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Paul Connerton’s chapter “Bodily practices” immediately sparked a series of questions in my mind: is Connerton’s theory supporting an ableist idea of what memory and performing rituals is?, while it somehow accounts for classism, does it have a narrow understanding of non-Western cultures?

He opens the chapter with an interesting idea of how we incorporate the body through some of our linguistic expressions. For instance, he points at the usage of the verb “to fall” in relation to other negative actions (or at least ones that put us in vulnerable positions): “to fall apart”, “to fall ill”, “to fall asleep” (74), and if I may add from the French, to “fall pregnant”. According to Connerton, this would demonstrate how language and meaning are intimately related to the body. If the act of falling is bodily firstly experienced through vulnerability, fear, and even pain, then those memories would explain how we started to construct from there and added connotation to other instances by putting the two actions in the same verbal phrase. So far, it would seem that these type of practices and associations would be universal, or that at least they would be proposed as such, however, he soon states that “culturally specific postural performances provide us with a mnemonics of the body” (75), in other words, even those seemingly “objective” bodily experiences can actually be experienced differently from one human group to another and those different significations can produce in turn new and different bodily experiences. Therefore, varying the incorporated (what does it mean to fall for groups of people that, dualistically too, see it and feel it as necessary as standing), the inscribed will be so in a culturally specific way. It was the universal pretension in stating that to fall was negative and to stand was equal to power and therefore the positive, that got me thinking that Connerton saw as legitimate these types of associations and their social repercussions: those who can’t stand, are powerless; “logically” validating their social exclusion at least through the way of narrating ourselves. However, I think it becomes clear that that’s not the case when he situates this type of knowledge.

Body ableness is referred to again later in the chapter when he cites Foucault who as well quotes La Salle, when the latter describes the “right” posture for making writing efficient, and where the right side of the body is legitimized, we can read against the grain how left-handed people were (in La Salle’s and I ask myself whether in Connerton’s reading were too) left not only in the necessity to translate all of the descriptions to their own laterality, but just in general put in the place of the invisibilized, abyect, minority. Moreover, awkward bodies appear again, but under a very different referent, the petit-burgeois, figure I find strategic in order to start denouncing classism in the conformation of Western societies, although not strong enough to dismantle it:

Unable to incarnate an acknowledged model, one tries vainly to compensate for this inability through the proliferation of the signs of bodily control. This is why the petit-burgeois experience of the world is characterised by timidity and unease: the unease of those who feel that their bodies betray them [for not having incorporated the manners, etc., of the aristocracy] and who regard their bodies, as it were, from the outside and through the appraising eyes of others, surveying and correcting their practices. (91)

This use of the petit-burgeois and the detailed descriptions of the aristocracy raised another question for me: valid as it is, he is using his knowledge on Western (European) culture and literatures in order to prove his theory, what I find a little problematic was his critique of the communicative systems that use pictograms or that depend on orality, saying that phonetic writing systems allow for economization and skepticism, skepticism being the ability to criticize the contents portrayed; while the use of systems that require more memorization, neither easy nor explicit, are associated with the distancing between the incorporated and the inscribed (in the case of the writing pictographic systems); and that “rhythm sets drastic limits” (76) (in the case of the communicative systems which depend entirely on orality) precisely because it does not have space for the incorporation of skepticism. According to him, the technology of phonetical writing opened up a space for the clear differentiation between the mythical and the historical. This made me think of, again, how narration, in his perspective, is first constructed through a suppousedly universal bodily experience that creates a series of images whose use in creating more stories tends to have a rhythm. Vladimir Propp and his Morphology of the Folktale came to my mind, The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell did as well. In these books, the two authors recuperate diverse folktales and myths from “all over the world” demonstrating in a way how the basic structure and types of adventures repeat from one human group to the other. However, I would question whether the instances of divergence between the tales and myths between diverse cultures and between the same culture over different periods of time are not precisely their way of incorporating said skepticism and Propp, Campbell and specially Connerton, by choosing to overlook them, are not reducing their possibilities; therefore, declaring that Western writing technology is in any way more efficient would be strange, as strange as comparing history and mythology when they serve different purposes, specially when having declared cultural specificity through language and body experience from the beginning.