of modalities. She shows environments stimulating many senses at once and “zooms in”, blending sensations from exteroceptive and interoceptive modalities so that readers can simultaneously experience a place and the character perceiving it. In interactions that emphasize touch, Danticat evokes sensations that run from a character’s surface to her core, inviting readers to imagine life in her body. Danticat crafts visual descriptions to encourage haptic exploration, prompting readers to join a character who is mentally feeling what she sees. Consistently, Danticat depicts her protagonist, Sophie, imagining the sensations of others, and she cues the reader to do the same. Breath, Eyes, Memory depicts a life in which an identity grounded in bodily experiences emerges through relationships with people and environments. Rather than “belonging” to one individual, sensations and emotions are shared.32

Danticat’s craft techniques, developed to make the inner life of a young, working, Black woman imaginable, deserve attention because for more privileged readers, imagining sensorimotor experiences different from their own may have far-reaching consequences. Researchers will not understand the full capacities of human sensory and motor systems without considering everyone’s sensorimotor life, and so far, only a narrow cross-section of humanity has participated in laboratory experiments. Literature can serve as a resource by affirming or challenging observed sensorimotor patterns and calling attention to unfamiliar trends and untested possibilities. Writers developing their craft may also benefit from learning that Danticat’s techniques for engaging readers resonate with some current scientific and literary findings on how visual, motor, and somatosensory systems collaborate. Socio-politically, making Sophie’s bodily life imaginable may validate what for many readers presents an unfamiliar but compelling way of being. In conversations catalyzed by powerful fiction, comparing scientific and craft knowledge of sensorimotor systems may yield consequential insights.