Grosz's call for a return to the la

Grosz's call for a return to the larger corporeality of “touch" clearly has implications for the way that we think about bodies within narra­ tive, but how we respond to this critique is not obvious. Ifnarrative is a means of conveying knowledge about the world, there may well be something particularly appropriate about the visual model of the body. We need to ask, however, if there are elements of narrative texts that engage with corporeality in ways other than as distinct, meaningful bodies. To return to Morrison s novel, we might note that in describing Beloved as a general body that overarches others, I am really suggesting that she is a mediating figure-both between the individual characters, and between the reader and text. She is not only a means of bringing other characters into contact, but also a physical embodiment of a story that the reader must confront. The last image in the book is of the disap­ pearing traces of Beloved s body：“Down by the stream in back of 124 her footprints come and go, come and go. They are so familiar. Should a child, an adult place his feet in them, they will fit. Take them out andthey disappear again as though nobody ever walked there”（275).Morrison ends the novel by emphasizing the reader's position in relation to this subject matter in general and to Beloved herself in particular in the refrain of the book s last chapter：“This is not a story to pass on月(275). Beloved here seems to exempli马r a kind of corporeality that does not coalesce into a distinct body given meaning by the story, but instead brings character and character, reader and text into contact. She is liter­ally the means by which these narrative elements “touch.”