Vittorini’s double realities in Conversations in Sicily : Embodied remembering in reading

Abstract

Readers, we argue, frequently engage with the events unfolding in literary texts without relying on symbolic representation. When immersing themselves in embodied and imaginative depictions of memories during reading, readers can directly experience and engage with these cognitive processes. We construct a theoretical framework rooted in an embodied-ecological view on language and reading to argue against the ‘code view’ where reading is seen as a translation of text into symbolic, mental representations. Drawing on recent developments in research on memory, we argue instead that reading can enable readers to re-experience the memory process depicted in the text. We apply this theoretical approach to Elio Vittorini’s Conversations in Sicily and show how embodied language can establish a direct connection between readers’ minded bodies and Vittorini’s protagonist’s memories of his childhood in Sicily.

Introduction

Berns et al. (2013) posited an intriguing perspective, suggesting that if the simple act of reading a book could incite a profound feeling of life alteration in a reader, it might bear the potential to induce real, significant modifications in both cerebral function and configuration. Their findings hint at a potential mechanism through which reading extends beyond strengthening language-processing regions to potentially influencing the reader through embodied understanding. They propose that increased connectivity in the somatosensory cortex may result from the neural activity triggered by reading a novel, particularly neural processes associated with physical sensations. This idea posits that immersing oneself in a novel effectively places the reader in the shoes of the protagonist, leading to possible alterations in somatosensory and motor cortex connectivity. From an embodied and ecological perspective, the activation of the somatosensory cortex during reading is not merely a neural response but part of a broader, dynamic interaction between the reader and the narrative. When readers immerse themselves in a story, the sensory and motor regions of the brain, including the somatosensory cortex, are engaged. This engagement allows readers to simulate the physical and emotional experiences of characters as they inhabit the narrative world. This re-enactment is not a detached, cognitive process but an embodied one, where the reader’s own sensory and motor systems are engaged to ‘live through’ the events of the story.

In this view, empathy towards the characters arises because the reader is not just understanding the story at a cognitive level but is experiencing it through their entire bodily system. The sensations described in the text – such as warmth, cold or physical tension – are re-enacted within the reader’s own sensory-motor framework. This embodied re-enactment creates a direct, affective connection to the characters, allowing readers to feel what the characters feel. The ecological aspect emphasises that this process is shaped by the reader’s ongoing interaction with the text, environment and their own lived experiences.

Such an understanding is supported by research showing that reading about sensory experiences can activate corresponding neural processes in the brain (e.g. Barsalou, 2008; Hauk et al., 2004). This activation, when viewed through an embodied-ecological lens, highlights how reading can, potentially, be a deeply immersive experience, where the boundaries between the reader’s body and the narrative world mesh, fostering empathy through a distributed and embodied experience.

In this article, we intend to explore these issues from an embodied-ecological perspective on cognition. We will argue against the code view (Love, 2007), namely the idea that reading is based on the translation of textual structures into symbolic representations in the brain. Rather, we will claim that reading can be an embodied and ecological re-experience of the cognitive process depicted in the text. Building upon the framework of embodied and ecological language and cognition (Chemero, 2009; Cowley, 2011; Gibson, 1969; Raczaszek-Leonardi, 2009; Rietveld and Kiverstein, 2014; Steffensen and Pedersen, 2014; Trasmundi, 2020; Trasmundi and Steffensen, 2016; Trasmundi et al., 2021), we perceive reading as a multifaceted activity with diverse goals and functions instead of being limited to mere linguistic word processing. In essence, reading is inherently embodied; it arises from our physical, sensory and emotional engagement with the text, extending far beyond purely cognitive and disembodied processing of linguistic symbols.

We want to explore these claims through an investigation of the sensory and motor exploration of memory and imagination emerging from Elio Vittorini’s novel Conversations in Sicily (henceforth Conversations). As we will show, Vittorini’s novel stages a complex process of remembering that takes place through the embodied and social dynamics of the literary environment, thus offering fertile ground for readers to engage with the text on a deeply embodied level. We will argue that through Vittorini’s highly embodied and evocative language, the reader can go well beyond translating the words into symbolic thought and, rather, re-experience the memory process depicted there. ¹ Starting from the constructive nature of memory (Schacter and Addis, 2007), we look to recent debates in the philosophy of memory on the tight links between imagination, future thinking and memory, where many now argue that memory is part of a bigger system of mental simulation (De Brigard, 2023; Michaelian, 2016, 2024). Also, we examine empirical results on vicarious memories (Pillemer et al.,2015, 2024; Thomsen et al., 2025) that point to how memories of other people’s stories have similar phenomenology as personal memories. This, together with the embodied and ecological view of language and reading, allows us to argue that through embodied descriptions ² within the literary text, readers can directly experience the affective-cognitive memory processes depicted in narrative.

Our argument can be broken down in the following way: (1) Due to the embodied nature of language and cognition, readers can simulate the experiences of characters depicted in literary texts instead of decoding the book as symbolic information. (2) In the case where literary characters remember, readers can simulate the memory processes depicted in the text during reading. (3) Current debates regarding the simulationist character of memory, as well as work on vicarious memories, suggest that we can think of such a simulation of a memory process in a literary work as a re-experience of this memory process, that is a kind of remembering.

The article is structured as follows. In the section ‘Vittorini’s Conversations in Sicily: exploring embodied reading and memory’, we begin with an overview of Vittorini’s Conversations, highlighting its significance for our objective, that is how reading can evoke embodied memory processes. Next, in the section ‘The code view in reading and an embodied-ecological alternative’, we discuss and criticise the common view in mainstream reading research. This common view applies a logical code view that entails a mentalistic, mechanical translation of textual information into symbolic representations. This translation is highly representational and detached from the reading context and the reader’s lived experience with language and texts. We contrast this view with an embodied-ecological approach to language and reading and discuss how embodied and sensorial literary depictions can enable direct experience of these senses and movements in the reader, without being translated into symbolic content. In the section ‘Constructive memory: imagination and the memories of others’, we present a constructive view of memory. We discuss in some detail the simulationist account of episodic memory as well as recent work on vicarious memories and how these strands of research are situated in current debates on memory. The section ‘Vittorini’s ‘twice real’: analysing embodied memory in Conversations’ presents a detailed analysis of Conversations, focusing on how it portrays memory processes within the text and the embodied descriptions it relies on to do so. The analysis demonstrates embodied reading as an alternative to the code view when it highlights the opportunities for whole-bodied engagement with the narrative. In the concluding section, we present this article as a step forward towards comprehending the various embodied processes enacted during the reading of literature. Finally, we propose new avenues for understanding the effects of literature on its readers and how this might impact educational practices.

Vittorini’s Conversations in Sicily: exploring embodied reading and memory

Vittorini’s novel, Conversations, published in 1941, tells of the narrator and main protagonist’s travel from Northern Italy to Sicily. The narrator (and Vittorini) grew up in Sicily but left 15 years earlier to settle in the northern parts of Italy. For 3 days, the narrator, who goes by the name Silvestro, travels by train up into the Sicilian mountainside, where he meets his mother in a remote village before finally deciding to go back to his home in the north. The novel tells, in highly subjective and evocative language, of the many impressions and encounters on the trip that the narrator either links to his childhood memories or in which episodes from the past are retold. Even though the book would not be considered autobiographical by most accounts, there are some significant biographical similarities between Elio Vittorini and the narrator: both grew up in Sicily in a railroad family and left at an early age to find work in Northern Italy.

The previous literature on Conversations has been interested in its stylistic and thematic features (e.g. Polletta, 1964), its editorial history, in particular the role of the photograph in the 1953 edition (Baetens and Bossche, 2015), its political connotations (e.g. Potter, 1975), as well as different comparative and intertextual studies (e.g. Ferrara, 2012). However, as far as we are aware, there has been little attention paid to the description of memory in this book and its effects on readers’ cognitive-affective or overall bodily experiences. One exception is an article by Stone (2013) that discusses, among other things, the role of food in Conversations. Stone investigates how descriptions centred around eating and food serve to map class differences and also help evoke the past together with the narrator’s mother. However, for Stone, these links stay at the level of symbolic representation, that is food is a sign in need of translation on the part of the reader. Its role is to represent both poverty (not having food) and wealth (having food). Likewise, for Stone, remembering is linked to food by the latter’s role as a symbol of past traditions and Sicilian identity. While Stone’s article is useful to map the sociological implications of Vittorini’s text, it can also serve as an example of how reading Vittorini’s novel can be understood from the code view. Instead of an invitation to experience, embodied aspects of the text are translated into representational symbols.

In this article, we use insights from embodied cognition and recent work on memory to argue that the experience of reading Vittorini’s novel can go much deeper than simply representing the past. We examine how written language serves to open up unique avenues for envisioning and recollecting the past experiences of the narrator through textual narratives that enable certain embodied and imaginative experiences. We argue that analytical and symbolic interpretations, such as regarding ‘A’ as a representation of ‘B’, essentially constitute an excessively intellectual approach to reading. Such an approach can be seen to portray reading as a symbolic translation of the text rather than actual reading, because it tends to detach from the embodied process of actual textual engagement.

Vittorini’s novel, we believe, encapsulates a unique way of perceiving, comprehending and, as is our main interest here, remembering the fictional world. Thus, the novel offers a valuable example of how human cognition can unfold within technologically, culturally and socially enriched and dynamic contexts. With Vittorini’s novel, we show how these insights emerge during direct engagement with the text and argue that they should not be reserved only for post hoc reasoning. ³ Our aim is to consider how reading can, and often will, go beyond a detached intellectual experience and enable a deeply embodied engagement with the textual world.

Particularly, we suggest that Conversations is rich in sensorial descriptions and action verbs that allow readers to directly engage in cognitive-emotional processes akin to those experienced by the characters and narrators. Within Vittorini’s novel, this engagement predominantly revolves around vividly recalling childhood memories of Sicily and re-establishing a connection with them. These memories are presented within social contexts that emerge around sensory, motor, visual and interactive experiences. Memory, being an embodied, context-dependent and distributed process occurring in the real world (Barnier and Hoskins, 2018; Brown and Reavey, 2015a; Neisser, 1997), provides a valuable perspective for understanding how literature can directly engage readers. Such a view of memory helps us see how Vittorini’s novel lets his readers re-experience the remembering in the book without having to translate the fictional events into higher-level symbolic representations. In the following section, we first address the ‘code view’ in reading research and how this model fails to capture the embodied and experiential aspects of reading. Then, we outline an embodied-ecological alternative that allows us to think differently about the interaction between our minded bodies, texts and context. Using Vittorini’s novel as an example, we argue that, from the framework of embodied and ecological reading, together with recent work on the constructive nature of memory, reading about memory should not be thought of mainly as a translation into symbolic representations, but as an experiential process of remembering.

The code view in reading and an embodied-ecological alternative

The code view in linguistics and cognitive science has given rise to a multitude of challenges across various empirical disciplines, including reading research (Cowley, 2011). It operates on the assumption that language is simply a symbolic system, where words are arbitrary signs that must be decoded and translated into mental representations. According to this perspective, reading is a stepwise computational process, where linguistic input is systematically converted into propositional content in the mind. In this model, comprehension occurs through a hierarchical transformation, beginning with phonological decoding, followed by lexical access, syntactic parsing and ultimately, the construction of propositional meaning (Dehaene, 2009). This analytical approach involves a sequence of decisions akin to how a computer script follows an algorithm. Kravchenko (2011) argues that this alluring logic disregards the experiential and embodied nature of linguistic semiosis. Altogether, this approach is based on a mentalist and representationalist view of language, where words and sentences function as disembodied symbols that are linked to concepts stored in a mental lexicon (Fodor, 1975; Pylyshyn, 1984). In this code view, meaning is not inherently linked to sensory or motor experiences; instead, it is stored in the mind as abstract and amodal propositions. These propositions represent knowledge in a code-like language format that is completely detached from bodily experiences and thus independent of sensorimotor engagement.

In contrast, the embodied-ecological perspective on reading involves sensory-motor systems and direct engagement with the text. Here, the reader simulates, for example the taste of the food and the description of the colour, size and shape can evoke visual imagery, which explains this process as lived rather than processed (Cowley, 2011; Järvilehto et al., 2011; Kravchenko, 2011). That is, when readers encounter descriptions within a text, especially if these descriptions are vivid, detailed and contextualised, they can directly pick up the literary experiences described in the text within their own bodies (Barrós-Loscertales et al., 2012; Simmons et al., 2005). This process involves activating sensory and motor regions of the brain associated with those experiences (Hruby and Goswami, 2011). Literary descriptions can evoke sensory information, such as visual, olfactory, auditory and tactile sensations. Readers engage with these sensory cues in a manner that closely resembles how they would respond to real-world sensory stimuli (Pulvermüller, 2005). Further, detailed and contextual literary scenes can trigger emotional responses in readers. They may empathise with the emotions experienced by the characters or narrators, which can lead to heightened emotional engagement with the text, something that goes beyond symbolic understanding or propositional knowledge (Trasmundi and Cowley, 2020).

To highlight the differences between the two approaches, consider the following example, which is taken from Conversations: ‘She [the protagonist’s mother] examined the herring on one side then the other, holding it up, and even the herring was both a memory and the something-more of the present’ (Vittorini, 2003: 53). Seen from the code view, this sentence might generate a propositional translation of the sentence through the steps of lexical processing of words to syntactic parsing, which enables relationships between subjects, object and verb, leading to a propositional construction by means of mental representation. These symbolic representations could, in turn, enable the reader to make semantic interpretations by comparing this result with prior knowledge. The code-view reader might still interpret the sentence in a literary manner, considering the mental representation of the herring-symbol as a complex symbol that holds both ‘memory and the something-more of the present’ and understand through previous readings and a certain experience with literary interpretation that the way the mother examines the herring on two sides might relate to these two symbolic meanings. However, a simpler explanation of how readers understand this example, and one in line with embodied and ecological approaches to cognition, is to think of the reader as using the linguistic structures to experience what is happening directly. As we will see in more detail in our analysis of this example in the section on Conversations, seeing this scene as experienced rather than decoded allows us cut through the symbolic layer of interpretation and argue that just as readers would be able to integrate material structures and social interactions in their remembering in real life, readers can use the herring here not as a symbol to be interpreted but as an evocative object to be directly experienced through the imagination as holding in it different layers of the past that are kept present simultaneously by the mother’s turning it back and forth.

Our argument does not deny that there is a massive amount of research suggesting hierarchical steps in reading (cf. Dehaene, 2009), such as the initial cognitive processes involved in decoding written text. However, once these processes are underway, readers can engage in a more direct embodied experience, bypassing the need for propositional translation. Neuroscience supports this explanation through empirical studies showing how sensory and motor experiences can activate the same neural circuits as when a person experiences them directly. Pulvermüller (2005) argues that reading about actions activates motor regions in the brain, showing that language engagement is linked to our sensory-motor systems. Hauk et al. (2004) further found that words like ‘kick’ or ‘pick’ trigger these motor areas, suggesting that readers re-enact physical experiences when engaging with text. Barsalou’s (2008) grounded cognition theory supports this view by proposing that cognitive processes, including reading, are rooted in sensory and motor experiences.

Kravchenko argues against the code view, suggesting the need for an alternative approach: ‘To understand what we read, we need to do more than decipher other people’s thoughts. Any code-based view of literacy is, at best, radically incomplete’ (Kravchenko, 2011: 39). Another critique of the code view on reading comes from ecological neuroscientists who study the anticipatory dynamics of reading, suggesting that

Reading, we conclude, is not a matter of decoding linguistic information. Far from being a text-driven process, it depends on integrating both sensory and motor processes in anticipatory meaning generation based on the history of experience and cultural context of the reader. (Järvilehto et al., 2011: 15)

Concretely, from an embodied and ecological perspective, we argue that reading can significantly impact the reader’s experience by engaging her in highly immersive and sensorimotor-rich cognitive processes. We are critical of the code view because it assumes that meaning emerges when a symbolic form – that is the text – is translated into another symbolic form, namely, the propositional mental representation. By emphasising the function of action–perception and embodied, experiential dynamics in reading texts, we can better understand how readers feel as they live the story and take part in it emotionally and cognitively. This argument aligns with embodied and ecological psychology (Chemero, 2009; Gibson, 1979), which has shown how cognition emerges not solely in the mind but through interactions between the brain, body and cultural environments.

Our alternative, the embodied and ecological approach, emphasises that reading involves a rich interplay between language and sensory-motor systems. Readers do not just translate words into thoughts; they (re)create understandings, emotions and bodily sensations inspired by the text and lived experience. ⁴ This approach recognises that reading is an ecological, embodied activity that transcends the limitations of a strict linguistic or cognitive code-view model. We acknowledge the possibility that certain texts can potentially enable a much more reflective and disembodied reading process than we consider here. However, we believe that in most kinds of literary texts, there is an important experiential element that is grounded in sensorial descriptions and action verbs. In what follows, we will focus on the possibilities such an embodied literary style can offer to readers in terms of experience. Conclusively, literature is thus not just a tool for abstract reasoning and thinking, but an artefact that enables readers to re-experience sensory, emotional and cognitive processes. In the next section, we put this embodied and ecological view of reading together with new work on memory. This will allow us to argue that when we read about memory in Conversations, the embodied and ecological dynamics of Vittorini’s narrative can provide readers access to a re-experience of these memory processes. Thus, this reading process can be said to be a form of remembering.

Constructive memory: imagination and the memories of others

The embodied and ecological approach to cognition challenges conventional views with its emphasis on the interconnectedness of the brain, the body, its sensory experiences and the environment (Chemero, 2009; De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007; Di Paolo et al., 2017; Gibson, 1979; Thompson, 2007; Trasmundi, 2020; Varela et al., 1991). We suggest that this approach to language and cognition can be usefully put together with recent developments in the cognitive science of memory. First, rather than viewing memory as passive retrieval of stored information in a mental drawer, a constructive view of memory (Schacter and Addis, 2007) has long been an integrated part of mainstream research. Further, memory is actively enacted by the body’s engagement with its surroundings and sensory perceptions, emotions and bodily sensations play an important role in memory formation and (re)construction (Iani, 2019; Sutton and Williamson, 2014) and the socio-material and emotional contexts in which they were initially experienced and where they are reconstructed (Brown and Reavey, 2015b; Fivush and Merrill, 2016; Heersmink, 2020; Michaelian and Sutton, 2013). In addition, since memory is not the retrieval of stored information about the past but is instead (re)constructed in the present, it is also closely linked with imagination (Addis, 2020; De Brigard, 2023; Michaelian, 2016).

For current purposes, we would like to zoom in on two recent developments within memory studies. First, empirical results have shown that the similarities between episodic memory and other cognitive episodic processes, such as imagination (Addis, 2020), future thinking (Szpunar, 2010) and counterfactual thinking (De Brigard and Parikh, 2019), are deep-running and that there are problems with trying to clearly separate between these at a phenomenological and neuronal level. It should be underlined that this discussion is still ongoing and that there are many counter voices to such attempts of dissolving the limits between episodic memories and other kinds of episodic thinking (see Andonovski et al., 2024). Yet, this questioning of the limits and nature of episodic memory has had important consequences in the field. Building on these developments, philosophers have developed a simulationist account of memory (De Brigard, 2023; Michaelian, 2016, 2024). In short, the simulationist account of memory posits that there is no way to ensure a firm anchoring of memories in the past event itself. Arguing against a causal view of memory (Martin and Deutscher, 1966; Sutton and O’Brien, 2022) that claims that memories need to have a causal relationship with a past event, simulationists have argued that this is not necessary. In a recent article, Michaelian pushes his earlier work even further, when he also drops the condition that for it to count as remembering, the event must actually have been experienced (even if it need not be a causal connection). His most up-to-date (and most radical) definition of memory runs simply that for it to be remembering, the subject must be able to represent an episode and that this process is done with a properly functioning episodic system. This means that for Michaelian’s (2024) simulationist account, ‘episodic memory is not memory for the episodes of the personal past; it is simply memory for episodes’ (1185). There are wide range of theoretical subtleties in this debate, as well as proposed ways to separate between memory and the imagination, and discussions regarding the simulationist nature of memory are far from settled. Yet the takeaway point here is that there seems to be growing support for viewing memory not as a natural kind but as part of a more general episodic system.

Overall, such views on memory as tightly connected with imagination, has had an impact also in empirical studies of memory. One result of this is that there is an emerging interest in the role and nature of memories that are not of the self but of others. In work on what has been termed ‘vicarious memories’ (Pillemer et al., 2015; Thomsen et al., 2025), the clear-cut distinction between personal memories and other peoples’ memories (vicarious memories) have been questioned. It has been found that calling to mind the episodes of other people’s lives (often those of close kin) is, phenomenologically, very similar to recalling one’s own experiences or life chapters, although less strong (Pillemer et al., 2015; Pond and Peterson, 2020; Thomsen and Pillemer, 2017). ⁵ As Pillemer et al. (2024) state in a recent article, vicarious memories are not about propositional knowledge as ‘vivid VM [vicarious memories] narratives allow transportation into the other person’s world in ways that are different from either abstracted knowledge or direct observation’ (160). This has led Pond and Peterson (2020) to argue that thinking of episodic memory as restricted to self-experienced memories is too narrow and that vicarious memory should also be counted as part of our capacity for episodic memory. Thomsen et al. (2025) state that ‘[a]lthough personal, vicarious and collective memories can be conceptualized as different types of memory, they intersect and blur into each other in myriad ways, reinforcing a need for a common framework’ (n.p.). If we accept the simulationist view sketched out above, it seems to support the call for including vicarious memories in the family of episodic memory. ⁶

These two research strands allow us to link the embodied-ecological account of reading and language with the cognitive process of remembering. The former approach, discussed in section 3, highlights the dynamic interplay between the body, its sensory-motor interactions and lived, contextual experience in reading. If we grant that written narratives can enable richly embodied and ecological experiences, not just symbolic translation, we can move literary narratives about the past into the recent developments in memory studies. Although the claims discussed above are not uncontroversial, we assume here a simulationist view of memory and endorse the claim that vicarious memories allow us to re-experience other people’s stories in a way that is largely overlapping with normal remembering. This validates our claim that Vittorini’s rich narrative can be said to offer a vicarious experience of memory during the reading of the book. Reading Vittorini’s novel, we will show, can be an embodied and sensorially rich experience that allows readers to vicariously follow the narrator’s memory processes when he returns to his childhood Sicily. Our embodied approach to reading acknowledges that the mind, body and world are intricately connected and that literature can tap into this connection to create deeply engaging and meaningful experiences for readers by prompting dynamic engagements with the text that can be understood as a process of vicarious remembering.

Vittorini’s ‘twice real’: analysing embodied memory in Conversations

When we now move to the analysis of Vittorini’s Conversations, we first show how he writes forth a sophisticated memory process that serves to reinsert his narrator, Silvestro, into the cultural ecology of his childhood Sicily. This style makes reality, in Silvestro’s words, twice real because the text both depicts what is there, Sicily as we can travel through, and the Sicily that Silvestro depicts through his emotional, experiential and lived connection with his homeland – that is through his memories. The protagonist also experiences how his imagination can drift off and make the twice real too far removed from concrete realities. We will trace how his readers are invited to follow this memory process in an embodied manner, using linguistic prompts and cues that resonate heavily with readers’ sensorimotor machinery. The embodied and ecological cognitive processes that are depicted in this book, we will argue, are not mainly driven by higher-level cognition but instead emerge from sensorimotor interactions. Given the embodied and ecological nature of language and reading, as well as the developments in work on memory we have reviewed above, we argue that these memory processes are re-experienced by the readers by relying on similar sensorimotor cues as those that Silvestro relies on. This process, then, will not need higher-level symbolic translation into explicit linguistic content. Rather, the memory processes are experienced directly with the readers’ bodies in the here and now.

In the first sentence of the novel, the narrator establishes his current negative state: ‘That winter I was in the grip of abstract furies’ (Vittorini, 2003: 5). These furies seem to be unable to find a concrete outlet and do not spur to action, rather the contrary:

That was the terrible thing: the calm in the midst of hopelessness. Believing humanity to be doomed and not burning with a fever to do anything about it; wanting to doom myself as an example of it instead. I was agitated by abstract furies, but they didn’t stir my blood, and I was calm, I desired nothing. (5–6)

The narrator is originally from Sicily but now lives in the much more prosperous north of Italy. He connects his state of apathy with his lack of connection to his childhood in Sicily:

I was calm. It was as if I had never had a day of life, never known what it meant to be happy; as if I had nothing to say, to affirm or deny, nothing of myself to put into play, and nothing to listen to; nothing to give and no inclination to receive; as if I had never in all my years of existence eaten bread, drunk wine or coffee, never gone to bed with a woman, never had children, never hit someone, never believed any of this possible; as if I had never had a childhood in Sicily among the prickly pears and sulphur, in the mountains; but inside, I was agitated by abstract furies, and I thought humanity was doomed [. . .]. (6)

The narrator is calm, despite his pessimistic beliefs about the future of mankind; he does nothing. Yet he does seemingly serve us an explanation of why he remains passive. He is calm, he says, ‘as if he never had a day of life’, that is he has no memory, no childhood in Sicily, he is without the flesh and blood provided by lived experience. Conversations can be read as the narrator’s (Silvestro) quest to regain the flesh and blood of his own life, to reinsert himself into the lived life of a man with a past and an origin.

Our entry point to this exploration of Silvestro’s quest will be Vittorini’s idea of the twice real. This idea, which surfaces at several points (and in different shapes) in the novel, is central to the narrator’s understanding and exploration of his own memories and the way these are shaped by embodied descriptions. We will dive further into this idea as we go, but a first example of this concept is presented by the narrator when he is reunited with his mother after 15 years. In their reunion scene, which is a key scene in the novel, the narrator and his mother eat together and talk. It is here that the narrator first introduces the idea of twice real:

[. . .] I saw that her face had lost nothing of the young face it had once been, as I was remembering it now, but age had added something to it. This was my mother: the memory of her fifteen years earlier, twenty years earlier, young and terrifying, the cane in her hand as she waited for us to jump off the freight train; that memory, plus all the time that had passed since then, the something-more of the present. In short, she was twice real. (52-53, our italics)

This dense passage contains complex relations between different timescales, as well as memory and imagination. First, in the mother’s face of today, nothing of the past is lost, but it is still a different face than the one of the past. Her face today contains all the traces of the past and its present state. This rich present, imbued with the past, is the twice real. Notice also the powerful embodied descriptions of his mother’s scary appearance that foreshadow a beating, and the hazardous children’s game of jumping off a train at speed.

Embodied descriptions such as these become much more pronounced in a later example of the twice real. After their reunion, Silvestro and his mother are having a meal together (we will return to this scene later). At one point during this meal, Silvestro is waiting for his mother to come back with some winter melons. These melons are heavily invested with memories, something which becomes clear when the mother appears with them in her hands: ‘And my mother came back, carrying a long melon in one hand. “See, sweetheart?” she said. “A winter melon!” She smiled, and she was like an apparition, twice real with the melon in her hand; she herself, and my childhood memory of her back in the plate-layers houses’ (66, our italics). The two then reminisce about how Silvestro and his brothers would try to find their mother’s hidden melons, never succeeding. Then,

The melon was put on the table and rolled slowly towards me, once, twice, its strong green rind subtly streaked with gold. I bent over to smell it. ‘That’s it’, I said. And there was a strong smell not only of the melon but an old smell like wine, the smell of lonely winters in the mountains, along the solitary track, and of the little dining room, with its low roof, in the platelayer’s house. (67-68)

In this passage, filled to the brink with both movements and sensorial detail, Silvestro presents his readers with a series of embodied prompts. Twice, the melon rolls slowly towards him, and its colours are evoked in detail. In this setting, it is as if the present is gradually imbued with the past through the rhythm of the rolling melon. Then the narrator smells. This smell is immediately connected with impressions from Sicily. However, there is no mention of the smell being translated into memories. Rather, the smell is portrayed as the memory itself. This smell brings memories of both abstract concepts, such as lonely winters, and more concrete physical memories, such as the low ceiling of a former house. Thus, Vittorini’s narrator draws heavily on embodied detail to reinstate the past in the present, making it twice real. This is achieved not through propositional language but through experience. As readers, we follow the melon as it is rolling from the past to the present, bringing the smell of memories consisting of abstract (loneliness), embodied (the low roof) and mixed (the solitary tracks) elements. In work on the role of evocative objects in memory (Heersmink, 2020; McCarroll and Kirby, 2023; Turkle, 2007), it has been claimed that objects can store and enable certain kinds of memories. Vittorini pushes this further, as his melon is not only evocative in the sense of holding memories; here, the evocative object (the melon) creates a possibility for remembering certain things for the narrator through its movements. Further, the sensorimotor memories enabled by the melon, as described by the narrator, do not seem to depend on symbolic translation but are depicted as experienced directly through the rolling melon. Given the way reading relies on a wide range of sensorial and sensorimotor processes, it seems that, for readers, the narrator’s concept of twice real can be re-experienced through a similar kind (although this does not imply identical) of remembering as that of the narrator.

As we proceed, we will see that food continues to play an important role for Vittorini, as he uses food’s close links with family life and Sicily as a whole as a way to anchor the past in a manner that enables rich memories and to re-establish himself in the twice real, in contrast to the abstract furies of Northern Italy. Re-establishing the twice real character of the present, imbued with the past, is the way out of the ‘abstract furies’ of Silvestro. Through reconnecting with Sicily, he exits his apathy and regains a form of political agency and impetus. In what follows, we will trace the embodied techniques Vittorini’s narrator uses to re-ground his present experience in the past. We will see how different forms of sensorial descriptions and action verbs result in powerful cues that both the narrator and the readers can use to experience the strange mix of past and present of the twice real. However, this is in no way an idyllic return to childhood’s lost paradise. Rather, the narrator’s mnemonic strategies allow him to connect to the concrete sufferings of the Sicilian people. In the last part of our analysis, we will see how a different embodied cue, namely wine, sets both Silvestro and the readers onto a path that loses track of concrete reality.

Cheese, oranges and herrings: embodying the past

Memories of his childhood in Sicily do not return suddenly for Vittorini’s narrator. Rather, he is slowly reintroduced into the Sicilian way of being through a series of meetings on his travel to meet his mother in her mountain village. Just as in the reunion scene with Silvestro and his mother, food is important in this slow return to the way of thinking of his childhood island. At the ferry crossing from Calabria to Sicily, the third-class floor is crowded with poor Sicilians. Silvestro has bought himself some bread and some Sicilian cheese before the crossing. This cheese connects Silvestro with his past in a way that is heavily invested with sensorial detail: ‘In Villa San Giovanni I had bought something to eat, bread and cheese, and I was eating it on the deck (bread, raw air, cheese) with gusto and appetite because in that cheese I recognized the ancient flavours of my mountains, and even their smells, their herds of goats, and their wormwood smoke’ (12). As we see, through the cheese, an almost Proustian memory unfolds, rich with sensorial detail. However, these memories are not yet connected to the Sicilian realities. The narrator, spurred on by these memories, tries to connect with his Sicilian fellow passengers, but his attempts fail: ‘I smiled at them as I ate and they looked at me without smiling. “There’s no cheese like ours”, I said. No one responded, but everyone looked at me [. . .]’ (12). As the narrator is kickstarting his memories of Sicily with the cheese, he still does not understand the level of hunger his fellow Sicilians have, and thus, why his proclamations of the qualities of Sicilian cheese might not be taken up well.

Still on board the ferry, he meets a Sicilian man and his wife. The Sicilian offers an orange to his wife, and at her refusal, he seems desperate. He ends up eating it himself,

angrily, in a frenzy, without even wanting it and without chewing, swallowing as if cursing, his fingers wet with the juice of the orange in the cold, his body a little bent into the wind, the soft visor of his cap batting against his nose. (15)

These oranges, as it turns out later, are his salary for working in an orange orchard, a salary he cannot sell, and is forced to eat himself. In the description above, these injustices manifest themselves on the little Sicilian’s body. The oranges give us a concrete physical object with which we can use to understand the injustice. As he digests the oranges, involuntarily, he curses, and the orange juice sticks to his body. In the quote above, it is as if the Sicilian man is wrapped up and covered by injustice, but he is forced to accept it, to digest it as best he can (‘swallowing as if cursing’). From this meeting, the narrator seems to begin understanding the level of hunger. The little Sicilian asks: ‘‘‘Are you American?’ He spoke with desperation yet with gentleness, as he had remained gentle even in his desperate peeling of the orange and desperate eating of it’ (15). This seems to make the narrator realise his strangeness and lack of understanding, and he replies ‘Yes’, I said, “I’m American. I’ve been an American for the last fifteen years”’ (15). Onboard the boat, food not only has the Proustian qualities of bringing back embodied memories but also functions to reveal the distance between the narrator and the hungry Sicilians, showing the hindrances for the narrator to regain his understanding of himself and of Sicily as twice real. Silvestro describes this process as happening through physical objects, the cheese and the oranges. When reading, the way these objects are handled, as well as their smells and looks, would activate readers’ sensorimotor systems and enable them to experience and discover, along with Silvestro, the deep poverty and injustice in Sicily at this time.

We have already discussed the reunion scene briefly with the mother. This scene is depicted at length, spanning 10 chapters (XI–XX). At this point, the narrator has worked his way down the Sicilian coast, travelled upwards into the mountains, before finally entering his mother’s house. Their reunion takes the narrator a very long way in restoring his connection with his childhood Sicily. Food remains the nave of this remembering, as it serves as a way to evoke and connect the memories of the mother and the narrator. Together, the two recreate rich and embodied memories that reconnect the narrator with his childhood.

Arriving in the small mountain village, the narrator finds the house of his mother and enters. The two recognise each other, hug, and the mother invites the narrator into the kitchen, saying that she is making herrings. The following scene is full of sensory details:

On the ground, beneath a wooden platform, a copper brazier was lit. The herring was roasting over it, smoking, and my mother bent over to turn it. ‘You’ll taste how good it is’, she said. ‘I will, I said, and breathed in the smell of herring, and it made a difference to me, I liked it, it brought back the smell of the meals of my childhood’. ‘I can’t imagine anything better’, I said, and asked, ‘Did we have it when I was a boy?’ (50, our italics)

We see here how the sensory details, the copper brazier, the smoke and his mother’s back turned to him as she flips the herrings, set the scene. Then the narrator smells the food, and this directly brings back his childhood. In the following scene, food references are sent back and forth, and from them emerge new memories. Within cognitive science, there is an emerging interest in the way we can remember together with others, and where memories are brought forth by collaboration, sometimes allowing for memories to emerge that are more than the sum of the participants’ memories (Barnier et al., 2018; Harris et al., 2014, 2018). Here, the collaborative remembering between the narrator and the mother happens through an anchoring in food: ‘Oh yes’, my mother said. ‘Herring in the winter and peppers in the summer. That’s what we always had. Don’t you remember?’ ‘And fava beans with thistles’, I said, remembering’ (Vittorini, 2003: 51, our italics). Here, the mother’s cooking and her retelling of the seasonal changes in diet enable memories in the narrator, as we see from the italics. However, this also goes the other way, and as they continue, we see how the two seem to be reciprocally helping each other by invoking the memories of childhood through providing embodied cues. They continue:

‘Yes’, my mother said. ‘Fava beans with thistles. You loved fava beans with thistles’. ‘Oh’, I said. ‘I loved them?’ And my mother: ‘You’d always want a second helping . . . And the same thing with lentils done with artichoke, sundried tomatoes, and lard.’. . . ‘And a sprig of rosemary, yes?’ I said. And my mother: ‘Yes . . . And a sprig of rosemary’. And I: I always wanted a second helping of that, too?’ And my mother: ‘Oh yes! You were like Esau . . . You would have given away your birthright for a second plate of lentils . . . I can still see you when you came home from school, at three or four in the afternoon, on the train’ . . . (51, our italics)

As we see from the italics, the narrator is cuing and directing the mother through his questions, shaping the direction of her memories. These open questions seem to prompt memories for the mother. Importantly, this is done by using different food ingredients.

Their conversation continues as the mother is preparing the herring. As the collaborative remembering between the two reaches its apogee, the embodied aspects of their joint remembering through food are highlighted as the narrator connects their reminiscing with the twice real and the herrings. The following citation comes right after the first mention of the twice real, quoted further above, and develops this idea, connecting it with the food and the social aspect of remembering here:

She examined the herring on one side then the other, holding it up, and even the herring was both a memory and the something-more of the present – the sun, the cold, the copper brazier in the middle of the kitchen, the existence in my mind of that place in the world where I found myself, everything had this quality of being twice real; and maybe this was why it made a difference to me to be there, to be on a journey, because of everything that was twice real, even the journey down from Messina, and the oranges on the ferry, and the Big Lombard on the train, and Whiskers and Without Whiskers [these, and the Big Lombard, are characters the narrator met on the train], and the malarial green, and Siracusa – in all, Sicily itself, everything twice real, and on a journey in the fourth dimension. (53, our italics)

As we discussed briefly in section 3, by turning the herring from one side to the other, the mother provides a possibility to experience the twice real: on one side of the herring is the past, on the other, the ‘something-more of the present’. This is a good example of the complex uses of food in Vittorini’s novel. On one hand, the herring is used as an evocative object that holds certain memories (of the sun, the cold, etc.). However, it also goes beyond this, in that the herring can also be acted upon: holding it up, looking at it from both sides. This adds an important embodied aspect to its evocative function that enables an experience of the past in the here and now of the narrator, through using the double temporality of the herring. In the current framework, these sensorial aspects (smell, taste, looks) as well as the action possibilities (holding up, turning) enable readers to engage in similar memory processes as those depicted in the novel.

Drifting imagination: wine and the world

However, different embodied descriptions enable different experiences. The qualities of food and the activities that surround meals provide for certain cognitive processes in the novel and, subsequently, certain reading experiences. However, as their meal ends, Silvestro turns to wine instead of food, something which has a very different effect on the narrative, and, arguably, the readers’ experience of this. Following the embodied and ecological view of language and reading, wine in a written text could evoke traces of its sensorimotor effects and action possibilities in real life. Silvestro seems to take advantage of this as he construes wine as the dark side of the twice real. His readers follow along in his tracks, experiencing the alcohol-fused vision of Sicily that emerges from Silvestro’s drinking session.

After their meal, the narrator accompanies his mother on her rounds as she helps sick villagers with their injections of medicine. After being shown around the village and meeting a series of sick and vulnerable people, the narrator tires and decides to go off on his own. He meets a knife grinder who introduces him to some of his friends and takes him to a bar located in a dark cellar, where they all get drunk on wine. Where food had an important role as a way of enabling an experience of the past as experienced in the present, wine also has an important effect on the narrator, seemingly also creating a twice real, but this time with negative connotations. Inside the bar, the narrator describes its double reality: ‘[. . .] from the walls, from the darkness, came the age-old odour of wine accumulated upon wine. The whole past of wine in human life was present around us’ (Vittorini, 2003: 159). However, this provides other possibilities for thinking about the world than does food and social interaction. Wine here seems to provide an illusory escape from concrete social realities, as the knife grinder slips into a drunken and imaginary flow of words: ‘[. . .] free legs, free arms, free chests, hair and skin in the wind in freedom, a free race, a free fight, uh! oh! ah!’’ (160). Here, the embodied depictions of freedom, followed by what seems to be drunken moaning, not only give a very different experience from the grounded memories of family life but also suffering, which was enabled by food. The knife grinder continues some passages later, referring to the narrator: ‘He suffers for the wronged world, and the world is large, the world is beautiful, the world is a bird and has milk, gold, fire, thunder and floods’ (161). Wine seems to render the world beautiful and full of possibilities. This, as we have seen, is very much negated by the concrete social and political realities. The twice real of the wine is not properly connected to reality nor to the past: ‘Thus those who suffered personal misfortune and those who suffered the pain of the wronged world were together in the nude tomb of wine, and could be like spirits, finally parted from this world of sufferings and wrongs’ (163). As we see from the last quote, the vision of Sicily brought forth by wine is illusory. The intoxicating effects of wine let the imagination drift away too long, creating an understanding of Sicily which denies the political and economic realities.

At one point during their drinking session, the narrator realises that he cannot venture any further into this imaginatively invested Sicily where the world is beautiful and filled with ‘milk, gold, fire, thunder and floods’. Something stops him: ‘[. . .] I couldn’t drink any more, I didn’t dare advance any further into the squalid nudity, the groundless territory of wine’ (164, our italics). Here, as we see from the italics, the narrator shows how wine does not allow for a proper connection to the real; it is groundless, flying above the Sicilians’ concrete sufferings. The wine tastes good, he says,

[. . .] but even so I couldn’t drink it; all the human past in me told me it was not something living, pressed from the summer and the earth, but a sad, sad thing, a phantom pressed from the caverns of centuries. (164)

Taken literally, wine is pressed from the summer and the earth, as the grapes are harvested after the growth season during the summer. However, arguably, the narrator refers to its effect as an anchor for the twice real and the past. Wine does not allow a deep connection to the lived lives of Sicilians, as food does (which is also pressed from the summer and the earth). Rather, it enables flights of imagination that do not allow for social action, nor does it take into account the lack of food and justice in Sicily. Before exiting the bar, the narrator puts this point succinctly: ‘[. . .] this was not what I wanted to believe in, there was no world in this [. . .]’ (166). In our reading of the reunion scene, we saw how the narrator succeeded in reinstating the twice-real nature of himself and his mother through anchoring their memory process in food. In the scene at the bar, we see the dark side of such embodied and ecological remembering. We see how wine pushes towards a distorted understanding of the world. Both these different processes are heavily embodied. The sensorial descriptions and action verbs are what imbue the present with past (in the case of food) and false meaning and beauty (in the case of wine). These reading experiences need not take a detour through high-level symbolic translation to be understood, but can be experienced directly in the reader’s here and now. Thus, the reading experience becomes twice real: Readers re-experience the novel’s memory process in the concrete here and now.

Conclusion

Through our example, Elio Vittorini’s Conversations, we have argued that reading can go well beyond a mere intellectual exercise and be a deeply embodied experience that can elicit physiological responses and engage readers on a sensory and emotional level that differs from propositional knowledge. This provides a way to go beyond the code view in research on reading. Reading can be (and, we strongly suspect, often is) a re-experience of the cognitive processes taking place in the fictional world. Rather than translating words and sentences into symbolic representations, reading can be an immersive and embodied experience where the imaginative flights of our minds and bodies mix with those of fictional characters and narrators. By re-experiencing cognitive-affective states depicted in literature, reading can potentially have an impact outside the reading process, as readers may shape their perceptions, memories and self-understanding through reading (Fialho, 2019; Trasmundi and Cowley, 2020). This suggests that the impact of literary engagement extends beyond abstract reasoning into deeply embodied and experiential dimensions, making literary reading a potential site for cognitive and emotional transformation (Fialho, 2019; Haraldsen and Kukkonen, 2025). More broadly, going beyond just texts that portray memories, it seems likely that other cognitive processes can be re-experienced as well through certain kinds of literary texts. This might provide readers with a way of better knowing their own cognitive processes and a better understanding of how we act, perceive and understand the world or, as Karin Kukkonen (2020) has argued, ‘[l]iterature is a place where you can watch yourself think’ (191).

This also underscores the importance of considering the embodied nature of reading in educational and pedagogical contexts, potentially leading to a reevaluation of curricula and teaching methods. First, we argue for the need to examine the writing style employed in the texts used in classrooms, particularly if that style is seen as having a tangible or embodied impact on the reader’s experience. We encourage a more informed choice of text because the content of the text itself has significant effects on how the reader is engaged. Second, we encourage classroom discussions around reading that include the cognitive processes involved in the text. Discussing how students think in different settings, after they have (hopefully) partly re-experienced certain cognitive processes in their reading, might be a useful way of creating engagement around literary texts. Such discussions could enable reflections on historical differences in styles of thinking (with older literature), the students’ own cognitive processes and habits, as well as cognitive differences among the students.