Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing by Abbie Garrington (review)

Sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch. Eyes, ears, tongue, nose … and then comes what, exactly? Hands? The skin? The sense of touch cannot quite be so readily reduced to one particular organ or place on the body, making it—so to speak—particularly difficult to grasp. In Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing, Abbie Garrington sets herself not only the difficult task of tracing the importance of the “haptic” to modernist literature but also of defining and cataloguing the plethora of sensations, motifs, and body parts that might be potentially subsumed under the sense of touch. The haptic is, as Garrington acknowledges, “troublesome to define, isolate and understand” (16), and unlike other studies of the transformation of the sense perceptions of sight or hearing in the modernist period, Haptic Modernism seems to require a different, more expansive approach befitting an organ—the skin—that encompasses the whole human body.

Indeed, Haptic Modernism is kaleidoscopic in its organization, ranging through a variety of topics at least tangentially related to the “haptic”: from manicures to masturbation, from sculptures to severed hands, from fingerprints to blindness, from the act of writing to the act of praying. In so doing, Garrington’s frame of literary reference is expansive, touching on Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Rebecca West’s almost forgotten text Sunflower, and Maurice Renard’s pulp novel The Hands of Orlac, as well as a variety of more canonical texts of British modernism, from Ulysses to Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage to Woolf’s The Years.¹

This sprawling approach is Haptic Modernism’s strength and weakness. While the book lacks an overarching central argument that might provide a clear definition of the haptic and the way it registers in modernism, that drawback is balanced by the fertility of the chains of associations it traces. Garrington smartly bounds her discussion through a focus on two organs of touch: the skin and the hands, the former conceived of as “a culturally contested, and culturally reimagined, mediator between the bodily and the body’s environment” and the latter as “a synecdoche, a kind of ‘poster-boy’ for the haptic” (18, 30). Through the lens of hands and skin, Garrington is able to forge connections among disparate motifs and concerns that previous, more narrowly focused works on modernism and the senses have missed.

In her analysis of the “Nausicaa” episode of Ulysses, for instance, Garrington juxtaposes Bloom’s masturbation—or “self-touching”—with descriptions of Gerty MacDowell that emphasize her sculptural characteristics, her skin and curves. Seeing the sculptural as key to the novel, Garrington, drawing on the theories of Johann Gottfried Herder,² describes sculpture in the novel as perceived through a “look which touches” (83): “Via Bloom, Joyce suggests that sculpture … calls upon the caressing gaze of the viewer, the oculo-tactile mode of appreciation … and leads to the compulsion to self-touch, to masturbate” (76). Garrington then links this sculpture-masturbation juxtaposition to Bloom’s masochism through the influence of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, alluded to in the novel: “Sacher-Masoch’s main protagonist, Severin, shares with Bloom the fantasy of physical domination and cuckoldry, but these enthusiasms are here more explicitly connected to his passion for sculpture” (88).³ Thus the emphasis on touch associated with sculpture becomes connected with the focus on the skin in Bloom’s masochism, and this concern with the haptic is amplified by the presence of the blind stripling in Ulysses who, like Joyce in his own descent into blindness, must rely on other senses like the sense of touch as opposed to sight. Garrington connects the blind stripling with his cane not only to Stephen and his ashplant but to Joyce and his pen, suggesting another link between the physical processes of writing—touching the pen with one’s hand—and the act of masturbation. These links might even lead us...