Abstract
This chapter addresses a critical neglect of the sense of touch in literary theory, identifying a hierarchy that places sight and hearing above the carnal sense of touch, which has historically been considered a more immediate, therefore less critical, sense. Building on Mark Paterson’s example of technologies that “remediate touch” by facilitating tactile experience, I outline particular literary techniques that remediate touch in Anaïs Nin’s fiction, arguing that touch, not sight, is the dominant sense in the reading process. In order to do so, I first establish the sensual hierarchy that exists in reading and critique, which has resulted in the predominance of what Paul Ricoeur calls a “hermeneutics of suspicion” and which, according to critics such as Eve Sedgwick and Rita Felski, has become the dominant mode of literary critique. Following this, I aim to reverse this hierarchy through close readings of Nin’s fiction, mobilizing Brian Kearney’s carnal hermeneutics, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s carnal phenomenology. Finally, this chapter considers the way in which Nin’s privileging of the carnal senses has resulted in critical marginalization, neglect, and misunderstanding in some readers, whilst triggering intense personal attachment in others.
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Notes
- 1.
In the field of media studies, the term “remediation” was coined by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin in Remediation: Understanding New Media (1998).
- 2.
Nin herself dropped out of high school at the age of 16, before beginning to work as an artist’s model, so I do not think she is referring to formal education.
- 3.
Wilson and Trilling’s reviews are cited from Nin’s journals.
- 4.
Shoshana Felman refers to this as the “the realistic invisible, that which realism as such is inherently unable to see” (30), as opposed to the “realistic” elements of the text—“proper names—identity and reference […] a single meaning that can be consequently mastered and made clear” (Felman 1993: 39).
- 5.
I am choosing to focus on Nin’s use of the third person as this is the narrative voice most often used, and used exclusively in her novels. She does also use first-person narration, in several of her short stories.
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Widner, J. (2022). Between Self and Other: Anaïs Nin’s Transformative Erotics. In: Thumala Olave, M.A. (eds) The Cultural Sociology of Reading. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13227-8_4
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