It should not be a surprise that th

It should not be a surprise that the body is able to function as this type of transitional figure. Throughout this study we have noted that writers and philosophers have seen in the body an ability to establish contact between individuals and elements. This was clearest chapter 2, where I used Elizabeth Grosz’s articulation of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of bodily “touch” to describe the general body. Bodies touch, Grosz argues, and in doing so they define a fundamentally different relationship between themselves and the outside world than models built around non-corporeal objects do. Indeed, most theories of textual hermeneutics mistakenly take this latter, “objective” approach, starting from the assumption that an interpretive theory must describe how the passive and static object of the text becomes meaningful to different people, often in different ways. In the corporeal theory that Grosz provides and that I have applied to narrative, hermeneutics is always a matter of defining first and foremost the point of “touch” between text and reader, the way in which we are offered or create a point of ingress to the text. Such a corporeal hermeneutics is, I think, the most compelling discovery of this theory of narrative, and the point at which the model of bodily circulation that I have described has the broadest application.