Histories of the Human Hand: Huxley and Isherwood’s Jacob’s Hands and Modernist Manual Culture

Garrington, Abbie

Abstract

Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood’s Jacob’s Hands (1944) has long been thought a curiosity or a failure—a screen treatment that never became a film. Yet it might reasonably be reframed, indeed best understood, as a vital text exploring modernist manual cultures. This chapter reads the titular Great War veteran Jacob Ericson as a traumatized figure to set alongside parallels from Lawrence’s short stories, clarifying the influence of the latter author upon the work of Huxley in particular. It considers the spiritual and pseudoscientific theorizations of the hand available at Huxley and Isherwood’s time of writing, including the trend of ‘hand-reading’. Finally, it reads Jacob’s Hands’ engagement with Black figures of the Pentecostal Church, influenced by the important Azusa Street revival, as a means of exploring the use of Black actors on-screen to attempt to exploit the haptic capacities of modernist cinema itself.

Citation

Garrington, A. (2023). Histories of the Human Hand: Huxley and Isherwood’s Jacob’s Hands and Modernist Manual Culture. In A. Kern-Stähler, & E. Robertson (Eds.), Literature and the Senses (392-412). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192843777.003.0022

• Online Publication Date: Aug 1, 2023
• Publication Date: Aug 1, 2023
• Deposit Date: Aug 27, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 6, 2024
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Pages: 392-412
• Book Title: Literature and the Senses
• Chapter Number: 21
• ISBN: 9780192843777
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192843777.003.0022
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1627640