Kinesthesia is taken as the sense of body movement and position. It permits the readers to coordinate and control the bod movements. This literary technique maintains balance and experience physical sensations like touch, pain, warmth etc. In literature, the writers use kinesthetic details to evoke visceral reactions in readers, which make them feel immersed in the characters’ experiences.
Definition of Kinesthesia
Kinesthesia is a literary device which is also known as proprioception. It is defined as the ability to feel and be aware of one’s body position, weight, movement and balance. Through specialized nerve receptors in the muscles, tendons and joints called proprioceptors, kinesthetic information is relayed to the brain about the current state of the body. This constant flow of sensory feedback enables fluid, coordinated motion and balance. Kinesthesia works in conjunction with the other body senses of touch, sight, and balance to create awareness of physical presence.
Functions of Kinesthesia
Kinesthesia serves many important bodily functions:
- Enables control of bodily movements – From basic reflexes to highly precise motor skills, kinesthesia provides the feedback needed to control muscle contractions and coordinate complex sequences of motion.
- Maintains balance – Information about the orientation of body parts relative to one another and to the ground is essential for balance. Kinesthesia prevents falls.
- Registers physical sensations – Kinesthetic receptors inform the brain about stimuli like touch, pain, temperature and the relative position of body parts. This helps protect the body from damage.
- Promotes body awareness – Constant kinesthetic signals create an overall sense of one’s physical presence and placement in space. This subconscious body awareness is key to normal functioning.
Importance of Kinesthesia in Literature
- Immerse readers in experiences – Vivid descriptions of how actions feel engage readers’ own proprioceptive memories, pulling them into the scene.
- Build empathy – Kinesthetic writing helps readers embody and emotionally connect with characters, sharing their physical sensations.
- Set tone & atmosphere – Certain kinesthetic descriptions can evoke visceral reactions, like tension, discomfort, thrill, queasiness, or relaxation.
- Reveal inner states – A character’s physicality can provide subtle external insights into their emotions, health, motivations, etc.
- Aid visualization – Concrete details of movement and physicality assist readers in visually picturing the action.
- Establish setting – Descriptions of temperature, terrain, close spaces, etc. provide strong sensory context.
Examples of Kinesthesia in Literature
Here are detail examples of kinesthetic writing from well-known literary works:
1. Temperature in James Joyce’s “The Dead”
In this scene from Joyce’s famous story, the frigid temperature plunges readers into the bitter cold of a winter night:
“Her shoes in one hand, she stood feeling over her hair with the other. Her beautiful hair was all damp, her fair throat damp, her delicate pink fingers damp and limp. An unpleasant warmth had spread all through his body leaving a strange ache in his limbs. He was conscious of their breathing each by each.”
2. Claustrophobia in “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe
Poe uses the sensation of being trapped to convey a nightmarish claustrophobia:
“The gait of my friend was unsteady, and the bells upon his cap jingled as he strode. I followed immediately at his heels, through a narrow passage, down a winding staircase, urging him to seek safety by flight. At the end of the passage a heap of bones met my eye, and my heart sickened as Fortunato clutched my arm and leaned upon me for support.”
3. Movement in “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac
Kerouac’s descriptions of driving capture the thrill and vibrancy of motion:
“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life. So Dean and I raced on to Chicago, crossing Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, finally Iowa on a long beautiful crazy extravaganza when everything seemed to be clacking and clanging into a new place in time.”
4. Exhaustion in “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane
The painful heaviness in the men’s arms powerfully evokes their profound exhaustion after days stranded at sea:
“The oiler and the correspondent rowed, and also the cook. They sat together in the same seat, at one of the three oars. The small boat had begun to climb a gentle slope of the sea. The oiler and the correspondent sat together in the same seat, the oiler pulled his left-handed oar and looked ahead…Each wave was a little higher than the last one, and each, at the top, managed to sprinkle a bit more water into the boat.”
5. Hunger in “A Hunger Artist” by Franz Kafka
Kafka uses gnawing hunger pangs to convey the protagonist’s anguished fasting:
“During these last decades the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished. It used to pay very well to stage such great performances under one’s own management, but today that is quite impossible…When the day came on which a fast usually ended, the whole town was on the move; everybody wanted to be there for the finish; there were people on all the roofs in the area; the fast had captured their imagination and every spectator felt a kind of kinship to the faster – which, of course the faster did not perceive.”
6. Drug Effects in “Confessions of an English Opium Eater” by Thomas De Quincey
De Quincey vividly describes the strange bodily effects of opium:
“Here was opium, which had sustained many miseries, and which had the power to still other miseries still. There I lay stretched on my bed — passive, relaxed, torpid, ignorant alike of life or death. Then came the mighty cataract. With unfathomable murmur it roared through all my brain; and with mingled and tumultuous images I arose as from sleep, with sound in my ears, a light in my eyes; intense yet dim, an intolerable ecstasy of joy.”
7. Grief in “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion
Didion portrays visceral grief through restlessness and agitation:
“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect the shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”
Literary Devices Related to Kinesthesia
- Metaphor: Bodily sensations used symbolically to describe emotions – “My heart is racing with excitement”
- Simile: Comparing actions to feelable sensations – “My joints creaked like rusty door hinges”
- Personification: Inanimate things described in kinesthetic terms – “The trees danced in the wind”
- Onomatopoeia: Words that phonetically sound like movement – “Thump, crack, zip!”
- Alliteration: Repetition of sounds evoking physicality – “Her dainty digits danced”
Kinesthetic language immerses readers in experiences and environments, creating visceral engagement with literature. By tapping into the power of physical sensations, writers can tell vivid and emotionally resonant stories.
Read also: Literary Devices That Start with K
