Literature and the Senses
Literature and the Senses
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文学与感官
DOI:
10.1093/oso/9780192843777.003.0019
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发表时间:
2023
期刊:
影响因子:
--
通讯作者:
Skoulding Z
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Skoulding Z
340 ZOË SKOULDING that includes but extends beyond the human. The loss of familiar sensations foregrounded what is usually unconscious and in the background; we were distanced, masked and sanitized, from the commons of breathing and touch. The availability of food, normally taken for granted, became precarious as supply chains stretched and snapped. While Condillac described the acquisition of knowledge through the senses in terms of the individual, the pandemic revealed that we are anything but statues, that everything about us is collectively shaped and mingled with the world. In this chapter I want to think about the interplay between language and the senses in my practice as a poet, looking back on one particular project with a focus on the linked senses of taste and smell. It was not a response to the pandemic; for several years previously, I had been writing a sequence of poems in response to a different period of change at the time of the French Revolution. A Revolutionary Calendar is a sequence of 360 poems based on the plants, animals, and agricultural implements to which each day was dedicated in the French Republican Calendar. I had begun it with a historical curiosity that became increasingly culinary and botanical as I searched out scents and tastes that were constantly on the point of vanishing, either into the past or into the gap between French and English. On its publication in 2020, the book seemed to take on unexpected contextual meanings, and it also led me into new ways of performing poetry. Poetry makes time sensory, drawing attention to the sensuality of language noticed by Marx:‘The element of thought itself–the element of thought’s living expression–language–is of a sensuous nature.’4 The recovery of the senses is at the heart of the revolutionary modernisms of the twentieth century, following Marx’s observation that ‘[i] n the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having’. Private ownership overrides and diminishes the other senses: in the relentless pursuit of capital, the senses are degraded, and can only be emancipated through a shift away from private property to the commons of public ownership. Furthermore, Marx makes the point that the senses are both social and constructed: the senses of the social man differ from those of the non-social man. Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form–in short, senses capable of human gratification, senses affirming themselves as essential powers of man) either cultivated or brought into being.... The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present. 5