Touching Texts: The Haptic Sense in Modernist Literature

Abstract

AbstractThe haptic sense combines touch – the reaching and touching of any part of the human skin – with kinaesthesis, or the body’s appreciation of its own movement. It also involves proprioception, a bodily sense of position within space. It has become a major focus of attention in academic studies of recent years, with film theorists, sociologists, computer scientists, physiologists and human geographers all attempting to describe with accuracy the elusive sense of touch. However, no full account has been given of the role of the haptic in literature, either as a subject of fiction or as the basis for a mode of writing. In the case of modernist texts, these seem particularly strange oversights, as the period was one in which human bodies were becoming accustomed to startling new experiences – including most importantly the cinema and mechanised transport – that transformed the human sense of movement and of tactile interactions between body and world. Several culturally attuned modernist theorists noted the haptic transformations of life in the early twentieth century. Walter Benjamin was to claim that modernist existence could only be fully apprehended through ‘tactile appropriation,’ while F.T. Marinetti’s ‘Tactilism’ manifesto lamented the poor thought‐conducting qualities of the skin and suggested tactile engagement as a route not only to great art but to better human understanding (Benjamin 233; Marinetti). Meanwhile, many authors of the modernist avant‐garde were recognising and evoking the importance of touch, kinaesthesis and proprioception within their texts. The work of Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson and D.H. Lawrence, amongst others, demonstrates that the haptic sense was a vital concern of the modernist period – not simply part of the fabric of daily life, but also a pressing matter to be identified and analysed within, and even re‐created by, literature. In fact, the period is poised at the mid‐point of the history of theories of the haptic, which stretches from nineteenth century physiological and art historical studies, to our present day, multi‐disciplinary attention to skin, touch and bodily movement. Tracing this theoretical history, and identifying a flowering of interest in the haptic sense in the modernist period, provides an opportunity to view modernist writing from a new perspective. By defining the haptic, and by looking at its role in the work of some canonical modernist writers, this article aims at exploring the promise of a haptic‐oriented analysis for the study of modernist literature.