Abstract:
This paper will investigate the place of tactilism in Iris Murdoch’s early novels and the
possible influence modernist writers such as D. H. Lawrence and Elizabeth Bowen had on
this aspect of her writing. The incidence of interpersonal contact underlies significant erotic
movements in Murdoch’s plots, particularly in The Sandcastle (1957) and The Red and the
Green (1965). Touching, however, is not merely a precursor to a seduction or a sexual
encounter; it also enacts a process of reification as individuals reach out, make contact, and
perceive the peripheries of others. These significant actions, where the selves of others are
real(ised) through haptic intervention, are studied in light of Murdoch’s coinage, ‘touchment’,
a word she used from time to time to refer to intimate contact. 1 Murdoch’s deployment of
touch as a narrative device will be investigated in relation to twentieth century literary
culture’s preoccupation with tactilism by referring to Abbey Garrington’s Haptic Modernism
Touch: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing. As a counterpoint in this enquiry, tactile
interactions with objects and the objectification of individuals through haptic contact will be
explored in a few of Murdoch’s texts to survey her creative deviations from her forebears.
