Pablo Maurette, <i>The Forgotten Sense. Meditations on Touch<i>
10.13125/2039-6597/3830
When speaking or writing about art and literature, cognition is often the leading term. It helps explain how in addition to offering artistic pleasure literature and art help us see the world, learn about it, understand it.
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2039-6597
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Thomas Pavel
Between
Pablo Maurette, <i>The Forgotten Sense. Meditations on Touch<i>
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
9
Between the Texts/Reviews: Ed. Giulio Iacoli, Beatrice Seligardi, Claudia Cao
2019-08-07
2019-06-01
2019-08-07
1
Thomas Pavel
2019
10.13125/2039-6597/3830
2039-6597
17
en
Pablo Maurette, <i>The Forgotten Sense. Meditations on Touch<i>
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/3830/3379
9
                     Pablo Maurette
                    The Forgotten Sense.
                    Meditations on Touch

     Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2018, 171 pp.
     When speaking or writing about art and literature, cognition is often
the leading term. It helps explain how in addition to offering artistic
pleasure literature and art help us see the world, learn about it,
understand it. When contemplating Michelangelo’s bust of Brutus one
grasps the bitter mixture of disappointment and determination. When
one reads or recites Shakespeare, Sonnet 116 (“Let me not to the
marriage of true minds / Admit impediments”), one feels invited to
reflect on perfect love. In Homer’s Iliad one finds a grand display of
heroic passions, a splendid presentation of an East Mediterranean
armed conflict at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC. But why in
order to understand the world should art and literature require us to
travel to places far away, long past? Because our actual experience is
narrowly limited whilst the additional cases art and literature offer –
overstated and implausible as they might sometimes be – teach new
important lessons or at least clarify what we already know to some
extent. How do these lessons reach us? Either through our most trusted
senses, sight and hearing, as it happens when we look at Brutus’s bust
and we attend the performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, or just
through language, as when we listen to the recitation of Shakespeare’s
sonnet 116 and Homer’s Iliad or when we read these works. If we rely
just on language, we do not hear love itself, but solely the words that
invite us to reflect on it. Language, in this case, involves either a detour
since it requires us to move through words to the image of the world
they propose, or a shortcut given that both the passage from words to



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Pablo Maurette, The Forgotten Sense. Meditations on Touch (Thomas Pavel)




meaning and from meaning to knowledge take place within our mind.
Cognitive poetics is the discipline that reliably examines the way in
which literature imparts knowledge. It pays considerable attention to
the interplay between the situations, actions and feelings presented by a
literary work, to their coherence, their likelihood, as well as their appeal
to the readers’ sense of verisimilitude and rightness1.
      Among the sensorial sources of knowledge, the most obvious are
the above-mentioned sight and hearing, the former having for a long
time occupied the place of honor among senses. In his fascinating
meditations on touching – the forgotten sense, as he calls it –, Pablo
Maurette labels “oculocentrism” the philosophical privilege granted to
sight and begs to disagree. As he reminds his readers, in Plato’s Republic,
«the sun and the light stand for truth and intelligence» and similarly,
according to Aristotle «sight allows us to know in the clearest and most
exclusive way […] to draw distinctions, separate, categorize». Touch, by
contrast, is in Aristotle’s view «the most pernicious and distracting»
(13) sense when it links us to the physical world, but, as Plato admits
and, later, Plotinus emphasizes, the mysterious contact between the
soul and the divine origin of the world can be metaphorically described
as tactile. Lucretius, however, being an Epicurean, asserts that touch,
tactus, «rules the nature of things» (15), given that the universe is a set
of moving atoms that constantly hit each other, engendering all that is
and all that happens. Consequently, one might consider that all bodily
senses are versions of touching and, as Maurette puts is so well,
«[t]hinking and knowing are tactile faculties as well; also dreaming,
philosophizing, and poetizing» (16).
      Concerning art, Maurette reminds us, during the last third of the
eighteenth-century Johann Herder reflected on the relation between
sight and touch in sculpture, while at the turn of the nineteenth-century
the great Austrian art historian Aloïs Riegl labelled “haptic” the tacit
sense of space projected by paintings and its distance from the spectator.

      1
       Karin Kukkonen in A Prehistory of Cognitive Poetics (Oxford University
Press, 2017) reflects on the trans-historical validity of cognitive poetics and
offers an ample bibliography.


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More recently, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari adopted this notion as
a counterpart of the older “optic”, while Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s
phenomenology of the body and Michel Henry’s reflections on the self-
affection / self-impact of the flesh brought to attention deep, almost
imperceptible sensorial and affective movements. The “affect-theorists”
(Brian Massumi, Eve Sedgwick and Lauren Berlant among others)
continue this line of exploration in art, film and literature. Present since
the earliest stages of life in every part of the human body, reacting to
one’s own touch, fully immediate, the haptic constitutes, in Maurette’s
terms, «the last line of defense between the outside world and our
interiority» (12).
       Maurette notices that led by a familiar prophetic impulse some
historians of culture claim that our century represents the beginning of
a haptic age, yet chooses to follow Riegl’s wiser view of the haptic as an
omnipresent practice subject to historical change. What, in Maurette’s
view, does belong to “the morning of modernity” is a haptic
“awareness”, inaugurated, according to him, by Lorenzo Ghiberti’s
persuasive tactile analysis of an ancient Roman statue that represents an
androgynous figure (17-18). Similar visual art examples of haptic
recognition are Antonio Canova’s The Three Graces (1817) and Gennaro
Cali’s Psyche Abandoned (1832), both highlighted in Alexander Sokurov’s
film Russian Ark (2002). When looking at these works of art, Maurette
aptly says, »[w]e are touched in the distance; it is touch through affect,
it is haptic» (21).
       The next questions are whether the haptic approach touches
important aspects of literature and, if so, how would haptic literary
history and criticism fulfill its mission. By inviting readers to intimacy,
friendship, but also, precisely thanks to the surface contact, to a search
for «unsuspected depths, unfamiliar sensations and primordial
affections» (22), Maurette answers. The modern novel, he argues,
excels in this task by augmenting details, first of settings, cloth, jewelry
and bodily features, then, based on free indirect speech, of the soul, both
conscious and unconscious. In such novels, Maurette’s first example
being Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, true depth lies at the surface. Melville’s
Moby Dick operate in the same way: torrents of details aim at showing


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that the true meaning of life lies in small sensorial and affective
experiences. By emphasizing interactions at the surface, according to
Maurette, modern haptic narratives suggest that our (Lucretian, one
might add) world is both right there, ready to be touched, and ultimately
and «irremediably Godless» (23).
     Long before modern times, by contrast, Homer’s epic poems
described cosmic interactions between mortals and gods, the latter
approaching the humans «from their unfathomable distance» (32), as
well as, for all these actors, the passions and conflicts that trouble them.
Most scenes and objects – the Trojan army watched by Helen and Priam
from the walls of Troy, Achilles’ shield – being eminently visual, the art
of Homer and his time would qualify as an optic rather than haptic. But
should we perpetuate the old Hegelian assumption that each historical
period and its culture are homogeneous and drastically different from
predecessors and successors? Maurette goes beyond this approach and
suggests a combination of the two categories – optic and haptic – into a
continuous range of possibilities between two extremes. Homer’s art for
him is both optic and haptic, each to a certain extent. Towards the end
of book 16 of The Iliad, when the Trojans try to drag the dead body of
Patroclus to Troy while the Achaeans pull the same body towards their
ships, the poet compares their efforts to what happens when

      some master tanner
      Gives the hide of a huge bull for stretching
      The beast’s skin soaked in grease and the men grab hold
      Bracing round in a bread circle, tugging, stretching hard (39)

     The scene is still optic, yet, as Maurette points out in an inspired
close-reading, the hide – the skin of the dead bull – belongs to the tactile,
haptic repertory. He also reminds the reader that in book 19 of the
Odyssey, when Odysseus returns home claiming that he is a wondering
beggar, his old nurse recognizes the hero’s visual features but fully
accepts who he is only after touching his calf and feeling the scar she
knows should be there.




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        Returning to the materialist view of nature, Maurette reminds us
the recent important work of Stephen Greenblatt2, who together with
Valentina Prosperi, Lisa Piazzi, Gerard Passannante and Ada Palmer
drew attention to the rediscovery of Lucretius during the Renaissance.
Significantly, the interest in Lucretian philosophy of the body and its
inevitable corruption was contemporaneous with a disturbing explosion
of contagious tactility brought by the epidemic of syphilis and smallpox
spread on both sides of the Atlantic during the new era of
intercontinental explorations. In his irresistibly seductive style Maurette
comments on this encounter between philosophical speculation and
skin putrefaction, adding a couple of digressions on Joel-Peter Witkin
famous photography Still Life Mexico (1993) and Giordanno Bruno’s
execution on the stake in Campo di Fiori, Rome, in 1600.
     A chapter on philematology – the discipline that studies kisses3 –
focuses on a specific kind of kiss, the one given with an open mouth, but
not without examining counter-chronologically several philosophical
classifications of this interpersonal form of touch. The taxonomy
developed by Kierkegaard’s character Johannes in the Seducer’s Diary
(the first part of Either / Or, 1843), turns out to be much less informed
than Francesco Patrizi’s dialogue Delfino or on the Kiss (1577) and less
passionate than Johannes Secundus’s Liber Basiorum (1541), perhaps
because the earlier two authors allow Neo-Platonic reflection on love to
nuance their approaches. Poetry, from Catullus to Maffio Venier (a mid-
sixteenth-century Venetian whose tipsy short poem “Kiss me my
darling” Mauretti translates), Philip Sidney and Shakespeare, celebrates


     2 Greenblatt, Stephen, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, New
York, W. W. Norton, 2011
     3 Not knowing the meaning of this term, the present reviewer searched it

on the Wiktionary, which defines it as «the scientific study of kissing». In the
upper corner of the Wiktionary screen one can see the picture of a sailor and a
young lady kissing each other. The two adults hold a baby who attentively
considers what they are doing. The text under the picture explains: «A United
States Navy specialist who had returned from a deployment kissing his wife
while their son engages in philematology».


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Pablo Maurette, The Forgotten Sense. Meditations on Touch (Thomas Pavel)




the ludic and propaedeutic role of kissing, applauding its role in erotic
sentimental education. A scene from Andrei Tarkovsky’s unforgettable
first movie, Ivan’s Childhood (1962), an episode from Guy de
Maupassant’s The Kiss (1882) highlight the enigmatic power of the kiss,
while more recent texts by Karl Ove Knausgaard (2014) and Julio
Cortázar (1963) describe in great detail long-lasting kisses. At the end of
the chapter, Brancusi’s sculpture Le Baiser (1913) presents a barely
separated couple forming a block of stone. Mauretti concludes: «they are
not two lovers, they are one kiss» (105).
      The charm of Maurette’s book comes from its author’s willingness
to espouse the most diverse points of view and always discover their
attractive side. Lucretius and materialism excite him, yet in the fifth
chapter, “The French Connection”, he approvingly discusses
Incarnation: A Philosophy of the Body (2000), the last book of Michel Henry
(1922-2002), a French phenomenologist whose work deserves to be
better known. Criticizing the primacy philosophers have virtually
always attributed to the intellect, Henry reflects on the role of lived,
embodied experience, the most fundamental and most common one
being the sense of one’s own flesh, of one’s own body. Calling it self-
affection, Michel Henry describes it as a primal awareness that one is a
concrete, living individual. Whereas since the early seventeenth century
the French Epicurean tradition examined the interactions between
human senses and concluded, like its European partners, that touch, not
sight, is the deepest, most interesting sense, Michel Henry discovers a
deeper, invisible, tacit awareness of one’s body. The Christian doctrine
of the Verb made Flesh holds «the key […] to that other great mystery,
that of our own flesh, that is revealed in a pre-sensorial self-affection»
(126). Only in France, Maurette exclaims, the country where both
Epicureanism and materialism blossomed, can one find a philosopher
who describes «the mystery of the living flesh that manifest itself like
tremor in the dark night of the soul» (128).
      What comes next in Michel Henry’s silent phenomenology is the
ability to move one’s body, which engenders a feeling of elementary
corporal power (“I can”), as well as the insight that the outside world is
real. To illustrate the opposition between “I can” and the reality of the


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world, Maurette resorts to the medieval literary example of Lancelot, the
King Arthur’s Court knight who, driven by love for Queen Guinevere,
Arthur’s wife, makes his way to her place by bending the unsurpassable
iron bars at her window. He hurts his hands, he bleeds but, in
Guinevere’s embrace, he does not even notice his wounds. The primal
“I can” grants him power. As Maurette comments, Michel Henry seems
to paraphrase and change one of Karl Marx’s famous dicta into
«philosophers have hitherto only seen the world in various ways when
the point is to live it» (114). Moreover, since the world is not just what
one sees and measures, one might ask philematologists whether «the
kiss lovers exchange is only a bombardment of microphysical particles»
(115).
      The last chapter, “Skin Deep” returns to the main theme of the book
– the kinship between on the one hand, Renaissance art and scientific
thought, and on the other hand, the haptic impulse of modernist
literature, visible in Hugo von Hofmannstahl’s Lord Chandos’s Letter,
Marinetti’s futurism, Joyce’s Dubliners and Kafka’s Penal Colony. The
chapter also visits Thomas Browne’s reflections on gardening and
texture and ends with several images of Marsyas and Saint Barthelemy’s
skin flaying in Renaissance paintings and sculpture. Surface taken away,
the bleeding bodies cannot survive. As Maurette states in his last
sentence, when these two adventurous periods, Renaissance and
modernism, hit the rock bottom where one can’t go further, «they both
show that even that is nothing but surface» (160).
      Immensely learned, open to a great variety of traditions and
disciplines, The Forgotten Sense belongs to a new crop of readable,
friendly books, reminiscent of open conversations among cultivated
people. Energetic, diverse, the book agreeably jumps from one period to
the next and from one issue to another, in the end succeeding to make a
strong point about an invisible, yet deeply ‘touching’ aspect of art and
literature.
      To conclude, a few ideas concerning Maurette’s present and future
projects. First, while the atomism and materialism inspired by Lucretius
had an important impact on the development of modern science and
philosophy, a wider, plural movement included, in science the birth of


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Pablo Maurette, The Forgotten Sense. Meditations on Touch (Thomas Pavel)




mathematical physics and astronomy, in literature and arts the
rediscovery of classical norms, and in religious life the impact of the
Reformation. Looking at a painting by Brunelleschi or Masaccio, one did
not only ‘see’ the represented scene but also ‘feel’ the mathematically
ruled harmony of the world and ‘reverberated’ at its silent beauty.
When, soon, radical trends of the Reformation prohibited sacred
paintings, the white church walls most probably aimed at helping the
faithful to pay attention only to the Scripture and echo its call.
      Next, Maurette’s superb comments about the wealth of
insignificant details in realist literature might also help nuance Michel
Henry’s insight that we do not just “see” the world, we “live” in it.
Descriptions of architecture, furniture, cloth, physiognomies and bodies
in Balzac and Flaubert certainly convey the sense that countless
inconspicuous items surround us. Yet realist writers remind us that we
‘see’ them and that many of them, if considered attentively, may convey
significant information. In Flaubert’s story A Simple Heart (1877), the
description of Mme Aubain’s living room mentions a barometer
hanging on the wall. It has no role in the story and in the early days of
structuralism, a critic argued that it just aims at suggesting the ‘reality’
of the place in general, without referring to anything concrete. Not quite,
answered another critic: during the last quarter of the nineteenth
century having a barometer at home was the mark of the affluent,
educated bourgeoisie. Readers of A Simple Heart only vicariously live in
Mme Aubain’s house and see its furniture, but if they pay attention, they
can notice significant details.
      Concerning literary modernism, Maurette’s examples beautifully
illustrate this trend’s interest in touch and surface. One might add that
Hofmannstahl, Joyce and Kafka’s cited texts generate a special kind of
dizziness that subverts the readers’ silent inner balance and their equally
silent ability to keep a straight path. But this is not always the case. In
Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913-27), where the interest in
non-visual elements and self-affection deals with submerged memories
of taste and scent (rather than touch), they stir up an unknown side of
inner ‘depth’. The fragrance of a madeleine (a small biscuit) dipped in
a cup of tea reawakes the narrator / main character’s childhood


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memories leading him, after many detours, to understand his true
calling: creative writing.
      These are just minor suggestions. In its present form Maurette’s
book is an exceptionally interesting debut of a highly promising young
literary critic.



                             The Author
Thomas Pavel

       Thomas Pavel is Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor
in Romance Languages and Literatures, Comparative Literature, the
Committee on Social Thought, and Fundamentals at the University of
Chicago. He was educated in Romania – his native country – and France,
and then he pursued an academic career in Canada (University of
Ottawa and Université du Québec à Montréal) and the U.S. (University
of California, Santa Cruz, Princeton University). Among his works:
Fictional Worlds (Harvard University Press, 1986), L’art de l’éloignement,
(Gallimard, 1996), The Spell of Language (University of Chicago Press,
2001) and Comment écouter la littérature (Fayard, 2006).

      Email: tpavel@uchicago.edu



                             The Review
Date sent: 15/03/2019
Date accepted: 30/04/2019
Date published: 30/05/2019




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Pablo Maurette, The Forgotten Sense. Meditations on Touch (Thomas Pavel)




                           How to cite this review
Pavel, Thomas, “Pablo Maurette, The Forgotten Sense. Meditations on
Touch”, Imagining the Impossible: Crossings of Creativity Between Literature
and Science, Eds. L. Boi, F. D’Intino, G. V. Distefano, Between, IX.17 (2019).




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