Finger Food
[In the following review, Hall offers a negative assessment of Touch, criticizing the work for focusing too heavily on ideas over actuality.]
In an ideal world you would be reading this article with your eyes closed. It would be printed in braille that was sumptuously and variously textured. As you read, the bottom half of your body would be lapped by waves of warm milk, while the top half would be expertly massaged. Alas, the New Statesman is printed in cheap ink on flimsy paper, and this article is one of the least sensuous of things—a book review. One can but dream.
Gabriel Josipovici is a dreamer. In his day job, as a professor at the University of Sussex, he has produced a steady stream of sturdy academic tomes, such as The Lessons of Modernism (1977) and The Book of God (1988). However, on rare days off, he has written novels and stories full of major yearnings. His new work [Touch] straddles autobiographical and scholarly styles.
Josipovici was born in 1940 and he is very much a child of the 1960s. He is obsessed with the mind-body problem, and believes that mind has been in the ascendant for too long. The mind's henchman is sight, and this organ of sense is “free” and “irresponsible.” Following Merleau-Ponty, he stresses that perception of others is “bodily” as well as “visual.” Unless we recognise the claims of touch, and are prepared to experience things effortfully, we will live in a self-imposed state of sensory deprivation.
Josipovici explores the theme of touch in a series of loose ruminations on cinema, literature, art, religion and sport. His book opens with a discussion of the scene in Charlie Chaplin's City Lights where the girl who has been cured of her blindness thanks to the tramp's largesse offers him money without recognising him. She is now happily working in a flower shop, and the tramp's arrival outside the window is an irritation. But as she presses money into his hand, she realises to whom it belongs. For Josipovici this is a primal scene that “does nothing less than give me back a sense of my own body, not as an object but as that which is alive in space and time.”
But does it? For the sense of touch to be activated, every other sense (except for taste) has to be repressed or neutralised. The scene only works because this is a silent film; if it had been a talkie the flower-girl would have recognised the tramp's voice and would have had no need to touch him. So deafness as well as prior blindness is a condition for its enactment. Chaplin's apotheosis of touch panders to an age-old male fantasy—the same fantasy as the one that imagines blind girls make good lovers.
Josipovici is at his best in his discussion of Proust, and here some of the dangers in his argument are addressed. After a scene in which Mlle Vinteuil considers spitting on the portrait of her recently deceased father, Proust claims that her behaviour is not an expression of absolute evil. Indifference, not sadism, is the cardinal sin. Sadism, as Josipovici remarks, represents “a wild strategy to force an apparently indifferent world to touch us, if only for a moment.” Yet it can never succeed, “for it is always we who instigate it and what we need is precisely the opposite: it is for the world to touch us, unawares.”
This is a stimulating but frustrating book. The frustration stems from the fact that Josipovici is more interested in the idea than the act of touching. This becomes clear when he discusses his own sporting achievements. During his childhood in Egypt he was a keen footballer. Because of the hard, dry pitches, it was a game of “touch and skill.” Gabriel was a star player: “There were magical days when I could do no wrong, scoring three or four … it seemed so easy to swerve round the half-backs, cut inside the backs and send the ball high into the net.”
The irony is that good touch in football makes you untouchable. His team, and the opposition, disappear. As so often happens in our body-fixated culture, a crusade to resensitise the world ends up advocating the survival of the fittest.
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.