ABSTRACT

This chapter describes the Tozzi representation of the body, arguing that embodiment, both in its ontological and historical dimensions, is the central concern of his novels. In each of his novels, Tozzi presents a protagonist who, often with great anguish, confronts a violent domestic and social space positioned in a natural world marked by brutality. Tozzi's blurring or outright reversal of the expected developmental sequence of the emotions reveals his debt to William James's theory of human emotions. James acknowledges that the customary sequencing of the stages of an emotion begins with the 'mental perception' that 'excites the mental affection called the emotion' which, in turn, 'gives rise to the bodily expression'. The involuntary manifestation of emotion that is most prevalent throughout Tozzi's novels is that of blushing. The ambivalent metaphor of blindness is part of a programmatic negation of the epistemological authority of the human sensorium.