1How does language deal with senses? How do senses work their way into a text? To what extent can literature or any other writing be grasped and interpreted sensuously by a reader or an audience? Or, to put it more precisely as the editors of the volume do in their introduction, how can style “convey our sensory interaction with the world around us” (Pillière and Sorlin 3)? The question is certainly not a brand new one, but in the context of new developments in the study of literature and other artistic forms such as haptic or kinaesthetic perspectives (Laniel and Pollentier; Pavis) it does leave room for further investigation such is the array of linguistic inquiries that it has triggered.
2As underlined from the very beginning, this 307-page book is the outcome of what may originally sound like a paradox: aimed at celebrating the 40th anniversary of PALA (Poetics and Linguistics Association), the subject chosen, “Style and sense(s),” was first and foremost due to give birth to a conference that had to be cancelled twice in its “live,” incarnated format because of the COVID-19 pandemic, now remembered as having precluded bodily interactions. This temporary eclipse of the bodily presence was, of course, only to pave the way for a growing awareness of the utter centrality of the theme, more particularly in the wake of the cognitive theories that have held sway for a few decades in the field of linguistics and granted full recognition to the “body in the mind,” as exemplified by the seminal works of Lakoff, Johnson, Turner or Sweetser, to quote but a few groundbreaking authors (duly mentioned and explored in the book).
3How the body asserts itself through language and style is indeed one of the main concerns of this book which encompasses a variety of genres, registers and semiotic fields such as—apart from verbal language itself—painting and choreography, to which the last part is devoted, including two contributions by Polina Gavin on “ekphrastic creativity” (263) and Jean-Rémi Lapaire on “physical interpretations of style” (299). The various chapters gradually build up a comprehensive vision of what is labelled by the editors as “sensory stylistics” (2), alternately giving prominence to different facets of the rich interplay between text and senses. Áine Doherty and Craig Hamilton’s venture into the “multisensory style” (99) of restaurant reviews—not a well-trodden path in stylistic analysis—provides a convincing illustration of how metaphors and other recurrent elements of speech may carry something of the intricate texture, movement, and flavour of the things and scenes described.
4Just as performing arts are supposed to “move” the spectator by way of “kinesthetic empathy” (Pavis 449), sensory style has the power to “move” the reader. In the field of fiction—unsurprisingly largely represented in the volume—emphasis is laid on the narrative modes, such as psychonarration and stream of consciousness devices, of which extensive use is made to report sensory experience and elicit the reader’s emotional response so as to achieve what Louise Nuttall aptly calls “immersive experiences of mind style” (169). It comes as no surprise either that Virginia Woolf’s works should be often brought to the fore as offering a wide range of “key moments of being and sensing” (Lapaire; Pillière and Sorlin 283) in which the character’s experience comes through instances of “extreme mimeticism” (Sotirova; Pillière and Sorlin 34) and modes of narration that “capture non-verbal facets of consciousness” (Sotirova; Pillière and Sorlin 28). The originality and thoughtful accuracy of Woolf’s approach to senses and bodily experience also surface in her foregrounding of smells in her mock-biography Flush where the syntax and grammatical construction used to convey the dog’s point of view set the stage for an “iconic representation” (Béligon; Pillière and Sorlin 84) of the complexities of a sense otherwise largely discarded, displaying one more instance of her celebrated insight into character and intimacy. Beside the many syntactic arrangements or lexical items involved, ranging from verbs of perception to such “iconic” forms as ellipsis and fragment, the use of pronouns is one of the other tools that the narrative voice may rely on to ensure the quality and depth of a shared experience, as Michael Toolan shows in his study of “you” as a major trigger of intimacy in a contemporary short story (58-62).
5As an experimental playground teeming with imagery and expressive potentialities, poetry is, of course, not left aside in this exploration of how sensory and embodied style and stylistics can be. The “synaesthetic transfer” (Sivakumar and Khanna; Pillière and Sorlin 181) observed when one particular aspect of sensory experience is conjured up in the terms of another, the metaphorical process and the creativity that comes with it (Adami; Pillière and Sorlin 227) are described as reaching out to the reader’s sensory imagination, weaving it into “the texture of literary reading” (Sivakumar and Khanna; Pillière and Sorlin 205). Experimenting with textures—of voices, of sounds, of the visual fabric of the poem—is at the core of poetry reading, just as it is, more generally, at the core of any kind of interpretation (not to mention, of course, translation). It is a mode of immersion and blending into the creative process itself that is worth fostering and treasuring since it brings us back to our own built-in sensory identity and abilities. Hence Willie van Peer and Anna Chesnokova’s query: “how can we preserve this sense of poetry for the future?” (238-239).
6It is hoped that part of the answer—concerning not only poetry but also poetics as a whole—lies in the new prospects opened up by this volume, in all the tools and reading strategies that it promotes, somehow along the lines of the “great observational skills” which, according to Catherine Emmott and Marc Alexander (132), help Sherlock Holmes make sense of a bulk of words or objects that would otherwise remain inert.
7With its multi-angled take on stylistics, on its achievements and perspectives, the book is a plea for the “pansemiotic” approach advocated by such philosophers of language as Jean-Jacques Lecercle (31). Above all, each chapter is, in its own way, an invitation to take stock of an aesthetic experience which has, hopefully, much in store to help our bodies and senses resist the pressure of our hectic, overloaded lives in which we are so often compelled to keep reality—and ourselves—at bay. Surely that is what our fascination with style and stylistics, our quest for anything alternative that goes into it, are about, in keeping with Marielle Macé’s ontology of style as care for the living, or else Yves Citton’s “ecology of attention”.