Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing

208 Pages·2013·1.988 MB·English

by  Abbie Garrington

Haptic Modernism
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For Randall Stevenson, who made a modernist of me.
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Haptic Modernism
Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing
Abbie Garrington
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© Abbie Garrington, 2013
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF
www.euppublishing.com
Typeset in 10.5/13 pt Sabon
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 4174 1 (hardback)
ISBN 978 0 7486 8253 9 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 0 7486 8254 6 (epub)
The right of Abbie Garrington
to be identifi ed as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Chapter 1
Haptic Modernism
Modernist manicures
In Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel Babbitt, we fi rst meet our eponymous
hero at rest in his sleeping-porch, where his recumbent body may be
read: ‘He was not fat but he was exceedingly well fed; his cheeks were
pads, and the unroughened hand which lay helpless upon the khaki
blanket was slightly puffy. He seemed prosperous, extremely married
and unromantic’ (Lewis 1950: 2). Babbitt’s choice of bed, in a space
related only tangentially to the main body of the house, and removed
from the conjugal chamber, leads the reader to suppose he may not be
as ‘extremely’ married as the narrative voice would have us believe. For
Rebecca West, this initial approach to a slumbering Babbitt is part of
Lewis’s exhaustive study of an inconsequential man, for ‘we know the
poor fatuous being in his standing up and his lying down’ (West 1987a:
272). Lamenting the ‘planless’ quality of the novel, West states that ‘its
end arrived apparently because its author had come to the end of the
writing-pad, or rather, one might suspect from its length, to the end of
all writing-pads then on the market’ (271). Whatever the meanderings
of the story, West concedes that Babbitt constitutes ‘a triumph of imper-
sonation’ and ‘a bit of character-exhibition comparable to [Charles
Dickens’s] Mr. Micawber’ (271). To the detriment of the world’s paper
stocks, then, Lewis achieves an insight into the (vertical and horizontal)
life of a suburban estate agent in the year 1920. Yet it is the second
protagonist of that opening sleeping-porch scene that takes centre stage
in the novel – Babbitt’s ‘unroughened’, ‘helpless’ and ‘slightly puffy’
hand. It is through his hand that we come to know the man – as a
synecdoche of Babbitt’s agency, his organ of intentional touch, and the
point at which his skin both defi nes him (his continent skin contains
him; his fi ngerprints are his alone) and most conspicuously extends to
meet the world (in an array of manual practices). Dermatoglyphics, the
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2 Haptic Modernism
study of the ‘writing’ or ridges of the fi ngers, was established following
the discovery by Sir Francis Galton in 1872 that the fi nger print of the
human being is unique to each (Jablonski 2006: 100–1). If Babbitt’s
hand reads the world, gathering impressions of shape, texture, tem-
perature and solidity, it can also be read, and read in such a way as
to establish its owner’s identity. In Lewis’s novel it is most often the
behaviours of the hand rather than its skin inscriptions that are avail-
able to be deciphered – making Babbitt a kind of study in haptoglyphics
(from haptesthai, of the grasp). If a literary sleight-of-hand has occurred
here, where I seem to be treating Babbitt’s puffy paw as an independent
entity, then in my defence I must argue that Lewis’s novel encourages me
to perform this manoeuvre. In fact, the adventures of the human hand
and related sensations of touch and the tactile constitute a substantial
tranche of the literature of the modernist period, as this study aims to
demonstrate.
Babbitt does not always take care of his dermatoglyphs. His motor-
car is most often depicted by Lewis as a positive prosthesis, extending
his physical capabilities, enabling his inhabitation of the commuter
belt community of Floral Heights, and marking out his importance
within the overtly masculine central business district of his city,
Zenith. Washing his car, however, temporarily allies Babbitt with the
feminine – not through an association with the domestic cleaning tasks
customarily overseen by Mrs Myra Babbitt, but through the regrettable
femininity of his hands. A masochistic scrub of those hands rounds off
the motorcar washing procedure: ‘He used up many minutes in washing
his hands; scoured them with gritty kitchen soap; rejoiced in hurting his
plump knuckles. “Damn soft hands – like a woman’s. Aah!” ’ (Lewis
1950: 267). By 1932, advertisers had created the condition ‘Domestic
Hands’ and were selling balms for its alleviation: balms which returned
a woman’s hands to their proper softness after the rigours of domestic
care (Armstrong 1998: 100). Babbitt’s traffi c is in the opposite direction,
in that he punishes his hands for their womanly softness, scouring the
skin with grit. He does well to try and control the way his hands might
be read by fellow citizens of Zenith. Lewis subtly but consistently links
Babbitt’s manual condition, and manual practices, to his newly arisen
discomfort with his place in the Zenith hierarchy. Masculinity here is
carefully circumscribed and regulated through manual decorum. One
must obey the rules of the Boosters Club or Athletics Club in terms of
hearty handshakes and slaps; one must fold one’s hands in prayer at
the Chatham Road church on Sundays; one must not let one’s hands
stray, either towards the wives of others, or towards undesirable (or too
desirable) young girls. Babbitt’s troubles begin when he cannot keep his
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Haptic Modernism 3
hands to himself, both in terms of sexual straying, and in terms of failing
to use those hands in ways agreed by the community. The situation gets
out of hand, we might say, when Babbitt loses his sense of orientation
with regard to his place in Zenith and his socio-political identity, when
his plangent longing for the amorphous ‘fairy girl’ (Lewis 1950: 37)
leads him in dangerously unbusiness-minded directions. Zenith, as its
name suggests, attempts to reach the celestial heights via the thrusting,
phallic, glistening towers of modernity. With another hubristic attempt
to reach the heavens in mind, that of Babel, we know that collapse
comes from a failure to speak a common language. Babbitt’s language
of the hand goes awry, and he falls out of touch, both literally and meta-
phorically, with his surrounding community. Lewis’s novel can there-
fore be read as the story of one man’s drift away from manual decorum,
later corrected by a return to the fold, or to the enfolding hand, of club
members, churchmen and wife.
Babbitt’s relationships with women other than Myra are mediated
through the touch of his hand. Playing on the intertwined understanding
of the terms ‘touching’ and ‘feeling’ as both physical and psychological
experiences, the trope of the touch of a loved one’s hand is a familiar
one. In Babbitt’s trinity of extra-marital relationships, however, touch
always means more than sexual and emotional connection. His party
girl neighbour Louetta Swanson is the recipient of his fi rst forays into
unlicensed contact (and we should note that the ‘tact’ within contact
here refers to both the skin-to-skin connection of a tactile act, and the
recognition of social niceties – niceties with which Babbitt dares to
tamper). Giving Louetta the benefi t of ‘that sonorous Floral Heights
gallantry which is not fl irtation but a terrifi ed fl ight from it’ (124–5),
Babbitt stumbles into the realisation that she is a fellow traveller, tacitly
dreaming of escape:
‘Well, when you get tired of hubby, you can run off with Uncle George.’
[. . .]
‘Anybody ever tell you your hands are awful pretty?’
She looked down at them, she pulled the lace of her sleeves over them, but
otherwise she did not heed him. She was lost in unexpressed imaginings.
(Lewis 1950: 125)
Babbitt and Louetta touch hands on a number of occasions (125, 276,
278), touches that speak most clearly of psychological desperation:
He had [. . .] the impression of a slaggy cliff and on it, in silhouette against
menacing clouds, a lone and austere fi gure. [. . .] He grasped Louetta
Swanson’s hand, and found the comfort of human warmth. Habit came,
a veteran warrior; and he shook himself. [. . .] He patted Louetta’s hand,
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4 Haptic Modernism
to indicate that he hadn’t meant anything improper by squeezing it. (Lewis
1950: 128)
Reaching for a point of anchorage, Babbitt grasps her; shaking himself,
and resetting his somatic sensibilities, he ‘comes to his senses’ and rein-
states gestural propriety in a pat. It is at a party attended by Louetta
that one other form of getting in touch is depicted, that of ‘spiritualism
and table-tipping!’ as Mrs Frink describes it (125). Foregrounding the
touch/communication connection, this attempt at spiritual contact will
be mediated by Chum Frink, whose hands are monitored carefully for
misleading raps of the table (125). Mrs Orville Jones requests that they
attempt to contact Dante, whom she has studied at her reading circle,
and whom Babbitt memorably glosses as ‘the fellow that took the
Cook’s Tour to Hell’ (126). Even the prospect of making contact with
the poet is overshadowed by the licence this event provides for married
men and women to hold one another’s hands in the gathering of the
séance: ‘They [the wives] laughed, “Now, you be good or I’ll tell!”
when the men took their hands in the circle. Babbitt tingled with a slight
return of interest in life’ (125). Spiritual contact with Dante, then, takes
second place to the thrill of manual contact that teeters on the brink of
impropriety – it is the ‘other side’ of extra-marital romancing that is the
real journey beyond the bounds of Zenith in this scene.
After these initial experiments in transgressive touch, Babbitt fi nally
succumbs to a philanderer’s affair with Tanis Judique, a woman whose
suitability is fi rst registered through her own sense of manual propriety.
She refers to ‘these women that try to imitate men, and play golf and
everything, and ruin their complexions and spoil their hands!’, prompt-
ing Babbitt to state that he ‘never did like these mannish females’ (282).
The use of the present tense by both parties suggests that there is a type
of woman now abroad who offends social dignities, with the result
of conspicuous manual ruin. Babbitt’s own feelings on the gender-
appropriateness of certain hand characteristics were made clear in his
masochistic scrubbing, and they recur when he meets Tanis, whose
wonderfully feminine hands lead him to believe that she must surely
play the piano – an excellent feminine accomplishment – ‘like a wiz’
(282). Neither is Tanis ignorant of the statements being broadcast by
her precious hands: ‘He glanced at her smooth hands [. . .]. She caught
the glance, snuggled her hands together with a kittenish curving of slim
white fi ngers which delighted him’ (282). Babbitt’s own manual move-
ments are made awkward by the sight of ‘her fragile, immaculate fi ngers’
(327) and his sexual desire is strangely diverted toward a yearning felt in
his own digits: ‘he was restless with desire to touch her hand’, he is ‘ago-
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Haptic Modernism 5
nized with need’ of the opportunity of a clasp (328). While this ballet
of tactile negotiations conspicuously stands in for other, future physical
manoeuvres (‘ “I’ll have to take you in hand!” “Wish you would!” ’
(325)), it is curious that initial attraction and partner selection, desire,
decision-making and the ultimate dissipation of resolve all seem to be
displaced to the end of the arms.
Given all the ‘manual labour’ that Babbitt undertakes, both in the
pursuit of women and in the bonhomie of the gentlemen’s clubs and
associations he frequents, he can perhaps be forgiven an indulgence that
he has in common with many protagonists of modernist texts: a regular
manicure. While Babbitt’s own offi ce is part of the Reeves Building, fully
equipped with a barber shop of its own, he slopes off with not a little
guilt to ‘the glittering Pompeian Barber Shop in the Hotel Thornleigh’
(33), conspicuous as the ‘largest and most dynamically modern hotel in
Zenith’ (284). The curiously named Pompeian employs forty barbers
and nine ‘manicure girls’ working at a desperate pace (285), and its
steam-fi lled basement (buried?) position prefi gures the underworld of
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927).1 The latter’s combination of futuristic
technology and Egyptian stylistic fl ourishes is pertinent here too since,
for all its dynamic modernism, the Pompeian’s clients sit in their pomp
amongst a sumptuous array of preparations that seems to owe more to
classical Arabia:
About him was luxury, rich and delicate. One votary was having a violet-ray
facial treatment, the next an oil shampoo. Boys wheeled about miraculous
electrical massage-machines. The barbers snatched steaming towels from a
machine like a howitzer of polished nickel and disdainfully fl ung them away
after a second’s use. On the vast marble shelf facing the chairs were hundreds
of tonics, amber and ruby and emerald. It was fl attering to Babbitt to have
two personal slaves at once – the barber and the bootblack. (Lewis 1950:
285)
While the violet-ray treatment, massage-machines (an example of sensu-
ous touch being mediated by a newfangled mechanism) and battle-ready
howitzer of a towel machine ally the Pompeian with technological
modernity, the plenty of the jewelled tonics and the personal attention
of ‘slaves’ suggests a multisensory manipulation belonging to far older
a time. Later, ‘the barber obsequiously rub[s] his wet hair and b[i]nd[s]
it in a towel as in a turban, so that Babbitt resemble[s] a plump pink
calif [sic] on an ingenious adjustable throne’ (286). As Laura U. Marks
reminds us, Arabic philosophers’ association of happiness of body with
happiness of mind led to toleration of moderate indulgences in bodily
pleasures, in societies otherwise carefully regulated in relation to the
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