Keywords

1 Introduction

Raw, raw. Unflinching. Heart-wrenching, gut-wrenching, visceral. It is hard, hard to read, hard to understand and harder to bear. (R6, Goodreads)

Her very sophisticated stream of consciousness style, her fragmented, traumatised syntax, the obscure fog followed by the most piercing clarity, consumed every part of me. Her narrative found clever ways to suffocate and also shatter me, it ached and pained me… (R17, Goodreads)

…if you can deal with it, I do think the text rewards you. With a haunting and visceral reading experience. With beautiful, strangely rhythmic prose. The reading of it is uncomfortable, which, again makes me understand how polarizing it seems to be. The book had me very literally squirming in my seat at times, like a graphic film might. (R26, Goodreads)

The above comments, taken from the popular book review website Goodreads (2023), describe three readers’ experiences of the coming-of-age novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride (2014). While the readers on this site differ greatly in how they rate this very polarizing novel, the majority of them agree that it is a difficult, uncomfortable or painful read. Indeed, a sample of the 50 “most popular”Footnote 1 reviews in English on Goodreads reveals the word difficult is used to describe the reading experience in 10 reviews, with uncomfortable (4 reviews), painful (4 reviews), gut-wrenching (3 reviews) and visceral (6 reviews) recurring in the reviews more broadly. This discomfort can be seen to arise from the invitation to vicariously experience the trauma of its first-person narrator. Addressing themes including childhood cancer and sexual abuse, the novel adopts an experimental “stream of consciousness” narrative style (Steinberg 1979), which attempts to “give a direct quotation of the mind” (Chatman 1978, 187), using techniques such as “free direct thought” (Leech and Short 2007, 275). The “traumatised syntax” (see R17 above) of the narrator’s discourse can be seen to immerse readers in the psychological and physical consequences of her trauma as part of the reading experience. Identifying several linguistic patterns that contribute to this narrative voice, I argue that this novel can be considered an example of “mind style” (Fowler 1977). Further, I consider the impact of this style on readers, as exemplified by the above reader responses. This text, I argue, illustrates the power of mind style more broadly to allow us to enact the felt, bodily experience of being someone else.

In its original definition by Fowler, mind style was defined as an “impression” arising during reading:

Cumulatively, consistent structural options, agreeing in cutting the presented world to one pattern or another, give rise to an impression of a world-view. (1977, 76)

Through investigation of the linguistic choices that contribute to this effect, mind style is now understood in stylistics to be an important technique for the representation of idiosyncratic character, narrator or (less commonly) author minds; essentially “any distinctive linguistic representation of an individual mental self” (Fowler 1977, 103). As well as individual minds, mind styles have been identified as representative of shared cognitive habits or traits, which may be “common to people who have the same cognitive characteristics (for example as a result of a similar mental illness or of a shared stage of cognitive development)” (Semino 2002, 97). These include, to give a handful of recent examples, mind styles of autism (Semino 2014), depression (Demjén 2015) and dementia (Lugea 2021), in which linguistic patterns suggestive of a specific kind of mind or mental condition are identified across multiple characters and texts.

One aspect of mind style which stylistic accounts have yet to fully explore is the embodied, emotional and aesthetic effects of this linguistic technique. This can be contextualized in relation to wider developments in (cognitive) stylistics, which in recent decades has turned its attention to aspects of reader experience beyond the representation and interpretation of meaning (e.g. Miall 2014; Miall and Kuiken 2002; Sanford and Emmott 2012; Stockwell 2009; Whiteley 2011). As exemplified by reader responses like those above, other felt experiences during reading are topics that readers often talk about when describing their responses to texts. Moving in a parallel direction, studies of mind style have begun to suggest the significance of mind style for creating feelings such as sympathy and empathy for fictional characters, as well as its interaction with our moral judgement of them (Gregoriou 2002, 6; Nuttall 2018, 29; Semino 2014, 155). Nuttall (2018) argues that by examining what goes on in the mind of a reader when processing a mind style, we can redefine it in a way that clarifies the “impression” that Fowler first described, in cognitive, experiential terms.

Stream of consciousness narratives represent an interesting case for mind style since they attempt to represent “the whole of consciousness” (Chatman 1978, 187) or the “unending flow of sensations, thoughts, memories, associations, and reflections; the exact content of the mind” (Holman et al. 1960, 471–472). Stream of consciousness narratives thus broaden our understanding of “mind” to include sensory, associative aspects, and attempt to represent such non-linear and non-verbal experiences using the fundamentally linear medium of language (see also Rundquist 2020). The way in which such narratives communicate these aspects of experience often poses challenges to our typical processes of discourse comprehension and to the mental representations we form as readers. Stream of consciousness narratives therefore provide an interesting case in which to consider the way we experience mind style.

The difference between talking about mind styles as representations and mind styles as experiences is similar to what Dancygier (2014) describes in her cognitive stylistic account of imagery:

The central idea is that the reader’s mind can experience (as opposed to understand) things through the mental and emotional arousal only, not through intellectually absorbing the situation described. I argue that the contrast we should be talking about is that between “experience” and “description”—the effect of imagery, rather than what it depicts. (Dancygier 2014, 214)

When applying this same argument to mind style, this doesn’t of course mean that what is being depicted—the kind of mind being represented—is not important, and neither does it mean that we don’t intellectually absorb this representation as part of our interpretation of the text. What it means is that there is more going on besides this, which we may be less consciously aware of, and these other aspects of processing are also important (see also Caracciolo 2014Footnote 2). Here, I argue that it is the fact that we are invited to experience, or enact, mind styles ourselves during reading, using our own minds and senses, that gives them their affective, embodied impact.

2 Mind Style and Iconicity

One account of the experience of mind style describes it as “a felt ‘enactment’ of cognitive habits as part of readers’ conceptualization of the fictional world” (Nuttall 2018, 179; see also Lugea 2021). Importantly, in stylistic terms, this enactment is understood as arising from the iconic force of the linguistic patterns which contribute to mind style. Before examining what “enactment” means more closely, it is worth briefly defining iconicity and its relevance to mind style.

Linguistic iconicity describes a similarity between linguistic forms, or signs, and the objects or concepts they represent. Two main types of iconicity differ in terms of the nature of this similarity (Nänny and Fischer 1999, xxi). First, “imagic iconicity”, describes the relatively rare observation of a direct, perceivable similarity between a sign and its referent, for example, in instances of onomatopoeia, where the phonic qualities of a linguistic form mimic the thing referred to. Second, “diagrammatic iconicity” describes a more pervasive form of iconicity in language, where the similarity between signs and referents is indirect and pertains to the relations between them. Haiman (1985, 1) characterized the “structural” form of diagrammatic iconicity like so: “[L]inguistic forms are frequently the way they are because, like diagrams, they resemble the conceptual structures they are used to convey.”Footnote 3 This kind of iconicity concerns the syntactic or grammatical relations between signs. Here it is the abstract relationship between linguistic forms, for example, in the ordering of words within a clause, or the clauses within a sentence, that approximates the relationship between their referents. Following Haiman, three types of structural relation can be distinguished:

Iconic sequencing—where the ordering of linguistic forms mimics the chronological or experiential order of their referents.

Iconic proximity—where the proximity or distance of linguistic forms mimics the proximity or associated-ness of their semantic referents.

Iconic quantity—where the number, length and complexity of the linguistic form mimics the size, duration or complexity of the referent. (Paraphrased from Haiman 1980; see also Fischer 2014)

As argued by Ungerer and Schmid (2006, 300–310), a cognitive linguistic framing of these structural relations makes for a plausible understanding of this linguistic phenomenon. This approach emphasizes what was in fact already suggested by Haiman’s original explanation: that we are not comparing forms and grammatical structures with real-world objects and events, but are instead always comparing them with our own “conceptual structures” or subjective cognitive models of the real world. This clarifies one sticking point faced in earlier discussions of iconicity where the idea of correspondences of varying directness between sign and signifier suggested the possibility of linking linguistic forms to an objective reality. As Jeffries points out, “[t]he whole of linguistic signification, from the arbitrary to the iconic, is always a question of point of view” (2010, 98; see also Leech and Short 2007, 195 on the subjectivity of iconic interpretation).

The cognitive linguistic development in our understanding of iconicity carries significance for our interpretation of its role in literary texts, including its contribution to mind styles. As has been noted in discussions of iconic sequencing, linguistic forms can either mimic the nature of events or objects in the world around us (the “natural order” Osgood 1980), or the subjective way in which those same referents are experienced by an individual consciousness (the “salient order”, Osgood 1980). Applying these ideas to fiction, Leech and Short (2007[1981], 189–190) distinguished between “chronological sequencing”, where textual order “imitates the purported sequence of events in the fictional world”, and “psychological sequencing” where “textual order reflects the order in which impressions occur in the mind” of a character, narrator or author.

Developing the above thinking, all three types of diagrammatic iconicity identified above might be interpreted in either way in the context of fiction: (a) as a reflection of the “purported” fictional world, or (b) as a reflection of the subjective, psychological experience of an individual within the text. Taking iconic sequencing first, the difference can be observed between two extracts of the same novel, in this case Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2002). While the ordering of the linguistic forms in (i) mimics the order in which events occur within the reality of the text (set in Britain and France during World War II), the syntax of (ii)—a fronted locative construction—instead mimics the main character’s gradual recognition of an approaching enemy fighter jet from a distance:

  1. (i)

    As they came out of the copse they heard bombers so they went back in and smoked while they waited under the trees. (p. 194)

  2. (ii)

    Hanging there, a long way off, about thirty feet above the road, warped by the rising heat, was what looked like a plank of wood, suspended horizontally, with a bulge in its centre. (p. 221)

While both descriptions are iconic, clearly (ii) is more foregrounded. This is because, contrary to what we might expect, the subject of this sentence—the “trajector” or main focus of our attention in perceptual terms (Langacker 2008, 70–73)—is delayed until the end of the sentence, and is in fact only named (‘a fighter”) in the following paragraph. This trailing syntax and delayed lexicalization seems to mimic the disorientation of the character, an injured British soldier (see also Nuttall 2019, 226).

The iconic proximity of linguistic forms, or what Leech and Short refer to as “iconic juxtaposition” (2007, 192–194), can similarly reflect the spatial, temporal closeness of the entities they refer to within the fictional world, or they can reflect the perceptual and psychological relations between the concepts they refer to in the mind of a specific character or narrator. We can see both kinds of iconicity at work in a single extract from Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1996):

  1. (iii)

    The summer dress rustles against the flesh of my thighs, the grass grows underfoot, at the edges of my eyes there are movements, in the branches; feathers, flittings, grace notes, tree into bird, metamorphosis run wild. (p. 161)

The syntax of this extract: the basic grouping of information in noun phrases (e.g. “the summer dress”, “the flesh of my thighs”) and the separation of the clause “the grass grows underfoot” by the comma, serves to package up related things within the sentence as a reflection of the fictional reality. The quality of “summer” belongs to the dress, and the “flesh” to her thighs, while the grass is spatially distinct underfoot. As the extract continues, other groupings of words and phrases appear to be motivated more by the connections that exist between concepts within the narrator, Offred’s, mind. The list of grouped features that modify “the branches” (“grace notes, tree into bird, metamorphosis run wild”) increasingly reflect perceptual, sensory associations formed by an observer. At the same time, patterns of consonance, for example, /g/ in “the grass grows”, and the fricatives /s/, /f/ and /sh/ recurring throughout—an example of “imagic iconicity”, here mimicking the sounds of the rustling dress and bird song—reinforce these syntactic groupings and invite further connections across the whole extract, as the interlinked sensory experiences of this narrator. Examples of such psychological juxtaposition (to extend Leech and Short’s terminology) are in abundance in this novel, which uses this device to foreground the unusual perceptual and semantic connections made by Offred as she attempts to make sense of her reality:

  1. (iv)

    The red is the same but there is no connection. The tulips are not tulips of blood, the red smiles are not flowers, neither thing makes a comment on the other. (p. 143)

Noun phrases are foregrounded and juxtaposed here by the asyndetic syntax which invites us to compare “the tulips” and “the red smiles” in parallel, along with “tulips of blood” and “flowers”. This iconically mimics the mental juxtaposition of ideas triggered by the sights Offred sees, contrary to any kind of actual “connection” within the world she inhabits (see also Nuttall 2018, 82).

Finally, iconic quantity, or the size/length of a linguistic expression, could reflect the complexity of the referent in the fictional reality, or the scale, complexity or importance of that entity to a particular character. Instances of the former iconic principle are seen in the tendency to use (capitalized) proper noun phrases to label places and people of importance within a fictional world, for example “The Republic of Gilead” and “The Guardians of the Faith” in the world of The Handmaid’s Tale. More generally, we expect an author to devote more description, more words, to important aspects of a setting, character or plot, in contrast to less important ones. On the other hand, the psychological interpretation of iconic quantity can be observed in the linguistic presentation of “given vs new information” (Halliday 1968). Typically, we expect that “given” or familiar entities and concepts will be introduced briefly using forms such as the definite article (“the”) while new, unfamiliar concepts will be described using the indefinite article “a” and longer, more complex noun phrases, that is, with an increased degree of “specificity” (Langacker 2008, 55). In Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2006), this linguistic expectation is manipulated to reflect the characteristic knowledge and understanding of its narrator, Kathy:

  1. (v)

    At the Cottages, though, when a couple were saying goodbye to each other, there’d be hardly any words, never mind embraces or kisses. Instead you slapped your partner’s arm near the elbow, lightly with the back of your knuckles, the way you might do to attract someone’s attention. (p. 119)

  2. (vi)

    But she just went on standing out there, sobbing and sobbing, staring at me through the doorway with that same look in her eyes she always had when she looked at us, like she was seeing something that gave her the creeps. Except this time there was something else, something extra in that look I couldn’t fathom. (p. 71)

In (v), the amount of highly specific description devoted to body language and the everyday behaviour of her schoolmates reflects the narrator’s preoccupation with these things and its importance to her. Meanwhile, in (vi) we see this same narrator’s tendency to rely on the highly nonspecific word “something” to describe the emotions underpinning such behaviour. The repetition of this word, seen in multiple scenes of intense emotion across the novel, reflects this narrator’s difficulty in understanding emotions and their relative absence from her view of reality (Nuttall 2018, 112–115).

A broader term sometimes used for these kinds of psychological iconicity is “experiential iconicity” (Enkvist 1981; Lugea 2021; Nuttall 2014, 2018, 2019; Rundquist 2020; Tabakowska 1993; Wolf 2001). According to Tabakowska (1993, 54), in texts with experiential iconicity, arrangements of linguistic choices are “motivated by the speaker’s perspective rather than by the state of affairs in the world”. Being non-specific, this term can be used to capture all the forms of iconicity discussed above, and others yet to be identified perhaps, in fictional narratives.

As is often noted by linguists, iconicity (especially the diagrammatic kind) is a pervasive but often relatively unnoticed tendency in language. As has been well documented in relation to metaphor (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1980), iconic structures can become entrenched as part of the conventional system of language so much so that the underlying similarities are no longer perceived. In literature, however, iconic forms and correspondences are often brought to attention and “defamiliarized” (Shklovsky 1965) through foregrounding (Fischer 2014, 381). Where iconic choices are foregrounded across a text, through repetition or deviation from some linguistic norm, they may be interpreted as a mind style. Mind style, then, is a specific foregrounded instance of the wider possibilities of “form enacting meaning” in texts (cf. Leech and Short 2007, 195).

Developing a similar argument, Lugea (2021) proposes that iconicity—notably including not only diagrammatic, but also imagic and metaphorical iconicityFootnote 4—is an essential part of mind style’s definition. She proposes that:

mind style can be redefined as an iconic representation of cognition, such that readers are invited to simulate the particular “way of thinking” endowed in the text. The proposed clarification to the definition emphasises the role of textual features in simulating the cognitive experience of the narrator/character, and implicitly recognises the effect upon the reader which is to share in that experience. (Lugea 2021, 191; italics in original)

However, as she goes on to note (Lugea 2021, 192), the way in which readers “enact” this experience and the nature of the “simulation” involved, require further explanation. The following section attempts to address this question in light of evidence from cognitive linguistics and psychology. In addition, the remainder of this chapter suggests that this enactment involves more than a “way of thinking”; it involves a simulation of the wider sensations that contribute to a character or narrator’s cognitive experience.

3 Enacting a Mind Style through Mental Simulation

How do we explain the experiential consequences of iconicity? Numerous stylistic accounts have discussed iconicity’s contribution to readers’ engagement with fictional worlds and perspectives (e.g. Burke 2001; Jeffries 2010). Leech and Short (2007) describe its effect:

The iconic force in language produces an ENACTMENT of the fictional reality through the form of the text. This brings realistic illusion to life in a new dimension: as readers, we do not merely receive a report of the fictional world; we enter into it iconically, as a dramatic performance, through the experience of reading. (Leech and Short 2007, 189–190; capitalisation in original)

In his 2001 article, Michael Burke argues that “the emotive value of iconicity for interpretation” has not yet been explained in stylistics. Citing Leech and Short, he asks: “[H]ow might the iconic force in language produce such an ‘enactment’ that is capable of coercing readers into the emotive world of this dramatic performance?” (Burke 2001, 32). Burke’s answer to this question is that in powerful cases of textual iconicity the form taps directly into affective processes, bypassing other aspects of cognition. Burke draws on emergent neuroscientific evidence to support this idea, and subsequent work on the interaction between emotion and cognition (e.g. see Sanford and Emmott’s chapter on “hot cognition”, 2012) provide further insight.

Relevant recent work in cognitive science includes the approach collectively known as “enactivism” (Newen et al. 2018; Tewes et al. 2017; Varela et al. 1991). Central to this “new wave” of cognitive science is the concept of “mental simulation” and the discovery that language processing, and conceptualization generally, involves the activation of brain regions associated with direct perception and action (e.g. Barsalou 1999, 2009; Niedenthal et al. 2005; Pulvermüller 2001; Speer et al. 2009; Zwaan 2004; Zwaan and Taylor 2006). In Barsalou’s influential account, mental simulation is “the re-enactment of perceptual, motor and introspective states acquired during experience with the world, body and mind” (2009, 1281). Caracciolo describes these simply as “memories of past interactions with the world” and terms them “experiential traces” (2014, 95).

Also influenced by the enactivist approach is Langacker’s theory of Cognitive Grammar (2008). In Langacker’s framework, simulation plays an important part in our ability to mentally represent the situations construed through language, especially when these require us to adopt a fictive vantage point. This process underpins the central notion of “construal”—“the ability to conceive and portray the same situation in alternate ways” (Langacker 2008, 43), which has been applied by stylisticians to (literary) texts (see, e.g., Giovanelli et al. 2021; Harrison et al. 2014; Harrison 2017; Nuttall 2018). Construal applies at both ends of the communicative event: the language of a text presents a writer’s construal of the reality presented, which is then construed in turn by the reader in their resulting conceptualization (Harrison 2017, 56; Hart 2011, 174). Construal, and the simulation that underpins it, therefore provides a theoretical explanation for the “enactment” readers undergo in response to the language of a text. The language used by an author or narrator to describe a situation invites readers to conceptualize the situation from the same perspective, in a similar order, activating stored memories of similar experiences and directing attention to these in the same way—in other words, simulating the same processes of perception and conception in their own minds.

This enactment doesn’t happen like for like since a reader’s background, experiences, attention span, mood, etc. will ultimately make their experience different, to a variable degree, from that being re-enacted. Drawing on cognitive models of simulation, the enactment of an author, narrator or character’s experience as part of a construal will always be “attenuated” (Langacker 2008, 536) or “partial” (Barsalou 2009, 1281) to some extent relative to actual, online experiences. It will lack their full intensity or vividness, and its content—in the form of motor and sensory imagery—will be more schematic, or less granular.

In cognitive stylistic approaches to literature, mental simulations have been used to account for reader experiences such as immersion in a fictional world and empathy for characters (e.g. Caracciolo 2014; Holm 2019; Jajdelska et al. 2010; Kuzmičová 2012; Stockwell 2009; Troscianko 2013). In these accounts, the role of stylistic choices in triggering or manipulating simulations forms an important research question (see Dancygier 2014, 216; Sanford and Emmott 2012, 133). Drawing on psycholinguistic research, researchers have proposed a range of linguistic features and styles that might facilitate more vivid, or less attenuated, simulations during reading. These accounts often overlap and feature a number of recurring suggestions which I will briefly summarize.

Following Caracciolo (2014, 124), we might identify two broad factors that affect the degree to which readers undergo what he terms “consciousness-enactment”: first, the “degree of similarity or consonance between our story-driven experience and the experience that we attribute to the character”; and second, “the level of detail […] of the textual cues”. Linguistic iconicity (summarized in Sect. 7.2) can be said to make an important contribution to the first of these factors, and offers a stylistic basis for analysing “similarity” in texts. The second of these factors—the “detail” or granularity of description—is a linguistic choice identified by several researchers as contributing to the vividness or richness of “embodiment effects” in readers (Sanford and Emmott 2012, 156–157). In particular, detailed sensory descriptions of visual perception, touch, taste, smell, along with emotional reactions, and kinaesthetic or bodily movement, are highlighted as potential triggers of mental simulations in contrast to more summative descriptions (Dancygier 2014; Jajdelska et al. 2010; Kuzmičová 2012; Troscianko 2013). How these two broad linguistic factors interact within texts, and their joint contribution to the enactment of an experience’s “bodily, perceptual and emotional ‘feel’” (Caracciolo 2014, 124), are questions therefore faced when analysing the effects of stylistic choices for mental simulations.

4 A Girl is a Half-formed Thing

To explore these stylistic effects at work, I will now consider an extract from the novel introduced at the beginning of this chapter. In A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (McBride 2014), we witness the experiences of an unnamed female narrator in a first-person narrative addressed to her older brother, who is referred to throughout as “You”. The narrative begins with the narrator as an infant, and her earliest memories of her brother’s treatment for brain cancer, progressing through a difficult childhood and teenage years into adult life. The novel tells of her upbringing as an Irish Catholic, and trauma arising from various forms of abuse, from her mother, who beats her and her brother, and sexual abuse from her uncle, in her early teens, the traumatic psychological consequences of which are seen throughout her adult life in the rest of the novel.

The extract below occurs early in the novel, when the narrator is abused by her uncle for the first time. In the extract, we see her run out of the house in the early hours of the morning to submerge herself into the lake, in what is either a suicide attempt or an attempt at cleansing herself in a pseudo-baptism.

Hmm help me I am drowning. Look up. Look up. The day’s begun. The cold and grasp. Retract now my wish for wading going in. My hair a cling now on. Sticking to my face and that rust smell of lake. Put my feet back on the bottom. Slipping in. The silt and grub of it. I have heard into the murky depths. My insides feeling squeal now. Yuck this filth. Yuck I have done. The circles snapping circles blackthorn bush to pull me out. The silence. Keep the moment. Panic slipping I get out. I’ll catch my. Death of. You know. What’s it. Here can’t be a leech. Not in this country. Too cold here I’m sure. The other side now. Cows are lowing. Lonely ancient bovine cries. Their teats are turning over wanting out relief of hot milk. Let it all begin again. My body cold reflected back up to my face as I stand there. Look down. I see my sorry self. That girl. My wicked. I see new ripe ones. Interesting eyes. Purged off. Cleaned out for sure the stings and bites of. Those things that happen in your head when you are young and cannot fathom never being clean again. The house will still be quiet. If I go there. Drip the floor. I felt this morning strange beginning. I know. I know I won’t tell. Yet. To whom. I go. I see the heron fly. Dart of it over my head. Heading are you out to sea? To the new found world old now though. To a sudden death or a happy mate or a quiet circle or a quiet nest. I watch it overhead. That heron flying. Towards unknown. I don’t think I will be clean now. Think instead I’ll have revenge for lots of all kinds of things. The start is. That is love. (McBride 2014, 56)

This scene alone is rich with experiential iconicity, including the three specific structural forms discussed in Sect. 7.2. As is often the case in stream of consciousness narratives, we see many instances of psychological sequencing, where the word order explicitly reflects the fleeting impressions, thoughts and sensations of the narrator in the order in which she experiences them. In sentences such as “Yuck this filth. Yuck I have done” we get the instinctive “Yuck” before learning the source of the sensation. Similarly, in “Panic slipping I get out” we first get the instinctive reaction “Panic” before the cause “slipping” and her thought response. “Too cold here I’m sure” and “Dart of it over my head” are further examples of this fronted perception. In describing the enactment invited by this iconicity, we can predict that these stylistic choices serve to direct attention to these perceptions and reactions as prominent “trajectors” within readers’ corresponding conceptualization of this situation (Langacker 2008, 70). Increasing the prominence of sensory descriptions might also be predicted to cue a vivid sensorimotor simulation of these bodily experiences themselves, by activating readers’ own stored memories (see Sect. 7.3).

Another recurrent pattern in the syntax is for sequences of ellipted sentences (often missing verbs) to reflect a thought process—a succession of individual observations occurring in real time, for example, “Here can’t be a leech. Not in this country. Too cold here I’m sure. The other side now.” At other times, what would typically be a single sentence is split by punctuation to form multiple sentences. An example of this, “I’ll catch my. Death of. You know.” seems to suggest the fragmentation of a single thought, iconically mimicking the struggle to think due to extreme cold, and perhaps also the way the sentence might be spoken while shivering. Another example of this in “I know I won’t tell. Yet. To whom. I go” creates ambiguity as to whether this is several highly ellipted sentences representing individual thoughts, or a single fragmented thought. This ambiguity reflects the narrator’s difficulty in even contemplating telling someone about what is happening to her. The syntax allows each component part to act in multiple grammatical roles: “Yet”, for example, could be modifying “I won’t tell” (as in not yet), or could be an adversative conjunction (as in but). By forcing the reader to “backtrack” in our processing of sentences (Langacker 2008, 490), the language produces an enactment of the narrator’s own back and forth in her contemplation of this decision. In terms of Cognitive Grammar, such fragmentation can also be said to split these thoughts and experiences into distinct “attentional frames”, which are conceptualized individually by the reader through “sequential scanning”.Footnote 5 According to Langacker, “dwelling on each clause individually, in a separate attentional gesture, enhances its cognitive salience and that of the elements it contains, if only by according them more processing time and thus a fuller realization” (Langacker 2001, 157–158). While inviting readers to enact the fullness and intensity of each perception and feeling for the narrator herself, this fragmented, ambiguous syntax and the backtracking it invites also complicates the summation of these discrete perceptions into a holistic mental representation of this scene as we read (see also Nuttall 2014, for a similar effect of iconic sequencing in The Handmaid’s Tale). This disrupted processing explains readers’ reported difficulty in comprehending this text (see Sect. 7.1), and iconically reflects the narrator’s own chaotic thought processes.

There are also many examples of psychological juxtaposition, where linguistic forms are merged or placed side by side to reflect the relatedness or equivalence of their referents in the mind of this character. One example is “The circles snapping circles blackthorn bush” where the ripples in the lake and the bush’s reflection seem to be combined in both her visual perception (“circles”) and the feeling of the thorny branches on her skin (“snapping”), reinforced by the phonic /s/ and /b/ patterning. Similarly, the iconic juxtaposition of “I felt this morning strange beginning”, highlighted by the phonological parallelism of “morning” and “beginning” emphasizes the direct connection between the two in the mind of this character. This kind of juxtaposition, using parallel structures to reflect the semantic and sensory parallels within this character’s mind, gives the style its poetic quality and is often quite beautiful: “To the new found world old now though. To a sudden death or a happy mate or a quiet circle or a quiet nest”. This syntax invites us to attempt to superimpose these different images, or in Cognitive Grammar terms, to mentally integrate successive details into a coherent, structured whole through a process of “summary scanning”.Footnote 6 Working together with the unusual sequencing described above, this iconicity thus disrupts typical discourse processing, inviting us to enact the distinctive way in which this narrator makes sense of what she sees. As Leech and Short comment in their analysis of iconicity in a poem, “the combined effects of juxtaposition and sequencing are to lead the reader into making associative, chiefly sensory, connections which short-circuit the logic of syntax” (2007, 194).

Psychological quantity, finally, reflects the complexity, familiarity and importance of concepts to this narrator. We see an example in the number of words devoted to describing the destination of the heron—an “overlexicalization” (Fowler 1996, 155) which suggests its significance to this narrator, and which seems to metaphorically represent her contemplation of her own future (drawing on the life is a journey conceptual metaphor). The lengthy noun phrase at the end of the sentence “Think instead I’ll have revenge for lots of all kinds of things” reflects the complexity of her emotions here, alongside the uncertainty surrounding the object of her feelings. The nonspecific construal “lots of all kinds of things” produces an equally nonspecific conceptualization in the reader and a highly attenuated mental simulation as a result (cf. Langacker 2008, 537). Notably, the narrator does not mention her uncle at any point in this extract, and here describes him only indirectly through “underlexicalization” (Fowler 1996, 152). The experiential effect of such linguistic choices as part of this mind style is to invite us to enact the limited understanding (and perhaps psychological suppression) it reflects, for ourselves.

Through the combined effects of the types of experiential iconicity identified here (psychological sequencing, psychological juxtaposition and psychological quantity) this narrative invites readers to enact the cognitive, sensory experiences of its narrator. Further, the dense and sustained nature of these iconic patterns across the whole novel, increasing in intensity in particularly traumatic scenes, causes these choices to be foregrounded and attributable to the mind style of this character-narrator. This “traumatised” mind style (see Sect. 7.1) is characterized by chaotic cognition and perception, reflective of the narrator’s state of mind, as well as the suppression of certain thoughts and feelings of shame, anger and desire. Our recognition of this mind style is important to the way in which we make sense of the unusual style of this narrative, and the authorial choice which underlies it. But, as I hope to have shown, key to our impression of this mind style is the way this narrative makes us feel, or, in cognitive terms, the embodied experiences that we simulate during reading.

5 Coercive Mind Style?

The first listed review of McBride’s novel on Goodreads (2023) opens with the questions: “How did she do it? […] How did the author keep me reading to the end?” (R1, Goodreads). Given the tendency for readers to describe this novel as “difficult” or “uncomfortable”, questions such as these are of particular significance (see Sect. 7.1). Yet, such questions also have wider relevance for studies of mind style in general, and especially those texts where unpleasant, traumatic experiences (or, alternatively, unlikeable, immoral characters) are portrayed. The enactment of another person’s cognitive processing and sensory experiences invited by mind style makes such texts rich in potential triggers for empathy, but also potential resistance (Stockwell 2009, 134–167). This is certainly the case for McBride’s novel, in which the narrator’s prolonged unhappiness and complex sexual feelings towards her uncle are ones that many readers may wish to resist sharing. Yet, literature, and art more broadly, is known for its ability to cue ambivalent experiences of “negative empathy” with tragic or repulsive individuals (Bonasera 2023; Ercolino 2018). Defined by psychologists simply as empathy for others’ negative emotions (Andreychik and Migliaccio 2015), negative empathy during reading is described as “an aesthetic experience that consists in a cathartic identification with characters […], which are disturbingly portrayed as markedly negative and seductive at the same time” (Ercolino and Fusillo 2022, 252, original emphasis, translated in Bonasera 2023). In this context, Burke’s description of iconicity as “coercing readers into the emotive world of this dramatic performance” (Burke 2001, 32; my emphasis) gains new significance in suggesting an element of seduction or persuasion of readers to undergo this emotive enactment.

In A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (and the other three novels quoted in this chapter), fixed-focalization through the eyes of a character-narrator offers no alternative perspective on the fictional world other than the mind style presented.Footnote 7 Hence, this world view is “constitutive” of the reality presented (Stockwell 2000, 203). In choosing to keep reading and engaging with this reality, then, readers must arguably go along with the enactive experience the language produces. As one reviewer on Goodreads comments, “the prose sweeps you along” (R12, Goodreads). Another insists that you “let this strange novel teach you how to read it” (R4), while another urges, “If you try to impose preconceived notions of sentence, paragraph structure […] then you will drown in the chaotic fragments. Instead, let it settle upon you like a diaphanous layer of understanding. It is the impression of it that will fill in the details” (R15).

This discussion raises bigger questions relating to the degree to which enactment and mental simulation are essential parts of linguistic comprehension, or optional extras which readers may or may not engage in (see Caracciolo 2014, 113–126; Sanford and Emmott 2012, 150–159 for perspectives on this). Specifically, do readers mentally simulate mind styles they are uncomfortable with, or even opposed to? Is it possible to read a highly iconic and richly sensory narrative such as this without enacting the cognitive and sensory experiences it reflects? While answers to these questions are not yet clear, systematic examination of reader responses such as those cited here could offer one source of insight into the passivity or agentivity of readers in immersive experiences of mind style (cf. Nuttall and Harrison 2020).

6 Conclusion

This chapter has provided a theoretical account of the way in which mind styles are experienced by readers. While recent work has explored the range of iconic linguistic choices which contribute to mind style, the effects of mind style for readers’ felt experiences of texts and characters is as yet unclear. The relationship between mind style and emotional responses such as empathy, feelings of immersion, and a range of other embodied, sensory responses (such as pleasure and discomfort) during reading represents a key direction for work on this topic. This chapter’s cognitive linguistic account of mind style in terms of enactment and mental simulation offers one means of linking this authorial stylistic technique to readerly experiences and responses.

This chapter has also unpicked the different types of structural iconicity which make a significant (and arguably primary) contribution to mind styles in texts (see Lugea 2021, for other kinds of iconicity that contribute to mind style). Building on Haiman’s model and Leech and Short’s application of it to fiction, this chapter has identified psychological sequencing, psychological juxtaposition and psychological quantity as three forms of experiential iconicity through which language can mimic the world view of a character, narrator or author and produce a corresponding enactment of this world view in readers.

Finally, the combined effects of these forms of iconicity were seen at work in a highly experimental stream of consciousness narrative. In A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, iconic linguistic patterns were said to produce an enactment of the narrator’s traumatized state of mind, which was underpinned by vivid mental simulations of the perceptions, sensations, thoughts and feelings portrayed through its fragmented stream of consciousness style. This analysis goes some way to explaining the cognitive difficulty and physical discomfort reported by readers of this text in online reviews and suggests possible ways in which readers are “coerced” (cf. Burke 2001) into engaging with such demanding texts. While the stream of consciousness narrative examined here offers a rich case study for the exploration of experiential effects during reading, the contributing stylistic features identified (forms of iconicity and detailed sensorimotor description) may be prominent in other texts, and especially those that feature a distinctive mind style.

But explaining readers’ processing of character minds is, of course, not the only objective of mind style analysis in stylistics. As Rundquist (2020) points out, the ability of narratives to linguistically represent aspects of consciousness not otherwise accessible to us offers a unique insight into the workings of the human mind. By explaining how language, via mind style, is able to represent other minds, and how this representation is in turn decoded and experienced by readers, we stand to better understand experience itself.