Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Each Word of Skin
- 1 Writing Bodies: Hustvedt's Textual Skin
- 2 Expeausition: Ondaatje's Skin-Effects
- 3 The Law of Tact: Freud and H.D.
- 4 So Close: Writing that Touches
- 5 Dis-tanz: 29 Tangos
- 6 Hand Delivered: From A to X
- 7 Digital Technologies and Prosthetic Possibilities
- 8 Phantom Limbs: Bowen's ‘Hand in Glove’
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - So Close: Writing that Touches
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Each Word of Skin
- 1 Writing Bodies: Hustvedt's Textual Skin
- 2 Expeausition: Ondaatje's Skin-Effects
- 3 The Law of Tact: Freud and H.D.
- 4 So Close: Writing that Touches
- 5 Dis-tanz: 29 Tangos
- 6 Hand Delivered: From A to X
- 7 Digital Technologies and Prosthetic Possibilities
- 8 Phantom Limbs: Bowen's ‘Hand in Glove’
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
(I won't bother arguing that I7#x0027;m not praising some dubious ‘touching literature.’ I know the difference between writing and flowery prose, but I know of no writing that doesn't touch. Because then it wouldn't be writing, just reporting or summarizing. Writing in its essence touches upon the body.) (Jean-Luc Nancy)
Does writing touch? For Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘touching – happens in writing all the time’. Outlining the relationship between touching and feeling, this chapter examines the tactile quality of So Close by Helene Cixous. Discussing the circulation of affect within the literary text, we explore some of the ways her writing generates new textures of feeling. Rubbing up against a number of works by Helene Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy and Renu Bora, this chapter also investigates ways in which texts can touch each other without tampering. Through a tactful reading of Cixous's poetics in So Close, I hope to get closer to touching back.
On feeling
In Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin, Ashley Montagu notes:
Interestingly enough, when one consults a dictionary for the various meanings of the word one finds that the entry under ‘touch’ is likely to represent the most extensive in the volume. It is by far the longest entry – fourteen full columns – in the magnificent Oxford English Dictionary. This in itself constitutes some sort of testimony to the influence which the tactile experience of hand and fingers has had upon our imagery and our speech.
Touch, then, is a slippery term, and an intimate connection between touching and feeling is revealed in our everyday language; as Montagu notes, a ‘deeply felt experience is “touching”’. Montagu argues that ‘although touch is not itself an emotion, its sensory elements induce those neural, glandular, muscular, and mental changes which in combination we call an emotion’. ‘Hence touch’, he explains, ‘is not experienced as a simply physical modality, as sensation, but affectively, as emotion.’ In other words, we experience touch through our feelings.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Tactile PoeticsTouch and Contemporary Writing, pp. 64 - 79Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015