Let us begin our search for a more

Let us begin our search for a more inherently narrative theory of textual space with an observation about how we inhabit our bodies in everyday life. Throughout this book I have argued that it is impossible to tell stories without taking account of the bodies at work within them. This is especially the case with settings, since a space only becomes a setting when something is located there. Let us go one step further and observe that we never exactly see the place that we occupy. Occupying a particu­ lar setting means looking out from that space to other locations. To suggest this is, to some extent, to adopt the visual model of the body that we have seen Grosz criticize in chapter 2 as a bias of modern culture. Certainly it is the case that we interact with our actual location more directly through touch and smell, and to some extent through hearing as well. But even within Merleau-Pon ty's writing-from which Grosz draws so much of her theory of touch and the body-it is clear that the body s position within space must be understood by reference to its possi­ ble movemen ts beyond itself. Merleau-Po 叫writes in Phen