Tactile Poetics: Touch and Contemporary Writing 9780748685325

Citation preview

Tactile Poetics

For Aoife

Tactile Poetics Touch and Contemporary Writing

Sarah Jackson

© Sarah Jackson, 2015 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 pt Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 8531 8 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 8532 5 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 8533 2 (epub) The right of Sarah Jackson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Acknowledgementsvi Introduction: Each Word of Skin

1

1. Writing Bodies: Hustvedt’s Textual Skin 

14

2. Expeausition: Ondaatje’s Skin-Effects 

32

3. The Law of Tact: Freud and H.D. 

51

4. So Close: Writing that Touches 

64

5. Dis-tanz: 29 Tangos 

80

6. Hand Delivered: From A to X 

98

7. Digital Technologies and Prosthetic Possibilities 

120

8. Phantom Limbs: Bowen’s ‘Hand in Glove’ 

140

Bibliography 150 Index161

Acknowledgements

Innumerable friends and colleagues have contributed to the shape and direction of this book. Without their encouragement and expertise, it would not be the book that it is. I’m indebted to them all. In particular, I would like to thank Anna Ball, Cathy Clay, Abi Curtis, Sarah Dillon, Celia Hunt, Philip Leonard, Nicholas Royle, Karen Schaller, Bethan Stevens, Sarah Wood, Gregory Woods, Tim Youngs and Nahem Yousaf for their inspiration and advice, and to my editors at Edinburgh University Press for their expert guidance. Acknowledgements must also be made to Friedrich-Wilhelm-MurnauStiftung for permission to include four film stills from Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang. Chapter 5, ‘Diz-tanz: 29 Tangos’ was first published in Oxford Literary Review in a special issue on deconstruction and poetry, edited by Sarah Wood, 33.2 (2011), pp. 167–87. Parts of Chapter 3 were published as ‘Touching Freud’s Dog: H.D.’s Tactile Poetics’ in Angelaki, 15.2 (2010), pp. 187–201, and an earlier version of Chapter 4, ‘So Close: Writing that Touches’, appeared in New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, 9.3 (2012), pp. 408–18. I am grateful to the editors and publishers of these journals for permitting me to reprint material in this volume. I also wish to thank the AHRC for doctoral funding, the University of Sussex for supporting my initial research and the School of Arts and Humanities at Nottingham Trent University for enabling and enriching the development of this book. And finally, but especially, thanks to Paul and Aoife, and to all my family, for their belief in me, their love and their immeasurable patience.

Introduction

: Each Word of Skin

Each Word of Skin

There is a way our bodies are not our own, and when he finds her there is room at last for everyone they love, the place he finds, she finds, each word of skin a decision. (Anne Michaels)1 The writer must get into touch with his reader by putting before him something which he recognizes, which therefore stimulates his imagination, and  makes him willing to cooperate in the far more difficult business of ­intimacy. (Virginia Woolf)2

Offering a ‘word of skin’, Anne Michaels’ ‘Into Arrival’ touches on the ways that the skin might be written about, written on and written into being. Pointing to the intimate relationship between the page and the surface of the body, the poem not only suggests that the skin signifies, but also indicates opportunities for it to be read, and re-read differently. Identifying this bond, Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey argue that the skin and writing are both ‘processes that involve materiality and signification, limits and possibilities, thought and affect, difference and identity’.3 The skin’s capacity to signify, moreover, leads them to conclude that we cannot think about the skin without touching on its ‘writerly effect’.4 This book is an examination of the relationship between writing and the surface of the body, considering not only the writing-effects of the skin, but also the ways that the text is like a skin, shedding, exposing and dissolving its own limits. And if the text functions like a skin, what happens, it asks, when a work of literature moves or touches us? As Virginia Woolf seems to indicate, touch can take place on a textual as well as a corporeal level. Insisting that it is the writer’s task to ‘get into touch’ with the reader, Woolf points to the tactile exchanges inherent in acts of reading and writing. Drawing on a range of work by

­2    Tactile Poetics t­wentieth- and twenty-first-century writers, and considering the ‘skineffects’ of language, this book explores the relationship between text and tact. In the following pages, we think about how texts touch not only their readers, but also touch on themselves and each other.

Touch paper 1: skin In the beginning, touch; at the origin, the medium. (Michel Serres)5

Before we begin, if it is ever possible to begin, or to begin again, there is touch.6 As Michel Serres writes in The Five Senses, it is ‘at the origin, the medium’. But touch comes to mean different things, at different times and in different places, to different people.7 This makes any theorisation of ‘the’ sense of touch a potentially troublesome one. Let us start, or start over, then, at the skin, for Jacques Derrida is not alone in his insistence that ‘a thinking of touch must at least go through a theory of skin’.8 As the site of our encounter with the world, the skin’s signification is multiple and complex, perpetually generating new meanings and alternative lines of thought. Steven Connor’s The Book of Skin provides a rich analysis of the changing status of the skin in historical and cultural terms, detailing the development of its representation in art and literature. He explains that although it covers the whole of the body, the skin in classical and medieval times was never actually considered to be part of the body. It was simultaneously ‘glorified’ and ‘disposed of’; ‘like a universal currency, the skin could underpin every value while having none itself’.9 This was the tendency in Western civilisation for centuries: the skin functioned as an invisible background for the rest of the body. Unless it pertained to disordered skins – skins marked in some way by race, culture, disease or trauma – the surface of the body remained unseen. Although, as Connor points out, the first book about the skin to be published in Europe was Girolamo Mercurialis’s De Morbis Cutaneis in 1572, no further significant work on the skin appeared for nearly two hundred years.10 It was only with the advances of science in the early modern era that the body began to be perceived differently. By the late eighteenth century, the skin had become that which we must breach to get to the body’s inside. In effect, knowledge of the body was produced through disembodiment as the skin was stripped back in anatomical dissection. Claudia Benthien notes: The history of anatomy can thus also be read as reverse archaeology, a paradoxical uncovering of layers in which the deepest strata were conquered first and the gaze returned only gradually to the surface, where a more refined

Introduction: Each Word of Skin    ­3 analysis revealed that the material that was initially flipped aside unnoticed was significant.11

Thus, only when the depths of the body had been penetrated did the scrutiny, at last, return to the surface. In recent years, however, the body’s margins have taken centre stage in critical and cultural theory, and far from being nudged aside, the skin is often considered to be at the forefront of identity. Critics emphasise not only its position as the site of individuation, but also its significance as the milieu through which we come to know and make contact with ourselves and other people. Facilitating dialogic exchange with the world, the skin is thus both the point of contact and the site of rupture. Studies of the skin have multiplied, indicating the various ways that the surface of the body signifies in different contexts. Examples include Benthien’s reading of the representation of skin colour in literature and the history of science, Jennifer Biddle’s account of the inscriptive practices of Australian Aborigines, Constance Classen’s examination of animal skins, and Jay Prosser’s discussion of the significance of the skin for transsexuals.12 What unites these studies is a refusal to take the skin for granted; rather than seeing it as a background screen, these critics draw attention to the crucial importance of the body’s limits. But the skin must be read beyond the boundary of the body. Particularly relevant to the direction of this study is the work of French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu, for whom the skin – our largest organ – is always the most important matter of the self. In The Skin Ego, first published in French in 1985, Anzieu positions touch as our first language; as infants, it is through the surfaces of our bodies that we first experience feelings of pleasure and displeasure. These early experiences enable connections between the external sensations of the skin and our internal emotional states. Researching the reciprocal relationship between the skin and the psyche in light of the pathologies that he encountered while working in a dermatological unit, Anzieu insists on the need for a unifying bodily envelope or psychical skin. This is the projection of the skin in the mind in order to generate an envelope or container for our sense of self. Implicit in Anzieu’s account, however, is the contradictory nature of this skin: it is ‘both permeable and impermeable, superficial and profound, truthful and misleading. It is regenerative, but caught up in a continual process of desiccation [. . .] The skin is both solid and fragile.’13 It is these contradictions that make Anzieu’s model a useful way of thinking about aesthetic form. The depth of the relationship between psyche and skin, and its implications for a theory of writing, is hinted at in Anzieu’s passing reference to a ‘poet searching for a “skin of

­4    Tactile Poetics words” [peau de mots] to weave on to his blank page’.14 Here, Anzieu alludes to what is made apparent in Michaels’ poem: the irreducible bond between words and skin. This relationship lies at the core of this book, and in the following chapters we consider the ways that thinking through the contradictions of the surface of the body might provide us with a framework for reading the complexities of a ‘textual skin’.

Touch paper II: touch If a text can function as a skin, how might writing work to touch us? For Aristotle, who sets out a theory of the five senses in De Anima, touch is always our primary means of perception. While all the senses contribute to our sense of well-being, touch is the only sense that we cannot live without. Necessary for all the other senses to function, it is our ‘common sense’. Although all animals have the sense of touch, Aristotle argues that it is the condition of human intelligence: ‘in point of touch his accuracy exceeds that of the others by a long way. And it is also for this reason that he is the most intelligent of the animals.’15 Despite its central role, however, he considers touch to be the basest or most servile sense, an opinion maintained by many Western philosophers for the last two and a half thousand years. Susan Stewart, for instance, provides a detailed account of the classical view of the senses, referring to medieval writers who use didactic and allegorical tales to demonstrate the view that touch is the condition of four other senses. Associated with proximity and corporeality, touch is conceptualised as residing within the body and thus separate from the mind. Its position in opposition to the intellect is evident in Elizabethan poetry, which, Stewart remarks, makes ‘witty, satirical use of the lower senses of taste, smell and touch’.16 The debasement of touch is still evident today and, as Michel Serres points out, ‘many philosophies refer to sight; few to hearing; fewer still place their trust in the tactile, or olfactory. Abstraction divides up the sentient body, eliminates taste, smell and touch, retains only sight and hearing, intuition and understanding.’17 Serres seeks to counter this hierarchy of the senses, and opens his examination with an account of touch, which he positions here, at the origin, right at the beginning. Serres is not alone in his attention to touch, and research into the tactile has been rejuvenated in recent years. Santanu Das, for example, notes that ‘there has been a sudden swell of interest in the senses’.18 Touch, often considered the most ‘intimate’ and ‘elusive’ of the senses, has, as Das explains, gained new ground.19 It is also the first sense to develop in utero. Clinical and theoretical research indicate that it is

Introduction: Each Word of Skin    ­5

central to subjectivity, and developmental psychologists have become particularly interested in the role of touch in human behaviour. Ashley Montagu proposes that bodily contact between the infant and the caregiver is vital for healthy human growth, and cites, at great length, several ailments that are the result of inadequate cutaneous stimulation during childhood.20 But the crucial significance of our experiences of the skin is not restricted to infancy. Locating touch at the interface between the self and the world, Irving Goh and Ryan Bishop emphasise that touch is always the ‘irreducible fact of existence, of our existing with others’.21 Touch, for these thinkers, is at the heart of all being. And because of this, a rethinking of touch necessarily unsettles our ideas about ourselves and the world around us. Certainly, scholars seem to have a lot to say about touch and over the last two decades the tactile has become the subject of intense critical debate.22 Laura McMahon, for instance, wonders if this current surge in a fascination with touch – and specifically, an investment in its associated dimensions of materiality, authenticity and referentiality – might be linked to a nostalgia for an embodied presence perceived to be lost in a digital age of hyper-mediated experience.23

This book is not just interested in the ways that touch is mediated in digital culture, but in all experiences of contact. Central to my argument is the work of Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. In Corpus, Nancy challenges the work of phenomenologists such as Maurice MerleauPonty, who suggests in The Visible and the Invisible that the reflexivity of the self-touch plays out the interrelatedness of self to world.24 Questioning this sense of epidermal mediation, as well as Edmund Husserl’s understanding of touch as immediate and auto-affective, Nancy insists ‘I am an outside for myself.’25 He explains why, for him, phenomenology’s efforts to describe a ‘primary interiority’ are impossible: ‘to begin with, I have to be an exteriority in order to touch myself. And what I touch remains on the outside.’26 The body’s experience, he argues, is always exterior. Moreover, he goes on to point to the ways that the self-reflexivity of touch is itself always untouchable: to touch oneself is to touch what is untouchable, ‘since “self-touching” is not, as such, something that can be touched’.27 Nancy thus introduces a spacing or interval into touch: it becomes the point at which we encounter exteriority, where it tends towards its own non-sense. The separation that always inhabits touch is a theme to which he often returns, and in Being Singular Plural he writes, ‘there is proximity, but only to the extent that extreme closeness emphasises the distancing it opens up’.28 Nancy’s

­6    Tactile Poetics insistence on the spacing at the heart of touch complicates our relationship not only to ourselves and to other people or objects, but also, as we consider in the pages that follow, to the literary text. Jacques Derrida takes up Nancy’s discussion in On Touching – JeanLuc Nancy, first published as Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy in France in 2000. He also outlines a haptocentric tradition that privileges the presence and immediacy associated with touch. Although Nancy’s emphasis on the separation that lies at the heart of touch challenges this haptocentrism, Derrida suggests that it does not sufficiently overturn phenomenology’s metaphysics of presence – or, as McMahon hints, Nancy’s model may not be ‘deconstructive enough’.29 The complex manner in which Derrida engages with Nancy’s work on touch – the way he, as J. Hillis Miller puts it, ‘takes back with the left hand what he has given with the right’ – has sparked much debate.30 For Miller, Derrida locates within Nancy’s self-proclaimed deconstruction of Christianity traces of ontotheological discourse – a language that retains vestiges of the privileging of presence and essence. He surmises, ‘to put it briefly and inadequately, Derrida finds in Nancy’s phrasing a lingering nostalgia for immediate touching’.31 He concludes that Derrida’s break with Nancy ‘is always a matter of the way things are put, that is, it is always a matter of language’.32 Suggesting that the terms of Nancy’s debate demonstrate an underlying return to metaphysical assumptions of immediacy, Derrida remains committed to the distance at the heart of touch. Critiquing Husserl’s ‘principle of all principles’, he troubles this reliance on immediacy as ‘the first axiom of a phenomenology of touch’.33 Because we can only touch the outside of objects with the outside of our bodies, contact always involves an interval between two or more surfaces, even when these surfaces are auto-affective. Rather than being, as Nancy seems to suggest, an encounter with exteriority, Derrida stresses the ‘interruption, interposition, detour of the between in the middle of contact’; interrogating the site of division between inside and outside, he insists that touching is always already inhabited by its own ‘différance of the between’ – and it is this interval or spacing between two surfaces that becomes the very condition of contact.34 A certain untouchability, then, lies at the heart of a text on tact.

Touch paper III: tact ‘Tracking down all the tropological uses of touch’ in Nancy’s work, Derrida cites a passage from ‘Unum quid’, within which Nancy asserts: ‘The displacement [of quasi] does not touch on anything important.’35

Introduction: Each Word of Skin    ­7

Derrida notes, however, that ‘the emphasis on “touch” is mine’.36 He continues, ‘Here, “to touch” means to say to tamper with, to change, to displace, to call into question; thus it is invariably a setting in motion, a kinetic experience.’37 But to which ‘touch’ is Derrida referring? One answer may be that he is referring to Nancy’s suggestion that the displacement does not touch on (or tamper with) anything important; his point might also, however, be applied to his own handling of Nancy’s text. By emphasising the word ‘touch’ in his citation of Nancy, Derrida inevitably changes and calls into question Nancy’s ‘original’ text. Derrida is of course mindful of the implications of these relations of tact, and his writing is always an invitation to touch back. But how do we touch without tampering? How do texts touch on each other with tact? Lisa McNally tackles this question of tact in Reading Theories in Contemporary Fiction. In all matters of reading, she says, tact is indispensable. If tact is taken to refer to a certain restraint or lightness of touch, then, as McNally suggests, a tactful reading must be a respectful, judicious, even reserved touch.38 McNally responds to the work of Valentine Cunningham in Reading After Theory, who warns that ‘theory keeps mishandling’ the text.39 Instead, he argues, we must read with tact, which requires a ‘gentle touch, caring touch, loving touch; appropriate handling, unmanipulative reading’.40 Tactful, ‘true’ or ‘real readers’, he insists, ‘don’t paw and mammock, don’t abuse, the text’.41 For Cunningham, a tactful approach lies in ‘close reading, no less’.42 McNally highlights the ironies of this account of close reading, pointing out that Cunningham’s discussion incorporates phrases such as ‘“tending towards”, “approaching near” and “coming carefully”’, all of which indicate ‘an inclination to touch, which never, in fact, makes contact’.43 She cites Isobel Armstrong’s point that a tactful reading might be better termed ‘distance reading, not close reading’.44 McNally thus draws our attention to the double bind of tactful reading; it requires at the same time close attention to and distance from the text. Our own handling of words, then, must somehow work in accordance with tact’s impossible contradictions.

Touch paper IV: feeling In On Touching, Derrida touches not only on the work of Nancy but also  that of Hélène Cixous – the other of his ‘two miracle ­wonderfriends’.45 Like Derrida, Cixous is attuned to the impossible contradictions of tact even while playing out the bodily effects of poetic language. In her essay ‘Making Sense from Singular and Collective

­8    Tactile Poetics Touches’, Verena Andermatt Conley identifies Cixous’s ongoing appeal to the body: ‘to write, she declares in the best of Romantic traditions, we have to close our eyes and focus on touch’.46 This is most evident in works such as ‘Writing Blind: Conversation with the Donkey’, where Cixous identifies an approach to writing that embraces the complexities of touch and feeling.47 This use of the metaphor of touch and Cixous’s writerly approach to feeling are addressed more fully in Chapter 4, but I wish to signal here the overarching influence of her work on the direction of this book. In particular, I’d like to suggest that the texture of the exchanges that pass between Cixous and Derrida opens up ways of rethinking reading and writing with tact. In her Insister of Jacques Derrida, Cixous refers to the space or passage between Derrida’s work and her own; like a skin, the passage between one text and another is that which separates and unites, or ‘separeunifies’.48 This textual skin not only hints at the literary tact between them, then, but also refers to the way that for both, a tactful writing tends towards its own interruption. A turn towards feeling also features in Gabriel Josipovici’s work in this field. In Touch, he stresses the need ‘to feel one’s way forward with care’.49 Instinct tells him that a theory of touch requires ‘groping my way forward’.50 But that, he continues, ‘is appropriate to the subject in hand’.51 ‘In hand?’ he presses. ‘That is surely the point. I do not have the subject in my hand. I do not hold it. But where then is it?’52 Josipovici seems to profess a certain blindness to touch: his approach to the slipperiness of tact can only be addressed in terms of fumbling and feeling, of groping and grasping.53 This dynamic is one that José Saramago explores at length in Blindness. Struck by an epidemic of blindness, his characters discover through the course of the novel that they must rely on their sense of touch to find their way. A blind man assumes that he will recognise his front door ‘by the magic of touch, as if he were carrying a magic wand’.54 As a result, the novel is invested with the language of groping, of stumbling and of grasping: ‘They advanced very slowly, as if mistrustful of the person guiding them, groping in vain with their free hand, searching for the support of something solid, a wall, a doorframe.’55 What is especially remarkable for our concerns, however, is the way that Saramago handles the specific relationship between blindness, writing and touching in the closing pages of the novel: One day I may tell you what it was like, then you can write a book, Yes, I am writing it, How, if you are blind, The blind too can write You mean that you had time to learn the Braille alphabet, I do not know Braille, How can you write, then, asked the first blind man, Let me show you. He got up from his chair, left the room and after a minute returned, he was holding a sheet of

Introduction: Each Word of Skin    ­9 paper in his hand and a ball-point pen, this is the last complete page I have written, We cannot see it, said the wife of the first blind man, Nor I, said the writer, Then how can you write, asked the doctor’s wife, looking at the sheet of paper where in the half-light of the room she could make out tightly compressed lines, occasionally super-imposed, By touch, the writer answered smiling [. . .]56

The question of writing, for Derrida, is always linked to blindness. Asking ‘what happens when one writes without seeing?’ he describes the way that ‘a hand of the blind ventures forth alone or disconnected, in a poorly delimited space; it feels its way, it gropes, it caresses as much as it inscribes, trusting in the memory of signs and supplementing sight’.57 In a sense, this book is also an act of ‘writing blind’, as Cixous calls it. Echoing Josipovici, the subject is not in hand – far from it – for when could touch ever be fully grasped? Instead, this exploration of writing and touch is a journey in the dark, endeavouring to feel its own way forward. Its attempts to venture forth are, perhaps, not always as tactful as I’d like. Reiterating David Wills’ discussion of the difficulty of separating an ‘apparent constantive and a more obviously performative mode’ of writing, Tactile Poetics seeks not only to address, but also to play out, aspects of a relationship between writing and touch.58 Aware of their own writerliness to varying degrees, the following chapters experiment with mode, form and address as a way of gesturing towards different literary textures. Feeling its way forward, Tactile Poetics explores and performs the (mis)adventures of literary contact.

Touch paper V: reaching out Not least because of its self-proclaimed blindness, it is worth offering a brief outline of the chapters that come together to form this book, to attempt to take its gestures in hand. Tactile Poetics follows a trajectory from the surface of the body to the digit. Like the variations in its own mode of address, the texts we consider are not unified by a single author, genre, region or theme. Rather than attempting to offer a totalising account of the representation of touch in contemporary writing, then, I hope to demonstrate through a discussion of a range of genres – a­ utobiography, the epistolary, film, the novel, poetry and short fiction – the d ­ ifferent ways that writing touches. This diversity allows us to touch on a variety of literary textures, and offers me, in turn, the opportunity to respond  through my own textual interventions. What brings these writers together is their refusal to take our tactile encounters for granted. Notwithstanding their cultural diversity, these texts all deal

­10    Tactile Poetics with experiences of liminality as they at the same time press at the limits of both language and form. Chapter 1 explores the representation of the skin ego in Siri Hustvedt’s novel, What I Loved. Rather than simply discussing the representation of the skin in literature, however, it examines the skin of literature and the ways that writing performs contact. Considering Anzieu’s description of a ‘skin of words’, it thinks about the ways in which a text, like a skin, is caught up in an endless process of destruction and renewal. Chapter 2 further develops our discussion of Anzieu, focusing on his account of the skin as a palimpsest that preserves traces of experience inscribed on its surface. Here, we read the ‘palimpsestuous’ quality of Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion. Rather than focusing on the traces inscribed in the narrative, however, this chapter employs Nancy’s theory of exscription in order to interrogate the traces that are ‘inscribed-outside’ the text. Moving from skin to touch, Chapter 3 addresses the biblical resonances of Freud’s prohibition of touch in H.D.’s account of their psychoanalysis in Tribute to Freud and her letters to Bryher, collected and edited by Susan Stanford Friedman. Both within and without the psychoanalytic session, H.D. and Freud, we see, perform Derrida’s instruction to touch, but without making contact. Chapter 4 consolidates a theory of ‘tactile poetics’. Discussing Derrida’s account of Cixous’s writing as a ‘poem of touch’, we consider the ways that her writing simultaneously interrogates and enacts contact, touching the reader in strange and sometimes startling ways.59 Reading the material surface of Cixous’s recent novel, So Close, the chapter draws on work by Renu Bora in order to explore the ways that literary textures circulate affect. In Chapter 5, we return to an examination of the spacing that always interrupts touch, and think through the relationships between touching, distance and dancing. Written in 29 tangos, this chapter takes as its starting point Anne Carson’s book-length poem, The Beauty of the Husband – A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, developing Derrida’s discussion of distanz in Spurs and ‘Choreographies’. Thinking about the intimate distanz at the heart of the original tango dances in Buenos Aires, I hope to show that Carson’s intimacy is not without its own interruptions, destabilising our experience of intimate contact. Chapter 6 turns from non-localised touch to specific body parts. Through a series of letters to the reader, we examine the primacy of the hand in John Berger’s From A to X. This chapter renegotiates the relationship between the visual and the tactile by considering the repeating motif of blindness in the novel alongside Derrida’s account of the hand that ‘ventures forth’ in Memoirs of the Blind. Derrida’s challenge to the assumption that the hand is exclusive

Introduction: Each Word of Skin    ­11

to the ‘humanual’ also informs our discussion of the non-human hand in Chapter 7, which recognises a growing interest in haptic technologies and the relationship between the screen and eye-contact. Thinking through the role of the hand in the ‘hominizing process’, the chapter interrogates Derrida’s refusal to neglect the non-human by considering prosthetic hands in the recently restored Fritz Lang film, Metropolis (1927/2010). Questioning the manipulations of the hand in haptic technologies, then, we turn to the digital and virtual mediation of contact. The final chapter draws together the themes of interruption, prohibition and prosthesis in order to present, in conclusion, the return of spectral contact. Reading phantom limbs in Elizabeth Bowen’s short story, ‘Hand in Glove’ (1952), we explore the relationship between haunting and haptology. At the same time, the discussion opens to broader questions of dead hands and their significance. Considering the nature of ghostly contact, we ask how ways of thinking and writing are ‘handed on’. Responding to recent work by Nicole Pepperell that addresses the role of the hand in inheritance, the book concludes by demonstrating that textual contact is always both a manipulation and a manoeuvre involving one or more missing limbs.

Touch paper VI: a final interruption Touch is the subject of both miracles and mistrust. Revered for its healing potential – the laying on of hands – it is also treated with some suspicion, requiring, it seems, a good deal of tact. Touch thus also offers us a sense of how we might think and read, and this book hopes to simultaneously move beyond the skin and take care not to touch too much. Throughout, I work with these contradictions in mind. Inevitably, there are areas into which I venture only briefly, but not, I hope, moments when I should keep my hands to myself. The book’s exploration of the relationship between writing and touch in twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury literature means that there are, necessarily, many directions towards which this text does not extend itself. And when I say touching, I of course mean touchings. We are not speaking of a single, unified, homogenised touch, but of a touching that is plural, varied in tone and texture, and signifying differently in different contexts and cultures. It is a touch that is always capable of changing, of being changed, as well as being exchanged. As a ‘touch paper’ for ongoing critical debate, or as a site of tactile exchange, this book does not seek to provide a totalising account of touch in literature; instead, it hopes to tender a series of openings or passageways to thinking through an impossible tact. And

­12    Tactile Poetics rather than closing down a discussion of touch, it is this impossible tact that opens up to something other, something to come.

Notes   1. Michaels, ‘Into Arrival’, pp. 151–2.  2. Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, p. 17.   3. Ahmed and Stacey, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–17 (p. 15).   4. Ahmed and Stacey, ‘Introduction’, p. 15.  5. Serres, The Five Senses, p. 35.   6. See Derrida, Without Alibi.  7. See, for instance, Classen, Worlds of Sense and The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch.  8. Derrida, On Touching, p. 267.  9. Connor, The Book of Skin, p. 26. 10. Connor, The Book of Skin, p. 24. 11. Benthien, Skin, p. 53. 12. Benthien, Skin, pp. 145–62; Biddle, ‘Inscribing Identity’, pp. 177–93; Classen, ‘Animal Skins’, pp. 93–122; Prosser, Second Skins. Other recent studies of the skin to which this study remains indebted include: Curtin, Out of Touch; Taylor, Hiding; and Ulnik, Skin in Psychoanalysis. 13. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 17. Anzieu’s theory of the skin ego is addressed in more detail in Chapter 1. 14. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 17. 15. Aristotle, De Anima, p. 180. 16. Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, p. 19. 17. Serres, The Five Senses, p. 26. We return to Serres’s approach to touch in Chapter 2. 18. Das, Touch and Intimacy, p. 12. 19. Das, Touch and Intimacy, p. 20. 20. Montagu, Touching, p. 91. 21. Goh and Bishop, ‘Introduction’, pp. 3–9 (p. 8). 22. In addition, my research draws on and responds to the following studies: Classen, The Book of Touch; Garrington, Haptic Modernism; Marks, Touch; Paterson, The Senses of Touch; Segal, Consensuality; Tilley (ed.), ‘The Victorian Tactile Imagination’; and Waters, Poetry’s Touch. 23. McMahon, Cinema and Contact, p. 6. 24. Demonstrating the body’s capacity to be both the perceiving object and the subject of perception, Merleau-Ponty writes: If my left hand is touching my right hand, and if I should suddenly wish to apprehend with my right hand the work of my left hand as it touches, this reflection of the body upon itself always miscarries at the last moment: the moment I feel my left hand with my right hand, I correspondingly cease touching my right hand with my left hand. (MerleauPonty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 9) 25. Nancy, Corpus, p. 128.

Introduction: Each Word of Skin    ­13 26. Nancy, Corpus, pp. 128–9. 27. Nancy, Corpus, p. 129. 28. Nancy, Being Singular Plural, p. 5. 29. McMahon, Cinema and Contact, p. 7. 30. Miller, For Derrida, p. 278. See also McQuillan, ‘Toucher I: (The Problem with Self-Touching)’, pp. 201–11. 31. Miller, For Derrida, p. 283. 32. Miller, For Derrida, p. 279. 33. Husserl, Ideas, p. 43. 34. Derrida, On Touching, p. 229. 35. Nancy, Ego Sum, cited in Derrida, On Touching, p. 25. 36. Derrida, On Touching, p. 25. 37. Derrida, On Touching, p. 25. 38. McNally, Reading Theories, p. 107. The concept of tact is addressed more fully in Chapters 3 and 4. 39. Cunningham, Reading After Theory, p. 156. 40. Cunningham, Reading After Theory, p. 155. 41. Cunningham, Reading After Theory, p. 157. 42. Cunningham, Reading After Theory, p. 156. 43. McNally, Reading Theories, p. 107. 44. Isobel Armstrong, ‘Textual Harassment’, pp. 401–20 (p. 403), cited in McNally, Reading Theories, pp. 123–4. 45. Derrida, On Touching, p. 124. 46. Conley, ‘Making Sense’, pp. 79–88 (p. 80). It is worth noting that Conley makes a reference in this article to Cixous’s ‘tactile poetic world’ (p. 82). 47. Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’, pp. 184–203. 48. Cixous, Insister of Jacques Derrida, p. 41. 49. Josipovici, Touch, p. 1. 50. Josipovici, Touch, p. 2. 51. Josipovici, Touch, p. 2. 52. Josipovici continues, ‘And do I have to try and banish all such metaphors as misleading as I set out in search of it?’ Identifying the propensity of tactile metaphors in our language, the answer, for Josipovici, is ‘I don’t think so, for then I would not be able to write at all’ (p. 2). 53. Michel Serres also employs the verb to grope as a means of blind navigation. Describing the experience of being trapped on a burning ship, he writes: ‘Blinded, you have to lie down. You can only grope your way out. Touch is the last remaining means of guiding yourself’ (Serres, The Five Senses, p. 18). 54. Saramago, Blindness, p. 273. 55. Saramago, Blindness, p. 48. 56. Saramago, Blindness, p. 276. 57. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, p. 3. 58. Wills, Prosthesis, p. 11. 59. Derrida, ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own’, pp. 17–92 (pp. 34–5).

Chapter 1

Writing Bodies: Hustvedt’s Textual Skin

Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved is a novel of doublings and divisions: pairs meeting, touching each other’s lives, and parting. Hustvedt scrutinises contact points and moments of separation as she recounts both the closeness of friends and lovers, as well as the slowly unravelling relationships between them. The web of relations that makes up the narrative is emphasised through an exploration of touch and its relation to intimacy. In part 1 of this chapter, we explore this intimacy through an examination of the skin. By paying particular attention to the representation of the surface of the body in Hustvedt’s novel, we consider it as a site of communication and of division, as marking the possibility of contact and of rupture. Reading scars, spots, rashes and wrinkles, it soon becomes clear that Hustvedt’s exploration of the skin runs in parallel with her interrogation of the psyche. Thus, in part 2 we draw on Didier Anzieu’s theory of the skin ego in order to consider how the margins of the body converge with the skin of the mind. But Hustvedt’s novel is also a book about reading and writing, and the discussion turns to her representation of textual processes and encounters. Opening up the possibility of a textual skin, this chapter thus explores the co-implication of the limits of the body, the psyche and the text. Moving beyond the notion of the skin as a one-dimensional and static surface of the body, we read its passageways, folds and cracks in order to open up the contradictions, complications and complexities of the textual skin, and its capacity to be continually re-written and re-read.

The skin of the body At the start of What I Loved Leo Hertzberg purchases a painting. The canvas depicts ‘a young woman lying on the floor in an empty room. She was propped up on one elbow, and she seemed to be looking at some-

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thing beyond the edge of the painting.’1 Noting the ambiguity of the title – Self-Portrait by William Wechsler – Leo observes the ‘thick stripes of black, gray, and white that may have been applied with a knife, and in those dense strokes of pigment I could see the marks left by a man’s thumb’ (p. 5). Purchasing the work, he takes it home to his wife, Erica. Here, examining the portrait again, he remarks on ‘a bruise just below her knee’. ‘I had seen it before,’ he admits to the reader, but at that moment its purple cast, which was yellow-green at one edge, pulled my eyes toward it, as if this little wound were really the subject of the painting. I walked over, put my finger on the canvas, and traced the outline of the bruise. (p. 5)

Aroused by this gesture, he says, ‘I have often wondered why the image of a sore on a woman’s body should have been so erotic to me’: Erica said that she thought my response had something to do with a desire to leave a mark on another person’s body. ‘Skin is soft,’ she said. ‘We’re easily cut and bruised. It’s not like she looks beaten or anything. It’s an ordinary little black-and-blue mark, but the way it’s painted makes it stick out. It’s like he loved doing it, like he wanted to make a little wound that would last forever.’ (p. 6)

Not long after buying the painting, Leo is introduced to Bill, the artist, and is invited to visit his studio, where he discovers six paintings of the same ‘dark-haired young woman’ (p. 10). This is Violet, later to become Bill’s second wife. Leo pauses by the third painting in the series, where he notices a pair of ‘red knee socks’ at the subject’s feet. What arrests him here is that ‘just below her knees were faint red lines left by the elastic of the socks’ (p. 11). Turning to Bill, he says that it reminds him of Jan Steen’s depiction of a woman at her morning toilet, taking off her sock. Bill replies, ‘“I saw that painting in Amsterdam when I was twenty-three, and it got me thinking about skin. I’m not interested in nudes. They’re too arty, but I’m really interested in skin”’ (p. 11). The two men start to talk about the representation of skin in art; they discuss the ‘beautiful red stigmata on the hand of Zurbarán’s Saint Francis’, ‘the skin color of Grünewald’s dead Christ’ and the ‘rosy skin of Boucher’s nudes’ (p. 11). And so it becomes clear that Leo and Bill’s friendship is one based on a shared interest in the surfaces of the body – its colours, its contours and its wounds. From the start, Hustvedt explores the intimate links between the canvas and the skin, between painting and caressing, and between the brushstroke and the bruise. But this interest is by no means limited to

­16    Tactile Poetics visual art, and Hustvedt repeatedly details the receptive surfaces of the body, its significance in our relations to the world and its ability to communicate aspects of our experience. Leo’s wife, Erica, for instance, is described as having ‘delicate skin’ (p. 103); Leo notes the ‘even pallor of her winter skin’ (p. 104) and also the way her recurring migraines ‘stole all the color from her face and turned the skin under her eyes nearly black’ (p. 111). After Matthew’s death, Erica leaves Leo. As she departs, Leo observes the ways ‘the lines around her eyes wrinkled’ and kisses ‘the mole over her lip’ (p. 150). It is as if the story of their relationship is mapped onto the complexion and contours of her body. The gradual unfolding of surfaces in What I Loved demonstrates that its significance goes beyond skin deep. In particular, Hustvedt exposes the intimate connection between our internal psychological states and their translation onto the surfaces of the body. Finding it difficult to cope with Mark’s behaviour following the death of Bill, for instance, Violet’s grief is written all over her skin: When I turned from the window and looked at Violet, she was so pale that her skin looked transparent, and I noticed a rash on her neck. Beneath her lowered eyes were faint purple shadows. I knew what I was seeing: dry grief, grief grown old and familiar. (p. 339)

Hustvedt thus reinforces the fact that our internal states of mind are bound up with the effects of the skin. This points to an intimate relationship between the margins of the body and the limits of the psyche. The skin, it seems, functions as a metonym not just for the body, but for the subject’s entire psychical makeup. The contiguity between the skin and the psyche can be examined in light of Didier Anzieu’s theory of the skin ego. Following the literal trajectory of Sigmund Freud’s statement in ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923) that ‘the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface’, Anzieu conceives of the ego as a projection in the psyche of the body’s surface.2 He suggests that this projection responds to our need for a narcissistic envelope that ensures a continuous sense of self, and thus surmises, ‘we may say, then, that consciousness appears at the surface of the psychical apparatus; better still, it is that surface’.3 Looking to object relations theory, Anzieu outlines his theory of the ‘skin ego’ – the impact of the skin on the mind, even the mind of the skin: By Skin Ego, I mean a mental image of which the Ego of the child makes use during the early phases of its development to represent itself as an Ego containing psychical contents, on the basis of its experience of the surface of the

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body. This corresponds to the moment at which the psychical Ego differentiates itself from the bodily Ego at the operative level while remaining confused with it at the figurative level.4

Anzieu thus maps the functions of the biological skin onto the psychological skin and proposes that the epidermis has three physical roles that are transferred onto the psychical development of the individual: The primary function of the skin is as the sac which contains and retains [. . .] Its second function is as the interface which marks the boundary with the outside and keeps that outside out [. . .] Finally, the third function [. . .] is as a site and a primary means of communicating with others, of establishing signifying relations; it is, moreover, an ‘inscribing surface’ for the marks left by those others.5

These three functions derive from Anzieu’s original 1974 article on the skin ego.6 Although he goes on to develop these in The Skin Ego to include the functions of maintaining, containing, protecting, individuating, intersensoriality, supporting sexual excitation, libidinal recharging, registering tactile sensory traces and a negative or anti-function, he insists that the list ‘remains open’.7 Steven Connor points out, moreover, that ‘the nine functions distinguished by Anzieu do not smoothly cooperate, or interconnect’.8 Instead, he suggests, they contribute to a ‘repertoire of different kinds of metaphorical enactment of skin function’.9 Taking the initial three functions as a starting point, and building on Connor’s reading of this metaphor, we now turn to Hustvedt’s representations of the skin as a container, an interface and an inscribing surface.

The skin as psyche When Leo sits beside Bill’s brother at a Thanksgiving dinner, he observes,  ‘Dan’s craziness wasn’t hidden. His fingernails were heavily rimmed with dirt, and his neck was thickly covered with ash-colored flakes of drying skin. His shirt had been buttoned wrong, giving his whole upper body a lopsided appearance’ (p. 63). It is clear that his disordered semblance and flaking skin correspond to the psychological fragmentation that he experiences. His sense of skin, it seems, does not sufficiently hold him together. But he is not alone. In fact, both Dan and Bill are described as having ‘emotions that weren’t easy to contain’ (p. 66), and Leo also grapples with a fear so overwhelming that ‘no single person could contain it’ (p. 344). This coincides with Anzieu’s primary function of the skin ego as a ‘sac which contains and retains’.

­18    Tactile Poetics Set in motion by the maternal ‘handling’ and ‘holding’ environment experienced by the infant, Anzieu suggests that we gradually learn to project the idea of an imaginary skin to contain our dreams, phantasies and memories. The containing function of the skin thus allows us, he asserts, the ‘possibility of an originary psychical space’.10 However, as Mark’s behaviour and his own sense of self deteriorate, Leo exhibits what Anzieu would term a partial failure of the skin ego, and it becomes apparent that the trauma of losing Matthew has ruptured his sense of skin. As a result, he finds that ‘wind blew through me rather than over me, and I thought I could feel my skeleton rattle’ (p. 148). When the containing function of the skin ego is damaged or has not been sufficiently established, the resulting anxiety, Anzieu says, may take two forms. On the one hand, ‘the individual seeks a substitute shell in physical pain or psychical activity: he wraps himself in suffering’; on the other hand, the container exists, but ‘its continuity is broken into by holes’.11 This situation leads to a ‘colander’ skin ego: ‘thoughts, and memories are only with difficulty retained; they leak away’.12 The skin ego as colander or sieve is played out quite explicitly in What I Loved via Violet’s intellectual preoccupation with physical and mental disorders. Reading her new book, Locked Bodies: An Exploration of Contemporary Body Images and Eating Disorders, Leo comes across the case of Raymond, ‘a hugely fat seven-year-old’, who ‘told his therapist that he thought his body was made of jelly and that if his skin was punctured, his insides would run out’ (p. 163). Raymond is afraid that the surface of his body will not sufficiently contain him and that he will leak out of the holes in his skin. Of relevance to this is the work of psychoanalyst, Esther Bick, who states in her 1968 article that if the primal skin function is not sufficiently established, the subject may attempt to reinforce his or her own sense of containment through the establishment of the ‘second skin’.13 This is true of her schizophrenic patient, Mary, whose skin ego ‘seemed in constant danger of spilling out its contents’.14 Mary’s ‘terror of falling to pieces, of liquefying’ is a return, Bick says, to the ‘catastrophic anxiety of falling-into-space’, and it is only by developing alternative means of containment that she is able to hold herself together in the face of overwhelming feelings.15 In order to safeguard herself against this all-consuming anxiety, Mary generates a ‘hunched, stiff-jointed’ physical muscularity, which acts as a ‘pseudo-independence’ or ‘second skin’.16 She thus creates a muscular carapace to compensate for the damage to her psychological skin. Representations of the ‘second skin’ frequently feature in Hustvedt’s work through the recurring motif of bodily armour. Leo, for instance,

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recalls how he coped after the death of Matthew: ‘At the time, I was like a man encased in a heavy suit of armor, and inside that corporeal fortress I lived with a single-minded wish: I will not be comforted’ (pp. 144–5). His efforts to hold himself together in the face of his grief take on a physical form. This metaphor returns in Hustvedt’s fourth novel, The Sorrows of an American, when the protagonist, a psychoanalyst named Erik, reflects on a patient’s ‘dread of “cracking up”’.17 After a troubling appointment, Erik observes that Ms W. ‘walked like a person in a suit of armor’ (p. 258). Yet more noteworthy, however, is the means by which Erik generates his own second skin. Rather than build up a physical carapace, Erik protects himself by reinforcing a rigid work ethic: ‘Work was my skeleton, my musculature. Without it, I felt like a jellyfish’ (p. 183). Steven Connor reminds us that while such second skins might create a stronger sense of psychological containment, they also anaesthetise us, and hence allow ‘no sensation through, sever[ing] that dual directionality characteristic of ordinary skin’.18 The  second skin, then, represses feeling, expression and perception, even as it attempts to keep us in one piece. In The Sorrows of an American, another of Erik’s patients, Ms L., reports her desperate need to police the body’s borders: ‘“Some days, it’s like I don’t have any skin”’, she tells Erik: ‘“I’m all raw and bleeding”’ (p. 155). Erik acknowledges that she has ‘no skin, no barrier, no protection’ and insists, ‘the borders are important’ (p. 155). This emphasis on preserving the boundaries of the body is reiterated in What I Loved through Violet’s research into eating disorders. Among a list of strategies designed to firm up the limits of the self, she includes ‘“diet centers, bodybuilding, plastic surgery”’, all of which ‘“testify to an idea of the body as extremely vulnerable – one with failing thresholds, one that is under constant threat”’ (p. 162). She explains to Leo that ‘in an age that has absorbed nuclear threat, biological warfare, and AIDS, the perfect body has become armor – hard, shiny, and impenetrable’ (p. 162). Rather than being a porous surface, then, the ideal skin is an impermeable boundary that forbids anything from passing through. Violet’s ‘mission’, as Leo describes it, is to ‘uncover the afflictions she called “inverted hysterias.” “Nowadays girls make boundaries,” she said. “The hysterics wanted to explode them. Anorexics build them up”’ (p. 81). She tries to explain this shift in terms of the metaphor of ‘mixing’: ‘It started because I was looking for a way to talk about the threat anorexics feel from the outside. Those girls have overmixed, if you see what I mean. They find it hard to separate the needs and desires of other people from their own. After a while, they rebel by shutting down. They want to close up all their openings so nothing and nobody can get in.’ (pp. 88–9)

­20    Tactile Poetics She continues, ‘“But mixing is the way of the world. The world passes through us – food, books, pictures, other people”’ (p. 89). Mixing, she confirms, is a ‘“key term [. . .] It explains what people rarely talk about, because we define ourselves as isolated, closed bodies who bump up against each other but stay shut”’ (p. 91). Here, she demonstrates Anzieu’s account of the second function of the skin ego as ‘the interface which marks the boundary with the outside and keeps that outside out’.19 Anzieu argues that it is through tactile experience that the child is able ‘progressively to differentiate a surface which has both an inner and an outer face, in other words an interface, permitting a distinction between inside and outside’.20 The skin ego thus distinguishes between internal and external realms of self-experience, and it is essential to primal unity – the establishment of firm boundaries clearly delimiting self from other. Throughout What I Loved, however, characters are unable to rely on the experiential borders of the body. Even the body of work left by Bill after his death seems to say to Leo, ‘When does one thing cease and another begin? Your borders are inventions, jokes, absurdities’ (p. 298). Everywhere, we are faced with the sense that, as Mark Taylor puts it, the very boundaries ‘that once seemed secure are becoming permeable membranes allowing inner to become outer and outer to become inner’.21 When Leo and Erica’s son, Matthew, turns four, he addresses his parents and asks how the number four gets ‘“inside his body”’ (p. 56). Leo explains to him that numbers don’t ‘magically lodge themselves inside us on birthdays’: ‘“The number doesn’t go inside you, Matt. People say you’re turning four, but nothing happens in your body”’ (p. 56). Leo reflects: It wasn’t strange that he had stumbled over the phrase ‘to turn four.’ His body had miraculous properties, after all. It had an invisible inside and a smooth surface with openings and passageways. Food went into it. Urine and feces came out of it. When he cried, a salty liquid streamed from his eyes. How could he possibly know that ‘turning four’ didn’t signify yet another physical transformation, a kind of corporeal ‘open sesame’ that allowed a brand-new number four to take its place beside his heart or in his stomach or maybe find a home in his head? (pp. 56–7)

But the body, of course, isn’t simply a ‘smooth surface’: its openings and passageways mean that the inside has the capacity to turn outside and vice versa. This is evident in What I Loved through the motif of impregnation. Considering Bill’s paintings of Violet, for instance, Leo muses that ‘one of the fantasies between the viewer/painter and the female object had to be impregnation. After all, conception is

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­ lurality – the two in the one – the male and the female’ (p. 26). For p Imogen Tyler, pregnancy means that ‘the body’s skin surface no longer straightforwardly performs the function of separating self from notself’.22 Pregnancy enacts the possibility of a skin inside a skin, thus challenging our conceptions of interiority and exteriority. It means that the outside of the unborn infant’s skin is enfolded in the inside of the mother, and that the mother’s inside is on the baby’s outside. Connor comes to similar conclusions, suggesting that the maternal body actually embodies the notion of the interface: ‘Her skin is a meeting place for the different possibilities or natures of the skin; as point of contact or exposure; as medium of transmission or permeation.’23 The ‘twin’ pregnancies of Erica and Lucille in What I Loved, then, offer us a double figure of the maternal skin. Seeing Erica and Lucille side by side, and thinking about the ways that the lives of these two families infiltrate each other, adds a further complication to our understanding of the boundaries between inside and outside, self and other. Stretchmarks, birthmarks, wounds and wrinkles all form part of the story of the skin, and draw our attention to Anzieu’s account of the third function of the skin as a ‘site and a primary means of communicating with others, of establishing signifying relations [. . .] and an “inscribing surface” for the marks left by those others’.24 The skin, he remarks, is a ‘sensitive surface, capable of registering traces and inscriptions’.25 It may come as no surprise, then, that What I Loved is composed of repeated references to writing on the skin. Mark’s friend Teenie, for instance, ‘looked damaged, as if her neuroses had written themselves onto her body’ (p. 190). This suggests that as well as communicating feelings of which we are aware, the skin has the capacity to remember what we might try to forget. Jay Prosser argues that the skin is ‘the body’s memory of our lives’, and is thus ‘saturated with the unconscious’.26 He goes on to state that ‘psychic disturbance can inscribe on the skin traumatic memories according to the hysterical symptomisations of the unconscious’; they are ‘fantasmatic returns of the repressed’.27 Through often unconscious processes, the body’s narratives become tools for communication, and as such, the skin serves as a text to be read. Trying to discover more about Mark and his friends, and in particular the influence of the artist, Teddy Giles, on Bill’s son, Leo recruits Lazlo as a pseudo-private investigator. Lazlo explains that he has heard ‘peculiar reports about “branding” – some form of body marking unique to Giles’s inner circle’ (p. 241). Leo witnesses this first hand when he visits Teenie to discuss Mark’s behaviour, but learns something else about Mark – another sort of marking:

­22    Tactile Poetics Finally, she said, ‘It started out like a game. I was going to get a tattoo on my stomach that said “The Mark.” Teddy was joking around and said he’d do it for me, but then . . . ’ Teenie lifted up her shirt and I saw two small scars that formed an M and a W, one on top of the other, so the bottom of the M met the top of the W to form a single character. (pp. 277–8)

Teenie claims that Giles inflicted the wound and that Mark helped. When he is confronted, Giles insists, ‘“Teenie cuts herself. She has scars all over her arms”’ (p. 289), and Leo is left reflecting on the haunting ways that the letters M and W keep on returning: ‘I remembered the sign on her skin – the connected M’s, or the M attached to the W. M&M. Bill’s M’s – the boys, Matthew and Mark’ (p. 301). The uncanny repetition of ‘M’ in the novel, I suggest, points towards the textual ambiguity of the skin and the different ways of marking the body. Anzieu’s theorisation of the skin as an inscribing surface is actualised in What I Loved through its portrayal of cases of dermographia. From derma, the Greek word for skin, and graphesis, meaning writing, dermographia is ‘writing on, or marking, the skin’.28 During an exhibition of Bill’s art, Leo and Erica notice a black-and-white photograph that depicts ‘a woman’s head and torso from behind. The word SATAN had been written in large letters on the skin between her shoulder blades’ (p. 71). Erica turns to Violet who confirms her suspicions: ‘“Dermagraphism”’ (p. 71).29 Referring to the kind of treatment hysterical patients received at the Salpêtrière hospital in the nineteenth century, Bill explains to Leo, ‘“Yes, they wrote on them [. . .] The doctors traced their bodies with a blunt instrument and the words or pictures would appear on the skin. Then they took photographs of the writing”’ (p. 71). Leo and Erica discover further examples of dermographia in Bill’s work: ‘Written twice on her arm, once with red paint and once with black crayon, was T. BARTHÉLÉMY. The letters appeared to be bleeding’ (p. 72). Violet explains that Barthélémy was a French doctor ‘“who wrote his name on a woman, and then commanded her to bleed from the letters at four o’clock the same afternoon. She bled, and according to the report, the name remained visible for three months”’ (p. 71). Violet continues: ‘Doctors like Barthélémy signed women’s bodies as if they are works of art’ (p. 74). Admitting that the scene was ‘“pretty theatrical”’, Violet still insists that ‘“the dermagraphism was real”’, and even performs it herself: She held out her forearm and traced the inside of it lightly with the index finger of her free hand. The name Violet Blom appeared on her skin as a pale inscription, which at first was the color of a pink rose and then deepened slightly. She closed her eyes, breathed again, and an instant later, she opened her eyes. ‘Magic,’ she said. ‘Real magic.’ (p. 74)

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Cases of dermographia were originally perceived to be symptoms of hysteria – the return of repressed desire, for instance, inscribed on the skin.30 Addressing ‘the interplay of hysteric discursivity and mechanisms of control’, Janet Beizer explains: Women – especially hysterics – were said to be more impressionable than men; consequently they were thought to be more often subject to dermographism, the immune reaction that doctors appropriated as skin-writing or skin-drawing, and sometimes referred to as autography or lithography.31

These ‘textual poses’, Beizer writes, demonstrate the female body as ‘saying nothing, signifying all’.32 As always, skin inscription is bound up in politics of control and relations of power. This is not to suggest, however, that the skin is a blank slate awaiting inscription. As Ahmed and Stacey point out, ‘the skin matters as matter: it is a substantial, tactile covering that bears the weight of the body’.33 The skin, in other words, is always already written on, and the performance of identity is dependent on how we read and write ourselves – and each other. Notwithstanding the gender politics at work, Hustvedt’s portrayal of dermographism in What I Loved points to the complex relationship between writing and the skin. For Ahmed and Stacey, dermographism not only refers to the medical process of writing on or marking the surface of the body, it also suggests that ‘skin is itself also an effect of such marking’.34 Rejecting the notion that ‘skin can be reduced to writing’, they insist that ‘the substance of the skin is itself dependent on regimes of writing that mark the skin in different ways or that produce the skin as marked. The skin is a writerly effect.’35 But in what ways, I ask, might this relationship be read in reverse? Might we consider not only the ways that the skin is written upon and read, but also the ways that the text, too, can function like a skin?

The skin of the text In the final part of this chapter, we turn to the skin’s implication in the reading and writing processes, examining the text’s participation in the metaphorical repertoire of the skin. Reflecting on Anzieu’s three primary functions of the skin – the container, the interface and the inscribing surface – I discuss the ways that these functions might provide us with a model for rethinking aesthetic form. This means examining Hustvedt’s use of metafiction to see how it challenges the properties, functions and contradictions of its own limits. Indeed, like the skin, the text is

­24    Tactile Poetics continually made and unmade. Signifying beyond its own limits, and involving processes of both writing and skinning, it is always re-written and re-read. Early in The Skin Ego, Anzieu acknowledges the influence of Sigmund Freud’s 1925 contribution, ‘A Note Upon “The Mystic Writing-Pad”’, in the development of his own theory, suggesting that Freud’s reference to the ‘psychical apparatus’ in a letter to Fliess on 6 December 1896 ‘anticipates the concept of the Skin Ego’.36 He goes on to argue that Freud’s account of the writing-pad ‘completes the detailed description of the topographical structure of this outer envelope and implicitly confirms the supporting of the Ego on the skin’.37 Freud describes a ‘small contrivance’ which can be used in order to ‘supplement and guarantee’ our limited capacity to remember.38 It consists of a thin transparent sheet laid over a slab of wax or resin. The top sheet is itself divided into two layers made of celluloid and waxed paper and joined at each end. Scratching the pad with a stylus, writing appears on the celluloid, but by raising both top layers the waxed paper is cleared of writing and is ready to be reinscribed. However, the writing remains on the surface of the wax slab, and thus the mystic pad, Freud points out, ‘provides not only a receptive surface that can be used over and over again’, but also bears a ‘permanent trace of what has been written’.39 Appropriating the double-layered structure of the mystic writing-pad, Anzieu thus draws attention to the ‘palimpsestuous’ nature of the skin.40 At the same time, however, he unwittingly enacts Jacques Derrida’s 1966 statement that Freud’s metaphor of writing ‘haunts European discourse’.41 Although Anzieu conceptualises the skin ego in relation to Freud’s mystic writing-pad, he does not fully acknowledge the significance of this metaphor or the contiguity of a theory of writing to a theory of skin. The closest he comes is in his account of Fanchon, a teenage girl abandoned at birth.42 As the result of a troubled upbringing, Fanchon experiences severe problems during puberty, including eating disorders, self-mutilation, auditory hallucination and a ritual of compulsive washing: ‘She washed and rubbed herself till she tore off the skin and made it bleed.’43 Tearing the surface of her body in this way, Fanchon tries to escape her own skin. Anzieu recounts her various attempts to renegotiate the boundaries of her body in order to contain her emotional distress. This includes her application of what he calls ‘representational writing’, which offers Fanchon some relief: Every morning on awakening, to keep up her struggle against madness and suicide, she put down on paper certain fixed sentences, relating to material facts concerning the present performance of her bodily functions [. . .] along

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with variable sentences, as in a private journal, containing judgements, interpretations, significations.44

This, Anzieu states, ‘could only be sustained and produced thanks to the skeleton provided by the immutable body of the text which gave order to space and time and marked out a frontier between Self and non-Self’.45 The body of the text, in effect, enables her to create a substitute for her own disordered body. As Fanchon herself explains, ‘“It is as if that writing enabled me to re-cover a skin”.’46 The text, this tells us, has the capacity to function like a skin. But while Fanchon’s remark highlights the relationship between writing and the body, Anzieu does not fully interrogate this notion, and nor does he address the textual implications of writing as skin. The text is thus a crucial but concealed metaphor in the psychoanalysis of the skin, one that keeps returning to the surface. If Anzieu tries to prevent the metaphor of writing from fully emerging in The Skin Ego, Hustvedt cannot be accused of the same. All the central characters in What I Loved – Leo, Violet, Erica, Lucille, Bill, Dan and Lazlo – are engaged in recurring acts of textual production and consumption. Alongside her authorship of academic texts, for instance, Violet writes letters to Bill after he leaves her to return to his first wife: ‘We’ve written and drawn ourselves into each other. Hard. You know how hard’ (p. 58). Lucille writes too: she is a poet, remarking, ‘I am very particular when I write. I am always worrying about verbs’ (p. 16). An assistant professor of English, Leo’s wife Erica is another writer, one concerned with interrogating the very acts of writing. Pointing to the containing properties of the text, she remarks to Bill, ‘“So you agree, the novel is a bag that can hold anything”’ (p. 17). Bill’s schizophrenic brother, Dan, writes too, but his ‘plays and poems were mostly unfinished, the tattered products of a mind that ran in circles and could never leap out of itself’ (p. 66). Leo observes that ‘the scraps of paper and manuscript pages that lie scattered about his one-room apartment are covered with verse or bits of dialogue followed by ellipses’ (p. 357). The scattered, fragmented and interrupted quality to his text is indicative of the lack of containment he experiences, and is signalled by the ‘ashcolored flakes of drying skin’ on his body (p. 63). Despite his attempt to rewrite a skin, then, Dan is coming to pieces. Like the other characters, Leo, mourning the loss of Matthew and his separation from Erica, also writes ‘long and hard’ (p. 152). Leo’s status as a writer, however, is a doubly heightened one, for not only does he write (academic papers, essays on art history and letters to Erica), but he is also the narrator of What I Loved, drawing attention to his own position as the novel’s presumed author. In the midst of writing a book about

­26    Tactile Poetics Bill, for instance, he interrupts his endeavours to ‘write these pages’ (p. 362). He tells Lazlo that this is a project he must undertake alone: He knows that I dusted off my old manual typewriter for the occasion and have been typing in a trance every day for hours. I chose my old Olympia because my fingers don’t lose their position on the keys as easily as on a computer. ‘You’re straining your eyes, Leo,’ he tells me. ‘You should let me help you with whatever it is.’ But he can’t help me with this story. (p. 362)

With failing eyesight, Leo writes. And it is the very act of writing blind for Leo that enables him to recover a skin. In the final pages of the novel, however, he notes that ‘every story we tell about ourselves can only be told in the past tense. It winds backward from where we now stand, no longer the actors in the story but its spectators who have chosen to speak’ (p. 364). Referring to the gaps we necessarily leave in all our narratives, he explains that ‘the story flies over the blanks, filling them in with the hypotaxis of an “and” or an “and then.” I’ve done it in these pages to stay on a path I know is interrupted by shallow pits and several deep holes’ (p. 365). Although his writing seeks to patch up the holes in his skin ego, then, his narrative necessarily points to its interruptions and intervals. For Leo, rather than simply weaving a smooth, solid and static surface, writing offers him a way to work through the cracks, passageways, folds and wounds that make up our skin. This is not to suggest that all skins are unable to contain us; rather, it points out that no skin is seamless. Hustvedt dramatises the relationship between text and skin further still through her frequent references to letters and words inscribed on or pressed against the skin. In What I Loved, Violet gives Dan a ‘tiny canvas that Bill had done of the letter W’ (p. 258). Leo notes that ‘Dan put it under his shirt and hugged the little painting throughout the afternoon’, thus guaranteeing the contact between text and skin (p.  258). Leo claims he knows why Dan is holding the painting so close: ‘He wanted no separation between himself and the little painting, because somewhere in the wood and canvas and metal he imagined that he was touching his older brother’ (p. 258). Here, the body of the text works as a substitute for Bill’s absent body. Furthermore, this W simultaneously recalls Matt’s blue pyjamas and the ‘red felt S sewed onto the chest and a cape’ (p. 66), and prefigures the letters carved on Teenie’s skin and the associative texts that unfold: ‘I remembered the sign on her skin – the connected M’s, or the M attached to the W. M&M. Bill’s M’s – the boys, Matthew and Mark. No K tonight, huh, M&M?’ (p. 301). There are other examples. One afternoon, Leo picks up a doll fashioned by Bill: ‘The girl doll was on her knees with her arms raised

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upward in a beseeching gesture. When I saw the C pinned to her chest, I thought of Saint Catherine’ (p. 126). And later, when ‘flayed, skewered, and dismembered’ cats are discovered around the city, Leo learns that these animals ‘had all been signed with the letters S.M.’ (p. 209). The inscription of letters on the skin not only points to the co-implication of the page and the body, but also raises questions regarding the place of language. Are words inside or outside us? Are the texts we read and write within or without? Could they be located at the very limits of the self – at the skin? And if so, what are the implications of this for writing on the skin? In The Sorrows of an American, Hustvedt once again positions the text at the limits of the subject, disturbing the interface between the interior and the exterior. Hearing his father repeat his mother’s name without seeming to realise it, Erik remarks: ‘That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don’t notice the threshold has been crossed’ (pp. 16–17). This idea is reiterated by Erik’s sister, Inga, who reports a passion for the ‘stories of philosophers’: She talked about Pascal’s carriage hanging over the water on the Pont de Neuilly, about his rescue, and the Memorial, written Monday November 23, 1654, when he recorded the words of his ecstasy, which he sewed into his coat to keep with him always. (p. 55)

Describing an intense religious experience that Pascal kept secret all his life, Inga is referring to the parchment stitched into the lining of his coat. The parchment bears two slightly different accounts of his experiences that night and, reputedly, was unpicked and resewn every time he changed his coat.47 Inga, like Dan, thus communicates an uncanny desire to keep the text as close as possible to the body, to rethink, perhaps, the possibility of a textual skin. Inga’s account of Pascal recalls Hélène Cixous’s description of Stendhal in Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing. In a series of interviews, Mireille Calle-Gruber asks Cixous: ‘While we were speaking you wrote: what we write on. On what?’48 Cixous responds: ‘On the waistband of our trousers’, referring to Stendhal’s autobiography, The Life of Henry Brulard (1890).49 In the opening pages of this fragment of autobiography, Stendhal reflects, ‘I shall soon be fifty, it’s high time I got to know myself.’50 Thinking over his ‘unhappy love affairs’ and their ‘victories’, he informs us that as he mused, ‘I hurried back to the Palazzo Conti (Piazza Minerva), quite exhausted. I was wearing trousers made of white English stuff; I wrote inside the belt: “October 16th, 1832, I am going to be fifty,” thus abbreviated so as not to be u ­ nderstood:

­28    Tactile Poetics “Imgo ingt obe5”.’51 In Rootprints, Cixous appeals to this Imgo ingt obe5 to refigure her own passage through the scene of writing. Like Stendhal, she writes on the edge, on the waistband of her trousers: ‘I wrote on the waistband, on the inside [. . .] As if I were writing on the inside of myself.’52 ‘We write the book’, Cixous argues, ‘for the skin of our belly’; ‘it is as if I were writing on the inside of myself. It is as if the page were really inside. The least outside possible. As close as possible to the body. As if my body enveloped my own paper.’53 Moving beyond a simple comparison of skin and page, then, Cixous once again voices the relationship between writing and the skin, situating the text at the very limits and at the very heart of experience. Very early in The Skin Ego, Anzieu describes the ‘poet searching for a “skin of words”’.54 He passes over this crucial remark almost without further comment. And while he discusses the representation of skin in literature and briefly testifies to the ways in which writing can help recover a sense of psychological containment in cases of pathology, he does not seek to fully unravel the unmistakable bond between text and skin. This relation is repeatedly played out in Siri Hustvedt’s fiction – a body of work that draws attention to rather than conceals the interrelatedness of writing and the body. However, the metaphor of writing returns in Anzieu’s text. At the very end of The Skin Ego he pauses. Referring to his own act of writing, he states, ‘the spoken word, and even more, the written word, has the power to function as a skin [. . .] If I have written this book, it is to defend my own Skin Ego also by writing.’55 Here, he acknowledges what a study of Hustvedt’s fiction makes clear: the co-implication of writing and skin. Appearing at the very end of The Skin Ego, Anzieu’s comment also implies that this relationship is to be found at the text’s limits – at the text’s own skin. Finally, turning his text back on itself, he prompts us to consider our own textual skins. Thus, as Anzieu seems to suggest I might, and in the kind of reversal that Hustvedt repeatedly performs, I end this chapter by reflecting on the processes of its own construction. As I write this chapter – moreover, this book – how do I hold it together? Or in what ways might it be said to hold me together? Do I write it or does it write me? Is this text inside me or outside me? Perhaps, as Cixous suggests, I am always writing on the inside of myself, the least outside possible.

Notes  1. Hustvedt, What I Loved, p. 4. Further page references to this edition appear parenthetically in the main body of the text.

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  2. Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’, in The Ego and the Id and Other Works. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud [hereafter SE], vol. 19, pp. 3–66 (p. 26). All further quotations are taken from this edition.   The importance of the surface is reiterated in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, first published in 1920, where Freud writes of the PerceptionConsciousness: ‘It must lie on the borderline between outside and inside; it must be turned towards the external world and must envelop the other psychical systems.’ The ‘“seat” of consciousness’, he continues, is ‘the ­ outermost, enveloping layer of the central organ. Cerebral anatomy has no need to consider why, speaking anatomically, consciousness should be lodged on the surface of the brain instead of being safely housed somewhere in its inmost interior’ (Freud, SE 18, pp. 1–64 (p. 24)).  3. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 85.  4. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 40.   5. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 40. See also Connor, The Book of Skin, p. 49.   6. Anzieu, ‘Le Moi-Peau’, pp. 195–208.  7. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 98; see pp. 96–113 for a detailed account of these nine functions.  8. Connor, The Book of Skin, p. 49.  9. Connor, The Book of Skin, p. 49. 10. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 13. Anzieu draws on Wilfred Bion’s notion of alpha-functioning in containment, whereby the container, he says, forms ‘a passive receptacle where the baby may store its sensations/images/affects, which in this way are neutralized and preserved’ (Bion, Learning from Experience; Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 101). A ‘maternal reverie’ enables the alpha-function, which ‘transforms and restores to the child his sensations/ images/affects in a representable form’ (p. 101). His theory also builds on Winnicott’s (1971) concept of the maternal ‘holding space’ in child development, which states that in order for healthy maturation to take place, the mother or other caregiver must offer a containing structure in which to ‘hold’ the infant physically and psychologically, until the child is able to internalise this for his- or herself (Winnicott, Playing and Reality; see Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 105). 11. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 102. 12. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 102. 13. Bick, ‘The Experience of Skin’, pp. 55–9 (p. 55). 14. Bick, ‘The Experience of Skin’, p. 58. 15. Bick, ‘Further Considerations on the Function of the Skin in Early Object Relations’, pp. 60–71 (pp. 66, 71). 16. Bick, ‘The Experience of Skin’, p. 56. See also Prosser, Second Skins. 17. Hustvedt, The Sorrows of an American, p. 258. Further page references to this edition appear parenthetically in the main body of the text. Hustvedt makes direct reference to the role of the container in this novel. Erik, for instance, muses over a session with Ms L.: ‘I wrote down Bion’s word “container,” the analyst as a vessel, a place to put your mess. Me, the urinal’ (p. 183). 18. Connor, The Book of Skin, p. 54. 19. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 40.

­30    Tactile Poetics 20. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, pp. 36–7. 21. Taylor, Hiding, p. 213. 22. Tyler, ‘Skin-Tight’, pp. 69–83 (p. 72). 23. Connor, The Book of Skin, p. 117. 24. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 40. 25. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 211. 26. Prosser, ‘Skin Memories’, pp. 52–68 (pp. 52, 54). 27. Prosser, ‘Skin Memories’, pp. 54, 66. 28. Ahmed and Stacey, ‘Introduction’, p. 15. 29. Elsewhere spelled ‘dermographism’. 30. See Connor, The Book of Skin, pp. 131–4; Taskapan and Harmanyeri, ‘Evaluation of Patients with Symptomatic Dermographism’, pp. 58–62; Montagu, Touching, pp. 147–8. Today, dermographic urticaria is most frequently understood as the breaking down of a membrane in the skin under physical pressure, causing an allergic-like reaction, and it is often treated with antihistamines. Connor points out that it reveals ‘an abnormal sensitivity of the skin which means that it reacts to the lightest pressure with swelling and weals. Words and images traced upon the skin of such patients may remain for 24 hours or longer.’ Connor, The Book of Skin, p. 131. 31. Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies, pp. 24, 21. 32. Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies, p. 1. 33. Ahmed and Stacey, ‘Introduction’, p. 15. Michel Foucault argues that the body is written on by historically and culturally specific discourses and ­ isciplinary technologies. See Discipline and Punish, where he addresses the d regime of criminals, arguing that the law is inscribed on the surface of the body. An often-cited literary example of this appears is Franz Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’, pp. 140–67; see Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 105. Judith Butler, however, refutes the notion of ‘cultural inscription as a “single drama” that acts on the body’. She refuses to accept ‘the body’ as a ‘blank page’ or a ‘medium’ that only emerges via the act of inscription. This suggests that the skin can never pre-exist its own marking; instead, it is inscribed by the trace of its own signifying matter (Butler, Gender Trouble, pp. 165–6). These debates have been discussed at length elsewhere, and rather than rehearse them here, I point the reader to Biddle, ‘Inscribing Identity’, pp. 177–9, and Mascia-Lees and Sharpe, Tattoo, Torture, Mutilation, and Adornment, in addition to the aforementioned texts. 34. Ahmed and Stacey, ‘Introduction’, p. 15. 35. Ahmed and Stacey, ‘Introduction’, p. 15. 36. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 71. Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904. In this letter Freud discusses the ‘psychic periods of development and the sexual phases’ (p. 209): I am working on the assumption that our psychic mechanism has come into being by a process of stratification: the material present in the form of memory traces being subjected from time to time to a rearrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances – to a retranscription. (p. 207)

He insists, ‘the fact that there are more psychic phases would fit very well with my assumption of still further translations and innovations of the psychic apparatus’ (pp. 211–12).

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37. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 75. 38. Freud, SE 19, pp. 227–32 (pp. 228, 227). 39. Freud, SE 19, p. 230. Freud compares this device to our ‘perceptual apparatus’ (originally outlined in Beyond the Pleasure Principle): ‘our mind consists of two layers, of an external protective shield against stimuli whose task it is to diminish the strength of excitations coming in, and of a surface behind it which receives the stimuli, namely the system Pcpt.-Cs’ (p. 230). 40. The palimpsest is the uncanny economy that enables a surface to be repeatedly reinscribed while at the same time preserving the trace of its history. Sarah Dillon is especially interested in the trace left by the ‘successful failure’ or imperfect erasure of the original text. She argues that the capacity for the ‘original’ writing to be temporarily effaced enables the parchment to be repeatedly re-used, while at the same time preserving the ghost of the original (Dillon, Palimpsest, p. 31). 41. Derrida, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, pp. 196–231 (p. 197). 42. This case study was originally published in Enriquez, Aux Carrefours, cited in Anzieu, The Skin Ego, pp. 206–8. 43. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, pp. 206–7. 44. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 207. 45. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 207. 46. Enriquez, Aux Carrefours, p. 213, cited in Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 231. This has interesting implications for Maggie Turp’s notion of the ‘narrative skin’ – the web of words generated by the therapeutic dyad (Turp, Psychosomatic Health, p. 62). 47. See Bjørnstad, ‘Twice Written, Never Read’, pp. 69–95. 48. Cixous, Rootprints, p. 103. 49. Cixous, Rootprints, p. 103. 50. Stendhal, The Life of Henry Brulard, p. 2. 51. Stendhal, The Life of Henry Brulard, pp. 2, 3. 52. Cixous, Rootprints, pp. 103, 105. 53. Cixous, Rootprints, pp. 104, 105. 54. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 17. 55. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, pp. 231–2.

Chapter 2

Expeausition: Ondaatje’s Skin-Effects

You are in a car, travelling through darkness. This is the story you gather in the early hours of the morning. Occasionally, you glance at the driver, whose expression you cannot read. At times, you are afraid that the driver is not keeping her eye on the  road. You tell yourself that this is all part of the adventure. When  she  brakes, you realise that you, too, are pressing your foot to the floor. You pass a sign: Crowe River. It is here that you finally understand that you are miles and miles from anywhere. You turn on the radio and try to find a voice that you recognise in all that white noise. This is something of what you hear. Michael Ondaatje writes on the skin. From the very title of In the Skin of a Lion, taken from The Epic of Gilgamesh, the reader is confronted with the transitory and mobile quality of the body’s surface: skin, the novel suggests, is something to try on or take off. The skin motif is repeated throughout the novel: there are animal skins, painted skins, dusty skins, wounded skins, erotic skins, the skins of migrant workers, the skins of mistresses and the skins of millionaires. Woven from the protagonist’s skin stories, the book begins and ends with a journey, during which Patrick tells Hana of his childhood in Depot Creek, where his father worked as a dynamiter. For Hana’s benefit, and ours, he recounts his migration to Toronto, where he sets out to find the missing millionaire, Ambrose Small, and where he meets Clara (Small’s mistress) and Alice (Clara’s friend and Hana’s mother). Discovering more about the history of the Macedonian community in which he lives, he begins employment firstly as a dynamiter and then as a leather worker in a tannery, before attempting to blow up the R. C. Harris water treatment plant while grieving the loss of Alice. Made up of shifting stories told slantwise, the novel presents the lives and deaths of

Expeausition: Ondaatje’s Skin-Effects    ­33

­marginalised subjects as they transform their individual and collective narratives – uncovering, recovering and discovering possible skins in the process. In The English Patient, Ondaatje once again brings the skin to the surface through the figure of the man who has almost entirely lost his skin following a plane fire and subsequent crash. Cared for by a young nurse, Hana, at the end of the Second World War, he occupies a room in the Villa San Girolamo, where thief Caravaggio and sapper Kirpal (known as Kip) also come to reside. The bombed library at the villa and its contents figure centrally in the novel. It is in the library that Hanna ponders the text’s surface: ‘The book lay on her lap. She realized that for more than five minutes she had been looking at the porousness of the paper, the crease at the corner of page 17 which someone had folded over as a mark. She brushed her hand over its skin.’1 Drawing attention to the longstanding association between the skin and the page, a relationship that deepens and intensifies as the novel develops, Hana reads to the English patient while she treats his burned body. And as she reads, she also begins to come to terms with the loss of her adoptive father Patrick, the tragedy of war, her desire for Kip’s smooth surfaces and for ‘all the varieties of his darkness’ (p. 127). In both these texts, then, Ondaatje relates the skin stories of outsiders,  exploring the ways that bodies bear the traces of their ­ own history – the writerly effects of the skin.2 Signifying far more than surface  matter, these skins become a way of mapping aesthetic movement and form. Following recent research by Gail Jones and Milena Marinkova, I take up the relationship between the body and the text, but rather than reading the representation of skin in literature, I examine  the relationship between the skin and literary form.3 Interrogating the ways that his fictions deconstruct their own surface properties, I argue that Ondaatje’s novels expose their own skin-effects. Thinking through the skin, we’ll see, is a way of rethinking the practice of reading.

Ondaatje’s ‘poetics of sense’ In Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self and the World, Claudia Benthien notes the significance of the skin in The English Patient, arguing that Ondaatje establishes ‘the body surface as a place where individual and collective history meet’.4 Gail Jones takes this further in her essay, ‘A Poetics of Sense’. Comparing In the Skin of a Lion to The English Patient, she points out:

­34    Tactile Poetics what seems under-examined in each is the degree to which both are about skin, about the gaining or erasure of identity through transformations of skin (both figurative and literal), and about the life of the senses in contradistinction to the life represented in words.5

She invites the reader to ‘consider, with a radical gaze, the skin of this text’, observing that ‘the surface of this textual body is complicated, as much disfigured as figured: distressed, rent, open both to wounds and the sweet surprise of erotics, by turns sumptuous and spare, hedonistic and ascetic, delicate, strident, volatile, settled’.6 Jones thus highlights not simply the recurrence of the skin in Ondaatje’s writing, but the ways that his textual skin performs many of the qualities, habits and functions of the surface of the body. Extending Jones’s account of the ‘anointings, touchings, and co-minglings’ that occur in Ondaatje’s work, this chapter interrogates the complexity of the surfaces of the body and their shifting morphologies.7 Like Jones, Milena Marinkova emphasises the central importance of the body’s surface in Ondaatje’s novels, examining the way that he uses ‘a set of multisensory aesthetic strategies’ in order to bypass dominant ideologies.8 Discussing Ondaatje’s aesthetic form and describing the ‘non-linear and disjointed’ narrative of In the Skin of a Lion, alongside the ‘formal experimentation’ of The English Patient, she suggests that the ‘haptic investment in the tactile and the intimate disrupts prescriptive modes of reading and writing, of reality construction and imagining’.9 She refers to a ‘tactile epistemology’, in which ‘the recurrent images of webs of roads, threads of tapestries, and plaster of murals convey the osmosis between the textual and the textural’.10 To read the skin in Ondaatje’s fiction, both Jones and Marinkova seem to suggest, is also to read the surface of the text – or textual skin.11 The skin, however, as Anzieu tells us, refuses to behave itself: The skin is both permeable and impermeable, superficial and profound, truthful and misleading. It is regenerative, but caught up in a continual process of desiccation. It is elastic, but a piece of skin detached from the body shrinks greatly. It sets off libidinal cathexes that are as much narcissistic as sexual. It is the centre of emotional well-being and also of seduction. It gives us pain and pleasure in equal parts.12

Like the skin, Ondaatje’s work also refuses to behave. Extending existing scholarship, this chapter interrogates what I call the ‘skin-effects’ of Ondaatje’s writing, addressing the mobile and shifting quality of his work and exploring the relationship between the skin’s complexity and aesthetic form. Drawing on research by Steven Connor, Jean-Luc Nancy and Michel Serres to rethink the complex and contradictory nature

Expeausition: Ondaatje’s Skin-Effects    ­35

of the skin, I demonstrate how it moves not as a solid mass, but in twists and turns, troubling our distinctions between inside and outside, between inscribing and exscribing, and between self and other.

Skin-effects Taking us in loops and whorls, smoothing surfaces, feeling for wrinkles,  bearing traces of the past and touching on possible futures, In the Skin of a Lion refuses to move in a straight line. Discovering that his own  life ‘was no longer a single story but part of a mural’, Patrick  weaves  ‘a wondrous night web’ in Ondaatje’s novel, drawing together a number of threads to expose the ways that subjectivities and stories continually come into contact with one another.13 The polyphonic text refuses to deliver a single story told from one point of view; instead, we find ourselves amidst multiple and interwoven narratives: ‘A nun on a bridge, a dare-devil who was unable to sleep without drink, a boy watching a fire from his bed at night, an actress who ran away with a millionaire’ (p. 145). For Marinkova, this means that In the Skin of a Lion demands ‘a reading that alerts the reader to the constructed and synchronized nature of History, a reading that exposes the reader to the contingency and plurality of reality’.14 It is in this vein that we come to learn that the nun who fell from the Prince Edward Viaduct and ‘disappeared into the night by the third abutment’ is the same woman who becomes Patrick’s lover – the political activist, Alice Gull (p. 31). Eventually we discover that Alice is also the mother of Hana, to whom Patrick tells his story during the car journey that frames the novel: This is a story a young girl gathers in a car during the early hours of the morning. She listens and asks questions as the vehicle travels through ­darkness [. . .] She listens to the man as he picks up and brings together various corners of the story, attempting to carry it all in his arms. (p. 1)

As you may suspect, this is a framing device that complicates rather than explicates the text. For a start, the act of ‘telling’ is at once both inside and outside the main story, troubling our perceptions of interiority, exteriority, beginning, middle and end. At the start of the journey, Hana simply ‘listens and asks questions’, but by the novel’s conclusion, she is invited to take the wheel: ‘“Do you want to drive?” he asked’ (p. 244). Marinkova explains that in these final pages, ‘Patrick and Hana swap authority over the story; Hana initially is a passenger engaged in the reconstruction of Patrick’s life and in the final scene she is the driver.’15

­36    Tactile Poetics Although Hana protests, ‘I don’t know the gears’, Patrick assures her that he will ‘talk the gears to you till we are out of town’ (p. 244). Thus ‘Hana sat upright, adapting the rear-view mirror to her height’, in the driving seat of the narrative, and heading out beyond the text’s own limits (p. 244). Refusing to follow a straightforward journey from beginning to end, the novel requires the reader, like Hana, to ‘gather’ together its points and pleats, to unfold and straighten it out, to try to make some sense of it. Although, broadly speaking, the novel follows chronological  time, the reader’s ability to form a coherent narrative doesn’t progress simply from beginning to end. Instead, the reader is taken on a fragmented and recursive journey. It is only at the very end of the novel, for example, when Patrick explains to Harris the circumstances of Alice’s death, that the reader understands his earlier actions when he attempts to burn down the Muskoka Hotel. In this manner, the reader frequently stumbles across gaps in the narrative, as well as moments when everything seems to happen at once. Furthermore, Ondaatje’s handling of geographical space is variously fractured, overlapping and dislocated. He folds and unfolds places in the novel, moving rapidly from one to the other, superimposing them, making distant places come close: Depot Creek, The Bloor Street Viaduct, the Ohrida Lake Restaurant, Union Station, Paris (Ontario), the tunnel under Lake Ontario, the old waterworks, the Cypress Street leather factory, the Geranium Bakery, Page Island, the Kingston Penitentiary and Featherstone Point; the reader visits them all while on the road to Marmora, travelling through darkness. Thus, both the temporal and spatial contexts of the novel are variously folded, crumpled, stretched out and torn. If we are to think of the novel as a skin, then, it is not one that acts as a simple screen or background upon which a story is inscribed. Disrupting the conventions of the realist novel, Ondaatje shows us that the textual skin is something far more mobile, complicated and unstable.

The syrrhèse Arguing that the surface of the body is neither linear nor a solid mass, Steven Connor compares the complication of the skin as surface to a handkerchief, which provides a ‘model for the tumbling and crumplings of the history of the skin and the skin in history’.16 He cites the French philosopher, Michel Serres, who, in an interview with Bruno Latour, remarks:

Expeausition: Ondaatje’s Skin-Effects    ­37 If you take a handkerchief and spread it out in order to iron it, you can see in it certain fixed distances and proximities. If you sketch a circle in one area, you can mark out nearby points and measure far-off distances. Then take the same handkerchief and crumple it, by putting it in your pocket. Two distant points suddenly are close, even superimposed. If, further, you tear it in certain places, two points that were close can become very distant.17

This account provides a model for aesthetic form in In the Skin of a Lion. With its capacity to be folded, flattened, crumpled or rent, it exposes the complications and contradictions of the textual skin. As his account of the handkerchief might suggest, Serres is particularly interested in the liminal spaces between inside and outside, self and other. The idea of an interface, he argues, is unhelpful because it presupposes that ‘the junction between two sciences or concepts is perfectly under control, or seamless, and poses no problems’.18 For him, this junction is not fixed and stable. ‘On the contrary,’ he writes, ‘I believe that these spaces between are more complicated than one thinks.’19 Dissolving the boundary that divides inside from outside, he compares this in-between space to movements or shapes such as the Northwest Passage or a fly’s flight pattern, remarking, ‘it’s more fractal than truly simple. Less a juncture under control than an adventure to be had.’20 Applying this perspective to the boundaries of the body, Serres argues in The Five Senses that the skin is both an in-between space and a common sense. He states that in the same way that ‘flat or irregular fabric becomes islands, hems, flounces, frills, gatherings, sewn decorations, so does our skin form the continuous backdrop, the base note of the senses, their common denominator’.21 As ‘a fundamental variable’ or a ‘sensorium commune’, the skin is common to all the senses, ‘forming a link, bridge and passage between them’.22 The skin, therefore, forms a passage between the senses and marks the site of their ‘mingling’.23 Following Serres, Steven Connor emphasises ‘the implicative capacity of the skin’: Rather than seeing the skin as possessing an inside which is on the other side of its outside, one might begin to imagine it, as it has in fact been drawn in imagination, drawn into imagination, drawn out in imagination, in many places and at many times, as a complex manifold, which is hugely impoverished by a scheme which depends upon the simple alternatives of inside and outside.24

Arguing that ‘the division between inner and outer is just a tactic, a way of getting us to the apprehension we need’, Connor follows Serres in proposing that:

­38    Tactile Poetics [the skin] is involved in other, much more mobile and ambivalent substances too, substances and forms which do not have simple superficiality or absolute homogeneity, but in which, so to speak, the surface turns on itself, goes all the way down: smoke; clouds; dust; sand; foam.25

Serres’s term for this kind of morphology is syrrhèse. In an interview with Latour, he explains: What I seek to form, to compose, to promote – I can’t quite find the right word – is a syrrhèse, a confluence not a system, a mobile confluence of fluxes. Turbulences, overlapping cyclones and anticyclones, like on the weather map. Wisps of hay tied in knots. An assembly of relations. Clouds of angels passing. Once again, the flames dance.26

Moving in the manner of a fly’s flight patterns, fractal ice froes or dancing flames, Serres is preoccupied with the mobility and motility of the skin as a site of mingling – a ‘mixture’ that, in Ondaatje’s work, seems always to be on the move.27 Crucially, with its capacity to be turned inside out and to touch on itself in an infinite number of ways, the syrrhèse provides us with a useful way of reading the dissipative structure of Ondaatje’s textual skin.

A digression on dust For Connor, Serres’s description of the syrrhèse can be compared to the movement of dust. ‘Dust’, he writes, ‘is the ultimate mixed body, the dissolution and dislimning of every distinct form.’28 It ‘can get everywhere’, he points out, making it ‘a medium of transformation and exchange’.29 Connor is especially quick to identify the ‘affinity’ between skin and dust, ‘and not just because of the charnel-house canard that most housedust is made up of human skin (it is not), but because of the tendency for dust to form skins, veils or integuments as it falls’.30 He also observes that ‘to dust means to cover with dust, or to make dusty, as when a cook dusts with flour or icing-sugar; but it can also mean to clear of dust’.31 He continues by noting that ‘oddly, one of the few other words of which this is true is to “skin”, which means both to cover with skin and to deprive of it’.32 Skin and dust are alike in that they come to signify their own opposite. They are examples of Freud’s primal or antithetical words.33 Reading Ondaatje’s dust in these recursive and reversible terms, then, allows us to rethink the possibilities of ‘skinning’ the text. In the Skin of a Lion has a good deal to say about dust. Exposing the appalling conditions for migrant workers, dust is something of an

Expeausition: Ondaatje’s Skin-Effects    ­39

­ ccupational hazard. Not only does Ondaatje allude to the explosive o quality of dynamite ‘dust’ when Patrick’s father throws his shirt on the fire, where it ‘fizzed and sprayed sparks over the knees of the loggers’ (p. 19), but it also insinuates itself in Patrick’s own work in the tunnel, where each day he picks up his dirty clothes, ‘hard as armour’, and ‘bangs them against the wall of the fire escape till they crack apart and soften, the dust in the air around him’ (p. 108). This sort of manual labour is dusty work: the men are ‘covered in wood shavings or granite dust’ (p. 31) and ‘gloves are buried in stone dust’ (p. 26).34 In fact, the dangers of dust go back a long way. Citing Thomas Oliver from 1916, Carolyn Steedman alerts readers ‘“that the greatest enemy of a worker in any trade is dust”’.35 In particular, Steedman points to the ‘hazards’ of leather working: Right through the process, from fellmongering (the initial removal of flesh, fat and hair from the animal skins) to the paring and finishing of the cured and tanned skins, workers were known to be liable to anthrax [. . .] Leather workers and medical commentators also knew that the processes of fellmongering, washing, limerubbing, scraping, further washing, chemical curing, stretching, drying and dressing all gave rise to dust, which was inhaled.36

Thus, when Patrick gets a job at the Cypress Street tannery, where he ‘waded into the brown skins with the pilot knife, slicing the hides in straight lines’, he is also at risk of inhaling dust (p. 129). He watches the dyers at work in the courtyards and wonders how he might paint them: What would the painting tell? That they had consumed the most evil smell in history, they were consuming it now, flesh death, which lies in the vacuum between flesh and skin, and even if they never stepped into this pit again – a year from now they would burp up that odour. That they would die of consumption and at present they did not know it. (pp. 130–1)

One of the causes of consumption (tuberculosis) is dust; far from being merely harmless matter, then, the inhalation of dust can be fatal. But what is particularly interesting about this passage is the way that it isn’t only Patrick’s skin-work in the tannery that is disturbing, the narrative form itself is, in its own way, equally disturbed. ‘This’, Ondaatje writes, ‘is how Patrick would remember them later’; by drawing a future memory into the present, Ondaatje unsettles the novel’s temporal frame (p. 130). Patrick’s job at Wickett and Craig’s tannery, then, not only points to the poor working conditions for migrants, but also reflects the text’s own dissolving edges. For Steedman, dust is about ‘circularity, the impossibility of things disappearing, or going away, of being gone. Nothing can be destroyed’,

­40    Tactile Poetics she writes.37 Dust, then, operates like the unconscious. Recalling Freud’s account of the psyche, where ‘nothing which has once been formed can perish – that everything is somehow preserved and that in suitable circumstances [. . .] it can once more be brought to light’, dust – like the repressed – always returns.38 From ‘granite dust’ (p. 61) to Patrick’s obsessive cleaning of his household dust (p. 82), to the ‘white dust’ (p. 210) of the bakery through which he perceives his friend, Nicholas Temelcoff, the novel is structured through the movement of dust. Using this as a way of rethinking aesthetic form, it is clear that the patterns of memory that make up the narrative refuse to settle. Thus, while Jones provides an astute reading of the textual skin in Ondaatje’s work, it is by considering the novel’s preoccupation with alternative integuments such as the veil of dust that we can get a sense of the more mobile and ambivalent forms that structure it. A preoccupation with dust – the way it gathers, scatters and refuses to disappear – thus produces and plays out the narrative’s refusal to settle – its resistance to being swept up and tidied away. Dust is, of course, unsettling. In fact, the thing about dust, remarks Geoffrey Bennington, is that it is ‘essentially scatter, matter with no inner principle of gathering or preservation, subject only to dispersion and loss, matter itself insofar as matter just is dispersion’.39 He points out that ‘things may gather dust, but dust itself is not a principle of gathering at all, but at best lies only until the arrival of the breeze that will raise and scatter it to the four winds’.40 He continues: The dust that things gather, the dust that settles and soils, can always be unsettled, disturbed, blown off or blown away, as when a reader blows the dust from his old copy of the works of Shakespeare: dust becomes most itself when airborne, suspended and sometimes even explosive, motes in the sunlight the figure of the scattered atoms, tendentially always figurable as what meteorologists sometimes call ‘diamond dust’, magical and apparently transfigured.41

As with In the Skin of a Lion, reading The English Patient is rich but dusty work. It is everywhere: ‘chalk dust’ (p. 202), ‘plaster dust’ (p. 284), ‘floating motes’ (p. 116) of dust in the air.42 In particular, however, the ‘red dust’ of the desert transfigures the narrative, evident when Hana picks up the English patient’s notebook and reads: ‘The harmattan blows across the Sahara filled with red dust, dust as fire, as flour, entering and coagulating in the locks of rifles’ (p. 17), he explains, in ‘small gnarled handwriting’ (p. 16). For him, the desert engulfs everything: it ‘surrounds them, traversed by a loose order of storms and caravans’ (p. 22). It doesn’t stop moving:

Expeausition: Ondaatje’s Skin-Effects    ­41 Here in the desert, which had been an old sea where nothing was strapped down or permanent, everything drifted – like the shift of linen across the boy as if he were embracing or freeing himself from an ocean or his own blue afterbirth. (p. 22)

There are, however, shapes that emerge among this drift. The English patient explains: ‘Dust storms in three shapes. The whirl. The column. The sheet. In the first the horizon is lost. In the second you are surrounded by “waltzing Ginns.” The third, the sheet, is “Copper-tinted. Nature seems to be on fire”’ (p. 17). This movement is reflected in the textual drift of Ondaatje’s writing, where the narrative’s dance is loose and unsettling, its signification always suspended. It suggests that, like the desert, the text can be a disorienting place to find oneself; thus, when the English patient describes being lost in a sandstorm, we might infer that he also addresses the work of the reader, who, like the explorer, is exposed to certain principles of scatter and drift. Here, you have to ‘keep moving. If you pause sand builds up as it would around anything stationary, and locks you in. You are lost forever’ (p. 137). Featuring centrally in the novel, dust thus provides a model for aesthetic form, unsettling the movement of the narrative and challenging the pattern of our reading.

Reading lessons Milena Marinkova draws parallels between the surfaces of the body and the book, suggesting that the complex ways in which we touch on the page also affect how we touch on the skin. She highlights the possibilities of reading skin in The English Patient, which, she points out, stages numerous acts of reading that flout normative boundaries and float between the creased and porous skin of the dusty volumes in the Villa San Girolamo, the destroyed skin of the English patient narrating or complementing those volumes, the skin of the page unfolding in front of Ondaatje’s readers.43

Marinkova thus makes a link between Ondaatje’s novel, the books referred to within that novel and the English patient’s skin. The fragmented, composite and ruptured acts of reading that these texts require must be considered reflexively, in order that their deconstruction in The English Patient not only reflects its own structure and design, but also causes the reader to rethink his or her own handling of the novel. Ondaatje’s writing requires us to make connections both within and between texts. This is not simply that characters – Hana, Caravaggio, Clara and Patrick – or references to them, appear in both In the Skin

­42    Tactile Poetics of a Lion and The English Patient, but it is also an effect of the palimpsestuous layering of writing within Ondaatje’s work.44 This is most explicit in The English Patient, where the text is haunted by a bombedout library, the remains of which include Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, Tacitus’ Annals, and the Bible, and which cannot fail to relocate the text’s own position in the Western cannon (pp.  94–5). Highlighting its own intertextual structure, much of the novel is ‘cradled within the text of Herodotus’, which the patient ‘brought with him through the fire’ following the plane crash (p. 16). In fact, his copy of Herodotus’ Histories is now ‘almost twice its original thickness’ (p. 94), filled with ‘pages from other books or writing in his own observations’ (p. 16). By giving us a text within a text – a composite Histories supplemented with annotations, references, memories, maps and other languages – Ondaatje draws attention to the way that his own works are plural, overlapping and palimpsestuous, demanding the reader’s active involvement in how they are put together and taken apart again. In this way, The English Patient presents a number of lessons in reading. From the library, which appears safe ‘except for a large hole at portrait level in the far wall, caused by mortar-shell attack on the villa two months earlier’ (p. 11), Hana takes books and settles in the ‘window alcove in the English patient’s room’ (p. 12): She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awakening from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams. (p. 12)

At night, when ‘he is never tired enough to sleep’, Hana reads to the patient ‘from whatever book she is able to find in the library downstairs’ (p. 5). She does not stop reading, however, if he stops listening or falls asleep. This means that for the patient the narratives have ‘gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night’ (p. 7). Again, considering the fragmentary and dissipative structure of The English Patient, I suggest this description can be applied to the text within which it ­features, positioning the practice of reading as central to the novel’s movement. We learn that while ‘many books open with an author’s assurance of order’, one cannot avoid engaging with ‘hesitation or chaos’ (p. 93). As a result, ‘Readers were never fully in balance. A door a lock a weir opened and they rushed through, one hand holding a gunnel, the other a hat’ (p. 93). Consequently, the English patient’s ‘first lesson

Expeausition: Ondaatje’s Skin-Effects    ­43

about reading’ is that it cannot be rushed: ‘“Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly”’ (p. 94). By situating this both within and beyond his own novel, Ondaatje also offers invaluable advice to his own readers.

The edge Ondaatje unsettles our experience of reading by laying bare the way that language resists fixed meanings. In In the Skin of a Lion, for instance, language is always different from itself. Upon his arrival in Canada, Nicholas Temelcoff ‘could not speak a word of English’, but after six months he realises that ‘If he did not learn the language he would be lost’ (p. 46). Henceforth, he enrols in a school while supporting himself through night shifts in a bakery. English, with its ‘terrible barriers’, is in fact a language that he comes to love (p. 43). As he grows increasingly familiar with it, he begins to pick apart its mechanisms, testing its limits and its possibilities. Highlighting the constructedness of language and its implication in social, political and racial contexts, he also exposes the ways that it works within, but also destabilises, systems of signification. Sometimes, the men labouring on the bridge hear him below, ‘breaking down syllables and walking round them as if laying the clauses out like tackle on a pavement to be checked for worthiness, picking up one he fancies for a moment then replacing it with another’ (pp. 42–3). As if to lay bare the différance – the difference and the deferral – of signification, Nicholas demonstrates the ways that a word depends on its association with and difference from other words, how words such as ‘absolutely’ and ‘positively’ exist in a chain of ­différance: ‘“‘Does she love me? – Absolutely! Do I love her? – Positively!’”’ (p. 43). Both differing and deferring meaning, these words expose how language is always different from itself, and that it is this différance, as Derrida writes in 1968, that ‘makes the movement of signification possible’.45 Slippery and unpredictable, meaning in Ondaatje’s fiction thus slides between different signifying systems. This happens not only at the level of the word, but also at the level of the text. It is demonstrated through the repetition of ‘demarcation’ in In the Skin of a Lion, where Caravaggio, like the novel within which he features, does everything he can to dissolve his own edges. ‘Demarcation’, he says when Buck and (Patrick) Lewis paint him the same blue as the jail roof and the sky, ‘That is all we need to remember’ (p. 179). Later, when Caravaggio and Patrick prepare to blow up the water treatment plant, the roles

­44    Tactile Poetics are reversed and it is Patrick who is ‘invisible except by touch, grease covering all unclothed skin, his face, his hands, his bare feet’ (p. 228). ‘Demarcation’: the word floats between them again (p. 228). For Peter Brooks, such repetitions have a curious effect on our pattern of reading. He says that they ‘take us back in the text, that allow the ear, the eye, the mind to make connections, conscious or unconscious, between different textual moments’.46 Thus, ‘an event gains meaning by its repetition, which is both the recall of an earlier moment and a variation of it’; as a result, repetition ‘hovers ambiguously between the idea of reproduction and that of change, forward and backward movement’.47 This ­repetition  – a quotation without quotation marks – reflects the disordered edges of Ondaatje’s own fiction, simultaneously arresting our reading and moving it forward. Jacques Derrida addresses the uncertain edges of the text in his double essay, ‘Living On / Border Lines’. He writes, ‘if we are to approach [aborder] a text, for example, it must have a bord, an edge’.48 At the same time, however, he insists that ‘no border is guaranteed, inside or out’.49 He puts this to work by repeating his own statement and folding it into his text once again, thus tampering with the notion of the edge, its beginning and its ending: If we are to approach a text, it must have an edge. The question of the text, as it has been elaborated and transformed in the last dozen or so years, has not merely ‘touched’ ‘shore,’ le bord [. . .] all those boundaries that form the running border of what used to be called a text, of what we once thought this word could identify, i.e., the supposed end and beginning of a work, the unity of a corpus, the title, the margins, the signatures, the referential realm outside the frame, and so forth.50

Derrida does not simply ask what happens to the edges of a text as we approach it; rather, he invites us to question what happens to our very idea of a ‘text’. ‘What has happened, if it has happened’, he writes, ‘is a sort of overrun [débordement] that spoils all these boundaries and divisions and forces us to extend the accredited concept, the dominant notion of a “text”.’51 The text is henceforth a ‘differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, to other differential traces’.52 This differential network does not destroy the idea of the border altogether, but it makes it ‘more complex, dividing and multiplying strokes and lines’.53 In Ondaatje’s work, this does not mean that the limits are lost; rather, it exposes them to complication, division and multiplication. Like the limits of the body, the textual skin is evidently in crisis. Its margins operate as a semi-permeable membrane, through which

Expeausition: Ondaatje’s Skin-Effects    ­45

c­ haracters, stories, languages and literatures pass. The slipperiness of In the Skin of a Lion is foreshadowed by Alice, who describes a play to Patrick in which different actresses share the role of the heroine. She explains: After half an hour the powerful matriarch removed her large coat from where animal pelts dangled and she passed it, along with her strength, to one of the minor characters. In this way even a silent daughter could put on the cloak and be able to break through her chrysalis into language. Each person had their moment when they assumed the skins of wild animals, when they took responsibility for the story. (p. 157)

Here, Ondaatje not only highlights the transformative power of a story, but also brings marginalised characters centre stage, where trying on a skin is also to sound out a voice. What is especially interesting about this passage, however, is the way that it also describes the novel in which it features. Marginalised characters have their ‘moments’ in In the Skin of a Lion, where they assume a different skin and tell their tale. By passing narrative responsibility on to Hana at the end of the novel, Ondaatje demonstrates the way that she, too, assumes a skin – and with it, a sense of agency over the story. Pointing beyond itself, the framing device enables the ‘handing’ on of the narrative, thus inscribing that which remains outside the text. Resisting closure, then, In the Skin of a Lion tends towards its own unreadability. Such unreadability for Derrida, however, ‘does not arrest reading, does not leave it paralyzed in the face of an opaque surface: rather, it starts reading and writing and translation moving again’.54 Handing the narrative from Patrick to Hana at the end of the text, this passage becomes ‘the ridge [arête] that also gives it momentum, movement, sets it in motion’.55 Ondaatje, I propose, writes on such a ridge; he writes on and beyond the skin.

Expeausition Jean-Luc Nancy’s account of ‘exscription’ provides us with a productive model for understanding the ways that Ondaatje simultaneously writes on the skin and deconstructs its limits. According to J. Hillis Miller, exscription is ‘Nancy’s neologism for an act of writing that puts something beyond writing or acknowledges that it cannot be touched by writing’.56 The neologism first appeared in Nancy’s reading of Georges Bataille, where he addresses the necessity of ‘touching the limit where all meaning [sens] spills out of itself’.57 Bataille, Nancy writes, ‘always played at being unable to finish, acted out the excess, stretched to the

­46    Tactile Poetics breaking point of writing, of what makes writing: that is, what simultaneously inscribes and excribes it’.58 Like Bataille, Ondaatje acts out the text’s excess, or what Nancy calls its ‘self-exteriority’.59 When Patrick passes narrative responsibility to Hana in In the Skin of a Lion, the novel’s own aesthetic construction is exposed, and we are reminded that the ‘common’ skin of the entire novel is a car journey during which a story is handed from one to another, mirroring the passage from writer to reader. The narrative frame, which sits both outside the plot and yet is always implicated within it, is exscribed. Thus, exscription is, as Joanna Hodge notes, ‘an effect of writing taken to its limit’.60 It is here, at the text’s limit, that we make ‘sense’. Exscribing meaning, writing, for Nancy, demonstrates that what matters – everything that is at stake in the text (including, Nancy remarks, ‘writing’s own existence’) – is in fact outside the text; it is inscribed-outside or exscribed.61 It is crucial to note, however, that exscription does not refer to the inexpressible or uninscribable; rather, it exists as ‘writing’s opening, within itself, to itself’.62 Exscription in Ondaatje’s fiction, accordingly, not only complicates or troubles the limits of the novel, but also sets it in motion. It is by opening itself to its own otherness that the novel makes meaning or ‘sense’. Exscription exposes the workings of literature. For Nancy, however, exposition does not mean to make visible something that would remain hidden, but refers to its ‘very being’.63 This exposition is always an ‘event of skin’: Being exposed, exposing: it is the skin, all the various types of skin, here and there open and turned into membranes, mucous, poured out inside of itself, or rather without either an inside or an outside, absolutely, continually passing form one to the other, always coming back to itself without either a locus or a place where it can establish a self, and so always coming back to the world, to other bodies to which it is exposed, in the same gesture that exposes them to itself.64

It is because exposition takes place at the skin that Nancy terms it expeausition.65 The skin thus marks the site of events of ‘ex-pulsion, ex-pression, ex-tension, ex-cretion, ex-scription, and ex-istence’.66 Following this, we can see that the limits of Ondaatje’s fiction – those moments of ex-cess – are an event of skin. Writing, for Ondaatje, is ‘é(x)criture’, where language is always subject to skin-effects.67 By exscribing poetics, language, Ondaatje shows us, is subject to its own expeausition. Using Jean-Luc Nancy’s theory of exscription in order to interrogate its ‘own-other’ that is ‘inscribed-outside’ the text, this chapter has read the

Expeausition: Ondaatje’s Skin-Effects    ­47

‘loosening of unsignifying spacing’ in Ondaatje’s work.68 Exploring the manner in which the text dislocates and exscribes itself, I have shown that it is at the very ‘skin’ of Ondaatje’s work that we touch on its limits, its possibilities and what Serres calls the ‘adventures to be had’.69 Ondaatje’s fiction unfolds through the expeausition of skin-effects, where his ‘tact of words’ in The English Patient exscribes the limits of both the body and the text (p. 213). In referring to ‘tact’, I am also, of course, gesturing towards the role of touch in all this. For Nancy, ‘The gesture of the limit, the gesture at the limit, is touch – or rather: touching is the thought of the limit.’70 Touching, he argues, is ‘being at the limit’.71 Touching on this now, I gesture to the limits of this chapter, marking the exscription of its own closure. And here, I hand over to you, for you to mark the expeausition of touch as this book’s remainder. You think you may have been asleep. At least, when you look up, you are somewhere else entirely. You scrabble around in the foot-well for a map, but soon put it back, because a map is only useful if you know where you are and where you are going. Although there is dust between your tongue and your teeth, there is a lightening in your chest. Ahead, the dawn begins to open the sky. You have many questions, but before you can speak, the driver asks, Do you want to take the wheel? You switch seats with the engine still running. And then, as in a dream, you realise that you have forgotten how to work the gears. What is it that they say? Mirror, signal, manoeuvre. Your passenger touches your arm. Lights, she says.

Notes  1. Ondaatje, The English Patient, p. 7. Further page references to this edition appear parenthetically in the main body of the text.  2. Ahmed and Stacey, ‘Introduction’, p. 15. See Chapters 1 and 4 of the present volume.   3. Jones, ‘A Poetics of Sense’, pp. 57–67; Marinkova, Michael Ondaatje.  4. Benthien, Skin, p. 214.   5. Jones, ‘A Poetics of Sense’, p. 58. Jones’s account of Ondaatje’s preoccupation with the skin includes the ways that both In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient explore bodies bearing the traces of history, interrogate notions of darkness and demonstrate a specific focus on wounds and wounding.   6. Jones, ‘A Poetics of Sense’, p. 57.   7. Jones, ‘A Poetics of Sense’, pp. 61–2.  8. Marinkova, Michael Ondaatje, p. 96.

­48    Tactile Poetics  9. Marinkova, Michael Ondaatje, pp. 97, 98. 10. Marinkova, Michael Ondaatje, p. 113. 11. Jones also describes ‘a textual garment, a textual skin’, referring to the ways that The Epic of Gilgamesh informs and shapes Ondaatje’s novel, noting, in particular, that the epic poem offers Harris a way in which to identify with Patrick (Jones, ‘A Poetics of Sense’, p. 64). 12. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 17. 13. Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion, p. 145. Further page references to this edition appear parenthetically in the main body of the text. 14. Marinkova, Michael Ondaatje, p. 101. 15. Marinkova, Michael Ondaatje, p. 100. 16. Connor, The Book of Skin, p. 47. 17. Serres with Latour, Conversations, p. 60. 18. Serres with Latour, Conversations, p. 70. 19. Serres with Latour, Conversations, p. 70. 20. Serres with Latour, Conversations, p. 70. 21. Serres, The Five Senses, p. 70. Jones also refers to Serres’s model of the senses, comparing Ondaatje’s ‘almost Aristotelian version of sense ­experience’ to Serres’s celebration of the ‘vivacious continuity and excursiveness of the body’ (Jones, ‘A Poetics of Sense’, p. 58). 22. Serres, The Five Senses, p. 70. 23. Serres, The Five Senses, p. 80. Serres goes on to say that ‘mixture is a more accurate term than medium’ (p. 80), bearing similarities to Violet’s account of ‘mixing’ in Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved (see Chapter 1). 24. Connor, The Book of Skin, pp. 40, 37. 25. Connor, The Book of Skin, p. 40. 26. Serres with Latour, Conversations, p. 122. 27. Serres with Latour, Conversations, p. 70. 28. Connor, ‘Pulverulence’, p. 6. 29. Connor, ‘Pulverulence’, p. 3. 30. Connor, ‘Pulverulence’, p. 1. 31. Connor, ‘Pulverulence’, p. 1. 32. Connor, ‘Pulverulence’, p. 1. 33. Freud, SE 11, pp. 153–61. 34. It is worth noting that there are other varieties of dust in the novel. The dusting of flour at Temelcoff’s bakery, for instance, is one that nurtures the community rather than marking its waste. When Patrick goes to the bakery to collect Hana, he searches for his friend in the dust: ‘Finally he saw him in his suit covered with white dust at the far end of the bakery, choreographing the movement of food’ (p. 210). 35. Oliver, Occupations. From the Social, Hygienic and Medical Points of View, pp. 71–2, cited in Steedman, Dust, p. 21. 36. Steedman, Dust, p. 23. 37. Steedman, Dust, p. 164. Steedman is careful to point out that dust ‘is not about rubbish, nor about the discarded; it is not about a surplus, left over from something else: it is not about Waste’ (p. 164). She argues that ‘Dust is the opposite thing to Waste, or at least, the opposite principle to Waste’ (p. 164). Geoffrey Bennington, on the other hand, remarks, ‘I am less convinced than Steedman that these principles are really so “opposite”’; instead,

Expeausition: Ondaatje’s Skin-Effects    ­49 he dissolves the difference between the two. Bennington, ‘Dust’, pp. 25–49 (p. 45). 38. Freud, SE 21, p. 69. 39. Bennington, ‘Dust’, p. 26. 40. Bennington, ‘Dust’, p. 26. 41. Bennington, ‘Dust’, p. 27. 42. Dust provides a particular occupational risk for Kip. He reflects on his training in England, where he remembers feeling ‘hot on the chalk hill, the white dust of it swirling up all around him’ (p. 201). He works steadily and all the while, ‘the chalk dust lifts, then settles on everything, his hands, the contraption, so he has to blow it off the fuze caps and wires continually to see the details’ (p. 202). 43. Marinkova, Michael Ondaatje, p. 112. 44. See also Chapter 1. 45. Derrida, ‘Différance’, in Margins of Philosophy, pp. 1–28 (p. 13). Derrida writes that ‘différance can refer simultaneously to the entire configuration of its meanings. It is immediately and irreducibly polysemic’ (p. 8). 46. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p. 99. 47. Brooks, Reading for the Plot, pp. 99–100. 48. Derrida, ‘Living On / Border Lines’, pp. 62–142 (p. 67). 49. Derrida, ‘Living On / Border Lines’, p. 64. 50. Derrida, ‘Living On / Border Lines’, p. 69. 51. Derrida, ‘Living On / Border Lines’, p. 69. 52. Derrida, ‘Living On / Border Lines’, p. 69. 53. Derrida, ‘Living On / Border Lines’, p. 69. 54. Derrida, ‘Living On / Border Lines’, p. 95. 55. Derrida, ‘Living On / Border Lines’, pp. 95–6. 56. Miller, For Derrida, p. 268. 57. Nancy, The Birth to Presence, p. 319. Nancy goes on to say: ‘Exscribed’ is not a word in our language, and one cannot invent it (as I have done here) and remain unscathed by its barbarism. The word ‘exscribed’ exscribes nothing and writes nothing; it makes a clumsy gesture to indicate what can only be written, in the always uncertain thought of language. (p. 339) 58. Nancy, The Birth to Presence, p. 334. 59. Nancy, The Birth to Presence, p. 175. 60. Hodge, ‘Excription at the Edge of Sense’, pp. 2–29 (p. 2). Hodge points out that Nancy’s refusal to provide a clear definition of excription ‘underlines the inverse ambiguity of a word so well used that its multiply unstable meaning is obscured’ (p. 7). Remarking that excription is rendered as both ‘exscription’ and ‘excription’ in translation, she suggests: The sense of a lack of fit is both irreducible and curiously helpful in making sense of what is here in process. It may turn out, were Jean Luc [sic] Nancy to disavow the sense to be attributed to it here, that this conception is not so much his, but my own, and that of any well disposed reader: that it is generated by reading, and by writing on Nancy. The

­50    Tactile Poetics notion of excription, of writing on the edge, thus assigns responsibility for meaning to the one uttering, or writing, or reading the words. (pp. 7–8)

See also Hodge’s discussion of ‘exscription’ as ‘the word’ and ‘excription’ as ‘the conception of meaning thereby invoked’ (p. 7). 61. Nancy, The Birth to Presence, p. 338. 62. Nancy, The Birth to Presence, p. 338. 63. Nancy, Corpus, p. 35. 64. Nancy, The Birth to Presence, p. 205. 65. Nancy, Corpus, p. 33; see Robert, Trials, p. 89. 66. Robert, Trials, p. 89. 67. Nancy, The Birth to Presence, p. 340. 68. Nancy, Corpus, p. 71. 69. Serres with Latour, Conversations, p. 70. 70. Nancy, The Birth to Presence, p. 206. 71. Nancy, The Birth to Presence, p. 206.

Chapter 3

The Law of Tact: Freud and H.D.

‘Do not touch me’, Frau Emmy von N. warns Sigmund Freud in 1889.1 ‘Do not touch her’, Freud echoes in 1933.2 This time, embarking on the psychoanalysis of H.D., Freud is referring to his pet chow, Yofi. After first remarking, ‘you are the only person who has ever come into this room and looked at the things in the room before looking at me’, he warns H.D., ‘Do not touch her – she snaps – she is very difficult with strangers’ (p. 98). H.D., however, challenges Freud’s word of caution: ‘unintimidated but distressed by the Professor’s somewhat forbidding manner, I not only continue my gesture toward the little chow, but crouch on the floor so that she can snap better if she wants to’ (p. 98). In this chapter, I argue that Freud’s prohibition of touch and H.D.’s ­challenge to it play out the multiple senses of ‘Noli me tangere’ – the scene in which Jesus says to Mary Magdalene, ‘Touch me not.’3 Examining the taboo on touching in light of work by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, I chart the spacing and withdrawal that interrupt touch. Reading Tribute to Freud (1956) ­ alongside the letters to Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman) published in Analyzing Freud, edited by Susan Stanford Friedman, I suggest that H.D.’s writing attempts to make contact in new and sometimes subversive ways.

Touch and taboo Do Not Touch, we are warned in museums; Breakages Will Be Paid For; Beware – Wet Paint; and Keep Off the Grass. Do Not Touch Your Father–Mother–Sister–Brother (Not Like That); Do Not Even Think Of Touching Yourself. ‘Of all the senses’, Jean-Luc Nancy notes, ‘touch is the one that is subject to the most taboo.’4 He stresses the importance of this taboo in our own culture: ‘we know exactly where it is allowed

­52    Tactile Poetics to touch, be it only the hand of someone else, not to mention the rest of his body, and up to what point it is acceptable to kiss on the cheek, to hug, to caress’.5 Touch, it seems, is inhabited by a ‘law of tact’, as Jacques Derrida calls it, a law that pervades our everyday professional, social and familial exchanges.6 This law of tact means that ‘in touching, touching is forbidden: do not touch or tamper with the thing itself, do not touch on what there is to touch. Do not touch what remains to be touched, and first of all law itself.’7 Thus, for Derrida, a ‘thou shalt not touch too much,’ ‘thou shalt not let yourself be touched too much,’ or even ‘thou shalt not touch yourself too much,’ would thus be inscribed a priori, like a first commandment, the law of originary prohibition, in the destiny of tactile experience.8

As Constance Classen remarks, ‘it seems that we have so often been warned not to touch that we are reluctant to probe the tactile world even with our minds’.9 Stay away from touch, we are told. Despite the suspicion surrounding it, however, touch is also revered for its healing potential – the laying on of hands, the ‘Midas touch’ or the ‘Royal touch’. Certainly, the healing powers inherent in Christ’s touch are clear: ‘And he stretched out his hand and touched him, saying [. . .] “I wish it; be clean.” And immediately his leprosy was cleansed.’10 Derrida notes that Jesus ‘the savior is “touching,” he is the One who touches, and most often with his hand, and most often in order to purify, heal, or resuscitate – save, in a word’.11 The taboo on touch, then, is Janus-faced. In fact, the word ‘taboo,’ Freud tells us, ‘diverges in two contrary directions;’ ‘it means, on the one hand, “sacred”, “consecrated”, and on the other “uncanny”, “dangerous”, “forbidden”, “unclean”’.12 Touch, in a similar fashion, has an antithetical resonance; it is at once both prohibited and revered, signifying both a threat and the potential for healing. Addressing the laws attached to the treatment of enemies, of chiefs or kings and of the dead, Freud explicitly links taboo and touch in Totem and Taboo: We cannot be surprised at the fact that, in the restrictions of taboo, touching plays a part similar to the one which it plays in ‘touching phobias’, though the secret meaning of the prohibition cannot be of such a specialized nature in taboo as it is in the neurosis.13

Describing the clinical history of such a case of ‘touching phobia’ or ‘délire du toucher,’ Freud states that in very early childhood, the ‘strong desire to touch’ is ‘promptly met by an external prohibition against carrying out that particular kind of touching’.14 ‘Both the desire and

The Law of Tact: Freud and H.D.    ­53

the prohibition’ of this particular kind of touch, Freud remarks in a footnote, ‘relate to the child’s touching of his own genitals’.15 He continues by explaining that the prohibition is accepted because it is more powerful than the instinct to touch. Rather than ‘abolishing the instinct,’ however, ‘its only result is to repress the instinct (the desire to touch) and banish it into the unconscious’.16 Hence, ‘a situation is created which remains undealt with – a psychical fixation – and everything else follows from the continuing conflict between the prohibition and the instinct’.17 All our future contact – with ourselves and with other people – is determined by the tension between the desire to touch and the order to keep our distance. It is significant that, in the psychoanalytic setting, physical contact is particularly taboo. Susie Orbach, for instance, notes that psychoanalytic practice is dominated by assumptions that it is ‘wrong, inappropriate, and unsafe: touch initiated by the therapist is invasive, potentially transgressive, and may bypass important psychic material’.18 Graeme Galton, furthermore, suggests that some psychoanalysts believe that ‘even to talk about touch would be taken as an endorsement of this reckless and dangerous behaviour’.19 This hasn’t always been the case, however, and during his early practice Freud deliberately employed the use of touch. His ‘pressure technique’ involved pressing his finger on a client’s forehead and massaging the neck and head to facilitate release.20 He describes the kind of healing contact a patient might undergo in an account of his treatment of Frau Emmy von N., where he refers to ‘warm baths, massage twice a day and hypnotic suggestion’.21 Freud’s hypnotic technique includes ‘strok[ing] her several times over the eyes’.22 He repeats this stroking to relieve her gastric pains a day later, despite her injunctions, ‘Keep Still! – Don’t say anything! – Don’t touch me!’23 It seems, perhaps, that Freud did hear Frau Emmy’s pleas, for at some point between 1896 and 1899, he revised his pressure technique and declared a rule of abstinence. Ernest Jones summarises, ‘The patient should be kept in a state of abstinence of unrequited love. The more affection you allow him, the more readily you reach his complexes, but the less definite the result.’24 For Didier Anzieu, it was the perceived risk of eroticisation, especially during his work with hysterical women and girls, that led Freud to explicitly prohibit touch in his practice. Anzieu notes that Freud ‘suspended all tactile contact with the patient in favour of purely linguistic exchange’.25 ‘The tactile’, Anzieu insists, ‘is fundamental only on condition that, at the necessary moment, it is prohibited’ – a double prohibition, in fact, that stresses the dangers of violence and of eroticisation implicit in touch.26

­54    Tactile Poetics

Noli me tangere Do not touch! Of course, we’ve heard it before. Following his resurrection, Jesus says to Mary Magdalene, ‘Noli me tangere’ or ‘Touch me not.’27 Erin Manning outlines the scene: As [Mary] reaches out to touch him, Jesus says: ‘Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God’ [. . .] As the news of Jesus’s resuscitation begins to spread, Thomas remains unbelieving and beseeches Jesus to allow him to touch despite the injunction not to touch. Jesus responds: ‘Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing’.28

Freud re-enacts this scene in the psychoanalytic relationship with H.D. when he cautions her against touching Yofi. Here, Noli me tangere is simultaneously performed and displaced when Freud uses the dog as a substitute for his own body. ‘Do not touch her,’ Freud says and, in terms of transference, he means do not touch me. Reframing the resurrection scene, H.D. recognises Freud’s position and represents it to Kenneth Macpherson in a letter dated 15 March 1933: Freud is just simply Jesus-Christ after the resurrection, he has that wistful ghost look of someone who has been right past the door of the tomb, and such tenderness with such humor, he just IS all that. I am sure he IS the absolute inheritor of all that eastern mystery and majic [sic], just IS, in spite of his monumental work and all that, he is the real, the final healer.29

‘Do not touch,’ Freud tells H.D., and we might wonder if this means more than he says. Reflecting on the many ways in which Noli me tangere has been interpreted, Jean-Luc Nancy remarks that ‘few phrases from the Gospels have been so widely disseminated’.30 Responding to Derrida’s own On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy in Noli Me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body, Nancy stresses that ‘Noli me tangere – “Do not touch me” – calls to mind a prohibition of contact, a question of sensuality or violence, a recoil, a frightened or modest flight’.31 Observing that Jesus specifically prohibits Mary from touching the ‘arisen body [son corps ressuscité]’, he points out that this body is ‘not to be touched because it cannot be’ – in other words, he ‘touches’ on the impossibility of ever touching the resurrected body.32 He concludes: ‘Its being and its truth as arisen are in the slipping away, in this withdrawal that alone gives the measure of the touch in question: not touching this body, to touch on [toucher à] its

The Law of Tact: Freud and H.D.    ­55

eternity.’33 Thus, he says, Noli me tangere is ‘a phrase that touches and that cannot touch’.34 The concept is further problematised, however, by its difficult translation from the original Greek version, ‘Me¯ mou haptou’, which carries the implied alternative, ‘Do not hold me back’, which might be taken to mean do not prevent my resurrection. ‘Christ’, Nancy says, ‘does not want to be held back, for he is leaving.’35 In other words, ‘don’t try to touch or to hold back what essentially distances itself and, in distancing itself, touches you with its very distance (in both senses: touches you with and from a distance)’.36 ‘“Do not hold me back,”’ Nancy suggests, ‘amounts to saying “Touch me with a real touch, one that is restrained, nonappropriating and nonidentifying.” Caress me, don’t touch me.’37 Within this ‘strange scene’, a glorified body presents itself and refuses to give itself to a sensate body. Each of the two exposes the truth of the other, one sense brushing against the other. But the two truths remain irreconcilable, each pushing the other away. Back away! Stand back! Restrain yourself! (Hold me back?) Withdraw!38

And with this, Noli me tangere thus exposes the withdrawal that lies at the heart of contact. But this scene, for Nancy, also ‘says something about touching in general’: It touches on the sensitive point of touching: on this sensitive point that touching constitutes par excellence (it is, in sum, ‘the’ point of the sensitive) and on what forms the sensitive point within it. But this point is precisely the  point where touching does not touch and where it must not touch in order to carry out its touch (its art, its tact, its grace): the point or the space without dimension that separates what touching gathers together, the line that separates the touching from the touched and thus the touch from itself.39

The phrase, ‘Do not touch me’, thus touches the heart of tactility – its implicit untouchability. Touching, for Nancy, is always marked by separation, but it is the impossibility of touch touching itself that makes touch possible.40

Freud’s dogs But H.D. does touch. What we must remember is that in her account of psychoanalysis in Tribute to Freud she takes care to highlight her challenge to Freud’s warning. Bending down to stroke the dog, H.D. reaches out to his substitute:

­56    Tactile Poetics But, though no accredited dog-lover, I like dogs and they oddly and sometimes unexpectedly ‘take’ to me. If this is an exception, I am ready to take the risk. Unintimidated but distressed by the Professor’s somewhat forbidding manner, I not only continue my gesture toward the little chow, but crouch on the floor so that she can snap better if she wants to. Yofi – her name is Yofi – snuggles her nose into my hand and nuzzles her head, in delicate sympathy, against my shoulder. (p. 98)

H.D. touches and Yofi clearly reciprocates. To what degree, we might ask, does Freud go along with this dogged touching? Might Yofi act as a vehicle to simultaneously prohibit touch and offer a certain tactile healing (do not hold me back)? This touching dynamic is not only played out in the relationship between H.D., Freud and his dog, but is endlessly repeated in the letters H.D. sends to Bryher while she is in Vienna for analysis. In a letter dated 23 March 1933, H.D. writes: Nearly through the hour, papa began to cough, and Yofi came and licked his hand, a most touching spectacle, papa apologized and said did I mind? The licking took a long time, almost five minutes, solid and solemn. F. says she always does that and it is sometimes very awkward. (p. 141)

A ‘touching spectacle’ quite literally, Yofi’s ‘licking’ performs the healing touch on the untouching healer. This tactile intimacy is repeated and amplified when the analysis moves to Hohe Warte in the summer months, where Anna Freud’s dog, Wolf, ‘barked the place down’ and the ‘hounds’ infiltrate all aspects of the analysis, ‘running in and out and jumping on the analysis couch to lick one all over’ (9 May 1933, p. 259).41 For Ashley Montagu, ‘“licking,” in its actual and in its figurative sense, and love are closely connected’.42 In licking both Freud and H.D., Yofi shows her love for them and performs their love for each other. The significance of the dogs in Freud and H.D.’s relationship is exhibited in a letter of 15 May 1933, which describes a fight between two of the dogs and the effect it has on Freud, who, despite deteriorating health, ‘flung’ himself into the thick of it: Had a terrible time yesterday. Yo-fi is back and doesn’t like Lun, and flew at her in the room. We had been to the kitchen to see the pups. Freud ran like lightning and flung himself on the floor and pulled them apart, all his money fell out and Anna and the maid rushed in, Anna screaming in German of course, ‘papachen beloved you shouldn’t have done that,’ and the maid taking off Yo-fi in her arms like Jesus with a lamb. (p. 292)

Her letters following this incident are nervy and distracted, concerned with Freud’s illness and the situation with the dogs. Writing to Bryher

The Law of Tact: Freud and H.D.    ­57

on 27 May, H.D. explains, ‘I think the dogs got his trouble and tried to get in to us, feeling he was sick. It was horrible. Almost too much when ones [sic] own skin is peeled off’ (p. 329). The dogs, then, not only break into the analytic space, but also penetrate the body. It is, for H.D., a touch abrasive. Challenging the rule of abstinence, H.D.’s analysis with Freud is one that is preoccupied with touch and feeling. Rather than limit this contact, Freud appears to extend his own reach through the introduction of a third party – another ‘dog’. This time, Freud touches through H.D.’s lover and lifelong friend, Bryher. It is not insignificant that Bryher’s pet name was ‘Dog’, revealed in Bryher’s own letter to Macpherson on 14 April 1933: I had my final interview for this visit with Dr F. to-day and he patted small dog [Bryher] and said now he had trotted into fold he must not be allowed to run out again and that every possible influence would be used to get small dog collar. (p. 175)43

‘Patting small dog’, Freud both conforms to and breaks his own taboo on touching his patients; abstaining from physical contact with H.D., he touches her through Bryher. Mirroring this, the analytic pair exchange forbidden gifts through substitute figures. Like touch, gifts are prohibited in Freudian analysis, but this prohibition is overcome and exchange is once again granted through the mediatory figures of Bryher and their daughter, Perdita.44 The main economy of exchange is, of course, the dogs, and many of H.D. and Bryher’s letters are concerned with Freud’s offer of one of Yofi’s puppies: Dawg and Dogggg.                 Dandog. The worst has happened. Will you please put your two heads together. I feel like the Virgin Mary at the entrance of the dove. Pa-pa has offered us one of Yo-fi’s pups. What will we do about it???????????????????? (26 April 1933, p. 200)

In offering them the puppy, Freud is, in effect, offering them a means of ongoing contact with Yofi, as well as with himself; the contract would be bound by the patting, snuggling and licking of dogs and their offspring. H.D. is not unaware of the significance of this gift, interpreting it as her impregnation by Freud: ‘I feel pregnant’, she writes to Bryher on 27 April, just like Yofi (p. 201). H.D., however, is adamant about this touching gift: ‘Evidently I was afraid of becoming pregnant by pap Freud,

­58    Tactile Poetics funny?????????? But no Freud-cat, or esoteric Yo-fi, I can assure you, will be stranded on your front door step like the last one, vintage 1919 [Perdita]’ (27 April 1933, p. 329). This assurance follows a curious revelation concerning H.D.’s own fears. Not only is H.D. (whose pet name is ‘Cat’ or ‘Kat’) horrified to discover that Freud doesn’t like cats, but she also displays anxiety about the vicious tendency of dogs towards cats. She writes to Robert Herring, who also owns chows, about the predisposition of this breed to attack cats: ‘You asked me, do they kill cats’, he writes back in an undated letter, ‘and I say, I don’t think its [sic] in them, more than other dogs [. . .] Yo-fi I should think attacked the cat because it knows a cat goes for the eyes, and felt it had to protect the pups it was carrying – perhaps?’ (p. 235 n.19). Ironically, in eventually rejecting Freud’s gift of the puppy, H.D. is most concerned with not hurting Freud’s ‘feelings’: ‘we will have to use tact’, she writes; it ‘must be done most tactfully [. . .] above all, most tactfully’ (24 May 1933, p. 230).

A matter of tact ‘I am trying to compose a tactful letter which I shall send you to give Freud’, Bryher writes to H.D. on 29 April 1933, pointing to a relation between writing and tact (p. 215).45 And H.D.’s letters, too, exhibit this preoccupation with tact, suggesting the ways that a missive might extend or limit its own reach.46 In a letter, dated 15 March 1933, written from her hotel room in Vienna, H.D. claims, ‘About your coming on here [. . .] I am really terribly touched’ (p. 95). She goes on to write, ‘Now it is really touchingly sweet of you, darling Fido, to say you will come through. I will “hold the right thought” and if it happens, it will be marvelous’ (p. 95). She describes events as ‘all very funny and touching’ (15 March 1933, p. 96), she refers to getting ‘in touch with “events,” if you like’ (2 May 1933, p. 231), says she is ‘not afraid (touch wood) of war’ (16 May 1933, p. 283) and feels ‘very tender toward’ England (16 May 1933, p. 284). However, she also exposes a certain (un)touchability. Referring to their terrifying housekeeper, Dorothy Hull, in one of her letters, H.D. demonstrates her ability to simultaneously be touched and remain out of reach: ‘Deliver some chaste message to the Q [Dorothy Hull] from the “untouchable.” I am so touched that P is gold-digging like mad’ (3 March 1933, p. 42). Untouchable to ‘the Q,’ she admits that she is ‘touched’ by the behaviour of her daughter, Perdita. Her reference to Perdita’s gold-digging is, of course, not especially tactful. Steven Connor explains that ‘the values of tact, “touch”, subtlety, refinement and so on, all depend upon and ramify from the thought

The Law of Tact: Freud and H.D.    ­59

of the sensation of its particular kind of lightness of touch’.47 Tact, for him, is a touch that ‘retracts itself, but not fully’; it gestures towards an ‘infinitesimal meniscus between touching and not-touching’.48 In effect, as Derrida writes, tact warns against the excess of touch, it is a ‘moderation of touch’, where ‘some kind of reserve holds it on the brink of exaggeration’.49 Tact ensures that touching ‘abstains from touching on what it touches’; for Derrida, it asks that you ‘do touch but do watch out and avoid any contact’.50 The two contradictory orders – ‘do do and do not do’ – Derrida remarks, are brought into contact and exposed to ‘contamination and contagion’; ‘a certain tact’ is thus the destiny of tactile experience.51 In insisting ‘it must be done most tactfully [. . .] above all, most tactfully’ (24 May 1933, p. 319), H.D. learns ‘how to touch without touching, without touching too much, where touching is already too much’.52 H.D.’s tactful communications, then, play out Nancy’s premise that touching is always about withdrawing. Challenging both the privilege and the unity of touch, Jacques Derrida also points to the spacing that interrupts touch. He insists that there exists a ‘law of parting and sharing at the heart of touching and con-tact’.53 He explains that we cannot touch the heart of the matter: touching you, I only ever touch the very outside of you with the very outside of me; contact is only ever at the absolute limits. The most we can ever do, Derrida says, is ‘touch on a surface, which is to say the skin or thin peel of a limit’.54 Touch, then, always becomes its own point of separation, with ‘interruption, interposition, detour of the between in the middle of contact’.55 For Derrida, this ‘between’ inhabits touch, overturning its associations with presence, proximity and immediacy. As Ian Maclachlan notes, ‘something always intervenes to disrupt the apparent immediacy of touch, whether it be a case of touching oneself or touching the other; touching presupposes interruption, lest touch simply vanish into consubstantiality’.56 The non-contact or ‘between’ space at the heart of touch – what we might, in fact, call the skin – is the very condition of the untouchability of touch. In Trials: Of Antigone and Jesus, William Robert notes, ‘Skin serves as that material limit that touch always touches; skin reaffirms with every touch that to touch is always to touch a limit.’57At the point at which contact is made, then, the skin gets in the way. What I’d like to suggest is that by working to keep ‘in touch’ with Bryher, H.D.’s letters inevitably play out what Derrida terms the ‘contradictory injunctions [. . .] at the heart of touch’.58 Her attempts to stay in touch expose the (im)possibilities of epistolary contact, and in particular, the distance at the heart of the telegram. Regarding the puppies, H.D. writes on 26 April 1933, ‘Please write, don’t (N.B. do not!!!) wire

­60    Tactile Poetics Freud, “yes” as I am not sure it would be feasible. Its [sic] all you, you, you, Fido. Now Fido [. . .] O, please I feel so very about-to-deliver’ (pp. 200–1). The delivery of this telegraphic touch, like the delivery of her dog-baby, is, however, forever postponed in the text, and the wires referred to in Friedman’s collection are often missing. On arrival in Vienna, H.D. writes to Bryher on 1 March 1933: I sent a wire off about 4 yesterday on arrival, as I feared I would not be able to call you up, and a wire would have been as quick. This morning a notice came that it had not been received, so I was horrified, and at once sent off another, to Macpherson, Closeup, Vevey. (p. 25)

Bryher and Macpherson’s ‘telegraphic address – Closeup Vevey’, Bryher writes to H.D., is, it turns out, not so very ‘close-up’.59 Bryher writes a pressing note to H.D. on 21 March: Urgent. Post office has changed our telegraphic address in error to Kenwin Vevey instead of Closeup accounting for terror on your arrival. Please note in future Kenwin Vevey. Stop Press. (p. 131)

While the telegram clears up the postal error, the messages remain haunted by both contact and separation. Pointing to the (im)possibilities of writing tact, Closeup, it seems, remains well out of reach. By permitting the metaphor of touch to run through her letters  – whether consciously or unconsciously – H.D. explores the rule of abstinence and exposes the contact and separation at the heart of touch. Although she refers to her initial brush with Yofi in Tribute to Freud by insisting, ‘My intuition challenges the Professor, though not in words’, it is, perhaps, through language that she opens up the (im)possibilities of touch, reframing the connections between text and tact (p. 99). Where touch is concerned, skin is always in the way. For Derrida, this interruption is the ‘différance of the between’ – the very ‘condition of contact’.60 Thinking through responses to touch by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, this chapter has explored the different ways that H.D. both challenges and conforms to the law of tact, suggesting that her encounter with Freud and his dogs, and her literary responses to that encounter, can be read as a re-enactment of the scene of Noli me tangere – do not touch, but do not hold me back. Exploring touch, H.D.’s texts expose the interruptions and distances, as well as the animal intimacies, that shape her account of psychoanalysis and tact.

The Law of Tact: Freud and H.D.    ­61

Notes   1. Freud and Breuer, SE 2, pp. 19–182 (p. 54).  2. H.D., Tribute to Freud. Further page references to this edition appear parenthetically in the main body of the text.   3. John 20: 17.   4. Nancy, ‘Rühren, Berhüren, Aufruhr’, pp. 10–17 (p. 15).   5. Nancy, ‘Rühren, Berhüren, Aufruhr’, p. 15.  6. Derrida, On Touching, p. 66.  7. Derrida, On Touching, p. 66.  8. Derrida, On Touching, p. 47.  9. Classen, The Deepest Sense, p. xi. 10. Matt. 8: 3, cited in Derrida, On Touching, p. 11. 11. Derrida, On Touching, p. 100. For further discussion of touch’s healing potential, see Classen, The Deepest Sense, pp. 47–51; Josipovici, Touch, pp. 62–4; Thomas, ‘Magical Healing’, pp. 354–62. 12. Freud, SE 13, p. 18. 13. Freud, SE 13, p. 33. 14. Freud, SE 13, p. 29. 15. Freud, SE 13, p. 29 n.1. 16. Freud, SE 13, p. 29. 17. Freud, SE 13, p. 29. 18. Orbach, ‘Too hot to touch?’, pp. xiii–xviii (p. xiii). For a discussion of touch in body psychotherapy, see Totton, ‘A body psychotherapist’s approach to touch’, pp. 145–62. Totton notes that ‘Contrary to widespread belief’, however, ‘body psychotherapy [. . .] is not synonymous with touch; it can be, and often is, carried out with no physical contact between client and therapist’ (p. 146). 19. Galton, ‘Introduction’, pp. xix–xxv (p. xxi). 20. For a history of Freud’s use of touch, see Beckenridge, ‘Physical Touch in Psychoanalysis’, pp. 2–20; Smith, ‘Traditions of Touch in Psychotherapy’, p. 7. For an account of the use of touch in other psychotherapies, see Older, Touching is Healing. 21. Freud, SE 2, p. 51. 22. Freud, SE 2, p. 53. 23. Freud, SE 2, p. 54. During later hypnosis, Freud discovered that her strange demands ‘related to the fact that the animal shapes which appeared to her when she was in a bad state started moving and began to attack her if anyone made a movement in her presence’. The ‘final injunction “Don’t touch me!”’ Freud explains, was derived from an experience when her brother, unwell from too much morphine, would ‘seize hold of her’ (p. 56). 24. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, p. 448. See also Galton, who notes that ‘Sigmund Freud stopped using the “pressure technique” at some point between 1896 and 1899 – we do not know the exact date’ (Galton, ‘Introduction’, p. xix). 25. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 139. 26. Anzieu, The Skin Ego, p. 140. 27. John 20: 17.

­62    Tactile Poetics 28. John 20: 17, 27, cited in Manning, Politics of Touch, pp. 72–4. 29. Friedman, Analyzing Freud, p. 100. Further page references to this edition appear parenthetically in the main body of the text. 30. Nancy, Noli Me Tangere, p. 109 n.17. 31. Nancy, Noli Me Tangere, p. 12. See also Chapter 4. For further readings of the scene, see Baross, ‘Noli Me Tangere’, 149–64; Derrida, On Touching, pp. 102–3; Manning, Politics of Touch, pp. 71–5; McQuillan ‘Toucher II’, pp. 84–108; and Schwall, ‘Noli me tangere’, pp. 227–60. For a discussion of the connection between believing and not seeing in relation to Noli me tangere, see De Kesel, ‘Mary’s Touch’, pp. 1–37. 32. Nancy, Noli Me Tangere, pp. 14–15. 33. Nancy, Noli Me Tangere, p. 15. 34. Nancy, Noli Me Tangere, p. 13. 35. Nancy, Noli Me Tangere, p. 15. 36. Nancy, Noli Me Tangere, p. 16. 37. Nancy, Noli Me Tangere, pp. 15, 49–50. Referring to a tradition in Western art where Jesus and Mary are in fact touching, McQuillan notes that, for Nancy: ‘Noli me tangere’ does not simply say ‘do not touch me’; more literally, it says ‘Do not wish to touch me.’ The verb nolo is the negative of volvo: it means ‘Do not want.’ In that, too, the Latin translation displaces the Greek Me¯ mou haptou (the literal transition of which would be non me tange). The touch between Jesus and the Magdalene in these paintings is then one that holds touch at a distance, the tele-haptology that haunts all touch. (McQuillan, ‘Toucher II’, p. 102) 38. Nancy, Noli Me Tangere, pp. 53–4. 39. Nancy, Noli Me Tangere, p. 13. 40. See also De Kesel, ‘Mary’s Touch’, p. 7. 41. For a cultural history of the nature of touch between humans and animals, see Classen, The Deepest Sense, pp. 93–122. The question of ‘non-human’ touch is addressed again in Chapter 7. 42. Montagu, Touching, pp. 28–9. 43. ‘Dog collar’ refers to Bryher’s desire for her acceptance into the psychoanalytic fold. 44. Perdita Macpherson Schaffner (born Frances Perdita Aldington), H.D.’s daughter to Cecil Gray, was adopted by Macpherson and Bryher in 1928. See Friedman, Analyzing Freud, pp. 192–3. 45. Friedman notes, ‘The letter to Freud, sent to H.D. for hand delivery on her approval, was probably never given to Freud’ (Friedman, Analyzing Freud, p. 215 n.33). 46. We return to epistolary touch in Chapter 6. 47. Connor, The Book of Touch, p. 259. 48. Connor, The Book of Touch, p. 262. 49. Derrida, On Touching, p. 47. 50. Derrida, On Touching, pp. 67, 68. 51. Derrida, On Touching, pp. 68, 47. 52. Derrida, On Touching, p. 67.

The Law of Tact: Freud and H.D.    ­63 53. Derrida, On Touching, p. 199. 54. Derrida, On Touching, p. 6. 55. Derrida, On Touching, p. 229. 56. Maclachlan, ‘Long Distance Love’, pp. 57–66 (p. 58). See also De Kesel, who refers to the ‘untouchable kernel formally hidden in the very act of touching’, and Morin, who points to a ‘contact separation, a contact through a separation’ (De Kesel, ‘Mary’s Touch’, p. 7; Morin, Jean-Luc Nancy, p. 41). 57. Robert, Trials, p. 84. 58. Derrida, On Touching, p. 76. 59. ‘Closeup’ also refers to cinema’s first art journal, edited by Macpherson (and greatly aided by H.D.). 60. Derrida, On Touching, p. 229.

Chapter 4

So Close: Writing that Touches

(I won’t bother arguing that I’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)1

Does writing touch? For Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘touching – happens in writing all the time’.2 Outlining the relationship between touching and feeling, this chapter examines the tactile quality of So Close by Hélène 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 Hélène 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.3

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”’.4 Montagu argues that

So Close: Writing that Touches    ­65

‘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’.5 ‘Hence touch’, he explains, ‘is not experienced as a simply physical modality, as sensation, but affectively, as emotion.’6 In other words, we experience touch through our feelings. This, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick points out, is played out in the ‘dubious epithet “touchy feely,” with its implication that even to talk about affect virtually amounts to cutaneous contact’.7 The epithet ‘touchy-feely’ is often regarded with some suspicion in scholarly discourse. Too close for comfort, it carries with it an association with femininity as a ‘soft touch’. Sara Ahmed notes that ‘emotions are associated with women, who are represented as “closer” to nature, ruled by appetite, and less able to transcend the body through thought, will and judgement’.8 Thus, emotion – and especially unruly feeling – is often overlooked in favour of reason or cognition. Moreover, in talking about feelings we are confronted with fundamental tensions that include divergences in how we perceive the relationship between the body and the mind, between the subject and his or her environment and between the ways that we both feel and are felt.9 Yet, while we may be suspicious of all that is ‘touchy feely’, we cannot touch on one without feeling for the other. Didier Anzieu addresses touch and feeling within the psychoanalytic context, noting once again the relationship between language and affect. Discussing his clinical practice with Gilbert Tarrab, he says, ‘in ordinary language we say “make contact with someone” or “be in good contact with a person”. This demonstrates very well that while the first origin of contact is tactile, contact is transposed metaphorically to other sense organs and other sensory areas.’10 Establishing the link between language and contact, he argues, ‘ordinary language actually puts it well, and our patients express it thus: “What you said touched me.” One can in fact touch the psyche otherwise than by touching the body.’11 Anzieu refers to this as a form of ‘symbolic touching’.12 Words, he says, have the power to touch us; they can function as symbolic touch experiences. Although Anzieu is referring to the spoken word and the role of touch in psychoanalysis, this holds significance beyond the verbal or therapeutic encounter. In what ways, this chapter asks, can literature touch us? And how does it make us feel?

On Cixous The possibilities and limitations of writing touch are exemplified in the rich and complex work of Hélène Cixous. In an interview with

­66    Tactile Poetics Cixous, Mireille Calle-Gruber remarks, ‘it is the writer that I touch on in you. Where I touch down.’13 Calle-Gruber is referring to a preoccupation with touch that pervades Cixous’s writing. Even in her early published work, her writing is a call to contact. In ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, for instance, she writes, ‘touch me, caress me, you the living no-name, give me my self as myself’.14 Verena Andermatt Conley notes that ‘over the last half-century, the critique of sight in French theory has led to a renewed attention to touch’.15 Touch, she says, ‘is associated with a return to the body and to a writing that is closer to the unconscious’.16 ‘To write’, Conley suggests, ‘we have to close our eyes and focus on touch’.17 This is made most explicit in ‘Writing Blind: Conversation with the Donkey’, where Cixous claims, ‘I feel myself see. Eyes are the most  delicate most powerful hands, imponderably touching the ­over-there. From over there I feel a self return to me.’18 Again in ‘Writing Blind’, she recalls: ‘An employee of Air France tells me on the telephone: I like your books because they touch me.’19 Certainly, Cixous – well aware of the power of writing to ‘move me, touch me, strike me with blows of the axe’ – claims to write in order to actually touch the limits: ‘I do not write to keep. I write to feel. I write to touch the body of the instant with the tips of the words.’20 She reiterates, ‘My business is to translate our emotions into writings. First we feel. Then I write.’21 For Cixous, then, writing touch is inextricably linked to feelings. Her work creates new passageways between contact and affect. The touchiness of Cixous’s writing is especially evident in So Close,  which not only demonstrates the desire to make contact, but also  unsettles the relationship between distance and proximity. To touch, this work of autobiographical fiction suggests, is not necessarily to be  as close as its title indicates. A deeply textured work first  ­published in French in 2007, So Close recounts the narrator’s return to Algeria  after a more than thirty-year absence. This is a journey toward both origin and end – the place of her childhood and the location of her father’s tomb beneath a cypress tree.22 As the text opens, the narrator, known as H., is in France, admiring her mother’s bathing suit. It is following the discovery of ‘the funereal secret of the word macaroon’ that she announces her return: ‘That’s when I said I would perhaps be going to Algiers’ (pp. 5–6). She repeats her mother’s reaction – ‘“What-is-this?”’ – describing ‘that warlike way she has of sticking all the syllables together in a single guttural apostrophe’ (p. 30). By paying attention to the sensual and tactile presence of words, the clumping together of sticky syllables in So Close gives her mother’s words a viscous, gummy quality. Words become ‘strange

So Close: Writing that Touches    ­67

signifiers’ (p. 30); they become palpable. The language that follows is one of pushing, pulling, smacking, kicking, and yet, apart from a spoon hitting  the kitchen table, no physical contact is made. Her mother’s fury has a ‘violent nakedness’ (p. 31): the words are ‘sharpened’ (p. 32); they inflict ‘one good blow’ (p. 34); they ‘pierce’ (p. 59). She ‘stamps out the words I’venotf’gotten. She throws the verb Ivenotfgotten in my face’: She looks for a way to strike me even harder. She finds it: There’s not afffucking thing for me there. She slams down FFFucking, with the small satisfaction of feeling the word fuck around between her lips, that’s new, she has never spurted out that word in her whole life. (p. 32)

The language leaves its impression on H.’s body: ‘I trembled as if I had just allowed my arms to be torn off, to let be torn from my arms the adored body that all the same I had never embraced’ (p. 33). Words clearly have a remarkable physical power: ‘we are stripping each other and mutually, we are in the skin of nudes who have an astounding  strength for their age’ (p. 34). In the midst of this verbal tussle, Cixous dramatises the interconnectedness of bodies, feelings, language and the emotional and tactile resonances of writing home. The tactile quality of language is the subject of Alice Fulton’s Feeling as  a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry. Here, she argues that a reader must ‘consider the leafiness of books, the peeling that is reading. Consider the peeling that is writing.’23 ‘By the end’, she says, ‘I feel exfoliated.’24 Words, for Fulton, ‘have an unignorable materiality. It is not only the meaning of words that holds my ­attention, but their sensual, and especially tactile, presence.’25 Thinking about  the sensual and tactile presence of language in So Close,  it is evident that,  notwithstanding the physical force of her conversation  with her  mother, the novel handles language with infinite care. Moving images and tender feelings circulate through the text. Cixous writes, ‘I was dreaming of sentences rising up to the clouds with their pointed tips constantly erased by the speed with which they moved’ (p. 59). Finally finding her father’s ‘tomb without address’ (p. 149), she writes: ‘I embraced you. I lay down upon you. I fastened myself with all my strength to the Tomb I felt how living it was, its hardness supple at my call [. . .]’ (p. 154). She calls to him: ‘With my voice I hollowed out the stone in me, I opened the ground, with my body I saw your whole body [. . .]’ (p. 155) until she is ‘seized by an immense tenderness’ (p. 156):

­68    Tactile Poetics I sensed that the blood of the call was running out. I called him my child. I said, my child, you are my child, you know? – I know, I know. And with the word know I set him back down. (p. 156)

Drawing attention to the materiality of the word ‘know’ here, Cixous demonstrates the capacity of her language to touch us, to move us, to make us feel. Her work, as Derrida points out with reference to her essay ‘Savoir’, can be read as ‘a poem of touch’; it ‘holds, touches, pulls, like a lead, it affects and sometimes tears the skin’.26 It is a body of work that performs its own tactility, making contact in strange and sometimes startling ways.

On music In Rootprints, Cixous claims that ‘the texts that touch me the most strongly, to the point of making me shiver or laugh, are those that have not repressed their musical structure’.27 She argues that ‘to write is to note down the music of the world, the music of the body, the music of time’.28 Paying particular attention to the rise and fall of her mother’s voice in So Close, she states, ‘One has to imagine the music. Astonished voice, rising, come from the depths of time, attaining the high pitch of incredulity. Pause. Voice goes back down the slope’ (p. 30). Here, Cixous demonstrates the connection between music, language and the body, also evident in Conley’s observation, ‘You try to write on the side of a language as musical as possible.’29 If, as Montagu believes, ‘in much music there is a very pervasive tactile quality’, then writing touch invites us to attend to the music of the text.30 The relationship between music and touch is also examined by Ryan Bishop in his essay, ‘The Force of Noise, or Touching Music’. Referring to a ‘musical haptics’, Bishop points out that ‘sound is also already touch’.31 He explains, ‘sound itself is composed of waves that physically and invisibly touch our ears and bodies’, and thus ‘to touch a tympanum, to caress the cochlea, one needs the invisible touch of sound waves’.32 This means that ‘at its source, touch operates with and causes sound, and it is only through touch-at-a-distance that we have sound at all’.33 He extends this to suggest that sound can touch parts of the body – and its interior – that physical touch cannot reach, enabling us to have a ‘deeper’ understanding of an object. If music is understood to be ‘the art or science of combining vocal or instrumental sounds to produce beauty of form, harmony, melody, rhythm, expressive content, etc.’, different musical sounds may touch us in different ways.34 Bishop

So Close: Writing that Touches    ­69

focuses his discussion on the tele-touch of Stockhausen’s ‘Helicopter string quartet’, arguing that ‘we can safely say, also, that music is touch, and it is the gift of tele-touch (or telehaptics) that we encounter with any musical performance’.35 Cixous’s references to the musical structure of language suggest that the tele-touch of the literary text can reach us in ways we did not think possible. Describing the ‘music’ that ‘goes through the belly, through the entrails, through the chest’ when she writes, Cixous draws attention to the role of the body in literary tact, suggesting that writing can touch its ‘untouchable interiors’.36 She makes it clear, however, that the musical structures that touch her most strongly are not to be found in formal technique. She writes: I am not talking here simply of phonic signification, nor of alliterations, but indeed of the architecture, of the contraction and the relaxation, the variations of breath; or else of what overwhelms me with emotion in the text of Beethoven, that is to say the stops, the very forceful stops in the course of a symphony.37

Cixous’s account of the breath of writing – its contraction, relaxation and emotion – highlights, in particular, the music of the body. The rhythms of writing, she says in So Close, match the ‘pulsings of my blood’ (p. 38). She leaves us with the impression that for our writing to touch, we must listen to the body’s music.

On the telephone Hang on – there’s the telephone. In ‘Writing Blind’, Cixous insists, ‘I owe books and books to the telephone and I will give at least one back to it. May it be this very one.’38 So Close may be another. Here, she refers repeatedly to H.’s ‘love for the telephone’ (p. 4). It becomes a third party not only to her conversations, but also to her thoughts: ‘That I give myself over, methodically and passionately, to the study of the life of these lives of life, I can say it only to you, I say, to the Telephone. I speak a lot to the Telephone’ (p. 4). This telephone also features centrally in her relationship with Zohra (Z.), the young Algerian involved in the Milk Bar Café bombing of 1956 who was sentenced to twenty years of hard labour, but eventually pardoned by the French government following the independence of Algeria in 1962. She writes: ‘So I telephoned. I said: Zohra? And the voice said No. Wait a second. I say Huc Coeamus. And it’s over’ (p. 79). Repeating Narcissus’ call to Echo, ‘“Meet me here; I’m here!”’ the telephone

­70    Tactile Poetics exchange completes this impossible text: ‘It is finished. The book in which we had never been able to speak to each other is finished. Ended. Here’ (p. 79).39 The telephone, then, puts H. and Z. back in touch. But what is it about the telephone that keeps us in contact? In The Medium is the Maker, J. Hillis Miller notes the reference to tact in the old slogan of the US telephone company, AT&T: ‘Reach out and touch someone.’40 Drawing on Nicholas Royle’s translation of Derrida’s ‘Telepathy’ and his book Telepathy and Literature: Essays of the Reading Mind, Miller describes the telephone as ‘a telepathic device’, explaining telepathy as ‘getting in touch at a distance’.41 Royle suggests that ‘the notions of telephone and telepathy are, however strangely, being put in touch’, pointing out that the telephone offers up a voice that is ‘always “tele-”, and over a distance impossible to decide’.42 The ‘tele-’ of the telephone is a distance that is simultaneously far away and uncannily close to home. Cixous plays on these uncanny relations between being in or out of touch, referring to the capacity of the telephone to unsettle notions of contact and distance. In ‘Writing blind’, she describes it as ‘our donkey stopped and placed on the table near my hand’, insisting ‘there is no more living more ordinary more divine more adorable-andterrifying more familiar and less familiar than this instrument-thatallows-a-­conversation between two distant people’.43 This is reiterated in Rootprints: ‘One cannot imagine closer to farther’: the telephone is ‘the far in the near’, ‘the outside in the inside’.44 She goes on to compare the ‘far near’ and ‘outsideinside’ dynamic of the telephonic exchange to the relationship a ‘pregnant (mother) woman has | With her child’, explaining, ‘Cannot be closer, cannot be farther’.45 Talking as much to the telephone as on the telephone, Cixous upsets our understanding of long-distance love and extends the possibilities of tele-tact. It is, as Derrida remarks in ‘Envois’, ‘about time to speak of the voice that touches – always at a distance, like the eye – and the telephonic caress, if not the (striking) phone call’.46 Addressing the voice and its ‘inflection, timbre, and accent’, not to mention its ‘elevations and interruptions in the breathing, across moments of silence’, Derrida argues that ‘sound’ touches from afar; it has the potential to reach those ‘untouchable interiors’ of the body: ‘who would deny that we can touch with our voice – close or far away, naturally or technically, if we could still rely on this distinction, in the open air or on the phone – and thus, even to touch the heart?’47 Here, and with all the telephones and telephone boxes of ‘Envois’, Derrida not only unsettles the relations of a long-distance telephone call, but also draws our attention to the capacity of the voice – and its various textures – to tend toward the heart of the matter.

So Close: Writing that Touches    ­71

On texture In her exploration of the sensual and tactile presence of language, Alice Fulton turns to the importance of literary texture. ‘“Texture”’, she writes, ‘can be built, for instance, from sequined, woolly, stippled, flannel, marbled, glittery, or drippy linguistic registers [. . .] Passages can have an ultrasuede nap, like the velour finish of a petal, or they can feel prickly as hairbrushes.’48 Like the skin, the text’s surface might be wrought with wrinkles and bumps, it might be polished smooth or it might be sticky. And different textures, of course, touch us in different ways. Reminding us that the perception of texture involves not only touch but other senses too – visual or auditory, for instance – Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that ‘the need to discuss texture across senses brings with it a need to think about texture across different scales’.49 She observes that a single bump on a surface doesn’t constitute texture, although ‘a repeated pattern like polka dots might, but it depends on how big they are or how close you are’, and concludes, ‘texture, in short, comprises an array of perceptual data that include repetition, but whose degree of organization hovers just below the level of shape or structure’.50 Furthermore, she points out, ‘a particular intimacy seems to subsist between textures and emotions’.51 The different surfaces of texts, then, leave us with different impressions. Addressing this word ‘impression’, Sara Ahmed argues that it allows us to: associate the experience of having an emotion with the very affect of one surface upon another, an affect that leaves its mark or trace. So not only do I have an impression of others, but they also leave me with an impression; they impress me, and impress upon me.52

She goes on to discuss ‘emotionality in texts’ in terms of a feeling that moves between subjects, objects and environments, rather than a static concept residing in a fixed location within the individual.53 Literary texture, and its capacity to touch or move a reader, Ahmed argues, is neither an unchanging state contained within the body of a work nor confined to an individual reader or writer. Instead, it refers to the fluid movement of feeling between surfaces as different textures make contact. And what of our impression of So Close? Rather than conforming to a single texture, Cixous incorporates the slipperiness, the shininess, the dampness, the hardness, the grittiness, the prickliness, the softness and the stickiness of language into her writing. She shows us the ways that a text can be folded and refolded, the ways it can be perforated or torn and the ways its protrusions and grooves shape the pattern of our reading. She highlights a process of texturisation, referring to ‘that way

­72    Tactile Poetics you have of moistening words, of silvering them to make them shine’ (p. 152). Meditating on the word ‘trace’ and bringing together literary texture and an essential aesthetics of feeling, she writes, ‘I liked to caress this word’ (p. 59). Later, by mimicking a particular cry, she repeats the single word ‘ashkoun’. In so doing, she demonstrates the effect of repetition on texture, highlighting how one word rubs up against another, creating its own internal energy, like static: Ashkoun ashkoun ashkoun ashkoun. Never heard a country cry so loud So many birds, so many voices France is so silent sitting Sitting in the dining room dining Everyone in their thoughts Who? who? who? who? (p. 102)

Cixous stretches the material surface of So Close to its limits. Devices such as repetition, fragmentation, stuttering and interruption demonstrate the processes of texturisation and detexturisation that circulate through her text. The rumpled surface of the writing generates ruptures in reading. For instance: With mybrother lacking, without legs, without feet to feel the floor of the shadowy entryway, without hands to feel in the dark the place of the staircase where the polished wood railing is there is no railing, there are no wooden steps with one eye closed and one ear cut off that’s what, because of mybrother, I am obli at the last mi he refu because there are places where I am not half mybrother but 54 Rue Phil without bro (p. 138)

The stuttering slippages in this passage create cracks and folds in its surface. These interruptions are characteristic of other texts by Cixous, and are taken up by Jenny Chamarette in her essay ‘Flesh, Folds and Texturality’, which discusses Cixous’s use of the ellipsis. For Chamarette, the absence of words is as important as their material presence. The ellipsis, she argues, foregrounds materiality and ‘draws attention to our own (interrupted) perceptual apprehension and comprehension of the text’.54 In So Close, these ‘interruptions’ are provided through omission, absence, repetition, space and supplementation. For Chamarette, interruptions such as these combine meaning with the materiality of writing, emphasising what she terms ‘the texturality of text’.55 Although in her

So Close: Writing that Touches    ­73

discussion of the neologism ‘texturality’ she draws attention to the visual dimensions of the text, her theory is equally relevant to its tactile dimensions. Thus, the moments in Cixous’s work where ‘printed ink is abandoned altogether, leaving enlarged white spaces on the page’, highlight the dynamic texturality that simultaneously enfolds the reader and breaks up the surface of his or her reading.56 The texturality of So Close confronts us with its refusal to define a beginning and an end, and, by exposing the ways that the text continually touches on itself, it explodes the possibility of sense-making.

On texxture In his essay ‘Outing texture’, Renu Bora expands the concept of texture, arguing that it has ‘at least two meanings’ in the English language: What I will henceforth call TEXTURE, the first meaning, signifies the surface resonance or quality of an object or material. That is, its qualities if touched, brushed, stroked, or mapped, would yield certain properties and sensations that can usually be anticipated by looking.57

Supplementary to texture, is the notion of ‘TEXXTURE’, which ‘refers not really to surface or even depth so much as to an intimately violent, pragmatic, medium, inner level (at first more phenomenological than conceptual/metaphysical) of the stuffness of material structure’.58 The supplementary ‘x’ in texxture is added, he explains, ‘to signal the way it complicates the internal’.59 Thus, when a surface (a rock, or your face, for example) has certain properties, we often project these properties into its interior, and by this interior I mean not just a cavity, invagination, fold, or center, but the structure, consistency, or TEXXTURE of its inner matter that extends liminally, asymptotically, into the surface.60

Introducing Bora’s essay, Sedgwick explains that while texture is that which ‘defiantly or even invisibly blocks or refuses such information’, thus performing ‘the willed erasure of its history’, ‘texxture is the kind of texture that is dense with offered information about how, ­substantively, historically, materially, it came into being’.61 Thinking about texxture and its internal complications thus demands that we take into account the ways that a text’s own history shapes its surface. Exposing its texxture, Cixous’s So Close is wrought with the materiality of its own becoming. Drawing attention to the writing processes that

­74    Tactile Poetics both reveal and conceal its own construction, her text touches repeatedly on another text – an ‘unwritten’ letter to Zohra Drif. In her ‘Letter to Zohra Drif’, published in English in College Literature in 2003, Cixous writes, ‘I have not written this letter.’62 In this ‘letter’ Cixous thus refers to the other letter – ‘unwritten’, ‘held back’, since January 1957 – and tells us what ‘it would say’.63 She explains, ‘there are letters we do not write, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist’.64 Her ‘letter’ – the one in which she writes of her unwritten letter – is thus haunted by what she would say. And, in writing of this letter in So Close, Cixous rubs one text up against innumerable others. In So Close, she reflects: What-is-Zohra-going-to-say is now one of the sentences of this book. It traverses it at regular intervals, floats, stops, moves on, among the upper branches of the pines, a little dimly luminous stellar formation, I see it to one side in the background behind me. I recognize it by its withheld breath, since it murmurs I can’t hear the color of its intonation, it wavers, perhaps perhaps [. . .] (p. 43)

Cixous’s absent letter, and her account of what it would say – ­more­over, what Zohra would say in response – thus transforms her narrative. Turning the text back on itself and drawing attention to the ‘sentences of this book’, as well as the sentences that are missing, So Close offers up its own texxture. This letter, however, is just one intertext of many touched upon in So Close; the work is woven from multiple narratives, its textual weave generating a new tact. In particular, So Close points beyond itself to the work of Jacques Derrida, highlighting the ways that these two writers continually touch on each other. Cixous repeats, for instance, Derrida’s statement, ‘“This Garden still exists”’, taken from ‘From the Word to Life: a Dialogue between Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous’, within which he writes of the Jardin d’Essai: ‘We have never been there together, but it represents a sort of paradise lost’ (pp. 64–5).65 Citing Derrida and touching on so many other texts, So Close enables its interior construction to extend to its surface. Exposing the traces of language that shape its texture, Cixous’s work is thus marked by the material and texxtural history of its making.

On tampering Cixous shows us that texts do touch, over and over, and often in very unexpected ways. The issue, it seems, is not whether texts touch, but how, and what problems and promises this contact may offer. After all, as Derrida points out, to ‘touch on’ a work of literature, to analyse

So Close: Writing that Touches    ­75

it, may also be to ‘tamper’ with it – ‘to change, to displace, to call into question’.66 To return to the question I posed in the introduction, how do texts touch with tact? How might our own texts touch on the work of others? How do texts stick to each other and slide across each other? For Zsuzsa Baross, a sur-text, a writing on the text of another writer, presents a risk. When, we must ask, is touching too much? She states: As offering, writing ineluctably risks giving offense, an intrusive touch (whose violence the biblical usage of offense as ‘striking against the foot’ [OED] so well preserves), sending off as it does in the direction of the other an unsolicited missive, a perhaps unwanted gift, and so far as writing, a ‘false’ present that would never give itself completely, without reserving something for itself.67

Thus, ‘the ever-present danger of misappropriation by the way of the hand – unlawfully grabbing, taking hold of, (another’s) writing, as though “property”’ tampers with all attempts to touch with tact.68 In So Close, similarly, contact is perpetually withdrawn. Following H.’s journey from France to her father’s tomb in Algiers, Cixous’s destination always remains out of reach: ‘And what if I didn’t arrive, what if I didn’t land, what if I didn’t reach, didn’t touch didn’t feel, Algeria?’ (p. 100). Beside her father’s tomb, H. cries, ‘I’m afraid that they will kill my sadness, don’t touch me!’ (p. 148). In an uncanny echo, Cixous – like Freud – repeats the words of Christ to Mary Magdalene following his resurrection from the tomb: ‘Touch me not!’69 So, despite claiming ‘I am touched on all sides’ (p. 67), a certain resistance, a certain tact, holds her back: When I said ‘Algiers,’ I didn’t mean to say precisely Algiers, I don’t know exactly what I wanted, the point was I think to approach, as much as possible and as little as possible, by way of metonymies, by intuitions, by detours, to approach, but what? (p. 37)

Approaching her destination, Cixous’s arrival is always deferred. Furthermore, by referring to both her travelling and her writing in terms of such non-arrival, she points to the spacing that always intercepts the possibility of reaching this destination. Reiterating her point in ‘Writing Blind’ that ‘writing is first of all a departure, an embarkation, an expedition’, she explains in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing: Writing is not arriving; most of the time it’s not arriving. One must go on foot, with the body. One has to go away, leave the self. How far must one not arrive in order to write, how far must one wander and wear out and have pleasure? One must walk as far as the night. One’s own night. Walking through the self toward the dark.70

­76    Tactile Poetics Departing for Algeria and approaching her father’s tomb, Cixous walks the self toward the dark, feeling her way forward. Blind, she says, ‘I write on writing. I turn on the other light.’71 Her journey thus leads us by the hand back to our point of departure: the co-implication of touching and feeling in the writing process. Once again: ‘I do not write to keep. I write to feel. I write to touch the body of the instant with the tips of the words.’72 To write is to feel. It is to touch upon the body, but perhaps without ever making contact. In Corpus, first published in French in 1990, Nancy asks, ‘How are we to touch upon the body?’73 He responds, however, by saying that ‘perhaps we can’t answer this “How?” as we’d answer a technical question’.74 It is not a set of guidelines we can pass on; thinking about writing demands, as Robert Sheppard suggests in his account of poetics, a move ‘away from the expectations of the answers’.75 And, despite claiming that ‘touching – happens in writing all the time’, Nancy has to admit that ‘maybe it doesn’t happen exactly in writing, if writing in fact has an “inside”’.76 Instead, however, touch happens ‘along the border, at the limit, the tip, the furthest edge of writing’.77 We must understand that this chapter has barely touched the surface. Feeling its way around affect, music, telephones, texture and texturality, I fear I am still at the point of departure. Attempting to touch with some tact, this chapter, too, is a departure in the dark. I am feeling my way.

Notes  1. Nancy, Corpus, p. 11.  2. Nancy, Corpus, p. 11.  3. Montagu, Touching, p. 102.  4. Montagu, Touching, p. 6. Josipovici points out that to say ‘“I am touched” means: I am moved. But “he is touched”, now an archaic expression, means that he is not quite normal. Touched by what then? Fate? God? Ill-luck?’ (Josipovici, Touch, p. 140).  5. Montagu, Touching, p. 103.  6. Montagu, Touching, p. 103. This notion is supported a number of theorists, including Sue Cataldi, who claims: ‘Because the logic of touch also belongs to the order of carnal ideality, emotions can theoretically be placed back “in touch” with feelings – not as “inner realities” but in their tangible dimensions’ (Cataldi, Emotion, Depth, and Flesh, p. 104).  7. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p. 17  8. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 3.  9. Jameson refers to the ‘waning of affect’ in the postmodern condition. Despite this, theorists such as Sianne Ngai argue that the study of affect and emotion remains ‘a long standing intellectual project’, burgeoning

So Close: Writing that Touches    ­77 across disciplines in recent study (Jameson, Postmodernism; Ngai, Ugly Feelings, p. 6). One area of contention, however, is caused by the fact that the terms of the debate – emotion, affect and feeling – remain sites of ongoing disagreement. Rei Terada, for instance, argues that these concepts are ‘entangled in the mysteries of consciousness, [their] history locked inside the classical histories of mind and will’ (Terada, Feeling in Theory, p. 6). 10. Anzieu, A Skin for Thought, p. 79. 11. Anzieu, A Skin for Thought, p. 74. 12. Anzieu, A Skin for Thought, p. 78. This also resonates with Montagu’s account of infant development, whereby the original sensation of being held by the caregiver is gradually replaced through language: ‘The rhythm of this kind of tactual stimulation that the mother conveys to the child in her arms is almost universally reproduced in the lullabies sung or hummed to lull children to sleep’ (Montagu, Touching, p. 119). 13. Cixous, Rootprints, p. 7. 14. Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, pp. 875–93 (pp. 881–2). 15. Conley, ‘Making Sense’, pp. 79–88 (p. 79). 16. Conley, ‘Making Sense’, p. 79. 17. Conley, ‘Making Sense’, p. 80. 18. Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’, p. 187. The association of seeing with feeling is also explored in ‘Savoir’. Here, Cixous describes ‘the delicate tact of the cornea’. Having ‘touched the world with her eye’, she writes of the eyes as ‘miraculous hands’, and concludes that ‘the continuity of her flesh and the world’s flesh, touch then, was love, and that was the miracle of giving’ (Cixous, ‘Savoir’, pp. 1–16 (p. 9)). 19. Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’, p. 188. 20. Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, p. 36. Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’, p. 195. 21. Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’, p. 189. This point is also emphasised by Conley in ‘Making Sense’, p. 81. 22. Cixous, So Close. Further page references to this edition appear parenthetically in the main body of the text. Note that the title of this text, translated from the French Si près, is haunted by the name of the cypress tree (cypress). According to translator, Peggy Kamuf, ‘these homonyms provide a principal key to the fiction’. Kamuf, ‘Translator’s Note’, in Cixous, So Close, pp. 162–3 (p. 163). 23. Fulton, Feeling as a Foreign Language, p. 38. 24. Fulton, Feeling as a Foreign Language, p. 38. 25. Fulton, Feeling as a Foreign Language, p. 77. 26. Derrida, ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own’, pp. 17–92 (pp. 34–5). 27. Cixous, Rootprints, p. 64. 28. Cixous, Rootprints, p. 46. 29. Cixous and Conley, ‘Voice I. . .’, pp. 50–67 (p. 62). 30. Montagu, Touching, p. 135. 31. Bishop, ‘The Force of Noise’, pp. 25–40 (pp. 28, 26). 32. Bishop, ‘The Force of Noise’, pp. 26, 25. 33. Bishop, ‘The Force of Noise’, p. 26. 34. The Oxford English Dictionary [OED].

­78    Tactile Poetics 35. Bishop, ‘The Force of Noise’, p. 27. 36. Cixous, Rootprints, p. 46. 37. Cixous, Rootprints, p. 64. 38. Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’, p. 189. 39. Ovid, ‘Book III: Echo and Narcissus’, p. 77. 40. Miller, The Medium is the Maker, p. 2. 41. Derrida plays on Freud’s comparison of telepathy as ‘a psychical counterpart to wireless telegraphy’, SE 22, p. 55. See also Derrida, ‘Telepathy’, pp. 226–61 (p. 242); Royle, Telepathy and Literature; Miller, The Medium is the Maker, pp. 4, 9. 42. Royle, Telepathy and Literature, pp. 168, 166. See also Royle, ‘Top 10 Writers on the Telephone’; Ronnell, The Telephone Book. The role of touch and the telegram is addressed in Chapter 3, and is extended to other communication technologies in Chapter 7. 43. Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’, pp. 192–3. 44. Cixous, Rootprints, p. 49. 45. Cixous, Rootprints, p. 49. 46. Derrida, ‘Envois’, pp. 1–256 (p. 112). 47. Derrida ‘Envois’, pp. 112, 204. 48. Fulton, Feeling as a Foreign Language, p. 77. 49. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p. 15. 50. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p. 16. 51. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p. 17. 52. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 6. 53. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, p. 12. 54. Chamarette, ‘Flesh, Folds and Texturality’, pp. 34–49 (p. 35). 55. Chamarette, ‘Flesh, Folds and Texturality’, p. 39. 56. Chamarette, ‘Flesh, Folds and Texturality’, p. 42. 57. Bora, ‘Outing Texture’, pp. 94–127 (pp. 98–9). Bora examines ‘queer texture’ in Henry James’s handling of Chad in The Ambassadors. 58. Bora, ‘Outing Texture’, p. 99. These distinctions, Bora explains later, are related to Deleuze and Guattari’s definitions of ‘smooth’ (or haptic) and ‘striated space’. In A Thousand Plateaus (2004), Deleuze and Guattari take these terms from the composer Pierre Boulez, who used them to describe differences in musical space. Whereas smooth space is characterised by the texture of felt – it is unlimited in every direction – striated space is characterised by a woven fabric, delimited on at least one side. In practice, connections and passages exist between these oppositions (Deleuze and Guattari, ‘1440: The Smooth and the Striated’, pp. 474–500 (pp. 539, 532, 525)). 59. Bora, ‘Outing Texture’, p. 99. 60. Bora, ‘Outing Texture’, p. 101. 61. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p. 14. 62. Cixous, ‘Letter to Zohra Drif’, pp. 82–90 (p. 82). 63. Cixous, ‘Letter to Zohra Drif’, pp. 82, 88. 64. Cixous, ‘Letter to Zohra Drif’, p. 88. 65. Derrida and Cixous, ‘From the Word to Life’, pp. 1–13 (p. 5). 66. Derrida, On Touching, p. 25. See Introduction. 67. Baross, ‘Noli Me Tangere’, pp. 149–64 (p. 150).

So Close: Writing that Touches    ­79 68. Baross, ‘Noli Me Tangere’, p. 150. 69. John 20: 17. For a fuller discussion of the Noli Me Tangere scene, with particular reference to its appearance in H.D.’s Tribute to Freud, see ­ Chapter 3. 70. Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’, pp. 184–5; Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, p. 65. 71. Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’, p. 189. 72. Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’, p. 195. 73. Nancy, Corpus, p. 11. 74. Nancy, Corpus, p. 11. 75. Sheppard, ‘Poetics as Conjecture and Provocation’, pp. 3–26 (pp. 7, 4). 76. Nancy, Corpus, p. 11. 77. Nancy, Corpus, p. 11.

Chapter 5

Dis-tanz: 29 Tangos

Tango 1

In his essay ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’, Jacques Derrida responds to the question ‘What is poetry?’ by pronouncing a radical love. To love poetry is to ‘learn it by heart’; ‘one would like to take it in one’s hands, undertake to learn it and understand it, to keep it for oneself, near oneself’.1 To love poetry, then, is to hold it close. Yet poetry also demands to be held at a certain distance. For Derrida, the poem is like ‘the hérisson, istrice in Italian, in English hedgehog’; it is ‘a converted animal, rolled in a ball, turned toward the other and toward itself’.2 ‘Prickly with spines’, ‘its pointed signs toward the outside’, the poem thus demands distance.3 Passionate and wounding, the poem loved, then, both invites and resists touch; we would like to take it in our hands even as its signifying points hold us at arm’s length. This chapter explores the ways that the poem negotiates between proximity and distance, between touching and not-touching. It takes as its starting point another prickly poem – Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos – exploring the distance at its heart. In so doing, it also opens up a discussion of the poematic in Derrida’s own writing – the ways that his own texts hold and withhold, the ways that they invite touch and yet demand tact. In ‘Envois’, for instance, Derrida writes that he must ‘distance myself in order to write to you’.4 This distance, I will show, is prefigured in the tango – a dance to hold long-distance lovers at an arm’s length, at least. For Derrida’s writing is always a dance of distance and différance. Yet it is also always an act of reaching toward, of tending, of tendering.

Tango 2

To tender, from the French tendre, ‘to hold out, offer’ (OED): the poem is an act of tendering, of holding out. ‘Tender, tend, extend’,

Dis-tanz: 29 Tangos    ­81

for Derrida, is ‘to give what is given without giving up.’5 A text of ­impossible intimacy, the heart of a poem is tendered to the reader with tender feeling, finding distant ways to touch, touching ways to interrupt. ‘Let us not play with words – ever’, Derrida writes; ‘Let us not place any bets on the homonymy, in French between tendre and tender.’6 Derrida picks up, on the one hand, the connotations of the verb ‘to tend’ – to stretch, to orient oneself toward, to intend to – and ‘on the other hand the instance of the attribute tendre’, which ‘often connotes fragility, delicacy, a rather passive vulnerability that is non-intentional, exposed, and rather childlike or feminine’.7 These two ‘tenders’ tend to haunt each other, to ‘visit the other’, while also touching on the sense of ‘payment, profit, or capital gain’ of tendering.8 And this chapter, too, is both an act of tendering and an act of tenderness: it tenders itself, it holds itself out with tender consideration, care, concern. I offer it with tender feeling, my dear, my beloved: ‘Without any play on words, ever, it would ­therefore be necessary to extend an ear and tenderly attend to these words – tender, tend, extend.’9 I tender this, I extend it, I draw it out. Tenderly, I tender this to you, and in return, I ask that you attend to me, that you extend your ears towards me. Take this. I tender it to you, dear, beloved.

Tango 3

Anne Carson’s seventh book, The Beauty of the Husband, offers a tender portrayal of a woman’s erotic affair with her unnamed husband – charting desire from adolescence, through marriage, to separation and divorce. The poem is characterised by an intimacy not between husband and wife, but an intimacy of address to the reader, to whom the narrator offers what she calls ‘inside information’:     Not ashamed to say I loved him for his beauty. As I would again if he came near. Beauty convinces. You know beauty makes sex possible. Beauty makes sex sex. You if anyone grasp this – hush [. . .]10

The text is repeatedly tender, touching, affective. Yet Carson’s text is wrought with complex moves; a fictional essay in 29 tangos, it refuses to stand still. Instead, it dances with intricate, intimate footwork. And this is not simply a dance between husband and wife. Incorporating ghostly references to John Keats, Homer, Charlotte Brontë, Georges Bataille, Plato, Samuel Beckett, Arthur Conan Doyle and Aristotle, among others, Carson interweaves multiple voices – voices touching each

­82    Tactile Poetics other, turning each other on, but also rubbing each other up the wrong way. Up close and personal, the 29 tangos are held together by Keats’s conceptualisation of beauty as truth: ‘What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth –’, he writes in a letter to Benjamin Bailey on 22 November 1817.11 Each tango is introduced with a fragment from Keats – from the odes, from Otho the Great, from ‘The cap and bells’ and even from words found scratched on the glass of his lodgings at Newport on 15 April 1817 – so that these textual traces (and the trace also carries the sense of a footstep) dance their way through Carson’s own body of work. And yet, Carson’s poem – if we can call it a poem, for nowhere is it named as such – moves far beyond a meditation on Keats’s notion of beauty and truth. If anything, it is about the nature of lying, and the distance and deferral at the heart of desire. But we’ll come back to that.

Tango 4

Tendering and touching. Distance and deferral. This might also be an account of the poematic in Derrida’s writing. Derrida’s address – and its turn from ‘“touching him” to “touching you”’ in On Touching – is intimate, tender: ‘What about you?’ Derrida’s writing always asks.12 The intimacy of voice is carried over to the intimacy between voices – voices touching each other, turning each other on, rubbing each other up the wrong way: ‘What counts and is counted then’, Derrida says of the text, ‘is what we do while speaking, what we do to each other, how we again touch each other by mixing our voices.’13 What counts and is counted in this poem then, is the dance of Derrida’s voices.

Tango 5 Naked in the stone place it was true, sticky stains, skin, I lay on the hay and he licked. Licked it off. Ran out and got more dregs in his hands and smeared it on my knees neck belly licking. Plucking. Diving. (p. 29)

Licking, plucking, diving, Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband points to an intimate touch, drawing attention to the tactility at the heart of desire. Yet, what is it that links – or separates – touch and desire? Touch, for Santanu Das, is ‘the most intimate and elusive of the human senses’.14 ‘At once intense and diffuse, working at the threshold between the self and the world, touch’, he writes, ‘can be said to open up

Dis-tanz: 29 Tangos    ­83

the body at a more intimate, affective level’.15 Elizabeth Harvey understands this desire as bound up with the closeness of touching bodies; touch, she claims, ‘insists on the corporeal because it relies upon contiguity or proximity for its operations’.16 To touch, this seems to suggest, you have to get up close and personal.

Tango 6

Not so fast. Carson’s rather shifty text, The Beauty of the Husband, deconstructs the very différance between proximity and distance. The poem’s unsettling tactility performs Derrida’s notion of the ‘law of parting and sharing at the heart of touching and con-tact’, revealing ‘interruption, interposition, detour’ at the heart of the poem.17 Drawing attention to the non-contact at the heart of touching, Carson shows that, as Derrida writes, a ‘thinking of touch, this thought of what “touching” means, must touch on the untouchable’, a tactful approach that Derrida tenders in his own untouchable text, with his own inimitable tenderness: ‘How to touch upon the untouchable? Distributed among an indefinite number of forms and figures, this question is precisely the obsession haunting a thinking of touch – or thinking as the haunting of touch.’18

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Drawing on Derrida’s exploration of ‘the law of parting and sharing at the heart of touching and con-tact’, my own 29 tangos touch on the way that Derrida’s writing dances distance even as it tends towards Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘the greatest thinker about touching of all time, I tell myself’, or ‘not of all time, perhaps, but ever since Aristotle suddenly hit on the manifold aporia of touch’: ‘I wanted, without telling him anything, at least to touch him. But not without tact, from a respectful distance.’19 Knowing ‘less and less’ what ‘touch, to touch him [le toucher] means’, these tangos make steps towards touching the matter with tact, and from a respectful distance, performing the relationship between touching and not-touching, between proximity and distance, between writing and dancing, between poetry and deconstruction.20

Tango 8

Let us dance. Imagine yourself onto the dance floor: an intimate ­stranger, music under your skin. In Buenos Aires you are always aware of your heart. The beat lifts you. Exhale. Hush now, don’t speak. Arms locked,  loose. Sweat in the curl of your back, where you feel only

­84    Tactile Poetics the shadow of a hand. Abrupt stops. Rush, drift. Dancing is writing; you can’t keep up  with your feet. An entanglement of legs. Breath. Blood. Beat. And there are holes in your heart. It is good for unlocking, they say. And they say you cannot stop until it is over. Tact has nothing to do with it. You’re not even close. This, my love, my heart, is the tango.

Tango 9

For Erin Manning, the tango is ‘more than a dance’.21 It is ‘a movement that offers the possibility of improvising our encounters’; as a way of being, of relating, of becoming, its movements ‘are always to come’.22 Originally composed by immigrants to Buenos Aires at the end of the nineteenth century, the tango was the dramatic expression of resistance to political and racial hegemony, and became a ‘signifier of darkness and illegitimacy, for desire and counter-culture’.23 Marta Savigliano notes that, quickly spreading to Paris, London and New York in the early twentieth century, and reaching popularity in Japan during the Second World War, the tango was ‘“polished” and accepted by the wealthy and powerful’ as it made its way from the slums to the ballrooms of the West.24 For Manning, however, the key to the tango is its dependence on ‘the closeness of two bodies’.25 And for Savliagno, too, it is a dance symbolised by its ‘tight embrace’.26 The history of the dance, however, reveals a contradiction. Describing the first dances in Río de la Plata as ‘bodies alternately coming close to each other and moving apart’, Savigliano notes that their ‘displays of eroticism scandalized and created distance/difference’.27 Moreover, ‘they did not embrace. They did not hold tight; their color held them together.’28 The original tango dancers, then, did not touch. Instead, theirs was a dance of différance.

Tango 10

In ‘Envois’, Derrida dances the tango: I have just hung up, it is still as difficult as ever. Agreed, at 6 o’clock Sunday evening, I dance in the water with you (Astor Piazzola, Libertango, Meditango, Undertango, Adios Nonino, Violentango, Novitango, Amelitango, Tristango) and I will stop only at the point of exhaustion, dead of fatigue.29

For Sarah Wood, Derrida’s letter here is ‘a virtual date, a lover’s contract, with the playlist of Piazzola tango music’.30 Explaining that these

Dis-tanz: 29 Tangos    ­85

tangos are all names of tracks recorded by Piazzola, she suggests that they function as ‘a way into an evocative, finite stretch of space and time in which the couple might be together although apart’.31 This is a dance of distance. While Manning asserts in the opening page of her book that tango comes from the Latin tangere, to touch, Wood insists ‘that’s wrong’.32 Etymologically, tango is from the Spanish, originally describing ‘a dance festival of Africans or Gypsies’ (OED). ‘“Meditango”’, writes Wood, ‘has nothing to do with touch – according to the dictionary, anyway, if you want to believe the dictionary.’33 And that is precisely my prickly point. The tango is all about touching not-touching; it is dancing with distance.

Tango 11 Come here. No. I need to touch you. No. Yes. That night we made love ‘the real way’ which we had not yet attempted although married six months. Big mystery. No one knew where to put their leg and to this day I’m not sure we got it right. (p. 10)

Something, it seems, is getting in the way. A certain tact – or lack thereof – interrupts the contact between lovers. Most untactfully, the husband takes the wife to Athens after a period of separation, where he dodges to the bar each night to telephone another woman. From tango XII: What was he thinking to bring her here? Athens. Hotel Eremia. He knew very well. Détente and reconciliation, let’s start again, thinking oysters and glacé fruits, it needs a light touch, narrow keys not very deep. (p. 97)

Carson’s intimacy, it is clear, is not without interruption, and the narrator’s troubled relations with her husband perform what Lauren Berlant calls ‘the distractions and disruptions’ that haunt our experience of close contact – intimacy’s ‘potential failure to stabilize closeness’.34 The Beauty of the Husband is inhabited by such distractions and disruptions, and the negotiations between the husband and wife need ‘a light touch [. . .] not very deep’ (p. 97). As I’ve already said, for Steven Connor, a ‘light touch’ has the value of tact; it is ‘a certain kind of touch that is not

­86    Tactile Poetics quite a touch, a touch that does not take hold, that holds back’.35 This poem, then, tends tirelessly towards a touch that is not quite a touch – textual contact is always already interrupted.

Tango 12

Derrida’s attempt to touch Nancy in On Touching is ‘an endless ­contretemps’: ‘I’ve hardly taken a single step, and he’s already running ahead of me, never out of breath’.36 ‘Touching him! How is one to touch him, still?’ he asks.37 In Carson’s tango, too, there is an endless contretemps: ‘Come here. | No. | I need to touch you. | No’ (p. 10). If, for Derrida, the poem is ‘to be learned by heart’, then this is surely a ‘long detour’ to its point.38 And if, for Manning, the tango plays out bodies in movement, then this is ‘a dance of encounter and disencounter’, a ‘complex network of (mis)understood directions’.39 It is, she writes, a dance ‘that is about a movement between here and there [. . .] about the pain of disconnection and the desire for communication’.40 These misunderstood directions, disencounters and disconnections are rife in Carson’s poem, where ‘Tensions poured up the walls | and along the ceiling’ as husband and wife come together and pull away (p. 10). An endless contretemps, the 29 tangos follow a series of separations, unions and reunions. ‘Fair reader I offer merely an analogy. | A  delay’,  she begins (p. 5). ‘Hesitate, | oh hesitate’, she continues (p. 57). In tango XII: The husband touched his wife’s temple and turned and ran down the stairs. (p. 54)

Always already departed, the poem is structured by its withholdings and its withdrawals. In tango IV, when ‘separated three years but not yet divorced’, the wife receives ‘a letter he wrote from Rio de Janeiro’ (p. 20). There is no return address: I cannot answer. He wants no answer. What does he want. Four things. But from the fourth I flee chaste and craftily. (p. 20)

Yet another departure.

Dis-tanz: 29 Tangos    ­87

Tango 13

Absences, departures and letters without return address: things are always coming between them; ‘We have this deep sadness between us’, writes the husband (p. 20). Carson’s poem is haunted by non-contact, by a thinking of touch that extends distance. This effect of distance is played out in Carson’s discussion of Sappho’s poetics in Eros the Bittersweet (1998). Eros, she points out, ‘denotes “want,” “lack,” “desire for that which is missing.” The lover wants what he does not have.’41 She continues by explaining that ‘where eros is lack, its activation calls for three structural components — lover, beloved and that which comes between them’.42 This third element, the ‘inbetween’, she notes, ‘plays a paradoxical role for it both connects and separates’.43 Moreover, these three elements exist ‘on a circuit of possible relationship, electrified by desire so that they touch not touching’.44 Thus in Eros, first published in 1986, fourteen years prior to The Beauty of the Husband, Carson has already formulated the non-contact at the heart of desire – the not-touching at the heart of the poem. To touch not touching, she writes; poetry dances through a ‘shift of distance’.45 Or, for Derrida, ‘this thought of what “touching” means, must touch on the untouchable’; the text dances to the beat of a ‘touchable-untouchable’ desire.46

Tango 14

There is an interval in the dance that requires one to step back, start over. Starting over with Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, Derrida interrogates the shift of distance in the German word, distanz, which always contains within it a tanz (dance). While Spurs is often read in terms of the way that Derrida equates the ‘question of style’ with ‘the question of woman’, what causes me to step back here is the very turn around the fact of ‘distance’ at the heart of desire.47 For Nietzsche, Derrida shows us, ‘A woman seduces from a distance. In fact, distance is the very element of her power.’48 But any seduction-from-a-distance that takes place in Carson’s poem is introduced by the husband; it is, after all, the husband who writes seductive letters to his wife from afar, signing them in the penultimate tango from ‘Husband in Exile’ (p. 134), while the wife insists ‘and of course distance made no difference, he was at best in letters anyway’ (p. 38). But the point is that in Spurs, Derrida enfolds dance within distance. Citing Nietzsche’s account of the effect of woman in Joyful Wisdom, he asks ‘What is the opening step of that Dis-tanz?’49 The rhythm of the dance, he argues, is already ‘mimed’ in Nietzsche’s own writing. From the opening step of On Touching, too, the rhythm of

­88    Tactile Poetics the dance is mimed within language: ‘One day, yes, one day, once upon a time, a terrific time, a time terrifically addressed, with as much violence as tact at its fingertips, a certain question took hold of me – as if it, or “she” [la question], came of me, to me.’50 Dancing with terrific timing, with the question at his fingertips, Derrida offers us an experience of the poematic in his hands, measured by his footsteps.

Tango 15

Drawing attention to the hyphen between dis and tanz, Derrida articulates it as ‘a stylistic effect’ that suspends the word: ‘The play of silhouettes which is created here by the hyphen’s pirouette serves as a sort of warning to us to keep our distance from these multifarious veils and their shadowy dream of death.’51 So dis and tanz are suspended by the veil, by the hyphen’s pirouette. It creates the dance of distance within its own word. Moreover, Derrida’s ‘touchable un-touchable’ hyphen connects and separates.52 Like the hymen, it is an example of syllepsis: ‘a figure by which a single word is made to refer to two or more words in the sentence’ (OED). As Derrida points out in Dissemination in 1972, the ‘hymen’ is ‘first of all a sign of fusion, the consummation of a marriage, the identification of two beings, the confusion between two’.53 Performing a ‘(con)fusion’, there is no longer any distance between desire (the awaiting of a full presence designed to fulfill it, to carry it out) and the fulfillment of presence, between distance and non-distance; there is no longer any difference between desire and satisfaction. It is not only the difference (between desire and fulfillment) that is abolished, but also the difference between difference and nondifference.54

Bringing together the distance between desire and fulfillment, between distance and non-distance, the hyphen in dis-tanz – a typographical hymen – fuses and confuses binary oppositions, producing ‘the effect of a medium (a medium as element enveloping both terms at once; a medium located between the two terms)’.55 It is, in other words, ‘an operation that both sows confusion between opposites and stands between the opposites “at once”’.56

Tango 16

‘To tell a story by not telling it – ’ (p. 145); ‘How shadows cross a wall and go – ’ (p. 123); ‘his thrust – analytic you could say’ (p. 15). Not simply interrupting relations between husband and wife, and

Dis-tanz: 29 Tangos    ­89

the ­consummation of a marriage, the hyphens in The Beauty of the Husband continually interrupt themselves. They con-fuse opposites, gathering signification to the between, to an impossible tact not just between husband and wife, not just between Derrida and I or you or Nancy, but also between texts, where touch takes place without touching, where dance takes place within dis-tanz.

Tango 17

Dis-tanz suggests to Derrida that ‘a distance from distance must be maintained’.57 We cannot get too close to distance. In an interview with Christie McDonald in ‘Choreographies’, Derrida returns to the dance contained within and upheld by distanz. Drawing attention to the fact that in French the word la danse is a feminine noun requiring the use of a feminine pronoun, Derrida side-steps McDonald’s attempt to pin him down on ‘woman’s place’: ‘Frankly, I do not know,’ Derrida writes. ‘I believe that I would not describe that place.’58 Instead, he suggests that the dance of woman ‘changes place and above all changes places’.59 The feminine, he seems to suggest, can dance otherwise.60 For Ann Cooper Albright, this ability to change place and change places testifies to the ‘revolutionary quality of dancing’: ‘By moving through instead of locating her(him)self in narrative positions,’ she argues, ‘the dancer is able to step out of meaning before it becomes stabilized.’61

Tango 18

It is this resistance to stability that makes Derrida’s writings, for Hélène Cixous, ‘living poems’.62 ‘I just called him poem’, she writes in ‘Jacques Derrida as Proteus Unbound’: For it is as poem, by passing through the poem, by the genius of improvisation in the language, while getting help and carried away constantly thanks to the other powers living in the language, that he outruns the dreaded dangers, arrest, landing in the jail cell of petrified properness, false and forced deciphering, the chains of interpretation, nightmarish reduction to self-unity.63

Derrida’s writing refuses house arrest; it is ‘carried away constantly’ by the ‘genius of improvisation’, where ‘illegibility remains a promise’.64 His writing ‘gives to read and to be read, it recalls to reading, and this right away on the threshold, from the first step [. . .]’65 Although he insists, ‘I’ve hardly taken a single step’, he tangos with improvisation, illegibility and desire.66 And resting with arrest: ‘Some tangos pretend

­90    Tactile Poetics to be about women but look at this’ (p. 145), Carson writes in the last tango, refusing to be arrested in ‘the jail cell of petrified properness’.67 Or, in André Lepecki’s terms, this is a dance that ‘happens away from home, beyond reach, faraway’.68

Tango 19

Drawing from afar on the ‘(almost spontaneous) parallels habit and language have forged between dance and writing (as explicitly manifested in “choreo/graphing”)’, André Lepecki asks ‘What does it mean to write with dance?’69 Confronting these questions close up, questions always already beyond reach, critics point to the ‘problem of dance’s ephemerality, of dance’s vanishing presence from the field of representation’.70 Susan Foster articulates ‘this transient quality of dancing – the fact that it disappeared as rapidly as it presented itself’; in comparison to other art forms, and before the possibility of film, dance ‘alone lacked the capacity to inscribe itself. It alone endured only in one’s memory.’71 For Lepecki, this means that ‘from the moment the question of dance’s presence began to be formulated as loss and temporal paradox, dance was transformed into hauntology and taxidermy — and choreography cast as mourning’.72 This sets up a ghostly and unstable task for choreography, ‘where dancing and writing, body and text, start detaching and distancing from each other’.73 This spectral choreography demands that body and text must at the same time come close and keep their distance.

Tango 20

It is through ‘the ephemeral tracing of dancing’, Lepecki argues, that we might ‘generate something other than discontent, or the desire to document’.74 For him, writing and dancing occupy ‘shared ground: dance cannot be imagined without writing, it does not exists [sic] outside writing’s space’.75 The Derridean trace, he argues, provides us with the theoretical tools needed to understand this; both writing and dancing, he says, ‘participate in the same motion of the trace: that which will always be already behind at the moment of its appearance’.76 Developing his conceptualisation of the trace in ‘Living On / Border Lines’, Derrida argues that ‘a “text” is henceforth no longer a finished corpus of writing, some content enclosed in a book or its margins, but a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, to other differential traces’.77 Carson’s 29 tangos, with their mixing of voices, make up a network of differential traces, generating a reading-effect that overruns its own limits, a dance that spills beyond a

Dis-tanz: 29 Tangos    ­91

dance floor. Here we have then, in Lepecki’s words, a ‘“writing” whose constitutive signs are as unstable and fleeting as dance steps’.78

Tango 21

Fleeting and unstable, Carson’s poem contains an urgency and breathlessness, an elegance and a stamp that echo the movements of tango dancers. At times straight-talking or ringing in our ears like a ‘botched tango’ (p. 69), and at other times miming ‘a beautiful boiling dance where your partner | turns | and stabs you to death’ (p. 119), her poem offers a range of unexpected moves that ask the reader to ‘rotate the husband and expose a hidden side’ (p. 19). This is an improvised choreography that blurs distinctions between stasis and movement. Slippery, shifty, at times prickly, the poem dances backwards and forwards, from side to side or page to page, making rapid leaps and awkward arabesques from Homer to Holmes, from the history of grapes to the Battle of Borodino, from beauty to truth to lies. Refusing to simply write about dancing, the language and form of Carson’s poem perform dance, resisting arrest.

Tango 22

Derrida’s ‘living poems’, too, are full of rapid leaps and abrupt stops. His writing dances the ‘Libertango, Meditango, Undertango, Adios Nonino, Violentango, Novitango, Amelitango, Tristango’.79 This, beloved, is a dance of rush and drift: Don’t keep pretending, as they do, don’t make believe, stop acting as if you wanted to make us believe that there is something one could call touch, an understood thing itself about which we could pretend to agree, and say something new, in the very place where, in touching upon the untouchable, this thing remains untouchable. Touch is finitude. Period. Stop at this point. Haven’t you yourself said ‘there is no “the” sense of touch’?80

Stop at this point. Poetry is dancing: I can’t keep up with your feet.

Tango 23

If poetry is dancing, it is a movement with breath and beat patterned into language and form. Take Carson’s tango II, for instance: You know I was married years ago and when he left my husband took my notebooks. Wirebound notebooks.

­92    Tactile Poetics You know that cool sly verb write. He liked writing, disliked having to start each thought himself. (p. 9)

Mirroring the pattern of starts and ends, of separation and looking back, this poem is constructed of lines in couplets, one long line, one short, with a steady beat, like the walking tango, the caminando. But in this poetic coupling, one line always falls short, no matter how far the reach. For Manning, ‘touch is the act of reaching toward’ and ‘every act of reaching toward enables the creation of worlds’.81 But, for Derrida, ‘suppose one were to reach there, what would give one the right to touch it?’82

Tango 24

For J. Hillis Miller, ‘the failure of touching ever quite to happen, contrary to what the philosophical tradition avers, is the central thesis of Le toucher’.83 Carson, too, comments on the impossible promise of reach in Eros the Bittersweet. This time, she refers to the reach of Sappho’s verse: As a sweet apple turns red on a high branch, high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot – well, no they didn’t forget – were not able to reach [. . .]84

Carson emphasises that ‘both its content and its form consist in an act of reaching’.85 The lines of Sappho’s fragment seem to be falling short, not quite reaching their destination, not quite touching: ‘the poem is incomplete, perfectly’.86 Carson suggests that ‘the reaching action of desire is attempted again and again in different ways through the different lines; with each line it becomes clearer that the reach will not succeed’.87 In The Beauty of the Husband, it becomes increasingly clear that here, too, the wife’s reach will not succeed. This is inscribed within its very form, which is punctuated by unfinished sentences, interruptions, ellipses, hyphens and parentheses. In tango XXII, for instance, there are no finished sentences, only interruptions, endless unendings: What is this, what future is there I thought You said We never When exactly day year name anything who I was who I am who did you Did you or did you not Do you or do you not This excuse that excuse pleasure pain truth What truth is that All those kilometres (p. 99)

Dis-tanz: 29 Tangos    ­93

Tango 25

All those kilometres. Hundreds, in fact: ‘How could you be there, hundreds of kilometres away, where I know you are now, and also be waiting for me, in ten minutes, at the Gare d’Austerlitz.’88 This distance, the necessary failure of reach, is also the dance of On Touching: ‘I can never get to it, to the truth, and I can never touch the point of departure, not to mention the end.’89 Without origin, without end, the rhythm and reach of Derrida’s living poem is always dancing. Filled with distance, Derrida’s text is incomplete, perfectly. Hesitate. Oh, hesitate. The intimacy is all in the reach. Tact has nothing to do with it. You’re not even close. This, my love, my heart, is the poetry of the tango.

Tango 26

The heart of the matter: there is a ‘law of parting and sharing at the heart of touching and con-tact’.90 While, for Manning, the tango is ‘closer to the heart, perhaps, than many exchanges between strangers and lovers’, Derrida points out that the heart is the organ that demands we keep our distance.91 In his discussion of Jean-Luc Nancy’s heart transplant, Derrida insists that the heart is the ‘absolute intimacy of the limitless secret’, that ‘interior surface of the body’ that ‘no “self-touching” can ever reach’.92

Tango 27

Speaking of hearts: for Derrida, a poem is ‘that very thing that teaches the heart, invents the heart, that which, finally, the word heart seems to mean’.93 ‘Not only the insensitive figure of the center or of secret interiority’, the heart, Derrida writes, ‘is the sensible heart, the rhythm, respiration, and beating of the blood, the bloody heart or the bleeding heart’.94 The heart is breath and beat and blood, and this ‘gives the downbeat, the birth of rhythm’.95 Derrida asks that we be attentive to the beat of writing, to its rhythm, learning it by heart, loving it by heart, like a poem.96 And the poematic in his own writing, too, marks out its own beat – its own heart-beat – or its two beats – or even its three beats of a human hand.97 The parting and sharing of the heart ‘breathes or marks the breathing’; the heart’s syncope ‘is a sharing out without fusion, a community without community, a language without communication, a being-with without confusion’.98 Thus, the ‘syncopal interruptions’ of the heart beat – and the spaces – and the beat of the poem – give ‘rhythm to pulse, pulsion, or even haptical compulsion, the cum of con-tact’.99

­94    Tactile Poetics

Tango 28

The beat of 29 tangos takes us far beyond touch as the laying on of hands. Reaching towards, but escaping our grasp, the poem is an act of holding out, an act of tendering. Anne Carson tenders the heart of her poem to the reader with tender feeling, finding distant ways to touch, intimate ways to interrupt. She tends it, she extends it, she draws it out. But in exchanging dance partners, we are infinitely touched by the poematic in Derrida’s own work, the breath and beat of his writing, its dis-tanz, its reach. Derrida dances as he writes, with intimate voices, tender steps. His writing is an act of holding out, tendering the heart of his poem, extending it, drawing it out. Drawing this out even further, and not even trying to reach a conclusion, the poem isn’t over after the last dance.

Tango 29

After tango XXIX, the husband still has his say: Some tangos pretend to be about women but look at this. Who is it you see reflected small in each of her tears. Watch me fold this page now so you think it is you. (p. 145)

In a tender act of reversal, the reader is enfolded into the text and invited to join the dance. The intimate dis-tanz between reader and writer then, measures out a different beat for the poem. Not simply a dance between husband and wife, between Derrida and Nancy and Cixous, we are also left breathless. And this, I propose, is the ‘absolute intimacy of the limitless secret’ – an interior surface of the text that no self-touching can ever reach – the heart of the matter, the heart of Carson’s poetics, the heart of Derrida’s living poems, and the heart of my own 29 tangos that I tender to you now, my dear, my beloved.100

Notes

1. Derrida, ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’, pp. 533–7 (pp. 536, 535). 2. Derrida, ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’, pp. 534, 537. 3. Derrida, ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’, pp. 536, 537. 4. Derrida, ‘Envois’, p. 28. 5. Derrida, On Touching, p. 94. 6. Derrida, On Touching, pp. 93–4.

Dis-tanz: 29 Tangos    ­95 7. Derrida, On Touching, p. 94. 8. Derrida, On Touching, p. 94. 9. Derrida, On Touching, p. 94. 10. Carson, The Beauty of the Husband, pp. 57, 9. Further page references to this edition appear parenthetically in the main body of the text. 11. Keats, Letters of John Keats, pp. 37–8. 12. Derrida, On Touching, p. 265. 13. Derrida, ‘Envois’, p. 56. 14. Das, Touch and Intimacy, p. 20. 15. Das, Touch and Intimacy, p. 6. 16. Harvey, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–21 (p. 2). 17. Derrida, On Touching, p. 229. 18. Derrida, On Touching, pp. 18, 6. 19. Derrida, On Touching, pp. 199, 4, 135. 20. Derrida, On Touching, p. 135. 21. Manning, Politics of Touch, p. 1. 22. Manning, Politics of Touch, pp. 4, 2. 23. Manning, Politics of Touch, p. 1. 24. Savigliano, Tango, pp. 11–12. 25. Manning, Politics of Touch, p. 4. 26. Savigliano, Tango, p. 11. 27. Savigliano, Tango, p. 30. 28. Savigliano, Tango, p. 30. 29. Derrida, ‘Envois’, p. 55. I am indebted to Sarah Wood for drawing these tangos to my attention. 30. Wood, ‘Edit’, pp. 47–57 (p. 48). 31. Wood, ‘Edit’, p. 48. 32. Manning, Politics of Touch, p. 1; Wood, ‘Edit’, p. 51. 33. Wood, ‘Edit’, p. 51. See also Sarah G. Cant’s discussion of the ‘over-­lapping etymological origins for the word “tango”’ in her auto-­ ethnographic study (Cant, ‘In Close Embrace’, pp. 211–30 (p. 211)). 34. Berlant, ‘Intimacy’, pp. 281–8 (p. 281). 35. Connor, The Book of Skin, p. 260. See also Chapter 3. 36. Derrida, On Touching, p. 131. 37. Derrida, On Touching, p. 131. 38. Derrida, ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’, p. 536; Derrida, On Touching, p. 131. 39. Manning, Politics of Touch, pp. 1–2. 40. Manning, Politics of Touch, p. 2. 41. Carson, Eros, p. 10. 42. Carson, Eros, p. 16. 43. Carson, Eros, p. 16. 44. Carson, Eros, p. 16; my emphasis. 45. Carson, Eros, p. 17. 46. Derrida, On Touching, pp. 18, 86. 47. Derrida, Spurs, p. 37. 48. Derrida, Spurs, p. 49. 49. Derrida, Spurs, p. 47. 50. Derrida, On Touching, p. 1. 51. Derrida, Spurs, pp. 47–9.

­96    Tactile Poetics 52. Derrida, On Touching, p. 6. 53. Derrida, Dissemination, p. 209. 54. Derrida, Dissemination, p. 209. 55. Derrida, Dissemination, p. 212. 56. Derrida, Dissemination, p. 212. 57. Derrida, Dissemination, p. 49. 58. Derrida, ‘Choreographies’, pp. 89–108 (pp. 90, 93). 59. Derrida, ‘Choreographies’, p. 94. 60. Derrida, ‘Choreographies’, p. 94. 61. Albright, ‘Incalculable Choreographies’, pp. 157–81 (p. 159). 62. Cixous, ‘Jacques Derrida as Proteus Unbound’, pp. 389–423 (p. 400). 63. Cixous, ‘Jacques Derrida as Proteus Unbound’, p. 400. 64. Cixous, ‘Jacques Derrida as Proteus Unbound’, pp. 400–1. 65. Cixous, ‘Jacques Derrida as Proteus Unbound’, p. 401; my emphasis. 66. Derrida, On Touching, p. 131. In ‘Ja, or the faux-bond II’, Derrida insists ‘one has to improvise. But I can no more improvise than escape improvisation.’ Improvisation, he says, is ‘“elaborated” in advance’; ‘it/id improvises behind the back of the most controlled and masterful elaboration: it/ id undoes the work’ (Derrida, ‘Ja, or the faux-bond II’, pp. 30–77 (p. 36)). 67. Cixous, ‘Jacques Derrida as Proteus Unbound’, p. 400. 68. Lepecki, ‘Inscribing Dance’, pp. 124–39 (p. 138). 69. Lepecki, ‘Inscribing Dance’, pp. 124, 8. 70. Lepecki, ‘Inscribing Dance’, p. 127. 71. Foster, Choreography and Narrative, p. 197. 72. Lepecki, ‘Inscribing Dance’, p. 127. 73. Lepecki, ‘Inscribing Dance’, p. 127. 74. Lepecki, ‘Inscribing Dance’, p. 132. 75. Lepecki, ‘Inscribing Dance’, p. 124. 76. Lepecki, ‘Inscribing Dance’, p. 133. 77. Derrida, ‘Living On / Border Lines’, p. 84. 78. Lepecki, ‘Inscribing Dance’, p. 145. 79. Derrida, ‘Envois’, p. 55. 80. Derrida, On Touching, pp. 138–9. 81. Manning, Politics of Touch, pp. xiv, xv. 82. Derrida, On Touching, p. 131. 83. Miller, ‘Touching Derrida Touching Nancy’, pp. 145–66 (p. 162). 84. Sappho, fragment 105a, cited in Carson, Eros, p. 26. 85. Carson, Eros, p. 26. 86. Carson, Eros, p. 27. 87. Carson, Eros, p. 28. 88. Derrida, ‘Envois’, p. 223. 89. Derrida, On Touching, p. 277. 90. Derrida, On Touching, p. 199. 91. Manning, Politics of Touch, p. 4. 92. Derrida, On Touching, p. 267. 93. Derrida, ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’, p. 536. 94. Derrida, On Touching, p. 267. 95. Derrida, ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’, p. 536. 96. Derrida, On Touching, p. 48.

Dis-tanz: 29 Tangos    ­97 97. Derrida, On Touching, pp. 195–6, 151. 98. Derrida, On Touching, p. 195. 99. Derrida, On Touching, p. 70. 100. Derrida, On Touching, p. 267.

Chapter 6

Hand Delivered: From A to X

Dear _______, This text warns us: I am sending you a message. (Hélène Cixous)1

‘Each book is in a certain way a letter that wants to be received by you,’ claims Hélène Cixous in her essay, ‘Writing Blind’.2 I think of this as a letter, destination unknown. In it, I address myself to you. But not  to  you. For, as John W. P. Phillips remarks in ‘The Dear (le tout cher)’, ‘the addressee at the present time – and therefore in principle at any time – cannot be identical with the one who reads it’.3 The address is exscribed in the text. It is, Phillips says, ‘a kind of potential that cannot be cancelled by an act of writing or reading’.4 Dissolving the ­division between an imaginary addressee and a real reader, there is  always another addressee, beside, beyond or even in excess of the letter’s reader. Moreover, for Phillips, ‘the structure and modalities of address are intimately related to the theme of touch’.5 Correspondence, after all, is a means of making contact or keeping in touch. And it is with this tact in mind that these letters hope to reach you. In September 2013, I addressed the task in hand: to write about touch in John Berger’s epistolary novel, From A to X. I had been struggling to grasp the matter for two years, at least. One night, not knowing how to go on with it, I listened to Cixous describe writing as like sending a message in a bottle: you are not sure who will get the letter, or if it will be received at all.6 Like a poem for Celan. And that’s exactly it with this correspondence too. I hadn’t been sure who I was writing to and now it was as if I sensed, at last, how I might begin to say it. So I set out writing these letters, destination unknown. When I have finished, if I finish, I will seal them in a bottle and throw them into the ocean. I write with the hope that these messages will reach you, and that you will read them in the spirit in which they are written. An attempt to reach out, to touch you.

Hand Delivered: From A to X    ­99

Yours, _______ Dear _______, ‘In the beginning, in principle, was the post, and I will never get over it.’ (Jacques Derrida)7

John Berger’s novel, From A to X, begins with a prologue. ‘Last year’, he writes, when a new ‘high-security’ facility was ‘built on the hills to the north of the town of Suse’, the old prison ‘was shut down and abandoned’.8 ‘J.B.’ visited the old prison and, in an abandoned cell, found an archive: The last occupant of cell no.73 in the old prison had arranged against the wall where the regulation bunk was, a shelf of pigeonholes. He had constructed it out of empty Marlboro cigarette cartons and attached it solidly to the wall with Scotch tape. Each pigeonhole was large enough for several decks of cards. In three of them some packets of letters were found. (p. 1)

These letters are from A’ida to her insurgent lover, Xavier, who is ‘accused of being a founder member of a terrorist network, and serving two life sentences’ (pp. 1–2). ‘It is clear’, Berger writes, ‘that the correspondence continued over a good many years’ (p. 2). Moreover, ‘sometimes on the back of the pages of A’ida’s letters (she never wrote on both sides of the paper) Xavier had made notes’ (p. 2). These letters are transcribed by J.B., who takes on the role of master detective, meticulously exscribing Xavier’s supplementary notes and printing them in ‘a more muted typeface’ (p. 2). Further unsent letters from A’ida are also included in the novel, but as J.B. explains, ‘how the unsent and sent letters came into my possession must remain, for the moment, a secret, for the explanation would endanger other parties’ (p. 2). The reader of the novel, then, is born into the secret of the text. Moreover, they are invited to unfold the letters according to their own law: ‘The unsent letters are written on the same blue paper as the sent ones. I have placed them in the packets where it seemed to me they fitted. But you can change them’ (pp. 2–3). In changing and arranging them, the reader becomes, like Dupin, both interceptor and detective, complicit in the (mis)handling of the text. Before I go on, I must make it clear that both my reading of From A to X and my writing of this correspondence go hand in hand with my reading of another: ‘Envois’ in Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card. Translator, Alan Bass, describes ‘Envois’ as ‘a performance and analysis

­100    Tactile Poetics of the irreducible twists in any sending system, and of the effects of these twists on what is supposedly most private within such a system – e.g. a love letter’.9 Naturally, then, as I manoeuvre from one text to another, these messages to you are full of their own irreducible twists and turns. Please bear with me, as I switch from letter to letter, from point to point. ‘Did you receive my last parcel?’ opens A’ida’s first letter. Writing (perhaps in code), she claims, ‘In it I put Marlboros, Zambrano, green mint, coffee’ (p. 7). Forbidden from visiting Xavier in prison because they are not married, A’ida’s only means of contact is through the written word and all that it reveals and conceals. She cannot visit him: she cannot touch him (much like you and I, don’t you think?). So she sends him letters, and letters within letters, without being sure what they will contain or knowing whether they will ever arrive, and if they do, how they will be received. Physically separated, then, the letter is the only way for A’ida to hope to touch Xavier. Perhaps because of this, ‘separation, like a bad monkey’ swings through the pages of the novel and her letters are filled with a vocabulary of distance (p. 35). When the young boy, Raf, who she is treating for a gunshot wound, asks her ‘So what do women dream of?’, she answers: ‘Of places no longer being separated’ (p. 89). His response – ‘Places have to be separated, it’s what kilometres are for!’ – challenges the force that holds them apart and opens up the possibilities and the impossibilities of coming together again (p. 89). Raf’s response reminds me of the distance that Derrida’s letters travel in ‘Envois’. His correspondence, too, is filled with spaces and spacing: ‘You are distancing yourself again’, he writes.10 And later, on ‘a day in May 1978’, he insists, ‘But it suffices to distance oneself a bit so that immediately .’11 Immediately what, we do not know, except that Derrida shows us that the very condition of the postal system concerns the distance between addressor and addressee: ‘you understand, within every sign already, every mark or every trait, there is distancing, the post, what there has to be so that it is legible for another, another than you or me’.12 The very ‘condition’ of this correspondence, then, ‘is that you are there, over there, quite alive outside of me. Out of reach.’13 On 1 September 1977, he writes that ‘the drama between us’ is ‘not to know whether we are to continue living together’, but rather ‘at what distance, according to what mode of distancing’.14 In fact, in a letter dated 9 June 1977, Derrida insists: ‘ distance myself in order to write to you’.15 Perhaps we do not write in order to cross the distance between addresser and addressee, but put distance between ourselves in order to write. Correspondents have to be separated, Raf would say: it’s what letters are for!

Hand Delivered: From A to X    ­101

As Berger’s novel develops, however, it becomes increasingly clear that the distance between A’ida and Xavier is one that incorporates both proximity and communion. On several occasions, A’ida overturns their separation in her touching accounts of human intimacy. Recording a recent interrogation by soldiers, she tells Xavier that ‘as I obeyed and watched I felt very close to you’ (p. 39). Moreover, describing the time he first took her flying, she writes of an intimate separation: ‘I didn’t feel us leaving the ground. You did. At a given moment the runway relaxed and we were no longer touching’ (p. 58). Above the earth, A’ida feels that ‘the silence was packed with distance, like my body’, and yet with Xavier navigating and ‘following in the sky below the invisible trace of the circle we were making, this distance became intimate and close’ (p. 62). A’ida refuses to allow physical separation to keep them apart and although Xavier’s imprisonment means that he ‘can’t cover distances­– except the repetitive minimal ones’, she tells him, ‘you think, and you think across the world’ (p. 164). For A’ida, the letter becomes a means not only of crossing distances, but of quite literally getting ‘in touch’. Their letters are employed as vehicles of tact: ‘When I hold a letter of yours in my hand, what I feel first is your warmth. The same warmth that’s in your voice when you sing. I want to press myself against it but I don’t, for, if I wait, the warmth will surround me on every side’ (p. 32). Rereading Xavier’s letter, A’ida is ‘surrounded by your warmth, the words you’ve written belong to the distant past and we are looking back at those words together’ (pp. 32–3). ‘We are in the future’, she writes (p. 33). And it is a future in which they are in skin to skin contact: ‘Hold my hand’, she urges, ‘I kiss the scars on your wrist’ (p. 33). It is clear then that although they are physically separated – held apart by the law – A’ida and Xavier continue to touch each other through their correspondence; their love is delivered by post. In a sense, they perform Jean-Luc Nancy’s account of touching through the text: It is the will to touch: the wish that the hands touch, across the book, and through the book; that its hands touch, reaching just as far as its skin, its parchment; that our hands touch, always through the intermediary of skin, but touch nonetheless. To touch oneself, to be touched right at oneself, outside oneself, without anything being appropriated. That is writing, love, and sense.16

This is a non-appropriating touch; this is touch at its limits. The letters passing from A’ida to Xavier in Berger’s novel perform this will to touch, and at the same time offer us an account of how contact is bound up with writing, love and sense. I think of the way this message to you

­102    Tactile Poetics plays out my desire to make contact, the way it brings to touch one’s love for a reader. Does my warmth surround you on every side? Does it carry you into our future? Yours, _______ Dear _______, Did you receive my last letter? Send me a sign, a message. What I say is true: my daughter owns a post-box. There are small letters that go inside small envelopes with small stamps that she posts in the post-box. She sends them repeatedly, and then we empty them out, and she sends them again. The letters are always being sent but they never arrive: this is her game. The possibility of non-delivery, however, is of course the condition of all correspondence. Of this failure to arrive or destinerrance, Derrida writes: Not that the letter never arrives at its destination, but it belongs to the ­structure of the letter to be capable, always, of not arriving. And without this threat [. . .] the circuit of the letter would not even have begun. But with this threat, the circuit can always not finish.17

Haunting this correspondence, then, is the possibility of missing contents, dead letters, of messages simply not arriving, and if they do, of not being received. But in fact, for Derrida, ‘the condition for it to arrive is that it ends up and even that it begins by not arriving’.18 David Wills explains: Not only are there any number of examples of letters, signs, senses, going astray, but that possibility must exist as soon as and as long as the sign, the message, the sense, is defined as involving even the smallest displacement, distance, difference. Hence, if the letter can not arrive, quite simply, it cannot arrive. That is to say, the sense of arriving must henceforth be made somehow to support the chance or possibility of its own contradiction.19

Like my own correspondence with you, Berger’s text participates in a postal economy in which the delivery of letters is far from guaranteed. Xavier remarks on the back of one of A’ida’s notes, ‘For almost two months they have withheld letters’ (p. 133). A’ida too refers to ‘weeks without a letter from you’ (p. 177). Later, when she learns that Xavier has been put in solitary confinement, she sends him the following note: ‘We both know that the receiving and sending of mail is forbidden for those in solitary confinement and this doesn’t stop me writing’ (p. 54). There is an acceptance that not all of the letters (and not all that they contain) will reach their destination: ‘You asked me to send some soap –

Hand Delivered: From A to X    ­103

the nearest we can get to swimming, you say. It came this morning, your letter. So I’m sending twelve soaps in the hope that you’ll get four’ (p. 95). From the moment that A’ida’s letters are sent, then, the correspondence is open to its own non-delivery, where letters are intercepted and messages go missing. From A to X thus enacts Derrida’s account of ‘the possibility, and therefore the fatal necessity, of going astray’.20 But there is a double interception at work in Berger’s novel: always under threat, the narrative would not exist at all if it had not also been intercepted by J.B. at the old prison. The very structure of the novel therefore sets up a chain of interference. The letters from A’ida to Xavier are always already intercepted by a series of intermediates: by the prison guards, by J.B. who discovers the letters in the old prison and hence also by the reader. While the particular circumstances of J.B.’s receipt of the correspondence (including those unsent, undelivered letters) remain a carefully guarded secret, the correspondence itself is all too easily handed over. Allow me to repeat myself: ‘I have placed them in the packets where it seemed to me they fitted. But you can change them’, J.B. says (p. 33). The reader is thus invited to enter the correspondence, to take part in keeping and safeguarding its continuation. You should understand, _______, that my use of the term ‘safeguarding’ here is deliberate. The letters that make up Derrida’s ‘Envois’, too, are interlaced with references to guarding, sounding out not only through the echo of the soldier’s post that I hear in ‘le poste’, but also through the idea of protecting or keeping safely.21 The ‘problematic of guarding’, Bass notes, ‘runs throughout the “Envois”’, and we are reminded that ‘la garde is the action of guarding, watching over, preserving; le garde is the person who performs these actions’.22 Drawing on both these nuances and fearing an ‘exposition without envelope [pli]’, Derrida writes that he wants to send a card knowing ‘that you will be able to read it, hold it in your hands, on your knees, under your eyes, in you, that you inherit it and guard it, reproduce my pictures and my caption’.23 Musing on the possibility of ‘guarding’ this exchange, he continues: The word guard [garde]: at this second I love it, I tell it that I love it, I also like to say it to myself, make it sing, let the a drag on for a long time, stretch it out at length, it is the voice, my vowel, the most marked letter, everything begins with it. In Greek it is also a superb word, phulake¯: la garde but also le garde, the sentinel [. . .]24

Here, Derrida makes reference to Plato’s use of the term phulake¯ in a letter to Dionysus to describe the greatest safeguard as learning by heart: ‘It is a very great safeguard to learn by heart instead of writing. It is impossible for what is written not to be disclosed.’25 Derrida repeats

­104    Tactile Poetics Plato’s remark on 4 September 1977: ‘It is a very great safeguard to learn by heart instead of writing [how many times have I told you!].’26 You can’t miss the importance of safeguarding; the guardianship of the letter marks its secret and its passage. But while Bass points out that there is a sort of guarding that is to ‘keep back’, this is precisely what J.B. doesn’t do when he hands the letters over to the reader.27 It seems to me that From A to X plays out the strange tension between the different senses of guarding – a changing of the guard, you might say. The letters are both preserved and held back from Xavier, but upon being discovered by J.B. they are handed on in order to safeguard the inheritance of the text. J.B. thus becomes an interceptor or even imposter in this chain of communication. It is not so much the handling of the letters that guarantees their survival, then, but their mishandling, not just by the prison guards, but by the narrator, and by the reader, too. We have been caught red-handed with a letter that is addressed to someone else. I imagine your hands holding this letter, now. Safeguard it, keep it, preserve it: pass it on. Yours, _______ My dear _______, I have not been able to stop thinking about your hands. How your hands might unfold the letter. How your finger might trace the words. These hands that might write a reply. The endless possibilities of mishandling! Hands, I want to show you, are bound up in the reading and writing process, and yes, there is added significance when we think about the art of correspondence, where the possibility of a letter being ‘hand delivered’ these days suggests that either the message conveyed is of particular value or that the sender disavows the other communication technologies available. Why deliver a message by hand when you can send it by other means – either physical or virtual? It must mean something. Hands, we suppose, raise the significance of the letter at every level. From A to X is full of hands. Examples of manual operations echo through its pages: ‘Now I look down at my hands that want to touch you and they seem obsolete because they haven’t touched you for so long’, A’ida writes (p. 69). Forbidden from visiting Xavier, her letters are filled with a remarkable vocabulary of the hand. She describes how her hands ‘want to touch you, they want to turn your head when you want to look away, they want to make you laugh’ (p. 145). Her desire is demonstrated, you might say, through the hand: ‘I lay in bed, my right hand touching my groin. I tell you this so you can picture me’ (p. 7). By specifying her right hand here, A’ida brings it sharply into focus, giving

Hand Delivered: From A to X    ­105

Xavier a hand, so to speak. And as the letters pass from A to X, a language of touch passes from hand to hand. This vocabulary of the hand is not so surprising, really, when we recall the hand’s persistence in everyday expression. ‘The hand’s gestures run everywhere through language’, explains Heidegger, and as J. Hillis Miller points out: English, like French, is full of idioms using ‘hand.’ We say ‘Let’s shake hands on it’ when patching up a quarrel or ‘I give you my hand on it’ when making a promise or sealing a contract [. . .] I ‘put my hand on my heart’ when swearing allegiance or when making a solemn promise.28

Miller goes on to list numerous other examples of handy vocabulary, all of which, he says, are part of a tangled, interlaced multitude, which includes manipulation of things with the hands, hand gestures, or hand signs – pointing, waving, clapping, ‘thumbs up’ (or down), and so on – as well as hands shaking one another, clasping one hand with the other in prayer, or just holding hands with another person.29

Referring to Jacques Derrida’s interest in the hand, and his manipulation of la main (the hand), Miller points out the ‘buried’ references to hand in maintenant, remarking on its echo in the English terms ‘“manoeuvre,” “manage,” “manufacture,” “maintain,” and “maintenance”’.30 From A to X is full of these manipulations and manoeuvres. From the start, A’ida’s resistance to those hands that withhold Xavier are figured through her own manual operations. ‘O.K., let’s go, give me your hand, don’t look back!’ A’ida imagines Xavier saying to her, as she takes matters into her own hands (p. 159). Forbidden from exchanging hands in marriage, his mother nevertheless manages to secure a bond between the pair: ‘Picking up the ring, she slips it over the fourth finger of my left hand’ (p. 52). So, despite being held apart, A’ida seizes every opportunity to take Xavier’s hand in her own. In turn, her memories of Xavier are always touched by his hands. Recalling the time he took her flying, she writes: You took your left hand off the stick and touched my right knee, you returned your hand to the stick, pushed the throttle forward with your right hand, your sleeve edged up, and I could see the scars, and the runway began to slip towards and under us, quite slowly and then gathering its own speed. (p. 58)

The hand is thus central to their correspondence, demonstrating not simply the individual’s reach, but performing the capacity for human interaction. This is also exemplified in A’ida’s hand-to-hand contact with her neighbours. When she watches the sun go down with Ama, for

­106    Tactile Poetics instance, she notes the way that Ama ‘stops smiling and her mouth goes sad and she seeks my hand to hold it’ (p. 32). Another neighbour, Ved, explains that although his children live some distance from him, they are always close: ‘Far away and here – he lays a hand on his heart. They’re all in different places and they all meet here. He moves the fingers of the hand placed against his heart’ (p. 30). For the characters in From A to X, the hand is always bound up with the matters of the heart. The hand’s significance in From A to X extends beyond individual attachments to political arms. Describing a recent skirmish with the military, A’ida explains that she stood holding hands with her friends on top of an old tobacco factory as it was circled by tanks. Recalling her fear as the tanks grew closer, A’ida tells Xavier that ‘Our holding hands helped because the calculating energy passed from hand to hand’ (p. 171). The hand becomes a sign of communion, of resistance and of holding people together. However, in Berger’s novel the hand also becomes a tool for seizing power and for inflicting pain. Referring to the way the guards shaved a woman prisoner, A’ida explains that ‘it’s like being chained hand and foot’, and although one can learn how to ‘slip out of the chains’, ‘the hatred felt for the hands that did it is timeless’ (p. 71). There are more subtle modes of control in the novel, too. On the back of one of A’ida’s letters, Xavier writes of ‘The Fear Industry’ and the display of a white kiosk entitled ‘Cogito 1002’, a surveillance device that is ‘manufactured by SDS’ and displayed at ‘Salon du Bourget, international market showroom for weaponry’ (p. 153). He explains: In the box a traveller is seated, asked questions and obliged to place her/his hand on a surface operating as a biofeedback reader. The body’s reactions to questions, as recorded by Cogito 1002, indicate whether or not the person is suspect. In use in US airports. Ready for export. (p. 153)

The hand, such a model suggests, points the way to ‘truth’; this, Derrida says, is the message of Heidegger’s seminar on Parmenides, which is ‘devoted to the history of truth’: ‘the hand comes into its essence (west) only in the movement of truth, in the double movement of concealment and disclosure (Verbergung/Entbergung)’.31 I put my hand on my heart and swear that if the hand is bound up with telling the truth, it comes as little surprise to read A’ida’s exclamation: ‘I’ll give you a clue. Look at your hands!’ (p. 145). The hands, she suggests, point to a truth. What is less certain, however, is what her clue might help us to discover. I’ve read it a number of times now, but I’m still groping for an answer. Yours, _______

Hand Delivered: From A to X    ­107

Dear _______, Did I tell you about the art classes I took? I like to watch other people draw. Even after a year of lessons, however, I was no closer to figuring out how to translate what I saw on the surface of my mind to the page. My hand couldn’t make sense of it. I have an impatient hand. But I love drawing, and I loved discovering the drawings in From A to X. You can’t miss them. Towards the end of the first packet of letters, A’ida writes: ‘I wanted to put my hand on a letter and draw its outline to send you’ (p. 68). She emphasises the link between the hand and sending, playing out the desire for the delivery of the hand, for hand delivery. She continues, ‘Sometime after – whenever it was – I came across a book which explained how to draw hands and I opened it, turning page after page. And I decided to buy it. It was like the story of our life’ (p. 68). On each page of the book, she finds ‘careful drawings of hands performing a different action. So I’m going to copy one’ (p. 92). And to start, she copies a drawing of a hand writing, at the same time insisting, ‘I’m writing to you’ (p. 69). But these hands don’t simply illustrate the content of A’ida’s letters; rather, they re-touch its coded messages, pointing to another subtext still to be touched upon. They include a hand with an eye in the palm (p. 76), hands clasping fists (p. 81), a hand sprinkling a powder, possibly medicinal (p. 93), a hand with the index finger meeting the thumb (p. 99), a hand splayed out, above the words ‘You can put it wherever you like’ (p. 112), an extended hand (p. 121), a hand holding a pair of scissors (p. 144), hands reaching towards each other (p. 163), a hand clutching a knife (p. 174) and a hand holding an object from which small fragments are disseminated, as if from a shower (p. 196).32 All these hands simultaneously perform and shake up A’ida’s narrative. They play out an alternative correspondence, one that suggests that there is another story to be carefully handled: What does the knife mean? What is that in your eye? What could you touch next? Sending these drawings, she invites her reader to decipher a pictorial code. Reading the correspondence, then, becomes an act of reading the other hands. To draw hands, Jacques Derrida suggests, is to draw attention to what one draws with the help of that with which one draws, the body proper [corps proper] as an instrument, the drawer of the drawing, the hand of the handiwork, of the manipulations, of the maneuvers and manners, the play or work of the hand.33

Thus, A’ida’s drawings of hands doubly accentuate the hand as an instrument. By drawing the hand, you might think that she draws attention to the link between seeing and touching, but rather than playing

­108    Tactile Poetics out a direct relationship between the visual and the tactile, A’ida’s letters persistently focus on that which is unseen or blind. It is not surprising to discover repeated references to Xavier’s eyes as ‘inflamed’ (p. 22) or ‘sore’ (p. 37), even as she fetishises his hands. Recalling the occasion when they first met, for instance – ‘it was midsummer and very hot and you were repairing a lorry, an open lorry’ – A’ida notes that Xavier’s eyes were doubly shielded: You were welding something. You wore a leather apron and apart from that a pair of shorts. In front of your face was a dark metal shield.   When you emerged from behind it, you were wearing a black patch over your right eye, and your face was screwed up as if in pain.   Is your eye hurt? I asked.   It’s inflamed, you replied, and I had to go to the hospital. It happens with this – and you held up the welder. (pp. 21–2)

When A’ida asks how long he must keep the patch on his eye, he replies, ‘Until I find gold!’: ‘Then, smiling, you slowly strode towards me and took it off’ (p. 22). Asking Xavier, ‘Agree to this version?’, A’ida’s hand in the account of events ensures that the sight of her restores his vision (p. 22). But there are other examples of blindness too. A’ida describes an upholsterer who ‘suffers from trachoma’ (p. 74), and the widow, Soko, who, ‘despite her cataracts [. . .] is still dressmaking’ (p. 180). She also refers to the uncanniness of a shopkeeper’s eyes: Behind the thick lenses of his glasses his eyes are strange, because they are both concentrated and distant, as though they were looking at two things at the same time – at whatever is in front of him and, simultaneously, at the word or words representing it. (p. 135)

Watching him move around the shop, A’ida writes, ‘I look at him hard and in a flash understand his eyes. He is almost blind. I’m sure of it’ (p. 135). Despite this, he is able to navigate through the shop by touch, weighing out ‘500 gr. of Biblia’, which he slides into a paper bag and holds out to A’ida: ‘He weighted them on a pair of scales held in the hand, and he felt where the pointer was with his finger. He didn’t use his eyes’ (p. 136). What is especially interesting here is the tension Berger establishes between not-seeing and hands. Holding out his hands, the shopkeeper navigates by touch; his hands, in effect, learn how to see. Allow me to interrupt myself to tell you this. Last August I was walking down some wide concrete steps leading from the house in which we were staying when my mother seized my hand. She was wearing new glasses – bifocals – and they blurred her vision when she

Hand Delivered: From A to X    ­109

looked down, she said. Her spectacles blinded her, for a moment. At the bottom step she let go of my hand again, surefooted, everything once again in hand. The episode reminds me not only of A’ida’s shopkeeper but also of what Derrida says about the ‘powerlessness for the eye’ in Memoirs of the Blind – a text that has a lot to say, I think, about how we might read Berger’s novel.34 Curating an exhibition on blindness at the Louvre Museum from 26 October 1990 to 21 January 1991, Derrida remarks that ‘the theme of the drawings of the blind is, above all else, the hand’.35 Considering, for instance, the way that Antoine Coypel’s blind men ‘hold their hands out in front of them, their gesture oscillating in the void between prehending, apprehending, praying, and imploring’, Derrida draws attention to the hand as it reaches into the unknown in the place of navigation by sight: ‘For the hand ventures forth, it precipitates, rushes ahead, certainly, but this time in place of the head, as if to precede, prepare, and protect it.’36 Because the hand reaches out, it becomes both a safeguard and a sign for the blind. Like the way my mother reached out to signal her temporary blindness and to safeguard her passage on the steps. But there is also an interesting confusion or contusion in Derrida’s account. His discussion of the drawings of the blind can, of course, refer to drawings in which the blind feature, but also to drawings by blind artists. Derrida disrupts this difference by asking, ‘How does one demonstrate that the draftsman is blind, or, rather that in or by drawing he does not see?’37 Is it possible to claim, he wonders, ‘that every draftsman is blind?’38 This question might be directed to the characters in Berger’s novel. Can A’ida be considered blind because she cannot see Xavier? Or is it her love that is blind? Maybe she is blind because she draws, and draws what she cannot see – the reality of (not-)touching him? Or maybe by drawing blind she finds she can see differently? Perhaps she finds, as Hélène Cixous would say, a different ‘passage through not-seeing’.39 Talking of not-seeing, let me return to Derrida’s own account of drawing. He writes of being inflicted by a ‘culpable infirmity’, claiming, ‘to this day I still think that I will never know either how to draw or how to look at a drawing’.40 He is, in a sense, blind to drawing: ‘it is as if, just as I was about to draw, I no longer saw the thing’.41 The object of his drawing becomes a ‘disappearing apparition’, he says, and thus drawing ‘blinds me while making me attend the pitiful spectacle’.42 Derrida’s ‘obscure punishment’ is heightened by his jealousy for his older brother’s ‘talent as a draftsman’, whose drawings are ‘religiously framed on the walls of every room’.43 Derrida goes on to remark that these drawings are ‘merely copies’, reproduced from family photographs or pictures in books.44 Disregarding the fact that Derrida ‘tried [his] hand at imitating

­110    Tactile Poetics his copies’, copying the copier, the slight against mere copying seems explicit.45 And yet, for Derrida, there is always an abyss between ‘the thing drawn and the drawing trait [. . .] between a thing represented and its representation’.46 A’ida’s drawings are also copies: another’s hand, other hands. The hands she offers, you might say, are never entirely her own, and there is a double gap between the hands that she draws and the hands that are reproduced in her drawings and delivered to Xavier. Notice the way that A’ida introduces her first drawing – a picture of a hand writing – with the words, ‘I’m writing to you’ (p. 69). Surely her remark here is quite pointed: the fact of her writing goes without saying, but by saying it, she is perhaps saying something else entirely. A’ida’s double-handed act – the drawing of the hand writing while writing of the drawing hand – seems to pick up and overturn a certain understanding of contact. It draws attention to the abyss between the hand and its representation: can you see at last that in drawing the hand, the hand is always already withdrawing? Yours, _______ Dear _______, My father came to our house last weekend and fixed the kitchen step. I smiled as I watched him touch the block of wood he had sanded smooth. I remembered Sunday afternoons in his garage, helping him fix broken things, helping him make new things. Handing him a nail or a hammer, I believed I became essential to his handiwork. Perhaps because of this, I am especially touched by A’ida’s recollection of Xavier’s love of ‘taking things apart, putting them together’ (p. 18). She describes the ten-year-old Xavier taking his father’s radio ‘to pieces, laying the pieces out one by one on the rug’ and his mother’s response: she ‘complained and wrung her hands’ (pp. 18–19). When his father returned, A’ida reports, ‘he kept shouting: Why? Why? How could you do this? Why? It was working, the radio! Why?’ The boy Xavier replies, ‘So I can put it together again’, ‘and by midnight he was handing you the last pieces as you asked for them, and next morning you listened to the news together, both of you’ (p. 19). Recently, I’ve been thinking about how A’ida’s interest in the work of the hand might be read in terms of Heidegger’s Handwerk. ‘The hand is a peculiar thing’, he writes in What is Called Thinking?47 Defining our relation to the world in terms of the hand, he has a particular interest in ‘craft’, which he notes ‘literally means the strength and skill in our hands’.48 Traditionally, Western philosophers have privileged encounters that prioritise non-contact: sight or thought, for instance.

Hand Delivered: From A to X    ­111

These encounters offer a relationship with the world that holds itself at a distance. Heidegger, however, turns to our actual manipulation of objects and its effect on our Being-in-the-world. In Being and Time he compares objects that are apprehended only theoretically, or by their presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit), with those objects that possess a ‘readiness-to-hand’ [Zuhandenheit].49 Describing the ‘work-world of the craftsman’, he suggests that certain ‘equipment’ such as the hammer offers itself as ‘ready-to-hand’: The less we just stare at the hammer-Thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is – as equipment.50

Thus, it is when we deal with objects by ‘manipulating them’ that an object ‘acquires it specific Thingly character’; this means, for example, that it is through the action of hammering that we expose the manipulability of the hammer-Thing.51 A’ida’s narrative in From A to X is one that repeatedly uncovers the manipulability or Handlichkeit of objects. Throughout the letters, she describes hands engaged in forms of manual or creative labour, ‘performing a different action’ (p. 69) – such as writing (p. 69), treating (p. 93), picking (p. 99) or cutting (p. 144). And the novel is replete with accounts of objects made by hand or of the manipulation of objects with the hands. For instance, describing her desire to mend a broken chair, she writes to Xavier, ‘One of the chairs was broken, its legs splayed, its seat was loose, the lateral struts between its legs wouldn’t stay in their holes’ (p. 71). Deciding to mend it, she realises, ‘it was clear what I had to do’: I took every length of wood I could out of its hole. I reckoned that those that wouldn’t budge were strong enough. Then I squeezed glue into all the empty holes and on to the tips of the legs and struts. I lined them up, eased each tip into its hole, and hammered the lengths home with the rag wrapped round the stained wood to protect it from the blows of the hammer. Everything was engaged and perfectly in place. I stood the chair on its legs and looked at it. And then a strange thing happened. I began to cry. I cried so much I couldn’t see anything. (pp. 71–2)

What is it, I wonder, about this basic carpentry that taps so deeply into her loss, blinding her in this way? A’ida’s engagement with the wood, which she notes was ‘perfectly in place’ (p. 72), recalls Heidegger’s example of the cabinetmaker’s apprentice in What is Called Thinking? The ‘true cabinetmaker’, Heidegger argues, maintains a certain ‘relatedness’ to the ‘essentials’ of his craft; ‘he makes himself answer and respond above all to the different kinds

­112    Tactile Poetics of wood and to the shapes slumbering within wood’.52 ‘Without that relatedness’, he argues, ‘the craft will never be anything but empty busywork, any occupation with it will be determined exclusively by business concerns’.53 Reading Heidegger, Derrida explains that ‘Handwerk, the noble craft, is a manual craft that cannot, like other professions, be put to public use or to the pursuit of profit’; it is ‘guided by the essence of the human dwelling, by the wood of the hut [la hûte]’ as opposed to ‘the activity that cuts the hand off from the essential, useful activity, utilitarianism, guided by capital’.54 A’ida’s emotional response to her own attempts to mend the chair demonstrate that although her work might be read as ‘useful activity’, it is not simply ‘empty busywork’, but is tied up in how she manages her own relatedness to the world. From A to X is filled with references to the work of the hand, instances that open up our definition of the noble craft, revealing that, as Heidegger admits, ‘the craft of the hand is richer than we commonly imagine’.55 For instance, A’ida identifies the pharmacist’s vocation in terms of the hand. She reports the way her friend and colleague Idelmis ‘checked the snakes by touching each jar’ as she arrived each morning at the pharmacy (p. 9). Idelmis, A’ida writes, is an ‘old hand’ (p. 119); ‘if she didn’t hand over cures and palliatives and prescriptions of hope and warnings,’ A’ida wonders, ‘what would happen to her?’ (p. 92). Her reflections on her own job, similarly, are filled with references to the manual. She tells the story of an elderly widow called Tamara who she treats: ‘She came in with a cut on the forefinger of her right hand this morning’ (p. 95). Bandaging this finger, A’ida shows her how to apply the dressings, a gesture Tamara attempts to repeat one-handed. A’ida notes that ‘her right hand has become her doll’; ‘she imitates my gestures with her left hand and laughs’ (p. 95). In this account, the hand becomes both the tool and the object of handiwork. A’ida’s treatment of Tamara demonstrates that her profession extends from the handing out or dispensing of pharmaceuticals to the manipulation of limbs. When two boys knock at A’ida’s front door with Raf, a thirteen year old who has been ‘wounded in the leg and couldn’t put his right foot on the ground’, A’ida resorts to surgical intervention, telling the children ‘I would examine him alone in the pharmacy’ (p. 86). Discovering that Raf has been caught out after curfew and shot, she ‘eased off his jeans, swabbed his leg and cut with scissors the tourniquet at the top of his thigh’ (p. 87). She describes to Xavier the work of her hands: I pick up with my left hand the little clip instrument for holding open the lip of the wound [. . .] In my right hand I have a cannula and with its tip I tap

Hand Delivered: From A to X    ­113 very gently along the length of the shallow gash, waiting to hear a metallic click, or to touch suddenly the hardness of metal. You’re more likely to register an embedded bullet like this than to see it with your eye. (p. 88)

Blind to the bullet, touch is indispensable to this handmade, homemade operation. Probing and finding a foreign body in the ‘ugly’ wound, she ‘extracted with the forceps a greenish bullet like a rotten tooth. He didn’t so much as flinch. Next I dripped betadine into the wound until it overflowed like a volcano does. He clenched his right fist, nothing more’ (p. 89). And finally, she writes: I close his wounds with thread and a tiny crescent needle. After each stitch has brought the two banks of the river together, I circle with the thread around the tweezers that are holding the needle, to make a knot. And knot by knot I proceed. The flesh wants to be joined. (pp. 89–90)

This is a manual operation. Thinking more about this operation, I am reminded of the way that Derrida makes explicit the relationship between the hand (cheir) and work (ergon) in his formulation of cheirourgia or surgery.56 Addressing Tobias Healing his Father’s Blindness, a drawing attributed to Rembrandt, in Memoirs of the Blind, he remarks: ‘This scene of hands, of maneuvering and manipulation, calls to mind a properly surgical operation, which I dare not, or not yet, call graphic.’57 He describes Tobias as ‘holding a stylus-like instrument, some sort of engraver or scalpel’.58 The ambiguity of this instrument is reiterated, Derrida points out, in the original inscription of 1803, as well as in numerous later titles, for instance, ‘Surgeon bandaging a wounded man, washed in bister on white paper? Rembrandt’.59 Here, and elsewhere, as translators PascaleAnne Brault and Michael Naas note, we see Derrida’s pleasure in indulging in a certain jeu de mains by playing on the hand [main] in manipulations, manoeuvres, and manières, as well as in the word ‘chirurgie’ – surgery – which comes from the Greek kheir (hand) and literally means the ‘work of the hands’.60

This surgical work of the hand features in a number of other texts by Derrida. For instance, in ‘Envois’, he writes in a letter dated February 1979: ‘You’re very sweet at the moment, like a surgeon of expert hand, very sure of what he is going to do, you are managing, managing, ­managing.’61 But the surgical operation is a complex one; as Cixous notes, it is ‘supposed to redeem, improve or else limit damage, but one limits damage through damage. Hence this ambivalence, this damage in order to de-damage, this deconstruction of damage is carrying itself

­114    Tactile Poetics out.’62 A de-damaging operation, the chirurgie reveals the ambivalence of handiwork as simultaneously revealing and deconstructing the manual. There is so much more to be said about this. Please write soon. Yours, _______ Dear _______, I am sitting in my chair listening to the rain and writing to you. I turn from the window back to my work. I must concentrate. I focus on my right hand holding this pen. My left hand moves to my mouth as I pause and then resume. Later, at the computer, I will type with both hands. I will touch-type, or write blind. Whichever way you look at it, my hand is bound up with my thinking, with my writing, with the shape of this chapter and with the way I attempt to reach out and touch you. My hand, it seems, extends itself in all sorts of ways. Remember, then, when I told you that Heidegger says that the ‘craft of the hand is richer than we commonly imagine’?63 He writes: The hand does not only grasp and catch, or push and pull. The hand reaches and extends, receives and welcomes – and not just things: the hand extends itself, and receives its own welcome in the hands of others. The hand holds. The hand carries [. . .] The hand is all this, and this is the true handicraft. Everything is rooted here that is commonly known as handicraft, and commonly we go no further.64

Heidegger takes it further than this, however, suggesting that ‘perhaps thinking, too, is just something like building a cabinet. At any rate, it is a craft, a “handicraft”.’65 The hand, he argues, is absolutely bound up with thinking: Every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself through the element of thinking, every bearing of the hand bears itself in that element. All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking. Therefore, thinking itself is man’s simplest, and for that reason hardest, handiwork, if it would be accomplished at its proper time.66

Examples of thoughtful handiwork are abundant in Berger’s novel. For instance, A’ida describes Xavier in the process of mending the printer. Watching him tap the machine with his screwdriver, she notes, ‘I could see – for it was visible in your shoulders – that you were not only following wires, you were tracing the thinking process by which men had conceived and then constructed that machine’ (pp. 36–7). She continues, ‘with manmade machines there are circuits of ingenuity which can be shared between minds. Like poetry is shared. I saw this in the backs of

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your hands’ (p. 37). But for Heidegger, it is not simply that thinking is essential to handicraft, but rather that hands are essential to thought. This idea is addressed by Abbie Garrington in Haptic Modernism. Referring to ‘the comprehending (prehendre) or grasping hand, the hand that knows’, she explains that ‘the hands, then, sculpt thoughts, an act of crafting which contains the suggestion [. . .] that thinking is occurring in the manual as well as, or instead of, the mental arena’.67 Accordingly, A’ida is not simply watching Xavier trace the thinking process with his hands; his hands shape his very thought. Derrida addresses the relationship between craft and thought in ‘Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II)’, showing that because thought is not a disembodied activity, it too is bound up with the body’s manoeuvres: ‘I am indeed saying Dichten und Denken are a work of the hand exposed to the same dangers as the handicraft (Hand-Werk) of the c­ abinetmaker.’68 Christopher Johnson interrogates this statement, arguing that the notion of handicraft demonstrates ‘the relationship between the hand and thinking, manipulation and intellection, the manual and the cognitive: “The hand thinks before being thought; it is thought, a thought, thinking”.’69 Johnson explains that Heidegger’s ‘triangulation of hand-thought-­ language does not necessarily give equal status to all three faculties, as it were’.70 Rather, ‘there is an order to Heidegger’s thinking about thought [. . .] the hand is thought from the point of view of thought and thought is thought from the point of view of language’.71 To rethink the hand, according to this view, is also to rethink language. Speaking of the hand and language, I want to turn to Derrida’s account of the ‘hand’s gesture for making the word manifest’.72 In ‘Heidegger’s Hand’, Derrida writes: If man’s hand is what it is only from out of speech or the word (das Wort), the most immediate, the most originary manifestation of this origin will be the hand’s gesture for making the word manifest, namely, handwriting, manuscripture (Handschrift), which shows [montre] – and inscribes the word for the gaze.73

Finding a book which falls open at a diagram drawn by Xavier, A’ida remarks that ‘under the drawing you wrote the name of the parts in your own handwriting. And it suddenly strikes me I’m looking at a love poem!’ (p. 115). Linking the hand, love and writing, this handwriting draws attention to the word made manifest. A’ida is as interested in the fact that Xavier’s poem is handwritten as she is in the content of the message. Indeed, on several occasions, Berger highlights the hand-written word and the medium through which the message is inscribed: the words traced with ‘no-nonsense neatness’

­116    Tactile Poetics on the ­ blackboard at school (p. 143), words texted (p. 13), words printed (p. 2) and words  written in the front of a poetry book (p. 147). Crucial to the characters’ liberty, the ‘hand writing’ is the novel’s central motif. Derrida, of course, prefers  the term ‘manuscripture’ to ­handwriting – a term that reminds us that ‘the writing of the typewriter­ [. . .] is also a handwriting’.74 Derrida is referring to Heidegger’s dislike of the typewriter, which he says, ‘tears [entreisst] writing from the essential realm of the hand’ and ‘makes everyone look the same’.75 Reflecting on Heidegger’s recourse to times when handwritten letters were good etiquette and a typed letter seen as impersonal or rude, Derrida remarks, however, that ‘today, it is the manuscripted letter that seems culpable: it slows down reading and seems outmoded’.76 Moreover, as Johnson notes, ‘with the writing machine the one-sided, predominantly right-sided manipulation of the pen is ­bilateralized, replaced with the combined articulation of both hands’.77 Thus, when we think of the relationship between hands and writing, we are not simply distinguishing between the handwritten and the typed (or printed or texted) communication; instead, we are opening our eyes to the fact that, as Garrington points out, ‘to write is to undertake manual  labour, an effort of the hand’.78 Writing this now, I offer my hand. I am at the same time writing on and writing with the hand. It’s enough to make you see double. Before I close and send out this letter, I must speak of style. This is addressed by J. Hillis Miller in ‘Touching Derrida Touching Nancy: The Main Traits of Derrida’s Hand’. Discussing Derrida’s ‘hand’, Miller points out that one might also mean ‘the distinctive features of his “style” in a given piece of writing’.79 He continues: Derrida, as we know from other essays, for example ‘Nietzsche’s Style,’ was aware that ‘style’ comes from ‘stylus,’ by way of another metonymy, that is, from the writing implement to what we ordinarily think of as the special features of a given author’s way of writing.80

So the hand refers both to the tool and a way of writing. Addressing what is ‘so strange and outrageous about Derrida’s “hand” in Le toucher’, Miller identifies a list of features distinct to Derrida’s ‘hand’.81 However, he insists that while ‘it might seem that I am interested only in Derrida’s “rhetorical strategies,” [. . .] as Derrida himself asserts more than once in Le toucher, both as a general fact about philosophy and as strikingly exemplified by Nancy’s work, style is meaning’.82 The hand, therefore, is central to the means and to the meanings of writing. When A’ida draws a picture of a hand and writes, ‘I’m writing to you’, she is giving us more than a hand. This is truly a novel of the hand; as both sign and safeguard, the

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manual is bound up in the text’s possibilities. And this is truly my last letter, written in my own hand. You and I are miles apart, but these letters are my chance to make contact. All this time, I’ve been trying to write of the way that the language of touch passes from hand to hand. This is a hand delivered. And what reach! A’ida tells us this when she writes, ‘All stories are also the stories of hands – picking up, balancing, pointing, joining, kneading, threading, caressing, abandoned in sleep, cutting, eating, wiping, playing music, scratching, grasping, peeling, clenching, pulling a trigger, folding’ (p. 68). Fold this letter now. Place it back in the bottle and send it on. But before you do, please heed the reminder that this correspondence is haunted by the possibility of its non-delivery. Like From A to X, its very existence depends on its interception, its mishandling and your own hand in matters. For now, though, I raise my hand to wave goodbye, still not knowing if you have even seen me. Yours, _______

Notes   1. Cixous, ‘“Mamãe, disse ele,” or, Joyce’s Second Hand’, pp. 339–66 (p. 361).   2. Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’, p. 199.   3. Phillips, ‘The Dear’, pp. 89–104 (p. 89).   4. Phillips, ‘The Dear’, p. 89.   5. Phillips, ‘The Dear’, p. 98.  6. Hélène Cixous in conversation with Alexandra Grant, Nottingham Contemporary, 10 September 2013.   7. Derrida, ‘Envois’, p. 29.  8. Berger, From A to X, p. 1. Further page references to this edition appear parenthetically in the main body of the text.   9. Bass, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in Derrida, The Post Card, pp. xii–xiii. 10. Derrida, ‘Envois’, p. 135. 11. Derrida, ‘Envois’, p. 143. 12. Derrida, ‘Envois’, p. 29. 13. Derrida, ‘Envois’, p. 29. 14. Derrida, ‘Envois’, p. 47. 15. Derrida, ‘Envois’, p. 28. 16. Nancy, A Finite Thinking, p. 109, cited in Derrida, On Touching, p. 275. 17. Derrida, ‘Le Facteur de la Vérité’, pp. 411–96 (p. 444). 18. Derrida, ‘Envois’, p. 29. 19. Wills, ‘Post/Card/Match/Book/Envois/Derrida’, pp. 19–38 (pp. 21–2). 20. Derrida, ‘Envois’, p. 66. 21. See Bass, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, p. xxv. 22. Bass, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, p. xxii. 23. Derrida, ‘Envois’, pp. 68–9.

­118    Tactile Poetics 24. Derrida, ‘Envois’, p. 82. 25. Plato, The Collected Dialogues, p. 1567. 26. Derrida, ‘Envois’, p. 58. 27. Bass, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, p. xxii. 28. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 16; Miller, For Derrida, p. 247. 29. Miller, For Derrida, p. 249. 30. Miller, For Derrida, p. 249. 31. Heidegger, Parmenides, pp. 27–62 (p. 45). 32. There is a final drawing – the only drawing that does not include a hand. This is a map of an escape route with the words ‘Exit tonight’. The ‘muted typeface’ suggests that this is a drawing by Xavier, aided by A’ida’s code: a double-handed escape, perhaps (p. 197). 33. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, pp. 4–5. 34. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, p. 44. 35. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, p. 4. 36. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, pp. 5, 4. 37. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, p. 43. 38. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, pp. 43–4. 39. Cixous, ‘Savoir’, p. 12. 40. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, p. 36. 41. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, p. 36. 42. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, p. 36. 43. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, pp. 36, 37. 44. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, p. 37. 45. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, p. 37. 46. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, p. 45. 47. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 16. 48. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 16. 49. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 98. 50. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 118, 98. 51. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 98. 52. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 14. 53. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 15. 54. Derrida, ‘Heidegger’s Hand’, pp. 37, 38. 55. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 16. 56. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, p. 5. 57. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, p. 26. 58. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, p. 26. 59. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, p. 26. 60. Brault and Naas, ‘Translator’s Notes’, in Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind,­ p. 5. 61. Derrida, ‘Envois’, pp. 174–5. 62. Cixous, ‘Paintings’, pp. 7–20 (p. 8). 63. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 16. 64. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 16. 65. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 6. 66. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, pp. 16–17. 67. Garrington, Haptic Modernism, pp. 30–1. 68. Derrida, ‘Heidegger’s Hand’, p. 56.

Hand Delivered: From A to X    ­119 69. Derrida, ‘Heidegger’s Hand’, p. 39, cited in Johnson, ‘Derrida and Technology’, pp. 54–65 (p. 60). 70. Johnson, ‘Derrida and Technology’, p. 61. 71. Johnson, ‘Derrida and Technology’, p. 61. 72. Derrida, ‘Heidegger’s Hand’, p. 46. 73. Derrida, ‘Heidegger’s Hand’, p. 46. 74. Derrida, ‘Heidegger’s Hand’, p. 46. 75. Heidegger, Parmenides, p. 81, cited in Derrida, ‘Heidegger’s Hand’, p. 46. 76. Derrida, ‘Heidegger’s Hand’, p. 46. 77. Johnson, ‘Derrida and Technology’, p. 64. 78. Garrington, Haptic Modernism, p. 8. 79. Miller, ‘Touching Derrida Touching Nancy’, pp. 147–8. 80. Miller, ‘Touching Derrida Touching Nancy’, p. 147. 81. Miller, ‘Touching Derrida Touching Nancy’, p. 148. 82. Miller, ‘Touching Derrida Touching Nancy’, p. 148.

Chapter 7

Digital Technologies and Prosthetic Possibilities

‘Hence the hand, and the fingers – and we are coming to them,’ writes Derrida in On Touching.1 Yes, the hand, and the fingers: we are always coming to them, picking them up, pointing, holding and handing them over. And this chapter examines the hands that feature throughout Fritz Lang’s 1927 film, Metropolis: ‘It was their hands that built this city of ours, Father. But where do the hands belong in your scheme?’ asks Freder to Joh Frederson, the founder of Metropolis and head of the city of subterranean workers.2 Although the protagonist’s father is liable to dismiss the manual workers, the viewer is continually reminded of the hand’s presence. Not only is manus, the hand, embedded within the manual worker, but young Freder’s passion for the hand-of-man overrides his father’s will to turn a blind eye to the hardships his regime inflicts. An immediate example of the hand’s deciding role in Metropolis comes early in the film, when Freder departs from the Eternal Gardens to venture underground. Here, he watches a man whose impossible task – with his two hands – is to align three hands on a clock face so that they touch at intermittently flashing lights. The worker, it seems, is missing a limb – that is, until Freder rushes to give him a helping hand. It is, for Freder, a call to arms. But this isn’t the only hand. Their sheer number invests them with a certain monstrosity (see Figure 7.1).3 The viewer is repeatedly presented with such images – hands extending, hands raised in terror, hands waving, hands grasping, hands writing, hands on hearts and of course the handshake that concludes the film (see Figure 7.2). Although the director, Lang, came to reject this signifying handshake, describing it in interviews as ‘embarrassingly naïve’, Derrida’s discussion of the hand cannot help but shake up established readings of the film.4 In Metropolis, we are always coming to hands – and last but not least, we are coming to prosthetic hands, which play out the tension between the human and the machine at the level of each individual digit.

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Figure 7.1  A scene from Metropolis, dir. Fritz Lang (Berlin: Universum-Film AG, 1927; restored Friedrich-Wilhelm-MurnauStiftung, 2010)

Holding Up My Hands Before going any further, however, it’s important to hold up my hands and to situate this chapter’s turn to cinema in light of existing research in the field of ‘haptic visuality’.5 The term ‘haptic’, as Abbie Garrington notes, should be understood as an umbrella term denoting one or more of the following experiences: touch (the active or passive experience of the human skin, subcutaneous flesh, viscera and related nerve-endings); kinaesthesis (the body’s sense of its own movement); proprioception (the body’s sense of its orientation in space); and the vestibular sense (that of balance, reliant on the inner ear).6

She continues, ‘Every aspect of that quartet of somatic experiences is troublesome to define, isolate and understand.’7 While this chapter does not seek to reproduce existing discussions of the haptic, it is important to address the reasons why a reading of the relationship between the haptic and technology might be particularly pertinent to a study of film.

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Figure 7.2  A scene from Metropolis, dir. Lang (1927/2010)

There has been a recent surge of interest in the haptic and the cinematic medium. Revisiting the materiality of the screen and rethinking the body in phenomenological terms, film theory has made a noticeable move back towards corporeality. Rather than conforming to ‘a model of spectatorship which aligns vision (and, by synecdoche, cinema) with distance, illusion, absence and separation’, recent theorists, Laura MacMahon, notes, ‘seek to consider cinema in terms of contact, immediacy, sentience and touch’.8 Central to this is the work of Laura Marks, who refers to the haptic as ‘the combination of tactile, kinaesthetic, and proprioceptive functions, the way we experience touch both on the surface of and inside our bodies’.9 In ‘haptic visuality’, she notes, ‘the eyes themselves function like organs of touch’.10 Drawing on and adapting the work of art historian, Aloïs Riegl, and Deleuze and Guattari’s account of smooth and striated space, Marks distinguishes haptic from optic visuality by explaining: Haptic looking tends to move over the surface of its object rather than to plunge into illusionistic depth, not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture. It is more inclined to move than to focus, more inclined to graze than to gaze.11

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Her theory of cinema considers ‘the ways cinema appeals to the body as a whole’; rather than focusing on touch as something that occurs at a particular point on the surface of the body, haptic perception allows us take into account the ways in which the cinematic medium immerses us in a bodily experience.12 For Jennifer Barker in The Tactile Eye, this way of thinking opens up the possibility of cinema as an intimate experience and of our relationship with cinema as a close connection, rather than as a distant experience of observation, which the notion of cinema as a purely visual medium presumes. To say that we are touched by cinema indicates that it has significance for us, that it comes close to us, and that it literally occupies our sphere.13

Barker, like Marks, reads cinema as having a very ‘close’ connection with touch. McMahon, however, critiques this tradition, and proposes a reading of cinema as ‘a medium of simultaneous contact and separation, proximity and distance’.14 Drawing on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, she argues that cinema offers us ‘a privileged space for understanding touch as a figure of withdrawal, discontinuity and separation rather than under its more traditional guise as a marker of immediacy, continuity and presence’.15 Rather than returning to existing scholarship on the relationship between the technical apparatus of the film and the possibilities of touching, however, this chapter shifts its focus to ask what technology can tell us about the relationship between the human and the humanual. My focus is Derrida’s challenge to the opposition between the human and the machine at the level of the hand. In p ­ articular, I examine the manipulations and manoeuvres of the prosthetic limb: what happens to humanualism, I ask, when the hand is severed?

Hands and Humanualism Let’s start over: we are always coming to hands. They get up to all sorts, in all sorts of ways. In fact, the motif of the hand has been of interest in Western philosophy since Aristotle at least, who argued that ‘the hand is a tool of tools’.16 It is this privileging of the hand as fundamental to sense by Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and others that Derrida takes up in Le Toucher – Jean-Luc Nancy, where he notes that ‘there is a Kantian hand, and there will be a Husserlian hand, and a Heideggerian hand, and so forth, which have traits in common but do not overlap’.17 Where many of the theories come together is in their

­124    Tactile Poetics positioning of the hand as the primary organ of touch. Derrida notes, ‘At the top of the organs of touch is the hand, the whole hand, its surface and fingers.’18 The hand thus takes on an elevated role in our relationship with the world. Steven Connor demonstrates this investment in the hand in The Book of Skin: The hand is not a mere part of the body; rather it represents the body as such, like a homunculus, for it is the body’s capacity to reach beyond itself, as well as transformingly towards itself. The hand is the body’s possibility.19

Moreover, for Aristotle in On the Parts of Animals, man’s possession of the hand is bound up with his intelligence. He argues: It is not because they have hands that human beings are most intelligent, but because they are the most intelligent of animals that they have hands. For the most intelligent animal would use the greatest number of instruments well, and the hand would seem to be not one instrument, but many; indeed it is, as it were, an instrument for instruments.20

The hand, Aristotle argues, is what makes us human. Such a belief, Derrida points out, leads to the assumption that ‘human beings touch more and touch better. The hand is properly human; touching is ­properly human: it is the same proposition.’21 The history of the hand, then, is bound up with what Derrida refers to as the ‘hominizing process’.22 But what is the nature of this relationship between the hand and the human? In phenomenological terms, Derrida argues, it seems to boil down to the hand’s ability to simultaneously touch and be touched, the hand’s role in the body’s relation to itself. The hand enables what he describes as the ‘pure, psychic auto-affection of the touching-touched’.23 ‘But why only the hand and finger?’ he asks. ‘Why not my foot and toes? Can they not touch another part of my body and touch one another? What about the lips, especially?’24 Thus, while ‘the hand’s privilege can be explained’ on account of its self-reflexivity, the ability of other parts of the body to touch one another leads Derrida to argue that this ‘phenomenological nobility’ is ‘not necessarily justified’.25 Re-reading the role of the hand in the hominising process, he overturns the assumption that the hand is exclusive to the ‘humanual’. In fact, addressing Husserl’s Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, Derrida points out that ‘where the sense of touch is in question (let us come back to it), it is practically man only that comes into question, and especially the fingers of the human hand’.26 ‘The “animal”’, he notes,

Digital Technologies and Prosthetic Possibilities    ­125 never seriously comes up, though it is a living being – not even the body proper of animals whose members or organs resemble hands, and even with fingers! And what about opportunities for so many handless animals to touch and be touched in countless ways!27

This is a point he also makes in ‘Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II)’, where he refers to the ‘irreducible bond’ between the hand and ‘the question of humanity’: ‘For here the question is nothing less, I venture to say, than the problem of man, of man’s humanity, and of humanism.’28 He points to Heidegger’s argument in What is Called Thinking? that humans are different to animals because they have hands: Apes, too, have organs that can grasp, but they do not have hands. The hand is infinitely different from all grasping organs – paws, claws, or fangs – ­different by an abyss of essence. Only a being who can speak, that is, think, can have hands and can be handy in achieving works of handicraft.29

Heidegger’s statement here suggests that in being deprived of a hand, animals are also unable to think or speak. The difference between man and animal, for Heidegger, is that the hand enables the human to signify: The hand reaches and extends, receives and welcomes – and not just things: the hand extends itself, and receives its own welcome in the hands of the other. The hand holds. The hand carries. The hand designs and signs, presumably because man is a sign.30

The signifying hand, then, is the proper characteristic of man. Notwithstanding the question of whether or not apes can be ­considered to have hands, Derrida shows that man’s ability to ‘demonstrate’ is not quite as ‘natural’ as it might seem. In ‘Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II)’, he turns to Hölderlin’s poem ‘Mnemosyne’, discussed by Heidegger in What is Called Thinking?, and cites ‘the famous stanza’: We are a monster void of sense We are outside sorrow And have nearly lost Our tongue in foreign lands31

In particular, Derrida examines the translation of ‘zeichen’, from the line ‘Ein Zeichen sind wir’, as ‘monstre’ rather than as ‘sign’. Drawing out the monster that links the signifying hand with the act of demonstration, he writes, ‘I would first like to stress the “we . . . monster”’:

­126    Tactile Poetics We are a monster, in the singular, a sign that shows and warns, but all the more singular since, showing, signifying, designating, this sign is void of sense (deutungslos). It calls itself void of sense, simply and doubly monster, this ‘we’: we are a sign – showing, informing, warning, a pointing as sign toward, but in truth toward nothing, a remote sign [à l’écart], at a distance from the sign [en écart par rapport au signe], a display [montre] that deviates from the display or monstration, a monster that shows [montre] nothing.32

‘What is un monstre, a monster?’ Derrida asks.33 Drawing out the monster that links the signifying hand with the act of demonstration, and playing on the ‘monstrosity of monstration’, he observes that ‘to demonstrate’ also means to ‘monstrate’, and perhaps also to be ‘monstrous’. Thus, for Derrida, ‘the hand is a monstrosity [monstrosité], the proper characteristic of man as the being of monstration. This distinguishes him from every other Geschlecht, and above all from the ape.’34 Man’s hand, then, is always on the verge of becoming monstrous or ‘unnatural’, perhaps even ‘inhuman’, a proposition that I’ll return to with respect to the monstrosity of Rotwang’s artificial hand in Metropolis. In short, Heidegger’s division of the human and the non-human is, for Derrida, ‘dogmatic’.35 Reducing and homogenising all animals to that which is other than human, he points out, ‘takes no account of a certain “zoological knowledge” that grows, becomes differentiated and more refined regarding what is brought together under this so general and confused word “animality”’.36 Conceptualising the human in opposition to the animal is to ignore difference – not least between the different species of animal. And by accepting this opposition as natural, we turn a blind eye to the fact that the human, too, is an animal. For Derrida, an anthropocentric privilege erases difference and leads us to ‘neglect what is not “human flesh”, outside of the human world, and sometimes even in the human world, technical prosthesis, animals etc.’.37 The ‘anthropotheological thinking of flesh’, he writes, does not leave any spare room for a questioning of technics [. . .] nor of the animal, or rather animals, nor of the hominization process that produces what is termed the hand in ‘everyday’ language, nor of the possibility of prosthetics onto which spacing in general opens, and so forth.38

Challenging Heidegger’s argument that the signifying hand is the characteristic of man, Derrida shakes up the humanualism that links the human and the hand. But rather than further interrogate the hand in relation to the animal, this chapter now turns to other non-human possibilities, taking up Derrida’s refusal to ignore the ‘technical supplement’ or the ‘prosthetic possibilities’ of touch.39 It does so through a

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consideration of the prosthetic hand in Metropolis – a hand that works to complicate the division between the human and the machine.

Differential Relations Although we tend to separate the human and the animal, the living and the dead, and the natural and the artificial, Derrida asks that we open ourselves to the way that the biological and the technical are always co-implicated in the other. Technology is not something separate from, outside or after the human. In fact, as Christopher Johnson points out, technology always ‘exceed[s] the “human” in the narrow sense of the term, to include the animal, the animate, or, to anticipate, the articulated’.40 For Johnson, the question is not so much ‘what is technology’, but a question of ‘where we decide to establish the boundary, the margin, the line of demarcation between what is and is not technology’.41 This line of demarcation has been taken up by a number of theorists. Considering the opposition between the human and the technological, Timothy Clark, for instance, notes: Neither term acts as the anchor in relation to which the other can be understood. Thus technology cannot be understood as a tool of the human on the one hand; nor can the human be understood as an effect of technics [. . .] The identity of humanity is a differential relation between the human and technics, supplements and prostheses.42

He adds here that ‘the seeming illogic of this sentence, defining the human partly by relation to itself, works precisely to dislodge the concept of the human from any identity whose “origin” is not always split, supplementary’.43 The human and technics, then, refuse to occupy distinct and divided categories; instead, they exist in a relation of différance. The differential relation between human and technology is perhaps most clearly played out in Metropolis through the figure of the MachineMan. This is the inventor Rotwang’s memorial to Hel, Joh Frederson’s late wife and his own lost love. Unveiling the Machine-Man to Joh, Rotwang cries, ‘24 more hours of work – and no man, Joh Fredersen, will be able to differentiate the Machine-Man from a mortal – !’ In creating the ‘Machine-Man’, Rotwang clearly attempts to create an object that both imitates and supplants the human. Seeing the Machine-Man, and desperate to quash the dissent that is brewing among his workers, Joh later directs Rotwang to give the robot the likeness of Maria, the object of his son’s affection and who he perceives as having a central role

­128    Tactile Poetics in the workers’ demonstrations. Rotwang, for his own jealous reasons, agrees, delivering the ‘false Maria’ to Joh with a hand-written note: She is the most perfect and most obedient tool that a man has ever possessed! Tonight you shall see how she holds up before the eyes of the upper hundred. You shall see her dance, and if only one single person recognizes the machine in her, I will call myself a bungler who never succeeded at anything! C. Rotwang.

Rotwang’s Machine-Man, accordingly, is held up as human. The Machine-Man plays out the relation between the machine and the human, signified by the hyphen that yokes together these terms in its own name. At the same time, however, the co-existence of the ‘real’ and the ‘false’ Maria – played of course by the same actress, Brigitte Helm – arouses in us a suspicion that perhaps the human and the machine can never be quite so easily distinguished. In his discussion of the robot in Prosthesis, David Wills refers to a transferential relation between the human and the machine. The robot, he remarks, ‘is not only a replacement for but a refinement of the human, a type of superhuman’.44 The robot’s task in Metropolis is to emulate the human. However, all robots, explains Wills, must repeat their task ‘endlessly, effortlessly, without error’.45 Performing ‘beyond human capability’, then, there is always the risk that the machine might ‘surpass the original in its functioning, simply do the job better; or rather do all sorts of other jobs the original could not conceive of’, resulting in a suspicion ‘that the robot might also surpass the human in the area of the nonmechanical, that is, in thinking’.46 This leads Wills to conclude that ‘in terms of thinking, of intelligence, the distinctions between the human and non-human or extra-human, the natural and the artificial, simply enfold’.47 Transgressing borderlines, the robot forces us to question our sense of ourselves, and perhaps this is what makes viewing the false Maria’s mechanical and monstrous movements so discomforting. Playing on our suspicions, the Machine-Man in Metropolis thus works precisely to force the question of the human. In many ways, the film offers a precursor to what later became known as the Turing Test. This well-known ‘imitation game’ was designed by Alan Turing in the 1950s to answer the question ‘can machines think?’48 The first stage of the game involved three people: ‘a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman.’49 Turing goes on to ask, ‘“What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?” Will the interrogator decide

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wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman?’50 Lang’s Machine-Man participates in a similar game, but crucially the interrogators are able to both see and touch the false Maria as she attempts to persuade the workers that she is wholly human. Although Freder grasps the truth, crying ‘You are not Maria – !!!’, the test does not fail entirely, for it is only at the arrival of the ‘real’ Maria that suspicions are confirmed to the workers. The fact that Maria has to be, as Thomas Elsaesser puts it, ‘split in two, in order to fulfil all the symbolic tasks required,’ plays out Derrida’s insistence on the ‘“technical” intrusion of the other’.51 Moreover, Turing himself points out that the results of the game ‘will not be quite definite until we have specified what we mean by the word “machine”’.52 Like the animal, the machine refuses to be reduced and homogenised, and the division between the human and the non-human begins to falter. Indeed, Clark insists that ‘One thing even a partially successful Turing test must underline is that the essence of the human can never be, has never been, separable from a certain technicity.’53 This follows Derrida’s assertion in ‘The Rhetoric of Drugs’: There is no natural originary body: technology has not simply added itself, from the outside or after the fact, as a foreign body. Or at least this foreign or dangerous supplement is ‘originarily’ at work and in place in the supposedly ideal interiority of the ‘body and soul’. It is indeed at the heart of the heart.54

Thus, while the destruction of the false Maria is so often taken as a reinforcement of the opposition between the human and the machine in Metropolis, a careful reading of the Machine-Man exposes the coimplication of the technological and the human. The technological supplement is already at the heart of the heart.

Prosthetic Possibilities The Machine-Man plays out the differential relations between human and non-human in overt terms. But let us return to the hand: if the human and the machine are co-implicated, what bearing does this have on how we understand the hand? In his essay, ‘Heidegger’s Hand’, Derrida insists, ‘One cannot talk about the hand without talking about technology.’55 And in On Touching he argues that the ‘“question of the hand,” which is also a history of the hand, as we know, remains – should remain – impossible to dissociate from the history of technics and its interpretation’.56 Derrida’s thinking of the hand, then, is bound up with his thinking of technics. Similarly, the hand has a central role in Lang’s

­130    Tactile Poetics representation of human and non-human relations. It is significant that when Rotwang introduces the Machine-Man to Joh Frederson in Metropolis, the first thing that moves is the hand. Moreover, Rotwang’s own prosthetic hand plays out Derrida’s ‘“technical” intrusion of the other’. And it is to this prosthesis that we now turn. In his account of ‘Structures of Narrativity’ in Metropolis, Alan Williams argues that ‘the opposition between the mechanical and the human is present also in the nature of the film’s protagonists’: Of the three principal traitors in Metropolis, only John Frederson [sic], who will be transformed into a hero at the film’s end, is wholly human. The robot is, obviously, a machine, but Rotwang is also in part, having lost his right hand and replaced it with a mechanical one during the robot’s construction.57

He continues, ‘Thus the inventor is an embodiment of this central tension: he is half human and half machine, on the metonymic level of the hands.’58 In fact, from the start, Rotwang is handed to the viewer by way of his prosthesis. In the first scene in which he appears, his false hand reaches out towards the edge of the frame, the stilted drumming fingers drawing attention to his (in)ability to manipulate the digit (see Figure 7.3). We can’t get away from this prosthesis, which extends towards the viewer. Shortly afterwards, Frederson arrives and pulls back the curtains to reveal the Machine-Man, during the creation of which Rotwang lost this hand. The Machine-Man, then, not only works to represent the deceased Hel, but is, according to Thomas Elsaesser, ‘a phallic representation of Rotwang’s missing hand’.59 The sequence unfolds through a series of handy interactions. Rotwang points, places his hand on his heart, then raises it in front of Joh’s face. But it is the false hand that Joh reaches for, which Rotwang withdraws and waves monstrously in the air, exclaiming, ‘Do you think the loss of a hand is too high a price for recreating Hel – ?’! and ‘Now, Joh Fredersen – ?! Isn’t it worth losing a hand to have created the man of the future – the Machine-Man – ?!’ (see Figure 7.4). In withdrawing from Joh’s touch, turning away and holding up his hand as if it belongs to the other, Rotwang demonstrates a strange and monstrous relation to his own limb. Here, he performs David Wills’ notion that the prosthesis is ‘necessarily a transfer into otherness’; it is, he proposes, ‘the figure for differential, and differantial, relations in general’.60 In Prosthesis, Wills shows us that the usual divisions no longer hold firm. The prosthetic supplement, he argues, draws attention to the ‘sense and function of articulations between matters of two putatively ­distinct orders: father/son, flesh/steel, theory/fiction, ­translation/ quotation,­literal/figurative, familiar/academic, rhetoric/medicine,

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Figure 7.3  A scene from Metropolis, dir. Lang (1927/2010)

Figure 7.4  A scene from Metropolis, dir. Lang (1927/2010)

­132    Tactile Poetics rhetoric/­ cybernetics, French/English, nature/artifice, public/private, straight/limping, and so on’.61 The prosthesis, he argues, confuses these oppositions. It participates in a dual economy, both conforming to and moving beyond the human; it marks a search, he says, ‘for a way between emulating the human and superseding the human’.62 Rotwang’s monstrous delight in his own artificial limb – the way he holds it up as if in triumph – plays into this confusion. On the one hand, the prosthesis is shaped and sized to fit the hand with the appropriate number of digits, thus making some attempt to replicate the severed ‘human’ hand. On the other hand, however, clad in black rubber or plastic, this false hand also draws attention to its own artificiality. It therefore exists in striking contrast to his other, ‘natural’ limb. Moreover, when Rotwang points to his own hand and moves his fingers, his awkward and uncanny manipulation of digits places it firmly in the ‘domain of robotic operations’.63 The prosthesis in Metropolis, then, moves in two directions at the same time – towards the human and towards the non-human. It conforms to Wills’ argument that its ‘relation to the other becomes precisely and necessarily a relation to otherness, the otherness, for example, of artificiality attached to or found within the natural’.64 Collapsing what Heidegger understands as the intimate relation between the hand and the human, Rotwang’s prosthesis clearly signals the blurring of borders. This leads us to conclude that the non-human is always at home within the human, and the artificial is always inscribed within the natural. Moreover, the technical supplement always exists from the start. It is, as Wills writes of his father’s artificial leg, ‘there from the very beginning’.65 Such handy differential relations are further extended in Lang’s film when Joh and Rotwang shake hands in the catacombs. It is, we note after Williams, ‘his right, mechanical hand’, a shaking that sparks the workers’ revolution and ultimately sets Rotwang’s downfall in motion.66 This is in fact the first of two handshakes that frame Metropolis. At the film’s conclusion, Williams notes, ‘[Frederson’s] transformation to hero will be signaled [. . .] by his shaking for the first time a fully human hand’.67 For Williams, the film’s narrative finds its resolution in the move from shaking the non-human to the human hand. But Williams neither acknowledges the co-implication between the human and the non-human, nor the complication of a handshake. As Geoffrey Bennington points out: A handshake is of course not a simple thing, either historically or phenomenologically. Somewhere between the ‘blow’ and the ‘caress’ that will occupy Derrida later in Le Toucher, supposedly a gesture of trust and confidence, whereby I extend my empty right hand (usually the right hand) toward the

Digital Technologies and Prosthetic Possibilities    ­133 other’s empty right hand, originally it would appear as proof that it is not holding a weapon, but which I then still use, in the very clasp and shake [. . .]68

‘Not a simple thing, then, a handshake’, Bennington confirms.69 Following Derrida’s ‘tangent’ on Merleau-Ponty in On Touching, Bennington asks: So do I experience the other (in the handshake) the same way I experience myself (when I touch my right hand with my left), or do I experience myself (when I touch my right hand with my left) the way I experience the other (in the handshake)?70

Pointing out that these two options are not in fact symmetrical, Bennington notes that Derrida reasserts Husserl’s insistence on the ‘radical apartness of the other [. . .] constantly making the handshake the mark of separation as much as and in fact more than that of joining’.71 In a sense, the handshake extends touch in the direction of spacing; it opens up the gash or béance ‘at the very point’ of con-tact.72 And what happens to this spacing when the hand appears to be ‘doubly other’, as in the case of Rotwang’s prosthesis? If, as Derrida argues, the ‘supplementarity of technical prosthetics originarily spaces out, defers, or expropriates all originary properness’, then the contractual handshake between Joh and Rotwang plays out the remoteness of touch.73 Rather than sealing the deal, this handshake unseals not only their contract, but also the very possibility of contact.

Digital Retouching I want to turn now, albeit briefly, to other unseen digits at work in the film. Three months after the premiere of Metropolis in Berlin, the film was ‘cut’ for the American market, and a second shorter German version was subsequently made. The ‘original’, writes Martin Koerber, was lost.74 Within a year, the film had become what Elsaesser describes as ‘a strange torso or changeling of a film, mutilated or merely mutated, depending on one’s vantage point’.75 The lost footage, I suggest, extending the metaphor, duplicates Rotwang’s severed limb. In 2008, however, a reportedly ‘untouched’ version was discovered in a museum in Buenos Aires by Paula Félix-Didier, who saw it as her duty ‘“to get the film into the right hands”’.76 Two years later, the restored and ‘digitally retouched’ version was released.77 The film’s lost limb was duly supplemented with the discovered footage and, like Rotwang’s mechanical hand or Derrida’s ellipsis, it was grafted on to the body as prosthesis. The film lives on. Significantly, however, the discovered reel

­134    Tactile Poetics was a scratched 16mm dupe negative, and thus, writes Koerber, the resulting restoration ‘was missing image information on the left and top of the frame’.78 In these restored frames, we see a double severing. In Figure 7.4, not only is the tip of Rotwang’s hand cut off, but our eye is also drawn to Joh’s disembodied limb. Despite – or because of – digital ‘retouching’, the hand is ‘cut off’ on every level. So while Metropolis reminds us of the part the digit or finger has to play in the history of a film that works precisely to draw attention to the prosthetic possibilities of touch, it is clear from these severed scenes that digital retouching can only touch so much. But what is ‘retouching’? And, to return to our earlier question, when is it tampering?79 Here, we might once again hear the echo of Derrida’s ‘final retouch’ of Nancy in On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy, a section that is almost exactly repeated later in the book – but for one little re-touch: ‘Now, Jean-Luc, that’s quite enough, stop touching and tampering with this word, it’s prohibited, you hear.’80 To ‘retouch’ is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘to improve or repair the appearance of (a painting, composition, photographic negative or print, etc.) by small alterations or fresh touches; to touch up’. What, then, is the nature and destination of digital retouching? Once, artists would have restored damaged film ‘by hand’. And when I say ‘by hand’, I refer to our old assumption that although airbrushing was the most common technique, there was direct contact between the hand and film. With the advance of computer technology, it would seem that this contact is withdrawn and replaced by virtual touch or tele-tact. In The Senses of Touch, Paterson cites a number of other examples of virtual touch, for instance ‘cybergloves’, the ‘virtual handshake’ and the TouchLabs in both the US and the UK where participants can move objects over the internet.81 Experimenting with evermore sophisticated haptic interfaces, the development of these technologies seems to suggest that touch is becoming increasingly disembodied. But what are the implications of virtual touch for an understanding of contact that is always mediated? Aden Evens remarks that ‘even the touchscreen, increasingly common not only in advanced tabletop computing but mostly in handheld devices, enriches digital touch only ambiguously’.82 There is an assumption, as Laura Marks remarks, that digital media are ‘fundamentally immaterial’, and that ‘to enter cyberspace or to use VR [Virtual Reality] is to enter a realm of pure ideas and leave the “meat” of the material body behind’.83 For Marks, however, digital and virtual media do not result in disembodied practices. ‘Though they seem to subsist entirely in a symbolic and immaterial realm’, she writes, these technologies ‘can remind us powerfully that they and we are mutually

Digital Technologies and Prosthetic Possibilities    ­135

enfolded in material processes.’84 Digital reality, then, has not ‘given up its body’; it is as embodied and tactile as any other ‘reality’. She uses quantum physics to prove that far from being ‘an agent of dematerialization’, the electron is a ‘physical entity’.85 Moreover, electronic technologies ‘occupy not a “virtual” space but a physical, global socioeconomic space’.86 Tele-tact, this might suggest, offers at least as much contact as physical touch. Perhaps what virtual touch really does is highlight the fact that contact is always a mediated experience. Derrida addresses the implications of digital touching in On Touching. At the ‘Untimely Postscript, for Want of a Final Retouch’, he asks, ‘How is one to believe that touch cannot be virtualized? And how can one fail to see that there is something like an “origin of technics” there?’87 He goes on to note that ‘in California, a haptical museum does exist’ (although he adds, in parenthesis, that ‘it’s not proof of anything, just a sign’).88 There is a website, he explains, where visitors can experience ‘“remote touching”’.89 But although he seems to open up a thinking of tele-tact, Derrida’s use of the word ‘remote’ in relation to contact recurs elsewhere. In Paper Machine, he points out that typing on a keyboard means that ‘the written thing becomes both closer and more distant. In this there is another distancing or remoteness, re-mote here meaning a distancing of the removed, but also a distancing that abolishes the remote.’90 ‘Re-mote’ touch, then, at once distances and removes distance in contact. Thus, rather than moving into untouched territories, remote touching in fact performs the ‘ageless intrusion of technics’, as Derrida puts it, the prosthetic possibilities that have always been at ‘the heart of all the debates regarding the “body proper” or the “flesh”’.91 Whichever way you look at it, then, both material and digital touching can be considered at the same time embodied practices and invested with distance. The development of new technologies doesn’t necessarily change touch; rather, it alerts us to the ways that touch is always haunted by technicity, by time and by tact. Thinking through the role of the hand in the ‘hominizing process’, this chapter has interrogated Derrida’s refusal to neglect the non-human by considering prosthetic hands in Metropolis. Exploring the way that Rotwang embodies both the biological and the machine at the level of the hand, we have considered the co-implication of the human and the non-human and suggested that there is no natural, originary body; rather, the technical supplement is there from the beginning. The ­ handshake between Joh and Rotwang, then, is a complicated matter, not simply undoing the difference between the artificial and the natural, but shaking up the hand and our understanding of what it is

­136    Tactile Poetics to be human. With its backwards glance, this chapter has thus moved some way towards what Martin McQuillan calls ‘the technology of the senses to come’.92 But for Mark Paterson, these senses to come open up a spectral dimension to tact. Paterson notes, for instance, that SensAble Corporation’s force-feedback device – a device that creates ‘credible illusion of tangible object in virtual space’ – is named PHANToM (Personal Haptic iNTerface Mechanism). Describing his experience with a range of other devices – for instance the virtual interface developed at MIT TouchLabs in Boston – he explains that all the sensations generated by these technologies ‘are reproduced through software algorithms in the applications program interface (API), appropriately enough called “Ghost”’.93 Describing the ‘virtual possibilities’ of touch as ‘ghostly’, Paterson highlights tact’s haunted quality.94 Overturning touch’s association with a metaphysics of presence and immediacy, developments in virtual technologies do not simply demonstrate the ways that touch is mediated; rather, they expose the ways that it is always subject to a certain haunting. In the final chapter, I return to the interval that haunts touch, examining ghostly contact, the phantom limb and other spectral manipulations.

Notes  1. Derrida, On Touching, p. 40.  2. Lang, Metropolis.   3. Figures 7.1 and 7.4 use the lost footage rediscovered in 2008 and restored in 2010, and are thus of poorer quality. See below.   4. Grant, Fritz Lang, pp. xii–xiii.  5. In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Gilles Deleuze explains that ‘“Haptic,” from the Greek verb aptó (to touch), does not designate an extrinsic relation of the eye to the sense of touch, but a “possibility of seeing [regard]” a type of vision distinct from the optical’. He uses the term ‘haptic’ to refer to moments when ‘sight discovers in itself a specific function of touch that is uniquely its own, distinct from its optical function’ (Deleuze, Francis Bacon, pp. 189 n.2, 155).  6. Garrington, Haptic Modernism, p. 16.  7. Garrington, Haptic Modernism, p. 16.  8. McMahon, Cinema and Contact, p. 6.  9. Marks, The Skin of the Film, p. 162. 10. Marks, The Skin of the Film, p. 162. 11. Marks, The Skin of the Film, p. 162; see also Marks, Touch, p. xii. 12. Marks, The Skin of the Film, p. 163. 13. Barker, The Tactile Eye, p. 2. 14. McMahon, Cinema and Contact, pp. 1–2. 15. McMahon, Cinema and Contact, p. 2.

Digital Technologies and Prosthetic Possibilities    ­137 16. Aristotle, De Anima, p. 210. 17. Derrida, On Touching, p. 149. 18. Derrida, On Touching, p. 152. 19. Connor, The Book of Skin, p. 140. 20. Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals, p. 99. 21. Derrida, On Touching, p. 152. 22. Derrida, On Touching, p. 154. 23. Derrida, On Touching, p. 181. 24. Derrida, On Touching, pp. 163–4. 25. Derrida, On Touching, p. 164. 26. Derrida, On Touching, p. 168. 27. Derrida, On Touching, p. 168. See also Derrida, ‘Heidegger’s Hand’, pp. 27–62. 28. Derrida, ‘Heidegger’s Hand’, pp. 31, 30. 29. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 16. 30. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, p. 16. 31. Hölderlin, ‘Mnemosyne’, cited in Derrida, ‘Heidegger’s Hand’, p. 33. 32. Derrida, ‘Heidegger’s Hand’, p. 34. 33. Derrida, ‘Heidegger’s Hand’, p. 36. 34. Derrida, ‘Heidegger’s Hand’, pp. 35, 36. 35. Derrida, ‘Heidegger’s Hand’, p. 40. 36. Derrida, ‘Heidegger’s Hand’, p. 40. 37. Derrida, On Touching, p. 243. 38. Derrida, On Touching, p. 261. 39. Derrida, On Touching, pp. 223, 204. 40. Johnson, ‘Derrida and Technology’, pp. 54–65 (p. 54). 41. Johnson, ‘Derrida and Technology’, p. 54. 42. Clark, ‘Deconstruction and Technology’, pp. 238–57 (p. 247). 43. Clark, ‘Deconstruction and Technology’, p. 247. 44. Wills, Prosthesis, p. 27. 45. Wills, Prosthesis, p. 27. 46. Wills, Prosthesis, pp. 29, 27. 47. Wills, Prosthesis, p. 27. 48. Turing, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, pp. 433–60 (p. 433). 49. Turing, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, p. 433. 50. Turing, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, p. 434. 51. Elsaesser, Metropolis, p. 53; Derrida, On Touching, p. 113. 52. Turing, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, p. 435. 53. Clark, ‘Deconstruction and Technology’, p. 240. 54. Derrida, ‘The Rhetoric of Drugs’, pp. 228–54 (pp. 244–5). 55. Derrida, ‘Heidegger’s Hand’, p. 36. 56. Derrida, On Touching, p. 154. 57. Williams, ‘Structures of Narrativity’, pp. 17–24 (pp. 21–2). 58. Williams, ‘Structures of Narrativity’, p. 22. 59. Elsaesser, Metropolis, p. 54. 60. Wills, Prosthesis, pp. 13, 14. 61. Wills, Prosthesis, p. 10. 62. Wills, Prosthesis, p. 26. 63. Wills, Prosthesis, p. 27.

­138    Tactile Poetics 64. Wills, Prosthesis, pp. 26–7, 44. 65. Wills, Prosthesis, p. 7. 66. Williams, ‘Structures of Narrativity’, p. 22. 67. Williams, ‘Structures of Narrativity’, p. 22. 68. Bennington, ‘Handshake’, pp. 167–89 (p. 168). 69. Bennington, ‘Handshake’, p. 168. 70. Bennington, ‘Handshake’, pp. 167, 171–2. 71. Bennington, ‘Handshake’, p. 177. 72. Barker, ‘Threshold (pro-)positions’, pp. 44–65 (p. 45). 73. Derrida, On Touching, p. 223. Works by Stephen Barker, Geoffrey Bennington, Martin McQuillan, and J. Hillis Miller, among others, bring invaluable insights to Derrida’s discussion of the hand, and in particular to his deconstruction of the ‘Hand-of-God’ in On Touching. Bennington, for instance, questions the hand Derrida extends to Nancy at the conclusion of On Touching, asking what kind of handshake is this – ‘what kind of address, salutation, salute and welcome?’ – while McQuillan considers not only Derrida’s discussion of tele-haptology in his ‘Salve: Untimely Postscript, for Want of a Final Retouch’, but also Nancy’s reciprocal retouch in Noli Me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body. In so doing, these critics address a number of important areas into which this chapter does not extend itself. Bennington, ‘Handshake’, p. 167; McQuillan, ‘Toucher II’; see also Barker, ‘Threshold (pro-)positions’ and Miller, For Derrida. 74. Koerber, ‘Metropolis: Reconstruction and Restoration’, pp. 47–9 (p. 47). 75. Elsaesser, Metropolis, p. 34. 76. Naundorf, ‘The Metropolis Mystery’, pp. 29–43 (pp. 43, 33). 77. Koerber, ‘Metropolis: Reconstruction and Restoration’, p. 49. 78. Koerber, ‘Metropolis: Reconstruction and Restoration’, p. 47. 79. See also Chapter 4. 80. In a passage described by J. Hillis Miller as a ‘wonderfully ironic, intimate, friendly, but nonetheless devastating paragraph of apostrophic prosopopoeia’, Derrida writes: ‘“Now, Jean-Luc, that’s quite enough, stop touching and tampering with this word, it’s prohibited, you hear. You have to abstain from this ‘touching,’ and once and for all stop using this incredible vocabulary, this concept nothing can really vouch for, these figures without figure and therefore without credit. And besides, if I may remind you of this again, haven’t you yourself said ‘there is no “the” sense of touch’?”’ He repeats this a few pages later, with a slight retouch: ‘“Now, Jean-Luc, that’s quite enough, give this word back, it’s prohibited, you hear. You have to abstain from this ‘touching,’ and once and for all stop using this incredible vocabulary, this concept nothing can really vouch for, these figures without figure and therefore without credit. And besides, if I may remind you of this again, haven’t you yourself said ‘there is no “the” sense of touch’?”’ Miller, ‘Touching Derrida Touching Nancy’, p. 160; Derrida, On Touching, pp. 107, 138–9. 81. Paterson, The Senses of Touch, pp. 119, 127. 82. Evens, ‘Touch in the Abstract’, pp. 67–78 (pp. 74–5). 83. Marks, Touch, p. 163. 84. Marks, Touch, p. xxi. 85. Marks, Touch, pp. 147, xxii.

Digital Technologies and Prosthetic Possibilities    ­139 86. Marks, Touch, p. 177. 87. Derrida, On Touching, p. 300. 88. Derrida, On Touching, p. 300. 89. Derrida, On Touching, p. 301. 90. Derrida, ‘The Word Processor’, pp. 19–32 (p. 25). 91. Derrida, On Touching, p. 113. 92. McQuillan, ‘Toucher II’, p. 87. 93. Paterson, The Senses of Touch, pp. 132, 168. 94. Paterson, The Senses of Touch, p. 135.

Chapter 8

Phantom Limbs: Bowen’s ‘Hand in Glove’

By way of a conclusion, I would like to offer a few remarks on Elizabeth Bowen’s short story, ‘Hand in Glove’ (1952). Rather than providing a definitive account of the state of touch in contemporary writing, I  use this opportunity to look forwards to the spectral dimensions of tact. This forward glimpse, however, necessarily involves a backward glance  – towards ghosts, burial and death – and to those writers and critics to whom it owes so much. Such comments can only ever point to a few of the areas into which discussions of tactile poetics might extend themselves, and this concluding chapter, by necessity, remains haunted by what it leaves out. Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘Hand in Glove’ plays out the return of the repressed. Alongside the ghosts of which it tells, it continues to haunt readers long after its closing sentence. The story itself seizes one with a sense of the text’s afterlife. Known as ‘the clever Miss Trevors’, sisters Elsie and Ethel are the talk of the town.1 Orphaned by their parents, they live with their elderly aunt, a Mrs Varley de Grey, who acts as a chaperone to her nieces but who evidently has little control over their actions. Indeed, when the presence of their aunt becomes troublesome, Ethel and Elsie lock her in her bedroom and prohibit contact with the outside world. Over the years, the sisters pilfer items from Mrs Varley de Grey’s trousseau, which is stored in seven large trunks in the attic, until eventually, all that remains – apart from a proposal of marriage – are evening gloves. Presuming that their aunt’s gloves must be locked within the one trunk that still defies them, they covet the keys she conceals under her pillow. In the meantime, the sisters’ social lives take their toll on their existing gloves and as a result, before they go out each evening, Ethel and Elsie ‘manfully dab away at the fingertips’ with benzine, a cleaning chemical formed from the distillation of benzoic acid with lime (p. 768). Although they do not at first realise it, it is the smell of benzine that puts off Ethel’s suitor, Lord Fred, who ‘though forever promising,

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still failed to come quite within Ethel’s grasp’ (p. 771). On the night of Lord Fred’s last local appearance, following an argument with Ethel (who has become, according to Elsie, ‘quite hand-in-glove’ with her aunt), Mrs Varley de Grey takes a turn rather for the worse (p. 772).2 Later, preparing herself for the ball, Ethel is interrupted by Elsie, who exposes the truth about the gloves and their effects on potential suitors. Insisting to Elsie that their aunt is only dozing, Ethel at last procures the key to the locked trunk from ‘under the dead one’s pillow’ (p. 773), and ventures up to the attics with one thing in mind: ‘Success was i­ mperative – she must have gloves. Gloves, gloves . . .’ (p. 774). Fumbling with the lock, she observes ‘the spotless finger-tip of a white kid glove’ appear from beneath the lid of the trunk and then withdraw (p. 774). Seeing the trunk bulge and tear itself open, Ethel continues her search – she so ‘craved what lay there exposed! – layer upon layer, wrapped in transparent paper, of elbow-length, magnolia-pure white gloves, bedded on the inert folds of the veil’ (pp. 774–5). Proclaiming Lord Fred to be now ‘within my grasp’, Ethel is attacked by the glove, which gradually fills out with a phantom hand, then clutches her hair and drags her down (p. 775). In a handy twist of fate, Ethel and her aunt, we are told, are ‘interred in the same grave, as everyone understood that they would have wished’ (p. 775). There is something decidely uncanny about Bowen’s story. A language of spectrality haunts it from the start. Ethel and Elise are described as a ‘spirited pair’, who ‘possessed an aunt’ – an aunt whose maiden name, Elysia Trevor, hints at Elysium, or the abode of the blessed after death (p. 767). Possession, as Abbie Garrington notes, connotes both control and its loss.3 Indeed, it soon becomes clear that Ethel is the one who is possessed – by her desire for gloves and ultimately by her aunt. But what is it about this story that so possesses the reader? Is it the glove or the absence of the hand within the glove that haunts us? Is it the ghostly hand that seizes us, or is it the missing body? Freud, as always, has something important to say about this. In his essay, ‘The “Uncanny”’, he includes ‘dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist, as in a fairy tale of Hauff’s, feet which dance by themselves’.4 ‘All these things’, Freud notes, ‘have something peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when, as in the last instance, they prove capable of independent activity in addition.’5 A dead hand is one thing, but a hand that functions independently of a body is entirely another. As Garrington remarks, a hand without a body ‘flickers with a life of its own’.6 This opens up a troubling array of possible intentions. If the hand has a mind of its own, who knows what it might do? Garrington draws on Katherine Rowe’s literary and intellectual history of severed, disembodied, ghostly and

­142    Tactile Poetics wandering hands. Relating these ghostly limbs to the dead hands of the legal term manus mortua, Rowe argues: With its close focus on the body part most often associated with intentional, effective action, the trope of manual dismemberment brings to attention the fraught ties between spirit and body, between persons, and between persons and things that constitute agency relations.7

Thus, she says, the dead hand ‘amuses, disturbs, or compels us because it points directly to those things that define this belief even while they remain out of control’.8 Robbing her of her human agency, the phantom limb in Bowen’s ‘Hand in Glove’ moves beyond Ethel’s grasp. This isn’t so much a phantom hand, though, as a phantom glove. Writing on the significance of gloves in Elizabeth Bowen’s work, Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle ask ‘for where, with a Bowen text, does the significance of a glove cease?’9 They go on to say that the glove is that ‘which is left behind and forgotten yet that which binds and generates narrative’.10 Ethel simply cannot forget her aunt’s gloves; representing the remains of Mrs Varley de Grey’s marriage, the gloves bring about the narrative action and its conclusion. But this isn’t an isolated ­reference to gloves in Bowen’s work. Bennett and Royle go on to describe the unravelling dynamic between Stella and Robert, the suspected spy, in The Heat of the Day (1949) for instance, as ‘in reverse, like a glove which, once turned inside out, can no longer be worn except with the truly disarming uncertainty of whether the hand is inside or out’.11 Thus, they offer what they call the ‘strange reality of the hand’ in Bowen’s writing, drawing out the hand’s slippery relation to writing. The gloved hand in Bowen’s work, they suggest, seems ‘to call for something like a critical theory of writing-in-gloves or gloved authorship’.12 What might such a writing-in-gloves look like? As Paul Harris notes with reference to Michel Serres’s topographies, ‘to turn a glove inside out, one must essentially send it through itself – by pushing or pulling the fingers out through the wrist opening’.13 Thinking through a writing-in-gloves, then, disarms the reader; the text turns itself inside out and in so doing, leaves one no longer sure of one’s position within or without the story. Mirroring the eversion of such a glove, this chapter pulls its own limbs through its opening, pointing the other way. There are certainly other hands at work here. In ‘Envois’, Derrida recalls another dismembered limb. In a letter dated 4 June 1977, he examines a post card he discovers at the Bodleian library. The card, we are told, depicts ‘Socrates writing, writing in front of Plato’.14 ‘The hand that is writing,’ Derrida remarks, ‘really appears incapable of belonging to S. More like it has been slipped under his

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cloak by someone else who is writing in his place’.15 Thus Derrida picks up on a childhood game, one that many of us will recall playing: One placed oneself behind the other, under the cloak, and let one’s hands stick out front, with all kinds of gestures (scratching the nose, rubbing the hands together, threatening with the finger). We laughed hard, but anxiety was there, and desire [. . .]16

There is a certain monstrosity to this game, a desire as well as a fear that a hand, possessed of its own volition, might appear out of nowhere and do all sorts of underhand things. We must not let this game get out of hand, so to speak. But in what ways must we also remain faithful to those hands that precede us? Examining the postcard, Derrida wonders whose is ‘the hand that is writing’? In particular, by describing Socrates writing in the place of Plato, but with a hand that cannot be his own, Derrida opens up the possibilities of one’s hand not being entirely one’s own. And of course, one’s hand is always indebted, even haunted, by others. If that’s the case, whose hand writes ‘Hand in Glove’? And whose hand is writing this? ‘A masterpiece always moves, by definition, in the manner of a ghost’, Derrida argues in Specters of Marx.17 All literary works, in other words, are haunted by other works. Picking up on this, Bennett and Royle point out that the word ‘genius’ can also be taken to mean ‘spirit’. Citing Derrida’s point that a masterpiece is ‘a work of genius, a thing of the spirit which precisely seems to engineer itself [s’ingénier]’, Bennett and Royle refer to the way that great works give us a sense of ‘having been spirited up, of working by themselves’.18 Works of genius have a phantasmal presence; their very workings are uncanny. Such texts, they say, ‘call to be read and reread while never ceasing to be strange, to resist reading, interpretation and translation’.19 Thus, ‘the greater the literary work, the more ghostly it is’.20 While for Harold Bloom, our relationship with earlier writers is to be viewed with some anxiety, Bennett and Royle cite T. S. Eliot’s remarks in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) that ‘the “best”, “most individual” parts of a literary work are “those in which the dead poets [. . .] assert their immortality most vigorously”’.21 Great works bear the spirit of other texts, and, in their own spirited manner, continue to resist a final reading. The spirit of this literary haunting might also apply to Bowen’s ‘Hand in Glove’, which, as Becky DiBiasio notes, ‘also refers back to an earlier tale, Henry James’s “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes”’.22 Terry W. Thompson makes a similar point in ‘“Weapons of Dress”: How Elizabeth Bowen Purloined Henry James’s First Ghost Story’. He argues that the two stories ‘exhibit marked similarities’ in theme, ­ characterisation,

­144    Tactile Poetics setting and plot.23 Drawing on Mary Y. Hallab’s account of the possible sources for James’s story (which she says include Pandora’s Box, Cinderella and the play, The Mistletoe Bough or The Mystery of the Old Oak Chest), Thompson argues that ‘in the case of Bowen’s story [. . .] her inspiration is abundantly clear’.24 The title of Thompson’s essay, more­ over, points quite markedly to a theft rather than to a loan. In ‘The Romance of Certain Old Clothes’, his first ghost story, James presents us with another two sisters, one of whom particularly covets the clothes of the other, which inevitably leads to her gruesome demise. Like the Trevors, the Wingrave sisters ‘wear all their choice finery’ and are forever ‘stitching and trimming their petticoats, and pressing out their muslins’ in a bid to win over their suitor, Arthur Lloyd.25 Once Perdita, the younger sister, secures his affection, she takes great care to ensure that she should ‘carry from home the genteelest outfit that her money could buy’ (p. 89). Rosalind, the elder sister, struggles with her jealousy until Perdita’s death leaves not only Arthur but also their newborn daughter. Rosalind takes the opportunity to decamp to Arthur’s to support the widower and child. Prior to her death, however, Perdita made Arthur promise that her clothes should be ‘wrapped in camphor and rose-leaves’ and locked away in a great chest in the attic until such time that her daughter should receive them (p. 94). ‘There is no end to what [the chest] will hold’, she says (p. 94). Rosalind, however, now Arthur’s second wife, begs him to hand over the key to these ‘exquisite fabrics’ (p. 97). Relenting, and venturing up to the attic to look for Rosalind, Arthur finds the chest open and his new wife dead before him, where on her ‘blanched brow and cheeks there glowed the marks of ten hideous wounds from two vengeful ghostly hands’ (p. 99). At least one of these ghostly hands returns, like the repressed, to haunt Bowen’s tale. This is a story that keeps on returning. Replying to a request by J. A. Hammerton on 23 July 1914, Henry James insists that he ‘should absolutely object to your publishing in your Collection of a thousand Short Stories the little old thing of mine’.26 ‘The Romance of Certain Old Clothes’, James says, is ‘not a thing that I have the least wish to see ­disinterred.’27 This early story, it seems, haunts his literary legacy; it is a text that won’t stay dead and buried. It is worth noting too that, for  Miriam Allott, James’s story is also haunted by its literary predecessors: No Jamesian seems to have commented so far on the real origin of James’s early short story ‘The Romance of Certain Old Clothes’ (first published in The Atlantic Monthly, February 1868), or on the reason for its resemblance to Tennyson’s narrative poem ‘The Ring’ (in Demeter and Other Poems, December 1889).28

Phantom Limbs: Bowen’s ‘Hand in Glove’    ­145

Notwithstanding other literary and cultural influences, Allott suggests that ‘the real source of the story’, as well as the poem, is a ‘legend related by James Russell Lowell’.29 This text, and others, operates in a vast crypt. Our concern is with the ways that all literary texts are haunted by other literary texts. It is, as Royle points out, ‘a crowded after-life: a new elaboration of ghosts and crypts, posthumous culture not as something back in the past, a life over, dead and gone, but rather as an inter, an interring and disinterring of birth and death’.30 In writing, then, when we attempt to put one body to rest, we inevitably dig up some more. In writing this book, I would like to pay my respects to my own ghosts  – those of which I am aware and those that haven’t yet fully surfaced. In ‘Hand in Glove’, Ethel and Elsie attempt to lay their hands on their inheritance; by rights, they seem to think, their aunt’s trousseau belongs to them. In fact, they cannot wait to get their hands on it. Ethel’s ultimate downfall and her burial alongside her aunt raises questions about what remains, and where, and to whom it might belong. Both Ethel and Rosalind learn that they cannot take their inheritance for granted; moreover, as Derrida tells us, ‘inheritance is never a given, it is always a task’.31 Many of you may know, of course, that I am also writing of another inheritance. In an interview with Susan Sellers entitled ‘We Must Hand our Inheritance On’, Cixous insists that ‘we are all inheritors’; drawing attention to the role of the hand in inheritance, she writes, we are all responsible for something that has been transmitted – an inheritance­– which is a treasure of good and bad memories, of memoirs and archives as you’ve said – of which you have to take care. We must hand our inheritance on.32

There has been much debate in the years since Derrida’s death in 2004 regarding the inheritance of his legacy, but his own words on inheritance are most apt and always, as ever, bring us back to touch. In Specters of Marx, Derrida discusses Marx and Engels’ remarks in Manifesto about the possible ‘aging’ of their text – its ‘intrinsically, irreducible historicity’.33 Marx’s text, Derrida argues, ‘incorporates in advance, beyond any possible programming, the unpredictably of new knowledge, new techniques, and new political givens’.34 ‘What other thinker’, he asks, ‘has ever issued a similar warning in such an explicit fashion? Who has ever called for the transformation to come of his own theses?’35 He’s talking about the ‘radical and necessary heterogeneity of an inheritance’, the ways ‘one must filter, sift, criticize, one must sort out several different possibles that inhabit the same injunction’.36 Thus, an inheritance is never a given; indeed, ‘if the readability of a legacy were given, natural,

­146    Tactile Poetics transparent, univocal,’ he writes, ‘if it did not call for and at the same time defy interpretation, we would never have anything to inherit from it’.37 Our inheritance of the text, then, puts into play a ‘dimension of performative interpretation, that is, of an interpretation that transforms the very thing it interprets’.38 Such an inheritance ‘would be both faithful to’ a text while at the same time ‘transforming it’.39 This, it might seem, has taken us some distance from tact. But notwithstanding the affirmations of debt this text owes, I would like to point to the language of the hand that Derrida employs in his discussion of inheriting Marx. He repeatedly refers to ‘sleight-of-hand’ tricks, he counts off the specters ‘on Marx’s fingers’, going so far as to ask ‘but what is Marx’s hand doing here, underhandedly so to speak [. . .]?’40 Derrida, like Cixous in the interview with Sellers, does not allow us to forget that inheritance is always a handing on. In her essay ‘Handling Value’ (2008), drawing attention to the manual operations that are disseminated through Specters of Marx, Nicole Pepperell emphasises inheritance as a ‘performative act’ by identifying the transformations that occur when Derrida cites Marx.41 She cites the passage where Marx refers to a fetishism which attaches itself to commodities: There [in the religious world] the products of the human brain [of the head, once again, of men: des menschlischen Kopfes, analogous to the wooden head of the table capable of engendering chimera – in its head, outside of its head – once, that is as soon as, its form can become commodity form] appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race . . . I call this the fetishism which attaches itself [anklebt] to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities.42

In this citation, Pepperell notes, Derrida inserts an ellipsis, thus removing ‘a single sentence . . . the sentence that reads: “So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands”.’43 Derrida’s inheritance of Marx cuts off the hand. Derrida retouches Marx’s text, and in so doing, he severs the hand, introducing the ellipsis as another prosthetic supplement. In severing Marx’s hand, then, Derrida at the same time extends its reach. This inheritance of Marx has important implications for the ways he simultaneously extends and withdraws his hand to Nancy in On Touching. Reframing Derrida’s question in On Touching – ‘What could this history of touch have to do with inheritance?’ – Pepperell asks, ‘Is there, perhaps, another way to inherit Derrida. . .?’44 Derrida, certainly, but others too – not least Cixous and Nancy, and countless other scholars, writers and friends. My work touches on them in infinite ways and to them all, I remain indebted. Here, I point to just

Phantom Limbs: Bowen’s ‘Hand in Glove’    ­147

a few. Beginning with a response to Ahmed and Stacey’s proposition that we cannot think about the skin without touching on its ‘writerly effect’, this volume has examined Anzieu’s account of a ‘skin of words’ in order to explore the ways that texts are caught up in the metaphorical repertoire of the skin, and its endless processes of desiccation and renewal. I am also indebted to Jean-Luc Nancy, his work on Noli Me Tangere as well as his discussion of exscription and the traces that are ‘inscribed-outside’ the text. Thinking through the ‘law of tact’ that always interrupts touch, Derrida’s work on the hand has not only illuminated my entire thinking of touch, but has also enabled me to consider the relationship between the hand and the humanual, which in turn has opened up questions about haunting and technicity. At the heart of all this is Nancy’s ambiguous suggestion that ‘touching – happens in writing all the time’.45 If this text is to touch, it will always, as Nancy says, be ‘at the limit, the tip, the furthest edge of writing’.46 It will also always be a spectral touch, a touch towards the spirit of other texts, most notably those by Derrida and Nancy. Cixous’s touch, too, is of course ever present, and Tactile Poetics owes much to the texxtures of her writing. In her words, a certain tact is required to handle this inheritance, to hand it on. Touch: no longer simply a sign of immediacy, presence, proximity and contact, but always already haunted by own untouchability, its own tact. And ‘tact itself’, as Cixous writes, is, by necessity, ‘a phantom touching’.47 If this text is to touch, it is also to retouch. And my attempts at literary tact are always wrought with phantom limbs.

Notes   1. Bowen, ‘Hand in Glove,’ pp. 767–75 (p. 768). Further page references to this edition appear parenthetically in the main body of the text.   2. Garrington notes that the term ‘“hand in glove” operated within the modernist period as a phrase suggesting a confederacy or suspiciously close friendship, sometimes with a hint as to sexual goings-on’ (Garrington, Haptic Modernism, p. 182 n.7).  3. Garrington, Haptic Modernism, p. 174.  4. Freud, SE 17, p. 244.  5. Freud, SE 17, p. 244. ‘As we already know,’ writes Freud, ‘this kind of uncanniness springs from its proximity to the castration complex’ (p. 244). Elizabeth Wright points out, however, that Freud’s essay on the uncanny ‘becomes a prime example of the return of repression’, because although Freud ironically ‘edits out’ the ‘uncanny potential’ of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ by insisting on the fear of castration, ‘what is left out of the story returns to haunt the essay’ in the form of Freud’s own anecdotes (Wright, Psychoanalytic Criticism, p. 143).

­148    Tactile Poetics   In his account of the hand cut off at the wrist, Freud refers to ‘The story of the Severed Hand’ by Wilhelm Hauff. He compares the ‘uncanny effect’ of Hauff’s story with Herodotus’ account of Rhampsinitus, which also features a severed limb but which does not possess, for Freud, the same uncanny potential because Herodotus’ story, he argues, focuses on the thief rather than on the princess. SE 17, p. 252.  6. Garrington, Haptic Modernism, p. 171.  7. Rowe, Dead Hands, p. 3.  8. Rowe, Dead Hands, p. 23.   9. Bennett and Royle, Elizabeth Bowen, p. 167 n.9. 10. Bennett and Royle, Elizabeth Bowen, p. 168 n.9. 11. Bennett and Royle, Elizabeth Bowen, p. 168 n.9. 12. Bennett and Royle, Elizabeth Bowen, p. 168 n.9. 13. Harris, ‘The Smooth Operator’, pp. 113–35 (p. 128). 14. Derrida, ‘Envois’, p. 9. 15. Derrida, ‘Envois’, p. 35. 16. Derrida, ‘Envois’, pp. 35–6. 17. Derrida, Specters of Marx, pp. 20–1. 18. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 20, cited in Bennett and Royle, An Introduction, p. 137. 19. Bennett and Royle, An Introduction, p. 137. 20. Bennett and Royle, An Introduction, p. 137. 21. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, pp. 37–44 (p. 38), cited in Bennett and Royle, An Introduction, p. 137. 22. DiBiasio, ‘The British and Irish Ghost Story’, pp. 81–95 (p. 93). 23. Thompson, ‘“Weapons of Dress”’, pp. 45–57 (p. 46). Comparison might also be made to Butts, ‘With and Without Buttons’ (pp. 332–45); the two stories seem quite hand-in-glove. See also Rose, ‘Bizarre Objects’, pp. 75–85. 24. Hallab, ‘The Romance of Old Clothes in a Fatal Chest’, pp. 315–20; Thompson, ‘“Weapons of Dress”’, p. 55. 25. James, ‘The Romance of Certain Old Clothes’, pp. 83–99, 87. Further page references to this edition appear parenthetically in the main body of the text. 26. Havens, ‘Henry James on One of his Early Stories’, pp. 131–3 (p. 131). 27. Havens, ‘Henry James on One of his Early Stories’, p. 132 28. Miriam Allott, ‘James Russell Lowell’, pp. 399–401 (pp. 399–400). 29. Allott, ‘James Russell Lowell’, p. 400. 30. Royle, The Uncanny, p. 224. 31. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 67. 32. Cixous, ‘We Must Hand our Inheritance On’, pp. 148–54 (p. 154). 33. Derrida, Specters of Marx, pp. 13–14. 34. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 14. 35. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 14. J. Hillis Miller points out that Derrida himself asks that his own book, On Touching, ‘be forgotten or effaced’. Derrida, On Touching, p. 301, cited in Miller, For Derrida, p. 267. 36. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 18. 37. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 18. 38. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 63. 39. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 67. 40. Derrida, Specters of Marx, pp. 174, 178. See also pp. 86, 149, 159.

Phantom Limbs: Bowen’s ‘Hand in Glove’    ­149 41. Pepperell, ‘Handling Value’, pp. 222–33 (p. 225). 42. Marx, Capital, p. 165, cited in Derrida, Specters of Marx, pp. 208–9. 43. Marx, Capital, p. 165, cited in Pepperell, ‘Handling Value’, p. 226. 44. Pepperell, ‘Handling Value’, p. 232. 45. Nancy, Corpus, p. 11. 46. Nancy, Corpus, p. 11. 47. Cixous, ‘Love of the Wolf’, pp. 110–30 (p. 124).

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Index

affect, 64–6, 71, 76n9; see also emotion; feeling Ahmed, Sara, 65, 71 Ahmed, Sara and Stacey, Jackie, 1, 23, 30n33, 147 Albright, Ann Cooper, 89 Allott, Miriam, 144–5 anatomy, 2–3 animal, 4, 27, 60, 62n41, 80, 124–7, 129 animal skin, 32, 39, 45 anthropocentrism, 126 Anzieu, Didier, 10, 14, 22–3, 28, 65, 147 The Skin Ego, 3–4, 10, 16–18, 20–1, 24–8, 29n10, 34, 53 Aristotle, 4, 83, 123–4 De Anima, 4, 123 On the Parts of Animals, 124 Armstrong, Isobel, 7 AT&T, 70 Barker, Jennifer, 123 Baross, Zsuzsa, 75 Bass, Alan, 99–100, 103–4 Bataille, Georges, 45–6 Beizer, Janet, 23 Bennett, Andrew and Royle, Nicholas, 142–3 Bennington, Geoffrey, 40, 48n37, 132–3, 138n73 Benthien, Claudia, 2–3, 33 Berger, John, 10, 98–103, 106, 109, 114–15 Berlant, Lauren, 85 Bick, Esther, 18 Biddle, Jennifer, 3 Bishop, Ryan, 68–9

blindness, 8–10, 26, 108–9, 113; see also Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’ Bloom, Harold, 143 Bora, Renu, 10, 73, 77n58 Boucher, François, 15 Boulez, Pierre, 77n58 Bowen, Elizabeth, 11, 140–5 Brault, Pascale-Anne, 113 Brooks, Peter, 44 Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), 10, 51, 56–60 Butler, Judith, 30n33 Calle-Gruber, Mireille, 27, 65–6 caress, 9, 15, 52, 55, 66, 68, 70, 72, 117, 132 Carson, Anne, 10, 94 The Beauty of the Husband, 10, 80–7, 90–2, 94 Eros the Bittersweet, 87, 92 Cataldi, Sue, 76n6 Chamarette, Jenny, 72–3 cinema, 123; see also film Cixous, Hélène, 7–10, 13n46, 28, 65–6, 72–4, 77n18, 89, 98, 113, 146–7 Insister of Jacques Derrida, 8 Rootprints, 27–8, 66, 68–70 So Close, 10, 64, 66–75, 77n22 Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 66, 75 ‘We Must Hand our Inheritance On’, 145–6 ‘Writing Blind’, 8, 9, 66, 69–70, 75–6, 98 Clark, Timothy, 127, 129 Classen, Constance, 3, 52 Conley, Verena Andermatt, 8, 13n46, 66, 68

­162    Tactile Poetics Connor, Steven, 2, 17, 19, 21, 30n30, 34–8, 58–9, 85–6, 124 correspondence, 98, 100, 103, 117; see also epistolary Coypel, Antoine, 109 Cunningham, Valentine, 7

epistolary, 9, 59, 62n46, 98; see also correspondence Evens, Aden, 134 expeausition, 46–7 exscription, 10, 35, 45–7, 49n57, 49n60, 98–9, 147

dance, 10, 38, 41, 80–91, 93–4; see also tango Das, Santanu, 4, 82 deconstruction, 6, 83, 113–14, 138n73; see also Derrida, Jacques Deleuze, Gilles, 136n5 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, 78n58, 122 dermographia, 22–3, 30n30 Derrida, Jacques, 2, 5–11, 24, 43, 49n45, 51, 64, 74, 80, 81, 88–9, 91, 93, 96n66, 105–6, 116, 123, 129, 145–7 ‘Che cos’è la poesia?’, 80, 86, 93 ‘Choreographies’, 10, 89 Dissemination, 88–9 ‘Envois’, 70, 80, 82, 84, 91, 93, 99–100, 102–4, 113, 142–3 ‘Heidegger’s Hand’, 112, 115–16, 125–6, 129 ‘Living on / Border Lines’, 44–5, 90 Memoirs of the Blind, 10, 107–10, 113 On Touching, 6–7, 52, 54, 59–60, 75, 81–3, 86–9, 91–4, 101, 120, 123–6, 129, 133–5, 138n80, 146, 148n35 Paper Machine, 135 Specters of Marx, 143, 145–6 Spurs, 10, 87–8 ‘Telepathy’, 70, 78n41 DiBiasio, Becky, 143 distance, 5–7, 10, 37, 53, 55, 59–60, 62n37, 66, 68, 70, 80–5, 87–90, 93–4, 100–2, 111, 122–3, 135 drawing, 23, 25, 107, 109–10, 113, 115, 117, 118n32 Drif, Zohra, 69, 74 dust, 32, 38–41, 48n34, 48n37, 49n42

Fanchon, 24–5 feeling, 3, 8–9, 19, 21, 57–8, 64–8, 71–2, 76, 76n6, 76n9, 81, 94; see also affect; emotion Félix-Didier, Paula, 133 film, 11, 90, 121–3, 128, 130–4; see also cinema fold, 14, 16, 21, 26, 33, 36–7, 41, 44, 47, 71–3, 94, 99, 104, 117, 141 Foster, Susan, 90 Foucault, Michel, 30n33 Freud, Anna, 56 Freud, Sigmund, 10, 24, 30n36, 38, 40, 51–60, 75 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 29n2, 31n39 ‘The Ego and the Id’, 16 ‘A Note Upon “The Mystic WritingPad”’, 24 Totem and Taboo, 52 ‘The “Uncanny”’, 141, 147n5 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 10, 51, 60, 62n45 Fulton, Alice, 67, 71

ego, 16–17; see also ‘skin ego’ Eliot, T. S., 143 ellipsis, 25, 72, 92, 133, 146 Elsaesser, Thomas, 129–30, 133 emotion, 65, 71; see also affect; feeling Engels, Friedrich, 145 Enriquez, Micheline, 31n42, 31n46

Galton, Graeme, 53, 61n24 Garrington, Abbie, 115, 121, 141–2, 147n2 ghost, 11, 31n40, 54, 81, 90, 136, 140–6; see also haunting; spectrality glove, 134, 140–2, 147n2 Goh, Irving and Bishop, Ryan, 5 Hallab, Mary Y., 144 Hammerton, J. A., 144 hand, 11, 98–117, 120–1, 123–7, 129–30, 132–6, 138n73, 141–7, 147n2, 147n5 ‘handing on’, 11, 45, 104, 146; see also inheritance handshake, 120, 132–6, 138n73 handwriting, 40, 115–16, 128 haptic, 6, 11, 34, 68–9, 78n58, 121–3, 136n5 Harris, Paul, 142 Harvey, Elizabeth, 83

Index    ­163 haunting, 11, 22, 24, 42, 60, 62n37, 74, 77n22, 81, 83, 85, 87, 90, 102, 117, 135–6, 140–1, 143–5, 147, 147n5; see also ghost; spectrality H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), 10, 51, 54–60 heart, 55, 59–60, 70, 83–4, 86, 93–4, 103–4, 106, 120, 129–30 Heidegger, Martin, 106, 114–16, 126, 132 Being and Time, 111 What is Called Thinking?, 105, 110–12, 114, 125 Helm, Brigitte, 128 Herodotus, 42, 148n5 Herring, Robert, 58 Hodge, Joanna, 46, 49n60 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 125 Hull, Dorothy, 58 humanualism, 11, 123–4, 126–7, 147 Husserl, Edmund, 5–6, 124, 133 Hustvedt, Siri, 10, 14, 17–18, 23, 25–6, 28 The Sorrows of an American, 19, 27, 29n17 What I Loved, 10, 14–27, 48n23 hyphen, 88–9, 92, 128 hypnosis, 53 hysteria, 22–3 inheritance, 11, 103–4, 145–7; see also ‘handing on’ interruption, 6, 8, 10–11, 25–6, 59, 60, 72, 81, 83, 85–6, 88–9, 91–4, 108, 141, 147 intimacy, 1, 4, 10, 14, 56, 60, 81–3, 85, 93–4, 101, 123 James, Henry, 143–4 Jameson, Fredric, 76n9 Jesus Christ, 52, 54–5, 75 Johnson, Christopher, 115, 127 Jones, Ernest, 53, 61n24 Jones, Gail, 33–4, 40, 47n5, 48n11, 48n21 Josipovici, Gabriel, 8–9, 13n52, 76n4 Kafka, Franz, 30n33 Kamuf, Peggy, 77n22 Keats, John, 82 Kipling, Rudyard, 43 Koerber, Martin, 133–4 Lang, Fritz, 11, 120, 129–30, 132; see also Metropolis

leather working, 32, 39 Lepecki, André, 90–1 Lowell, James Russell, 145 McDonald, Christie, 89 machine, 114, 116, 120, 123, 127–30, 135; see also technology Machine-Man, 127–30; see also nonhuman; robot Maclachlan, Ian, 59 McMahon, Laura, 5–6, 122–3 McNally, Lisa, 7 Macpherson Schaffner, Perdita, 57–8, 62n44 McQuillan, Martin, 62n37, 136, 138n73 Manning, Erin, 54, 84–6, 92–3 Marinkova, Milena, 33–4, 41 Marks, Laura, 122–3, 134–5 Marx, Karl, 145–6 Mercurialis, Girolamo, 2 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 5, 12n24, 133 metafiction, 23 Metropolis (film), 11, 120–2, 126–32, 133–6; see also Lang, Fritz Michaels, Anne, 1, 4 Miller, J. Hillis, 6, 45, 70, 92, 105, 116, 138n80 monster/monstrous, 120, 125–6, 128, 130, 132, 143 Montagu, Ashley, 5, 56, 64–5, 68, 77n12 music, 68–9, 84 Naas, Michael, 113 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 5–7, 10, 34–5, 49n60, 51, 59–60, 62n37, 64, 83, 86, 89, 93–4, 116, 123, 134, 138n80, 146–7 Being Singular Plural, 5 Birth to Presence, 45–7, 49n57 Corpus, 5, 46–7, 60, 64, 76 A Finite Thinking, 101 Noli Me Tangere, 54–5, 60, 138n73, 147 narrative frame, 35, 39, 44–6 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 87 Noli me tangere (expression), 51, 54–5, 60, 62n37, 75, 79n69; see also touch, prohibition of non-human, 11, 62n41, 126, 128–30, 132, 135; see also animal; machine; robot

­164    Tactile Poetics Oliver, Thomas, 39 Ondaatje, Michael, 10, 32–6, 38, 40–7, 48n21 The English Patient, 33–4, 40–3, 47 In the Skin of a Lion, 10, 32–46, 48n11 Orbach, Susie, 53 palimpsest, 10, 24, 31n40, 42 Pascal, Blaise, 27 Paterson, Mark, 134, 136 Pepperell, Nicole, 11, 146 PHANToM device, 136 phenomenology, 5–6, 122, 124, 132 Phillips, John W. P., 98 Plato, 103–4, 142–3 poetry, 1, 4, 9, 10, 25, 68, 80–3, 86–9, 91–4, 98, 114–16, 125, 144–5 poetic language, 7, 33–5, 46, 64, 76, 87, 92, 94; see also ‘tactile poetics’ pregnancy, 21, 57, 70 ‘pressure technique’ (Freud), 53, 61n24 Prosser, Jay, 3, 21 prosthesis, 11, 120, 123, 126–35, 146 proximity, 4–5, 37, 59, 66, 83, 101, 123, 147 psychoanalysis, 3, 10, 18–19, 25, 51, 53–5, 60, 61n20, 62n43, 65; see also Anzieu, Didier; Bick, Esther; Freud, Sigmund quantum physics, 135 reading, 1, 7–8, 14, 33–5, 41–5, 64, 67, 71–3, 89–90, 107, 116, 143 Rembrandt, 113 repetition, 22, 43–4, 56, 69, 71–2 repression, 19, 53, 68 ‘return of the repressed’, 21, 23, 40, 140, 144, 147n5; see also repetition ‘retouching’, 134, 138n80, 146–7 Riegl, Aloïs, 122 Robert, William, 59 robot, 127–8, 130, 132; see also machine; non-human Rowe, Katherine, 141–2 Royle, Nicholas, 70, 145 Sappho, 87, 92 Saramago, José, 8–9 Savigliano, Marta, 84 scar, 14, 22, 101, 105 second skin, 18–19

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 65, 71, 73 Sellers, Susan, 145–6 SensAble Corporation, 136 Serres, Michel, 4, 34–8, 47, 48n21, 142 The Five Senses, 2, 4, 13n53, 37, 48n23 Sheppard, Robert, 76 skin, 1–4 in art, 15, 20, 22 as container, 3, 16–19, 23–6, 28, 29n10 functions of, 17–18, 21, 23 as inscribing surface, 10, 17, 21–4, 26–7, 30n33, 36, 45–6 as interface, 17, 20–1, 23, 27, 29n2, 37 in literature, 33 and psyche, 3–4, 16–23 related to reading and writing, 23, 28; see also ‘textual skin’ ‘skin-effects’, 1–2, 33–6, 47 ‘skin ego’, 14–20, 24, 26, 28 Socrates, 142–3 sound, 68, 70 spectrality, 11, 90, 136, 140–1, 147; see also ghost; haunting Steedman, Carolyn, 39–40, 48n37 Steen, Jan, 15 Stendhal, 27–8 Stewart, Susan, 4 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 68–9 syllepsis, 88 syrrhèse, 36–8 taboo, 51–5; see also touch, prohibition of tact, 7–8, 11–12, 47, 55, 58–60, 64, 69–70, 74–6, 77n18, 80, 83–6, 88–9, 93, 98, 101, 135–6, 140, 146–7 law of, 52, 60, 147 ‘tactile poetics’, 10, 13n46, 140; see also poetry, poetic language ‘tampering’, 7, 64, 74–5, 134, 138n80 tango, 10, 80, 83–94; see also dance tattoo, 22, 30 Taylor, Mark, 20 technology, 11, 78n42, 104, 121, 123, 126–7, 129–30, 132, 134–6; see also machine telehaptics, 60, 62n37, 69–70, 134, 138n73; see also touch, virtual/ digital

Index    ­165 telephone, 66, 69–70 ‘tender’, 67, 80–1, 83, 94 Tennyson, Alfred, 144 Terada, Rei, 76n9 ‘textual skin’, 4, 8, 14, 24–8, 34, 36–8, 40, 44–5, 48n11 ‘texturality’, 72–3 texture, 8–11, 34, 64, 66, 71–3, 122 ‘texxture’, 73–4 Thompson, Terry W., 143–4 Totton, Nick, 61n18 touch sense of, 1–12, 14, 26, 41, 47, 55–60, 82 prohibition of, 10, 51–7, 61n23, 62n37, 75, 134; see also Noli Me Tangere; taboo in psychoanalysis, 61n18, 61n20, 61n23, 65 virtual/digital, 11, 133–6; see also telehaptics

and writing, 64–8, 73–6, 80–94, 98, 100–2, 114, 146–7 ‘touchy-feely’, 65 tuberculosis, 39 Turing, Alan, 128–9 Tyler, Imogen, 21 uncanny, 22, 31n40, 52, 70, 75, 141, 143, 147n5 unconscious, 21, 40, 53, 66 untouchable, 5–6, 55, 58–9, 63n56, 69, 70, 83, 87, 91 Williams, Alan, 130, 132 Wills, David, 9, 102, 128, 130, 132 Wood, Sarah, 84–5 Woolf, Virginia, 1 Yofi, 51, 54, 56–8, 60 Zurbarán, Francisco de, 15