Skilled fiction-writers can guide readers to imagine from multiple perspectives at once.

Combined visual and somatosensory cues can show simultaneously what one character sees and another feels.

Identifying with characters engages readers, but readers can imagine things protagonists can't perceive.

Fiction-reading can develop much-needed skills to imagine situations from multiple viewpoints.

Have you ever been called a pig? Insults can push us to imagine. When you were compared to a grunting animal, did you experimentally plant your mind in a pig’s body? Or did you maybe picture a snout emerging on the person trying to hurt you?

Skilled fiction-writers can guide the imagination, cuing readers to use their senses so that they fantasize more richly than they could alone (Scarry 1999, 3-9). If it serves a storyteller’s artistic aims, a writer can prompt readers to imagine a scene from several perspectives at once. Creative writers can accomplish this goal by blending appeals to readers’ visual and somatosensory (bodily) senses.

Madeline Miller’s novel Circe is all about point of view. In Greek mythology, Circe has a bad reputation—because readers know her from Homer’s Odyssey as a love-hungry witch who turns men to pigs. As an expert on ancient Greek culture, Miller uses literary craft to let Circe tell her own story.

Daughter of the sun god Helios and the ocean nymph Perse, Circe is scorned by her divine relatives, then exiled to an island for using her powers. She learns that she has a knack for transformation and can use herbs and incantations to “turn creatures to their truest selves” (Miller 63). On her island, she feeds a lost, hungry captain and his crew (not Odysseus and his men, who arrive later), but she uses her powers against them after the captain rapes her.

From Circe’s perspective, Miller describes the rapist’s transformation, guiding readers to imagine what she hears and sees:

"His rib cage cracked and began to bulge. I heard the sound of flesh rupturing wetly, the pops of breaking bone. His nose ballooned from his face, and his legs shriveled like a fly sucked by a spider. He fell to all fours. He screamed, and his men screamed with him. It went on for a long time" (Miller 196).

As Miller conveys what Circe sees and hears, her evocative words encourage readers to imagine how these changes might feel in their own bodies. Human somatosensory modalities include proprioception (detection of bodily position and movement), interoception (detection of internal organs’ states), and pain and temperature detection as well as surface touch. Words like “bulge,” “rupturing,” “ballooned,” and “shriveled” seem crafted to engage readers’ visual and somatosensory systems, enabling them to imagine the suffering witch and her attacker at once.

Psychological studies of reading indicate that feeling immersed in a story often depends on imagining characters’ sensations and actions. Moniek M. Kuijpers and David S. Miall asked readers to report their bodily feelings while reading stories and observed “a positive correlation between absorption and the experience of bodily feeling,” especially in the head, stomach, and chest (Kuijpers & Miall 2011). In the human-to-pig conversion, Miller encourages gut-level imagining by targeting the chest, face, and legs. A recent interview study with fiction-readers has also shown that “self-character comparison is an important component in highly absorbed narrative experiences” (Kuzmičová & Balint 2019, 430). But whose feelings do writers’ words help readers to share? Imagination evoked by literature can run far beyond the protagonist.

Cognitive literary scholar (and fellow PT contributor) Emily T. Troscianko sees readers’ imagination as “a form of ongoing exploration” (Troscianko 2013, 185). In a story, language associated with any of the characters or narrator can set off this exploration (Troscianko 2014, 2).

In an experiment, Troscianko asked readers to draw what they experienced internally while reading the opening of Franz Kafka’s novel, The Castle. The participants tended to “elaborate imaginatively to some extent beyond the text given,” since in the snowy darkness, the protagonist K can’t see the castle he’s approaching (Troscianko 2014, 109). The readers drew the castle anyway. Often, “relatable” protagonists imagine beyond their perceptions, which helps explain Troscianko’s finding. Perhaps, sensing K's imagination at work, the readers imagined along with him. Writing a good story involves crafting signs of an active, observant mind, one that imagines what it can’t know based on what its senses are saying.

In this time of political division, the ability to imagine a situation from multiple perspectives has immense social value. Miller’s skill at creating complex situations and characters invites readers to sense how the abuse of power can alter many different lives. Homer never told his listeners that years before Odysseus reached Circe’s island, Circe “felt [a] man tremble” as he raped her, crushing her throat so that she couldn’t scream (Miller 195). Miller guides readers to imagine a witch sensing, relishing, and maybe already regretting her revenge in the moment of its enactment. Miller’s writing motivates readers to imagine feelings experienced by others based on what little they can perceive.

Kuijpers, M. M., & Miall, D. S. (2011). “Bodily Involvement in Literary Reading: An Experimental Study of Readers’ Bodily Experiences During Reading.” In De stralende lezer: Wetenschappelijk onderzoek naar de invloed van het lezen. Edited by Frank Hakemulder. Delft: Dutch Reading Foundation, pp. 160–182.

Kuzmičová, A., & Balint, K. (2019). “Personal Relevance in Story Reading: A Research Review.” Poetics Today, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 429-51.

Miller, M. (2019). Circe. New York: Back Bay Books; Little, Brown & Co.

Scarry, E. (1999). Dreaming by the Book. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.

Troscianko, E. T. (2013). “Reading Imaginatively: The Imagination in Cognitive Science and Cognitive Literary Studies.” Journal of Literary Semantics vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 181-98.

Troscianko, E. T. (2014). Kafka’s Cognitive Realism. New York: Routledge.

© Psychology Today