Viktor Shlovsky wrote almost hundred years ago that there is art that makes one “recover the sensation of life”. His famous remark “to make the stone stony” refers, in my mind, to the very concept of a sensorial aesthetic; objects should be described as they are sensed not as they are perceived. Modernist novels occupy an ambiguous space between being mono-medial and multi-modal, acting as both self-referencing works of art and, at the same time, evidently referring to and being inspired by other media such as cinematography and music. Studies of modernist fiction, and its relation to the sensorial modalities vision and sound, are numerous and convincing, especially in concordance with modernity and technology (Danius 2002; Jacobs 2001; Kern 1983; Kundu 2008); discussions on the remaining sensorial modalities, smell, taste and pressure, are scarcer. In this paper I will investigate modernist fiction in the light of a multimodal aesthetic that (a) relates to text as sensorial rather than as perceptive, e.g. the production of sensorial perception in readers rather than perception inherently already being part of literary discourse, and (b) focuses mainly on smell, taste and the auditive. In addition to investigating why modernism, in particular, accentuated sensorial modalities, my paper is concerned with aesthetic strategies and emotive reception. This investigation will, apart from sketching some general historical and theoretical outlines, mainly discuss examples from texts by Malcolm Lowry and William Faulkner, in order to convincingly establish a relation between modernist fiction and sensorial aesthetics.