Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 5 Number 2, August 2004
Special Issue: Literary Universals
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Hertel, Ralf. Making Sense: Sense Perception in the British Novel of the 1980s and 1990s. Amsterdam & New York, NY: Rodopi, 2005. 243pp. ISBN: 90-420-1864-x. € 50.- / US$ 67.-
Reviewed by
Pomona College
“When we open a book, all it provides us with is, strictly speaking, black letters on white pages” (191). Ralf Hertel takes this incontrovertible fact as the starting point of his inquiry into how prose writers write the body and the senses and works out answers mostly in British novels from the 1980s and 1990s. Whence “does literature obtain this power to turn mere letters into vividly experienced worlds?” (191). Relying on Iser’s reader-response theory, on feminist and postmodern strategies of writing the body and perception, touching on the growing amount of neuroscience data on sense perception and its neural processing, and solidly based on close reading, Hertel ends his well-organized book with a discussion of the human faculty of the imagination. It is “all in the head,” and imagination is the key tool in transmitting the inherent power of texts into truly felt emotions and even sense impressions in the reader.
The book opens with an introductory chapter that provides an overview of textual aspects of perception, together with accompanying developments in the “real world” (cyber phenomena, “olfactory globalisation” [12]) and new theoretical concepts. The views presented vary widely: whereas Kamper and Wulf notice in 1984 Das Schwinden der Sinne, (the titel of their collection of essays), Starobinski rediscovers the body as the seat of all sense perception in his Kleine Geschichte des Körpergefühls only a few years later (1991). Foucault, always keenly aware of the body, sees it in a postmodern sense as a place of inscription of social (power) structures; and Baudrillard has moved toward understanding the outside world as a “simulacrum” altogether. Broadly speaking, the time from the 1960’s onward is characterized by the simultaneous “disappearance of the body” and its “rediscovery” or “reemergence.” Susan Sontag, for one – and Hertel keeps her call for “an erotics of art” in lieu, or as a complement, of a “hermeneutics” (17) in mind throughout his analyses – points into the direction of bodily “presence instead of representation” or (over)interpretation (18) early on in that time period.
The chapter, besides providing a useful, although rather condensed, juxtaposition of major theoretical positions in, broadly speaking, textualization, interpretation, and representation of the body and the senses, helps to direct Hertel’s subsequent analyses by pointing out the crucial “parallels between sense perception and imagination as triggered by a literary work” (25). Hertel’s main task is thus to show how each of the traditional five senses stimulates the cortex of the brain and shapes conscious individual experience from the inside, as it were, through language and textual strategies, instead of externally through concrete, physical stimuli provided by the sense organs. Imagination as the key human capacity for this internal perception must therefore be an integral part of literary interpretation, criticism, and theory.
The subsequent chapters are each dedicated to one sensory mode, beginning with the visual, and moving on to the auditory, the olfactory, the gustatory, and the tactile. Each chapter centers on one work by one author for providing the key examples for discussion and analysis, followed by an expansion and amplification of the findings in both a theoretical-general direction and by adducing additional texts, either by the same author or by others. This simple and clear organization of the material provides a helpful and predictable framework for contents that, by their very nature, tend toward dispersal.
At the center of the first chapter on the visual is John Banville’s trilogy Frames (1989-1995), with “fames” indicating the key mode of representation, namely looking at characters as at paintings. Liquefaction of the border between art and (fictional) reality from both directions, looking into and out of frames, is at the center of Banville’s writing. In the theoretical part of the chapter, Hertel spells out the concept that dominates Banville’s trilogy but can be generalized as the central strategy in all “visual writing”: ekphrasis. Its role as a literary device is, according to Hertel, “to create mental images through words” (56). While both painting and literature “create mental images,” there is nevertheless a fundamental difference: “art is often considered to be irrational, following the rules of images and dreams, while literature is believed to be rational, governed by the logic of grammar” (63). That this constellation has a strong potential for gendering, is discussed by Hertel in A. S. Byatt’s novel Still Life.
Not only is Hertel good at choosing his examples here and throughout, he also has a gift for putting a fine point onto his findings in a memorable phrase or choice of metaphors – as for the contrastive representational strategies of texts and images: Pygmalion brings life to visual objects, Medusa freezes live figures into images (62). In the contemporary world of rapid and ubiquitous communication Medusa seems to have the upper hand. The trend is not of “the text silencing the picture, but the picture taking over” (71). Ekphrasis “is a prime tool in writing the senses” (70).
The centerpiece of chapter two, “The auditory in the novel” (72), is John Berger’s To the Wedding (1995). Told by a blind narrator, this novel is, according to Hertel, all about voices, their distribution and interaction and, as a consequence, the increasing disappearance of the narrator and, ultimately, the “death of the author.” Hertel connects the postmodern phenomenon of narrator-less novels with the “influence of orality on literary forms” (85) and the effort of lending a voice to those who do not generally have one (91). He therefore puts the question of “how the technique of fictive orality functions and how it succeeds in creating the impression of orality in written fiction” at the center of his inquiry (89). Multiperspectivity, “polyphony of voices inside the reader” (96), the text taking on the function of “a musical score,” where “each act of reading is an individual performance” (98) emerge as dominant strategies of postmodern, auditory or voice-centered writing. This writing, though, amounts to a “paradox: a mute form of orality” (100). As with ekphrasis, the technique of foregrounding orality has an implicit gender bias: “It is striking how frequently we find women in the position of speakers and men in the position of writers” (102).
For
its olfactory qualities Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981)
is the main text of chapter three. Discussed are also Mc Ewan’s Cement
Garden, Berger’s King, and, in a departure from the British novel,
but justified by its near-canonical status in the field of olfactory writing, Süskind’s
Perfume. As others before him, Hertel encounters and discusses the
specific difficulty of that sensory mode in literature through its precarious
linguistic grounding, but he provides an enlightening analysis of Midnight’s
Children, based on Marianne Crowney’s four categories of the physical,
symbolic, magical, and metafictional roles of smell/the nose in the novel (106).
In accordance with his overall interest in how the characteristics of a given
sensory mode shape literary writing, Hertel focuses on metafictionality and
shows convincingly how the foregrounding of olfactory perception by Rushdie is
tied to certain structural, thematic, and descriptive features of the book.
Examples are the link between the narrator, Saleem, and the Hindu god Ganesh
with his elephant’s head and trunk; the well-established connection between
the olfactory and memory – which creates the potential for a rather subjective
and unreliable narrator; the pickling of chutneys as a method of systematizing
smells (as well as tastes) and shaping remembrance; and the easy dispersion of
smells as an analogy of the unruly and potentially unlimited narrative itself.
Yet, Hertel has to admit that “the reader will hardly feel that he actually
experiences smells or that he smells decidedly more than when reading other
texts” (114). In the subsequent theoretical part, Hertel discusses the
olfactory in its tension between its purely animal and physical aspect, its
function as a carnivalesque and picaresque mode, its status as an exemplary
marker of postmodernity, but rightly emphasizes its literary role as
quintessential “resistance to representation” per
se (128). Instead he notes the “symbolic use of smell” and its “link
... with the process of writing” in Rushdie (130).
For chapter four, “The gustatory in the novel,” Michèle Roberts’s Flesh and Blood (1994) provides the paradigms. As for the other senses, the gustatory, closely associated with food and eating, is both a central topic of the text itself as well as a structuring, metatextual device. Roberts is quoted as saying that her writing is about “food, sex, and God” (133). The link between the first two in the bodily processes of in- and excorporation is obvious enough, to the third it exists, for instance, through the Eucharist, thereby pointing out the essentially liminal experience of eating. Issues of bodily and textual control are further topics associated with the gustatory and Hertel, in the theoretical part of the chapter, discusses quite extensively A. S. Byatt’s story “The Chinese Lobster,” which he calls “anorexic,” in contrast to Irvine Welsh’s Filth, which is “bulimic” (155). Rather brief are Hertel’s comments on taste, the food experience generalized into an aesthetic key category, inevitably raising the spectre of its other, disgust. Absent is also any reference to Elias Canetti’s profound discussion of functions of eating in both an anthropological and symbolic sense.
The main character, Vilanelle, in Jeanette Winterson’s novel The Passion (1987) which serves as the prime example for illustrating the tactile, has webbed feet and thus an additional expanse of skin, the general organ of touch. Temperature, texture, and the erotic are foregrounded in the novel as well as in Hertel’s discussion of touch. He goes on to emphasize the liminal dimension of touch, its intimacy and, in the analysis of Ondaatje’s The English Patient, its blurring of boundaries between the patient’s (burnt, missing) skin and the story that unfolds. “With his skin, the layer onto which his biography and identity was inscribed, erased, he is the ideal canvas for Hana’s projections and desires” (184). Writing the body and writing on the body are central themes associated with the sense of touch, together with, although only briefly addressed by Hertel, the question of pain.
The final section of the book first summarizes key findings of the foregoing analyses before turning to the all-important capacity of the imagination, the internal psycho-emotional-sensory engine that turns the black letters on the white page into experience. Naturally, the points made by Hertel, excellent though they are, do not amount to a full discussion of this crucial component in human perception, emotion, thought, and, specific to the inquiry under discussion here, reading. With a view to the role and functioning of what we might term “written perception,” Hertel is right to call “a detailed analysis of the reading process ... a desideratum” and to point out that such an analysis has to be “an interdisciplinary cooperation of literary critics and cognitive scientists” (225).
Hertel’s study is clearly written, stimulating, and enlightening throughout. It provides intriguing applications and innovative uses of existing theories and concepts across a diverse body of recent (British) writing. In raising more questions than it answers it points to considerable lacunae in the unquestionably interdisciplinary field of literary encoding, representation, imagination, and perception. The study takes a significant step toward one of Hertel’s own desiderata: “an aisthetics of art” (224) - the spelling highlighting the physical base of such a concept, the body, as the unruly and irreducible piece de résistance in conteporary writing as well as theorizing. In calling for a close collaboration between literary theory and cognitive science, Hertel is set on a promising path of future research efforts.