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FATHOM a French e-journal of Thomas Hardy studies
6 | 2019 Objects in Hardy and Conrad Les objets chez Thomas Hardy et Joseph Conrad
Annie Ramel and Isabelle Gadoin (dir.)
Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/fathom/871 DOI: 10.4000/fathom.871 ISSN: 2270-6798
Publisher Association française sur les études sur Thomas Hardy
Electronic reference Annie Ramel and Isabelle Gadoin (dir.), FATHOM, 6 | 2019, « Objects in Hardy and Conrad » [Online], Online since 01 October 2019, connection on 09 May 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ fathom/871 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/fathom.871
This text was automatically generated on 9 May 2020. 1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Objects in Hardy and Conrad Annie Ramel
Articles
Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Apollo, Dionysus, and Stonehenge J.B. Bullen
Joseph Conrad’s Objects Robert Hampson
“He had tied a bit of white worsted round his neck”: Focusing on Details in Heart of Darkness Nathalie Martinière
Observing Objects as Mutability and Meaning in Thomas Hardy’s Human Shows (1925) Adrian Grafe
‘Looking into Glass’: Moments of Unvision in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy Isabelle Gadoin
Boats and Knitting Machines: Objects of Doom in Hardy and Conrad Stéphanie Bernard
Kairos and Mistiming: Clocks, Watches in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd and Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim Catherine Lanone
The “Obscure Odyssey” of the Object in Conrad’s “Karain” Josiane Paccaud
The Ring in The Mayor of Casterbridge: Gaze and Voice as Surplus Objects Annie Ramel
The Use of Weapons for the Production of the Uncanny in Hardy and Conrad Andrew Hewitt
Objects or Subjects? Pictoriality and Domesticity in Tess of the d’Urbervilles Ludovic Le Saux
The Footprint as Object in Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887) and Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly (1895) Jane Thomas
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Introduction: Objects in Hardy and Conrad Introduction : les objets chez Hardy et Conrad
Annie Ramel
1 According to The Concise Oxford Dictionary, an “object” is “a thing placed before the eye or presented to one of the senses”. The word comes from the Latin objectum, itself derived from objicere, which means “to throw” (jacere) “before” (ob). An “object”, whether an artefact or not, may be put to some purpose. But the object, as “thrown before” the subject, as a “person or thing to which action or feeling is directed”, may also refer to the thing aimed at by human desire. Therefore the object is not just what is owned, or could be owned, but also what one desires.
2 The life of objects extends over the years, sometimes over millennia, during which they become loaded with meaning and memories. They can be exhumed, like the “Druid Stone” buried three feet deep in the earth at Max Gate, which Hardy discovered, brought to the surface, and exhibited in his garden. In his mind, it was undoubtedly associated with Stonehenge, a fact which J.B. Bullen uses as a starting-point for his essay on “Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Apollo, Dionysus, and Stonehenge”. The essay focuses on a dialectic between Apollo, the sun god, and Dionysus, the chthonic god of the underworld, where the harp-playing Apollo is figured by Angel Clare and Dionysus by Alec d’Urberville, whose cigar looks like a “phallic thyrsus”. It concludes with a parallel between two scenes: the violation of Tess by Alec d’Urberville/Dionysus in the forest of The Chase, which anticipates the “imminent immolation” of Tess at Stonehenge, viewed as a sacrifice to the sun god. Both Dionysus and Apollo “surfeit” on the object offered to them in sacrifice: Tess.
3 Objects may be a trace of bygone civilizations left in the present, or the productions of an age when “commodity culture” was beginning to spread, not just in Victorian England, but all over the world, at a time when “the sun never set on the British Empire”. Such objects can be given, exchanged, sold, in complex circulations of meaning and emotions. Robert Hampson, in his essay on “Conrad’s Objects”, focuses on objects as cultural artefacts, seen in an ethnographic perspective, and on the trading
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networks through which commodities are exchanged in Conrad’s fiction. The article shows “the pervasiveness of commodity culture” in an inter-related, globalized world, of which Conrad had a first-hand experience. It also shows how those objects were sometimes recoded, recycled, in various forms of “cultural detournement”. Hampson goes further when he considers the object as fetish, and notes the sense of “hollowness” which overcomes the characters when their fetish objects lose their magical power. The essay ends with another form of magical thinking: “charms and talismans”, which can be given and thus have power in a man’s life. But to be able to relate what Yael Levin calls “the otherwise present” (Levin quoted by Hampson) — like haunting, ghosts, hallucinations — the writer needs a power of imagination that goes beyond the techniques that could be learnt from Flaubert.
4 With Hardy, and then with Conrad, the nineteenth century was drawing to a close. In the Victorian era, especially after the Great Exhibition of 1851, objects multiplied in the daily life of English people. Homes became cluttered with decorative objects, and Victorian novels were said to be “crowded novels” (Brown 1986, 786-794), filled with a multitude of useless details or objects. Victorian realism has often been associated with an aesthetics where fullness prevails, in which proliferating objects come to punctuate the narrative, thus producing numerous effets de réel. Yet those objects can be powerfully symbolic, they can serve as metonyms, or metaphors, which represent personalities, situations, ideological positions. Dickens used them as elements of characterization, revealing the psychology of his characters, sometimes producing micro-comical effects.
5 But Hardy and Conrad wandered between two worlds, the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries — one drawing to a close, the other attempting to be born, to paraphrase Matthew Arnold’s verse in “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”1. And it seems that objects in their texts have a different modus operandi from that of earlier writers. Indeed Flaubert’s verisimilitude is not enough to capture “the otherwise present” (R. Hampson). Several articles published in this volume point to a punctum effect that objects produce in the studium of representation, blurring signification, redirecting the reader’s gaze, in an aesthetics which is radically different from that of Dickens. Catherine Lanone, analyzing the scene in the church where Troy is to be married to Fanny, in Far from the Madding Crowd, sees the quarter-jack as a punctum in the studium of reality. Similarly, Jim’s vision of reality in Lord Jim is made unreadable by unexpected details that produce a punctum effect, while the “strange noise” that he hears on the Patna functions like an auditory punctum (S. Bernard). The “bit of white worsted” the dying man has tied round his neck in Heart of Darkness is an apparently insignificant detail, but according to Nathalie Martinière it works as a punctum shooting out of the studium of the text, pricking, piercing, bruising the reader (Barthes 26) as it confronts him to some repressed, unbearable truth — the truth about colonialism and its crimes. Similarly, the “disruptive presence” of objects such as the “glaringly white” shirt and cuffs of the accountant, the dominoes on board the Nellie, the piano-keys at the Intended’s in Brussels, form a subtext which re-introduces the human element into the picture and forces the reader to consider the ethical and moral questions raised by the novella. Though seemingly unimportant background details, they are essential in Conrad’s aesthetic strategy.
6 Indeed objects in Hardy and Conrad have the power to make us see and hear what the text in its discursive dimension fails to show. That point is made by Adrian Grafe in his
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essay on Human Shows, Hardy’s penultimate poetry volume. The article deals with Hardy’s deep sense of the “aliveness” of objects (Winnicott, quoted by Grafe) — objects which may speak in Hardy’s poems, or be addressed to by the speaker of the poem. They may seem to be insignificant details, but under their frozen outer surface they have a life of their own which means a lot to the poet. They both serve as metaphors and as realia linking the poet to the phenomenal world. Hardy “particularizes” them, he takes them as they are, in sheer wonder at their density and vividness, which inspire his “poetics of wonder”.
7 If, beyond their “immediacy” (A. Grafe), objects point to some truth that lies beneath the surface of the text, could it not be argued that they have the power to make visible the invisible? The idea is developed by Isabelle Gadoin in her essay on looking-glasses, inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s ideas on visibility/invisibility. There is more than meets the eye in Hardy’s looking-glasses: instead of providing the onlooker with the perfect image of a unified self, they work as “hour-glasses”, like Vanities, and they also allow moments of “unvision” when the subject glimpses the enigma of his subjective division. In fact the glass “abstracts” human subjects into shadows, it “empties out the universe” as it shows it peopled with phantoms.
8 The question then is: what is that thing pointed out by objects in literature, the “thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing” (Woolf 138), the “deep hidden truthfulness” (Conrad 168), “the heart and inner meaning” of things, which art makes “vividly visible” (Hardy 183)? For if something transcends the material reality of objects, what may be visioned — or unvisioned — in that beyond? What is the essence of the “invisibility” that the visible both conceals and reveals? In George Herbert’s Anglican hymn (“The Elixir”), it was a vision of Heaven that could be glimpsed (I. Gadoin). In those days, the presence of some transcendent reality was conceived as the equivalent of Kant’s “supra-sensible thing”. But with Hegel (and with Conrad), “the transcendent presupposition has vanished into thin air”, “the truth of the supra- sensible thing is just appearance as appearance” (Josiane Paccaud). Conrad “finds no salutary hope in transcendence” (S. Bernard). The First Cause is not a caring God but an indifferent knitting machine for which “nothing matters” (Ian Watt, quoted by Bernard). According to Žižek, the sublime points to a void, “the pure Nothing of absolute negativity” (Žižek 1989, 206). Hegel calls that abyss “the night of the world” (Žižek 1999, 136). For Conrad, that “thing of nothing” (Paccaud) is “a depth of horrible void”.
9 That unfathomable void is at the core of several articles in this volume: in Stéphanie Bernard’s article it is the “vain gloriousness” of the Titanic in Hardy’s poem “The Convergence of the Twain”2. A parallel is drawn between “the spinner of the years”, which has caused the disaster, and Conrad’s “knitting machine”. Hardy’s poem conveys a vision of “human vanity”, i.e. of emptiness (in the etymological sense of “vanity”), as it is about a radical, irremediable loss, the loss of an object which is “forever unreachable in this realm of death” (Bernard).
10 In her study of timepieces, Catherine Lanone opposes the “ecology of kairos” (as exemplified by Gabriel Oak’s skilful handling of communal and organic time in Far from the Madding Crowd) to Jim’s inability to act at the right moment in Lord Jim. After the fatal jump (“an anti-kairotic moment”), a “temporal faultline” opens between before and after, an abyss which makes Jim feel as if he “had jumped into a well — into an everlasting deep hole” (Conrad 70). What has happened is “a drama of no-thing”
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(Paccaud, quoted by Lanone), a “temporal vortex” that the text can only circle round. Thus it appears that the fullness, the solidity of the Victorian world, crowded with a profusion of material objects, turns into some bottomless void in the writings of our two authors.
11 In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek (following Lacan) distinguishes between three types of objects of desire: first, “the object cause of desire”, which we must leave behind and whose very absence sets desire into motion. Should it fail to be a radical absence, a missing object that may be replaced by another, it would block the metonymy of desire and lead to tragedy. In “Karain” it is embodied by Karain’s mother and the Queen of England (Josiane Paccaud). In Far from the Madding Crowd, Bathsheba is “the object cause” of Boldwood’s desire. The second object, a “massively intrusive presence, the mute embodiment of impossible jouissance” (Paccaud), is the Lacanian object-gaze and object-voice, which may haunt a character’s life if it ceases to be an evanescent punctum and turns into a permanent fixture in his/her reality. Annie Ramel’s article on “gaze and voice as surplus objects in The Mayor of Casterbridge” deals with such an object. So does Paccaud’s article, in its handling of voice and gaze (the voice and the sunken eyes of Matara’s ghost pursuing Karain). The logical outcome of this disorder is the destruction of social links: Henchard becomes alien to his community, and only death can ensue, with the absolute silence reached at the end of the novel. Žižek’s third variety of the object makes possible a restoration of the symbolic order: in “Karain”, it is the gilt sovereign, the jubilee sixpence, a portable object of exchange in the image of the Queen of England, which is “a mere semblance for an absence” (Paccaud). Yet that insignificant leftover stabilizes the cruel gaze and hushes the haunting voice. Bernard also writes about Conrad’s characters who need to cling to objects (like the sovereign in “Karain”) as well as to “the salutary value of work”, which saves them “from the devouring terror of emptiness”.
12 Viewing human beings as phantoms, mere shadows in the “night of the world”, raises the issue of the relation between subject and object: what becomes of subjects when machines take the lead over men and turn them into objects (Bernard)? Andrew Hewitt approaches the question by his study of weapons in the novels of Hardy and Conrad: domestic objects (like carving-knives) are turned into lethal weapons in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and The Secret Agent — and conversely weapons used in combat may find their way into the domestic sphere. The uncanny, the unheimlich, springs from this blurring of boundaries, the intrusion of the strange into the familiar. Rather strangely, those weapons make their appearance “without warning”, “out of nowhere”, they are “added” to the scene after they have been used, in a reconstruction of events. They seem to be in excess of reality3. The question, then, is: would it be possible for those objects to have an agency of their own? Could they be so full of uncontrollable life that they might be part of what Jane Bennett calls “vibrant matter”?
13 The misuse of domestic objects — like the carving-knife used as a weapon by Tess — is also mentioned by Ludovic Le Saux, who stresses not so much the unheimlich aspect of such misemployment as its symbolic value: for it is emblematic of Tess’s failure to fit into the domestic mould of “The Angel in the House”. Le Saux makes this point by focusing on Hardy’s reappropriation of the tradition of Golden Age Dutch painting, in an ironic perspective which parodies the genial atmosphere of that genre. Hardy’s highly visual descriptions are reminiscent of Vanitas paintings, as they suggest the vanity of human existence and contribute to the tragic tone of the novel. Thus the
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novel is “progressively emptied of human presence” (Le Saux) — absence par excellence being rendered by the image of the two vacated chairs on the morning after Tess has told her story. Again we find ourselves in “the night of the world”, and again the question raised by “the vain gloriousness” of human life concerns the relation between subjects and objects: as subjects are nullified, objects become subjects,4 they invade the scene and become powerfully present.
14 Jane Thomas focuses on the footprint in Hardy’s The Woodlanders and Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly. The essay shows how such “irrelevant details” (J.H. Miller) are not just “objects” but “things”, whose “thingness” comes from their being in excess of reality, in a close relationship to a subject. Objects such as fetishes, idols, totems, etc., may be called “things” because their value for a particular subject goes beyond their usefulness in the material world5. In both Hardy’s and Conrad’s texts, a father fetishizes his daughter’s footprint because he projects his own subjectivity and ambitions on her. Thus the footprint as “object-thing” is emblematic of patriarchal/colonial control, which commodifies Grace Melbury in The Woodlanders, and Nina Almayer in Almayer’s Folly. But paternal fetishization is defeated by both daughters: Grace’s light foot saves her from the mantrap set in her way, she is reconciled with her husband who takes her away from her father. Nina will not follow in her father’s footsteps, she walks away from home and follows her desire. Both women free themselves from their footprint as “object-thing” and assert themselves as subjects.
15 Focusing on objects in Conrad and Hardy means raising the question of their texts as objets d’art — a question raised by several authors in this volume. Bernard shows how Hardy turns “objects of doom” into art objects, Le Saux sees the “magnifying of objects” as a way “to show the beauty of the insignificant”. That point is also made by Grafe, who borrows from Tim Ingold a distinction between objects and things: to him poems are “things” rather than objects, i.e. phenomena “involved in setting, time, and process” (Grafe), which keep the poet in a permanent state of dynamism and creation. That idea brings desire back to the foreground, and is consonant with Lacan’s statement that art objects are “sublime”, in that they are “elevated to the dignity of the Thing” (Lacan 2008, 138). Could it not be argued that Conrad’s novels are sublime objects because they are raised to the dignity of the “nothing” that they encircle? In both Hardy’s and Conrad’s writings, the void is turned to good account, for it makes resonant the silent voice of the text and makes audible its “unheard melodies”6.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography (1980), trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill & Wang, 1981.
Brown, E.K., “The Art of the ‘Crowded Novel’”, in Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. Jerome H. Buckley, New York: W.W. Norton, 1986.
Conrad, Joseph, Lord Jim (1900), Norton Critical Edition, New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.
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Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar, vol. XX, “On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972-1973”, trans. Bruce Fink, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1999.
Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar, vol. VII, “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960”, trans. Dennis Porter, Abingdon: Routledge, 2008.
Millgate, Michael (ed.), The Life of Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1984.
Woolf, Virginia, The Waves (1931), ed. David Bradshaw, Oxford World’s Classics, 2015.
Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso, 1989.
Žižek, Slavoj, “Otto Weininger, or ‘Woman Does Not Exist’”, The Žižek Reader, eds. Elizabeth Wright & Edmund Wright, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999.
NOTES
1. “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born”. 2. A parallel can be made between the convergence of the iceberg and the ship (“The Convergence of the Twain”) and the chapter entitled “Converging Courses” (“Concurritur, Horae Momento”) in Far from the Madding Crowd, in which a parody of kairos brings together the protagonists only to make them burst apart (Lanone). 3. Like points of contact with the Lacanian Real (what cannot be integrated into the symbolic order and remains unspeakable)? The punctum is such a point of contact. 4. Objects seem to speak when characters are silent, they are also “witnesses” that have eyes to see. They could be linked to the two objects (gaze and voice) listed by Žižek. 5. If one remembers that for Lacan “jouissance is what serves no purpose” (Lacan 2008, 3), one feels tempted to argue that the “thingness” of objects is closely related to a subject’s jouissance. And therefore not far removed from the Lacanian Thing, Das Ding. 6. Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter”.
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Articles Articles
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Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Apollo, Dionysus, and Stonehenge Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Apollon, Dionysos et Stonehenge
J.B. Bullen
1 In 1899 Sir Edmund Antrobus who had recently inherited Stonehenge and the land around it, put the monument up for sale. In the campaign to try to buy it for the nation Hardy’s support was enlisted because of its prominence in one of the closing scenes of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. He agreed to be interviewed and a reporter from The Daily Chronicle was sent down to Dorchester to meet the author at Max Gate. Hardy had always had a keen interest in the archaeology of Wessex, and when the foundations of his house were being dug three skeletons were discovered. In 1884 he gave a paper to the Dorchester and Antiquarian Field Club in which he said he believed that these were Roman in origin. He was actually mistaken, and their true origins were only revealed in 1986 when excavations were conducted near Max Gate for the Dorchester by-pass (see Bellamy 46). The findings were startling. Max Gate was discovered to lie almost at the centre of a late iron-age henge whose dimensions almost exactly matched those of Stonehenge, and the skeletons discovered in Hardy’s garden dated from about 3,000 BC. The space under Max Gate has never been excavated, but in an irony that Hardy would have appreciated, he wrote his account of Tess of the d’Urbervilles at his desk poised above numerous undiscovered prehistoric burial pits. In 1891, however, he discovered in his garden something that might have given him another clue to the existence of this subterranean henge. It was a large sarsen stone buried three feet down in the earth and which he brought to the surface and placed in his garden. He called this the “Druid Stone” and it later featured in the poem “The Shadow on the Stone”. “I went by the Druid stone,” he wrote, “That broods in the garden white and lone” (Hardy 1976, 530). But the fact that he called it “The Druid Stone” suggests that it was associated in his mind with Stonehenge. When he was interviewed by The Daily Chronicle he offered no opinion about the origins of the monument but said that he delighted in the “state of dim conjecture” (Hardy 1967, 200) surrounding its history and purpose, including, of
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course, that it had played a part in Druidic rites of human sacrifice. In the interview Hardy expressed architectural and engineering opinions about the monument, carefully explaining its weathering, its possible preservation and its appearance. He also spoke of how it acted as a trigger for the imagination, stressing the loneliness of its situation, its solemnity and its height. He also recalled a peculiar aural effect that he had experienced amongst its pillars. “If a gale of wind is blowing,” he said, “the strange musical hum emitted by Stonehenge can never be forgotten” (200).
2 Some nine years previously when Hardy was writing Tess of the d’Urbervilles Stonehenge figured in similar terms but in a more dramatic way. When Angel and Tess approach the monument “rising sheer from the grass” in the “open loneliness” and “black solitude” it is the size and verticality that first impresses them, reaching to “an indefinite height overhead” (Hardy 2008, 415). At first the fallen blocks appear to Angel to be a “Temple of the Winds” (415) but when he recognises that it is Stonehenge, Tess asks if it is “the heathen temple…?” (416). Resting on the “Altar Stone”,1 she puts a further question to Angel: “Did they sacrifice to God here?” …. “No,” said he. “Who to?” “I believe to the sun.” (Hardy 2008, 417)
3 Tess’s choice of the word “sacrifice” instead of “worship” is, of course, a significant one. It brings to mind the “dim conjecture” about Stonehenge concerning Druids and human sacrifice that, though they were seriously doubted in archaeological circles by Hardy’s day, persisted in the popular mind.2 It also takes the reader back in the story to the “druidic mistletoe” that hung on the ancient trees of the Chase on the night of Tess’s violation by Alec d’Urberville, and it anticipates the imminent immolation and slaughter of Tess herself, sacrificed to the laws of the land. Contemporary archaeological belief endorsed the idea that Stonehenge was in fact a solar temple (e.g. Evans 326), with several commentators earlier in the century suggesting that during the period of Roman occupation it had actually been a temple of Apollo (Davies 190 and Gidley 15). Which brings us to the sound produced by the “stiff breeze” as it played upon the edifice.
4 In recent years there has been a strong interest in the acoustic properties of pre- historic monuments. The audio-archaeologist Rupert Till has examined many buildings in this light, including the stones of Stonehenge, and has confirmed the authenticity of Hardy’s observation of this effect (Banfield 20-21). But significant here is the difference between the way in which Hardy recorded it in The Daily Chronicle and how he expressed the same effect in the novel. In the newspaper he was quoted as saying that it sounded like a “strange musical hum”; in the novel, however, it creates “a booming tune, like the note of some gigantic one-stringed harp” (Hardy 2008, 415).
5 The idea that the sound of the wind at Stonehenge resembles that of a harp recalls, of course, Angel Clare’s harp playing. It takes us back in the novel to Talbothays, its wild garden and an evening in June during the courtship of Angel and Tess. It also invokes an element in the mythological patterning of the novel. I have previously explored the presence of solarism in this novel but now I think this to be even more extensive than I first believed.
6 Angel and Tess first met in Marlott during the May-time “Club Walking” incident. Hardy calls this a “local Cerealia” (Hardy 2008, 19) a fertility rite associated with the
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Greek goddess Ceres to assure the success of the harvest. Ovid (in both the Metamorphosis and the Fasti) mentions the way in which the female celebrants of the Cerealia wear white clothing only and are either virgins or are sexually chaste during the period of the rites (Ovid 1986, Book X, ll. 430-434, and Ovid 2011, Book 4, 11, ll. 618-619). As Hardy accounts for this episode, however, the association of another Greek deity is invoked, because the whole incident takes place under the benevolent auspices of the sun. The sun lit up their white garments and their “luxuriant” hair. Each girl was “warmed without by the sun” and each one “had a private little sun for her soul to bask in” (Hardy 2008, 20). Later in the novel the sun appears even more prominently in a context that links it specifically to solar worship. It occurs at that point when Tess has returned to Marlott with her child and is once again taking up agrarian life. “The sun,” Hardy wrote, on account of the mist, had a curious sentient, personal look, demanding the masculine pronoun for its adequate expression. His present aspect, coupled with the lack of all human forms in the scene, explained the old-time heliolatries in a moment. One could feel that a saner religion had never prevailed under the sky. The luminary was a golden-haired, beaming, mild-eyed, God-like creature, gazing down in the vigour and intentness of youth upon an earth that was brimming with interest for him. (Hardy 2008, 99)
7 The name of Phoebus Apollo lies just beneath the surface of this mythopoetic event, and the prominent mythographer Max Müller, with whose work Hardy was familiar, described the rising sun in similar terms. It was, he said, “the revelation of nature, awakening in the human mind that feeling of dependence of helplessness, of hope of joy […] the spring of all religion” (Max Müller, “Comparative Mythology” in Müller 1867, ii, 99-100).
8 The sunshine presides over Tess’s first entry into the valley of the Froom providing an “ideal photosphere” (Hardy 2008, 119) for her arrival and the sunlight of dawn “that strange and solemn interval, the twilight of the morning” (145) lights up her first intimacy with Angel in the water meads around Talbothays. Hillis Miller linked the action of the sun in this novel with “the fecundating male source” (Miller 122), and nowhere is this more powerfully expressed than during the moment of Angel’s return to Talbothays having announced his marriage plans to his parents. As the couple embrace, Tess’s excitable heart beat against his by way of reply; and there they stood upon the red-brick floor of the entry, the sun slanting in by the window upon his back, as he held her tightly to his breast; upon her inclining face, upon the blue veins of her temple, upon her naked arm, and her neck, and into the depths of her hair. At first she would not look straight up at him, but her eyes soon lifted, and his plumbed the deepness of the ever-varying pupils […] (Hardy 2008, 187)
9 The sexual excitement of this event is achieved partly through the way in which Angel’s physical presence elides into the rays of the sun slanting behind him, and both the sun and Angel enact a process of symbolic penetration.
10 But the sun is not always a benevolent masculine force. Its fertilizing power drives the milkmaids of Talbothays to distraction, and as Tess lies on the Altar Stone at Stonehenge, the rising sun performs another act of penetration but one which has greater destructive implications than even her loss of virginity in The Chase: “Soon the light was strong, and a ray shone upon her unconscious form, peering under her eyelids and waking her” (Hardy 2008, 418). Finally solar influence is denied all
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benevolence as “the sun’s rays smiled […] pitilessly” on the figures of Clare and ‘Liza-Lu attending Tees’s execution at Wintoncester.
11 Hardy’s notebooks reveal that he was fully aware of the dominance of solarism in late- nineteenth century mythography. In 1885, for example, he copied out some details from an article by Müller entitled “Solar Myths”, which summarized the current view that sun worship formed the basis for all religions: The sun
12 He was also a great admirer of both John Addington Symonds and Andrew Lang, who, though they adopted rather different approaches, held shared beliefs in the centrality of solarism in the myth-making process. In the novel, the courtship of Angel and Tess follows minutely the pattern of the solar day and the solar year. Beginning in the spring dawn it reaches a crescendo in August, begins to sink in September with the prospect of marriage, and sinks to its lowest point on their wedding day on the last day of the year: “The sun was so low on that short last afternoon of the year that it shone in through a small opening and formed a golden staff which stretched across to her skirt, where it made a spot like a paint-mark set upon her” (Hardy 2008, 236).
13 Angel Clare is frequently and positively identified with the solar deity, Apollo. His harp playing is a strikingly unusual leisure activity,3 and in mythology Apollo was the harp- playing god of music. Apollo took this skill with him when, after killing the Cyclops he was banished from heaven by his father, Zeus, and took up temporary residence with King Admetus in Thessaly. Similarly Clare feeling at odds with the strict evangelical ideologies of his father and brothers and their “untenable redemptive theolatry” (Hardy 2008, 131) took on voluntary exile in agricultural activities. Working as a herdsman and shepherd, he even pointed out to Tess the superior pleasures of “ pastoral life in ancient Greece” (141). Tess is deeply moved by the prophylactic power of Clare’s harp playing in guarding against the ghosts of her past life (“But you, sir, can raise up dreams with your music, and drive all such horrid fancies away!”, 140), and in the legends of Apollo he is often associated with animals. For example, Sophocles called Apollo “the wolf slayer” (Electra, qtd in Lang, ii, 207-208). Hardy exploits this association in the context of Angel’s solar status. “Her affection for him,” Hardy writes, “was now the breath and life of Tess’s being; it enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiating her into forgetfulness of her past sorrows, keeping back the gloomy spectres that would persist in their attempts to touch her. […] [But] she knew that they were waiting like wolves just outside the circumscribing light” (Hardy 2008, 213). Apollo’s character was not, however, solely protective or supportive. On the contrary in the ancient world he was regarded as an apotropaic god, that is one who brought healing and comfort to mankind, but who also brought plague, pestilence and death. “The fair humanities of old religion,” said Andrew Lang, “boast no figure more beautiful; yet he, too, bears the birth-marks of ancient creeds, and there is a shadow that stains his legend and darkens the radiance of his glory” (Lang ii, 207-208). Similarly, in his “Hymn to Proserpine”, Swinburne expressed this double sidedness of the character of Apollo: “Yea, is not even Apollo, with hair and harpstring of gold, / A bitter God to follow, a beautiful God to behold?” (Swinburne 58). Yet for Tess Angel Clare is an object of worship: “She hung on
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his words as if they were a God’s” (Hardy 1967, 361) and her feelings persist even after he has deserted her. When he returns to Wessex from Brazil, the narrator tells us that “he was still her Antinous, her Apollo even” (Hardy 2008, 408).
14 But as he appears in Hardy’s novel, Clare is not quite the Apollo of Max Müller, Andrew Lang or even the wider world of Victorian Hellenism. Instead he bears many of the characteristics of the Olympian deity but in a weakened or diminished form. This is nowhere better seen than in his less than impressive harp playing. Apollo was the god of music, supreme in execution and performance. Angel’s harp, like his “progressive” ideas, is second-hand and “both instrument and execution were poor” (Hardy 2008, 138). Angel’s adoption of late nineteenth-century views on the freedoms of neo- paganism are highly tenuous, with the result that the first challenge to them results in his rapid collapse into the orthodoxies Victorian socio-sexual morality. So Angel resembles not so much the Apollo of nineteenth-century Olympianism, the embodiment of what Walter Pater called the “rational, chastened, [but] debonair” (Pater 1980, 162), but appears as a weakened latter-day version of the god. For the origins of such a figure we have to turn from the mythographers to the work of Heinrich Heine, and especially his essay “The Gods in Exile” (1853). Heine was a radical poet, journalist and writer who challenged many of the religious and social orthodoxies of his native early nineteenth-century Germany. Heine’s “romantic paganism”, as Osama Mamoru showed many years ago, deeply impressed Hardy (Mamoru 1939, 517). His rebelliousness against convention at the expense of feeling, his struggle, as Matthew Arnold called it, “in the war of liberation of humanity” strongly elicited Hardy’s sympathy. Hardy had read Heine’s Die romantische schulle before 1881 since he quotes it in A Laodicean, and he quotes Heine again in Two on a Tower (1882). In 1890, according to Florence Emily Hardy he was once again reading Heine, (Hardy 1928, 301) and when they made a journey to Montmartre in Paris he visited Heine’s grave. “The Gods in Exile” is an antinomian text, part myth, part history, part fiction, about the way in which the pagan gods were suppressed and driven into exile by the growth of the power first of Christianity and then of the Church. As Heine described it: […] when the true Lord of the universe planted the banner of the cross on the heavenly heights, and those iconoclastic zealots, the black band of monks, hunted down the gods with fire and malediction and razed their temples, then these unfortunate heathen divinities were again compelled to take to flight, seeing safety under the most varied disguises and in the most retired hiding-places. (Pater 2014, 269)
15 Heine’s Gods represent various human impulses and desires repressed or ignored within the orthodoxies of nineteenth-century culture. They are a remnant of pagan vitality that had a powerful influence on the expression of neo-paganism in the work of Pater, Swinburne, John Addington Symonds and Vernon Lee. Symonds, in particular, developed a version of Hellenism that ran counter to contemporary Olympianism, stressing the sensual and sensuous aspects Greek art and life. “Years before we met”, Hardy wrote to Symonds, in 1889, “I used to read your essays (as correctives to those of M. Arnold […])” adding that “I get raps from critics who appear to think that to call me a pessimist and a pagan is all that is necessary for my condensation” (Hardy 1978, 1 190-191). But it was probably Hardy’s meeting with Walter Pater, first in 1886 then for a longer period in 1888, that increased his interest in the underground persistence of the cult of pagan sentiment.4 Pater had long been fascinated by Heine’s idea of fallen gods in exile and throughout his life it maintained a strong hold on his imagination.5 His
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first reference to the idea occurs in his 1869 essay on Leonardo da Vinci, and then again in his essay, “Pico della Mirandola”, where Pater included a long quotation from Heine with the account of how a latter-day Apollo was “content to take service under graziers” (Pater 1980, 24-25). But it is in three of his imaginary portraits, “Denys l’Auxerrois” (1886), “Duke Carl of Rosenmold” (1887) and “Apollo in Picardy” (1893) that he develops this notion most extensively. Heine depicts Apollo as a god coming into conflict with Christian orthodoxy and having to “accept service with cattle breeders […] as once before he had tended the cows of Admetus…” (Pater 2014, 294). For Pater in “Apollo in Picardy”, he was a “god […] in exile” who had become “a hireling at will…, singing his way meagrely from farm to farm, to the sound of his harp” (279). Similarly in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Clare joked of his harp playing that “he might have to get his living by it in the streets some day” (Hardy 1978, 133). “Mr Angel Clare”, says one of the milkmaids summing up his latter-day Apollonian characteristics, “he that is learning milking, and that plays the harp – never says much to us. He is a pa’son’s son, and is too much taken up wi’ his own thoughts to notice girls. He is the dairyman’s pupil – learning farming in all its branches. He has learnt sheep-farming at another place, and he’s now mastering dairy-work. […] Yes, he is quite the gentleman- born” (Hardy 1967, 129).
16 Though “Apollo in Picardy” was not published until 1893 it is highly likely that Pater had already conceived the idea when he spent time in London as Hardy’s neighbour, and discussed with him a subject that had been an abiding passion. As a result there are a number of points of strong similarity between Pater’s Apollo and Hardy’s Angel Clare – points that are not shared by Heine. First, there is the double-sided nature of the God. This was one of the most prominent characteristics of the Olympian figure of Apollo. In Pater’s story Apollo is benign. He “charmed away other people’s maladies”, and “calmed the respirations of a troubled sleeper” (Pater 2014, 281-282). At the same time, however, he attracts victims such as wild animals, then “surfeited […], destroys them when his game with them is at an end” (282). In “Apollo in Picardy” Pater wrote of the way in which Apollo charmed his prey. “Though all alike would come at his call or to the sound of his harp, he had his preferences […]” (282) and Angel’s harp playing in the wild garden at Talbothays, too, is powerfully necromantic. As Clare plays in the open space Tess, drawn by his music “listened […] [and] like a fascinated bird, could not leave the spot” (Hardy 2008, 138). The garden itself is redolent with a spontaneous, “natural”, liquid sexuality. Tess “undulated upon the thin notes of the second-hand harp” penetrated by their harmonies which “passed like breezes through her, bringing tears into her eyes” (138-139). In a synaesthetically sensual moment Tess’s sexual arousal becomes identified by the “natural” arousal of the garden: “the dampness of the garden [is] the weeping of the garden’s sensibility” (130). But the focus of that arousal is the correspondence created between the music produced by Clare’s harp and the fecundating action of the plants: “The floating pollen seemed to be his notes made visible” (139).6
17 The sexual, fertilizing power of pollen in connection with music plays an important role previously in this novel. It occurs at the point when, in an earlier phase of her life, Tess is working for Mrs d’Urberville at Tantridge. It is September and persuaded by her co-workers she begins to make regular journeys to the nearby town of Chaseborough and its Saturday market. On one occasion she follows her friends to the house of a hay- trusser and peat-dealer where, in a hut in the back garden they are having “a little jig”
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(Hardy 2008, 71). From outside “she could hear the fiddled notes of a reel” coming from “a windowless erection used for storage”. “From the open door there floated into the obscurity a mist of yellow radiance […]”. The identity of the yellow mist is revealed “when she came close and looked in”. She now “beheld indistinct forms racing up and down to the figure of the dance”. The dust from the floor was thrown into the air and “this floating, fusty debris of peat and hay, mixed with the perspirations and warmth of the dancers” to form “a sort of vegeto-human pollen” (72).
18 Here again, sexual arousal is likened to the transmission of pollen and is triggered by music. But in contrast to the Olympian calm of Talbothays where the music “wandered in the still air with a stark quality like that of nudity” (Hardy 2008, 138), Hardy supplies a scene of frenetic metamorphosis in which the ordinary people of Tantridge are transformed into some of the demi-gods of classical mythology. Hardy wrote: Of the rushing couples, there could barely be discerned more than the high lights— the indistinctness shaping them to satyrs clasping nymphs—a multiplicity of Pans whirling a multiplicity of Syrinxes; Lotis attempting to elude Priapus, and always failing… At intervals a couple would approach the doorway for air, and the haze no longer veiling their features, the demigods resolved themselves into the homely personalities of her own next-door neighbours. Could Trantridge in two or three short hours have metamorphosed itself thus madly! Some Sileni of the throng sat on benches and hay-trusses by the wall; and one of them recognized her. (Hardy 2008, 72)
19 The role call for this “metamorphosis” is a significant one. When it was published as an extract in The National Observer in November 1891 this episode was given the ironical title “Saturday Night in Arcady”, alluding to the principal domain of Pan, the lustful fertility god who pursued the virginal Syrinx in an attempt to rape her. Priapus, offspring of Dionysus and brother of Pan, attempted, according to Ovid, to rape the nymph Lotis at a celebration in honour of Dionysus, while Silenus was the drunken teacher and follower of Bacchus (Ovid 2011, Book 1, ll. 415–433). These are some of the most lascivious gods in the mythological pantheon, and all of them are associated in one way or another with Bacchus or Dionysus. So this dance at Chaseborough is much more than a simple “jig”: instead it is some kind of Bacchanalian orgy. But where, we might ask, is Dionysus? The answer comes immediately: “A loud laugh from behind Tess’s back, in the shade of the garden, united with the titter within the room. She looked round, and saw the red coal of a cigar: Alec d’Urberville was standing there alone” (Hardy 2008, 73).
20 This is the strangest metamorphosis. Alec d’Urberville the young, irresponsible buck of the Slopes suddenly becomes a Dionysian figure complete with the familiar phallic thyrsus in the form of a lighted cigar. D’Urberville is a modern figure, whereas Pater in his imaginary portrait, “Denys l’Auxerrois” went back to the Middle Ages. He developed the idea of the god Dionysus “a denizen of old Greece itself actually finding his way back gain among men […] in an ancient town of medieval France” (Pater 2014, 167). In Pater’s story Denys is a restless spirit creating disturbances in Auxerre with “wild social licence” (77). Under his influence “the hot nights were noisy with swarming troops of dishevelled women and youth all with red-stained limbs and faces, carrying their lighted torches over the vine-clad hills, or rushing down the streets […]. A shrill music, a laughter at all things, was everywhere”. As Pater’s editor Lene Østermark-Johannsen points out, the origin of this incident is to be found in Euripides’ description of the women of Thebes who have “become wild, unruly and mad under the influence of
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Dionysus” (177n) and we know that The Bacchae had a powerful influence on Hardy. Not only did he possess an 1850 imprint in the Bohn’s classical Library, he copied (with approval) the words of a review of a more recent translation of the play from The National Observer: “There is nothing more fascinating for a modern mind than to study the essential forces of Paganism.… The Bachæ is a play of surpassing interest. Dramatically & artistically it is p[erha]ps the poet’s most finished work: instinct with a feeling for nature, it is ever suggestive of the charm of mountain, wood, & river, &c.” To this Hardy added a note saying, ‘I quite agree with the above criticism’” (Hardy 1985, entry 1905). But Hardy also seems to have read carefully Heine’s version of the legend in “The Gods in Exile”, similarly re-enacted in the medieval world of the Tyrol.
21 In Heine’s account of the exile of Dionysus a young fisherman lends a boat once a year to three mysterious monks who call at night at his house. On the seventh occasion, filled with curiosity, he hides on the boat and travels with them to a location on the local river. Disembarking, the fisherman is amazed by what he sees. “There were many hundreds of young men and young women, most of them beautiful as pictures, although their faces were all as white as marble [which] gave them the appearance of moving statues” (Pater 2014, 296). Throwing off their habits, one “monk” reveals “a repulsive, libidinous face, and pointed goat-ears, and scandalously extravagant sexuality” – clearly the figure of Pan. The second “monk”, “a big-bellied fellow, not less naked, whose bald pate the mischievous women crowned with a wreath of roses” is Silenus, and the third is Dionysus: “[…] he unbound the girdle of his robe, and with a gesture of disgust flung off from him the pious and dirty garment, together with crucifix and rosary, [and] lo! there stood, robed in a tunic brilliant as a diamond, a marvellously beautiful youth with a form of noble symmetry […] The women caressed him with wild enthusiasm [and] placed an ivy-wreath upon his head […]”. The scene is “filled with romping, dancing, and vine-crowned men and women”, all to the sound of music. “But,” says Heine turning to the reader, “I forgot that you are […] most cultured and well-informed […] and have long since observed that I have been describing a Bacchanalia and a feast of Dionysius” (297).
22 Hardy, too is describing a Bacchanalia, and has borrowed some of the same ithyphallic followers of Dionysus from Heine. But in Tess of the d’Urbervilles the connection between Dionysus and Alec d’Urberville extends beyond this scene. Dionysus or Bacchus was most famous as the inventor of wine, he subverted conventional morality, and had a most potent effect on women. In the novel Hardy gathers together these characteristics as he opens Chapter Ten. “Every village”, he writes, “has its idiosyncrasy, its constitution, often its own code of morality. The levity of some of the younger women in and about Trantridge was marked, and was perhaps symptomatic of the choice spirit who ruled The Slopes in that vicinity. The place had also a more abiding defect; it drank hard” (Hardy 2008, 70; my emphasis). The “choice spirit”, Alec d’Urberville, like his mythological forebear, is wild, unconventional, and sensual. Dionysus was an exotic god, an outsider, who descended on Thebes from Asia. Alec d’Urberville is also an outsider, who descended upon Wessex from the north of England, the son of a successful businessman. In legend Dionysus was known as the ivy god of epiphanies and disguises who often shocked or surprised humans by his sudden and unannounced appearances. D’Urberville surprises Tess when she is teaching bullfinches to whistle. “She became aware of a movement among the ivy-boughs which cloaked the garden- wall”. Then, “looking that way she beheld a form springing from the coping to the plot. It was Alec d’Urberville […]” (67). Alec then skulks in his mother’s bedroom with the
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intention of jumping out on Tess but thinks better of it. Later in the novel he appears suddenly beside the bonfire at Marlott, disguised as a local farm labourer; and when he leaps up from an altar tomb in Kingsbere church, on which he looked like a monument of tomb furniture, “the shock to her sense […] was so violent that she was quite overcome […]” (384).
23 Alec d’Urberville comes to Tantridge with a false identity: he is a Stoke disguised as a d’Urberville, but his most extravagant disguise is his sudden conversion to Evangelical Christianity: “less a reform than a transfiguration” (Hardy 2008, 325), which Hardy expresses as a corporeal change from Paganism to Paulinism: The former curves of sensuousness were now modulated to lines of devotional passion. The lip-shapes that had meant seductiveness were now made to express supplication; the glow on the cheek that yesterday could be translated as riotousness was evangelized to-day into the splendour of pious rhetoric; animalism had become fanaticism; Paganism, Paulinism; the bold rolling eye that had flashed upon her form in the old time with such mastery now beamed with the rude energy of a theolatry that was almost ferocious. (Hardy 2008, 325)
24 Similarly in Heinrich Heine’s “The Gods in Exile” the figure of Dionysus, or Bacchus, hides beneath an ecclesiastical guise. After his nocturnal experiences, the young fisherman decides to report the events to the superior of a local monastery. As he is telling his story he realises that the monk before him was the same person that he had seen on the previous night “as a heathen demon” (Pater 2014, 298).
25 Hardy even supplies his Dionysus with maenads. In the Bacchae, Dionysus has about him a group of wild women who perform ecstatic rituals during the Bacchanalia. Three of these are mentioned by Euripides as violent and possessed: Agave, Autonoë and Ino. After the dance at Chaseborough three women, Car Darch, Nancy her sister and a “young married woman” (Hardy 2008, 74) leave the dance and travel along the road in a state of maenadic, inebriated ecstasy. The were possessed “with a sensation that they were soaring along in a supporting medium […] themselves and surrounding nature forming an organism of which all the parts harmoniously and joyously interpenetrated each other. They were as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon and stars were as ardent as they” (74). Describing maenadic ecstasy R.P. Whittington Ingram writes that “the limitations of self are laid aside, and the dancer feels at one with the god, with her fellows and with all nature” (Winnington-Ingram 154). When Tess laughs at one of the girls, Car Darch, for her absurd behaviour, Car strips off her bodice, appearing like a figure from Greek sculpture, “as luminous and beautiful as some Praxitelean creation” (Hardy 2008, 76). Meanwhile the other girls close ranks against Tess, threaten to hunt her down, but suddenly she is carried off on horseback by Alec d’Urberville. In one of his manifestations Dionysus is a hunting god. In the Bacchae (Otto 109) he spurs on the maenads and as Dionysus Zagreus, he pursues wild animals. It is in the appropriately named woodland area named “The Chase” that Alec violates Tess and begins the first phase of a hunt which persists to the last scene of the novel.
26 Tess first became aware of The Chase when she went to claim “kin” with the d’Urbervilles living at Tantridge. “The Chase”, Hardy wrote, is “a truly venerable tract of forest land, one of the few remaining woodlands in England of undoubted primaeval date, wherein Druidical mistletoe was still found on aged oaks, and where enormous yew-trees, not planted by the hand of man grew as they had grown when they were pollarded for bows” (Hardy 2008, 43-44). Hardy stresses the age of the forest,
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“primaeval”, the size of the trees that make it up, “enormous” and its mythological associations, “Druidical”. By the time that Tess and Alec arrive there the September night has cooled, the moon has gone down and fog has arisen amongst the trees. Hardy repeatedly stresses the profound darkness. “The Chase was wrapped in thick darkness”, “The obscurity was now so great […] everything else was blackness alike”; “darkness and silence ruled everywhere around”, forcing Alec to move about instinctively like a blind man “obliged to advance with outstretched hands to avoid contact with the boughs” (82). Dionysus was an ancient chthonic fertility god of the underworld for whom The Chase is an appropriate habitat. It is an extremely ancient place, as ancient as the act perpetrated upon Tess. Furthermore, the Chase stands outside the world of culture and human society, placed deep within the world of arboreal nature. Several of the characters including her mother point out that what happened to Tess was essentially a “natural” act (“’Tis nater, after all”, 94) and part of the cycle of nature. In The Chase the only witnesses to Tess’s violation are the inhabitants of that natural world: “gentle roosting birds in their last nap and […] the hopping rabbits and hares” (82).
27 The events of The Chase involve a sacrifice, the sacrifice of Tess’s virginity, but it seems to have gone unnoticed that both the circumstances and the details of those events have close parallels in her second sacrifice, the sacrifice of her life at Stonehenge. Both The Chase and Stonehenge are pervaded by darkness so great as to produce the sense of sensory deprivation. In The Chase, Alec advanced “with outstretched arms” and at Stonehenge Angel and Tess proceed “gropingly for two or three miles” (Hardy 2008, 415). In both incidents Tess is exhausted and lies on or near the ground. In The Chase she first sits, then falls back into a deep sleep; at Stonehenge she lies on an altar stone and falls asleep. In both incidents she is covered by the overcoat of the accompanying male. Alec “pulled off a light overcoat that he had worn, and put it round her tenderly” (81) whereas Clare “flung his overcoat upon her” (416). In both scenes her body provides a horizontal axis, and in both she is surrounded by tall objects rising from the ground. In the first it is the natural, ancient trees of The Chase; in the second it is the ancient stones of the man-made Stonehenge, “older than the centuries” and “rising sheer from the grass” (415). The upward thrust of the stones of Stonehenge is stressed several times. The “vast erection” (415) has “vertical surfaces” (415), comprising “towering monoliths and trilithons” which reach up to “an indefinite height overhead” (417). The events of The Chase are represented as part of a violent but natural cycle, and the sexual act is softened by its natural, woodland setting. Not so the drama at Stonehenge, where the intransigent nature of Druidic law elides into the inflexible statutes of British law and is expressed by the presence of the ancient stones, oppressively “square and uncompromising” (415).
28 Throughout her life Tess seems to have been caught between conflicting forces: chthonic Dionysianism and draconian Apollonianism, often expressed metaphorically in terms of the contrast between darkness and light, night in conflict with daylight. There are many important twilight moments in the novel (including the events at The Chase and Stonehenge) and several are expressed as a struggle between illumination and darkness. Sometimes they exist in Manichean opposition. For example, at Chaseborough: “It was a fine September evening, just before sunset, when yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hair-like lines” (Hardy 2008, 70-71). More frequently, however, the relationship is a complementary one: “In the twilight of the morning, light seems active, darkness passive; in the twilight of evening it is the darkness which
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is active and crescent, and the light which is the drowsy reverse” (145). In the earlier part of the nineteenth century Dionysus and Apollo had been seen as contrasts between the irrational and instinctive and the rational and the tranquil. Following in the wake of Winckelmann, Hellenism had been seen largely in terms of the triumph of Olympianism with Apollo at its head while the chthonic deities were relegated to the margins. But this balance changed. The admiration accorded to the serenity and balance of the Olympian gods was slowly withdrawn in favour of the Mysteries. As Margot Louis points out though, “mythographers at the middle of the nineteenth century seemed often to glorify the Olympian gods of light and of conscious wisdom” (Louis 12); as the century wore on the emphasis shifted “toward the chthonic deities and the gods of the Mysteries” (12); and by the end of the century “the focus turned towards the orgiastic and ecstatic elements of the chthonic rites” (14). The denunciation of the Olympians for their cold indifference to human affairs and their inadequacies as custodians of moral worth was slowly accepted as was the celebration of the energy and vitality of the Dionysian mysteries. Pater in his contribution to the posthumous collection Greek Studies was one of those who clearly began to mark out the new ways of reading ancient mythology, and it is easy to see where Heine’s “The Gods in Exile” fits within this pattern. The shift in the balance of attitudes in the nineteenth century to the figures of Greek myth could be expressed in the changing fortunes of attitudes to Apollo and Dionysus. The historians Walter Burkett and John Raffan trace the way in which Apollo and Dionysus were sometimes treated as opposing forces even within Greek culture itself but often as complementaries or as equals. They point out that the figures of both gods appear at Delphi and, according to Plutarch the year was divided between them. The four winter months belonged to Dionysus and the summer months belong to Apollo (Burkett and Raffan 224; Lang ii 216). In Tess of the d’Urbervilles Alec d’Urberville’s violation of Tess takes place in September, and his pursuit of her continues in the bleak days of the winter at Flintcombe Ash. Angel Clare, however, courts her through the spring and summer then in the winter rapidly vanishes westward like the sun itself, over the horizon to Brazil.
29 But there are other points of affinity between these two principles. As the sons of Zeus, Apollo and Dionysus were brothers and it was claimed that Dionysus was buried in the temple of Apollo at Delphi. In the novel the events of Tess’s “sacrifice” in The Chase and her arrest on the Stone of Sacrifice at Stonehenge represent terrible re-enactments. In the Chase, Alec/Dionysus is at home in a natural arboreal setting, “a truly venerable tract of forest land” (Hardy 2008, 43); at Stonehenge Angel/Apollo finds his appropriate setting in another forest, in the man-made “forest of monoliths grouped upon the grassy expanse of the plain” (415). Tess, it would seem, is caught between two inexorable and destructive forces – one linked to the ancient Chthonic God Dionysus, the other to the God Apollo.
30 The dialectic movement between the extremes of Dionysian and Apollonian plays an important part in the structure of Tess of the d’Urbervilles and the question inevitably arises as to whether Hardy might have been familiar with the same dialectic used by Nietzsche’s in his The Birth of Tragedy (1872). “Wherever the Dionysian voice was heard”, wrote Nietzsche “the Apollonian norm seemed suspended or destroyed. Yet it is equally true that, in those places where the first assault was withstood, the prestige and majesty of the Delphic god appeared more rigid and threatening than before” (Nietzsche 35). Yet, says Nietzsche, neither side ever prevails because they are in fact complimentary. Though this is very close to the view that Hardy seems to take in Tess of
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the d’Urbervilles, the evidence suggests that when he was writing his novel he knew little or nothing about Nietzsche or The Birth of Tragedy. The book was not translated until 1909 and though there are brief references to Nietzsche in Hardy’s notebooks, it would appear that he first came to an understanding of The Birth of Tragedy in 1902 when he read and annotated a review of a French translation by Arthur Symons (see Hardy 1985, entry 2194). But as Richard Seaford points out, the idea of dialectic between Dionysus and Apollo was not peculiar to Nietzsche. For at least a century before Nietzsche wrote The Birth of Tragedy numerous German intellectuals – far more than in England or France – had pondered the Dionysiac not as mere matter for scholarship but as a principle that retains significance for the contemporary world”. The Apollonian and the Dionysiac, he adds, “were elaborated as contrasting ideal types of beauty by the art historian Winckelmann (1717-1768), as contrasting creative principles by the philosopher Schelling (1775-1854), and by the jurist and anthropologist Bachofen (1815-1887) as contrasting principles that include sexuality, gender, spirituality, and social organisation” (Seaford 143). As Hardy employs these principles, Tess becomes the victim of complementary ontologies, hunted down first by the principles of one and then by the principles of the other. Pater’s Apollo was a cruel hunter and the words he used to describe him have a strange resonance with the famous last lines of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Apollo he says, “surfeited […] destroys [his victims] when his game with them is at an end” (Pater 2014, 282). Hardy too, invokes a hunting metaphor: “‘Justice’ was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess” (Hardy 2008, 420).
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Evans, Arthur, “Stonehenge: a public lecture given on Dec. 6, 1888” (Oxford, 1888), 312–330.
Gidley, L., Stonehenge, Viewed by the Light of Ancient History and Modern Observation, Salisbury, 1873.
Hardy, Thomas, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), eds. S. Gatrell, and J. Grindle, Oxford: OUP, 2008.
Hardy, Thomas and F.E. Hardy, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840–1891, London: Macmillan, 1928.
Hardy, Thomas, “Shall Stonehenge Go?”, in Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings, ed. H. Orel, London: Macmillan, 1967.
Hardy, Thomas, The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. J. Gibson, London: Macmillan, 1976.
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Hardy, Thomas, The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, ed. L.A. Björk, London: Macmillan, 1985.
Hardy, Thomas, The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, eds. R.L. Purdy and M. Millgate, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978–2012.
Heine, H., “The Gods in Exile”, in Walter Pater, Imaginary Portraits, ed. L. Østermark-Johansen, London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2014.
Lang, A., Myth, Ritual and Religion, London: Longmans, Green, 1887.
Louis, M.K., Persephone Rises, 1860–1927: Mythography, Gender, and the Creation of a New Spirituality, 2016, London: Routledge, 2016.
Miller, J.H., Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982.
Millgate, M., Thomas Hardy: a Biography Revisited, Oxford: OUP, 2004.
Müller, F.M., Chips from a German Workshop, London: Longmans, Green, 1867.
Müller, M., “Solar Myths”, The Nineteenth Century 18 (1885): 900-922.
Nietzsche, F.W., The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals (1872), trans. F. Golffing, New York: Anchor Books, 1990.
Osawa, M., “Hardy and the German Men-of-Letters”, Studies in English Literature, 19.4 (1939): 504-544.
Otto, Walter F, Dionysus Myth and Cult, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1973.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A.D. Melville, ed. E.J. Kenney, Oxford: OUP, 1986.
Ovid, Times and Reasons: a New Translation of Fasti, trans. & eds. A. Wiseman & T.P. Wiseman, Oxford: OUP, 2011.
Pater, W., The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry: the 1893 Text, ed. D.L. Hill, London & Berkeley: U of California P, 1980.
Pater, W., Imaginary Portraits, ed. L. Østermark-Johansen, London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2014.
Seaford, R., Dionysos, London: Routledge, 2006.
Swinburne, A.C., Swinburne: Selected Poems, ed. L.M. Findlay Manchester: Carcanet, 1982.
Winnington-Ingram, R.P., Euripides and Dionysus: an Interpretation of the Bacchae, Hakkert: Amsterdam, 1969.
NOTES
1. See “The Stones of Stonehenge”, http://www.stonesofstonehenge.org.uk/2015/02/altar-stone- stone-80.html (last accessed 1 August 2018). 2. As recently as 1874 Lewis Gidley had written: “There are so many proofs of Stonehenge being a Druidical temple, that it seems remarkable that any antiquarians are not satisfied that this was the case” (Gidley 1874, 15). 3. Professsor Suguru Fukasawa, formerly the President of the Thomas Hardy Society, Japan, pointed out to me that the harp-lute, developed at the end of the eighteenth century by Edward Light, was a much smaller and portable version of the full sized harp. It is very likely that this is the kind of harp that Hardy had in mind.
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4. According to Millgate, though Hardy met Pater in the summer of 1886, they spent rather longer as neighbours in Upper Phillimore place in the summer of 1888 (Millgate 2004, 252, 268, and 274). 5. According to Pater’s editor Donald L. Hill (Hill 1980, 322). 6. Pater uses the phrase “music made visible” on two occasions in “Apollo in Picardy”. See Pater 2014, 273, 280.
ABSTRACTS
Triggered by Hardy’s account of Stonehenge in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and his subsequent support of the purchase of the monument for the nation, this paper explores the mythological structure of the novel. Seen from one point of view, the narrative turns on a dialectic between Apollo and Dionysus where Angel Clare is allied to the sun god, Apollo, and Alec d’Urberville to the chthonic god of the underworld, Dionysus. Hardy’s interest in solar mythology is well known. Less well explored is the pattern of light and dark, summer and winter in this novel, a pattern that corresponds to the annual rise and fall of the power of these two ancient gods. Though we might expect that this mythical polarity might have derived from Nietzsche, it is more likely that Hardy found something similar in the work of Walter Pater and in Heinrich Heine.
Cet article se fonde non seulement sur l’évocation de Stonehenge dans Tess of the d’Urbervilles mais aussi sur le soutien apporté par Hardy à l’acquisition du monument par la nation, pour explorer la structure mythologique sui sous-tend l’œuvre. De ce point de vue en effet, la narration peut être saisie comme affrontement dialectique entre Apollon et Dionysos – Angel Clare se trouvant associé au dieu solaire, tandis qu’Alec d’Urberville partage bien des traits avec le dieu chtonien du monde sous-terrain, Dionysos. L’intérêt de Hardy pour la mythologie solaire est bien documenté ; moins connu en revanche est le schéma narratif et symbolique opposant dans Tess of the d’Urbervilles la lumière et l’ombre, l’été et l’hiver – schéma qui se cale sur le rythme annuel d’assomption et de chute de ces deux dieux antiques. Or, alors que cette polarité dérivée de la mythologie semble issue directement de Nietzsche, il est plus probable en réalité que Hardy l’ait découverte à travers l’œuvre de Walter Pater et celle de Heinrich Heine.
INDEX
Mots-clés: objet, mythologie, Stonehenge, Apollon, Dionysos, Bacchus, Heine (Heinrich), Pater (Walter), Müller (Max), Nietzsche (Friedrich) Keywords: object, mythology, Stonehenge, Apollo, Dionysus, Bacchus, Heine (Heinrich), Pater (Walter), Müller (Max), Nietzsche (Friedrich)
AUTHOR
J.B. BULLEN J.B. Bullen is Professor Emeritus at the University of Reading, Honorary Research Fellow, Royal Holloway, University of London, and now Visiting Fellow, Kellogg College, Oxford University. He
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has had a long-standing interest in interdisciplinary studies and his books include The Pre- Raphaelite Body: Fear and Desire in Painting, Poetry and Criticism (OUP 1998). In 2003 he published a history of the Byzantine Revival entitled Byzantium Rediscovered, and in 2005 European Crosscurrents: British Criticism and Continental Art, 1810-1910. His book Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Poet appeared in 2011. He has written two books on Thomas Hardy. The first was The Expressive Eye: Fiction and Perception in the work of Thomas Hardy (1986) and the second Thomas Hardy: The World of his Novels (2013). He is working on the influence of the occult on mid- nineteenth century art and literature.
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Joseph Conrad’s Objects Les objets chez Joseph Conrad
Robert Hampson
1 Conrad begins his volume of reminiscences, A Personal Record, by recalling how he wrote the tenth chapter of his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, in the winter of 1893, on board a 2,000-ton steamer called the Adowa “alongside a quay in Rouen” (Conrad 1923c, 3). This was Conrad’s way of acknowledging the importance of Flaubert for his conception of the novel as a form – and a way of invoking the spirit of Flaubert at the start of his reminiscences as a patron saint.1 Thus, he describes the ship’s original berth, “in the neighbourhood of the Opera House”, and the view through his cabin porthole window onto the café where “the worthy Bovary and his wife […] had some refreshment” (5). He then compares this with his later view, through the same port-hole, of a very different café, “a little café with curtained windows and a shabby front of white woodwork, corresponding with the squalor of these poorer quarters bordering the river” (5). A year earlier, in a letter to Marguerite Poradowska (6 April 1892), written from on board the Torrens in Port Adelaide, Conrad had testified to his intense interest in Madame Bovary and his respect for Flaubert’s verisimilitude (Conrad 1983, 110–111). He praises Poradowska’s writing in the following terms: “You both observe and describe. In the […] striking simplicity of your descriptions, you remind me a little of Flaubert, whose Madame Bovary I have just reread with respectful admiration. […] In him, we see a man who had enough imagination for two realists” (111). Some ten years later, in December 1909, he wrote to Robert d’Humières, confirming Ford Madox Ford’s assertion that he knew “entire pages of Madame Bovary by heart” (309–310). However, in June 1918, he rejected Horace Walpole’s assertion that Conrad’s works showed the stylistic influence of Flaubert: You say that I have been under the formative influence of Madame Bovary. In fact, I read it only after finishing A.F., as I did all the other works of Flaubert, and anyhow, my Flaubert is the Flaubert of St Antoine and Ed: Sent: [L’Éducation sentimentale] and that only from the point of view of the rendering of concrete things and visual impressions. I thought him marvellous in that respect. I don’t think I learned anything from him. What he did for me was to open my eyes and arouse my emulation. (Conrad 2002, 228)
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2 Although this letter demonstrates the unreliablity of author’s statements about their own life and work, that reference to “the rendering of concrete things and visual impressions” and the letter’s emphasis on the important lesson from Flaubert (“to open my eyes”) provide a way into the consideration of Conrad and objects.
3 If we return to the opening pages of A Personal Record, there is plenty of attention to “the rendering of concrete things and visual impressions”, as the quotations above suggest. The reminiscences begin by describing the material conditions of this scene of writing for his tenth chapter: Conrad’s reference to “the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a river in the middle of a town” is made more concrete by focusing on “the grey paper of a pad which rested on the blanket of my bed-place” (Conrad 1923c, 3). In this focussed attention to memory objects, he then recalls the “steam- heater” with which he keeps his berth warm and even the tin he had placed under its “leaky water-cock” (4). He concludes this description with his own “person from Porlock” moment: the interruption of his “mood of visions and words” (3) by the arrival of the third officer with his banjo. This banjo now becomes a focus of narrative attention, and references to it are used to articulate this encounter. First, Conrad provides a general observation: “When he did not play the banjo he loved to sit and look at it” (4). This is demonstrated in this particular instance: the young man “proceeded to this sentimental inspection” and meditated “a while over the strings” before asking: “What are you always scribbling there […]?” (4). Conrad’s response is to turn “the pad over with a movement of instinctive secrecy”, and the encounter ends with the third officer lowering “a tender gaze on his banjo”, while Conrad “went on looking through the port-hole” (5). The reminiscence is organised by reference to a repeated set of objects: the banjo, the writing pad, and the brass-rimmed porthole. The porthole provides the frame for a series of different views, while the pad is the prompt, the locus, and the intended destination of those “visions and words”, the products of another kind of seeing. The way these details are selected and used also helps us to understand what Conrad meant, in his praise of Flaubert, by the realist’s need for imagination.
1. Cultural artefacts and commodities
4 What Conrad was writing was, as he puts it, “a sunset in Malayan Isles” and the “hallucinated vision of forests and rivers and seas” (Conrad 1923c, 3). This tenth chapter that Conrad was writing in Rouen begins with an extended dialogue between Almayer’s Sulu wife and their daughter, Nina, as Nina prepares to depart with her lover, the Balinese prince, Dain. This is followed by Mrs Almayer’s return home to collect the dollars she has amassed before she, too, leaves Almayer, crossing the river to join her Sulu compatriot, Babalatchi, in the Rajah’s compound. Before she collects the dollars, she takes a last look at her husband, “huddled up” in a chair asleep on the verandah: “At his feet lay the overturned table, amongst a wreck of crockery and broken bottles”, while the chairs, “scattered violently all over the place”, “now lay about the verandah with a lamentable aspect of inebriety in their helpless attitudes” (Conrad 1923a, 157). It is, of course, not the chairs, which were the worse for drink. Conrad’s description of this constellation of objects is an economical reminder of the dinner party of the previous evening and the disappointed Almayer’s drunken harangue of the visiting Dutch naval officers, which had been the subject of the
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previous two chapters. In addition, the “chaos of demoralized furniture” and the moon- light illumination of “the objects on the verandah” in “all the uncompromising ugliness of their disorder” provide the objective correlative to Almayer’s own demoralization with the collapse of all his dreams of “wealth and power” (3).
5 What I want to consider in relation to Almayer’s Folly, however, is not just these objects that are part of reality effect or part of the narrative semantics of the novel, but three other kinds of objects. First, I want to consider a detail from the account of Nina’s first sight of Dain: “The crude light of the lamp shone on the gold embroidery of his black silk jacket, broke in a thousand sparkling rays on the jewelled hilt of his kriss protruding from under the many folds of the red sarong gathered into a sash round his waist, and played on the precious stones of the many rings on his dark fingers” (Conrad 1923a, 54). The black silk jacket, the jewelled hilt of the kriss, the sarong and sash and the precious stones are obviously cultural objects, the objects of the ethnographic gaze that permeates Conrad’s Malay fiction. In The Rescue, the third volume of the Lingard trilogy, we find a similarly detailed description of Lingard’s Bugis allies, Hassim and Immada. Hassim is introduced with the following description: He was clad in a jacket of coarse blue cotton, of the kind a poor fisherman might own […] From the twist of threadbare sarong wound tightly on the hips protruded outward to the left the ivory hilt, ringed with six bands of gold, of a weapon that would not have disgraced a ruler. Silver glittered about the flintlock and the hardwood stock of his gun. The red and gold handkerchief folded round his head was of costly stuff, such as is woven by high-born women in the households of chiefs, only the gold threads were tarnished and the silk frayed in the folds. (Conrad 1924b, 65)
6 Conrad presents again a series of cultural objects – the jacket, the sarong, the kriss, the gun, the red and gold handkerchief – but he also provides a reading of their cultural coding: the expensive weapons and the red and gold handkerchief point to Hassim’s high status within his community, while the fisherman’s jacket, the tarnished gold and the frayed silk indicate the turn in his fortunes from which the narrative takes off. His sister, Immada, is described in similar detail: Her sarong, the kilt-like garment which both sexes wear, had the national check of grey and red, but she had not completed her attire by the belt, scarves, the loose upper wrappings, and the head-covering of a woman. A black silk jacket, like that of a man of rank, was buttoned over her bust and fitted closely to her slender waist. The edge of a stand-up collar, stiff with gold embroidery, rubbed her cheek. She had no bracelets, no anklets, and although dressed practically in man’s clothes, had about her person no weapon of any sort. (Conrad 1924b, 65–6)
7 This is another complicated image: this time with its mix of male and female dress, which also anticipates the role Immada is to play in the novel, as a woman engaged in the armed struggle for the restoration of her brother’s kingdom. What is striking is how this ethnographic gaze not only understands how to read these cultural objects through national, class and gender codes (“the national check”, “like that of a man of rank”, “man’s clothes”), but is informed enough to draw attention to objects of dress that are missing: no belt, no scarves, no loose upper wrappings; “no bracelets, no anklets”.
8 This documentation of cultural artefacts, which is also a form of salvage anthropology, inevitably suggests a process of othering. At the same time, however, we have to notice that, in the first instance, the passage from Almayer’s Folly, the gaze is actually Nina’s and is expressive of her “admiration and desire” (Conrad 1923a, 55). It is like the Lady
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of Shalott’s vision of Lancelot in Tennyson’s poem. This moment also initiates the novel’s counter-plot: the mixed-race Nina’s struggle to establish her identity within a racially polarised world finds some degree of resolution through her love for the Balinese prince, Dain (see Hampson 1992, 11–31). In the case of The Rescue, the description of Hassim and Immada is the prelude to an account of Sulawesi politics – more specifically, the war of the Wajo succession. This, in turn, points to an often- overlooked aspect of the Patusan section of Lord Jim: Patusan is not simply the exotic setting for an adventure story, but Conrad’s narrative is rooted in an understanding of the culture and politics of Eastern Borneo. Jim’s arrival in Patusan coincides with, and becomes an intervention into, the tense balance between three “antagonistic forces”: the Malay Rajah Allang, who controls the river, which provides access to Patusan; Sherif Ali, “an Arab half-breed” who “on purely religious grounds , had incited the tribes of the interior”, and had now “established himself in a fortified camp on the summit of one of the twin hills’ outside the town of Patusan”; and the Bugis, Doramin, with whom Jim allies himself (Conrad 1923f, 228, 257). Stein is Marlow’s source for this information, and Marlow indicates also the basis of Stein’s knowledge: “He was as full of information about native States as an official report […] He had to know. He traded in so many” (227). Marlow points to two modes of colonial information gathering: the knowledge production that was part of official engagement with native States, the kind of report that Conrad’s friend Hugh Clifford wrote as part of his work with the British administration in Malaya; and the understanding of local customs and politics that were a necessary part of successful trading in the archipelago.
9 The second kind of object I want to note in Conrad’s early fiction is the object as commodity. As Maya Jasanoff has noted, Conrad had a first-hand experience of globalization. As she puts it, “Conrad watched the emergence of the globally inter- related world” from the deck of a ship (Jasanoff 6). Conrad’s own experience of South- east Asia was the result of his varied maritime experiences – including, most productively, his work as first-mate in the Vidar, following what he called a “huckster’s round” of trading between Singapore and various small ports in Celebes and Borneo (Conrad 1923g, 166). As Francis reminds us, in this period, “the responsibilities of ships’ captains embraced both navigation and commerce” (Francis 23).2 This experience on board the Vidar provided Conrad with the basis for his first two novels. It is not surprising, therefore, that Conrad’s first novel is permeated by the circulation of objects of trade. Dain, for example, presents himself to the people of Sambir as a trader and is very precise about his ostensible trading interests: he asserts that he is not interested in buying gutta-percha or beeswax, but wants to collect trepang (sea-slug) and birds’ nests. These are staples of inter-island trade. Sea-produce (including trepang and pearls) and jungle-products (such as birds’ nests, beeswax, gutta-percha) were traded by Arab, Bugis and Chinese traders. Almayer’s Folly provides evidence of the role of the Arabs and Bugis in these trades, and it also registers the supply chain by which forest produce was gathered by the interior peoples (called the Dyaks by Europeans) and brought down river to these Arab and Bugis traders (The novel is silent, however, about the reverse trade in slaves from the coastal Arabs and Bugis to the Dyaks to supply the labour to gather this produce).
10 Almayer is also a trader – though one who, at the time of the narrative, has lost his monopoly of trade to the Arabs – and has gone into decline. His “ruined go-downs” contain “a few brass guns” and “a few mouldering cases of Manchester goods” (Conrad 1923a, 28). The “brass guns” are small locally made lantakas, originally from foundries
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in Malacca and Pahang, which were often exchanged as gifts – Lakamba, for example, wants “to buy a couple of brass guns as a present to his friend the chief of Sambir Dyaks” (32) – but they were also recognised as a form of currency – and could be traded for rice, drums, canoes, tools. The Manchester goods are probably cotton. They are a reminder of the “assorted cargo” that Lingard used to carry in his brig Flash: “Manchester goods, brass gongs, rifles and gunpowder”, which he traded for “gutta- percha and rattans, pearl shells and birds’ nests, wax and gum-dammar” (8). They are evidence of the larger trading networks that bring about the penetration of the local culture by objects from Europe and China. The audience chamber of the rajah’s residence, for example, is “curtained off, by heavy stuff of European manufacture” (75) and is illuminated by a “European lamp with a green shade” (76). Perhaps most interesting, in this context, is the rajah’s “small hand-organ” (88). This is a small barrel-organ operated by a crank-handle: the rajah relaxes by having Verdi’s Il Trovatore played for him on the hand-organ. Francis discusses this in relation to the Sulu’s skill in cultural adaptation. As he puts it, “Malay culture can embrace both ‘a wooden drum’ and the ‘small hand-organ’” (Francis 36).
11 However, we might also compare this catalogue of European imports – curtains, lamps, hand-organs – with the objects that characterise Almayer’s domestic life. When he returns home at the end of the first chapter, the house to which he returns is presented by reference to the following objects: a paraffin lamp without a globe (Conrad 1923a, 15), “torn rattan screens” (15), and a table laid with a “cracked glass tumbler” and a “tin spoon” (16). While Almayer has “absorbed himself in his dreams of wealth and power away from this coast” (3), clearly his trading business has fallen apart as these objects indicate – even the words “Office: Lingard and Co” are “half-obliterated” though “still legible on the dusty door” on the side-wall of the house (15). In addition, other domestic objects have suffered from (and testify to) the conflicts in the Almayer marriage. Almayer recalls his wife “burning the furniture, and tearing down the pretty curtains”, which he interprets as motivated by her “unreasoning hate of those signs of civilisation” and as evidence of her “savage nature” (26). However, as the narrative later reveals, she does not simply destroy the curtains and furniture, but she turns the western curtains into sarongs for the slave-girls and uses the western furniture to cook rice (91). In short, she makes over European items for local uses. She engages in a form of cultural detournement as a strategy of resistance.
12 What I want to suggest, then, following Andrew Francis and my own earlier Cross- Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad’s Malay Fiction, is that Conrad’s early Malay fiction shows an informed understanding of the various objects of inter-island and international trade (Hampson 2000). More than this, it shows Conrad’s attention to trading networks, local supply chains (for example, to bring produce from the forests of the interior to riverine trading posts), various colonial trading networks, and also various illicit trading networks. As Francis observes (and demonstrates): “Conrad’s portrayal of commerce in his Asian fiction offers an informed, complex, and historically specific context” for the narratives he produces (Francis 5). How ingrained this attention to commerce, commodities and trading networks was is suggested by Conrad’s son, John, in his reminiscences about the interest Conrad and his friend Hope took in John’s “maritime activities” – playing with model ships in the moat that surrounded the Conrads’ home, Capel House. John recalls how the two former captains “would want to know what the cargo was, where it came from and where it was consigned to” (Conrad 1924b, 23). Indeed, John was required to produce small bundles
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of ripped-up newspapers for each of his ships to satisfy their demand for “the ships’ papers”.
13 There is a similar attention to the circulation of commodities in “Heart of Darkness”. Nathalie Martinière has discussed the “bit of white worsted” worn round the neck of the African helmsman. She has also mentioned the ivory, which is the central commodity in the novella. Ivory is present in the opening scene on board the Nellie in the form of the dominoes with which the Accountant toys “architecturally”; it reappears at the return to Europe in the piano keys in the Intended’s apartment. Through this attention to the commercial uses of ivory, instead of contrasting the two worlds of Europe and Africa, as Achebe claims, Conrad actually shows the intimate connectedness of the two – and the complicity of the Intended and the audience on board the Nellie in the horrors perpetrated in the Congo (Achebe 782-794). The comparison of the African steamer to a Huntley and Palmer biscuit-tin, as Stephen Donovan, Johan Warodell and others have suggested, intimates another aspect of the history of the commodity (see for example Donovan 116). The comparison of the steamer to a biscuit-tin might seem like a giant leap of the imagination: what has a Huntley and Palmer biscuit-tin to do with the Congo? It is true that, in his second essay on the loss of the Titanic, Conrad compared the Titanic to a Huntley and Palmer biscuit- tin (Conrad 1924a, 229-248).3 In this case, however, another factor comes into play. African expeditions like Stanley’s were equipped with Huntley and Palmer biscuits: the biscuit tins travelled into the continent with them and were photographed alongside them4 (Scott also took these biscuits with him to Antarctica in 1910).5 However, this is not just evidence of the circulation of the commodity but also of the pervasiveness of commodity culture. Thus Conrad justifies his comparison of the Titanic to a biscuit-tin by describing Huntley and Palmer biscuit-tins as “almost a national institution” (233). Furthermore, Felix Driver has drawn attention to the Victorian picturing of the commodity “on the frontiers of knowledge and power” as a way of associating “the glamour of overseas exploration” with “consumption at home” (Driver 207). On the one hand, explorers like Stanley and Livingstone were associated through advertising with various commodities “such as soap, tea and pills” as a form of celebrity endorsement (207). On the other, commodities were represented in adverts in a variety of colonial settings to present “a striking picture of imperial progress” (209). As Thomas Richards puts it, “the commodity was represented as the bulwark of empire” (Richards 142). Thus Marlow’s imagined Roman might regret the absence of Falernian wine during his occupation of Britain, but modern explorers could take their Huntley and Palmer biscuits with them. Indeed, it was not just modern explorers: Reading Museum notes that, by 1874, the firm was boasting that “seldom a ship sails from England” without “a Reading biscuit” on board. More significantly, the Museum has an 1890s photograph of a Congo trading steamer with a Huntley and Palmer’s biscuit-tin prominently displayed. At the same time, as the Huntley and Palmer’s Gallery in the Reading Museum also shows, Major Powell-Cotton’s Congo expedition (1904-1909) came back with a photograph of a young African man holding a thumb piano with a recycled Huntley and Palmer’s biscuit tin as its sounding box.6 As with the Almayers’ curtains, European objects can be recoded, transculturated and turned to local uses.
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2. The object as fetish
14 The third category of object I want to discuss is the object as fetish. I want to approach this through Conrad’s second novel, An Outcast of the Islands, in which he goes back some 15 years to relate the series of events which resulted in Almayer losing the trading monopoly in Sambir through the treachery of Willems. Willems is another of Captain Lingard’s protégés. When he is disgraced and thrown out by his wife, Lingard rescues him and brings him to Almayer’s trading station in Sambir. To try and make things “ship-shape”, Lingard then persuades Willem’s wife to come with him to Sambir and take back her husband (Conrad 1928, 40). I want to focus on two passages from Chapters 1 and 2 of Part V of the novel. Part V opens with Almayer “alone on the verandah of his house”, musing and gazing on the river as the sun sets (291). The setting and Almayer’s thoughts obviously recall the opening of Almayer’s Folly. As in that novel, he contemplates his dreams for himself and his daughter: “In less than ten years their fortune would be made and they would leave this place, first for Batavia – yes, Batavia – and then for Europe” (293). This time, more clearly than in the earlier novel, Conrad presents the strength and bitterness of Almayer’s feelings: “he hated all this; he begrudged every day – every minute – of his life spent amongst all these things” (292). However, through his dream, these things are also “very precious to him”: they constitute “the present sign of a splendid future” (292).
15 This is the context in which I wish to discuss the first passage.7 This passage occurs after Almayer has finished his evening meal on the verandah: it describes the setting up of the Lingard and Co. “office” in Sambir and Almayer’s original feelings about it. The paragraph begins with a glance towards “the closed door” in “the whitewashed wall of the house”: Black letters were painted on it proclaiming the fact that behind that door there was the office of Lingard and Co. The interior had been furnished by Lingard […] and it had been furnished with reckless prodigality. There was an office desk, a revolving chair, bookshelves, a safe: all to humour the weakness of Almayer, who thought all those paraphernalia necessary to successful trading. (Conrad 1928, 299)
16 There is then a long account of the marvelling reactions of the locals as this furniture is moved, with some difficulty, from the ship which brings it to the office. Since this account is focalised through the local people, the narrative produces a defamiliarized account of these various objects. Thus the office desk is seen as “a big meza, with many boxes fitted all over it and under it” (Conrad 1928, 299), and it prompts the question: “What did the white man do with such a table?” (299).8 Ian Watt introduced the term “delayed decoding” into Conrad studies: for example, when Marlow in “Heart of Darkness” is navigating upriver towards the Inner Station, he glimpses “vague forms of men” in the bush through the shutter-hole of the pilot-house, then something strange happens to his African helmsman, who has been firing at these “vague forms”: Something big appeared in the air before the shutter, the rifle went overboard, and the man stepped back swiftly, looked at me over his shoulder in an extraordinary, profound, familiar manner, and fell upon my feet. The side of his head hit the wheel twice, and the end of what appeared a long cane clattered round and knocked over a little camp-stool.9 (Conrad 1923d, 111)
17 As Watt defines it, “delayed decoding” involves a mode of representation which “combines the forward temporal progression of the mind, as it receives messages from the outside world, with the much slower reflexive process of making out their
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meaning” (Watt 175). In this instance, as the sentences accumulate, we realise that the “something” was a spear and that the helmsman has been killed by it. In the passage from Outcast, however, the opposite happens: the local description of the writing desk begins with the Malay word for a table and then responds to the desk’s drawers by describing them as boxes. The resulting description has something of the quality of a riddle – except that we have already been given the solution by the narrator before we were given the riddle. The question (“What did the white man do with such a table?”) completes the riddle. It has an obvious answer for us, and, in this, it resembles one of the possible effects of “delayed decoding”. Watt’s describes this effect as “amusement, because we feel a certain patronising contempt for those who do not understand things as quickly as we do” (178). However, while the question (“What did the white man do with such a table?”) has an obvious answer (it is a writing desk) which might produce this effect of superior amusement in the reader, the question also poses a deeper question: “What did the white man do with such a table?” We know, from Almayer’s Folly, what Almayer did next – and what became of Almayer’s dreams. The context also provides another answer to the question. As I said a moment ago, “things” constitute for Almayer “the present sign of a splendid future” (Conrad 1928, 292).
18 I want to explore this phrase further through another set of objects, which are not included in the list I have just quoted. These are more accurately identified by the locals as “a pile of books”. Again, they prompt the question among the bystanders: “What were they for?” (Conrad 1928, 299). This time, “an old invalided jurumudi” (that is, another helmsman) “explained to a small knot of unsophisticated citizens of Sambir that those books were books of magic – of magic that guides the white men’s ships over the seas, that gives them their wicked wisdom and their strength” (299). In the case of the writing desk, the defamiliarized description that constitutes the riddle invites our amusement based on superior knowledge, but then subverts that cultural hierarchy by the insistence of a more profound question: “What did the white man do with such a table?” In this instance of Almayer’s books, there is a layering to the hierarchy: the jurumudi, with his professional knowledge of Europeans through working with them on ships, can identify and explain the objects to the “unsophisticated citizens of Sambir”. The sophisticated European reader might be amused by this explanation of Almayer’s account books as “books of magic”. However, Conrad makes clear that Almayer’s ideas about the furniture and fittings for his office are no less magical, no less primitive: “he thought himself by virtue of that furniture, at the head of a serious business” (300). Furthermore, as Francis shows, the jurumudi is not so wrong about these “books of magic”. We have already seen their pre-printed “blue and red ruled pages” in Almayer’s Folly (Conrad 1923a, 199). As Francis notes, “double-entry book- keeping, representative of the force of Western culture, is crucial to commercial success in the increasingly globalized world” (Francis 57), and the lack of knowledge of this system was one of the contributory factors to the decline of Arab trading in the region in the period immediately after the end of the novel.
19 As I have suggested, the opening of Part V has already indicated to the reader that “things” are valued by Almayer not for themselves but for their assigned place in his plans: they are “signs” instead of reality. Not objects so much, perhaps, as fetishes. Conrad reinforces this suggestion by the imagery with which he describes the failure of Almayer’s plan: “He found no successful magic in the blank pages of his ledgers; and gradually he lost his old point of view in the saner appreciation of his situation. The
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room known as the office became neglected then like a temple of an exploded superstition” (Conrad 1928, 300). The long account that follows of Willems’s wife’s temporary occupation and use of the office and its furniture emphasises the failure of Almayer’s plans and the lost power of these objects: The big office desk was pushed on one side […] Bits of white stuff; rags yellow, pink, blue: rags limp, brilliant and soiled, trailed on the floor, lay on the desk amongst the sombre covers of books soiled, grimy, but stiff-backed, in virtue, perhaps, of their European origin. The biggest set of bookshelves was partly hidden by a petticoat, the waist-band of which was caught upon the back of a slender book pulled a little out of the row so as to make an improvised clothespeg. (Conrad 1928, 300-301)
20 As Francis observes, the changes made by Joanna’s temporary occupation of this space emphasises “the hollowness of Almayer’s aspirations” (Francis 57). However, the making over of the desk, the bookshelves and even the books to other uses and the intimate intermingling of “the uses of commerce with the needs of the body” (58) do more than this: they also suggest a desecration. The failure of the dream is accompanied by the loss of power of these fetish objects.
21 Almayer’s Folly shows us the final stages of this process. When Almayer returns to his house at the end of the novel after Nina’s departure, first he confronts “the chaos of overturned furniture” (Conrad 1923a, 197) on the verandah, which I discussed earlier on its first appearance in Chapter 10; then he comes upon Nina’s “European trunk” with “the large initials N.A. on the cover” and a “few of Nina’s dresses hung on wooden pegs” in the “women’s room” – relics of an abandoned European identity; then he opens the locked office: “He entered in a cloud of dust that rose under his feet. Books open with torn pages bestrewed the floor; other books lay about grimy and black; looking as if they had never been opened. Account books. […] For many years there had been no record to keep on the blue and red ruled pages” (199). The magic really has fled from these objects. And, one by one, the narrative ticks off the catalogue of items of furniture: In the middle of the room the big office desk, with one of its legs broken, careened over like the hull of a stranded ship; most of the drawers had fallen out, disclosing heaps of paper yellow with age and dirt. The revolving office chair stood in its place, but he found the pivot set fast when he tried to turn it. […] The desk, the paper, the torn books, and the broken shelves, all under a thick coat of dust. (Conrad 1923a, 199)
22 The objects are all in their correct place – the desk has not been displaced by Joanna’s bed; they have not been recoded by another use or culture; but they are objects without use or aura: a non-functioning desk; yellowed paper; torn books; a revolving chair that doesn’t revolve. Almayer’s self questioning – “And all for what?” – reminds us of the questions asked by the local on-lookers when the furniture first arrived – in the book that Conrad was yet to write. As Bill Brown observes: “We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily” (Brown 4). Objects re-assert themselves as things, and Almayer’s response is to recode them. Almayer reads them now in terms of “wreck, ruin, and waste” (Conrad 1923a, 200). The office is, indeed, “the temple of an exploded superstition”, and Almayer’s response is appropriately iconoclastic: “[He] feverishly began to rake in the papers scattered on the floor, broke the chair into bits, splintered
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the drawers by banging them against the desk, and made a big heap of all that rubbish in one corner of the room” (200). The objects which arrived with such high expectations, with so much financial and emotional investment, are reduced to “rubbish” and are consigned to the flames.
23 At the same time, the transtextual narrative of Almayer’s 25 years in Sambir reveals how he has transferred his allegiance from the office furniture to another object. At first, Almayer had “sought refuge” from his wife in the office, but, later, when Nina could talk “he found courage and consolation in his unreasoning and fierce affection for his daughter” (Conrad 1928, 300). The suggestion of transferred allegiance is confirmed by the second passage from Outcast that I want to discuss: the description of the interior of Almayer’s house in Part V Chapter 2. This begins by focussing on another piece of furniture, Nina’s cot: “In the middle of the room a small cot, under a square of white mosquito net, stood – the only piece of furniture between the four walls – looking like an altar of transparent marble in a gloomy temple […]” (319-320). This temple imagery, which links the cot to the earlier description of the office furniture, is reinforced by the imagery used to describe Almayer in his apparent moment of tenderness beside his child’s cot, which has the full force of the reverential feelings of a worshipper at a shrine. The passage begins with the material circumstances of the scene: “Almayer, the smoky light in one hand, his pipe in the other, stood before the curtained cot looking at his daughter” (320). However, these material concerns are soon left behind. First, there is that moment of apparent tenderness: “it was as if he had been bathed in a bright and warm wave of tenderness, in a tenderness greater than the world, more precious than life” (Conrad 1923a, 320). We note the “as if” and the doubt it casts on Almayer’s emotions; we notice also the feeling of exaltation as the sentence goes on. In this mood of “rapt attention”, Almayer appears “strangely impressive and ecstatic: like a devout and mystic worshipper, adoring, transported and mute; burning incense before a shrine, a diaphanous shrine of a child idol with closed eyes” (Conrad 1928, 320). The cot is transformed into a shrine; the smoke from the pipe and the lamp transmuted into incense. Almayer has moved from the fetishizing of the furniture to the idolising of this child. In this context it is significant that, when he burns the furniture at the end of Almayer’s Folly, “he heard distinctly the clear voice of a child” (Conrad 1923a, 199). This is the prelude to his later haunting by the figure of Nina as a child: “wherever he went, whichever way he turned, he saw the small figure of a little maiden with pretty olive face, with long black hair, her little pink robe slipping off her shoulders, her big eyes looking up at him in the tender trustfulness of a petted child” (202). However, to understand this haunting, it is necessary to return to that lengthy passage in Outcast, where the object of Almayer’s worship is presented as follows: he is “looking at his daughter – at his little Nina – at that part of himself, at that small and unconscious particle of humanity that seemed to him to contain all his soul” (Conrad 1928, 320).
3. Fetish and talisman
24 In the preceding section I have analysed Outcast in terms of a shift between two modes of venerating objects – that is, a shift from the fetish to the idol – from the fetishizing of objects as “the present sign of a splendid future” (Conrad 1928, 292) to the idolising of the child within “the temple of self” as representing the best part of himself. In this
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section, I want to consider the anthropological concept of the fetish a little further. William Pietz has argued that the concept of the fetish emerged from the encounter between Europeans and Africans on the West African coast as part of a process of translating and transvaluing objects (Pietz 6). In his 1985 essay, the problematic he confronts is “the capacity of the material object” to embody “religious, commercial, aesthetic and sexual values” (7). More specifically, the issue he addresses is “the social value of material objects as revealed in situations formed by the encounter of radically heterogeneous social systems” (7). In contrast to the idol, which has a representative function, Pietz affirms that the “truth of the fetish resides in its status as a material object” (7). He emphasizes the irreducible materiality of the fetish: for him the issue is the value to be attributed to material things and the embodiment of socially significant values in objects.
25 In this context I want to consider briefly Conrad’s other African fiction, his neglected short story “An Outpost of Progress”.10 This is set on another Congo trading station, manned by two incompetent Belgians, Kayerts and Carlier, and a very competent Sierra Leonean, Henry Price. In this story, not only does Conrad differentiate between a range of African cultures, but he also makes the central figure an African. I have discussed elsewhere Henry Price’s centrality and how, because of his Sierra Leone background, he skilfully mediates between European and African cultures (Hampson 2001, 211-230). I want to focus here on objects, and I want to begin at the end of the story. At this point, Kayerts and Carlier have had no communication with the Company for eight months: “one of the Company’s steamers had been wrecked, and the Director was busy with the other, relieving very distant and important stations on the main river” (Conrad 1923e, 109). This is where “An Outpost of Progress” and “Heart of Darkness” briefly intersect. While the Director is travelling upriver with Marlow, Kayerts and Carlier have been left to a diet of boiled rice without salt, and coffee without sugar. Apart from that they have a half-bottle of cognac and fifteen lumps of sugar, which Kayerts has locked away for use “in case of sickness” (109). The two Europeans fall out over the fifteen lumps of sugar, and Carlier is shot and killed by Kayerts. The chase which concludes with this killing is the most activity that they have shown in the course of the narrative. Up to this point, Conrad describes them as getting on well together “in the fellowship of their stupidity and laziness” (92). Their conception of their role in Africa is to “sit still and gather in the ivory those savages will bring” (90). Henry Price, of course, does the actual bargaining with the men who bring the ivory to the station and the ivory is then stored in the “fetish”. The narrator drily observes: “the storehouse was in every station called the fetish, perhaps because of the spirit of civilization it contained” (93). This comment is typical of the mordant irony deployed by the narrator. What interests me, here, is the use of the word “fetish” to describe the storehouse for the ivory. The word used by Europeans to describe African practices in relation to objects seems to have been turned around to explain the Europeans’ investment in ivory and the collection of ivory. A term generated in the context of cross-cultural encounter to describe a perceived irrational investment in objects is turned back to question the obviously entirely rational European investment in ivory.
26 Something similar happens in “Karain: A Memory”. This story of European gun-runners and their relations with a Bugis leader, Karain, builds up to a climactic scene in which Karain seeks a charm to protect himself against the spirit of the dead friend who haunts him. One of the gun-runners, Hollis, creates a charm from one of the objects in a
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box he produces. It is a Jubilee sixpence with “a hole punched near the rim”, which he offers as “the image of the great Queen”, “more powerful than Suleiman the Wise, who commanded the genii”, who “commands a spirit, too – the spirit of her nation” (Conrad 1923e, 49). This charm is, apparently, effective. But this incident is not just a trick at the expense of the Bugis leader, showing his superstition and gullibility, while the reader shares with the European characters a comfortable sense of superiority. The box Hollis produces and the objects it contains undermine that possible position taking. The list of contents begins: “There were a couple of reels of cotton, a packet of needles, a bit of silk ribbon, dark blue […]” (48). So far this sounds like the contents of a sewing box: things that a sailor would need for the repair of his clothes. However, that “bit of silk ribbon” actually marks the transition to another kind of object: “a cabinet photograph” of a young woman; and then, “amongst a lot of various small objects, a bunch of flowers, a narrow white glove with many buttons, a slim packet of letters carefully tied up” (48). These are clearly mementoes connected with a young woman at home, with whom Hollis has presumably spent time during his recent six months’ leave of absence. The narrator observes archly: “Amulets of white men! Charms and talismans!” (48). However, that observation points to the deeper significance of the objects involved in this encounter. There is an equivalence between Hollis and Karain: there is a form of magical thinking involved in Hollis’s keepsakes and love-tokens as there is in Karain’s trust in the charm. The narrator continues: “Potent things that procure dreams of joy, thoughts of regret; that soften hard hearts, and can temper a soft one to the hardness of steel. Gifts of heaven – things of earth […]” (48). These are objects that have power in a man’s life. These are “things of earth” invested with magical powers.
27 As Pietz suggested, “desires and beliefs and narrative structures establishing a practice are also fixed (or fixated) by the fetish” (Pietz 7). Hollis’s various “Charms and talismans” are self-evidently invested with “desires and beliefs”; they are embedded in a “narrative structure” – though that narrative is somewhat occluded; and that narrative structure establishes a practice that includes the giving of keepsakes, the exchange of photographs. The Jubilee sixpence is evidence of another kind of primitive, magical thinking, the selection of a “royal” individual for veneration. Here, however, as Hollis’s anxieties about whether the Moslem Karain will accept the image of a human indicate, we are shifting from the fetish to idolatry.
28 “Karain” and “An Outpost of Progress” were both published in 1897. In 1894, another sailor, Arnold Ridyard, Chief Engineer in the SS Niger, on the Elder Dempster line’s Liverpool-West Africa run, began to donate African objects to what is the World Museum in Liverpool.11 Between 1895 and 1916, when he retired, Ridyard gave the museum over 2,000 artefacts from West and Central Africa. Ridyard was drawing on a network of some 200 contacts along the African coast, who donated the objects to the museum through him. These donors included European traders and government officials, but also some 80 West Africans, 77 of them from Sierra Leone. As Zachary Kingdon has shown, these donations were part of an unofficial paracolonial cultural exchange: in which objects from West Africa were donated by West Africans, in exchange, for example, for British illustrated magazines (see Kingdon). Interestingly, these objects were catalogued in Liverpool with the name of the donor – in contrast, say, to the cataloguing of objects in the Royal African Museum in Brussels. These donors included Krio traders from Sierra Leone such as Mrs W.E. Johnson and Miss B. Yorke – and the marvellously named Claudius Dionysius Hotobah During (1886-1973),
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who attended the Methodist Boys’ High School in Freetown and then came to London to study law (1908–1911). The early donations were “powerful objects”: masks and Central African minkisi (power figures). These objects, when used by a skilled operator, the nganga, could intervene on behalf of the supplicant with enemies or evil spirits. They were called “fetishes” by Europeans. According to Wyatt MacGaffey, the word fetish is “an entirely European term, a measure of persistent European failure to understand Africa” (MacGaffey 32).
29 Most of these cultural objects, though given by people from Sierra Leone, were not from Sierra Leone: they were collected from various parts of central Africa: Nigeria, Ghana, the Gambia, Matadi. They thus testify to the Sierra Leone diaspora – which Henry Price also represents. They also testify to another process. Nicholas Mirzoeff has argued that minkisi were objects of resistance to colonial rule: they were not an old tradition but a new cultural form produced through the transcultural process (see Mirzoeff). They were ritual objects, activated by the appropriate ritual, with power against illness, spirits, and individuals. They were destroyed by Christian missionaries for obvious reasons; they were also confiscated and destroyed by colonial authorities. According to Mirzoeff, the Belgians understood that the removal of minkisi was a necessary military action: the minkisi were not relics of an archaic religion, but “a means of organising resistance to colonial culture” (Mirzoeff 145). The minkisi gifted by Sierra Leonians to the Liverpool Museum, have a different, but related function. First, as Alisa LaGamma has noted, these minkisi have been carefully deconsecrated by the removal of certain parts (cowrie shell navels, beards, fibre skirts): they have been de- activated to make them safe for the new owner, but also to prevent their use in the wrong hands (see LaGamma). The framing European motivation for assembling these objects in the museum was “knowledge gathering”. The incomplete nature of the object frustrates this project, but also, as with the gifts that During brought with him to the UK, the objects attempt to reframe the European image of Africa as static and a- historical through their transcultural nature, their embodiment of a response to European colonisation. Besides his two African stories, Conrad’s other “loot” from Africa was “two African figures”, perhaps minkisi. Unfortunately, his wife, Jessie, made him get rid of them.
30 I want to end by going back to A Personal Record, and Conrad’s account of his time in Rouen, writing that tenth chapter of his first novel amid “hallucinated visions of forests and rivers and seas” (Conrad 1923c, 3). I want to pick up on that word “hallucinated” and juxtapose it to Conrad’s account of how he started to write Almayer’s Folly: “in the front sitting-room of furnished apartments in a Pimlico Square […] Unknown to my respectable landlady, it was my practice directly after my breakfast to hold animated receptions of Malays, Arabs and half-castes” (9). With “hallucinated” and “haunted” (8), we are not talking about objects of perception – like Jim’s iron plate or Marlowe’s “sticks”; instead, we are in the realm of what Yael Levin has called “the otherwise present” (Levin 3ff). We might think of the figure of the child that haunts Almayer at the end of Almayer’s Folly; the haunting of Karain by his dead friend; or the haunting of Razumov by the spectre of Haldin in Under Western Eyes. We might think of Hugh Epstein’s brilliant reading of the rocks passage in “The End of the Tether”, where the opacity of the object leads to the projection of the English sailor’s remembered English landscape onto the Malay space. It is this realm which helps understand another comment I started with: Conrad’s statement that Flaubert had “enough imagination for two realists”. It is good, but not enough to learn to “open [one’s] eyes”. It is good, but
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not enough to learn techniques for “the rendering of concrete things and visual impressions”. What is also needed, for Conrad, at least – and this is a different power of the imagination – is that openness to the otherwise present: to ghosts, haunting, hallucinations.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Achebe, Chinua, “An Image of Africa”, The Massachusetts Review 18 (1977): 782–794.
Brown, Bill, “Thing Theory” in Bill Brown (ed.), Things, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004.
Conrad, Joseph, Almayer’s Folly, London: J.M. Dent, 1923a.
Conrad, Joseph, “An Outpost of Progress” in Tales of Unrest, London: J.M. Dent, 1923b.
Conrad, Joseph, A Personal Record, London: J.M. Dent, 1923c.
Conrad, Joseph, “Heart of Darkness” in Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether, London: J.M. Dent, 1923d.
Conrad, Joseph, “Karain: A Memory”, Tales of Unrest, London: J.M. Dent, 1923e.
Conrad, Joseph, Lord Jim, London: J.M. Dent, 1923f.
Conrad, Joseph, “The End of the Tether” in Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether, London: J.M. Dent, 1923g.
Conrad, Joseph, “Certain Aspects of the Admirable Inquiry into the Loss of the Titanic”, Notes on Life and Letters, London: J.M. Dent, 1924a.
Conrad, Joseph, The Rescue, London: J.M. Dent, 1924b.
Conrad, Joseph, An Outcast of the Islands, London: J.M. Dent, 1928.
Conrad, Joseph, Joseph Conrad: Times Remembered, Cambridge: CUP, 1981.
Conrad, Joseph, The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Vol. 1, eds. Karl Frederick & Laurence Davies, Cambridge: CUP, 1983.
Conrad, Joseph, The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Vol. 6, eds. Davies, Laurence, Frederick R. Karl & Owen Knowles, Cambridge: CUP, 2002.
Donovan, Stephen, Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Driver, Felix, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
Francis, Andrew, Culture and Commerce in Conrad’s Asian Fiction, Cambridge: CUP, 2015.
Hampson, Robert, “The Mystic Worshipper and the Temple of Self”, The Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society (U.K.) 2.4 (September 1976): 9–11.
Hampson, Robert, Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992.
Hampson, Robert, Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad’s Malay Fiction, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000.
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Hampson, Robert, “‘An Outpost of Progress’: The Case of Henry Price” in Conrad in Africa: New Essays on “Heart of Darkness”, eds. Attie de Lange & Gail Fincham, Boulder, Colorado: East European Monographs, 2001, 211–30.
Jasanoff, Maya, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, London: William Collins, 2017.
Kingdon, Zachary, “Unofficial Exchanges: Investigating West African Gifts to UK Museums in the Early Colonial Period”, Lecture, Tate Britain, 25 November 2015.
LaGamma, Alisa, Kongo: Power and Majesty, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015.
Levin, Yael, Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad’s Novels, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
MacGaffey, Wyatt and Michael D. Harris, Astonishment and Power: The Eyes of Understanding, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas, An Introduction to Visual Culture, London: Routledge, 1999.
Pietz, William, “The Problem of the Fetish”, RES Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (Spring 1985): 5–17.
Richards, T., The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle 1851-1914, Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990.
Watt, Ian, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, London: Chatto & Windus, 1980.
NOTES
1. Flaubert was born in Rouen in 1821; after a period in Paris, he left there in 1846 and moved to Croisset near Rouen for the rest of his life. He died there in 1880 and was buried in Rouen. 2. Francis notes that, along with Lingard, Hermann in “Falk” is shown carrying out both duties. The captain of “The Smile of Fortune”, with his deal in potatoes, is the clearest instance of a captain, even one who is an employee, taking initiatives as a trader. 3. In his first essay, “Some Reflections on the Loss of the Titanic”, Conrad had reflected on the limits of increasing the thickness of metal plates relative to the tonnage of a ship (Conrad 1924a, 219). In the second essay, still thinking about the claim of “unsinkability” and the thickness of metal plates, he suggests that, “for the hazards of her existence”, the Titanic was “about as strong as a Huntley and Palmer biscuit tin” (233). 4. See the Huntley and Palmer collection in Reading Museum: www.readingmuseum.org.uk (last accessed 17 March 2019). 5. See the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge (www.spri.cam.ac.uk, last accessed 17 March 2019). and the Antarctic Museum, Dundee, on board the Royal Research Ship, Discovery (www.rrsdiscovery.com, last accessed 17 March 2019). 6. The Museum also has two thumb-pianos which use Huntley and Palmer tins as their sounding box. 7. For an earlier take on this material, see Hampson 1976. 8. Compare the description of the safe: “a green square box, with a gold plate on it, a box so heavy that those twenty men cannot drag it up the bank” (Conrad 1928, 299). 9. Hugh Epstein has more recently shown how this term is inaccurate: the process involves encoding rather than decoding. 10. “An Outpost of Progress” was first published in Cosmopolis in 1897. 11. See www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk (last accessed 17 March 2019).
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INDEX
Keywords: object, material culture, artefact, commodity, fetish, talisman, Conrad (Joseph) oeuvrecitee Personal Record (A), Almayer’s Folly, Rescue (The), Outcast of the Islands (An), Heart of Darkness, Outpost of Progress (An), Karain: A Memory Mots-clés: object, culture maérielle, artefact, marchandise, fétiche, talisman, Conrad (Joseph)
AUTHOR
ROBERT HAMPSON
Professor Robert Hampson (FEA, FRSA) was for many years Professor of Modern Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is currently a Distinguished Teaching and Research Fellow in the English Department there. He is the author of three monographs on Conrad: Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity (1992); Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad’s Malay Fiction (2000) and, most recently, Conrad’s Secrets (2012) which was awarded the Adam Gillon Prize by the Joseph Conrad Society of America. He has also co-edited two collections of essays: Conrad and Theory (with Andrew Gibson, 1998) and Conrad and Language (with Katherine Isobel Baxter, 2016). In addition to writing numerous essays on Conrad, he has also edited Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness and Victory for Penguin – and Nostromo and the Lingard Trilogy for Wordsworth Editions. He is also on the editorial board for the Cambridge edition of Conrad. He is a former editor of The Conradian and currently Chair of the Joseph Conrad Society (UK). He was recently given the A.P. Watt Award by the Joseph Conrad Society of America for excellence in Conrad studies.
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“He had tied a bit of white worsted round his neck”: Focusing on Details in Heart of Darkness « Il s’était attaché un bout de fil blanc autour du cou » : le souci du détail dans Cœur des ténèbres
Nathalie Martinière
1 In the preface of The Nigger of Narcissus, Conrad states that, as a writer, his “[task] is, before all, to make you see. That – and no more, and it is everything.” What he wants to make us see, if we trust the preface, has to do with “the truth, manifold and one, underlying […] every aspect [of the visible universe]” (Conrad 1984, xlii). But the truth, in order to be made visible, must be lodged in tangible things: in facts, in characters, in objects.
2 Conrad was not Dickens or Flaubert, though he knew them very well, and long descriptions of innumerable objects do not abound in his fiction. Many of the objects which do find their place in his stories however mark out significant moments, so much so that they have become emblematic and their meaning has been the source of controversies, interpretations and re-interpretations. The young captain’s hat in “The Secret Sharer” is one such example, as is the jubilee sixpence in “Karain” or Brierly’s gold chronometer in Lord Jim. Such objects stick out, as if they could be detached from the continuum of the narrative in order to become meaningful and often powerful images in the readers’ minds. Others on the contrary seem to be present only to contribute to a “reality effect”,1 since they cannot be interpreted allegorically and/or do not have a function in the plot: they look like unimportant details. Such are the sorts of objects I would like to deal with in this paper, focusing on Heart of Darkness.
3 Because “material interests” are so important in Conrad’s fiction, I want to concentrate on the material dimension of objects, in order to see “why and how [the author] use[s] objects to make meaning […]” (Brown 4): apparently unimportant details create circuits of meaning, shedding light not only on the characters they are associated with or belong to, but more generally on how colonialism works and what it implies, as is the
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case with objects made in ivory. I will then focus on one particular case, the white worsted in the “grove of death” scene,2 a detail that arrests Marlow’s gaze and throws light on Conrad’s aesthetic strategy in Heart of Darkness when dealing with what Marlow calls the “unspeakable”, “wrapping up the idea in secondary notions” (Conrad 1986, 157)3 as he put it in one letter, but also helping readers find out “the meaning of [the] episode” (Conrad 2006, 5).
1. Watching Details
4 If one concentrates on the objects at the beginning of Heart of Darkness, apart from the mention of sails, canvas and other elements which constitute the ship’s tackle, we notice that there are very few of them: an “only cushion” and an “only rug” on which the lawyer sits, “a box of dominoes” (Conrad 2006, 3), and that is about all. At the end of the story, when Marlow visits the Intended, the description of her drawing-room is slightly more detailed, with “the bent gilt legs and backs of the furniture […] the tall marble fireplace […] a grand piano […] with dark gleams on the flat surfaces like a somber and polished sarcophagus” (73). The narrators are different, but in both cases, their descriptions concentrate on just a few objects which are apparently mentioned in order to characterize the characters’ social background. As a consequence, these objects are seen but not used in the fiction: as the frame narrator notices, “we did not begin that game of dominoes” (4); and at the Intended’s, no fire is lit in the fireplace, no one plays the piano. Similarly, later in the story, a majority of objects mentioned by Marlow cannot be used, either because, like the “boiler wallowing in the grass” or the “railway-truck lying […] on its back with its wheels in the air” (15), they are wrecked and no longer of use, or because like Towson’s manual, they are written, if not “in cipher” at least in a language Marlow cannot understand, or even because they are repeatedly evoked, hoped for, promised […] but remain absent, like the rivets.4 If such objects are mentioned, it is not because of their use value, or because they are instrumental in the progression of events: nothing that happens in the story happens because of them. It seems that their only function is to be seen and mentioned by the narrators, and particularly by Marlow, their uselessness being a way for him of characterizing the situation in Africa.
5 At first sight, they may appear as insignificant objects arresting the gaze in moments of inactivity (in the case of the frame narrator) or of uneasiness, distress, psychological tension (in the case of Marlow). It must be noticed that, apart from the very first scene, throughout the novella objects are mentioned because they have been perceived by Marlow and have left their mark on his retina and in his mind, as if he were looking for something in objects which is not their use. Hence a number of scenes in which their presence seems meant to create an atmosphere—most of the time a gloomy, gothic atmosphere, as is the case for instance with Kurtz’s “small sketch in oils” which strikes Marlow so much because it looks so “sinister” (Conrad 2006, 25).
6 Details, art critic Daniel Arasse tells us, are meant to be “revealing.” Surprising us, they strike our gaze because they look either superfluous or they distract us from the general meaning of the work. Details convey “information which is different from the overall message of the work”.5 Thanks to them, the “work’s content or intention is either veiled or unveiled” (Arasse 10). They stop our gaze and disrupt the logic of interpretation, opening new paths,6 favouring unexpected associations (23) and
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suggesting new modes of approach: details may seem unimportant or trivial, but they can also be read as “signs” that beckon to us, indicating that there may be other ways of reading a painting, for example. Arasse deals with the visual arts, but his remarks may also apply to literature and particularly Heart of Darkness.
7 In the novella, Marlow’s interest in apparently insignificant objects creates moments of stasis during which his gaze is arrested by their presence, a presence which reverberates on the overall picture. Such is the case for instance with the accountant met by Marlow in the outer Station with his “high starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clear necktie, and varnished boots. No hat. […] a green- lined parasol held in a big white hand.” Marlow is clearly fascinated by the man and his attire: he calls him a “miracle” and compares him to a “vision”, saying that he “ respected his collars, his vast cuffs […]” (Conrad 2006, 18) – not that he respected the man. The accountant’s clothes obviously stand for Europeanness and European “civilization”. Adding that “his starched collars and got-up shirt-fronts were achievements of character” and that he had “backbone”, Marlow encourages a psychological interpretation, the accountant becoming a model of resistance to the “destructive” influence of the African climate, “[keeping] up his appearance in the great demoralization of the land” (emphasis mine). In a novella that deals explicitly with the effect of “the powers of darkness” on Europeans, such a reading of the role of the accountant’s clothes seems only legitimate. But, if it looks like the most obvious interpretation, it is not the only one, as Marlow immediately adds that the man “[had] been teaching one of the native women about the station [to clean and starch his linen]. It was difficult. She had a distaste for the work” (18). As has been underlined by critics already, what this understatement reveals is that the mention of the accountant’s clothes may have another function in the story. The white cuffs and starched shirt can be read as a form of comment on the presence of such a glaringly “white” character in Africa: such details are not only an idiosyncrasy, a proof of the accountant’s eccentricity and attachment to European “manners”, they also point at the subjection of the woman. Marlow concludes that “this man had verily accomplished something” (18, emphasis mine). It remains for the readers to understand that he has pushed the logic of exploitation to a degree where the detail reveals a whole system of relationships between Europeans and natives, based on coercion.
8 Thus objects are two-faced: considered in relation with characters, they can be interpreted as revealers of their psychology and serve as elements of characterization or contribute to the creation of an atmosphere, in true Victorian fashion. But there is another way of seeing them, which has to do with where they come from, how they were obtained, why they are where they are, what amount of work or servicing they need, etc., in other words with their history as objects outside the text. In The Ideas in Things, Elaine Freedgood insists on the fact that “objects in texts may have connections beyond the covers of the text, or outside the frame of the narrative” (Freedgood 11), pointing out that things that tend to be considered as pertaining only to the reality effect should be considered for themselves, “in terms of their own properties and history”, as they may enable us to perceive “the play of history” “haunting” the text, although generally overlooked.7 Objects may look like details, but their own story throws a different light on the general picture: seen as elements in a system of relationships, they point to the material realities dealt with in Heart of Darkness. Therefore, they shed light on the economic and cultural implications of the story told by Marlow. From that point of view, objects in the novella have a lot to tell us about
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colonialism, and more particularly that economy and culture cannot be dissociated. In fact, it is in the presence of objects, in their description and in the way they are characterized, as much as in the relationships between characters, that the reality of colonialism is made clear: ‘Everything else in the station was in a muddle – heads, things, buildings. Strings of dusty niggers with splay feet arrived and departed; a stream of manufactured goods, rubbishy cottons, beads, and brass-wire set into the depths of darkness, and in return came a precious trickle of ivory. (Conrad 2006, 18; emphasis mine)
9 Saying this, Marlow points out that the presence of objects there is the result of exchanges: the station is filled with “manufactured goods” coming from Europe, which he characterizes as “rubbishy”,8 to be exchanged for “precious […] ivory” (Conrad 2006, 18). The imbalance in this system of circulation and exchange is double as is underlined by the choice of adjectives and of a water metaphor that contrasts the abundance of valueless trade goods from Europe with the scarceness of what is really valuable and valued, i.e. ivory. Objects therefore become symptoms of the reality of the colonial situation and work as material contradiction to the “civilizing work” (90) extolled by Marlow’s aunt (12): if the Europeans bring quantities of objects to Africa and get little out of it, profit is nevertheless on their side, and there is no chance of “civilizing” the natives with glass beads and brass-wire.
2. The Many Lives of Ivory
10 As we can see, the presence of objects which may look like mere details in the story told by Marlow – defined as the story of a quest for a man –, actually writes a subtext in the novella, which on second reading proves essential to its understanding. Postcolonial criticism, turning its back on psychological or metaphysical interpretations of Heart of Darkness, contributed to the revaluation of such details. An emblematic example is ivory. Of course, ivory is not presented as a detail in the novella, it is the very thing around which everything and everyone in the story revolves. But Conrad did not expect his readers to associate it only with Africa. He also made use of apparently insignificant details in order to saturate his text with its implicit presence, and force readers to acknowledge that they were not distant, outside spectators of what was taking place on a far-away continent.
11 The word “ivory” recurs only 31 times in the story.9 Yet its presence can be felt throughout the text if one pays attention to details, marking out important scenes, creating a network of signification and links that “make of that story something quite on another plane than an anecdote of a man who went mad in the centre of Africa” as Conrad put it in one of his letters (Conrad 1986, 417). Throughout Marlow’s stay in Africa and his quest for Kurtz, “the word ivory would ring in the air” (Conrad 2006, 35), and it is quite significant that, as the narrator tells us in “An Outpost of Progress”, “the storehouse [for ivory] was called the fetish” (Conrad 1983, 89), a term that underlines the layer of values ivory is endowed with: an image of power invested with an erotic dimension (Kurtz’s African mistress is covered with “the value of several elephant tusks”; Conrad 2006, 60), ivory is also the object of what Marx called “commodity fetishism”. For Marx, commodity fetishism conceals the relationships between people (or with animals) involved in the production of goods (workers and capitalist) behind the economic exchange of money and commodities: “It is nothing but the definite
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social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things” (Marx 165). In “An Outpost of Progress”, when Makola exchanges tusks for the station men, he trespasses on what is acceptable by the white men because he replaces the usual trade goods which can be seen as an equivalent of money (beads and calico), and which seem to confine transactions to the exchange of objects, with human beings. He therefore reveals the true nature of the relationship between colonized and colonizer: it is not an exchange of material goods but slavery. As Elaine Freedgood puts it, “social relations hide in things” (Freedgood 54). And they can be read in things. In Heart of Darkness, the same idea is conveyed in a much less direct or explicit manner, when Marlow speaks of the “strings” of black workers, thus making a parallel with the (strings of) beads that serve for payment of the ivory – his way of underlining that the natives are turned into objects themselves.
12 But the situation is made more complex because Marlow’s narrative is framed by scenes that take place not in Africa, where ivory is to be had, but in Europe, on the Thames and in Brussels. There, the precious raw material is never mentioned, at least never directly. Yet, as has been underlined, ivory is nevertheless present. It is present under a form that leaves the raw material out, in background details that seem largely disconnected from the main story: dominoes and piano-keys. First, these objects are never presented as the result of the transformation of ivory into something of a supposedly different nature (but is it?), i.e. utilitarian artefacts valued by the European upper middle classes who never set foot in Africa but who were probably not entirely ignorant of the “geographical and human origins” (Freedgood 8) of these objects (contrary to many later-days readers), if one thinks only of the campaigns against the Congo Free State that took place more or less at the time when the novella was published. Freedgood insists that the Victorians and Edwardians were largely conscious of the power relations hidden in things that seem innocuous enough to us, like mahogany furniture (or in our case piano-keys): [a]n apparently innocent object like a mahogany dresser or a walnut panel decorates the moral and moralized space of the novel’s winners, while sneaking in the true extent of their morally precarious triumph and evoking useful and self- protective memories of imperial mastery. […] Because we, contemporary readers of Victorian fiction, have lost many of the possible meanings of the things of those […] novels, what might be called the social destruction of meaning in the novel has unwittingly been abetted by practices of reading that ignore the literal or material qualities of objects, the very qualities that might take us back in time to the meanings and resonances these objects may have had for earlier readers.10 (Freedgood 51-52)
13 So piano-keys at the Intended’s and dominoes on board the Nellie could look like details to mid-20th century readers who read Heart of Darkness as a voyage into the self or a metaphysical quest (Hochschild 143). But the meaning of such details was much clearer for the late Victorian or Edwardian readers: their presence had to be re-inserted into the circuit of “exchange”, i.e. appropriation, transformation and distribution that guaranteed their availability on the European market. From that point of view, they were no longer details but the logical outcome of the ivory hunt in Africa, giving the attentive reader the key with which to understand why those who went out there behaved as they did.11 At the beginning of the novella, Marlow says that what redeems “[t]he conquest of the earth” is “the idea only” (Conrad 2006, 7, emphasis mine), but objects like the dominoes or piano-keys keep pointing at the material reality inseparable from the “idea”. The “horror” of colonialism may be only a rumour for the
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European readers, but the mention of such details functions like the return of the repressed and ensures that it remains grounded in reality.
14 As a consequence, their presence is perfectly necessary and logical. What they tell us is that the frame narrative is not only a frame but the place where everything starts and ends, not a place from which the crimes of colonialism can be judged but their cause. What they reveal is that there is no solution of continuity between Europe and Africa, as the comparison of the piano with a “sarcophagus” (Conrad 2006, 173) suggests: the victims of colonialization may be buried in Africa, but their ghosts have travelled to Brussels with the ivory or the money it returned. And it is all the more remarkable that Conrad chose objects like dominoes and piano-keys, not only because they were so trivial in a sitting-room or among a group of gentlemen trying to while away the time, but also because they are objects associated with leisure and culture, and telling us therefore that European culture is haunted by colonialism and its crimes, that it thrived on them while concealing its material (and highly unpalatable) aspects under a very civilized veil of refinement. Dominoes and piano keys make it possible for Conrad to go further than the denunciation of what takes place in Africa; they point at the other side of imperial domination. They associate Europeans who never took a direct part in colonization (but made use of the objects which were available thanks to it) to the process, revealing how the system of exploitation could go on since it safeguarded people’s clear conscience12 and concealed the material realities of colonialism behind the veil of culture. However, it also contaminated humans: not only Kurtz, out there, whose head had become an “ivory ball” (48) – a sign of his subjection to ivory fetishism –, but also the Intended who plays the piano, or Marlow’s friends who are allegedly interested only in navigation.
3. “… as in some picture of a massacre or a pestilence”
15 But objects do not only point at the circulation of goods between Africa and Europe and at the ethical and moral questions raised by colonialism, they also force us to pay attention to Conrad’s aesthetic strategies when dealing with what Marlow calls the “unspeakable”. In the “grove of death” passage, Marlow, just arrived at the first station, discovers the dying men. What he sees is so shocking that he can show it to us only at a remove, by transforming it, domesticating it. As Allan Simmons puts it, “Marlow’s narrative enacts the dilemma of representing ‘atrocity’ generally: what is the language to communicate that of which we can’t speak? Is there a ‘rhetoric of the unsayable’? […] the scale of the ‘horror’ to which it alludes cannot be adequately conveyed through facts […]” (Simmons 188-189). I would contend that if it cannot be “adequately conveyed through facts”, it is made sensible through details, through apparently insignificant objects. In order to speak of “that of which we can’t speak” and to protect himself from the trauma of the nightmarish encounter,13 Marlow’s solution is first to de-realise the scene in order to make it more acceptable for his listeners (and probably for Conrad’s readers as well): he therefore concentrates on the description of the men’s bodies, or rather on parts of their bodies seen separately, as if they were lifeless objects (bones, orbs of the eyes, fingers), like a painter who would try to make what stands before his eyes as precisely visible as possible – except that what he describes is anything but normal:
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Black rags were wound round their loins, and the short ends behind wagged to and fro like tails. I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope; […]. (Conrad 2006, 15) Near the same tree two more bundles of acute angles sat with their legs drawn up. (17)
16 Such close-ups on body parts convey the dehumanization of these living corpses as well as Marlow’s shock: it seems that he can register the situation only progressively, one image after another. He needs familiar images to come to terms with such horrific visions: as a consequence, the sailor mentions ropes and their knots when he looks at their joints, or resorts to literary similes (“it seemed to me I had stepped into a gloomy circle of some Inferno”; Conrad 2006, 16). Above all, he presents the scene to his listeners as a painting or a print, describing the dying bodies with terms borrowed from the visual arts, as if he were technically commenting on a work of art: “Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees, leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair” (17, emphasis mine). At the end of the passage, Marlow explicitly associates what he sees with painting: “and all about others were scattered in every pose of contorted collapse, as in some picture of a massacre or a pestilence” (17). Conrad’s readers may have thought of Romantic pictures by Delacroix or Gros for instance. Here, Marlow does two things: speaking of “knots in a rope”, he de-realizes what is unbearable; and then he characterizes it as a “picture”, i.e. aestheticizes what he saw,14 domesticating it in order to make it acceptable, first to himself, and then to his listeners… and of course ultimately to the readers: the “horror” of the scene is finally contained by the pictorial reference; the material reality of tortured bodies is veiled by the aesthetic approach and yet, at the same time it becomes conspicuous thanks to this aestheticisation.
17 There is, however, a second step in the process, as incongruous material details are again crucial in the description, and become elements that force us to take a side step, so to speak, and consider the “picture” from a different perspective: The black bones reclined at full length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which died out slowly. The man seemed young – almost a boy – but you know with them it’s hard to tell. I found nothing else to do but to offer him one of my good Swede’s ship’s biscuits I had in my pocket. The fingers closed slowly on it and held – there was no other movement and no other glance. He had tied a bit of white worsted round his neck – Why? Where did he get it? Was it a badge – an ornament – a charm – a propitiatory act? Was there any idea at all connected with it? It looked startling round his black neck, this bit of white thread from beyond the seas. (Conrad 2006, 17)
18 In this scene of horror, Marlow introduces a small piece of cloth which takes a particular importance in his description and about whose presence he can only offer hypotheses. I would like to make several remarks concerning the piece of cloth, whose surprising presence forbids us from yielding to the lulling effect of the Romantic “picture of a massacre or a pestilence”: “[A] white thread from beyond the seas”, it becomes a link, confirming that the scene of horror that takes place in Africa finds its origin in Europe. And the contrast between the white worsted and the man’s black skin can also be re-inserted into the general pattern which constantly subverts the usual “cultural and moral hierarchy” (see Parry 44) in Marlow’s story: in this case, the white and black bear no meaning of any sort, they are simply contrasting hues. For that
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matter, the piece of cloth works more or less in the same way as the dominoes or piano- keys, underlining the fact that there is no solution of continuity between the two continents and between what takes place in both.
19 Then, it also works for Marlow like what Roland Barthes calls the “punctum” (as opposed to the “studium”). Barthes defines the punctum as the “detail” that attracts the viewer’s attention because it breaks the “unity” of the picture and “interrupts [his/ her] reading” (Barthes 41): The second element will break (or punctuate) the studium. This time, it is not I who seek it out (as I invest the field of the studium with my sovereign consciousness), it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. […] This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole – and also a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me). (Barthes, 26; emphasis in the original text)
20 Marlow is obviously deeply shocked by what he sees in the grove of death. The piece of white worsted therefore gives him something he can rest his eyes on in this moment of extreme tension. But it also, and above all, works as the detail that “is poignant to [him]” and therefore “interrupts [his] reading”, redirecting his gaze and forcing him to acknowledge the man’s humanity: what the presence of the white worsted tells Marlow is that at one point in his life, the young man was an individual with a will of his own, who chose to put the piece of cloth around his neck. What the successive questions underline is that such a decision remains mysterious for Marlow, who cannot account for it but only make hypotheses, so that the detail transforms the meaning of the whole picture: the piece of cloth punctures the “picture”15, destroys its unity, forces Marlow (and the reader with him) to keep in mind that it is peopled by real human beings (not brushstrokes), and that the bones belong to living – or rather dying – bodies. The white worsted may be interpreted in many ways: as an image of the whites’ power over him, as a noose around his neck prefiguring his imminent death, etc. But Marlow sees it as an expression of the man’s choice, an ultimate manifestation of freedom in the midst of the dehumanizing process he is a victim of, a sign that he is still a human being. It brings back reality and its real atrocities into the picture. Focusing on the white worsted re-introduces a personal dimension, sympathy – and therefore the possibility of an ethical point of view. Adam Smith showed that sympathy is related to imagination and that emotions therefore have a moral value, as they encourage us to identify with others and empathize with them.16 This is exactly what happens here with Marlow: the white worsted “pricks” and “bruises” (Barthes 26) Marlow, forcing him to acknowledge the young man’s sufferings. As a consequence, sympathy reintroduces the possibility of an ethical point of view in a scene that is otherwise largely aestheticized.
21 There may not be many objects in Heart of Darkness and they may at first glance look like details. A closer look reveals however that they are essential, not only because they create circuits of meaning throughout the novella, which point at the hidden aspects of colonialism but also because Conrad’s “rhetoric of the unsayable” (Simmons 189) rests largely on these apparently unimportant objects – details through which the horror’s daily manifestations are made visible, details that re-introduce the human element into the picture. Thus, looking at objects, we perceive that Conrad’s aesthetic strategy in Heart of Darkness is based on the disruptive presence of these apparently insignificant objects: focusing on unexpected details suddenly transforms the picture he has carefully drawn, in the manner of an anamorphosis, and forces the readers to realize
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that the ethical and moral questions his novella raises are questions that concern them directly.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arasse, Daniel, Le Détail. Pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture (1992), Paris : Champs/ Flammarion, 1996.
Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill & Wang, 1981.
Brown, Bill, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature, Chicago: Chicago UP, 2003.
Conrad, Joseph, “An Outpost of Progress” in Tales of Unrest (1898), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
Conrad, Joseph, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897), ed. Jacques Berthoud, Oxford: The World’s Classics, 1984.
Conrad, Joseph, The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, vol. 2 (1898-1902), eds. Frederick Karl & Laurence Davies, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986.
Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness (1899), ed. Paul B. Armstrong, New York: Norton, 2006.
Freedgood, Elaine, The Ideas in Things. Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006.
Hochschild, Adam, King Leopold’s Ghost, Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999.
Jameson, Fredric, The Political Unconscious. Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981), London: Routledge, 2002.
Karl, Frederick & Laurence Davies (eds.), The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, vol. 2 (1898-1902), Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986.
Marx, Karl, Capital (1867), London: Penguin Classics, 1990.
Murphy, Ryan Francis, “Exterminating the Elephant in Heart of Darkness”, The Conradian 38.2 (2013): 1-17.
Parry, Benita, “The Moment and Afterlife of Heart of Darkness”, in Conrad in the 21st Century. Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives, eds. Carola M. Kaplan, Peter Lancelot Mallios & Andrea White, London: Routledge, 2005.
Peters, John G., Conrad and Impressionism, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.
Simmons, Allan, “Conrad, Casement and the Congo Atrocities”, in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), ed. Paul B. Armstrong, New York: Norton, 2006.
Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiment (1759), Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2010.
Watt, Ian, “Impressionism and Symbolism in Heart of Darkness”, Southern Review 13.1 (1977): 96-113.
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NOTES
1. “In the secret dictionary of novel criticism […] objects are weak metonyms for the subjects they adorn or generic markers of the real they indicate” (Freedgood 9-12; 36). 2. The question of the ivory and white worsted in the novella has already been studied by Ryan Francis Murphy, while the role of details has been tackled, among others, by Ian Watt or John G. Peters. 3. Letter to R.B. Cunningham Graham, Feb. 8, 1899. 4. Such disconnection between object and use also suggests a world in which causality has become problematic or been utterly defeated. 5. “[…] le détail se manifestait alors comme un écart ou une résistance par rapport à l’ensemble du tableau ; il semblait avoir pour fonction de transmettre une information parcellaire, différente du message global de l’œuvre – ou indifférente à celle-ci.” (Translation mine) 6. “Mais le détail peut aussi se manifester comme le lieu où s’est condensé l’investissement du tableau (et de son thème) par son auteur ; son écart fait alors affleurer les enjeux du peintre, au travail dans son œuvre” (Arasse 14 ; translation mine). 7. Freedgood concentrates on Victorian literature. In Jane Eyre for instance, she shows that “mahogany becomes more than a weak metonym for wealth and taste; it figures, first of all, itself. It tells a story of imperial domination – the history of deforestation and slavery from Madeira to Jamaica – that crosshatches the manifest narrative of Jane Eyre […]” (Freedgood 3). 8. In “An Outpost of Progress”, Carlier also characterizes them as “rubbish” and “rags” (Conrad 1983, 89). 9. The name of Kurtz occurs 122 times; the pilgrims are mentioned 31 times as well. Clearly, if we trust the recurrence of terms, human interest seems to outweigh material interest. 10. See also 24 and 35: “colonial products like tea and sugar made consumers anxious because they threatened to bring home the violence that attended their production. This anxiety suggests the ways in which acts of consumption were regarded as moral choices.” 11. Not to mention the fact that the dominoes were also called bones, a term which is highly evocative in Heart of Darkness. 12. Neither Marlow nor the frame narrator, who mention the piano-keys and dominoes, associate them with what made their presence possible. Readers must make their own deductions. 13. Confronted with the dying boy, he admits that “[he] found nothing else to do but to offer him one of [his] good Swede’s ship’s biscuits […]” (Conrad 2006, 17). 14. It is what F. Jameson reproaches Conrad with: concealing economic (or imperialist) realities behind an aesthetic veil. Yet there are moments when Conrad (or in the present case, Marlow) points to the presence of the veil for us, making it possible to see what lies behind and underlining its function: the screen thus becomes a revealer (see Jameson 194-270; 202). 15. It can be noticed that this way of zooming in on “details” is a characteristic feature with Marlow. He is helped in that process by optical instruments like the binoculars which reveal to him that the “round knobs” around Kurtz’s compound are in fact dried heads. Such “unveiling” “pricks” Marlow in the same manner as the white worsted: “And then I made a brusque movement, and one of the remaining posts of that vanished fence leaped up in the field of my glass. You remember I told you I had been struck at the distance by certain attempts at ornamentation, rather remarkable in the ruinous aspect of the place. Now I had suddenly a nearer view, and its first result was to make me throw my head back as if before a blow. Then I went carefully from post to post with my glass, and I saw my mistake. These round knobs were not ornamental but symbolic; they were expressive and puzzling, striking and disturbing – food for thought and also for the vultures if there had been any looking down from the sky” (Conrad 2006, 57).
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16. “Though our brother is on the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. […] It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them” (Smith 2).
ABSTRACTS
There are only a limited number of objects in Heart of Darkness and they may at first glance look like details. A closer look reveals however that they are essential, not only because they create circuits of meaning throughout the novella which point at hidden aspects of colonialism but also because Conrad’s aesthetic strategy rests largely on these apparently unimportant objects – details through which the horror’s daily manifestations are made visible, details that may re- introduce the human element into the picture. This article analyses how a limited number of objects shed a revealing light onto the novella’s meaning. Two instances of particular importance (ivory and the white worsted round the dying black man’s throat in the “grove of death” scene) are analyzed in detail in order to show that what could not be conveyed through facts when the novella was first published is made sensible thanks to the disruptive presence of apparently insignificant objects. Drawing on postcolonial theory, art criticism and R. Barthes’s “punctum”, the paper underlines how focusing on details forces the readers to realize that the ethical and moral questions raised by the novella are questions that concern them directly.
Les objets sont peu nombreux dans Cœur des ténèbres. Une lecture attentive montre pourtant qu’ils ne sont pas de simples détails mais les supports essentiels d’une circulation du sens qui met en lumière certains aspects cachés du colonialisme : ils sont essentiels à la stratégie esthétique de Conrad, dirigeant le regard du lecteur vers les manifestations de l’« horreur » qu’ils rendent visible, introduisant aussi de l’affect dans le discours de Marlow. Cet article analyse la manière dont un nombre limité d’objets jette une lumière révélatrice sur ce que raconte Marlow. Deux exemples (l’ivoire et les différents objets qui en sont composés, et le brin de laine autour du cou du jeune noir agonisant dans la scène du « bosquet de la mort ») sont abordés en détail de manière à montrer que ce que le roman ne dénonce pas directement est rendu sensible à travers la présence d’objets apparemment de peu d’importance dans la narration. S’appuyant sur la théorie postcoloniale, la place du détail en peinture et le concept de « punctum » emprunté à Roland Barthes, l’article étudie comment la présence de ces « détails » dirige le regard du lecteur vers les questions éthiques et morales soulevées par Cœur des ténèbres.
INDEX oeuvrecitee Heart of Darkness (J. Conrad) Mots-clés: objet, détail, ivoire, esthétique, circulation du sens, Conrad (Joseph) Keywords: object, detail, ivory, aesthetics, circuits of meaning, Conrad (Joseph)
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AUTHOR
NATHALIE MARTINIÈRE Nathalie Martinière is Professor at the University of Limoges where she teaches literature. She works on Conrad’s fiction and on postcolonial rewritings of classics. She is the author of Figures du double: du personage au texte (2008), she co-edited Rewriting in the 20th et 21st centuries: Aesthetic Choice or Political Act? (2015) and recently contributed the part on Heart of Darkness in a volume entitled Expériences de l’histoire, poétiques de la mémoire (2017). She is the editor of L’Époque Conradienne.
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Observing Objects as Mutability and Meaning in Thomas Hardy’s Human Shows (1925) Les objets dans Human Shows de Thomas Hardy : sens et mutabilité
Adrian Grafe
1 Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) lived to the age of eighty-seven, a good innings by anyone’s standards but especially good for the time, particularly among writers. Henry James (1843-1916) was born shortly after Hardy and died twelve years before him. Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) was born seventeen years after Hardy and died four years before him. Not the least idiosyncrasy of his career is that Hardy’s longevity enabled him to have two writing lives – following upon his occupation as a novelist. Devoting himself full time to poetry – even though he had always written it – literally gave him a new lease of life, and a second, but by no means secondary, writing life. Poetry, like his first wife, Emma Gifford, was always his first love: during her lifetime she was as it were his virtual muse, morphing into his real one when in the “Poems of 1912-13”, he wrote the poems that lay dormant during his first marriage, waiting to be written while he toiled at his livelihood as a prose writer1. His first writing life lasted for twenty-seven years. It began with The Poor Man and the Lady (1868), rejected by Macmillan, and ended with Jude the Obscure, published in 1895. Wessex Poems appeared in 1898 and Hardy regularly published poetry over his thirty remaining years. Why is it then that James Gibson’s Literary Life (1996) devotes far more space to the novelist than the poet? The fact that Gibson devotes twelve pages to The Poor Man and the Lady, of which no manuscript subsists, and just three to Human Shows, speaks volumes for current critical attitudes to poetry, and Hardy’s in particular, even coming from the editor of that poetry. R. G. Cox’s Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage (1970) devotes three quarters of its space to the novels. After covering reviews of the first three volumes of Hardy’s twelve volumes of verse, Cox seems to get fed up with his whole editorial enterprise and doesn’t even bother mentioning Human Shows. Surely this misrepresents the author, whose poems were the part of his literary production that meant most to him. Perhaps the best account of Human Shows is that of Rosemarie Morgan, who both reads the poems closely
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and assesses the collection as a whole. She relevantly notes that in the collection “significance is given to what seems insignificant” (Morgan 184): the discrepancy or gap between being and seeming lies, as its title suggests, at the thematic heart of the volume, and Morgan’s remark is especially true of the treatment of objects therein, including the objectivisation of what is not originally an object2.
2 Hardy’s feeling for objects – one might say, borrowing a term of Chesterton’s (quoted just below) which Hardy approved, his “sense of” the object – is attested to in countless places in his writings in prose and verse. To take but two examples, one his own, the second copied from elsewhere: “An object or mark raised or made by man on a scene is worth ten times any such formed by unconscious Nature. Hence clouds, mists, and mountains are unimportant beside the wear on a threshold, or the print of a hand” (quoted in Armstrong 332; Hardy’s note dates from 1877). The demonstrative pronoun group “any such” refers to the “object or mark” previously mentioned. The sentence seems to be anti-Romantic, denoting a search for meaning within the realm of human activity alone, rather than in response to, or communication with, “Nature”. But Hardy in 1877 was not primarily a poet, and some poems in Human Shows (we take “Why Do I?” as an example in the concluding section of this essay) either conceal meaning or deal in ambivalence, a “mark” of which is Hardy’s contorted syntax. He copied into his notebook a passage from Chesterton’s study of Browning: The sense of the terrible importance of detail was a sense wh. may be sd. to have possessed Browning in the emphatic manner of a demoniac possession…Any room that he was sitting in glared at him with innumerable eyes & mouths gaping with a story… If he looked at a porcelain vase or an old hat, a cabbage, or a puppy at play, each began to be bewitched…the vase to send up a smoke of thoughts & shapes; the hat to produce souls as a conjuror’s hat produces rabbits; the cabbage to swell & overshadow the earth like the Tr. of Knowge; and the puppy to go off along the road to the end of the world –” [This is true of all poets–not especially of Browning] (Björk 152-153)
3 Hardy twice underlines the last four words in order to emphasise what he finds in Chesterton’s description of Browning. Hence what is intrinsic to a poet is on the one hand his sense of detail, and on the other the element of possession which Chesterton says would overcome both Browning as he encountered objects and account for the latter’s “bewitched” quality when they met his gaze. This is perhaps a post-Romantic version of Keatsian negative capability – “the poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence” (Keats 119) – since it suggests that there is no hierarchy of subjects in poetry: no subject is worthier of treatment in a poem than any other, partly because, in poetry, subject-matter is in any case not of the essence, but mainly because all things to a poet are equally worthy of interest when it comes to making a poem. This argument would in itself explain the plethora of objects, domestic and outdoor, in Hardy’s writing: what Hardy sees and feels in the phenomena around him is life or, to use Chesterton’s word, soul, even3. Thus the poet’s, and in particular Hardy’s, feeling for the aliveness of the world, an aliveness that is, to some extent, created by the poet, can be related to Winnicott’s notion of the “aliveness and behaviour of the external object” (Winnicott 413) that is available to the child and that will later affect his relationship with religion, the arts, and scientific creativity4.
4 One could also take the question of objects in Hardy’s poetry, at least in Human Shows, as a purely poetic one. In this respect, he tallies, as Michael Alexander pointed out, with Pound: “Hardy […] conformed before it was articulated to Pound’s demand for ‘direct
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treatment of the object’ – the ‘natural object’ which, in Pound’s view, was ‘the proper and perfect symbol’” (Alexander 52). Nevertheless the “natural object” is not always symbolic in Hardy’s poetry, just as the cows in Hardy’s poem “Bags of Meat” are primarily themselves (though the way in which human beings treat or mistreat them may make them into metonymies for the natural world).
5 We encounter the Hardy of Human Shows, published three years before the poet’s death, raging against the dying of the light – indeed, the light is hardly dying at all. One might argue that the one hundred and fifty-one poems that make up Human Shows, Hardy’s penultimate poetry volume and the last to be published in his lifetime, show his poetic imagination to be working at its most powerful, and that his treatment of objects in the collection bears this out. Incidentally, unlike Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922) before it, and Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928) after it, no prose note prefaces the collection of poems, as though Hardy felt that anything he had to say there lay within the poems alone and perhaps the excessively descriptive full title, Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs, and Trifles, in itself an iambic, and lightly tripping, pentameter line. It is a collection that redounds not only in shows and fantasies but in “Premonitions”, “forebodings” (“The Lady of Forebodings”), “visions” (“Discouragement”), and “phantoms” (“Song to an Old Burden”). In this context full of abstract emotion, objects serve both as metaphors for the reality of such emotion and as realia linking the poet to the phenomenal world so beloved of Hardy. Hence, we take the term “objects” for the purposes of argument, as first of all, not only what David Trotter calls “functional objects”, but also the various components of the phenomenal world, some man-made, others natural, occurring in the poems. Some of the “phantasies”, moreover, as we’ll see below, are not as “far”, in place at least, as Hardy’s collection title suggests.
6 Hardy’s attentiveness to objects in his poems reflects his attentiveness to, and care for, language: each object is meticulously named and has its own place in the poem. Are objects in Hardy’s poetry a source of wonder? If they are, they would function as an antidote to the poet’s philosophical pessimism. Hardy’s perspective upon objects is to situate them within deep time, the time of geology and archaeology. This lends a density which grants them significance that goes beyond the object’s immediacy. Objects have a resurrectionary power in Hardy’s poetry, capable of reviving the past within the present and bringing something new to it. Hence Robert Gittings’s view, that the poems in Human Shows are “thin”, warrants some qualification: they are not necessarily or not all without substance, and the impression of thinness may in any case conceivably be intended, even if it is true that some poems satisfy more than others5. Hardy’s specific focus on objects can be seen as an aesthetic and even political choice, an option for, and celebration of, the everyday, as opposed to the tawdry or the fashionable – the showy, in fact. If a poetics of wonder is to be grounded anywhere, it is to be grounded in the serendipity of commonness and dailiness.
7 In Human Shows, Hardy’s approach to objects – as with any subject he tackled – is far from systematic or univocal. This essay therefore aims at showing how Hardy exhibits a variety of perspectives on the poetic object. On a simple level, Hardy applies the techniques of personification and apostrophe to “To a Sea-Cliff” (Hardy 793-794), but goes far beyond them. If the sea-cliff can be considered as an object, then it is clear that its role in the poem is central, not descriptive or circumstantial, endowed with the indeterminate ontology that, attributing a partial sense of human being to the object, shows how much the object – the subject of the poem – means to the poet. The poem is
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a vector of drama, pathos, and surprise or rather suspense (the idea of the cliff-hanger, given the poem’s title, is relevant): the emotion felt by the speaker on learning that the woman he thought loved him in fact loved another. The speaker of the poem begins by telling the cliff he will, standing (or sitting) on top of it, relate to it “a page from your history”. One is reminded of Wordsworth’s “There was a Boy” (composed in 1789) with its opening address to the cliffs: “There was a Boy; ye knew him well, ye cliffs /And islands of Winander!” Perhaps typically of each poet, Wordsworth’s poem mourns the loss of childhood innocence and instinctive communion with Nature, whereas Hardy’s turns out to be inspired by a love triangle: the woman beloved of the speaker – his wife, likely – revealed, when she and the speaker were once sitting “silent” and “listless” on the sea-cliff, that she was in love with another man, on board a ship (not taken here as an object) that sails past the sea-cliff’s “jutting head” before the couple’s eyes. The poem’s first three stanzas are all explicitly addressed to, and mention, the sea-cliff, while the last one does not mention it, although the whole poem can be taken to be addressed to it. Two further objects, this time not personified or addressed, enter the poem in the last stanza, through a series of lines all dramatically run-on: He slid apart Who had thought her heart His own, and not aboard A bark, sea-bound… That night they found Between them lay a sword.
8 Hardy objectifies the woman’s heart by placing it on board a ship. But the third object of the poem, the sword, is the most striking: the sword objectifies and makes concrete the now openly declared difference between the speaker and the woman he loves. The woman’s revelatory declaration – or declarative revelation – brings about a transformation in the love relationship between the speaker and her, perhaps, indeed, transforming it into one of hate. The poem then brings all of its components, including its objects, into a transformative poetic force-field. The water of the sea, the “solid stone” of the sea-cliff, and the metal of the (metaphorical) sword: Hardy uses the objects, and the material of the objects, to get at something elemental in the quarrel between the speaker and his faithless wife. The elemental nature of the objects points, if only by contrast, to human frailty, as figured in the speaker of the poem’s own broken heart.
The object speaks
9 Rather than addressing objects, other poems are themselves, in whole or in part, voiced by objects. In several different ways, Hardy exploits the technique of prosopopoeia which, for our purposes, is more than personification since it gives objects the power of speech. Such a device goes to the heart of Hardy’s poetics and perhaps to the heart of the art of lyric poetry6. But in previous poems Hardy had used the device to personify Nature as a whole, or took objects in Nature, such as the “pool, /Field, flock, and lonely tree” in “Nature’s Questioning” (Hardy 66-67), as metonymies by which to question Nature as a phenomenon, so that, as Allen Tate pointed out in relation to the poem, the objects themselves are unparticularised7. Tate in fact does argue that the objects are “weakly perceived” since their identity as themselves is not sufficiently established. In other words, they merely serve Hardy’s own philosophical “questioning”. It is
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interesting to note that such poems as “Nature’s Questioning” and “To Outer Nature”, among the main examples of Hardy’s texts chosen by Nashimura and the critics he adduces (he also discusses Under the Greenwood Tree) are taken from Hardy’s first poetry collection, Wessex Poems (1898). Hardy’s writing of objects might then be perceived as part of a trajectory over the course of which he gradually moved from general statements and pathetic fallacy to a greater degree of particularisation and a warmer degree of appreciation both of the natural world and of the link between man and the latter. If this argument were possible, a late poem such as “Afterwards” would tend to bear it out. One of the reasons why this poem is so beloved a part of Hardy’s poetic production is that it takes the objects as they are, and does particularise them (without calling upon any specific rhetorical device). Once in each of the poem’s four stanzas, Hardy contents himself with the more discreet but repeated deictics and the intensifying adjective “such”: “He was a man who used to notice such things”; “To him this must have been a familiar sight”; “such innocent creatures”; “He was one who had an eye for such mysteries”; “He…used to notice such things” (italics mine). Hardy and his poetics are at home with “such things”, and perhaps “things” as such, because his sensibility takes pleasure in what Michael Edwards calls their “quiddity”. Edwards writes that Hardy’s “sensibility responds to the least thing seen or heard” (Edwards 214-215). Hardy is thus perhaps more satisfying as a poet when he leaves off his Wordsworthian “obstinate questionings/Of sense and outward things” (from the “Immortality” ode8) and devotes his attention to realia as they are and in what they mean to him.
10 In Human Shows objects are observed for themselves, despite the theatrically-inflected9 title of the collection, without (necessarily) being part of a pathetic fallacy. The persona’s voice in “Green Slates” (Hardy 712) as it were hands over to the eponymous objects in the last two lines of the poem10. But there are several objects in the poem, typical of the way in which Hardy concretises his thought through object-metaphors as well as describing what are intended to be realia. Hardy’s use of the indeterminate term “A form” serves to objectify, or rather reify, the pictorial abstract figure of Emma against “the slate background” in Penbethy slate quarry in Cornwall where, in 1870, Hardy had gone, accompanied by Emma and her married elder sister Helen, to inspect the slate to be used for the restoration of St Juliot’s Church for which Hardy had been commissioned. The poem commemorates then a partial crystallisation of Hardy’s love for Emma “fifty years” (!) after the event. Emma’s “form” is made even more abstract by the unusual diction and contorted syntax which works against natural word-order: the speaker saw “A form against the slate background there, /Of fairness eye- commanding.”, Hardy splitting the noun group “Of fairness” from its antecedent, “A form”, at the beginning of the previous line, so that at first the woman (in the next stanza we learn to what, or to whom, the “form” corresponds) seems to be a mere form, insisting on the form’s beauty through the Miltonic inversion and the invention of the compound adjective, as though no already-existing adjective could do that beauty justice. The green slates themselves, physically and geographically detached – quarried – from their original site, serve as an objective correlative of Hardy’s incipient love for the young woman: Green slates – seen high on roofs, or lower In waggon, truck, or lorry – Cry out: ‘Our home was where you saw her Standing in the quarry!’
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11 (One notes incidentally an echo of Hardy’s West Country accent, or ear, in the lower/ saw her rhyme, with the West Country “low” corresponding to RP “law”). However, as in other poems discussed here, it is the blend of objects as realia and as metaphors which is perhaps most outstanding, as in the phrase in the third stanza “strange- pipped dice my hand has thrown me”, in which current word order is again inversed, and the grammatical object – “dice” – placed before the verb. Hardy uses the object – the dice – to offer a paradox: the speaker throws the dice himself (“my hand”) and is thus in a sense responsible for the way in which the circumstances of his life have come about, “strange” or puzzling as they are, while the pips are the dots from one to six on each face of the dice and not in themselves “strange”.
12 “The Sundial on a Wet Day” (Hardy 808-809) is spoken by the sundial. The latter in turn personifies the sun as “He”, an almost godlike figure, rejoicing in the fact that, in spite of rain, He is still up there, And may gaze out Anywhen, anywhere; Not to help clockmen Quiz and compare, But in kindness to let me My trade declare.
13 The declarative ending hints at the poem as a cipher for the naturalness of a certain kind of poetic activity and for the latter’s dependence on something other than itself – in this case, the object (the sundial). There may be an Apollonian subtext to the poem, to the extent that Apollo was the god of both the sun and of poetry. The sundial – like the poet – finds its delight in exercising its “trade”, its craft or (not-so-sullen) art. Hardy transforms the humble object, not known for its beauty, and hardly noticed or necessary in a time of mechanisation (“clock”), into an ars poetica. Furthermore, Hardy uses the unfamiliar technical term “gnomon” (the raindrops “down /My gnomon drain”), denoting the rod the shadow of which, falling on the face of the sundial, indicates the time. The term derives from the Greek verb gignosko, to know, and intimates an interpretation of the poetic art as one in which understanding and cognition guarantee any usefulness it may have. The object in the poem, or poems, then, carries weight within the process of cognition that is the poem, and the reading of the poem.
14 “The High-School Lawn” (Hardy 812) offers an even more subtle use of prosopopoeia: Gray prinked with rose, White tipped with blue, Shoes with gay hose, Sleeves of chrome hue; Fluffed frills of white, Dark bordered light; Such shimmering through Trees of emerald green are eyed This afternoon, from the road outside. They whirl around: Many laughters run With a cascade’s sound; Then a mere one. A bell: they flee: Silence then: –
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So it will be Some day again With them, – with me.
15 This is because only the last line confirms that the lawn itself voices the poem. The lawn is literally in a perfect position, indeed a privileged one, to relish sympathetically the sights and sounds of schoolchildren’s afternoon play. The objects – clothes, shoes, colours – Hardy places in first position in the poem, with no main verb or subject of the main verb when it comes (“are eyed”), so that the action of the poem is concentrated in the objects which seem indeed endowed with a life of their own. Hardy provides a variation on this approach at the beginning of the last stanza in which, preceded by the article, the noun “A bell” suffices to conjure up the object’s action and its sound. The pronoun “They” which appears in the seond and third stanzas takes on a certain ambiguity since it could either refer back to the objects (which would be a logical, grammatical deduction), or else stand for the schoolchildren. This exemplifies Hardy’s general approach to objects in the poems: they are liable to be animated if not personified. The poem might make a possible contrast with Yeats’s “Among School Children” which dates from the same period as Hardy’s poem, having been composed in 1926. The elderly persona of Yeats’s poem observes the children sitting in rows in their classrooms with their mistresses, doubtless holding their natural exuberance in check, though the poem does end with an ecstatic vision of dance. How typical of Hardy, though, to show the children in joyful motion under no watchful or censorious adult eye. Once again a dialectics of presence and absence underpins or, rather, in the case of “The High School Lawn”, becomes the explicit subject of, the poem. The poem works on a temporal matrix of alternation and iteration (“So it will be…again”), perfectly mirrored in the alternate rhymes, metrical pattern, and stanzaic division. The poem is in dimetre except for the variation in the longer eighth and ninth lines which are tetrametrical. The unusual pluralisation of the noun “laughter” almost turns the laughter into a multiplicity of objects.
“Bags of Meat”: reversing the perspective
16 Conversely to poems previously examined, the persona of “Bags of Meat” does not reify a living being (in the sense that Hardy sees the Emma of “Green Slates” as a mere “form”, for instance). Rather, Hardy castigates the lack of empathy for animals which he finds within the farming trade – Hardy or, rather, his speaker, since the writer himself admitted he was not vegetarian11. He takes on the mantle of polemicist in this poem, just as his whole poetic oeuvre is an explicit – and sometimes explicit – rebuke to critics of his prose fiction. There is possibly a slight touch of irony or ambiguity to the poem since Hardy criticises the exploitation of animals for human consumption while espousing, not without relish, the “show” of the cattle auction, with its sense of theatre and ritual12. The theatrical side of the setting Hardy stresses through the word “scene” in the last stanza: the speaker imagines the animals reproaching the humans for bringing them to the “sinister scene” of the cattle market. This reinforces and dramatises the undoubted tragic element of the poem13.
17 The poem consists of a series of observations of the sale of animals at a cattle-market. Unusually for Hardy, he eschews regularity in the poem, be it in terms of metre, rhyme or number of lines per stanza. The first stanza is made up of eight lines; the second, six
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lines; the third, four; the fourth and fifth, eight lines; and the sixth, eleven lines. Hardy takes the poem-title from the words of the auctioneer presenting a steer at a cattle- market: “Here’s a fine bag of meat”, words which Hardy quotes in slightly altered form as the first line of the poem, adding the plural and removing the adjective, and which transform the living animal proleptically into an inanimate object, the commercial end-product of its life. The auctioneer does not see the animal as a living being but as mere commodity: hence the poem is anti-bucolic, in keeping with Hardy’s perspective on country life since Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), in which, over half a century before “Bags of Meat”, he invented his own, Wessex, brand of anti-pastoral. “Bags of Meat” is a protest at the inhumane treatment of animals and ecological protest at the exploitation of the natural world for material gain, contrasting the jocular sales-talk of the auctioneers with the undignified treatment of the animals, and the latter’s own feelings as the speaker imagines them. Hardy focuses in turn on a steer, a heifer, a bull, and a calf. The implication of the plural in the poem-title is that they will all be turned into bags of meat. In the last stanza, the speaker reverses the perspective, revealing the underside of a situation vaunted by the auctioneers for its glamour: the “young bull” is worth thirty pounds to “have his picter done”. The glamour of the cattle market is precisely an example of the human show Hardy’s title sets forth, except that the show here is more inhuman than human, and Hardy wants to expose what he calls in the last stanza its “sinister” side. This is but one of a series of adjectives in the last stanza designed to counter the sales talk about the animals and their mistreatment – the way in which they are “prodded” (first stanza), “rapped on the horns and snout” (fourth), struck “on the buttock” and branded (fifth). It is arguable that Hardy’s view in the poem is Manichean, especially as he himself was not vegetarian. But poem’s simple, fixed moral standpoint need not detract from the poem’s power: quite the contrary, if anything. One might, in conclusion, compare this poem with a latterday “kin”, “The Cows on Killing Day”, by the Australian poet Les Murray (1938-2019) (Murray 125). Murray keeps Hardy’s anthropomorphic premise but takes it a stage further by having the cows themselves voice the poem14, which they do through the object-pronoun “me” used throughout the poem as the subject-pronoun: “A stick goes out from the human / and cracks, like the whip. Me shivers and falls down /with the terrible, the blood of me, coming out behind an ear.” Hardy’s poem omits explicit representation of the slaughter but adumbrates it through the violence meted out to the beasts, including, as in Murray’s poem, their being struck with a stick: the bull is “rapped on the horns and snout” while, concerning the calf, “The stick falls […], /On the buttock of the creature sold”. The last stanza of Hardy’s poem stages an agonistic struggle between eros – the farmer keeping the beast on the land – and thanatos – the butcher: a struggle in which, this being Hardy15, “the butcher wins”. After awarding the beasts both subjectivity and subject-status in the early part of the stanza – “Each beast […] /Looks round at the ring of bidders there /With a much-amazed reproachful stare”, the last words of the poem (“the butcher wins, and he’s [sc. the beast’s] driven from the place.”) return the animal to its object-status announced in the poem-title and first line.
“Another sphere”
18 In order to reach a tentative conclusion, one might first take up one or two points made by Tim Ingold in his article “Bringing things to life: creative entanglements in a world of materials”, in order to see whether they might the idea that Hardy is bringing to
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poetic life the things in his poems. A shift, then, operates here, from “objects” to “things”. Ingold follows Heidegger by saying that an object “presents its congealed, outer surfaces for our inspection”. This notion would seem to chime with that of “show” in Hardy’s volume title: the show is the surface, whether it be of people or things. The adjective “congealed” adds to the negative connotation of the object within this perspective. Ingold continues: “The thing, by contrast, is a ‘going on’, or better, a place where several goings on become entwined […] To observe a thing is not to be locked out but to be invited in to the gathering.” An object becomes a thing when it is seen holistically, that is, as belonging within, and taking in, the broader, dynamic, transformative processes of life. Could this perspective be applied to the last poem in Human Shows, “Why Do I?”? And would it enable us the better to understand the role of objects – and things – in Hardy’s poetry? Why Do I? Why do I go on doing these things? Why not cease? Is it that you are yet in this world of welterings And unease, And that, while so, mechanic repetitions please? When shall I leave off doing these things? – When I hear You have dropped your dusty cloak and taken you wondrous wings To another sphere, Where no pain is: Then shall I hush this dinning gear.
19 The poem gives no direct indication as to what the “things” that make up the speaker’s repetition compulsion might be, any more than to whom the “you” refers. As with any fine poem, several readings are possible. The poem gives an impression of presence – one might say, the poem presents, or presences itself – through the repetition of the deictics: these, this, these, this. The speaker seems to be questioning himself – thinking out loud, even – in the first two lines, and the first line of the second stanza. The dynamism of the poem is reflected not only in the metre, a combination of regularity and irregularity in the stress patterns and line lengths, but also in the poem’s temporal features: “while” the first stanza anchors, but not freezes, poem, speaker and interlocutor in the present, the second is wholly proleptic. In fact, if there is a tension at work here, which there undoubtedly is, it is not the dialectical relationship between “past and present”, but rather the dialectical dynamic between present and future which is by definition, to apply a spatial metaphor to rhetoric, forward-looking. At the same time, as the poem look to the future the questioning forms and tone of the first four sentences, all of which are questions, gives way to the long, four-line sentence that constitutes the answer to the question posed in the second stanza’s first line. The sense of certainty the poem conveys is reinforced by the minimal number of rhymes, only three rhyme sounds (“ings”, “ease”, and “ear”) for ten lines in all, perhaps designed to give a (willed) impression of monotony. The syntax is sufficiently varied, however, to counter or at least balance this impression, above all in the line which houses two named objects, the cloak and wings, the structure of which might indeed seem clumsy, though it could just as well be delicate, making the reader (this reader, at least) pause for a second, to notice that “have” does double duty both for “dropped” and “taken”, and that the subject of the verb “have taken” is not “you” but “wondrous wings”. It is the presence of the “you”, the anonymous addressee, who could be a, or the, Muse (depicted, by Ovid for example, as winged), or a current love or a past one, that,
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according to the argument of the poem, keeps the poet “doing these things”. As Tim Armstrong writes: “Demonstrative pronouns and adjectives which normally have a clear referent – ‘then’, ‘the thing that I did’, ‘one who’s there’ – come unlocated and mysterious […]” (Armstrong 328) The only objects, as one usually understands the word, are the “cloak” and “wings” which are relatively unproblematic, although generically different from each other, and clearly intended to be. This leaves the meaning of “these things” undecided. Even so, the adjective “wondrous” acts as an expression of wonder which attends the positive dimension of Hardy’s lyric achievement, and indeed Gitting calls the poetry-writing of Hardy’s old age a “miracle” (Gittings 274). Given that the demonstrative could refer to what the speaker is currently concerned with, the “things” in question are arguably the poems Hardy is currently working on. Independently of the quality of the poems themselves, there is a heroism in the act of writing them, in Hardy, the craftsman, the journeyman till the end, expending himself, every morning at his writing desk, in the task at hand, in the work he knew: “He allows nothing to interfere with his morning’s work”, Florence Hardy wrote (255); “Lyrics still poured from him, some of them as moving and accomplished as anything he had written in all his long life” (274). What Gittings calls Hardy’s “lyrics” could be the “things” Hardy does here: the enduring, disciplined writing of them. Hence, poems are done as well as made, since they involve willed activity, if only (if such is the case) the physical committing of them to paper and print. Although poems can, especially since Zukovsky and the Objectivists, be considered as objects, it is perhaps more fruitful to consider them, in Hardy’s case, as things such as Ingold’s perspective takes the latter to be: phenomena involved in setting, time and process. Harder to interpret satisfactorily are the “mechanic repetitions”, which seem to refer back to “these things” and forward to “dinning gear”, all of which are linked by the demonstratives and seem to refer to the same phenomena. “Mechanic repetitions” might refer to the principles of metre and rhyme which are, by definition, repetitive. They need not be mechanical, but they might be habitual, and Hardy may be pointing to his lifelong habit of verse-writing which invariably respects these principles. “Gear” would echo the adjective “mechanic” while “dinning”, more dynamic an adjective than “mechanic”, can only denote sound: Hardy is saying that his poems, though some have musical titles, are not mellifluous, an idea borne out by the fact that Human Shows is the collection of Hardy’s in which the Latin term “concordia discors” appears16. The spectre or Muse figure represented by “you” literally compels the speaker to keep writing, producing the “things” (the dynamic, processing objects) that are his poems which do, after all, “please17”. His writing is thus compulsive, with the risk, according to a negatively-connoted reading, of transforming the poet himself into an automat, and therefore an object. His writing is thus compulsive, the presence of, and wonder induced by, “you”, keeping the poet in a permanent state of dynamism and creation and, yes, pleasure.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Armstrong, Tim, “Thomas Hardy”, in A Companion to Modernist Poetry, eds. David E. Chinitz & Gail McDonald, Oxford: Blackwell, 2014, 325-334.
Björk, Lennart (ed.), The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, Volume 2, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985.
Alexander, Michael, “Hardy Among the Poets”, in Thomas Hardy After Fifty Years, ed. Lance St John Butler, London & Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1977, 49-63.
Edwards, Michael, “The Transcendence of Things Seen”, in Thomas Hardy, Poet: New Perspectives, eds. Adrian Grafe & Laurence Estanove, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2015, 207-216.
Elliott, Ralph W.V., Thomas Hardy’s English, Oxford: Blackwell, 1984.
Gittings, Robert, The Older Hardy (1978), London: Penguin, 1980.
Hardy, Thomas, The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.
Ingold, Tim, “Bringing Things to Life: Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials”, NCRM Working Papers Series 5/1 (July 2010), http://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/ 1306/1/0510_creative_entanglements.pdf (last accessed 23 Sept 2019).
Keats, John, Selected Poems and Letters, eds. Robert Gittings & Sandra Anstey, Oxford: Heinemann, 1995.
Morgan, Rosemarie, Student Companion to Thomas Hardy, Westport, Connecticut; London: Greenwood Press, 2007.
Murray, Les, New Selected Poems, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012.
Nishimura, Satushi, “Thomas Hardy and the Language of the Inanimate”, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 43.4 (Autumn, 2003): 897-912.
Trotter, David, “On the Nail: Functional Objects in Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders”, in Literary Bric-à-Brac and the Victorians: From Commodities to Oddities, eds. Jonathan Shears, Jen Harrison, Farnham: Ashgate, 2013, 115-128.
West, Anna, Hardy and Animals, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Winnicott, D. W., “A Study of the First Not-Me Possession”, Collected Works, Volume 5 1955-1959, eds. Lesley Caldwell & Helen Taylor Robinson, Oxford: OUP, 2016, 406-420.
Wood, James, “Anxious Pleasures”, London Review of Books 29.1 (4 January 2007): 25-29, https:// www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n01/james-wood/anxious-pleasures (last accessed 23 Sep 2019).
NOTES
1. Not the least interesting aspect of Human Shows, the volume of Hardy’s verse on which this article concentrates, is the fact that it contains poems such as “The Prospect” and “When Oats were Reaped” which were explicitly dated, beneath the text, respectively 1912 and 1913, though it is unclear whether or not such postscripts indicate the date of composition or an emotional throwback to those years.
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2. Tim Armstrong’s excellent article “Thomas Hardy” in The Blackwell Companion to Modernist Poetry (2014) focuses on Human Shows in order to argue that various facets of the volume and the poems in it play into Modernist poetics. 3. See James Wood who calls Hardy a writer of “animistic” feeling. 4. The possible application of Winnicott’s theories to Hardy’s treatment of objects would warrant a separate study in itself. 5. “the impression left by the book is thin.” (Gittings, 268) 6. As J. Hillis Miller has argued: “Without prosopopoeia no poetry.” (quoted in Nishimura 899). 7. Tate quoted in Nishimura (904). 8. In his “Apology” to Late Lyrics the poetry collection that preceded Human Shows, Hardy rejected the “disallowance of ‘obstinate questionings’ and ‘blank misgivings’” in poetry, without, incidentally, attributing the two phrases in quotation marks to their author. He thus defended the philosophical dimension of his poetry which seems less prevalent in Human Shows, a collection for which for which he wrote no preface. He perhaps expected the somewhat lengthy full collection-title to suffice by way of description or justification. 9. Robert Gittings’ unsurpassed biography of the poet shows how, around the time Hardy was composing the Human Shows volume, he was also involved in writing his Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall, and taking a close interest in adaptations of various novels of his for the stage (see Gittings 255-269). 10. Another possible example of this technique is “Inscriptions for a Peal of Eight Bells (After a Restoration)”, a poem which is both occasional verse and indeed fairly trifling. Each of the bells voices a stanza of the poem. 11. Hardy told Alfred Noyes that he was in this respect “not consistent”. See West 131 n4. Hardy says this in a “dismal” tone. 12. See, for example, the well-known scene at the farmers’ market in Chapter XII of Far from the Madding Crowd. 13. As Ralph Elliott points out, Hardy commonly uses the word “scene”, nor is the use of theatrical imagery is unique to him. Among other contexts, Elliott quotes from “An August Midnight” (1899) (“this scene”). Even at this relatively early stage in his poetic career, and despite the speaker’s need to draw a philosophical conclusion from the insects’ presence around his writer’s lamp, and the awkward inversion and chiasmic diction – in the last line, the insects the poem celebrates are said by the speaker to “know Earth-secrets that know not I” –, Hardy’s fellow-feeling for the animals is the same as in “Bags of Meat”. See Elliott 158. 14. In a different vein, Hardy did adopt this technique for “Why She Moved House (The Dog Muses)” also in Human Shows. 15. The remark is not quite fair: in the same collection, if other, agricultural animals are “consigned to doom” like the sheep in “A Sheep-Fair”, the sparrow and cat both survive in “Snow in the Suburbs”, the latter thanks to human intervention. 16. In “Genetrix Laesa”. 17. A further study would contrast the commonplace idea that repetition in music and poetry are sources of pleasure with the Freudian one that in repetition compulsion the subject re-enacts specifically painful events from the past: this perspective could be applied to much of Hardy’s poetry. “Why Do I?” perhaps owes its specific character to the encounter between these two notions.
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ABSTRACTS
How does Hardy represent objects in his poetry? What function(s) do they perform? Hardy uses the technique of personification but goes well beyond it. Thus “To a Sea-Cliff” begins as an address to place which finally has everything to do with drama and nothing to do with Nature as such. “The High-School Lawn” and “Green Slates” show Hardy lending objects voice, but the point of the poems lies not in rhetorical technique itself but in broader poetic creation, the recreation of emotion, and the evocation of deep time. Hardy anthropomorphises the animal kingdom in such a way as to suggest that the killing of sentient beings for human consumption, transforming them into “Bags of Meat”, is an ecological tragedy. These poems show the later Hardy as philosophical a poet as ever, an empirical one grounding his poetics, not merely in the object itself, but in what the object points to, and as an analogue for the realia of experience. If this argument were valid, it would add another dimension to the appreciation of Hardy’s thought, complementing the more familiar one highlighting his disillusion. The last poem in the collection, “Why Do I?”, leads us to conclude with a reflection inspired by Tim Ingold’s differentiation between objects and things: the poem is a weird, spectral ars poetica in which the “things” the persona says he “does” are actually, in the absence of any (other) referent, the poems that make up the collection and the activities that form the writing process.
Comment Hardy représente-t-il les objets dans sa poésie, et surtout dans le recueil Human Shows (1925) ? Quelle(s) fonction(s) remplissent-ils ? Hardy utilise la technique de personnification mais va bien au-delà. Ainsi, « To a-Sea-Cliff » commence comme une apostrophe qui a finalement tout à voir avec le drame et rien à voir avec la nature en tant que telle. « The High-School Lawn » et « Green Slates » donnent voix aux objets, mais l’intérêt des poèmes ne réside pas dans la technique rhétorique elle-même, mais dans une création poétique plus large, la recréation de l’émotion et l’évocation du « temps profond ». Hardy anthropomorphise le règne animal de manière à suggérer que le fait de tuer des êtres sensibles pour la consommation humaine, en les transformant en « Sacs de viande », est une tragédie écologique. Ces poèmes montrent le Hardy de ses dernières années comme un poète toujours aussi philosophique, empirique, fondant sa poétique non seulement sur l'objet lui-même, mais sur ce que cet objet désigne et en tant qu'analogue de la réalité de l'expérience humaine. Si cet argument était valable, il ajouterait une autre dimension à l’appréciation de la pensée de Hardy, complétant celle, plus familière, qui met en avant son pessimisme. Le dernier poème du recueil, « Why Do I? », nous amène à conclure par une réflexion inspirée par la différenciation qu’effectue Tim Ingold entre objets et choses : ce poème est un étrange ars poetica spectral dans lequel les « choses » que le personnage dit « faire » sont en réalité, en l’absence de tout (autre) référent, les poèmes qui forment le recueil ainsi que les activités que comporte le processus d’écriture.
INDEX
Mots-clés: objet, prosopopée, interprétation, post-romantisme, realia, Nature, émerveillement, corrélat objectif, chose Keywords: object, prosopopoeia, interpretation, post-Romanticism, realia, Nature, wonder, objective correlative, thing oeuvrecitee Human Shows, To a Sea-Cliff, Green Slates, Sundial on a Wet Day (The), High-School Lawn (The), Bags of Meat, Why Do I?
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AUTHOR
ADRIAN GRAFE Adrian Grafe is Professor of Literature in English at Université d’Artois. He co-organised the 2012 Thomas Hardy Poetry Conference with Emilie Loriaux at Artois, and co-edited Thomas Hardy, Poet: New Perspectives with Laurence Estanove (McFarland, 2015). He has published broadly on poetry in Britain, France, America and elsewhere. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the English Association, and Book Reviews Co-Editor, with Emily Taylor Merriman, of the Hopkins Quarterly. Along with poetry, he also researches popular music.
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‘Looking into Glass’: Moments of Unvision in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy « Dans le miroir » : le vu et l'invu dans la poésie de Thomas Hardy
Isabelle Gadoin
1 In her landmark study Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination (1830-1880), Isobel Armstrong uncovers the perceptual, epistemological and even ontological transformations brought about by the extensive use of industrially-produced glass in the nineteenth century. This was, she notes, “the century of public glass” (Armstrong 1), and the apt symbol for the omnipresence and centrality of this new medium was the glass fountain at the centre of the Crystal Palace housing the Great Exhibition in 1851 – an event which could also be understood as the triumph of an ideal of universal visibility, putting virtually the whole world in the form of objects before the eyes of bedazzled spectators. But Armstrong also underlines the fundamental ambiguity of glass, an “ethereal substance” whose very materiality is denied by its defining quality, transparency: “Transparency is something that eliminates itself in the process of vision” (5, 11). Interposed between the spectator and the object, glass both allows sight and forbids physical contact: “glass is an antithetical material. It holds within itself contrary states as barrier and medium” (11).
2 Thomas Hardy shared his century’s fascination with glass, and his novels often dramatise personal relationships as conflicts of gazes through optical devices like lenses, telescopes, microscopes distorting images, or even windows treacherously deflecting them. In his poems, on the other hand, the drama of the gaze is often linked to the experience of looking at oneself in a mirror. Yet the looking glass offers even more of a paradox than transparent plate glass, as Isobel Armstrong also pointed: it seems to send back a perfect reflection of the subject looking into it, but this is only a deceptive likeness of the person, a projection that reverses the left-right sides1 and appears to falsely “materialize” the most intangible and indefinable features that make a human being a “person”. Mirrors, Armstrong beautifully writes, “produce deceptive
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palimpsest images: in glass, forward-moving figures come from the opposite direction of their originals; the helix reverses in the mirror, a phenomenon Lewis Carroll made axiomatic to Through the Looking Glass. Glass looks. Surfaces become alive with images and traces of images, losing their trustworthy solidity. The observer is accompanied continuously by a secondary world of figment” (Armstrong 8). The popular proverb holds that “the mirror cannot lie”, but Hardy knew better…
3 Even if the rural world, and the fictional county of Wessex, were still relatively preserved from the invasion of glass in the form of shop-windows or glass monuments, Gabriel Oak’s condemnation of Bathsheba’s mirror as an instrument of vanity at the beginning of Far from the Madding Crowd betrays a rather diffident, if not downright hostile attitude to glass, reflections, and superficial lustre. The speakers in Hardy’s poems do not entirely dismiss the experience of the encounter in a mirror, contrary to Oak; but the experience reverberates, reflects upon themselves, and serves to question the solidity, tangibility and objectivity of the self, in an almost metaphysical way. Indeed, in these poems, mirrors never quite offer the perfect picture of truth one would expect them to. They often seem to show either too much or not enough, so that the experience of “looking into the glass” becomes a strangely counter-intuitive and troubling one. Instead of providing a moment of ontological discovery, with the confirmation of personal identity, the confrontation of the beholder with his/her own image is nearly always a failed encounter, a moment of radical non-recognition which replaces the expected moment of self-understanding with the sudden awareness of the “self-unseeing”, to take up the title of a poem from the collection Poems of the Past and the Present2 (Hardy 166).
4 For Lacan, the “mirror stage” is a fundamental step in the child’s development: the moment when he starts recognising his own body image in the mirror, and forming a mental notion of his unified self. But Lacan himself progressively completed this initial schema, adding that this fundamental moment of self-identification also operates thanks to the Other –the adult who stands by his side and points to the image in the glass, calling the child by his name. In truth, it is first of all this other that the child recognises; which means that otherness – or intersubjectivity – unexpectedly becomes one of the founding sources of self-definition. Moreover, what this later and fuller analysis adds to Lacan’s initial understanding of the mirror-stage is the mediation of language, with the parent calling the child by his name. Now, as a poet, Hardy shows an amazing prescience of this “primordial discordance” (Lacan 96): in his “mirror” poems, the speaker only experiences a form of alienation, when failing to reconcile himself with his own distorted, fleeting, evanescent image in the mirror. The mirror becomes the agent of revelation of this inner split, as well as of the distance between past, present and future selves. The moment of the gaze becomes a meditation on time, but also on what escapes one’s capacities of perception, and on the puzzling intertwining of the visible and the invisible in human experience. This is all the more frightening as many other objects may also happen to work as mirrors, like windows, polished materials, or even natural surfaces reflecting the gaze, like bodies of still water. In the latter case, the contemplation of one’s reflection on a watery mirror naturally recalls Narcissus’s fascination and plight. But the Hardyan variant of the myth in fact stages a strongly anti-narcissistic experience, yielding not the sense of beauty and enthralment, but that of illusion and spectrality. In Hardy’s world, the mirror is finally less an object
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in itself than a medium: an instrument of revelation, or rather a surface of refraction sending man back to the unsolvable mystery of his condition.
1. The looking glass: revealer or deceiver?
5 In the history of painting, mirrors have often been instruments for the apprehension of the self. Because painters used to look at themselves in mirrors when painting self- portraits, they often pictured them within their canvases as a way of hinting at this work of self-observation and self-analysis: the mirror then stood as the material instrument of visual discovery, the metaphor for self-portraiture, and the signifier of the meta-pictorial dimension of self-portraits at one and the same time. In Van Eyck’s famous double portrait of the Arnolfini couple (1438, London, National Gallery), the convex mirror in the background includes a miniature image of the painter within the painted scene, an arrangement which Velázquez also made use of in his Meninas (1656, Madrid, Museo del Prado); only this time it is the royal couple looking at the canvas who is projected into the scene – a mise en abyme of the canvas’s spectators again taken up by Manet, in his Bar aux Folies Bergères (1882, London, Courtauld Gallery), where the glass behind the waitress reflects subjects external to the painting. This favourite alliance of the mirror and the portrait, highlighted in Johannes Gumpp’s triple self- portrait conjoining the figure of the artist, the canvas and the mirror (1646, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi) remained a central topos of painting up to the many examples of Picasso’s mischievous play on the painter and his model(s). Inside-outside, objective- subjective, the looking glass was altogether the condition, the instrument and the symbol of the art of painting – or of the art of realism, rather, for one should not forget that the pictorial celebration of this supposed instrument of truth came along with the discovery of the illusionistic trick of “artificial perspective” in oil painting at the time of the Renaissance, a trick that passes a two-dimensional canvas as the exact reproduction of a three-dimensional scene. The mirror indeed served to denote “truth”, but within a system of representation itself entirely founded on optical illusion.
6 Hardy’s relationship with mimesis is known to have been a rather vexed one, and in his poetic “self-portraits”, the mirror does not serve to attest to the truth of the picture. On the very opposite, it seems to substitute an image for another, and to offer a simulacrum, a ghostly projection only given in the conditional modality: I Look Into My Glass I look into my glass, And view my wasting skin, And say, ‘Would God it came to pass My heart had shrunk as thin!’ For then I, undistrest By hearts grown cold to me, Could lonely wait my endless rest With equanimity. But Time, to make me grieve, Part steals, lets part abide; And shakes this fragile frame at eve With throbbings of noontide. (Hardy 81)
7 This poem only offers the tantalising shadow of a self-portrait. Nowhere is the poet’s whole face mentioned. What catches his eye is a thin “skin” that veils just as much as it reveals – literally a “shagreen”, “peau de chagrin”, which acts as both a metaphor and a
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metonymy for the process of disappearance, the erasure of the body. This body has so much dwindled at the end of the poem as to lose substance and be called a “frame” – as if it could identify with the mirror frame, the material border enclosing the empty space of a vanished reflection, a passing existence. And the fricative sounds linking the “ fragile frame” and the heart’s “throbbing” make us hear and feel the speaker’s trembling apprehension at this foreseen and foretold disappearance.
8 Instead of presenting a stable physical image, the mirror suggests an ongoing “wasting” process, in the progressive form; one that reveals or displays the agency of time in the look of a face – a process to which Hardy dedicates another poem, “Faded Face”, which reads as a dirge, a lament on a face discovered too late, past the beauty of its prime: How was this I did not see Such a look as here was shown Ere its womanhood had blown Past its first felicity? – That I did not know you young, Faded Face, Know you young! (Hardy 447).
9 Tellingly, the visual process of perception in “I Look Into My Glass” is entirely and exclusively contained within the very first line of the poem, while the second line immediately rewrites the verb “to look” as “to view” – a verb which can be heard as “to review”, “to analyse”, “to study in detail”: an action necessarily unfolding in time. Thus the poet does not see himself, but rather his aging process, his mortality, in a word his coming end; and the verbs that punctuate the poem (“to waste”, “to pass”, “to shrink”, “to grow cold”, “to steal”, “to grieve”) point all the steps of the implicit scenario ineluctably leading to death. So the moment is less anchored in the instant, as the reflexive process of self-contemplation should be, than turned towards the future, stretching the present moment of “noontide” towards the coming evening or “eve”.
2. Palimpsest images and prescient mirrors
10 Interestingly, the static moment of the gaze is doubled with the awareness of a constant oscillation in thought between past, present and future, what was and what will be, what has gone and what will remain – an oscillation clearly marked by the symmetrical construction “part steals” / “part abide” around the comma that severs the line, and the central pivot in the verb “lets”. Finally the poem ends on a strangely oxymoric “projected retrospection” – if we may call it thus – that is, an anticipation of the final moment when the poet will be looking back upon his entire life. What should have been an existential moment of encounter with the self turns into the uncanny experience of double vision, collapsing the present face and the future skull, as in Picasso’s weirdly prescient self-portrait of June 30th, 1972 – barely one year before his death (private collection; a chalk drawing of the same date is kept at the Picasso Museum, Paris). The frightening encounter with the aging self turns into a peaceful acceptance of death; but for this, the speaker also needs to sever the ties with others (in the second, pivotal stanza), letting go of humanity as a whole, in an attempt to preserve himself from feeling and therefore suffering. And this is a departure indeed, an adieu, since “I Look Into My Glass” is as a coda, the concluding piece to the whole volume of Wessex Poems, followed by the silence of a blank page and the closing of the book cover.
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11 So the glass of Hardy’s poem is not so much a looking glass as an hour glass, and the poem may be called a Vanity: a meditation upon time, a quiet and disabused contemplation of self-effacement presenting us – contrary to “Faded Face” – with a lesson of acceptance of body decay. Nor is this the only instance when the poet sees the glass as an instrument of prediction: in “Near Lanivet, 1872”, the poet’s young lover leisurely spreads her arms against a gate and suddenly appears as a frightening figure of crucifixion “in the running of Time’s far glass” (Hardy 436, l. 30). In another instance still (“By the Runic Stone”) the sand-glass turns into something of the fated crystal bowl containing all of men’s destinies. What the mirror discloses here is the action of malevolent Time “tossing” together individual histories: It might have strown Their zest with qualms to see As in a glass, Time toss their history From zone to zone! (Hardy 471)
12 If mirrors thus reflect the past and adumbrate the future, it is because, in scientific terms, the process of reflection itself unfolds in time – albeit the time of an unperceivable split second, as Isobel Armstrong again superbly expresses: “There must always be something askance about the mirrorscape’s image. A silver aloofness comes athwart the viewer because reflections are simply light’s memory traced in matter. Mirror poems long for faces and visual coherence. There is always the possibility that the inhuman takes over as the human face is evacuated from the glass” (Armstrong 112, my emphasis). As a poet, Hardy seems to have felt instinctively what physicists rationally demonstrated about the agency of time in the shaping and perception of images. A late poem, “The Lament of the Looking Glass”, seems to transfer this agency onto the mirror itself, which bemoans the disappearance of the girl who used to look at herself in the glass: Words from the mirror softly pass To the curtains with a sigh: ‘Why should I trouble again to glass These smileless things hard by, Since she I pleasured once, alas, Is now no longer nigh! ‘I’ve imaged shadows of coursing cloud, And of the plying limb On the pensive pine when the air is loud With its aerial hymn; But never do they make me proud To catch them within my rim! ‘I flash back phantoms of the night That sometimes flit by me, I echo roses red and white – The loveliest blooms that be – But now I never hold to sight So sweet a flower as she.’ (Hardy 674)
13 In words quoted earlier, “glass looks. Surfaces become alive with images and traces of images, losing their trustworthy solidity” (Armstrong 8). From a mere object, the glass here has become an active, “reflective” subject speaking in direct discourse and entertaining complex relations of affection, need and longing for human beings. For the mirror is nothing without the human counterpart who animates it: “the denial of reflection empties out the universe” as Armstrong notes, commenting on the extremely
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Hardyan perception of absence in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse: “Once a looking glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed” (Woolf qtd by Armstrong 113). But before Woolf, Hardy had understood this ontological paradox: human subjects lend their existence and life to the glass; but the glass in turn abstracts these human subjects into shadows: “I flash back phantoms of the night”…
3. The visible and the invisible
14 “I Look Into My Glass” is particularly forceful in its rare concentration. Yet it is hardly an exceptional example of failed encounter with the self: the volume Moments of Vision offers many other moments of such non-coincidence. The whole collection is quite striking in its almost obsessive inquiry into the ambiguities of vision, with its coinage of the two dialectically paired verbs “to vision” (Hardy 533, l. 14) and to “unvision” (Hardy 530, l. 19) – a dialectics which is superbly illustrated in the poem which opens the volume and shares its title, “Moments of vision”: That mirror Which makes of men a transparency, Who holds that mirror And bids us such a breast-bared spectacle to see Of you and me? That mirror Whose magic penetrates like a dart, Who lifts that mirror And throws our mind back on us, and our heart, Until we start? That mirror Works well in these night hours of ache; Why in that mirror Are tincts we never see ourselves once take When the world is awake? That mirror Can test each mortal when unaware; Yea, that strange mirror May catch his last thoughts, whole life foul or fair, Glassing it—where? (Hardy 427)
15 The poem seems to play at systematically reversing all the usual conditions in which one “look[s] into [a] glass”: the mirror shows more at night than when men are awake and aware; above all, it does not stop at surface reflections, but penetrates to the heart and soul of men (their “breast”, “mind” and “thoughts”) pretty much in the manner of an X-ray picture. (And is it not this capacity of penetration which retrospectively accounts for the choice of the preposition “into” in the title “I Look Into My Glass”, in preference to the more trivial, and also more superficial “I look at myself in the glass”?). Like the glass which turned the skin into a thin veil, that mirror abstracts the body into a “transparency”, to reveal not the visible but the invisible – down to the depths of the soul, as suggested by the confessional implication of the image of bearing one’s breast, in the condensed locution “breast-bared spectacle”. Nevertheless, as in Hardy’s other “mirror poems”, the revelation is only a very partial one, for it intimates the feeling of a superior, but unknowable and forever invisible power holding up a mirror to men’s gazes. It is the notion of distance indeed, as well as a form of
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meditative suspension, which is conveyed by the demonstrative “that” in the insistent anaphora that beats the rhythm at the beginning of the first line and end of the third line in each stanza. Contrary to the mood of quiet, though highly disillusioned, acceptance of the former poem, here the whole text is structured by, and ends upon, unanswered questions: “who”, “why”, “where”: the poem reads as a riddle.
16 The mirror here becomes far more than a mere instrument reflecting physical features; it allows one to see further than mere surfaces and to question the forces of the beyond. The mirror this time holds an explicitly “magical” power (line 7) operating at night – an almost occult power also adumbrated through the allusion to Macbeth’s Weird Sisters predicting destinies “foul and fair”... It is able to transmute men’s appearance into new “tincts”, which might carry echoes of alchemical “tinctures”. And contrary to “I Look Into My Glass”, where the speaking subject remained in control throughout – at least grammatically –, here the mirror (as in “The Lament of the Looking Glass”) is the live agent throughout, associated with active verbs: it “makes”, penetrates”, “works”; it “can test” men, and “may catch” moments of vision, as the title of the collection goes. Undoubtedly, the most striking of these verbs of action is the final term “glassing”, a beautiful coinage which Hardy re-uses in “The Lament of the Looking Glass”, and also in his eulogy “To Shakespeare”. In that latter instance though, there is no mirror at all, only flickers of light reflected upon the watery surface of the river Avon: “the Avon just as always glassed the tower” (Hardy 440). Here, glass is understood metaphorically, as connoting the notion of reflection; and the verb “to glass” comes to fuse, magically indeed (or more precisely by synecdoche), the very substance of the instrument (the mirror-like surface) and the effect of its action (the reflections).
17 In “Moments of Vision” therefore, as in “I Look Into My Glass”, the mirror is able to show something beyond the face of the onlooker. Its power is no longer of mere reflection, but of penetration. And this time, the interrogation is not only ontological (the fact that we are “mortal” is simply posited as granted by the vocabulary) but metaphysical: the mirror is so important because it allows us to confront and question our status as subjects, in the literal sense of beings subjected to, submitted to, and overcome by, a world that much exceeds our capacities of comprehension, and is moved by some superior and forever unknowable power. In his analysis of “I Look Into My Glass”, Richard Beards notes that the form of the poem is that of the Anglican hymn (“four-line trimeter stanzas, with the third line of each stanza being four feet”, Beards 76), and that it was compared to George Herbert’s hymn “The Elixir” (77). But whereas Herbert’s Christian soul could catch a glimpse of Heaven in his glass, Hardy’s disabused speakers only discover there the enigma of the world beyond the self. The partial reflection in the glass stands for their partial understanding of a “strange”, puzzling world.
18 From that point of view, Hardy’s mirrors are powerful illustrations of the type of intertwining of the visible and the invisible highlighted by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological readings of literature and art. For the French philosopher, the visible world cannot be perceived without its inherent background of invisibility, which is not its opposite, but on the contrary, its very condition of possibility: the visible emerges from the invisible, which “lines” it and gives it birth, and vice versa, in an endless “chiasm” or inextricable series of “inter-encroachments”, to borrow some of Merleau-Ponty’s expressions. In the same way, Hardy’s dark night makes the mirror an even more effective instrument of “vision”, once sight is obscured.
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19 Although Merleau-Ponty acknowledges the presence of the sentient body within the process of vision, he also insists on the reversibility of that vision, in which the seeing subject is always also a seen object, placed under the eyes of others (like those beings looked at by their own mirrors in the poems quoted above), while he himself will never be able to see his own eyes, which work as a sort of “nullpoint” in his own visual field. The reason why mirrors are so revealing, Merleau-Ponty remarks, is that they clearly manifest this vital reversibility of the seeing person and the seen body, of the subject and the object, of the self and the other: The reason for the fascination with mirrors is that I simultaneously see and am seen, that there is a reversibility of the sensory world, which mirrors both display and reproduce. In a mirror, my outward body finds itself completed by all that is most secret in me, passing through my face – that flat and closed surface which I first intuited through my reflection on water. […] The ghost in the mirror extirpates my flesh, so that suddenly my body’s invisibility can invest all the other bodies I see. (Merleau-Ponty 1964a, 33, translation mine)3
20 This quotation helps us understand the action of mirrors in Hardy’s poems: they turn the self into an “object” in the widest sense, that is, an image of the body, resembling yet separate from the looking subject, and on which the latter projects his own inner sensations. Thus what others see in the reflected image will never be exactly what the seer perceives of himself.4 The mirror betrays both the impossibility of perfect reflexivity and the multiplicity of points of view which intercross upon one and the same image. […] the mirror is the instrument of a universal magic which turns things into spectacles, spectacles into things; which turns the self into the other and the other into the self. Painters usually love mirrors because they see, below this “mechanical trick”, similar to the tricks of perspective, the metamorphosis of the seer and the visible which characterizes the flesh, as well as defines their vocation as painters. (Merleau-Ponty 1964a, 34, translation mine)5
4. The metamorphoses of the mirror
21 It follows from this that the poet is hardly interested in the mirror as a material object or a tangible thing, but rather as optical device, or as a transparent or even invisible medium (an interface, in today’s jargon), which is never seen for itself: what catches the attention instead is its power of revelation. Consequently, we might compare it to other instruments or techniques presenting disturbingly or suspiciously “faithful” images like painting or photography. The narrative scenario of the poems mentioned above is indeed partly duplicated in the poem “The Rival”, which narrates another tragic drama of self-alienation. Like the speaker of “Moments of Vision”, the female narrator of the poem also makes “a clean breast”, confessing her jealousy towards the woman whose portrait her husband keeps carefully locked away in his desk – until the day when she dares open the drawer at last, and discovers that the picture he thus treasured was none other than… hers! And there was the likeness – yes, my own! Taken when I was the season’s fairest And time-lines all unknown. (Hardy 433)
22 The shock of recognition comes with the silent acknowledgement of distance and self- estrangement, in the dash and the exclamation which separate the word “likeness” from the revelation of identity: “my own”. The incredibly tale-tell rhyme that couples
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“my own” with “unknown” expresses the split between the present speaker and her past self, a split that leads her to “destroy” the picture – without however recovering a sense of the full self, since the active subject, “I”, remains wide apart from the passive “me”, at both ends of the line: “I destroyed that face of the former me” (emphasis added). The graphic shape of the poem, just as much as its content, then, materializes the traces of the cleft subject, torn apart by the subject/object divide – in a perfect illustration of what Jill Richards called “an aesthetic of disjunction”, expressing the effects of a “disjointed subjectivity” (Richards 125-127). Richards insists notably on Hardy’s use of the “asyndetic gap” – and we might venture to say that mirrors operate in a somewhat similar fashion, by making visible or perceptible the gap between “I” and “me”.6 Here too Hardy’s poems instinctively perceive the subjective division (“la refente du sujet”) which Lacan was to explore in such detail half a century later – including the schism between the enunciating and the enunciated subject (Lacan 517), finely expressed here in the distance between “I” and “me”…
23 In all these examples, the poet expresses his fascination for visual images thrown back to us, or placed under our eyes, which force introspection and question the notion of identity. And, as Hardy did when slipping from the noun “glass” to the verb “glassing”, we have to extend our reasoning from “mirrors” to the operation of “mirroring”. Indeed, the poems offer many examples of elements polished, frozen or glazed into mirror-like surfaces —surprising ones at times, like the coffin of Hardy’s friend William Barnes sending a “last signal” by catching the last rays of the setting sun: “It meant the west mirrored in the coffin of my friend there” (Hardy 473, l. 11, emphasis added).
24 But the closest equivalent to the mirror is of course the window, which often throws back unexpected images, particularly when watched against the night sky.7 “The Pedigree” narrates an almost magical or mystical moment of revelation, when the narrator discovers how little “himself” he is, and how much he owes to his ancestors and to the logic of heredity. In that dreamer’s trance, the moment of realization comes from a double transformation: in a process of reification of the metaphor, the lines of the family tree traced in an old book of chronicles become real branches pointing towards the window, which in turn morphs into a surface that does not reflect the face of the onlooker, but exhibits those of his forbears. What we expected to be an exact reflection of the speaker’s dreamy face instead discloses the element of otherness in his very self: The branches seemed to twist into a seared and cynic face Which winked and tokened towards the window like a Mage Enchanting me to gaze again thereat. It was a mirror now And in it a long perspective I could trace Of my begetters, dwindling backward each past each All with the kindred look (Hardy 460)
25 The little plot of this revelation in the glass-turned-mirror is fairly similar to that of “Something Tapped”, a poem strongly reminiscent of the situation in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”: some insect seems to be tapping at the pane of the room, whose hybrid function is implied by the term “window-glass”; but what is shown upon the dark window is the narrator’s “Belovéd’s face”, an apparition which might be pulled directly out of the speaker’s unconscious, of his desires or longings (Hardy 464).
26 What may be discerned here is one of those “repetitive patterns” which Dennis Taylor identified in Hardy’s poetry, which we might call the drama of estrangement and/or
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self-estrangement. And these dramas are played on many other surfaces, like pools of still water sometimes acting as mirrors; at other times, the waves or ripples of more dynamic streams or rivers work as kaleidoscopes disseminating broken images of slightly more worrying aspect. In the poem “On a Midsummer Eve” – the title of which makes us expect some Midsummer Eve’s… dream – the narrator bends upon a brook and all of a sudden sees, reflected there, not himself, but his old love, as in the former example: I went, and knelt, and scooped my hand As if to drink, into the brook, And a faint figure seemed to stand Above me, with the bygone look. (Hardy 443)
27 All the modalisers in that stanza (“as if”, “faint”, “seemed”) contribute to throw a doubt on the reliability of this perception; and yet we clearly identify here the repetitive Hardyan scenario of a revelation that shows literally “more than meets the eye”.
28 The narrative that appears in filigree in many of those visual dramas of missed encounters and split selves carries far-away echoes of Narcissus’s myth, as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book 3, lines 402 to 510). In Ovid’s text, Narcissus, having unwittingly caused the nymph Echo to pine away for love of him, discovers his face mirrored on “a clear, unmuddied pool of silvery, shimmering water” (Ovid 112, ll. 407-408). It is of course this “silvery” quality – that “silvery aloofness” evoked by Armstrong – that turns the transparent water into a mirror; and Ovid’s metaphor was confirmed by Dante’s periphrase, which defined water as “Narcissus’s mirror”, while Leon Battista Alberti, the architect and pioneering theoretician of painting during the Italian Renaissance, made the contemplation of reflected images a hypothetical source for the art of painting itself, and more especially a paradigm of portraiture – thus tightly linking the three poles of the subject, the mirror, and the portrait: “‘Consequently I used to tell my friends that the inventor of painting was Narcissus […] What is painting but the act of embracing by means of art the surface of the pool?” (Della Pittura, book 2, 1435, qtd in Land 10a). Finally Freud himself was to pursue the analogy by linking Narcissism and the creative frame of mind of artists in general (Land 14, n1).
29 In Ovid’s version of the story, Narcissus becomes enflamed with his own reflection, which he does not understand at first to be a deceitful image. The text nonetheless carefully insists on the utter insubstantiality of the all-too-seductive reflection, in words strongly recalling Hardy’s treatment of mirror images: “a shadow mistaken for substance”, a “strange illusion”, “a fleeting phantom”, a “shape now haunting [his] sight”, “a reflection consisting in nothing” (Ovid 112-113, ll. 416-417, 431-434, my emphasis). The text itself could not say more clearly that Narcissus is not only in love with his own image, but also in love with a threatening nothingness… Still unaware of the nature of the image, Narcissus first addresses it as a “you” (“peerless boy”, l. 454, “Oh marvelous boy”, l. 500), before he finally understands its nature – but even then, he still insists on the tragic split between his own self and its reflection, in two separate clauses that fail to reunite the two sides of a single self: “I know you now and I know myself” (115, l. 472).
30 Narcissus’s story is usually understood as a tragedy of self-love and vanity – Ovid uses the notion of “self-adoration” and associates it with that of almost religious “worship”
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(Ovid 113, l. 423). But reading Ovid’s text, one is struck by the constantly paradoxical nature of the boy’s feelings: although he is first fooled into believing that the image is a real person, he soon comes to realise that it is no more than a shadow. From that moment on, he explicitly states that he does not yearn for a reunion with that other part of himself (“O how I wish that I and my body now could be parted, I wish my love were not here! – a curious prayer for a lover”, 115, ll. 466-467) but on the contrary would want to preserve what he clearly perceives as irreducible distance, being aware that the union with the watery image would be his own death…, and that his death would ineluctably put to death the beautiful image he reveres. The moment of his death is encapsulated in this paradox, that he would wish his image to live on (“better indeed if the one I love could have lived longer”) but also, simultaneously, yearns for a final union of their two souls, which makes the former proposition impossible: “but now, two soulmates in one, we shall face our ending together” (ll. 471-473). Unable to tear himself away from the pool, Narcissus “rests his weary head in the fresh green grass”, dies, and is turned into the flower that bears his name.
31 There are very obvious differences between Narcissus’s myth and Hardy’s elaborations on mirror images. What Narcissus sees is a picture of absolute perfection and beauty, one that irresistibly seduces the senses. In Hardy’s mirrors on the contrary, it is distortion, indirection and excess, or deferral, that prevails: one does not see the fleshy envelope but rather the heart and mind of the subject; one does not see the present but rather the past and the future condensed in an instant; one does not see the self but rather the other – the estranged lover, for instance. Nonetheless, what both scenarios have in common is the clear awareness of a tragically unbridgeable distance between self-perception and outer-image. In all those cases, the mirror is the medium that signals the gap between fragments of the self: it becomes an operator of disjunction.
32 It seems that mirrors in Hardy’s poetry are hardly ever evoked as “objects”,8 in the sense of functional or decorative commodities. Mirrors always come to share something of the insubstantiality of glass. They deflect, refract, disseminate the gaze, creating a world of unstable doubles, of passing shadows, of aerial images. There is a “poetics of glass” (Armstrong 1) in Hardy’s poems and novels, which de-realises images instead of confirming them. It “glasses” men, in the sense that it not only reflects them but dissolves their very flesh, abstracts them into “transparencies” or flickering presences. And it complicates the simple subject-object confrontation by imposing obliquity, indirection, transitivity. Hence a constant questioning of the process of perception itself, and of the very definition of the self.
33 But behind this poetics of glass lies a metaphysics of the invisible. Because they draw attention to the instability of images, mirrors recall the necessity of seeing what lies beyond external surfaces. In Armstrong’s words, the mirror “exposes an image and alienates it at the same time” (Armstrong 99). Paradoxically, the contemplation of the mirrored – i.e. distanced – image is mostly an opportunity to question the inwardness of things and of human beings. Hardy again and again recalls that what matters is what the mirror does not show… And in this he again chimes in with Merleau-Ponty’s ideas: “the in-visible is the secret counterpart of the visible, and is only perceptible through the visible […] it is the pregnant kernel of the visible, inscribed in it – in filigree” (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 269); and the perceiving subject never fully coincides with that totality.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Armstrong, Isobel, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination (1830-1880), Oxford: OUP, 2008.
Beards, Richard D., “The End Game. Thomas Hardy’s Looking Glass”, in Thomas Hardy, Poet. New Perspectives, eds. Adrian Grafe & Laurence Estanove, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2015, 75-81.
Berger, Sheila, Thomas Hardy and Visual Structures: Framing, Disruption and Process, New York UP, 1990.
Borel, France, Le peintre et son miroir : regards indiscrets, Tournai: La Renaissance du Livre, 2002.
Bullen J.B., The Expressive Eye: Fiction and Perception in the Work of Thomas Hardy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.
Estanove, Laurence, La Poésie de Thomas Hardy : une dynamique de la désillusion, unpublished PhD Diss., Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, 2008.
Gadoin, Isabelle, “Les yeux de Tess”, Méthode ! Revue de littératures française et comparée 14 (automne 2008): 287-295.
Gadoin, Isabelle, “‘Ces horribles femmes’ : le portrait de famille, entre interpellation et interposition”, in Autour du Tiers Pictural – “Thanks to Liliane Louvel”, eds. Michel Briand & Anne- Cécile Guilbard, Rennes : PUR (La Licorne n°108), 151-164.
Hardy, Thomas, The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson, London: Macmillan, 1976.
Lacan, Jacques, “Le stade du miroir”, “L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient”, in Écrits, Paris : Seuil, 1966, 93-100 & 493-528.
Land, Norman E., “Narcissus Pictor”, Notes in the History of Art 16.2 (Winter 1997): 10-15.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, L’Œil et l’esprit, Paris: Gallimard, 1964a.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Le visible et l’invisible, Paris: Gallimard, 1964b.
Miller, Joseph Hillis, Distance and Desire, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1970.
Miller, Susan M., “Thomas Hardy and the Impersonal Lyric”, Journal of Modern Literature 30.3 (Spring 2007): 95-115.
Nancy, Jean-Luc, Le Regard du portrait, Paris: Galilée, 2000.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, transl. David Raeburn, intro. Denis Feeney, London: Penguin, 2004.
Paulin, Tom, Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Perception, London, Macmillan, 1975.
Richards, Jill, “The History of Error: Hardy’s Critics and the Self Unseen”, Victorian Poetry 45.2 (Summer 2007): 117-133.
Taylor, Dennis, “The Patterns in Hardy’s Poetry”, ELH 42.2 (Summer 1975): 258-275.
Zietlow, Paul, Moments of Vision: The Poetry of Thomas Hardy, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1974.
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NOTES
1. I am grateful to Barrie Bullen for pointing this out. 2. All the page numbers given here refer to Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson, London: Macmillan, 1976. Hereafter Hardy 1976. 3. “Le miroir apparaît parce que je suis voyant-visible, parce qu’il y a une réversibilité du sensible, il la traduit et la redouble. Par lui, mon dehors se complète, tout ce que j’ai de plus secret passe dans ce visage, cet être plat et fermé que déjà me faisait soupçonner mon reflet dans l’eau […]. Le fantôme du miroir traîne dehors ma chair, et du même coup tout l’invisible de mon corps peut investir les autres corps que je vois.” 4. One might find many examples of characters sadly subjected to others’ gazes in Hardy’s novels. It is Tess’s plight, for instance, to be constantly defined as a desired object rather than an autonomous subject. See Gadoin 2008. 5. “Quant au miroir il est l’instrument d’une universelle magie qui change les choses en spectacle, les spectacles en choses, moi en autrui et autrui en moi. Les peintres ont souvent rêvé sur les miroirs parce que, sous ce ‘truc mécanique’ comme sous celui de la perspective, ils reconnaissaient la métamorphose du voyant et du visible, qui est la définition de notre chair et celle de leur vocation.” 6. Reading the novels too, we would find very similar scenes when the viewer does not recognize him/herself in his/her own reflection; or conversely, when he/she finds an uncanny family air in the look of strangers, like Tess instinctively shuddering in front of the two old “hags” of the d’Urberville family whose picture she discovers on the landing of Wellbridge Manor… See Gadoin 2014. 7. Here too one may recall that in Tess, the heroine looks at herself in a window lined by some black fabric, as a makeshift mirror. 8. But in another sense, these mirrors are an object, the “object-gaze”, with which Annie Ramel’s article deals more amply in this volume.
ABSTRACTS
The article studies the ambivalent, if not antithetical, qualities of glass – both a substance and a transparent medium – in Thomas Hardy’s poems. In these, the looking glass does not send back the exact image of the human subject looking at it, but series of fleeting, evanescent images through which the past is conjured up and the future intuited. Reflected images travel in space and time, with a strange capacity of penetration and subversion: subject and object, seer and seen, the real and the virtual, the visible and the invisible are tossed together, until all that is left is the fundamental ontological question: “who am I?” In Hardy’s mirrors, the beholder undergoes a deeply troubling anti-narcissistic experience, which only inspires him with the feeling of self- estrangement (instead of self-love) and of alienation, in a world inhabited by mysterious transcendent presences.
Le verre du miroir est, chez Hardy, une étrange matière, à la fois transparence et obstacle, qui n’offre aucune image fixe à qui le contemple, mais met en branle tout un mouvement de superposition et de substitution d’images : dans le miroir, le sujet reconnaît en palimpseste celui qu’il a été, et devine celui qu’il sera ou pourrait être. Mais l’image du miroir ne traverse pas
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seulement le temps, elle pénètre aussi les surfaces, renvoie le visible à l’invisible, et vice versa, pour poser silencieusement la question ontologique fondamentale : qui suis-je ? Ainsi les miroirs hardyens imposent-ils sans cesse l’épreuve déstabilisante d’un anti-narcissisme : le sujet ne s’y reconnaît plus, et n’y saisit que la distance de soi à soi, dans un monde régi par d’énigmatiques présences, tout aussi indéchiffrables que le destin humain.
INDEX oeuvrecitee I Look into My Glass, Near Lanivet – 1842, To Shakespeare, Rival (The), Pedigree (The), Something Tapped, Lament of the Looking Glass (The), Wessex Poems, Late Lyrics and Earlier Keywords: object, glass, mirror, window, transparency, reflection, self-portrait, self, alienation, metamorphosis, Narcissus Mots-clés: objet, miroir, verre, fenêtre, transparence, reflet, autoportrait, moi, métamorphose, Narcisse
AUTHOR
ISABELLE GADOIN Isabelle Gadoin is Professor at the University of Poitiers, where she teaches English literature and text-and-image studies. Her thesis was entitled “Structures spatiales dans les romans de ‘Caractère et d’Environnement’ de Thomas Hardy: espace représenté et espace représentant” (University Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1993); she has been one of the promoters of Hardy studies in France, and was one of the founding members of FATHOM (French Association for Thomas Hardy Studies). Her research bears on the question of space and visual structures in the work of Thomas Hardy, and more globally on visual perception and the relationships between text and image in literary works. In 2010 she published Far from the Madding Crowd: Thomas Hardy, entre convention et subversion. CNRS, équipe Thalim (UMR 7172) / Université de Poitiers
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Boats and Knitting Machines: Objects of Doom in Hardy and Conrad Navires et autres machines : objets de malheur chez Hardy et Conrad
Stéphanie Bernard
1 Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad gave voice and shape to the mood of the times they lived in. Hardy was inspired by long walks through the countryside as much as by journeys by train; evocations of such inventions as the threshing machine in Tess of the d’Urbervilles or the Titanic go along with depictions of old churches and ancient places in his writings. In Conrad, boats – from sail to steam1 – are overwhelmingly and obviously present. Gradually with the industrial revolution and the development of technology, objects and machines became – and still are – emblematic of progress, but in an ambivalent way that also signalled danger and the risk of dehumanizing men. We will see how boats, machines and other objects – those “material thing[s] that can be seen and touched”2 – appear in Hardy’s and Conrad’s works at the turn of the 20th century and what their representation reveals about the authors’ visions of the world and of life itself.
1. Of boats and men
2 The first two words in Heart of Darkness, Conrad’s most famous work, are those that compose the name of the ship on which the narrator, Marlow, will tell his tale: “The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest” (Conrad 1996, 135). Later on, long delay is caused by the necessity to fix different parts of Marlow’s sunken steamer on the Congo River (162). In both cases, the massive and motionless object floating on a river allows for the story and narration to unfold and linger on.
3 Ships in Conrad often move the story and trigger the narrative because they appear either too motionless, as in Heart of Darkness or as in The Shadow-Line, in which total
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quietness and absence of wind, together with fever, threaten the whole crew, or uncontrollably restless as in The Nigger of the “Narcissus”: A big, foaming sea came out of the mist; it made for the ship, roaring wildly, and in its rush it looked as mischievous and discomposing as a madman with an axe. [...] [T]he coming wave [...] towered close-to and high, like a wall of green glass topped with snow. The ship rose to it as though she had soared on wings, and for a moment rested poised upon the foaming crest as if she had been a great sea-bird. Before we could draw breath a heavy gust struck her, another roller took her unfairly under the weather bow, she gave a toppling lurch, and filled her decks. (Conrad 1990, 57)
4 In Lord Jim, the hesitation between these two extremes is contained in the “awful stillness preceding a catastrophe” that characterizes the moments before Jim’s fatal jump (Conrad 1989, 108), the water appearing “still – still as a pond, deadly still, more still than ever sea was before” (110-111). But the impending catastrophe never happens, which turns the Patna – the ship from which Jim leaps – into the place and cause of disaster for the protagonist.
5 Jim is fully mistaken as an observer. Although he asserts: “I saw as clearly as I see you now [...]”, (Conrad 1989, 107), he misreads the situation he has to face and is an unreliable focaliser. He tries to observe and listen to the pilgrims on board, the crew and the ship herself, but his efforts result in a chaotic vision: “He saw here and there a head lifted off a mat, a vague form uprise in sitting posture, listen sleepily for a moment, sink down again into the billowy confusion of boxes, steam-winches, ventilators” (106).
6 He will eventually stop looking (“I made up my mind to keep my eyes shut”, Conrad 1989, 121); but he fails to understand that what he should see has been replaced by an inner vision dictated by his own thoughts and influenced by his romantic mind. 3 He does not perceive the concreteness of the people and things in front of him – thirsty and endangered pilgrims, the looming catastrophe as well as the possibility to avert it – because he is only open to his own reading and (mis-)understanding of the events taking place around him: Nothing in the world moved before his eyes, and he could depict to himself without hindrance the sudden swing upwards of the dark sky-line, the sudden tilt up of the vast plain of the sea, the swift still rise, the brutal fling, the grasp of the abyss, the struggle without hope, the starlight closing over his head for ever like the vault of a tomb – the revolt of his young life – the black end. (Conrad 1989, 114)
7 None of this ever happens on the Patna.
8 This vision, moreover, is conveyed to us through Marlow’s narration, as he reports what he remembers of his past conversation with Jim at the time of his trial. These layers of storytelling reinforce the distortion effect because of the distance between the facts and their interpretation, putting into question the possibility of ever reaching the truth.4
9 Jim’s way of telling about what took place on the Patna, as reported by Marlow, is a first indication of the unreliability of his vision. The “gaps are both visual and textual: for example Jim’s vision of the dark abyss before he jumps into the sea is mirrored by typographical blanks in the text, such as aposiopesis, unfinished sentences and fragmented dialogues” (Delmas 15). The narrative points at the indecisiveness of the story, so that the whole picture is blurred. What Ian Watt has defined as “delayed decoding”, a narrative device aimed at underlining “the semantic gap between the
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sensations aroused in the individual by an object or event, and their actual cause or meaning” (Watt 270), rather tends here to deconstruct and annihilate the vision.
10 Catherine Delmas’s words about the deconstruction of Orientalism in Conrad fittingly apply to what the protagonist undergoes in the ship: Jim’s eyes “are arrested by the discovery of an unexpected detail which resists interpretation, and corresponds to the intrusion of the Real into the space of the picture. Vision is then reversed, as the painting or the page, instead of being offered to the viewer’s or reader’s tranquil gaze (Barthes’s studium), suddenly captures the reader’s attention: instead of looking at the page or the painting, the reader or viewer is suddenly looked at (the punctum), from the fold or the gap in the painting/text […]” (Delmas 15). This reversal happens when Jim notices a parched passenger “whose eyes entreated him together with the voice” (Conrad 1989, 109). Gradually his romanticized vision becomes hazy and fragmented, the picture cracks up. He stops seeing, as he is being seen by the others around him, becoming the object they look at in the process.
11 On board the Patna, Jim stands petrified and becomes unable to see clearly, contrary to what he pretends. The words “still”, “motionless”, “silent” spread in the text and contaminate the character: “the power of the written word” (Conrad 1990, xlii) dictates Jim’s fate in the same way as the evocation of the name of the d’Urbervilles condemns Tess from the very first page of Hardy’s novel. Jim is literally turned into an object: “The sights it showed him had turned him into cold stone from the soles of his feet to the nape of his neck” (Conrad 1989, 114), making him as still and solid as the “tough old iron” of the ship (115), a fact Jim himself acknowledges: “‘I flinched no more than a stone. I was as solid standing there as this,’ he tapped lightly with his knuckles the wall beside his chair” (110).
12 The “strange noise” (Conrad 1989, 106) that is supposed to signal the inevitable “annihilation” (114) awaiting the ship, has a similarly petrifying effect and functions like an auditory punctum. Jim seems dehumanized and depersonalized – reified. He loses consciousness of what is going on: about what would make him move again on board the Patna, “he knew no more than the uprooted tree knows of the wind that laid it low” (123).
13 What is on the verge of annihilation, after all, is not the ship but reason itself. Every member of the crew shows signs of madness: Jim witnesses the “new antics” (Conrad 1989, 118) of the “four men fighting like mad” (121), while “there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal” (120). He is deprived of any chance of becoming a hero and is faced with the nonsensicality of the situation. The absurdity of it all only grows and grows, until the resolution of the case with the reappearance of the ship ashore and all the passengers safe.
14 Amid such nonsense, Jim’s capacity to see and hear is impaired. He becomes trapped in a process in which his identity disintegrates and he finds himself immobile and silent, just like the Patna, just like an object, a thing, unable to act and decide, subjected to a dim and meaningless perception of the scene: Twice, he told me, he shut his eyes in the certitude that the end was upon him already, and twice he had to open them again. Each time he noticed the darkening of the great stillness. The shadow of the silent cloud had fallen upon the ship from the zenith, and seemed to have extinguished Every sound from her teeming life. He could no longer hear the voices under the awnings. He told me that each time he closed his eyes a flash of thought showed him that crowd of bodies, laid out for death, as plain as daylight. When he opened them, it was to see the dim struggle of
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four men fighting like mad with a stubborn boat. [...] His eyes fell again. “See and hear... See and hear,” he repeated twice, at long intervals, filled by vacant staring.5 (Conrad 1989, 120-121)
15 Jim does not look or watch, he does not listen; he just receives sounds and images that get impressed on his mind but never make sense. He is like a dead man with eyes wide open, and the simile is reinforced by the way he responds to the call of the crew calling him George: “‘Then three voices together raised a yell: one bleated, another screamed, one howled. Ough! [...] Eight hundred living people, and they were yelling after the one dead man to come down and be saved. ‘Jump, George! Jump! Oh, jump!’” (Conrad 1989, 124). In the same chapter, Marlow’s mention of Jim as “a corpse” (123) suggests that the protagonist does indeed convey an impression of inertness and lifelessness, both in his way of telling his story and in his attitude at the time of the events.
16 Jim accepts to take the place of the dead man because he no longer knows who he is or what he is doing, contrary to Marlow in Heart of Darkness who “was morbidly anxious to change [his] shoes and socks” stained by his dead helmsman’s blood (Conrad 1996, 203): he hastily threw the shoes overboard in an attempt to save his life, his expedition and his boat. Jim has no intention to do so because he has lost the consciousness of things, he has lost his mind and thus his humanity: “‘I had jumped...’ He checked himself, averted his gaze... ‘It seems,’ he added. [...] ‘I knew nothing about it till I looked up,’ he explained hastily. And that’s possible too. You had to listen to him as you would to a small boy in trouble. He didn’t know. (Conrad 1989, 125)
17 He jumps, abandoning the pilgrims to their fate, although the sound heard on the ship comes to nothing: the passengers are safe, the boat never sinks.
18 To a certain extent the fate of the Patna reflects Jim’s fate: both are allowed a new start although they seemed condemned. This underlines one aspect of irony within the world of the novel. Indeed, Jim will be given a second chance in Patusan, achieving greatness and becoming a hero: “Tuan Jim: as one might say – Lord Jim” (Conrad 1989, 46). But his success does not erase his past mistakes, just as the Patna remains an old rusty boat after her reappearance; the place of Jim’s heroism will also be the place of his second failure and his tomb.
19 The irony also functions beyond the fictional universe in an even more disturbing way. While Joseph Conrad found inspiration for Lord Jim in the real story of the Jeddah in the 1880’s (Vandamme 80), the story of the Patna, written in 1896, increases the sharpness of Conrad’s ironic comment on the loss of the Titanic in 1912: the old iron ship that was doomed to sink came back to port with her passengers alive, while the unsinkable steamer got sunk by an iceberg, killing thousands of people.
2. The Titanic
20 In the different Conradian texts we have mentioned, ships tend to function like objects of doom or like fateful machines that seem to announce the most fateful one of all – which Conrad would rather call the most “fatuous” (Conrad 1912, 306) of all –: the Titanic. Her tragic destiny brought him to write an article entitled “Some Reflections on the Loss of the Titanic – 1912” which was first published in The English Review6 in May 1912.
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21 Hardy was equally inspired by the tragic fate of the steamer and wrote a poem entitled “The Convergence of the Twain” (Lines on the loss of the “Titanic”). He started writing these lines a few days after the catastrophe,7 having been asked for a poem to be read at a fundraising charity event. The poem was first published in June 1912 in The Fortnightly Review (and even earlier than that as part of the souvenir program for the above- mentioned charity event8). In 1914 it appeared, in its revised form, in Hardy’s collection of poems entitled Satires of Circumstances, Lyrics and Reveries.
22 In his article on the Titanic, Conrad gives technical information about the reasons for the tragedy, and the irony is directed at man’s blind belief in progress and desire for success and wealth. His reflections underline the obtuseness of men engrossed in the power of science and money. The warning is crystal-clear: “Apparently, there is a point in development when it ceases to be a true progress” (Conrad 1912, 300).
23 The criticism is both ironic and direct: the Titanic appears as “a sort of Marine Ritz” (Conrad 1912, 306). The fault definitely lies with the ambition of a “handful of individuals, who have more money than they know what to do with” and find in the construction of the Titanic “a perfect exhibition of the modern blind trust in mere material and appliances” (294). Such short-sightedness and dependence on materiality – in other words, idolizing of objects – led to the disastrous negligence of the rules of seamanship, those same rules which might have saved the Titanic from its tragic end, as the author’s references to famous averted catastrophes show. Hence Conrad’s sarcastic criticism of the conception of the Titanic: “if that luckless ship had been a couple of hundred feet shorter, she would have probably gone clear of the danger. But then, perhaps, she could not have had a swimming bath and a French café” (295).
24 Hardy’s evocation of the loss of the Titanic is not so straightforward, although the ironic tone is equally present. Hardy suggests the inhuman and extravagant dimension of the tragedy by not mentioning human losses and by attributing the cause to “The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything” (Hardy 2001, 307). He provides no description of the event and he does not refer to the people who died on that day, but carefully depicts the material effects of the “convergence” of the iceberg and the ship: The Convergence of the Twain (Lines on the loss of the “Titanic”) I In a solitude of the sea Deep from human vanity, And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she. II Steel chambers, late the pyres Of her salamandrine fires, Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres. III Over the mirrors meant To glass the opulent The sea-worm crawls – grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent. IV Jewels in joy designed To ravish the sensuous mind Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind. V
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Dim moon-eyed fishes near Gaze at the gilded gear And query: ‘What does this vaingloriousness down here?’ . . . VI Well: while was fashioning This creature of cleaving wing, The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything VII Prepared a sinister mate For her – so gaily great – A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate. VIII And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue, In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too. IX Alien they seemed to be: No mortal eye could see The intimate welding of their later history, X Or sign that they were bent By paths coincident On being anon twin halves of one august event, XI Till the Spinner of the Years Said ‘Now!’ And each one hears, And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres. (Hardy 2001, 306-307)
25 This way of reporting events, however, can be interpreted as an indirect criticism of hubris, when Conrad’s condemnation is direct. The latter’s sarcasm in the article is foiled by Hardy’s sadly ironical images in the poem: “the pyres” have become “rhythmic tidal lyres” (Hardy 2001, 306). “Over the mirrors [...] [t]he sea-worm crawls” (306); “the smart ship” (307) now lies “[i]n a solitude of the sea” (306). The contrast between former brilliancy and wealth on board the ship and the current darkness that surrounds her in the poem expresses Hardy’s own vision of “human vanity” (306) as the true cause of the catastrophe. Although the Immanent Will could appear to clear man of any responsibility, the allusion to this external, mechanical force combined with images of decay in the poem results in a heightened sense of human tragedy and of loss, to echo the word commonly used in relation to the event and chosen by Conrad and Hardy too. Whereas most poems by Hardy leave an overall impression of nostalgia and sustained longing for the lost object, “The Convergence of the Twain” is tainted by elegy: the loss is irrecoverable and definitive. The object is forever unreachable in this realm of death.
3. Knitting machines
26 The two authors undeniably share the same ironic vision of the event and are led to the same sort of interrogation about human existence. Although the literary forms they choose and the ultimate answers they give may be different, the feelings and the questioning raise similar issues.
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27 Hardy’s answer is largely linked to his conception of the Immanent Will which he first mentioned in his extensive narrative poem inspired by the Napoleonic wars and initially published between 1904 and 1908: The Dynasts. In the Fore Scene of the epic poem, one character of the tragic chorus says: […] like a knitter drowsed, Whose fingers play in skilled unmindfulness, The Will has woven with an absent heed Since life first was; and ever will so weave. (Hardy 1965, 2)
28 In other parts of The Dynasts, it is referred to as “the Immanent”, “the Immanent Intent” or “the Immanent Shaper”. It has often been described as a mechanical cause, an automatic will which appears as a somewhat contradictory notion. Claire Tomalin describes it as “a morally indifferent force that controls events without awareness of what it is doing (like a machine)” (Tomalin 223). Can the concept of will be reconciled with that of mindlessness and automatism? This oxymoric expression reflects Hardy’s complex frame of mind as far as faith and religion are concerned: although he claimed he was an agnostic and created characters who rejected faith, he never gave up his quest for meaning – for a cause behind human life – and his writings are imbued with echoes from the Bible. Rather than an agnostic, Hardy “might more aptly and literally be described as a ‘not-knower’. There is nothing organized about Hardy’s agnosticism [...]” (Hands 211).
29 This is the reason why his works are often related to the idea of cosmic irony, which “is used in reference to literary works in which God, or destiny, or the process of the universe, is represented as though deliberately manipulating events so as to lead the protagonist to false hopes, only to frustrate and mock them” (Abrams 100). As Jeannette King underlines in her commentary on Jude the Obscure, “the whole cosmos, not the individual, is at fault” (King 126) This is true of “The Convergence of the Twain” too and it somehow points to Hardy’s modernity in that it foreshadows James Joyce’s vision of an uncaring God.
30 One can also detect an echo of Conrad’s own frame of mind. God becomes “the Spinner of the Years” in Hardy’s poem. For Conrad and Hardy, things thus become a kind of metaphor or philosophical concept. The image of the automatic spinning – of a spinning machine – recalls Conrad’s knitting machine, which he depicted in a letter to his friend R.B. Cunningham Graham on December 20th, 1897: There is – let us say – a machine. It evolved itself (I am severely scientific) out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold! – it knits. I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled. I feel it ought to embroider – but it goes on knitting. You come and say: ‘This is all right; it’s only a question of the right kind of oil. Let us use this – for instance – celestial oil and the machine will embroider a most beautiful design in purple and gold.’ Will it? Alas, no! You cannot by any special lubrication make embroidery with a knitting machine. And the most withering thought is that the infamous thing has made itself: made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight, without eyes, without heart. It is a tragic accident – and it has happened… It knits us in and it knits us out. It has knitted space, time, pain, death, corruption, despair and all the illusions – and nothing matters. (Watts 57)
31 This quotation is both an evocation of the determinist undertones in Conrad’s writing and a reminder of his nihilism. This insensitive machine is depicted as the cause of human suffering: it is the only explanation Conrad can find to such tragedies as that of
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the Titanic, and this sombre outlook on the universe cannot but remind one of Hardy’s own sombre vision of life.
32 In his radical vision of the absence of order behind the creation of the universe, Conrad creates characters who need to cling to objects – ships, a silver ring in Lord Jim, a sovereign in “Karain” – or to the salutary value of work. This is especially true for Marlow. Although he knows the horror is looming, symbolised by the darkness that envelops his journey up the Congo River, he does not follow Kurtz in his fall. He keeps himself busy with a work that appals him, but that also saves him from the devouring terror of emptiness: “I had not much time to give him, because I was helping the engine-driver to take to pieces the leaky cylinders, to straighten a bent connecting-rod, and in other such matters. I lived in an infernal mess of rust, filings, nuts, bolts, spanners, hammers, ratchet-drills – things I abominate, because I don’t get on with them” (Conrad 1996, 239).
33 The saving power of objects and work derives from the opportunity they give one to feel alive and real, as Marlow admits: “No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work – no man does – but I like what is in the work, – the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others – what no man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means” (Conrad 1996, 175). Working and being active safeguard one’s individuality, keeping it away and distinct from the world around, that is to say the wilderness in Heart of Darkness.
34 Conrad’s set of values is deeply human and down-to-earth, since he finds no salutary hope in transcendence. In the article on the loss of the Titanic, he therefore insists that he has “neither the competence nor the wish to take a theological view of this great misfortune, sending so many souls to their last account”9 (Conrad 1912, 287). Conversely, Hardy chooses to underline the theological and supernatural origin of the disaster: the Immanent Will has determined the fate of the Titanic and her passengers. His vision, although quite hopeless too, is more romantic, as he hesitates between the notion of the Immanent Will and God’s will.
35 Hardy had been a believer in his youth. “Losing faith in Christianity was like shedding a protective skin: intellectually necessary but also a melancholy process. […] He could no longer believe, but he cherished the memory of belief […]” (Tomalin 78). The hesitation could reveal some feeling of fear or lack of courage. After all, Hardy did denounce the perversity of marriage in his novels,10 and he shocked readers by writing about forbidden love relations, but in real life he never divorced his wife in spite of being estranged from her for years.
36 Yet it could also point out a feeling of nostalgia for his lost faith. As Timothy Hands underlines, “[j]ust as it is always important to consider how much Hardy had ever actually acquired faith, it is also important to question how fully he ever lost it” (Hands, 210). Timothy Hands goes on to argue that indecision was constitutive of Hardy’s “[r]eligious [b]eliefs, [e]thical [a]ttitudes” (210) and artistic creation: “Hardy’s commitment to provisionality of viewpoint, to an aesthetic dependent on freedom of the artist to deliver impressions, not argument, was impressively steadfast, consistent in its defence of the right to inconsistency” (212). Mark Asquith stresses a similar point in his article about Hardy’s approach to philosophy: “Hardy’s philosophical ‘tentativeness’, then, is less a reflection of theoretical uncertainty than the product of an aesthetic perspective which makes a virtue of perplexity” (Asquith 182). So, contrary
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to the character of Jude who clearly sees God as a malignant Other and says so at the end of the novel,11 Hardy seemed reluctant to abandon his hope for a benevolent God. To a certain extent, “replacing” God by the image of a senseless machine12 allowed Hardy to seem less defiant, but also not to have to decide between the existence, or the death, of God.
37 The hesitation is embodied by another character in Jude the Obscure. Indeed Sue, the protagonist’s beloved, had hoped the world could be seen as a work of art: a poem, or a piece of embroidery, to echo Conrad’s choice of words in his letter to R.B. Cunningham Graham. The tragic deaths of her children will bring her to endorse a bleaker vision of life: Vague and quaint imaginings had haunted Sue in the days when her intellect scintillated like a star, that the world resembled a stanza or melody composed in a dream; it was wonderfully excellent to the half-aroused intelligence, but hopelessly absurd at the full waking; that the First Cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage; that at the framing of the terrestrial conditions there seemed never to have been contemplated such a development of emotional perceptiveness among the creatures subject to those conditions as that reached by thinking and educated humanity. But affliction makes opposing forces loom anthropomorphous; and those ideas were now exchanged for a sense of Jude and herself fleeing from a persecutor.” (Hardy 1996, 409)
38 Sue abandons her idealistic interpretation to cling to a belief in an authoritarian and cruel God, a devouring Other at the origin of their tragedy. Her spiritual journey is the reverse of Jude’s – and of Hardy’s too: she evolves from a dreamy belief in “the First Cause” – another potential expression for the Immanent Will – to religiosity. In both respects she seems to be deluded; for the Cause did not give birth to a poem but to human suffering in an insensitive universe. Religion is accused of similar insensibility, as when Jude overhears two clergymen discussing the question of the position of the priest in the Communion Service, while Sue and he are grieving the deaths of their children: “Good God – the eastward position, and all creation groaning!” (Hardy 1998, 403).
39 The unclear notion of a mechanical cause that Sue comes to doubt will mature and become more defined in Hardy’s writings, as he will abandon fiction after the publication of The Well Belloved in 1897 and devote himself to poetry. Step by step, as it appears in the huge poetic drama The Dynasts (1904-1908) and later in the poem “The Convergence of the Twain” (1912), the idea of a machine as “the First Cause” gets more precise.
40 I would argue that Conrad’s knitting machine helps understand what Hardy had in mind with “The Spinner of the Years”. What is paradoxical in both cases, however, is that this huge and malign object, this horrible machine, does not account for man’s own blindness and vanity, be it exemplified in the tragedy of the Titanic or in the discussion between the two clergymen.
4. The Fate of Modernity
41 Tragedy is being questioned as it is relocated in the context of modernity. Fate is not in the mighty hands of God or the gods of Ancient Greece, but it is the result of the uncontrollable working of machinery. Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim expresses man’s predicament in a famous sentence: “we live, as we dream –
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alone” (Conrad 1996, 172). Man has no more grasp on his own existence than he has on his dreams, for the machine decides on everything, and no help is to be found either on earth or in heaven. Man is subjected to the power of the machine, just as Jim is petrified on board the Patna. Objects and machines take the lead over men, their desires and the whole world, turning them into objects too.
42 In return, using and mastering objects is part of the virtue Marlow finds in work. If this appears to be but a second-best solution for him, the ambivalence is equally noticeable in Hardy’s fiction. Jude’s trade as a stonemason is seen in a positive way, partly perhaps because Hardy was himself an architect, in love with old churches and gothic constructions. Yet when it comes to modern types of works and objects, the vision is not so flattering. In Jude the Obscure, Hardy’s last novel, landscapes gradually seem to be surrounded by the railways and the characters keep travelling to and fro by train rather than on foot.
43 If allusions to trains are rare in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the episode of the threshing machine is a striking example of the intrusion of progress in the countryside. What could be seen as an improvement in the field of agriculture in the age of industrialisation, comes to represent danger for the human beings around. As Tess is working on the farm at Flintcomb-Ash on a bleak March morning, she appears to be subjected to the machine she serves rather than uses, and her workload is not lessened but increased by this new mode of threshing: “[…] the red tyrant that the women had come to serve – a timber-framed construction, with straps and wheels appertaining – the threshing machine, […] whilst it was going, kept up a despotic demand upon the endurance of their muscles and nerves” (Hardy 1998, 315).
44 The machine turns the workers into machines themselves. They become mute and dehumanized automatons, silent objects merely answering a purpose of augmented productivity: “[...] the perspiring ones at the machine, including Tess, could not lighten their duties by the exchange of many words. [...] for Tess there was no respite; for, as the drum never stopped, the man who fed it could not stop, and she, who had to supply the man with untied sheaves, could not stop either [...]” (Hardy 1998, 316-317).
45 The tragedy that threatens Tess as a woman – i.e. her womanhood – in her relationship to Alec, the tyrant lover, is mirrored and amplified by the tragedy that endangers her very humanity through the working of the machine. We could say that these threats eventually conquer her as she is reduced to a sign, an object at the end of the novel: “a black flag” (Hardy 1998, 384) on the horizon. Her death is enacted both in the unfolding of the diegesis and in the words on the page.13
46 Tess is “a pure woman” presented as a victim. However she comes to seal her own fate by killing Alec and turning herself in at Stonehenge without ever attempting to flee. Her move is coherent with Hardy’s vision: he did suggest that not only the Immanent Will but man himself was responsible for man’s sad destiny. In his autobiography he wrote: “Tragedy may be created by an opposing environment either of things inherent in the universe, or of human institutions. If the former be the means exhibited and deplored, the writer is regarded as impious; if the latter, as subversive and dangerous; when all the while he may never have questioned the necessity or urged the non- necessity of either [...]” (Hardy 1962, 274).
47 “Human institutions” are not the result of chance but of human choices and calculations. They underline man’s responsibility in the history of humanity, in men’s
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lives and in the evolution of the world. Human institutions, man-made machines, people’s beliefs and choices suggest that men are both subjects and objects, the doers and the victims of their own tragedies. Such irreconcilable positions form Hardy’s frame of mind and writing, accounting for the complexity of his art and the opposing views of readers confronted to his work.
48 Conrad is not exempt from similar ambivalence. In spite of his refusal to cling to a theological understanding of the universe, he expressed man’s predicament in religious words that echo his description of the loss of the Titanic as an “Act of God”. Questioning the idea of immortality he wrote in an essay entitled “The Life Beyond”: “Since the Day of Creation two veiled figures, Doubt and Melancholy, are pacing endlessly in the Sunshine of the world. What humanity needs is not the promise of scientific immortality, but compassionate pity in this life and infinite mercy on the Day of Judgment” (Conrad 1921, 93-94).
49 Hardy and Conrad are great authors and will continue to be read because they explore the heart of man, the savageness of human thoughts and feelings, the obscurity of existence. Their art is their unique weapon to resist the threat of dehumanization which they perceive in the advance of progress and in man’s faith in man. Such belief is not, in their eyes, to be replaced by belief in God; but hope can be found in man’s creativity and art. Hardy believed that “[t]o find beauty in ugliness is the province of the poet” (Hardy 1962, 213). It is the desire to make “the world resembl[e] a stanza or melody composed in a dream” (Hardy 1996, 409) – the desire to “embroider” while the machine merely “knits” – that led him to become one of the greatest writers and poets of the late Victorian period and of the Edwardian era. Similarly, Conrad’s ambition was that of the writer whose task “is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see!” (Conrad 1990, xlii). For both authors, as their works show, (only) art and imagination had the strength to elevate the spirit of the time and turn objects of doom into objects of art.
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Hardy, Thomas, The Dynasts: An Epic-Drama of the War with Napoleon, In Three Parts, Nineteen Acts, and One Hundred and Thirty Scenes, London: Macmillan, 1965.
Hardy, Thomas, The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.
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NOTES
1. Conrad stopped being a sailor and turned to writing for a living “as steam superseded sail and as vessels became larger and more efficient” (Watts, ODNB). 2. “Object, n.”, OED [Online], OUP,
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7. The date “April 24, 1912” can be read at the end of the manuscript (Hardy 2001, 961, n248). 8. For more details, see Bergmann. 9. When Conrad does mention a potentially metaphysical interpretation of the disaster, irony looms again as the religious allusion is immediately linked to a notion of merchant shipping. Moreover the allusion is clearly presented as hypothetical: “And if ever a loss at sea fell under the definition, in the terms of a bill of lading, of Act of God, this one does, in its magnitude, suddenness and severity; and in the chastening influence it should have on the self confidence of mankind” (Conrad 1912, 287, my emphasis). 10. In 1912, i.e. 17 years after the initial publication of Jude the Obscure, Hardy added a Postscript in which he attempted to justify the way he dealt with the theme of marriage in the novel: “My opinion at that time, if I remember rightly, was what it is now, that a marriage should be dissolvable as soon as it becomes a cruelty to either of the parties – being then essentially and morally no marriage […]” (Hardy 1996, viii). 11. On his last encounter with Sue, Jude derides religion for being as harmful as alcohol: “I was gin-drunk; you were creed-drunk. Either form of intoxication takes away the nobler vision...” (Hardy 1996, 467). The benevolent God has disappeared and what remains is human suffering, expressed through the verses of the Book of Job Jude recites on his deathbed (484). 12. “The activities of the Immanent Will and the Spinners of the Years recall the role of God in Genesis” (Ousby 783). 13. Tess’s sister appears as a “pale” (Hardy 1998, 383) copy of the heroine, as if to atone for her tragic destiny in a feeble attempt by Hardy to offer a happy ending after all. Yet what we remember of Tess in this closing chapter is the flag signalling her death, undermining the “drooping” (383) presence of the new unconvincing couple.
ABSTRACTS
Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad gave voice and shape to the mood of the times they lived in. They were highly aware of what changes progress brought about in people’s lives in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Conrad wrote lengthily about sailboats, steamships and vessels. Hardy depicted landscapes surrounded by railways and field workers using a threshing machine. Such objects of modern civilization led them to question the value of progress and to warn readers about the dangers of dehumanization. In their writings, man’s predicament appears to be heightened rather than alleviated by the quest for advancement, leading both Hardy and Conrad to give a new form to tragedy in their fiction.
Thomas Hardy et Joseph Conrad ont su parler de leur époque. Tous deux sont les témoins des changements sociétaux induits par les progrès de la fin du 19ème et du début du 20ème siècles. Les écrits de Conrad sont remplis de bateaux à voiles, à vapeur, et de navires. Ceux de Hardy dépeignent des paysages entrecoupés par les lignes de chemin de fer ou des ouvriers agricoles s’affairant à faire fonctionner une batteuse. Ces objets de la civilisation moderne les conduisirent à s’interroger sur la valeur du progrès et à alerter leurs lecteurs sur leur dangerosité potentielle. Le destin des hommes et des femmes paraît plus sombre encore face à cette course au développement, si bien que Hardy et Conrad en viennent à dessiner les contours nouveaux d’une tragédie moderne dans leur fiction.
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INDEX
Mots-clés: objets, déshumanisation, tragédie, machines, Titanic, Volonté Immanente, machine à tricoter, Conrad (Joseph) Keywords: objects, dehumanization, tragedy, machine, Titanic, Immanent Will, knitting machine, Conrad (Joseph) oeuvrecitee Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure
AUTHOR
STÉPHANIE BERNARD Stéphanie Bernard is Assistant Professor at the University of Rouen (France) where she is in charge of teacher training. She wrote a thesis on Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad, dealing with the treatment of the tragic in the early days of modernism. In addition, she has been focusing on the question of otherness in literary works (femininity, intertextuality and rewriting), widening her approach to other texts by Hardy, including his poems and short stories, and to other nineteenth and twentieth authors such as Charlotte Brontë, Jean Rhys and C.S. Lewis. She was the convenor of the conference on “Objects in Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad” that was held in Rouen in May 2018.
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Kairos and Mistiming: Clocks, Watches in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd and Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim Pendules, réveils, montres : l’objet et la poétique de l’intempestif dans Far from the Madding Crowd de Thomas Hardy et Lord Jim de Joseph Conrad
Catherine Lanone
1 Since Christopher Tilley’s emphasis on the connection between objects and cultural context , material culture studies have highlighted the way in which human beings rely upon the technology of everyday life and endow artefacts with agency, or in other words, are made by the objects they make. For Eugene Halton, clocks and watches are an emblematic example of this process: timepieces belong to consumer culture, they may be considered as a status symbol or be granted personal significance as a family gift. A wristwatch, for him, is a “microcosm of global culture”, “encoding a combination of the Babylonian base 60 counting system, the Greek decimal system, Arabic numerals originally developed in India, and two divisions of twelve hours each, deriving from ancient Egypt” (Halton x). The clock is also part of a gradual paradigm shift that leads from a divine universe to a post-Darwinian world, from an “anthropocentric mind” to a “ mechanocentric mind” where the clock becomes “a dominant symbol in Western consciousness, reshaping and rationalizing daily life, work discipline, and the very conceptions of time and space” (Halton x). It may be useful to examine, from the perspective of material culture analysis,1 the function of clocks and watches in Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad’s fiction, as clues that help to trace the relatively unacknowledged connection between these two writers.2 For clocks and watches loom large in their work; as Philip Mallett points out for instance, “Time, with or without the capital letter, is the subject of so much of [Hardy’s] work” (Mallett 156).3 May not such objects reveal how both writers engage with social and material culture and consciousness, to explore the “mechanocentric” drift of society and devise their ironic
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method? We shall first see how these objects stand out, like ludicrous, potentially comic details. We shall then consider the way in which timepieces reflect shifting conceptions of the world, prompting us to explore the tension between chronos and kairos which lies at the heart of both Far from the Madding Crowd and Lord Jim.
1. A Collection of Strange Timepieces
2 Laurence Estanove has considered the importance of “mute things” in Thomas Hardy’s poetry, like the sundial dripping in the rain and musing upon its own uselessness. Émilie Loriaux has drawn attention to the “jack-o’-clock” with its “double ding-dong ricochetts”, which beats the time of the poem in “Copying Architecture in an Old Minster”.4 In Far from the Madding Crowd and Lord Jim, we also find a number of devices measuring the passing of time, but they tend to be out of place or incongruous. For instance, in Lord Jim, a gold chronometer watch5 is found hanging on the railing of a ship. Yet its owner, the stern Brierly who judges Jim at the trial, has been emphatically presented as the epitome of a good seaman, as a series of anaphoric negations stresses his shining reputation: “He had never in his life made a mistake, never had an accident, never a mishap, never a check in his steady rise, and he seemed to be one of those lucky fellows who know nothing of indecision, much less of self-mistrust” (Conrad 38). Yet soon after the trial, suddenly, after having duly recorded the ship’s coordinates in the log and marked the spot on the map, he leaps overboard, leaving his gold watch hanging behind as a mysterious statement. Similarly, when Jim reaches Patusan and is imprisoned by the rajah, he is asked, surprisingly enough, to mend a clock: “They did actually bring out to him a nickel clock of New England make, and out of sheer unbearable boredom he busied himself in trying to get the alarum to work” (152). There is a ludicrous discrepancy between tinkering and being trapped.6 In Far from the Madding Crowd, clocks and watches also seem rather untimely. For instance, Boldwood places the enigmatic letter on a timepiece with an eagle’s wings, triggering for Annie Ramel a kind of anamorphosis7; when they are about to get married, Troy waits for Fanny in a church with a strange clock featuring a “grotesque” automaton, a quarter- jack that pops out every quarter of an hour to strike a bell. When Troy later woos Bathsheba, he impulsively gives her a splendid gold watch, which later proves to contain a lock of Fanny’s hair. The strangest timepiece of all may well be Gabriel’s watch, the first object that stands out in the novel: Mr. Oak carried about him, by way of watch, what may be called a small silver clock; in other words, it was a watch as to shape and intention, and a small clock as to size. This instrument being several years older than Oak’s grandfather, had the peculiarity of going either too fast or not at all. The smaller of its hands, too, occasionally slipped round on the pivot, and thus, though the minutes were told with precision, nobody could be quite certain of the hour they belonged to. (Hardy 1986, 7-8)
3 The family relic is utterly unable to tell the time. It does work, after a fashion – provided one pays no interest in the actual hour. Besides, the size of the watch is rather unusual and unpractical, to say the least: It may be mentioned that Oak’s fob being difficult of access, by reason of its somewhat high situation in the waistband of his trousers (which also lay at a remote height under his waistcoat), the watch was as a necessity pulled out by throwing the body to one side, compressing the mouth and face to a mere mass of
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ruddy flesh on account of the exertion required, and drawing up the watch by its chain, like a bucket from a well. (Hardy 1986, 8)
4 Extracting the watch from one’s clothes involves an effort of almost epic proportions; this is as close as Hardy may come to Dickens’s way of sketching characters through one grand, signature gesture.8 This comedic approach to material culture is confirmed by Gabriel’s usual remedy to make up for the watch’s inaccuracy: he simply thrusts “his face close to the glass of his neighbours’ windows, till he could discern the hour marked by the green-faced time-keepers within” (Hardy 1986, 8). Gabriel’s clownish number makes him a country oaf, as opposed to the dashing glitter of Troy, the seducer.
2. Contextualizing objects
5 Yet the series of ludicrous objects is more meaningful than it may seem. In his analysis of material culture, Bill Brown points out that “one can imagine writing a life story of objects, beginning with prototypically biographical questions: ‘What has been [the object’s] career so far, and what do people consider to be an ideal career for such things? What are the recognized ‘ages’ or periods in the thing’s ‘life,’ and what are the cultural markers for them?” (Brown 246). Hardy and Conrad do provide a biography for some of these incongruous objects; for instance, the gold watch that Troy foolishly presses upon Bathsheba, and which she uses to time her work as the mistress of the farm, has a history of its own, as Troy explains: “A coronet with five points, and beneath, Cedit amor rebus – ‘Love yields to circumstance.’ It’s the motto of the Earls of Severn. That watch belonged to the last lord, and was given to my mother’s husband, a medical man, for his use till I came of age, when it was to be given to me. It was all the fortune that ever I inherited. […] Now it is yours.” (Hardy 1986, 138)
6 Like the spoon stamped with a crest in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the object is a palimpsest, the relic of a connection with the aristocracy, a Freudian commodity fetish.9 Incidentally the dubious Latin motto does not bode well for the courtship.
7 If Troy’s watch was given to his father, a doctor, presumably as a token of appreciation, in Lord Jim Brierly’s watch is a trophy, a gift, a reward for good service: “He had saved lives at sea, had rescued ships in distress, had a gold chronometer presented to him by the underwriters, and a pair of binoculars with a suitable inscription from some foreign Government, in commemoration of these services” (Conrad 38). Gabriel’s watch is a more humble family relic, presumably his great-grandfather’s, since it is older than his grandfather. Its odd use recalls what Bill Brown calls “the commodity’s afterlife – or its several afterlives – within multiple singularized dimensions” (Brown 246). Gabriel will not give up the watch as dysfunctional refuse. With its theatrical ontological persistence, the family watch is an instance of what Jane Bennett describes in Vibrant Matter as the capacity of things to draw us near to them, to create attachment, “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (Bennett 6): “But what if materiality itself harbors creative vitality?” (125). Sometimes, objects are quickened to life with an uncanny animation. Such is the case of the quarter-jack, which relishes Troy’s dismay: “when the rattle began again, the puppet emerged, and the four quarters were struck fitfully as before. One could almost be positive that there was a malicious leer upon the hideous creature’s face, and a
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mischievous delight in its twitchings” (Hardy 1986, 92). Like the impish fire in Tess,10 the quarter-jack becomes here an imp of time.
8 The timepiece, here, becomes the detail that peculiarly calls out to the reader, that moves, pricks or bruises the character and/or the reader, what Roland Barthes defines as a punctum. This is because such objects are not simply endowed with a personal value, but because they belong to a wider social context, and function as metonymies of temporal systems. For instance, before it was repurposed as a token of love, Troy’s watch once was the tool of a system: “It was all the fortune that ever I inherited. That watch has regulated imperial interests in its time – the stately ceremonial, the courtly assignation, pompous travels, and lordly sleeps. Now it is yours” (Hardy 1986, 138). The imp of time inside the church connotes the way in which clocks transform the perception of time. For Troy, waiting half an hour is such an unbearable ordeal that it severs him from Fanny; social time has become mechanical, intentional, directed, whereas the hour measured by the sun would allow for more loosely defined intervals. Analysing Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, Ihde calls clocks a “temporal, technological exit from the Garden” (Ihde 60). Quoting Lynn White Jr., Ihde notes that “clocks were very differently embedded in cultural praxes in the Latin west compared to the Byzantine East” (61): as soon as clock were invented, they quickly spread to both the outside and the interior of Western churches, whereas in the East, only sundials were used close by, but no clocks were permitted inside the churches. In the West, as soon as one moved away from the seasons and the sun, clockwork became paradigmatic (first positing the Universe as a clockwork mechanism run by God, then as a ruled by the Godless mechanism of evolution). Hardy’s evil clock inside the church mocks the eternal time that the church is supposed to embody, and suggests on the contrary that standardized social time is blind and restless.11
9 Whereas Troy’s watch is part of Imperial regulation, Gabriel’s obtrusive but useless watch harks back to an older, less constraining system. One-handed clocks, for Ihde, favoured duration, the broad span of time, rather than the precise instant, the pointer, the exact “familiar visual gestalt” (Ihde 63). As Kirstin Olsen recalls, “until the late seventeenth century, most clocks had only one hand – an hour hand –” (Olsen 111)12 and though two-hand clocks became the norm in the eighteenth century, the measure of time remained somewhat relative: “But by the standards of later centuries, 18th- century Britain was almost lackadaisical about time. Each parish church set its clock to local time, often by means of a sundial. When it was noon in London, for instance, it was about 12:11 in Bristol and 12:04 in Reading” (111). All of this was to vanish with the railway network, which demanded standardized time for train timetables; for Trish Ferguson, Victorian time was thus a fairly new concept, as the railway “heralded a new era of industrial time-consciousness” (Ferguson 57). She recalls that in 1852 a number of towns, like Dorchester, held out against the establishment of Greenwich time and remained faithful to “local mean time”: “Many towns maintained both local and Greenwich Time for the railway, with two clocks keeping different times at the railway station” (57). Ferguson adds that Hardy was no doubt familiar with the Curtis v. March case, which was to be was heard at the Dorchester Assizes at 10 a.m. GMT on the 25th of November 1858, but where the defendant abided by Dorchester time, and was late by a few minutes, so that the judge had already ruled in favour of the plaintiff by the time he appeared. Interestingly enough, with its single hand, Gabriel’s watch is not even a watch that, like seventeenth-century clocks, tells only the hour. It is a watch concerned with minutes only, running fast or slow, in other words a watch that resists progress,
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defeats all standardized systems. It does not care for legal time, the standardized Greenwich time of railway timetables. Using only one hand at a time, Gabriel’s lackadaisical, anachronistic watch requires different time-telling skills. Gabriel longs to retain the outmoded, the residual, yearning for some kind of temporal communality: he pops his face at the window to see his neighbours’ clocks, as if the cogs of the community could maintain a better sense of time than an individual watch.
10 On the contrary, Brierly abandons the community of the ship, committing suicide without a word, regardless of the crew’s dismay. Before Brierly jumps, he thoroughly sets the log and writes down the ship’s coordinates on the map, then carefully hangs “his gold chronometer watch under the rail by its chain” (Conrad 52). We should not forget that the point of the chronometer watch is not simply to tell the time, but to help to ascertain a ship’s position: the chronometer watch is a navigational instrument. Don Ihde considers that modern clock culture and navigational practice are part of the same hermeneutic shift. Mapping and chart-reading mean judging one’s position from above, from a bird’s eye view, “from a disembodied or imaginative perspective” that one does “not in fact occupy” (Ihde 67). Both practices, for Ihde, prompt the exit from the “Garden”, the shift to hubristic technological time. The chronometer watch signals Brierly’s skills, his ability to tell the time and steer, but also his eagerness to fit in within the logic of commerce and hegemonic England, as the standard-bearer of Imperial chronology. Brierly’s cold desperation reveals a need to impose order – hence the fear that order may collapse, on a personal but also a symbolic level. It is as if he trusted the symbolic watch to maintain that order, even after his own death. It is also significant that Jim should be made to mend a clock in Patusan, at the very moment when he is about to adopt a colonial posture and transform himself into the reborn Tuan Jim, the leader. For Yablon, not only do clocks set “the modern regime of time”, they are the “agent for instilling capitalist or European time discipline among subaltern populations, or alienating us from their more organic rhythms – whether biological, seasonal, religious or communal” (Yablon 128). But this also raises the question of the ability to retrieve this organized time, and of the tension between timing and mistiming that undermines the colonial process.
3. Kairos vs Chronos: Mistiming in Hardy’s and Conrad’s Fiction
11 What is at stake, here, ultimately, is the old opposition between chronos and kairos.13 On the one hand, there is chronos, the linear logic of clock time, of the chronometer watch, prompting to synchronize human time with mechanical time, and on the other hand, we find the significant moment and the cyclical movement of the day, the seasons, the earth. With his broken watch, Gabriel asserts his belief in communal and organic time. Picking up a lamb in his arms, he examines the sky at night, “to ascertain the time of night from the altitudes of the stars” (Hardy 1986, 14): The Dog-star and Aldebaran, pointing to the restless Pleiades, were half-way up the Southern sky, and between them hung Orion, which gorgeous constellation never burnt more vividly than now, as it soared forth above the rim of the landscape. Castor and Pollux with their quiet shine were almost on the meridian: the barren and gloomy Square of Pegasus was creeping round to the north-west; far away through the plantation Vega sparkled like a lamp suspended amid the leafless trees, and Cassiopeia’s chair stood daintily poised on the uppermost boughs.
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“One o’clock,” said Gabriel. (Hardy 1986, 15)
12 Deciphering the map of the stars without the likes of Brierly’s chronometer watch, Gabriel is one with the peaceful flow of the night, with the slowly stirring cogs of the stars and planets, with cosmic energy. He oscillates between sky and earth, he fits in within the landscape, the moment. As opposed to the regulated time of chronos, we have here the liberated time of kairos, the ability to be in the moment, in an ecocritical moment. For there is an ecology of kairos. This is emblematized by the storm scene, where Troy and all the men lie in a drunken stupor, since Troy has celebrated with them his wedding to Bathsheba with a soldier’s “dyonisian”14 stamina, as Isabelle Gadoin puts it, and stipulated that it would not rain. Gabriel, on the other hand, is sensitive to the toad on the path, to the “thin glistening streak” on his table left by a slug (Hardy 1986, 188), to the huddling sheep, and he rushes to cover up the ricks. His ability to read the signs, his intuition are an instance of the transmission of knowledge, or, as Ihde puts it, “once one has left the Garden the past ways of gaining knowledge are more often lost or forgotten. Very few of us ‘know’ what any peasant would have known about planting times or take seriously in the same way the passage of the seasons. Our praxes have irreversibly changed” (Ihde 63). The soldier’s praxis is of little avail when the struggle with the weather comes. Hardy’s depiction of a pastoral world, here, is less nostalgic than ecocritical, laying stress on a natural temporality that ought to be preserved. The tremendous storm scene is an example of kairos, of the ability to seize the moment, to act in time, on cue. In the midst of flashes of lightning and rumbling thunder, Gabriel and Bathsheba work side by side, covering the ricks, while the threatening weather gradually unleashes its power: “the forms of skeletons appeared in the air, shaped with blue fire for bones – dancing, leaping, striding, racing around, and mingling altogether in unparalleled confusion” (Hardy 1986, 193-194). This operatic scene brings together the forces of nature, Oak and Bathsheba, acting just in time to save the farm.
13 The storm scene contrasts with moment of failed kairos, when time is shattered and falls out of joint. Hence the church scene with its leering imp of a quarter-jack, in which Fanny fails to turn up because she has gone to the wrong church, an example of the mishap, mistiming and missed opportunity that are characteristic of Hardy’s conception of fate’s little ironies. Towards the end of the novel, the converging final moment, “Concurritur, Horae Momento”, depicts beautiful Bathsheba, treacherous Troy, and wild, monomaniac Boldwood getting dressed at the same time, preparing to meet unawares. The parallel montage stresses both simultaneity and misdirected energies, so that the chapter constitutes a parody of kairos. They only come together to burst apart, as Boldwood shoots Troy, stepping out of time for ever. This is the wrong deed at the wrong moment. The parallel montage does not signal kairos but some kind of perverse coincidence, as time is not assembled but wildly out of joint.
14 Such disassembled time is at the heart of Lord Jim. For Jim repeatedly misses kairos. On the training ship, he dreams of saving lives but, lost in his thoughts, fails to see a collision in the harbour. Whereas his fellow students jump to the rescue, he only tries to leap into the rowing boat once it is too late. Later on, when serving on the Patna, Jim is lost in contemplation of the peaceful night, something that seems akin to Gabriel’s cosmic tuning into the stars: The propeller turned without a check, as though its beat had been part of the scheme of a safe universe […] a few wavelets, a few ripples, a few undulations that, left behind, agitated the surface of the sea for an instant after the passage of the
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ship, subsided splashing gently, calmed down at last into the circular stillness of water and sky with the black speck of the moving hull remaining everlastingly in its centre. (Conrad 15)
15 But such stillness is deceptive. Once more, Jim is lulled by appearances and proves out of touch with the moment, his roaming eyes fixed on the horizon, unable to catch “the shadow of the coming event” (Conrad 16). That shadow is the invisible, evil agency of the ghoul of a wreck15 that comes across the Patna’s course unseen, and passes smoothly under the hull, seemingly damaging it beyond repair.
16 There is for Badiou a split between before and after that characterizes an event, and the temporal fault line of that event is marvellously conjured up by the kaleidoscopic structure of the text. For the invisible wreck shatters the omniscient perspective and the chronological linearity of the novel. To begin with, the collision between the hull and the wreck is itself presented as a riddle that challenges both the reader and the characters. It all begins when a drunken crewmember is arguing with the captain; when he seemingly stutters and stumbles out of drunkenness, the reader must understand in a flash that something very different is actually occurring: [he] let go the rail and made ample gestures as if demonstrating in the air the shape and extent of his valour; his thin voice darted in prolonged squeaks upon the sea, he tiptoed back and forth for the better emphasis of utterance, and suddenly pitched down head-first as though he had been clubbed from behind. He said ‘Damn!’ as he tumbled; an instant of silence followed upon his screeching: Jim and the skipper staggered forward by common accord, and catching themselves up, stood very stiff and still gazing, amazed, at the undisturbed level of the sea. Then they looked upwards at the stars. (Conrad 20)
17 Ian Watt has famously described this scene in terms of “delayed decoding” (Watt 177-178). The reader must grasp, in a split second, that the cantankerous sailor has not been clubbed from behind, nor has he fallen because he is drunk; nor have Jim and the skipper fallen of their own accord. Something must have hit the boat. The disturbance, however, remains a mental blank, a minor earthquake that cannot be construed: What had happened? The wheezy thump of the engines went on. Had the earth been checked in her course? They could not understand; and suddenly the calm sea, the sky without a cloud, appeared formidably insecure in their immobility, as if poised on the brow of yawning destruction. (Conrad 20-21)
18 The moment stunningly blends a deceptive lingering impression of peace and the ominous sense of an impending fall. The next chapter suddenly leaps forward, famously shifting to the trial, simultaneously leaping from heterodiegetic third-person narration to homodiegetic narration, as the text switches to Marlow’s tale: “A month or so afterwards, when Jim, in answer to pointed questions, tried to tell honestly the truth of this experience…” (Conrad 21).
19 The temporal vortex16 forces the text to circle back around the event, via a prism of witnesses, as if the event could not be broached before Jim can disclose the memory to Marlow, during the long confessional vigil that follows the trial. In Jim’s account, time seems to both stretch and speed up, as perception is warped. For John G. Peters, Conrad probes here into human time, the way time is experienced rather than measured by instrument17: Jim “cannot synchronize his personal time with either mechanical time or the time others experience” (Peters 424). Whereas the event took him unawares, and he reacted a little too late, time now seems to speed up, to rush out of control. After the stray wreck has hit the Patna, indeed, Jim perceives “events moving faster than they
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actually are” (424). Desperately feeling that there is no time left, that the rusted Patna is about to sink, Jim is hypnotically drawn towards the renegade captain and his meagre crew, who have already abandoned both ship and passengers and are desperately calling out to him, mistaking him for one of their own, George: I heard as if I had been on the top of a tower another wild screech, ‘Geo-o-o-orge! Oh, jump!’ She was going down, down, head first under me....” ‘He raised his hand deliberately to his face, and made picking motions with his fingers as though he had been bothered with cobwebs, and afterwards he looked into the open palm for quite half a second before he blurted out— ‘“I had jumped . . .” He checked himself, averted his gaze. . . . “It seems,” he added. (Conrad 69)
20 For Josiane Paccaud-Huguet, this moment of Othering, this blank or lapse of consciousness which corresponds to the leap, is precisely “a drama of no-thing”.18 The leap is not so much a decision as an impulse, a reflex, an unconscious momentum of the body that somehow escapes consciousness, as suggested by the tense, the ellipses, the bemused, bewildered “I had jumped . . .”, “It seems”. Nathalie Martinière stresses the inability to speak which characterizes the moment of the split: “Le saut physique s’associe d’ailleurs à un blanc psychologique et langagier pour le personnage : un avant et un après le saut existent. Pendant n’est pas évocable, sujet à un refoulement complet” 19 (Martinière 79). Clearly, for Marlow (who shows little sympathy at that point) Jim is equivocating, but for the reader, on the contrary, the text creates a disturbing affect of before and after, as if the event severed both language and the course of time. The hand brushing invisible cobwebs suggests Jim’s inability to understand what happened, and the simultaneous haunting insistence of the recollection. So do his clasped hands that come apart as the next chapter opens, precisely at the same moment: “He locked his fingers together and tore them apart” (Conrad 70). The textual montage, the shift from one chapter to the next, creates a visual cut that again stresses the deep rupture in Jim’s life.
21 Furthermore, there is no turning back, as signalled by the obverse of the leap, the impossible verticality of the boat “uprising” above, seen in a striking low angle shot: It had happened somehow. […] then he rolled over, and saw vaguely the ship he had deserted uprising above him, with the red side-light glowing large in the rain like a fire on the brow of a hill seen through a mist. “She seemed higher than a wall; she loomed like a cliff over the boat . . . . I wished I could die,” he cried. “There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well—into an everlasting deep hole. . . .” (Conrad 70)
22 The leap is the very opposite of kairos, it does not allow to seize the moment but prompts Jim to fall into the folds of Time, the abyss of the irretrievable instant. For Robert Hampson, the narrative is “somatic” and reveals how fixed Jim’s memory is, yet at the same time always paradoxically out of reach: “At the same time, as we see Jim’s attempted confessions, while trauma may have left vivid memories, those memories are not available to voluntary control and narrativisation” (Hampson 155). Indeed, this is what Davoine and Gaudillière, following Cathy Caruth, call “the frozen time” of trauma (Davoine & Gaudillière 249). For Sue Zemka, this anti-kairotic moment is the pivot of the novel: “Thus does Conrad build a novel around an instant, the instant that tells on character […] Ineluctably, the moment bears the burden of a life” (Zemka 174).
23 Faced with such self-betrayal, the instruments that were supposed to rule time, such as Brierly’s watch, prove useless. Brierly’s second in command, Jones, pitifully moans that he has no idea why Brierly should have committed suicide, and he repeatedly asks
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Marlow why, as if the latter could provide an answer. The text suggests a fear of contamination: if this can happen to Jim, the very pattern of a sound British sailor, “one of us” (Conrad 59), as the leitmotif has it, then it might happen to anyone, including the brilliant Brierly himself. Brierly commits suicide in full glory, leaving the gold watch behind, a gold standard of absolute value, as iconic and fetichised as a Rolex today (we might apply here Roland Barthes’s analysis of fetichised objects in Mythologies, and consider the chronometer watch as an object that becomes the vehicle of ideology and myth, through “surreptitious faking” (Barthes 1972, 125).
24 Hence also the clock that Jim fixes in the Rajah’s yard. For repairing the clock suddenly becomes performative, as if the object could mend Time itself, and erase the traumatic moment on the Patna, triggering a second kind of leap, a healing, cathartic jump. On an impulse again, without thinking, Jim runs, leaps over the fence, lands in primordial mud, and is reborn as Tuan Jim, the white administrator ruling Patusan like a demi- God. But the imps of mistiming have not had their say yet; the clock cannot be fully mended, Time cannot be turned on its head. To recall the image of Gabriel’s watch, mutatis mutandis, here too the minute hand is broken as it were, time stutters and repeats itself. In comes the Other, the intruder, another renegade, Jim’s nemesis, ironically nicknamed “Gentleman Brown”. Place signals the way in which the clock of misdeeds has started ticking again: They met, I should think, not very Far from the place, perhaps on the very spot, where Jim took the second desperate leap of his life – the leap that landed him into the life of Patusan, into the trust, the love, the confidence of the people. They faced each other across the creek, and with steady eyes tried to understand each other before they opened their lips. (Conrad 225)
25 The trickster, here, pretends to be Jim’s double: he begs for a second chance, acknowledging his misdeeds but questioning Jim at the same time, asking him how he came to end up here in Patusan, implying that they have shared similar fates. A deeply disturbed Jim allows Brown and his crew of thieves to leave; on the way, in the fog, they massacre everyone, including Jim’s closest friend, Dain Waris, prompting his own sacrifice to make amends for the sake of Dain Waris’s parents.
26 Thus both Conrad and Hardy explore the discontinuities in the experience of space and time discussed by Craig Allen. Timepieces seem to become precisely that, pieces of time, instruments measuring the linear, mechanical time of clocks, but also signalling the inability to synchronise human time and mechanical time, cultural mediators that cannot function as a compass allowing to map the course of time and destiny, and compromised by their allegiance with material culture and the logic of capitalism or imperialism. Hence narrative dislocation, or syncopation, the rhythm of both texts, one which runs the course of tragedy, the other which offers a muted respite in the end. As the characters long for kairos, repetitions and echoes create the haunting beat of the text, recalling Deleuze’s definition in one of his seminars: “Le kairos, ce que les Grecs appellent le kairos : k-a-i-r-o-s. Et le kairos est le bon moment, l’occasion favorable. Je ne vois qu’un truc en musique, vous savez. […] ce qu’on appelle le timing, dans le jazz, le timing. Le timing, c’était pas le tempo, c’était le moment favorable pour un des improvisateurs pour intervenir. Le bon moment, par exemple, pour placer un solo de trompette. Le bon moment, c’était vraiment, le timing, c’était l’occasion favorable, quoi”.20
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, Craig R., Holling, Crawford S. (eds.), Discontinuities in Ecosystems and Other Complex Systems, New York: Columbia UP, 2008.
Allen, Thomas M. (ed.), Time and Literature, Cambridge: CUP, 2018.
Badiou, Alain, L’Être et l’événement, Paris : Seuil, 1988.
Barthes, Roland, S/Z, Paris : Seuil, 1970.
Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, trans. Jonathan Cape, New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.
Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010.
Bernard, Stéphanie, De Thomas Hardy à Joseph Conrad : vers une écriture de la modernité, unpublished PhD Diss., Université Lyon 2, 2004.
Brown, Bill, Other Things, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2015.
Caruth, Cathy, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History; Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1996.
Conrad, Joseph, Lord Jim (1900), New York: Norton (Norton Critical Edition), 1996.
Davoine, Françoise & Gaudillière, Jean-Marc, History Beyond Trauma, trans. Susan Fairfield, New York: Other, 2004.
Deleuze, Gilles, seminar, 20th December 1983, “La Voix de Gilles Deleuze en Ligne” [online]
Epstein, Hugh, Hardy, Conrad and the Senses: Epistemiology and Literary Style in the Early Fiction, unpublished PhD Diss., St Mary’s University College, 2013.
Estanove, Laurence, “Thought and Silence: The ‘Pensive Mutes’ of Hardy’s Verse”, FATHOM [online] 2 (2013)
Ferguson, Trish, “Hardy’s Wessex and the Birth of Industrial Subjectivity”, in Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes, ed. Trish Ferguson, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Gadoin, Isabelle, Far from the Madding Crowd: Thomas Hardy entre convention et subversion, Paris: PUF, 2010.
Halton, Eugene, “Preface”, in Philip Vannini, Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life: Ethnographic Approaches, New York: Peter Lang, 2009, vii-xiii.
Hampson, Robert, Conrad’s Secrets, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Hardy, Thomas, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), ed. Robert C. Schweik, New York: Norton (Norton Critical Edition), 1986.
Hardy, Thomas, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), ed. Scott Elledge, New York: Norton (Norton Critical Edition), 1991.
Hardy, Thomas, The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
Higdon, David Leon, “Conrad’s Clocks”, The Conradian 16.1 (1991): 1-18.
Ihde, Don, Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.
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Mallett, Phillip, “Hardy and Time”, in Reading Thomas Hardy, ed. Charles Pettit, London: Macmillan, 1998, 157-171.
Martinière, Nathalie, “La Figure du saut comme dynamique d’écriture dans Lord Jim”, L’Époque Conradienne 24 (1998): 75-90.
Olsen, Kirstin, Daily Life in 18th-Century England, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999.
Paccaud-Huguet, Josiane, “The Sublime Object in Lord Jim”, L’Époque Conradienne 30 (2004): 155-170.
Peters, John G., “Joseph Conrad’s ‘Sudden Holes’ in Time: the Epistemology of Temporality”, Studies in the Novel 32.4 (Winter 2000): 420-441.
Ramel, Annie, The Madder Stain, Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2015.
Tilley, Christopher, “Ethnography and Material Culture”, in Handbook of Ethnography, eds. Paul Atkinson & al., Los Angeles: Sage, 2001, 258-272.
Vannini, Philip, Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life: Ethnographic Approaches, New York: Peter Lang, 2009.
Watt, Ian, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, London: Chatto, 1980.
Yablon, Nick, “Untimely Objects: Temporal Studies and the New Materialism”, in Time and Literature, ed. Thomas M. Allen, Cambridge: CUP, 2018, 120-133.
Zemka, Sue, Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society, Cambridge: CUP, 2011.
NOTES
1. “To call a clock ‘material culture’ is to draw attention to how culture manifests itself in communicative practices, which include language, beliefs and skills, but how it includes material embodiments as well” (Halton x). 2. See Stéphanie Bernard’s unpublished PhD Thesis, De Thomas Hardy à Joseph Conrad: vers une écriture de la modernité, and her article in this volume
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anamorphosis for Annie Ramel: “The gaze of the unknown Other has entered Boldwood and reached him at the very point from which he sees” (Ramel 112). 8. Dickens often uses a comic gesture to identify characters, such as pulling oneself up by one’s hair. Watches are significant; Sam Weller’s watch is stout, with a big face, while in Little Dorrit, Mrs Clennam’s watch is engraved with the initials D.N.F., standing for Do Not Forget, symbolizing her guilt, her resentment and her belief in a vengeful God. In Great Expectations, Jaggers’s watch is a massive gold repeater, the emblem of Jaggers’s power as a lawyer; each link of the god chain seems like red-hot iron to those who fear him. 9. In this case, the connection with the aristocracy is spurious, since the watch is simply a hand- me-down, or second hand, as it were. 10. In the confession scene, the fender grins and the fire looks “impish”, signalling the shift from romance to rupture (Hardy 1991, 178). For Philip Mallett, “[o]f all of Hardy’s novels, Tess of the d’Urbervilles is the most deeply saturated in the sense of time. Its division into phases suggests as much.” (Mallett 163) 11. Fanny’s mistake, as she confuses the two churches, is also an instance of life’s little ironies, of deterministic error or mishap, of the tragic absence of Providence that lies at the heart of Hardy’s world. 12. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Tess goes to fetch her parents at the Inn, walking through an ancient lane “laid out before inches of land had value and when one-handed clocks sufficiently divided the day” (Hardy 1991, 15); the sentence alludes to enclosures and market economy, but also to severe modern temporal divisions. Tess will depart early and fall asleep, unwillingly provoking the death of Prince. Perhaps a world of one-handed clocks would not make the earth such a demanding, “blighted star” (23). 13. Sue Zemka explains that the Greek term “kairos” means time, and was first used to signal an orator’s ability to speak at the right time; then in the Christian church it symbolized the second coming, and gradually man’ helplessness before God’s timing; following Kierkegaard’s analysis of the moment, the term has become a key concept in Twentieth-century philosophy, theology and critical discourse. Zemka, for instance, reads George Eliot in terms of the concept of kairos (Zemka 131). Yablon defines kairos as time as “occasion” and chronos as “time as measure” (Yablon 128). Yablon’s article reflects on the link between material studies and the “temporal turn” (120) in Humanities. 14. “Les réjouissances apolliniennes ont cédé la place au défoulement et aux excès dionysiaques” (Gadoin 77). Isabelle Gadoin reads the moment as a dislocation of the pastoral community. 15. Zemka points out the opposition between the hermeneutic shock of the moment and the timeless nature of the wreck, which does not seem connected with modern technology: “The near sinking of the Patna is not a new type of emergency, but a new type of temporal mimesis” (Zemka 174). 16. For Zemka, Jim’s panic infects Marlow’s style: “a panic engendered by temporal myopia makes Marlow’s narrative style the double of Jim’s crisis, with the added resemblance that, like Jim, Marlow’s version of the crisis keeps repeating itself” (Zemka 175). 17. This is what Bergson described in terms of speed (when excitement quickens the perception of time) and duration (when the moment is dilated by the mind). 18. “I will argue that Lord Jim parodies and deconstructs the tradition of the sublime (tragic, romantic, Gothic): it is a drama of no-thing, revealed by the false climax of the Patna’s wreckage” (Paccaud-Huguet 156). 19. “For the character, the physical leap is linked to a psychological and linguistic blank: before and after the jump may exist – during cannot be evoked, subjected as it is to total repression” (Translation mine). 20. “Hence kairos, I mean what the Greeks called kairos: k-a-i-r-o-s. For kairos means the right time, the suitable, opportune moment. You see that with music, you know, that kind of thing […]
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that’s called time, timing, in jazz. It’s not a question of tempo, it’s the ability jazz musicians have to take turns to improvise at the right moment. The right moment, for instance, for the shift to a trumpet solo. The right moment, that’s what it really meant, timing, seizing a favourable opportunity, that’s it” (Translation mine). Gilles Deleuze, seminar, 20/12/83, “La Voix de Gilles Deleuze en Ligne”, http://www2.univ-paris8.fr/deleuze/article.php3?id_article=276 (last accessed October 29, 2018).
ABSTRACTS
Both Hardy and Conrad are fascinated by the concepts of timing and mistiming, of kairos (acting at the right time), delayed recognition (belatedness) and event (the irreversible split between before and after). In Far from the Madding Crowd and Lord Jim, timepieces stand out as misplaced or incongruous, like the chronometer watch Brierly leaves hanging on his ship’s rail, the broken clock Jim mends in Patusan, or Gabriel Oak’s momentous one-hand watch. Such timepieces might seem comedic; in fact, they embody representations of time, such as the strict timing of imperial trade and standardized Victorian Britain, as opposed to a more embodied, natural and intuitive perception of time. Jim mends Time when tinkering with a broken clock, while with his broken watch Gabriel Oak must peer through his neighbours’ windows and steer by the stars or the clues given by Nature. In both cases, Conrad and Hardy engage with kairos, the right time, the moment when an action should be performed, an opportunity seized. The inability to act in time triggers the irreversible split between before and after, the wound of that which cannot be changed, materialized by the imp of the clock when Fanny waits in the wrong church, or by the gold watch hanging in Lord Jim, signalling a temporality of despair and chaos rather than measured order.
Dans Lord Jim, comme dans Far from the Madding Crowd, les objets censés permettre de mesurer le temps se déplacent ou se dérèglent, comme la montre abandonnée par Brierly, ou la montre démesurée de Gabriel Oak, qui n’a qu’une aiguille et permet de lire les minutes mais non les heures. Or ces objets incongrus ou comiques en apparence, révèlent en fait diverses conceptions du temps, de l’emploi du temps rigoureux de la marine avec son substrat impérialiste, au temps uniformisé de la révolution industrielle, par opposition au temps du rite et de la nature. S’immisce alors l’intempestif, la dissonance de l’action toujours à contretemps, alors que se décale ou s’effondre le moment propice, celui où il faudrait savoir agir. Le kairos, c’est lorsque se produit la rencontre du possible et du moment opportun; c’est là où se jouent l’être et l’intégrité, alors que l’instant raté se dissout dans le chaos et le néant. Réparer la montre, ce serait pour Jim ravauder le Temps, tandis que la coïncidence perfide doit laisser place à la rencontre des temporalités chez Thomas Hardy.
INDEX oeuvrecitee Far from the Madding Crowd, Lord Jim (J.Conrad) Mots-clés: objet, coïncidence, Conrad (Joseph), horloge, impérialisme, kairos, montre, temporalité, culture matérielle Keywords: object, clock, coincidence, Conrad (Joseph), kairos, material culture, temporality, watch
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AUTHOR
CATHERINE LANONE Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3 A former student of École Normale Supérieure, Catherine Lanone is Professor of nineteenth and twentieth-century literature at the university of Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris. She has written a book on Emily Brontë (Les Hauts de Hurlevent d’Emily Brontë: Un vent de sorcière, Paris : Ellipses, 2000) and a book on E.M. Forster (E.M. Forster, Odyssée d’une écriture, Toulouse, Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1998), and many articles on the Brontës, Thomas Hardy, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf.
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The “Obscure Odyssey” of the Object in Conrad’s “Karain” L’« obscure odyssée » de l’objet dans « Karain », de Joseph Conrad
Josiane Paccaud
1 “Karain” is one of Conrad’s two early stories set in the Malay Archipelago. Published in Tales of Unrest (1898) with its twin story “The Lagoon”, it relates an “obscure odyssey” (Conrad 1978, 43) of betrayal and revenge focusing upon the very object of epic romance – a woman. But the treatment given to the motif is radically different in each story.
2 The eponymous hero, Karain, is a native chief who embarks with his friend Pata Matara on a long journey to find Matara’s sister, a noble woman promised to a local chief who has eloped with a Dutch trader. In order to save the family’s honour, Matara must kill her. During their lonely years of wandering, Karain falls under the subjection of the young woman’s dream image, of her hypnotic gaze and voice. One day, the two men find the couple at last. The stage for revenge is ready. While Matara is supposed to kill his sister with a traditional weapon, Karain has to kill the trader “with a sure shot” (Conrad 1978, 40). But at the climactic moment, hidden in the bush, he cries out “return!” to the young woman and, as if by accident, he shoots his own friend, Matara. The consequence of this tragic “mistake” is that Karain will never go back to his native land. After some heroic war deeds in the local wars against the Spaniards, he becomes the chief of a small community on an island where the frame narrator, himself a gun- runner, regularly meets him.
3 This story particularly deserves to be read in the light of Edward Said’s comment upon the prominence in Conrad’s works of objects derived from primordial substances (ivory, silver, coal, language), affecting the protagonists in many ways: One can suppose that during the writing of his fiction an essential place in Conrad’s imagination was filled by substances around which a great deal of the narrative action is organised: Lingard’s gold, Kurtz’s ivory, the ship of sailors, Gould’s silver, the women that draw men to chance and romance. A large proportion of the tension in Conrad’s fiction is therefore generated as the author, narrator, or hero
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tries to make us see the object that draws out the writing, the thought, the speech, and so on. (Said 106)
4 “Karain” teems with objects organising all types of human commerce – ranging from raw materials to the modern commodity. In Conrad’s Secrets, Robert Hampson has shown how the story “is framed by and revolves around the illicit trade of weapons” in the context of “the local politics of internecine struggle or anti-colonial resistance” (Hampson 27). What comes upon the stage in Conrad’s fiction is the substance of a new fetishism: money, “the sublime object of ideology” (according to Slavoj Žižek’s title), to which Conrad’s writing will oppose a certain modality of the gaze and the voice as objects of literary transfer.
1. The sublime stage
5 The story opens on a distant view of Karain’s post-apocalyptic kingdom, a “land still, complete, unknown” – the equivalent of Patusan in Lord Jim: The bay was like a bottomless pit of intense light. The circular sheet of water reflected a luminous sky, and the shores enclosing it made an opaque ring of earth floating in an emptiness of transparent blue. The hills, purple and arid, stood out heavily on the sky: their summits seemed to fade into a coloured tremble as of ascending vapour; their steep sides were streaked with the green of narrow ravines; at their foot lay rice-fields, plantain-patches, yellow sands. A torrent wound about like a dropped thread. (Conrad 1978, 14)
6 This patch of Flaubertian word-painting bears the features of a sublime landscape, pointing to the presence of some transcendent thing, an invisible idea, an impalpable illusion1 – the equivalent of Kant’s supra-sensible thing – whose representative on earth here is the epic hero, the conqueror of this “insignificant foothold” shut “from the rest of the world”: “a land […] where each sunrise, like a dazzling act of special creation, was disconnected from the eve and the morrow” (Conrad 1978, 14). In this U- topian place, surrounded by the “gleam of silk and metal” (two other substances), Karain struts, “incomparably dignified, made important by the power he had to awaken an absurd expectation of something heroic going to take place […] upon the vibrating tone of a wonderful sunshine” (15). As a respected Master with a benevolent gaze, he anticipates everyone’s desire and answers for everything: “They were Karain’s people – a devoted following. Their movements hung on his lips; they read their thoughts in his eyes; he murmured to them nonchalantly of life and death, and they accepted his words humbly, like gifts of fate. They were all free men, and when speaking to him said, ‘Your slave.’” (14). In short Karain occupies the position of a sublime object of awe, “raised to the dignity of the thing” – in this case the illusion – to quote the Lacanian definition of the sublime.2
7 But to the Western narrator, there is something that protests too much. The respect enjoyed by Karain is “accorded in the irreverent West only to the monarchs on the stage”. If he seems “word-perfect” (Conrad 1978, 17), it will be less because he embodies safety and guarantee for his subjects, than because of the part dictated by the illusions of the stage. Karain is the object of a kind of “fetishistic misrecognition” which, as pointed out by Slavoj Žižek, is the characteristic effect of ideological discourse, whether Eastern or Western: ‘Being a king’ is an effect of the network of social relations between a ‘king’ and his ‘subjects’; but – and here is the fetishistic misrecognition – […] they think that they
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are subjects giving the king royal treatment because the king is already in himself, outside the relationship to his subjects, a king; as if the determination of ‘being a king’ were a ‘natural’ property of the person of a king. (Žižek, 25)
8 The text makes it clear through the high-flown rhetoric of the first pages, that there is nothing very natural about Karain’s “ornate and disturbing person” (Conrad 1978, 16). Even his followers seem to “hedge him from humanity” (18), including his own. Among them is an old sword-bearer who always stands close at his back, gazing downward and exchanging with him in inaudible whispers, with a “face so covered with wrinkles that it seemed to look out through the meshes of a fine dark net”. For it seems that Karain has a “dislike of open space behind him […] a nervous preoccupation of what went on where he could not see” (19).
9 The scenic landscape, then, is but a screen, as suggested by proleptic details like the puff of breeze bringing “a flash of darkness” (Conrad 1978, 15), by a shadow in “the strange obsession that wound like a black thread through the gorgeous pomp of his public life” (20), reminiscent of the torrent that “wound about like a dropped thread” in the landscape. There is a secret wound indeed in Karain’s story: “[…] one could not imagine what depth of horrible void such an elaborate front could be worthy to hide. He was not masked – there was too much life in him, and a mask is only a lifeless thing; but he presented himself essentially as an actor, as a human being aggressively disguised” (16). In other words, it may be that the Idea/Ideal, the illusion which Karain stands for, is a thing of nothing screened by the sensuous appearance. Or even, to follow Hegel’s argument, that the truth of the supra-sensible Thing is just appearance as appearance3: between Kant and Hegel, the transcendent presupposition – or the ideal – has vanished into thin air.4 Conrad’s fiction situates itself in the days when many ideals and discourses vacillated, leaving a “depth of horrible void” which radically modified the status of the sublime. The crucial point here is that an object will be sublime not in itself, but simply because it momentarily fills the vacancy, an insight which psychoanalysis confirms. Indeed, any type of object can come in this place as a fetish standing for the Thing-in-itself, which is an empty place: […] what the objects, in their given positivity, are masking is not some other, more substantial order of objects but simply the emptiness, the void they are filling out. […] there is nothing intrinsically sublime in a sublime object – according to Lacan, a sublime object is an ordinary, everyday object which, quite by chance, finds itself occupying the place of what he calls Das Ding, the impossible-real object of desire. The sublime object is ‘an object elevated to the level of Das Ding.’ It is its structural place – the fact that it occupies the sacred/forbidden place of jouissance – and not its intrinsic qualities that confers on it sublimity. (Zižek 194)
10 These observations are crucial to grasp the effect of the ideological tensions in the background of Conrad’s story, between a pre-capitalist society and the age of the modern commodity based on a money economy. What is foremost is that the status of fetishism is not the same in each socially symbolic structure: “in pre-capitalist societies – commodity fetishism is not yet developed, because it is ‘natural’ production, not production for the market which predominates”, Zižek points out (194). In the case of Karain’s kindgdom, fetishism manifests itself in the relations of bondage between master and slave, or between king/queen and subjects. The retreat of the Master – or of the ideal figure of the Monarch – in capitalism produces a shift, “as if the de- fetishization in the ‘relations between men’ was paid for by the emergence of fetishism in the ‘relations between things’ – by commodity fetishism”5. In this latter perspective,
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human beings are no longer related by symbolic bonds, they just become inert objects affected by the forces of labour.
2. Three types of object
11 In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek differentiates three types of objects of desire: 1) The missing object which is the cause of desire and may actually be nothing at all: an indifferent void by structural necessity, a pure pretext for setting any type of action in motion, like the MacGuffin in Hitchcock’s films: a trivial device for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands where there are no lions – nevertheless people travel there to shoot lions. Its significance is purely self-reflexive6. 2) The massively intrusive object and material presence, the mute embodiment of impossible jouissance like the strident voice which materializes the presence of the watchful gaze in Hitchcock’s The Birds (Žižek 184). Neither of these two objects can lend itself to any sort of exchange among subjects. 3) The object as leftover, and the prop for exchange, whether it be a bodily left-over (in Conrad’s fiction, ivory, pearls…) or a symbolic object which is the result of a signifying operation, like money; the paradox of its role is that “the structure of symbolic exchanges between the subjects can take place only in so far as it is embodied in this pure material element which acts as its guarantee” (183). Money comes as a good candidate for the status of the leftover as sublime object since it stands for an ideal thing, a king/queen which is the guarantee of its value: such will be the fortune in “Karain” of a small coin called sovereign.
12 Let us begin with the object cause of desire whose very absence sets desire into motion: woman as love object, whose versions in “Karain” are either symbolic – the Queen and Mother – or full-fledged characters. Karain is the son of a woman who once was a Queen, the ruler of a small semi-independent state, a woman “resolute in affairs of state and of her own heart” (Conrad 1978, 22), of whom he speaks proudly. In his discussions on board the schooner, he is curious about the Queen of England, “the Monarch of whom we spoke with wonder and chivalrous respect – with a kind of affectionate awe?” (20) The question mark here raisesng some doubt about the irreverent Westerners on the boat. They suspect that the image of Karain’s mother “mingled somehow in his mind with the image he tried to form for himself of the far- off Queen whom he called Great, Invincible, Pious, and Fortunate” (20-21). They do their best to provide him with details “fit for his august and resplendent ideal” (21) which may not be theirs. In other words, the Queen as benevolent Other and Mother is the object of fetishistic misrecognition on Karain’s part: she holds the place of the supra-sensible Thing.
13 The third figure is Matara’s sister, the “great and wilful lady” (Conrad 1978, 34) who has ravished the Dutch trader’s heart and who becomes the object of Karain’s fantasy, the sovereign voice and gaze of his dreams during the nights of exile: ‘She was beautiful, she was faithful, and in the silence of foreign countries she spoke to me very low in the language of my people’. (Conrad 1978, 38) ‘I saw her! The consoler of sleepless nights, of weary days, the companion of troubled years! She looked straight at the place where I crouched’. (41)
14 In his imaginary conversations with her, one night Karain promises: “‘You shall not die,’ […]” (Conrad 1978, 39). The cruel traversing of fantasy takes place when he sees from afar the actual person sitting by the Dutch trader, counting the “increase of her
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pearls” (40) in a box on her lap – it seems that she, too, has her own fetish provided by the West. After Karain has shot Matara unwittingly, but obviously to satisfy some unconscious wish, he is presented to her as her saviour. But she does not recognize him: “No! I never saw him before. […] Had she forgotten already? […] My head swam with the fear of space” (42). The ideal object of fantasy has fallen, and with it the protective screen.
15 Another stage in the obscure Odyssey begins. Karain is now pursued by Matara’s ghost with its “sunken eyes” and terrible voice floating in open space, threatening from everywhere, calling out “Kill with a sure shot!” (Conrad 1978, 44). The massively intrusive object (both gaze and voice) foreshadows the presence of a ferocious Other, inviting to the mere jouissance of killing. Karain will indeed fight and kill in local wars, not for an ideal but just as a mercenary, until he feels weary of all this killing, and settles in his “foothold (“insignificant foothold”, 16). In the meantime he has found an old sword-bearer to whom he can tell his story, and whose presence obstructs the space behind, preventing the irruption of the ghost. The old man’s downward gaze and silence mark out a vacancy, a blind spot in the field previously occupied by Matara’s voice: a kind of vanishing point that will now condition the framing of Karain’s new “reality”, in the land of illusion where he can again play his part as master of his people: “Karain would ‘take up’, wide-eyed, the slender thread of his dream” (24). But after several years the old man dies, “and with him the power of his words and charms. And I can tell no one”, Karain complains (31). A dramatic shift in the master-slave relationship has taken place: he has become “the slave of the dead” (45) until one night of thunderstorm, he leaps onto the schooner to seek protection, confronting the two round stern-ports glimmering “like a pair of cruel and phosphorescent eyes”, while the “looking-glass over the little sideboard leaped out behind his back in a smooth sheet of livid light” (29).
16 Then comes the famous “redemption” scene. Karain has leaped on board to ask the sailors for “some of your strength – of your unbelief . . . A charm!” (Conrad 1978, 47). One of them, Hollis, goes to his room and returns with a box: “The quilted crimson satin of the inside put a violent patch of colour into the sombre atmosphere; it was something to look at – it was fascinating” (49). Something which, therefore, like the old man’s charms, stabilizes the cruel gaze. Here, then, comes our third variety of the object as insignificant left-over: There were there a couple of reels of cotton, a packet of needles, a bit of silk ribbon, dark blue; a cabinet photograph, at which Hollis stole a glance before laying it on the table face downwards. A girl’s portrait, I could see. There were, amongst a lot of various small objects, a bunch of flowers, a narrow white glove with many buttons, a slim packet of letters carefully tied up. Amulets of white men! Charms and talismans! Charms that keep them straight, that drive them crooked, that have the power to make a young man sigh, an old man smile. Potent things that procure dreams of joy, thoughts of regret; that soften hard hearts, and can temper a soft one to the hardness of steel. Gifts of heaven—things of earth . . . (Conrad 1978, 50)
17 These are mere little things, remains, memories whose presence marks out an absence or a loss – nothing like the supra-sensible Thing, but the possible props for a new form of symbolic commerce, like a story.
18 From this heap of broken things Hollis extracts a… gilt (not gold) sovereign, a Jubilee six pence: a portable object of exchange on the basis of the “engraved image” of the
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Queen, the image being a mere semblance for an absence. The coin is the perfect embodiment of the commodity and of the sublime object of ideology: […] the sublime material, of that other ‘indestructible and immutable body’ which persists beyond the corruption of the body physical […]. This immaterial corporeality of the ‘body within the body’ gives us a precise definition of the sublime object, […] this postulated existence of the sublime object depends on the symbolic order: the indestructible ‘body within the body’ exempted from the effects of wear and tear is always sustained by the guarantee of some symbolic authority. (Žižek 18)
19 By a typically Conradian turn of the screw, the sovereign will be displaced from its ideological background to become another type of fetishistic stop-gap object. Hollis holds up the coin and speaks in Karain’s native language: “‘This is the image of the great Queen […] The Invincible. The Pious. She commands a spirit, too, the spirit of her nation’” (Conrad 1978, 51). The engraved image which overlaps with the memory of Karain’s mother can thus become a personal symbol, even though the cynical turn of the performance does not escape the narrator: “His people will be shocked” (51).
20 Hollis suggests that for the charm to become an amulet, he has to make this gift of small value more personal. He must add something which he will really miss, among the remains of the box. Among these is a leather glove and a blue ribbon that may have belonged to a girlfriend. He cuts a piece of leather in the glove to make “a thing like those Italian peasants wear” (Conrad 1978, 52), and then sews the coin in the delicate leather which he hangs around Karain’s neck. Under the effect of the new charm on his breast, Karain seems to wake up from a dream, or a nightmare, and returns again to his stage of illusions. The former symbolic structure, it seems, has been restored.
21 Many comments have been made on this extraordinary scene of mock magic. I would suggest that it is the inexhaustible process of its interpretation which makes of “Karain” one of Conrad’s first great texts. I shall make two observations here. Does the charm simply restore a pre-capitalistic symbolic order that will defeat the forces spreading in the world in Conrad’s time? The narrator’s own scepticism as to Karain’s ability to defeat those forces is a clear answer: He seemed fearless of the future, and in his plans displayed a sagacity that was only limited by his profound ignorance of the rest of the world. We tried to enlighten him, but our attempts to make clear the irresistible nature of the forces which he desired to arrest failed to discourage his eagerness to strike a blow for his own primitive ideas. (Conrad 1978, 25)
22 The story’s coda transports the reader back to the London stage where the crowd shows the corrosive forces of reification in full swing under the power of the fetish of the time: A watery gleam of sunshine flashed from the west and went out between two long lines of walls; and then the broken confusion of roofs, the chimney-stacks, the gold letters sprawling over the fronts of houses, the sombre polish of windows, stood resigned and sullen under the falling gloom. The whole length of the street, deep as a well and narrow like a corridor, was full of a sombre and ceaseless stir. Our ears were filled by a headlong shuffle and beat of rapid footsteps and by an underlying rumour—a rumour vast, faint, pulsating, as of panting breaths, of beating hearts, of gasping voices. Innumerable eyes stared straight in front, feet moved hurriedly, blank faces flowed, arms swung. (Conrad 1978, 55)
23 It may then be that capitalism itself is a self-devouring chimera.
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24 Secondly, if the sight of the sovereign has the effect of a cure which stops Karain’s wanderings, it is clearly not because of its exchange value but of the unconscious relation with the mother figure. For Karain, the coin works as a leftover of great libidinal value, an homage to the lost object like the glove and the ribbon in Hollis’s box. But there is a disturbing element which comes from the uncertain substance of language and produces a vacillation of the story upon itself: the ambiguity of the word sovereign, referring either to a coin, the signifier of symbolic exchange, or to a monarch. It appears that both are objects of worship, producing eerie resonances between Karain’s story and Western history. The gilt (not gold) coin which energizes the exchange of raw materials becomes a potent symbol of the shift from local to global economy whose enjoyment is ruled by commodity fetishism. The West’s Other, a greedy and ferocious deity, the mysterious cause driving the crowds onwards has replaced the Idea/Ideal in the former order. Thus, Žižek observes, the sublime is no longer an object indicating the dimension of the Thing-in-itself, but […] an object which, but its very inadequacy, ‘gives body’ to the absolute negativity of the Idea […] ‘the Spirit is a bone’, ‘Wealth is the self’, ‘the State is Monarch’, […] in Hegel we are dealing with a miserable ‘little piece of the Real’ – the Spirit is the inert, dead skull; the subject’s Self is this small piece of metal that I am holding in my hand; the State as the rational organization of social life is the idiotic body of the Monarch. […] this very negativity, to attain its ‘being-for-itself’, must embody itself again in some miserable, radically contingent corporeal leftover. (Žižek 206)
25 In the case of Conrad’s story, it may well be that the sovereign “Spirit of the great nation” is nothing but a miserable six pence.
3. “A marvellous thing of darkness and glimmers”: the object raised to the dignity of the Thing
26 In the early stages of the story, the narrator wonders about the force that had driven Karain through the night to look for shelter on the schooner where he could deliver his tale, an object produced out of his struggle against “a shadow, a nothing” and out of the necessity to find a cure. It is, then, as if there were an urge to tell: The necessity within him tore at his lips. There are those who say that a native will not speak to a white man. Error. No man will speak to his master; but to a wanderer and a friend, to him who does not come to teach or to rule, to him who asks for nothing and accepts all things, words are spoken by the camp-fires, in the shared solitude of the sea, in riverside villages, in resting-places surrounded by forests – words are spoken that take no account of race or colour. One heart speaks – another one listens; and the earth, the sea, the sky, the passing wind and the stirring leaf, hear also the futile tale of the burden of life. (Conrad 1978, 32)
27 In the story’s coda, the frame narrator and one of his former mates on the schooner, Jackson, meet in London. Jackson wonders whether “the thing was so, you know. . . . Whether it really happened to him. . . . . What do you think?” (Conrad 1978, 55). The narrator then invites him to look at the London crowd, driven by their own powerful illusions.
28 Which, between the two, is more real? The thing of nothing which has produced a tale, or the crowd under their eyes? Jackson replies: “‘Yes; I see it’ […] ‘It is there; it pants, it runs, it rolls; it is strong and alive; it would smash you if you didn’t look out; but I’ll be hanged if it is yet as real to me as . . . as the other thing . . . say, Karain’s story’”
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(Conrad 1978, 56). Whether the thing happened or not does not matter since it is made up of words. For the narrator, “the memory remains” (54) and it is out of that leftover that a story will be produced. The post-diegetic story comes as the object raised to the dignity of that nothing, an homage paid to “things invisible, […] things dark and mute, that surround the loneliness of mankind” (30), in words that unmistakably echo Conrad’s artistic credo in the Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus, or Marlow’s remark about Jim’s tale in Lord Jim: it has the very “futility, often the charm, and sometimes the deep hidden truthfulness of works of art” (Conrad 1996, 168).
29 We read in the opening lines of “Karain” that “[a] strange name wakes up memories; the printed words scent the smoky atmosphere of today faintly, with the subtle and penetrating perfume as of land breezes breathing through the starlight of bygone nights” (Conrad 1978, 13). The story under our eyes is made of little shreds of language sounding against a void, which, by their metonymic power, awaken memories. Like Hollis’s charm, it is an object produced out of craftsmanship, binding together a silent voice and a blind gaze. Its charm is the effect of the signifier – the mute letters that embody the sound of Karain’s words as objects loaded with all sorts of affects: “His words sounded low, in a sad murmur as of running water; at times they rang loud like the clash of a war-gong – or trailed slowly like weary travellers – or rushed forward with the speed of fear” (32). This story is indeed a thing of great craftsmanship, the laboratory of two texts still to come under Conrad’s pen: “Heart of Darkness” (1899) and Lord Jim (1900). The craftsman’s object concerns here words that bind together sounds, letters and images. In the author’s note to Tales of Unrest, Conrad mentions the importance of “verbal suggestions” (11) that drive his writing. We have seen the ways in which the word sovereign rings in many unexpected directions, giving an eerie turn to one of the fundamental verbal suggestions in Lord Jim, “the sovereign power enthroned in a fixed set of conduct” (Conrad 1996, 123), in other words, an Idea/Ideal. Another case is the insistence of the word wound to describe the flowing thread of the torrent on Karain’s sunny hills, then the black thread through Karain’s tale, and then the “narrow ragged strip of smoky sky [that] wound about between the high roofs, extended and motionless, like a soiled streamer flying above the rout of a mob” (Conrad 1978, 56). The power of the signifier consists in the fact that it both creates a world – a visual motif – and makes it vacillate by the sheer power of the written word:7 the wound – another word for trauma – in the fabric reveals the void behind. It will become the dark thread woven in the Conradian narrative, driven by the logic of the aleatory and the accidental inherent in human languages and lives.
30 In the Author’s Note to Tales of Unrest, Conrad compares “Karain” with the story’s prototype, “The Lagoon”. The motif of “Karain” is almost identical with “The Lagoon”, he observes, but with a little something more: reading “Karain” after many years “produced on me the effect of something seen through a pair of glasses from a rather advantageous position” (Conrad 1978, 11). It is as if he had produced a frame out of which to look at the “primitive” tale in “The Lagoon”. The framing device is no other than a ship, on board of which the telling takes place through the mouth of a frame narrator: the confidant drawn towards an enigmatic figure who seems to think that someone can perhaps understand him, and yet confronted with the impossibility to convey the effect of the story. In other words, he is the predecessor of Marlow in “Heart of Darkness” and Lord Jim. The frame here will contain a visual object made of broken fragments and phrases, a narrative in six sections written in heterogeneous styles – Flaubertian scenic panorama, first-person subjective narration, distanced
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narrative –, some parts of it being presumably translated from a remote, possibly lost language. The whole is made even more complex by the numerous analepses and prolepses that profoundly disturb the chronological line. Or, to take up one of Conrad’s most powerful metaphors in Lord Jim, the story as object has the shape of a broken kaleidoscope.
31 One night Karain steps off from his stage and comes to talk with the white men. The narrator observes: “sounds ceased, men slept, forms vanished – and the reality of the universe alone remained – a marvellous thing of darkness and glimmers” (Conrad 1978, 18). It is to this reality that Conrad’s writing pays homage, producing an object crafted out of shreds of the past, raised to the dignity of the thing itself – a thing of nothing: a sublime object.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Conrad, Joseph, “Karain”, Tales of Unrest (1898), London: Penguin Books, 1978.
Conrad, Joseph, Lord Jim (1900), ed. Tom Moser, Norton Critical Edition, 1996.
Conrad, Joseph, The Nigger of the Narcissus (1895), ed. Robert Kimbrough, New York: Norton, 1969.
Hampson, Robert, Conrad’s Secrets, Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Kay, Sarah, Slavoj Zižek: A Critical Introduction, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003.
Said, Edward. “Conrad: the Presentation of Narrative”, in The World, the Text, the Critic, London: Faber, 1984, 90-100.
Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso, 1999.
NOTES
1. “[…] when we determine the Thing as a transcendent surplus beyond what can be represented, we determine it on the basis of the field of representation, starting from it, within its horizon, as its negative limit […]” (Žižek 205). 2. “An object aligned with this point is said to be raised ‘to the dignity of the Thing’. Rather like an eclipse, when a heavenly body becomes positioned between us and the sun, and appears surrounded by an aura of light so intense that we could never look directly at it, an object located in this way between us and the unsymbolizable Thing becomes as though irradiated by the drive, bathed in jouissance, transfigured, spiritualized and resplendent. Objects positioned in this way are referred to as ‘sublime’. This term was elaborated by Lacan in a way that attaches the psychoanalytical concept of sublimation (in which we renounce the immediate satisfaction of a drive in favour of some other reward) to Kant’s concept of the sublime (which contrasts its awesome, uplifting splendours with the less austere charms of the beautiful” (Kay 54). 3. “The appearance implies that there is something behind it which appears through it; it conceals a truth and by the same gesture gives a foreboding thereof; it simultaneously hides and reveals the essence behind its curtain. But what is hidden behind the phenomenal appearance?
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Precisely the fact that there is a nothing to hide. What is concealed is that the very act of concealing conceals nothing” (Zižek193). 4. “Kant still presupposes that the Thing in itself exists as something positively given beyond the field of representation […]. Hegel’s position is, in contrast, that there is nothing beyond phenomenality, beyond the field of representation. The experience of radical negativity, of the radical inadequacy of all phenomena to the Idea, the experience of the radical fissure between the two – this experience is already Idea itself as ‘pure’, radical negativity […] the Thing-in-itself – for this Thing-in-itself is nothing but this radical negativity” (Žižek 205, original emphasis). 5. “The place of fetishism has shifted from inter-subjective relations to relations ‘between things’: the crucial social relations, those of production, are no longer immediately transparent in the form of the interpersonal relations of domination and servitude (of the Lord and his serfs, and so on); they disguise themselves – to use Marx’s accurate formula – ‘under the shape of social relations between things, between the products of labour’” (Zižek 205). 6. “[…] the famous MacGuffin, the Hitchcockian object, the pure pretext whose sole role is to set the story in motion but which is in itself ‘nothing at all’. […] Two men are sitting in a train; one of them asks: ‘What’s that package up there in the luggage rack?’ ‘Oh, that’s a MacGuffin.’ ‘What’s a MacGuffin?’ ‘Well, it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ ‘Well, then, that’s not a MacGuffin’. […] the MacGuffin is the purest case of what Lacan calls objet petit a: a pure void that functions as the object-cause of desire […] a cause which in itself does not exist – which is present only in a series of effects, but always in a distorted, displaced way” (Zižek 163). 7. According to Conrad’s statement in the Preface to the Nigger of the Narcissus: “Fiction – if it at all aspires to be art – appeals to temperament. […] the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses, if its high desire is to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions” (Conrad 1969, 146).
ABSTRACTS
Published in Tales of Unrest, “Karain” is one of Conrad’s most enigmatic Malay stories. It continues to draw critical attention because of the ambivalent status of an object, a gilded (not gold) sovereign, offered by a group of sailors to a native chief, Karain, in a curious scene of redemption. Obviously the shining sovereign does not have the same value for the sailors and for Karain, who sees it as an amulet, a “charm”, an image of the Great Queen: almost a fetish that will fill the gaps of his existence. The gilded sovereign has two sides: one which is attractive to the imagination and one which is commonplace – it was not worth much in the Victorian era. In structural terms, the coin materializes the two sides of the object of desire – both as an object of fascination, and as a mere nothing. If we refer to the Lacanian notion of the sublime as “an object raised to the dignity of the Thing”, what appears is the deeply ironic value of such an ideological object. Back in London, the frame narrator presents Karain’s remote story as “this Thing”: as a sublime object raised to the dignity of the Thing. From the reader’s point of view, the sovereign/ story with its charm and rich ambivalence both covers and shows the void, the “nothing” against which the modern artist creates with his/her own object: here, the written word.
Paru dans Tales of Unrest, « Karain » est l’une des nouvelles indonésiennes les plus énigmatiques de Conrad, en raison du statut ambivalent d’un objet : une pièce de monnaie, un souverain doré
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offert par un groupe de marins à un chef local, au cours d’une curieuse scène de rédemption. Le souverain n’a clairement pas le même statut pour les marins que pour Karain, qui le prend pour une amulette, un « charme », l’image même de la Grande Reine : un fétiche dont la présence viendra combler les manques de son existence. L’histoire dramatise les deux versants de l’objet du désir : l’un, brillant, qui suscite l’imagination, et l’autre, commun : un presque rien – le souverain n’a guère de valeur monétaire à l’époque victorienne. L’histoire de Karain met en évidence la valeur profondément ironique de cet objet en termes idéologiques. Mais si l’on se réfère à la notion lacanienne du sublime comme « un objet élevé à la dignité de la Chose », elle nous offre aussi une précieuse plus-value. De retour à Londres, le narrateur présente l’histoire lointaine de Karain comme « cette Chose » : comme un objet précisément élevé à la dignité de la Chose. La pièce/l’histoire avec son « charme » et ses riches équivoques révèle et cache simultanément le rien, le vide contre lequel l’écrivain moderne s’appuie pour créer à partir de son objet qui n’est autre que le mot écrit, la lettre.
INDEX oeuvrecitee Karain (J.Conrad), Lord Jim (J.Conrad), Heart of Darkness (J.Conrad) Keywords: Conrad (Joseph), fetish, object, desire, Thing, sublime Mots-clés: Conrad (Joseph), fétiche, objet, désir, Chose, sublime
AUTHOR
JOSIANE PACCAUD Josiane Paccaud is Professor Emeritus of Modernist literature and Literary Theory at Université Lumière-Lyon 2 (France). She has a special interest in the connexions between literature and psychoanalysis. She has published extensively on Modernist authors and in psychoanalytical journals, in France and abroad. Her latest publications include the translation of Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts for the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris/ Gallimard, 2012), a monograph on Joseph Conrad for Les Éditions de l’Herne (Paris, 2014), and a collection of essays on Malcolm Lowry (La Fureur et la grâce. Lectures de Malcolm Lowry, Paris/ Garnier Classiques, 2017).
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The Ring in The Mayor of Casterbridge: Gaze and Voice as Surplus Objects L’anneau dans The Mayor of Casterbridge de Thomas Hardy : le regard et la voix comme objets en trop.
Annie Ramel
1 The “ring” is a key-signifier in The Mayor of Casterbridge, where it forms a paradigmatic chain, begun in the wife-sale scene (chapter one) when Susan Henchard flings across the booth the wedding-ring that had once sealed her matrimonial “alliance” (a wedding-ring, in French) with her husband. The next morning, when Henchard awakes from his drunken sleep, he discovers a little shining object amidst various “odds and ends” dotting the grassy floor of the tent. He recognizes his wife’s ring, and remembers the events of the previous evening. The Ring, the Roman amphitheatre of Casterbridge, is the setting of a scene where Susan and Henchard meet again and renew their “alliance”, since Henchard, who has now become the powerful Mayor of Casterbrige, offers to (re)marry Susan in an attempt to mend matters. A secret meeting with Lucetta takes place there much later; the Ring is also the place from which Henchard spies on Elizabeth-Jane and Farfrae. Part of the same series is the “stout copper ring”, welded on to the nose of the bull that attacks Lucetta and Elizabeth-Jane (Hardy 1987, 205), and the ring formed by the cups “round the margin of the great sixteen-legged oak table” at the Three Mariners (231) where Henchard ends his long term of abstinence from drink. The last term of the series is Henchard’s return to the very spot where the tent had stood: “Here we went in, and in we sat down. I faced this way. Then I drank and committed my crime. It must have been just on that very pixy-ring that she was standing when she said her last words to me before going off with him” (319).
2 Much critical attention has been given to this paradigm by various commentators, including myself, but my intention in this article is to focus on the ring as object. Objects in The Mayor of Casterbridge are prominent from the very first pages of the book.
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Henchard as he walks along with his wife “carrying a child” is described with great minutia, with particular insistence on his clothes and on the basket that he carries: He wore a short jacket of brown corduroy, newer than the remainder of his suit, which was a fustian waistcoat with white horn buttons, breeches of the same, tanned leggings, and a straw hat overlaid with black glazed canvas. At his back he carried by a looped strap a rush basket, from which protruded at one end the crutch of a hay-knife, a wimble for hay-bonds being also visible in the aperture” (Hardy 1987, 5) 1.
3 So far, the objects described only connote a “skilled countryman”, a man in possession of objects that ought to ensure him a place on the labour market, and in society. The only slightly troubling detail is the verb “to carry”, used both for the baby carried by the young woman and for Henchard’s rush basket containing his tools. The parallel between a human being as object and Henchard’s tools will be made explicit a few pages further with Henchard’s agreement to part from his wife: “She shall take the girl if she wants to, and go her ways. I’ll take my tools and go my way” (Hardy 1987, 12). The sale of a wife like a mare on a fair is about to take place.
4 Objects are in abundance in the small capitalistic world of Casterbridge, where Henchard and Farfrae prosper by trading corn and hay: articles for sale displayed in shop-windows (Hardy 1987, 31) or on trestles and boxes (61), ornaments and nice personal possessions enjoyed by Elizabeth-Jane when she finds herself in a position of affluence (87), the heavy and ornate furniture filling Henchard’s dining-room “to profusion” (67), the food heaped by Henchard on Farfrae’s plate “to a prodigal fulness” (65), etc. The society of Casterbridge anticipates our modern consumer society – where Lucetta can order two dresses from London just as one would now order them from Amazon!2 But affluence is the privilege of the few, and though some people may enjoy “roaring dinners”, others “must needs to be put to for want of a wholesome crust” (32), while the poorer folks go hungry, “what with hard winters, and so many mouths to fill, and Goda’mighty sending his little taties so terribly small to fill’em with” (53).
5 But something is about to disturb this seemingly sturdy structure. The disruption is brought about, not by want, not by a lack of objects, but by a surplus object, an object which stands out as an anomaly, catching the eye as one too many in the well-ordered cosmos of symbolic reality. In the very first chapter, Henchard and Susan enter the tent selling furmity rather than the one selling ale and cider, but “there was more in that tent than met a cursory glance” (Hardy 1987, 9). That something more is the rum with which Mrs Goodenough slily laces Henchard’s furmity – in Lacanian terms, I would say that Henchard’s transgression takes him beyond the pleasure principle, into the realm of jouissance. From now on Henchard’s reality is going to be encumbered by objects that are out of place, and whose illicit, untimely, or uncanny intrusion will disrupt reality and cause disaster. From “rum” we quickly move to “ring” (a ring which is not part of social constructs but lies among “odds and ends”). Then the paradigm of surplus objects is continued throughout the novel, with for instance the four ounce-pennies placed on Susan’s dead eyes, then buried in the garden, but later dug out by Christopher Coney (121) – the question being whether objects belonging to death should rightly be allowed to encroach upon life. The back door with the leering mask at High Place Hall (141-142) is also typical, for it seems to serve no particular purpose, the occupant of the house (Lucetta) being unaware of its presence – or so she says (145).3
6 Tragedy is triggered by the presence of such objects, letters in particular: Susan’s letter, “not to be opened till Elizabeth-Jane’s wedding-day” (Hardy 1987, 119), yet not
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properly sealed and opened prematurely, or Lucetta’s letters to Henchard. Lucetta’s wish is to have them privately destroyed, so she asks Henchard to hand them back to her.4 But she fails to come to the rendez-vous, Henchard keeps the letters, later reads them out to Farfrae (without revealing who had written them), then promises to return them to Lucetta. But he entrusts the wrong man with the mission of forwarding them to the right person, so that the letters fall into malevolent hands, and their contents are disclosed to the whole town. Disposing of them has proved impossible. The scandal that ensues involves two more surplus objects: the effigies carried around in the “skimmity-ride”, Lucetta’s effigy causing her death, but Henchard’s floating effigy (“a something floating in the circular pool”, 297) saving him from drowning – so he believes (298-299). During the skimmity-ride, something rather strange happens: the two constables, frightened by the crowd, push their “Gover’ment staves” up a water- pipe so as not to be noticed as law officers. The staves, then, which symbolize the Law, are surplus objects that must be hidden! Questioned by a prominent burgess about the skimmity-ride, Jopp replies that he has seen and heard nothing, while hiding in his great-coat pocket “a pair of kitchen tongs and a cow’s horn, thrust up under his waistcoat” (281). At Peter’s Finger, the landlady conceals a tambourine in the oven. The series of surplus objects ends with the goldfinch in its cage, which Henchard intended as a wedding-gift to Elizabeth-Jane but which he forgets when he departs suddenly, leaving the poor little songster to starve to death. Such an “object” cannot be given as a present: it cannot find a place in reality, it can only be in excess of it.
7 The question which arises then concerns the law: is it only the social law which is broken by the presence of those disruptive objects, or is it something far more fundamental? I will argue that such intrusions always involve eye-sight or voice, and that the “something more” that meets the eye or the ear is the object-gaze and/or the object-voice. As I have already explained elsewhere (Ramel 2018), the object-gaze is the point from which the Other sees me, but it is not a permanent fixture, it may be briefly glimpsed when the light “focuses on a luminous spot which may figure the gaze, which incarnates for a moment the all-seeing gaze of the big Other” (Miller 103). Should that object-gaze be included in reality, our experience of reality then would lose its consistency, for “something must be excluded, ‘primordially repressed’” (Žižek 1996, 91) if we are to have normal access to reality. The same applies to the object-voice5 (the voice of the Other), which has to be “extracted” from our reality. Here, in Hardy’s novel, tragedy is caused by the gaze and the voice of the Other being included in the protagonists’ experience of reality: is not Lucetta killed by the Other prying into her past, by the sound and the fury of the vox populi?
8 I will start with the gaze qua object. Something goes wrong with the gaze right from the first chapter, with Henchard watching the furmity-woman’s proceedings “from the corner of his eye”. Nothing seems amiss in the following chapters (whose focus is mostly on Elizabeth-Jane looking through windows). But then, all of a sudden, an object comes in the way, it is a luminous spot which catches Farfrae’s attention, “something white fluttering in the morning gloom”: “‘For maircy’s sake, what object’s this?’ said Farfrae” (Hardy 1987, 99, my emphasis). That “something white” is soon identified as the part of Abel Whittle’s white shirt showing below his waiscoat – for Henchard has ordered Whittle to go to work half-naked because he has overslept and is late again. Whittle says that he “cannot outlive the disgrace”, that he will kill himself afterwards. Farfrae orders him to go back home and get dressed, in defiance of Henchard’s command (99-100). That seemingly insignificant episode is the little seed that will “lift
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the foundation” (97) of the friendship between Henchard and Farfrae. Farfrae becomes the most admired man in Casterbrige, while Henchard’s public image is in decline. Henchard is made gloomy by public talk about him: “I have been hearing things that vexed me”, he says (102). Pained by hearing and seeing (or being seen), Henchard nurtures a sense of a rivalry between himself and Farfrae.
9 The next crucial episode is the day of public rejoicing, when Henchard’s entertainment is a dismal failure because of the rain, while Farfrae’s “pavilion” under canvas is a tremendous success. Again Henchard is hurt by remarks that he hears, also by the frantic music that the band is playing and to which the people are dancing (“a tune of a busy, vaulting-leaping sort”; Hardy 1987, 108) – the pain being the sharper as he sees Elizabeth-Jane dancing with Farfrae. A little detail catches his eye: “the pattern of the shining little nails in the soles of his boots […] familiar to the eyes of every bystander” (108). The object-gaze, the gaze of the Other, is there, transiently figured by those shining nails. But at this stage it is a mere threat, a little seed that will grow into something bigger and more disquieting. The scene causes Henchard to dismiss Farfrae, who goes his own way and sets up on his own account. In the corn-market room, where the large farmers and corn-merchants have their names painted on their stalls, there appears a new name, “Farfrae”, “in staring red letters” (116, my emphasis). The ambiguity of the verb “to stare” in English, which means both “to be unpleasantly prominent” and “to look fixedly” (COD), makes it plain that here the gaze of the Other is reaching Henchard – exactly like the “staring vermilion words” in Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Hardy 1991, 85)6.
10 The skimmity-ride, which will prove fatal to Lucetta, is a climax in the growth of the destructive power of the gaze qua object. A few signs act as fore-runners of the disaster. When Lucetta goes to meet Henchard at the Ring, she veils herself, “to avoid the contingency of being recognized”, but the veil is to no avail, for the Other’s gaze is there, only waiting to destroy her: “The sun was resting on the hill like a drop of blood on an eyelid” (Hardy 1987, 249). One thinks of Boldwood staring at the Valentine card, whose red seal becomes “as a blot of blood on the retina of his eye” (Hardy 1986, 80). On the morning of the visit of the Royal Personage, there is “permanence” in the glow of the sun, “a full-faced sun confronting early window-gazers eastward” (Hardy 1987, 263). There is no closing the eyelid of the Other. When Henchard has handed to Jopp the bundle of letters that he wishes him to deliver at Mrs Farfrae’s, something catches his eye: “Jopp sat on till his eyes were attracted by the shadow of the candle-snuff on the wall, and looking at the original he found that it had formed itself into a head like a red-hot cauliflower. Henchard’s packet next met his gaze” (253). The packet meeting Jopp’s gaze reminds him of “something of the nature of wooing” between Henchard and Mrs Farfrae, and thus begins the process that will eventually lead to Jopp opening the bundle of letters at Peter’s Finger and disclosing its contents. Disruption is caused by a seemingly insignificant object – a figure of the gaze qua object.
11 And then the thing happens, the terrible thing that Lucetta sees and hears, and which kills her. It involves both gaze and voice: first Lucetta is disturbed by “a hubbub in the distance”, which increases till it becomes a “din” (Hardy 1987, 277). Then she hears the voice of two maid-servants speaking to each other from upper windows in the street, one of them seeing the scene and reporting to the other. From the description Lucetta infers that it is an effigy of herself, and of Henchard, which the procession is carrying on a donkey, and that her past is being exposed to the public eye. She knows that she
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has been reached by the gaze of the Other. Elizabeth-Jane rushes into the room and tries to close the shutters and the window (“‘Let us shut it out,’ coaxed Elizabeth-Jane”, 278), but to no avail: there is no way in which the voice can be hushed, or the “scandal” kept out of sight. Something in both sight and sound is irresistible: “Let it be – hush!” (278), “I will see it” (279), are Lucetta’s peremptory words to stop Elizabeth-Jane. Lucetta’s face grows rigid, as though she were petrified by a Medusean gaze. The image of the scandalous pair will be seen by Farfrae, she believes, and seeing has a lethal power: “He will see it, won’t he? Donald will see it. He is just coming home – and it will break his heart – he will never love me any more – and oh, it will kill me – kill me” (278). The scene reaches a climax when the procession comes closer and Lucetta’s eyes are “straight upon the spectacle of the uncanny revel”, while “the numerous lights around the two effigies [throw] them up into lurid distinctness” (279). Seeing herself as seen by the Other actually kills Lucetta: she has a “fit” (279-280), an “epileptic seizure” (in the narrator’s words, 279), and she dies of it.
12 Lucetta’s position (under the gaze of a malevolent Other) has similarities with what a paranoiac might fancy and, characteristically, it mixes voice and gaze, or more precisely it makes the gaze audible:7 the effigy – the surplus object – is the object-gaze staring at Lucetta, and at the same time it is a voice that cannot be hushed. Lucetta cannot avoid seeing herself being seen, nor can she silence the deafening voice of the Other. That voice heard through a window (while one normally sees through a window), which causes Lucetta’s attention to be “riveted to the matter” (Hardy 1987, 277), or rivetted to “it”, the Thing,8 is reminiscent of an earlier scene, when Susan first hears “tones caught from the inn-window which strangely rivet[ed] her attention” (34). It is as though the gaze were made audible.
13 The paradigm of voice – an intrusive, compelling, irresistible voice – is sustained all along the novel. At the beginning, it is the voice of Henchard, often characterized as a “roar”: “‘why didn’t she know better, than bring me into this disgrace!’ he roared out” (Hardy 1987, 19). Then, once he has become “the masterful, coercive mayor of the town” (83) who makes Susan feel “overpowered” (35), his voice sounds like that of some kind of divine master, comparable to the Freudian father of the primitive horde, an “uncastrated” father whose enjoyment is supposed to be boundless.9 The inhabitants speak of the “roaring dinners” enjoyed by the rich, who “blare their trumpets and thump their drums” (32). Henchard’s “commanding voice” (34) is always a “roar”, whether he addresses Abel Whittle (98), or the choir-members (233) to compel them to sing a psalm that they object to. That “thunderous” voice (168) which, like “Yahweh’s voice” (Lacan 2004, 281-295), commands total compliance, is similar to the sound of shofar in the Jewish ritual (287), “a prolonged sound reminiscent of a bull roaring” (Dolar 2006, 53; Lacan 2004, 289) by which the community asserts its submission to the Law – interestingly, Henchard is compared to a bull (“a bull breaking fence”; Hardy 1987, 269), as well as to a lion (“a netted lion”, 303, a “fangless lion”, 309). “What object is this?” asks Lacan. “The object called the voice” he replies (Lacan 2004, 290, my translation).
14 But what the shofar makes us hear is the roar of a “stunned bull”,10 the cry of the dying primal father of the primitive horde, and the function of that voice, “apart from presentifying God, is also to remind God that he is dead, in case he had forgotten” (Dolar 1996, 26). In The Mayor of Casterbridge too, the omnipotent Father’s voice is broken: as the tale unfolds, the “bull-roarer” loses his power, his voice becomes
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“softened” (Hardy 1987, 234), “subdued” (250), until it dwindles into pure silence: the “murder of the Father” takes place, but in tragedy the sacrifice is not symbolic, it is real. The “roar” then becomes what Henchard hears, what he is subjected to. It all begins with the description of the Ring (chapter XI): a silent place where a person sitting with a book or dozing might suddenly hear the “roar” of the excited voices of Roman soldiers watching a gladiatorial combat (71-72). The bank of the river is the place to which Henchard resorts when he is in a mournful mood, and there he can hear the water roaring down a back-hatch “like the voice of desolation” (127), or the “terrific roar” of a cascade (221), or he fancies he can catch “the tune of the roaring weir”, like the mob gathering there in the old days to watch an execution (127). The series aptly ends with the “uproar” of the skimmity-ride, the “roars of sarcastic laughter” which go off “in ripples” immediately after Lucetta’s fall (279). The terrible “roar” is now the indomitable voice of a malevolent Other.
15 The “roar” is often associated with the sound of trumpets (Hardy 1987, 32, 244, 296) and horns – a fact not altogether surprising, for the voice of Yahweh inevitably calls to mind the trumpets of the Last Judgement (Revelation, I, 10). But another signifier plays a major part in the novel: the word “ring”. The ringing of bells always heralds the misfortunes that befall Henchard: the bells are ringing for the wedding of Lucetta and Farfrae (214, 216); there is “a great ringing of bells” (243) in Casterbridge to celebrate Farfrae’s election as Mayor (“the bell-ringing, and the band-playing loud as Tamerlane’s trumpet, goaded the downfallen Henchard indescribably”, 244). It is as though the bells persecuted Henchard, for they sound like the voice of a cruel Other: “The ring of the bell spoke to him like the voice of a familiar drudge who had been bribed to foresake him” (244). For the citizens of Casterbridge watching the London highway on the day of the Royal visit, “the ringing of bells” (265) is a social ritual, but for Henchard it is the voice of the Other addressing him. A voice which cannot be silenced, like the uproar raised by the crowd in the skimmity-ride, which Elizabeth- Jane cannot shut out. Such a voice, “the intractable voice of the Other that impose[s] itself upon the subject” (Dolar 1996, 14) is the object-voice.
16 But as the novel draws to a close, the “revelry” (Hardy 1987, 325) comes to an end: the bells ringing for Elizabeth-Jane and Farfrae’s wedding become “the soft pealing of the Casterbridge bells” (323, my emphasis). We read about the hiring of the town band for the celebration (323), Henchard hears from a distance the voice of Farfrae singing, and then the rest is silence: no more music is heard, the detailed description of the dance- scene focuses not on sound but on the gyrations of the dancers as seen by Henchard, on the “saltatory intentness” (326) of both Farfrae and Newson. Nothing is said about the band, its instruments, the sound produced. It is as though the guests were dancing in silence, in typical Hardyan fashion (see Ramel 136-137). Absolute silence is reached with Henchard’s failure to speak: “Henchard’s lips half-parted, to begin an explanation; but he shut them up like a vice, and uttered not a sound” (Hardy 1987, 327). His voice will be heard no more, neither will the voice of “the poor little songster” (329) starved to death in its cage,11 nor the persecuting voice of the Other. Henchard’s silent voice is finally heard in the written text of his will, which requires (among other things) that “no sexton be asked to toll the bell”, and that “Elizabeth-Jane be not told” of Henchard’s death (333). That Elizabeth-Jane should not be told, and that the bells should not be tolled, is quite ironical, for indeed we as readers have been told at length about the story, as we are about to close the book.
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17 So the climax reached by the story is absolute silence, which may be understood as the final resolution of a tragic plot where a compelling voice has played such a crucial role. Yet, at the same time, the “absolute, deadly silence, supreme fascination and horror” (Poizat 92) is precisely what makes audible the inaudible object-voice. That point is made by Žizek: The voice qua object is precisely what is ‘stuck in the throat’, what cannot burst out, unchain itself and thus enter the dimension of subjectivity […]: if the exemplary case of the gaze qua object is a blind man’s eyes, i.e. eyes which do not see […], then the exemplary case of the voice qua object is a voice which remains silent, i.e., which we do not hear.12 (Žižek 2001, 117)
18 Giving presence to the vocal object, such is, paradoxically, the effect of silence. The surplus object (voice in the present case) turns into a void, the void of The Thing, i.e. absolute nothingness – “the nothing”, le rien, which is another object listed by Lacan. Another paradox is that of the written text, which is but silence yet allows us to be told a story. As my colleague Claude Maisonnat has argued in his book on Conrad and voice, “the textual voice can be considered as a qualified offshoot” of the Lacanian object- voice (Maisonnat 51), its “literary by-product”, in that it is “silent yet active” (53).
19 But the very essence of the textual voice is, according to Maisonnat, that it “accommodates” jouissance, leaving us to enjoy only fragments of a massive and destructive enjoyment: Now, the textual voice is not the literary equivalent of the object-voice proper, it is only one of its positive avatars, the agency that assuages it by metabolizing the affects associated with it, so that within the subject’s linguistic production an inner voice challenges it, producing the “unheard melodies”13 which are the sweetest to Keats’s ears. The paradox, and the miracle of the textual voice, in so far as it is the hallmark of all great writing, is that what cannot be represented – the voice as object – returns with the signifying chain and is perceptible to the discriminating reader short of being heard. This immaterial voice brings to the text what is known as surplus jouissance and does not only make for the literary quality of the work but ensures its textual appeal which explains why generations of readers will continue to enjoy reading it. (Maisonnat 52)
20 Thus, in Hardy’s text, the unbearable “ring” that so oppresses Henchard turns into a poetic “ring” which resonates silently “in the void of creation” (Maisonnat 58). To the paradigmatic chain formed by the repetition of the noun “ring” should be added the “ear-rings” (Hardy 1987, 260) swinging from the ears of the landlady of Peter’s Finger – one of the perpetrators of the skimmity-ride who keeps a tambourine hidden in her oven. Those “ear-rings” work as a “hear-ring”: they portend the awful din that will soon reverberate in Casterbridge, but they are part of an “unheard melody”, the poetic ring whose silent resonance makes Hardy’s text so pleasant to read. Indeed other “hear-rings” are overheard all along the text, finding their way into the innermost reaches of the narrative. They are often concealed in words referring to an imperious and cruel voice, such as “hearing things” (102), “the roaring weir” (127), “the nearing of the noise and laughter” (278), “hearing the din of cleavers, tongs, tambourines, […]” (280). A remarkable example of Hardy’s poetics is the following one: To the east of Casterbridge lay moors and meadows through which much water flowed. The wanderer in this direction, who should stand still for a few moments on a quiet night, might hear singular symphonies from these waters, as from a lampless orchestra, all playing in their sundry tones from near and far parts of the moor. At a hole in a rotten weir they executed a recitative […]. The spot at which
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their instrumentation rose loudest was a place called Ten Hatches, whence during high springs there proceeded a very fugue of sounds. (Hardy 1987, 296) 21 The recurrence of the dipthong /ɪə/ (in “hear”, “near”, “weir”) sounds like an invitation14 to hear the “ring” which is so loud “during high springs”, but it is not the voice of a commanding Other imposed upon the reader – for the reader is free to listen or not. He may, or he may not, lend his voice to the poetic “ring” of the text.
22 In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the “staring vermilion words” which face Tess “shout themselves out, and make the atmosphere ring” (Hardy 1991, 85, my emphasis). The gaze (“stare”) turns into a voice, and the confusion of gaze and voice is made explicit by the paranomasis leading from “staring” to “ring”. In The Mayor of Casterbridge too, “ring” is heard in “staring” (the “staring new letters”, Hardy 1987, 116), “leering” (“the leering mask”, 142), “louring” (“looking at her with a louring invidiousness”, 132). Lucetta hears with her eyes like Tess, but we readers find a haven in the “rich resting- place of silence” (Rancière 32) afforded by the text, which assuages both gaze and voice while retaining in its meshes small particles of an untractable jouissance. After all, Jopp speaks some truth when, asked by Mr Grower whether he has heard “a gang of fellows making a devil of a noise”, he answers: “Now I’ve noticed, come to think o’it, that the wind in the Walk trees makes a peculiar poetical-like murmur to-night” (281). Jopp (and Hardy) knew all about the capacity of the textual voice to accommodate jouissance! 15
23 The metatextual dimension of Hardy’s narrative is perceptible in several passages. Perhaps Henchard’s silent will, written by himself on a piece of paper (even though “the pen and all its relations” are “awkward tools in his hands”; Hardy 1987, 253), could be seen as opening the “rich resting-place of silence” into which the reader is invited. The “poor little songster”, “shrouded in newspaper” (329), is an even better figure of the silent textual voice: what better metaphor could be found for the “unheard melody” of a literary text than this song stifled by the “dry and papery”16 matter enveloping its cage? A voice striving hard at producing a tune, and yet irrevocably silent, like the letters printed on a page – whether the page is that of a newspaper or that of a novel? Another metatextual element is Elizabeth-Jane as a figure of the writer. 17 She too has the capacity to hear through windows, that is to say to hear with her eyes – but as a flesh-and-blood character she also gazes through windows, she allows her desires to wander freely, and so her fate is not tragic. She is also a great reader of “books and looks” (Gaspari 7), as well as someone who has great skill in netting.18 She has a know-how which enables her to cope with holes (she fits them into nets and does not allow herself to be engulfed in a tragic void). A writer too knows how to catch little fragments of the Real in the meshes of his texts/textiles, thus containing (in both senses of the word) a jouissance that might otherwise turn lethal. Through the process of écriture, the abyss opened by the intrusion of the surplus object (the object-gaze and /or the object-voice) is turned into a “plus-de-jouir” (“surplus enjoyment”).19 How to be satisfied with minute particles of enjoyment, that is what the final pages are about, as they dwell on a secret acquired by Elizabeth-Jane: “[…] the secret (as she had once learnt it) of making limited opportunities endurable; which she deemed to consist in the cunning enlargement by a species of microcospic treatment, of those minute forms of satisfaction that offer themselves to everybody not in positive pain” (Hardy 1987, 334).
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Braunstein, Nestor, La Jouissance, un concept lacanien, Paris : Point Hors Ligne, 1992.
Dolar, Mladen, “The Object Voice”, in Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, eds. S. Žižek and R. Salecl, Durham: Duke UP, 1996, 7-31.
Dolar, Mladen, A Voice and Nothing More, Cambridge [Mass.]: M.I.T. Press, 2006.
Gaspari, Fabienne, “Their glances met”: “Looks and Desire in The Mayor of Casterbridge”, FATHOM [online] 5 (2018),
Hardy, Thomas, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), ed. Robert C. Schweik, New York & London: W.W. Norton, 1986.
Hardy, Thomas, The Return of the Native (1878), Oxford & New York: World’s Classics, 1990.
Hardy, Thomas, The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Oxford & New York: World’s Classics, 1987.
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Oxford & New York: World’s Classics, 1991.
Lacan, Jacques, Le Séminaire XXII, RSI, 8 April 1975, Ornicar? Revue du Champ freudien 5 (1975-1976): 37-46.
Lacan, Jacques, Le Séminaire X, “L’angoisse”, Paris : Seuil, 2004.
Lacan, Jacques, Le Séminaire XVI, “D’un Autre à l’autre”, Paris : Seuil, 2006.
Maisonnat, Claude, Joseph Conrad and the Voicing of Textuality, Lublin: Maria Curie-Skolodowska UP, 2017.
Miller, Jacques-Alain, “L’image du corps en psychanalyse”, Notre sujet supposé savoir, La Cause freudienne 68 (2008): 94-104.
Poizat, Michel, L’Opéra ou le cri de l’ange (1986), Paris : Métailié, 2001.
Poizat, Michel, The Angel’s Cry, Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Opera, transl. Arthur Denner, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992.
Ramel, Annie, The Madder Stain, A Psychoanalytic Reading of Thomas Hardy, Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2015.
Ramel, Annie, “Hardy et l’arithmétique”, FATHOM [online] 4 (2016),
Ramel, Annie, “The Medusan Eye in Thomas Hardy”, eds. Isabelle Gadoin et Annie Ramel, “Desire and the Expressive Eye”, FATHOM n°5 (2018),
Rancière, Jacques, La Parole muette, Paris : Hachette, 1998.
Showalter, Elaine, “The Unmanning of the Mayor of Casterbridge”, in Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, ed. Harold Bloom, New York & Philadelphia: Chelsea House, Modern Critical Interpretations, 1987, 53-68.
Žizek, Slavoj, “‘I hear you with my eyes’; or, The Invisible Master”, in Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, eds. Slavoj Žižek & Renata Salecl, Durham & London: Duke UP, 1996, 90-126.
Žizek, Slavoj, Enjoy your Symptom, New York & London: Routledge, 2001.
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NOTES
1. When he leaves Casterbridge near the end of the novel, he buys a new tool-basket to carry “his old hay-knife and wimble”, and sets himself up in “fresh leggings, kneenaps and corduroys”, to go back to “the working clothes of his young manhood” (Hardy 1987, 312). 2. In that society the key-word is “value”, applied not only to objects, but also to human beings: Farfrae would be “invaluable” to Henchard (Hardy 1987, 50), who at the end of the novel values himself very little (317, 327). 3. One may also mention the two empty glasses on the table at Henchard’s right hand (the third glass being filled with water; Hardy 1987, 34), which are but the inverted image of the “something more” that had led to his inebriation. Or Henchard’s waggon loaded with hay which gets entangled with Farfrae’s in a thoroughfare and causes a blockage (191). 4. “[…] that no writings of mine, or trifling articles belonging to me, should be left in your possession through neglect or forgetfulness. […] Can you meet me with the letters and other trifles?” (Hardy 1987, 118). 5. In his seminar on anxiety (“L’angoisse”), Lacan added two objects, the object-gaze and the object-voice, to the “partial objects” listed by Freud (the breast, the faeces, the penis...). For information on the Lacanian “object-voice”, see Dolar 1996 or Dolar 2006; also L’Opéra ou le cri de l’ange by Michel Poizat, in its original French version (2001, 1rst ed. 1986) or in a translation (1992) – in particular the chapter entitled “L’objet-voix” (Poizat 2001, 141-149). 6. Here Henchard enters tragedy, but worse is still to come: later in the story, his name will be obliterated and replaced by Farfrae’s (“a smear of decisive lead-coloured paint had been laid on to obliterate Henchard’s name, though its letters dimly loomed through like ships in a fog. Over these, in fresh white, spread the name of Farfrae”, Hardy 1987, 221). The object-gaze is such a threat that the vacant eyes of the dead Susan have to be hidden from sight by four heavy ounce- pennies, which keep the eye-lids closed. The mask over Lucetta’s back-door exhibits “a comic leer” (141), as well as an open mouth, which Elizabeth-Jane cannot bear to look at. 7. “La paranoïa, […] c’est un engluement imaginaire. C’est une voix qui sonorise le regard qui y est prévalent, c’est une affaire de congélation du désir” (Lacan, Le Séminaire XXII, 1975-1976, 42). 8. One should note the recurrence of the pronoun “it”, whose phonemes are repeated all along: “[…] the latter knew it already”, “Let us shut it out”, “He will see it […] Donald will see it”, “it will kill me”, “Is there nobody to do it?”, “I will see it” (Hardy 1987, 278-279). The series ends quite logically with the word “fit”. “It” is the very thing that kills Lucetta through her “fit”, as though she had seen (and heard) what must remain unseen, unheard: the primordial object to which we are drawn, “the absolute aim of desire”, the Thing (Braunstein 79), which in our reality remains unattainable – for the encounter with it could only mean death. 9. Of course Henchard is not a father, since he has abandoned his child. But as “cornfactor” – etymologically the “maker” of corn – he occupies the position of the first, of the origin of the seed of life, he is his own origin, “the new Adam, reborn, self-created, unencumbered” (Showalter 57). See also Ramel 2016. 10. “C’est son beuglement de taureau assommé qui se fait entendre encore dans le son du chofar” (Lacan 2004, 295). 11. I am indebted to Isabelle Gadoin for pointing this out to me at the Rouen conference. 12. Michel Poizat draws the same parallel between gaze and voice: “Just as the empty socket in the skull is what best makes immediate, or ‘makes present’, what Lacan called the seeing object [l’objet-regard], so the silence we are given to hear by the cry – the cry that by ‘rending the silence’ also lets it be heard – Is what best gives presence to the vocal object, paradoxical though this may seem” (Poizat 85). 13. Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter”.
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14. The text invites the reader (who identifies with “the wanderer in this direction”, 296) to hear the singular symphonies played by the tumultuous waters, so that the passage has a metatextual dimension: it is about a voice, the “unheard melody” of its poetics (Ramel 2015, 159). 15. A cluster of signifiers forms another poetic series with jouissance throughout the text connected: “revel”/ “revelry”, “rival”/ “rivalry”, “reveal”/ “revelation”, “rave”, “revenge”, “revive”/ “revival”, “reverie”, “reverberation”, “riveted”, “reverted”, “ravine”. 16. The voice of Egdon Heath is said to be “dry and papery” in The Return of the Native (Hardy 1990, 51). 17. About the dinner at High Place Hall in which Henchard and Farfrae sit stiffly side by side, “like some Tuscan painting of the two disciples supping at Emmaus”, while Elizabeth-Jane watches them from a distance “like the evangelist who had to write it down” (Hardy 1987, 182), Fabienne Gaspari writes: “[…] Elizabeth-Jane becomes the evangelist, the witness in the picture but on the margin, at a distance from the central scene, herself a projection of the narrator/ painter” (Gaspari, n.p.). 18. “A wonderful skill in netting of all sorts – acquired in childhood by making seines in Newson’s home”, (Hardy 1987, 217). 19. Claude Maisonnat explains this process in precise terms: “[…] it is crucial to remember that jouissance, contrary to enjoyment, is a lethal abandonment to the fascination of disintegration, dissolution, a refusal of the Symbolic not so different from Freud’s ‘oceanic feeling’, the temptation to meet the totality of a fantasized big Other, while surplus enjoyment refers to that part of jouissance that can be captured, accommodated by the signifying chain and the symbolic order mostly through artistic creation” (Maisonnat 421, n16). Voir “De la plus-value au plus-de- jouir” (Lacan 2006, 11-25).
ABSTRACTS
Like the ring discerned by Henchard on the grassy floor when he wakes up from his drunken sleep, surplus objects are found all along The Mayor of Casterbridge: objects which are disruptive out of place, in excess of reality, Letters, for instance, when read prematurely or by the wrong people, can cause disaster in the lives of the protagonists. But then such objects always involve eye-sight or voice, so I will argue that the “something more” which disrupts reality in this novel is the “object-gaze” or/and the “object-voice” (two Lacanian concepts), the climax in the story being the intrusion in Lucetta’s reality of the two effigies representing herself and Henchard. Lucetta dies of a fit after this scene, killed by a vision of herself seen by others and by the indomitable “uproar” which persecutes her, whatever Elizabeth-Jane may do to shut out sight and sound. Indeed the “roar”, like the “ring”, is a voice that cannot be silenced. Absolute silence is reached when tragedy comes to a resolution: Henchard fails to reply to Elizabeth-Jane, shutting his lips “like a vice”. He will be heard no more. Neither will the “poor little songster”, the bird starved to death in its cage. The rest is silence. But then the literary text is precisely this: a silent voice, “dry and papery” (like the voice of the wind on Egdon Heath), which paradoxically can be a delight to the ear of the reader. Thus the tragic “ring” of the diegesis can be made into a “poetic ring” by Hardy’s pen, which can turn the surplus object into a “surplus enjoyment” (“plus-de-jouir”, in Lacan’s formulation).
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Comme l’alliance distinguée par Henchard sur le sol herbeux lorsqu’il s’éveille le lendemain de la soirée de beuverie où il a vendu sa femme, des objets “en trop” se trouvent tout long de The Mayor of Casterbridge : des objets qui dérangent, qui ne sont pas à leur place. Les lettres, par exemple, lues prématurément ou par des gens à qui elles ne sont pas destinées, peuvent amener le désastre dans la vie des personnages.Mais le regard et la voix sont toujours impliqués dans l’effet produit par ces objets. Je vais donc montrer que l’objet en trop qui vient déranger la diégèse est “l’objet-regard” et/ou “l’objet-voix” tels que conceptualisés par Lacan, un point culminant étant atteint avec l’intrusion dans la réalité de Lucetta de deux effigies, l’une la représentant et l’autre représentant Henchard. Lucetta meurt d’une crise d’apoplexie après cette scène, tuée par une vision d’elle même vue par les autres et par le vacarme (“uproar”) qui la persécute, en dépit des efforts d’Elizabeth-Jane pour faire taire cette voix et masquer cette vision. Le vacarme (“roar”), tout comme le bruit des cloches sonnées à toute volée (“ring”), est une voix qu’on ne peut faire taire. On atteint le silence absolu lorsqu’advient la résolution tragique : Henchard ne répond pas à Elizabeth-Jane, il ferme ses lèvres entr’ouvertes comme un étau. On n’entendra plus jamais sa voix, ni celle du “pauvre petit chanteur”, l’oiseau qui meurt de faim dans sa cage – autre objet “en trop”. Le reste n’est plus que silence, mais le texte littéraire est exactement cela : une voix silencieuse, “sèche et parcheminée” (comme la voix du vent sur la lande d’Egdon) qui paradoxalement se donne à entendre et vient régaler notre oreille. “Ring” a pour Henchard une résonance tragique – qu’il s’agisse de l’alliance jetée à terre, du sinistre amphithéâtre romain, ou du bruit odieux des cloches célébrant son malheur. Dans le silence de son écriture, Hardy lui substitue un tintement poétique (“poetic ring”). L’objet en trop est devenu un “plus-de-jouir”, selon la formule de Lacan.
INDEX
Keywords: ring, object, disruption, letter, object-gaze, object-voice, gaze, voice, silence, poetics, Lacan (Jacques) oeuvrecitee Mayor of Casterbridge (The), Tess of the d’Urbervilles Mots-clés: anneau, bague, résonance, objet, lettre, objet-regard, objet-voix, voix, regard, silence, poétique, Lacan (Jacques)
AUTHOR
ANNIE RAMEL Annie Ramel, professor emeritus at Université Lumière-Lyon 2, is the president of FATHOM (French Association for Thomas Hardy Studies). Her publications include: Great Expectations, le père ou le pire (Messene, 2000), articles on Charles Dickens, Henry James, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy. She co-edited Rewriting/Reprising: the Paradoxes of Intertextuality with Josiane Paccaud and Claude Maisonnat. She has edited or co-edited four volumes of the e-journal FATHOM, including the latest (“Desire and the Expressive Eye”), as well as the volume on “Liminality” of The Hardy Review (Spring 2013). She has published The Madder Stain: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Thomas Hardy (Brill-Rodopi, 2015).
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The Use of Weapons for the Production of the Uncanny in Hardy and Conrad L’utilisation des armes et l’inquiétante étrangeté chez Hardy et Conrad
Andrew Hewitt
1 This paper suggests three ways in which Hardy’s use of a particular subcategory of objects, namely weapons, contributes to the production of the uncanny in his texts. First, weapons may appear out of nowhere; second, anything can be a weapon; and third, weapons, like many objects in Hardy, seem to have a degree of agency of their own. I am particularly interested in the carving-knife used as a murder weapon in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, not least because it appears again in much the same context and to much the same end in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. This carving-knife is one of three objects singled out for dispraise by an early “genteel” reader of Tess, as Hardy recalls in his Preface to the Fifth Edition: according to this critic, “such vulgar articles as the Devil’s pitchfork, a lodging-house carving-knife, and a shame-bought parasol” had no place “in a respectable story” (Hardy 2008b, 5). It is, however, presumably not the “article” itself that is being censured, but the use to which it is put. In fact we do not even see the carving-knife until after it has been weaponised, so to speak: when Mrs Brooks, the landlady of the fashionable boarding-house where Tess and Alec have been staying, enters their rooms just after the murder, everything seems to be in order, except that “the carving knife [is] missing” from the breakfast table (405). Notable by its absence, the carving-knife has in this sense come out of nowhere, to be used as a weapon by Tess – although even this is not completely clear, for although she confesses to the crime, nobody saw her pick up the knife, nobody saw her stab Alec. The question of agency is thus left open: did the knife itself act upon Alec in some way? I will begin with some general observations about weapons in Hardy before turning to a range of specific examples to support my claims that weapons may appear without warning, out of nowhere; that anything may be a weapon; and that weapons have agency – factors that together contribute to the sense of the uncanny in Hardy. I will then return to the
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carving-knife to suggest some grounds of comparison between Tess of the d’Urbervilles and The Secret Agent.
2 Hardy’s work incorporates hundreds of references to arrows, cannons and artillery, guns and pistols, swords and pikes, as well as to a range of improvised weapons of a sometimes bizarre and unsettling nature. Some of these weapons are “real”, that is, imagined as actually present in the story. In Far from the Madding Crowd, Sergeant Troy famously performs the sword-exercise for Bathsheba, not with a walking-stick but – as Bathsheba insists – with a “real sword” (Hardy 2002, 180); and Troy is later killed by a real shotgun. In The Return of the Native, Diggory Venn takes potshots at Damon Wildeve as part of the escalating campaign of “menace” intended to keep Wildeve from rekindling his affair with Eustacia Vye (Hardy 1990, 273). In A Laodicean, Will Dare draws a pistol while searching the bedroom he shares with the architect Havill, and again when he confronts Abner Power, the “political regenerator” (Hardy 1997, 328). But weapons also feature in simile and metaphor. “My thoughts go through me like swords”, says Clym Yeobright (Hardy 1990, 312), and Michael Henchard is embarrassed when Elizabeth-Jane, instead of writing in “ladies-hand”, produces “a line of chain-shot and sand-bags”, that is, blots and loops rather than neatly-formed upright letters (Hardy 2008a, 122). There is one example of a bomb in Hardy, which interestingly, for a comparison with Conrad’s The Secret Agent, goes off accidentally (Hardy 1997, 327). References to weapons are also used to create patterns, as in Far from the Madding Crowd when Gabriel’s proposal to Bathsheba is at first coolly received (“Bathsheba did not look quite so alarmed as if a cannon had been discharged by her ear, which was what Oak had expected. “Marrying me – I didn’t know it was that you meant,” she said quietly. “Such a thing as that is too absurd – too soon – to think of by far”, Hardy 2002, 382), but eventually accepted and acted upon: “Just as Bathsheba was pouring out a cup of tea their ears were greeted by the firing of a cannon followed by what seemed like a tremendous blowing of trumpets in the front of the house. ‘There!’ said Oak laughing, ‘I knew those fellows were up to something, by the look on their faces’” (388). Oak’s proposal is not so startling as a cannon going off in Bathsheba’s ear would be; in the next chapter, a cannon actually going off in their ears to celebrate their marriage is not so startling either: “I knew those fellows were up to something”. The back-to-front symmetry of the two clauses “a cannon had been discharged by her ear […]” / “their ears were greeted by the firing of a cannon […]” is surely deliberate, a way of notating the reversal of Bathsheba’s position in the structure of the sentences that bookend it.
3 More poignant is the parallelism of the straight arrows in Jude the Obscure. The simile “straight as an arrow” to describe a supine body occurs twice in the novel, first in the context of Jude’s seduction by Arabella (“She lay supine, and straight as an arrow, on the sloping sod of this hill-top, gazing up into the blue miles of sky, and still retaining her warm hold of Jude’s hand. He reclined on his elbow near her”, Hardy 2008c, 47), and then again at the end of the novel, when Jude himself is stretched out on his deathbed under the same cloudless sky: By ten o’clock that night Jude was lying on the bedstead at his lodging covered with a sheet, and straight as an arrow. Through the partly opened window the joyous throb of a waltz entered from the ball-room at Cardinal. Two days later, when the sky was equally cloudless, and the air equally still, two persons stood beside Jude’s open coffin in the same little bedroom (396)”.
4 While Arabella is always quite undeviating in her purpose, Jude is an arrow that has missed its mark – though in recalling, via his body language (“straight as an arrow”),
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the moment his life first veered off course, the narrative suggests that his superficially wandering, aimless life may have followed a well-defined trajectory after all.
5 For a novel set during the Napoleonic Wars, The Trumpet-Major is more invested in the gradual domestication of lethal weapons, their subsidence into implements of peace- time life, than it is in describing their deployment in military exercises, let alone actual battles: […] The religion of the country had, in fact, changed from love of God to hatred of Napoleon Buonaparte; and, as if to remind the devout of this alteration, the pikes for the pikemen (all those accepted men who were not otherwise armed) were kept in the church of each parish. There against the wall they always stood, a whole sheaf of them, formed of new ash stems, with a spike driven in at one end, the stick being preserved from splitting by a ferule. And there they remained, year after year, in the corner of the aisle, till they were removed and placed under the gallery stairs, and thence ultimately to the belfry, where they grew black, rusty, and worm- eaten, and were gradually stolen and carried off by sextons, parish clerks, whitewashers, window-menders, and other church-servants for use at home as rake-stems, benefit-club staves and pick-handles, in which degraded situations they may still occasionally be found. (Hardy 1991, 196)
6 The tendency of weapons to blend in with the tools of peaceable rural life is explained in a passage from Far from the Madding Crowd: […] she found Gabriel Oak at the bottom of her garden, grinding his shears for the sheep shearing. All the surrounding cottages were more or less scenes of the same operation; the scurr of whetting spread into the sky from all parts of the village as from an armoury previous to a campaign. Peace and war kiss each other at their hours of preparation, sickles, scythes, shears, and pruning-hooks mingling with swords, bayonets and lances in their common necessity for point and edge. (Hardy 2002, 131)
7 This verges on the commonplace, but there is an underlying message, I believe, about the vanity of war, which comes across most clearly in the poem “Channel-Firing”, where the heavy artillery blazes away at non-combatants – the dead, who only want to be left to their slumbers, and the church mice who only want to be left to their crumbs: That night your great guns, unawares, Shook all our coffins as we lay, And broke the chancel window-squares, We thought it was the Judgment-day And sat upright. While drearisome Arose the howl of wakened hounds: The mouse let fall the altar-crumb, The worms drew back into the mounds, The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, “No; It’s gunnery practice out at sea Just as before you went below; The world is as it used to be […]” Again the guns disturbed the hour, Roaring their readiness to avenge, As far inland as Stourton Tower, And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge. (Hardy 1976, 305-306)
8 We may think also of “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’”, which although it does not mention any weapons juxtaposes the timeless quality of the love between “maid” and “wight” to the annals of war and the passing of dynasties (543).
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9 The insinuation into private, domestic, “everyday” life by weapons designed for impersonal combat epitomised in “Channel-Firing” is met by a movement in the opposite direction which sees the conversion of everyday objects such as knitting needles, parasols, pokers, the carving-knife in Tess or the box-cord in Jude, into dangerous weapons. Susan stabs Eustacia in church with a “long stocking-needle […] so as to draw her blood, and put an end to the bewitching of Susan’s children that has been carried on so long” (Hardy 1990, 179). A parasol is weaponised by the people of Mixen Lane in the scene of the skimmington-ride in The Mayor of Casterbridge. Watching from her window, Lucetta sees the effigy of herself, yoked to her former lover Henchard, being paraded through the streets: Lucetta’s eyes were straight upon the spectacle of the uncanny revel, now dancing rapidly. The numerous lights round the two effigies threw them up into lurid distinctness… “She’s me – she’s me – even to the parasol – my green parasol!” cried Lucetta with a wild laugh as she stepped in. She stood motionless for one second – then fell heavily to the floor. (Hardy 2008a, 259-260)
10 While Elizabeth-Jane carries a “sun-shade” for her complexion, Lucetta has the more elevated “parasol”; but now it seems as if the parasol has betrayed her, gone over to the other side. No mere prop for the representation of a generic fashionable lady, but the object that identifies Lucetta to herself beyond any doubt, and thus, by a massive discharge of shame, brings about her seizure and death, the parasol is without a doubt a dangerous weapon. In the same novel, Henchard brandishes a poker at the choristers to make them sing a psalm that will bring down a curse on Donald Farfrae, and then bends the poker in two to show how he would like to deal with Farfrae himself (Hardy 2008a, 215-216). In Tess, Dairyman Crick uses breakfast cutlery to prefigure Tess’s fate:
11 “I don’t – know about ghosts,” she was saying. “But I do know that our souls can be made to go outside our bodies when we are alive.” The dairyman turned to her with his mouth full, his eyes charged with serious inquiry, and his great knife and fork (breakfasts were breakfasts here) planted erect on the table, like the beginning of a gallows. (Hardy 2008b, 135)
12 Tess will complete her passage to the gallows by taking up another “great knife” from another table laid for breakfast: “The room was empty; the breakfast – a substantial repast of coffee, eggs, and a cold ham – lay spread upon the table untouched, as when she had taken it up, excepting that the carving-knife was missing” (405). While the “great guns” blast away at cows and mice, the hearth and the breakfast-table are mini- arsenals, bristling with deadly weapons. That domestic objects in particular – familiar household items, ordinary appurtenances of home – can be so swiftly and unexpectedly transformed into the means of threat and attack might suggest a link with Freud, whose essay “The Uncanny” analyses the unheimlich, the eerie sensation that accompanies an eruption of the strange into the familiar. The literal meaning of the word is “unhomely”, as in “unfamiliar”, “untamed”, but it is typically translated into English as “uncanny”, which however loses the sense of “home” as the safe place which the unheimlich destabilises.1 In an anecdote included in Martin Ray’s anthology Thomas Hardy Remembered, Henry Woodd Nevinson recalls emerging from a tea-room in April 1906 with Hardy, who was shocked by the broadsheet headline: “Family Murdered with a Pen-Knife”: “He couldn’t get over that. The vision of the pen-knife seemed to fascinate him” (Ray 135). By far the most macabre use of a domestic object as a murder weapon is in the poem “Her Second Husband Hears the Story”, where a wife matter-of- factly confesses to her second husband that she suffocated the first by sewing him up so
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tightly in his bed-clothes when he came home drunk that he could not breathe. “Here it came about”, she says, presumably indicating the bed, but it is an interesting turn of phrase, as if to suggest that the event somehow just happened, without human intervention (Hardy 1976, 860).2
13 Chekhov’s advice to playwrights was that if there is a pistol hanging on the wall in the first act, by the third act it must go off. Hardy’s practice seems to be the exact opposite: often, guns and knives and other weapons are introduced only after they have been used. Consider the murder of Sergeant Troy in Far from the Madding Crowd: the first time we read of Farmer Boldwood’s gun is in fact after it has gone off. If it was hanging on the wall in the first act, it was invisible. Like Troy, who appears out of nowhere at Boldwood’s Christmas party, which is also meant to be a celebration of Boldwood’s engagement with Bathsheba, the gun is just suddenly there, primed and loaded. Troy lays hands on Bathsheba to claim her: […] she writhed, and gave a quick, low scream. The scream had been heard but a few seconds when it was followed by a sudden deafening report that echoed through the room and stupefied them all. The oak partition shook with the concussion, and the place was filled with grey smoke. In bewilderment they turned their eyes to Boldwood. At his back […] was a gun- rack, as is usual in farmhouses, constructed to hold two or three guns. When Bathsheba had cried out in her husband’s grasp, Boldwood’s face of gnashing despair had changed. The veins had swollen and a frenzied look had gleamed in his eye. He had turned quickly, taken one of the guns, cocked it, and at once discharged it at Troy. Troy fell. The distance apart of the two men was so small that the charge of shot did not spread in the least, but passed like a bullet into his body. (Hardy 2002, 367)
14 The events are not narrated in chronological order: we jump from Bathsheba’s cry to the stupefying explosion, then go back to find out what happened. The crucial information that Boldwood keeps a loaded gun handy, “as is usual in farmhouses”, comes only after the gun has been fired. In fact nobody sees him fire it: the narrator’s explanation – “He had turned quickly, taken one of the guns, cocked it, and at once discharged it at Troy” – is a reconstruction of events, not a description that accompanies their unfolding in real time, as it were (hence the use of the pluperfect).
15 The murder of Alec d’Urberville by carving-knife unfolds in a similar way. When Mrs Brooks, the landlady of The Herons, peers through the keyhole of the suite of rooms occupied by that fashionable couple, Tess and Alec, she sees the breakfast-table already laid. There is no mention of any carving-knife; why should there be? A carving-knife is “usual” on a breakfast-table. Only later, when the landlady enters the room, having become alarmed by the sight of blood pooling on her ceiling, does she notice the carving-knife, by its absence: The room was empty; the breakfast – a substantial repast of coffee, eggs, and a cold ham – lay spread upon the table untouched, as when she had taken it up, excepting that the carving knife was missing. She asked the man to go through the folding- doors into the adjoining bedchamber. He opened the doors, entered a step or two, and came back almost instantly, with a rigid face. “My good God, the gentleman in bed is dead! I think he has been hurt with a knife […]” (Hardy 2008b, 405)
16 The weapon, in other words, only makes its appearance after it has been used. Then follows the explanation – “a lot of blood had run down upon the floor […]. The wound was small, but the point of the blade had touched the heart of the victim”. Hardy could
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have left the carving-knife out on the table, as it were, for us to see through the landlady’s eyes; he could have written: “The breakfast table was already spread with plates, glasses, and all the implements necessary for the meal, including a carving- knife…”. That would have been more compliant with Chekhov’s law. Strictly speaking, what Chekhov says is that there should be no gratuitous exhibition of weapons: if there is a pistol in the first act, it must go off. He does not stipulate the reverse – that any weapon used in the course of the action must have been introduced at an earlier point. So we cannot say Hardy is guilty of breaking the rule. But I think the assumption underlying Chekhov’s law is that events proceed in a linear fashion: you cannot go back on yourself and conjure up a weapon that you forgot to mention first time around, just because you suddenly need it for the purposes of the plot. It is out of respect for this assumption that the narrator of Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma feels obliged to confess his oversight when he describes two characters boating on a lake near the Swiss-Italian border, without having first explained how they come to be in that setting: “We have forgotten to mention, in its proper place, that the Duchessa had taken a house at Belgirate, a charming village and one that fulfils all the promise of its name (i.e. the view of a beautiful bend in the lake)” (Stendhal 398). In this case, the failure to mention something in its proper place is easily forgiven. It is taking a much greater risk to withhold mention of an object as important as a gun or a knife that features in the climax of the story, until after it has been used.
17 This is not to suggest that the use of weapons is completely unpredictable in Hardy, simply because he does not introduce guns or knives to the narrative in a timely way. There is plenty of foreshadowing in the novels. With regard to the violent fate of certain human characters, I would like to highlight a particular pattern that arises, I believe, out of Hardy’s belief in the kinship of all animals. Recall Hardy’s comments about the significance, for him, of the discovery of natural selection as the mechanism of evolution and the need for the “centre of altruism” to “shift” away from humankind exclusively to embrace all living creatures: “the most far-reaching consequence of the establishment of the common origin of all species is ethical; […] it logically involve[s] a re-adjustment of altruistic morals by enlarging as a necessity of rightness the application of what has been called ‘The Golden Rule’ beyond the area of mere mankind to that of the whole animal kingdom” (Hardy 1989, 376-377). Darwinism demands the extension of “do unto others” to dogs, horses, sheep, blackbirds, snails, butterflies, and so on. Now, the novels do not spare such creatures any more than they spare the humans. Indeed, the first character to be killed by a gun in Far from the Madding Crowd is Gabriel’s over-enthusiastic sheepdog, “taken and tragically shot” for his part in causing the fatal stampede of Gabriel’s sheep (Hardy 2002, 42). Troy is several times compared to a “dog”, for example when he says of himself to Bathsheba, “I am thankful for beauty, even when ’tis thrown to me like a bone to a dog” (163), or when Gabriel describes him as, “That man of a family that has come to the dogs” (189), or when a rustic predicts of Troy that, “He’ll drag [Bathsheba] to the dogs” (358). To be sure, Boldwood also compares himself to a dog who has had his day. Nevertheless I believe Troy’s fate to be an instance of a curious economy in Hardy’s works, based in a sense on the Golden Rule, which dictates that when an animal is killed, a human character will later die by the same means. We see this much more clearly in Tess, where the fate of the horse, Prince, accidentally stabbed by the rushing mail-cart, foreshadows the murder of Alec, that prince of darkness, and his terrible loss of blood on the bed in the lodging-house. Alec does not just bleed, his blood pours out, flooding the bedclothes, the mattress, the
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carpet, and the floor, at a speed and in a quantity sufficient to seep right through and stain the ceiling of the room below, and all this from a “small” wound that is still stoppered by the carving-knife plunged into his chest. From a realist perspective, this is not credible; in my view, the best way to account for the sheer profusion of blood is by reference to the earlier scene of the horse’s death: A sudden jerk shook her in her seat, and Tess awoke from the sleep into which she, too, had fallen. […] [T]he waggon had stopped. A hollow groan, unlike anything she had ever heard in her life, came from the front. […] Something terrible had happened. The harness was entangled with an object which blocked the way. In consternation Tess jumped down, and discovered the dreadful truth. The groan had proceeded from her father’s poor horse Prince. The morning mail-cart, with its two noiseless wheels, speeding along these lanes like an arrow, as it always did, had driven into her slow and unlighted equipage. The pointed shaft of the cart had entered the breast of the unhappy Prince like a sword; and from the wound his life’s blood was spouting in a stream, and falling with a hiss into the road. […] The huge pool of blood in front of her was already assuming the iridescence of coagulation […] Prince lay alongside still and stark; his eyes half open, the hole in his chest looking scarcely large enough to have let out all that had animated him. (Hardy 2008b, 38-39)
18 Once again, the weapon is only introduced after it has done its work; first Tess’s waggon comes to an abrupt halt and we hear the terrible groan, then we learn of the collision with the mail-cart and the way its shaft “had entered” the breast of the horse. Note the size of the wound, which like Alec’s is perceived as small, though it has “let out” everything. In leaving her native sphere, Tess has entered a kind of parallel “economy of blood” or blood-nexus in which relations among people are governed by blood. The profligate spilling of Prince’s blood leaves Tess in the position of a labourer who must put herself out not for wages, but in the hope that Alec will link “his blood” to hers. In this parallel economy, only when a like quantity of Alec’s blood is poured forth will the debt owed to Prince ever be paid; that is why Alec’s death must be so implausibly bloody. Even Tess herself is subject to this system that exchanges a human for an animal life, for it is Tess who wrings and breaks the necks of the wounded pheasants in the wood, Tess who is then compared to a bird, turning her eyes to Alec “with the hopeless defiance of the sparrow’s gaze before its captor twists its neck” (351), and Tess who is eventually killed by the noose.
19 As many readers have observed, the whole fabric of Tess is woven of foreshadowings. Many of these involve the colour red and the words “blood”, “bleeding”, “bled”. When Tess sees the words of the sign-painter, “Thy, Damnation, Slumbereth, Not”, in red letters on the side of a barn, they go “well home to the reader’s heart” (91). Alec declares to Tess that his feelings have “suddenly found a way open in the direction of you and […] all at once gushed through” (349). Gradually the conviction grows upon the reader of Tess that a terrible crime is being prepared; the denouement will be bloody, it will very likely involve the piercing of the body, perhaps by a wound that goes “straight to the heart”, that will “open” the body to gushing outflows; but the choice of weapon, who will wield it, where or when, who the victim will be, are unclear. The narrative is building up a vast stockpile of affect, but we do not know how it will be discharged.
20 Even when the murder has taken place, we still do not know exactly how it happened. It is true that we have Tess’s own testimony, but that is all we have. Nobody saw her
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take up the knife, nobody saw her commit the crime. The workman who is sent into the room and discovers the body says “the gentleman in bed […] has been hurt with a knife”, a passive construction that places the victim on the receiving end of the “hurt” while leaving open the question of who actually caused it. “The point of the blade had touched the heart of the victim […]. In a quarter of an hour the news that a gentleman […] had been stabbed in his bed, spread through every street and villa of the popular watering-place” (405). The question is, how should agency be determined in such a case? Could the carving-knife somehow have exerted its own agency? With such questions we enter the territory of “vibrant matter” as charted by the political theorist Jane Bennett in her book of that title. Where our tendency is to think of matter as passive and inert, Bennett argues that material objects can be lively and spontaneous, in fact so full of life that they can be considered as agents. In Ruth Leys’ summary, the theory of vibrant matter holds that “a lively, material, and effective agency is distributed throughout the world [...] that profoundly affects situations and events beyond the scope of human wishes and desires” (Leys 346-47).
21 This is not a new idea. In the summer of 1272, William le Cupere of Bedford climbed a ladder to get into the belfry of a church, fell and broke “the whole of his body”, and the next day died. The jury at his inquest declared the ladder forfeit to the Crown, who would have the right to take it away and sell it or to claim an amount of money from its owner in lieu (Kirton-Darling 4). It would not be correct to say that the ladder was “found guilty”, but clearly some notion of retributive justice centring on the ladder was involved. The legal term for an object forfeited in this way was “deodand” and enough trials involving objects seem to have taken place for various refinements to have emerged; for example, juries distinguished between objects at rest and objects in motion when determining the degree of culpability that an object such as a waggon might be said to have. “The trials of deodand never took place before ecclesiastical courts, but always before criminal courts. The jury consisted of twelve men, who investigated the occurrence and evaluated the instrument if it was proven to have caused the death. Its nature and value were then stated in the indictment by the jury” (Hyde 729). In one example quoted by Blackstone in his Commentaries on the English Laws, a penknife that was deemed to have caused a death was valued at six-pence, and this was the amount the King could demand. The instrument itself might be accursed (729). As one modern scholar has put it, “the deodand marked a world in which peril and possibility lay everywhere and in everything” and required people “to engage with the physical world’s capacity for unruliness”. Until it was abolished in 1846, deodand “acted as recognition of – not submission to – the inseparable place of the uncontrollable physical world in law” (Kirton-Darling 21).
22 The idea of “vibrant matter” is certainly present in Hardy. Indeed we might go further and say that, at times, Hardy’s narratives could not progress at all without lively objects to impel them. Perhaps the most obvious example is the elm tree in The Woodlanders, whose threatening stance towards John South triggers the main events of the story. Or if not the tree, then the two sovereigns placed on Marty’s mantle looking- glass that “confronted her […] in such a manner as to suggest a pair of jaundiced eyes on the watch for an opportunity” (Hardy 1988, 53). Or the Valentine that Boldwood receives from Bathsheba and places on his mantle-piece, where it interacts with the objects in the room to attain a “deep solemnity” (Hardy 2002, 99), or the ear-rings that Elfride receives as a gift from Henry Knight, that face off against the banker’s receipt she has received from her other suitor, Stephen: “There before her lay the deposit-
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receipt for the two hundred pounds, and beside it the elegant present of Knight […]. She almost feared to let the two articles lie in juxtaposition: so antagonistic were the interests they represented that a miraculous repulsion of one by the other was almost to be expected” (Hardy 2009, 186). These objects participate in the world of intentionality and feelings; in Hardy we find ourselves truly in the midst of what Bruno Latour calls a “parliament of things” (Latour 142).
23 I have tried to suggest three ways in which weapons are deployed to help produce a sense of the uncanny in Hardy. First, weapons may appear out of nowhere. Writing of the scene of Prince’s death in The Madder Stain, her psychoanalytic reading of Hardy, Annie Ramel points out that the tragedy happens on account of “an object which blocked the way”, “a surplus object that jams the system”, and suggests that “things go wrong in Hardy’s tragic world because of an object that comes in excess of reality” (Ramel 15-16). What I find interesting about Hardy’s use of weapons is that the shooting or puncturing object is indeed “added” to the scene, appearing suddenly out of nowhere, but then its “excessive” nature is immediately disclaimed: a shotgun is “usual” in farmhouses, the mail-cart is speeding along about its business “as it always did”, the carving-knife belongs so obviously on a breakfast-table that you do not even notice it unless it is missing. Second, anything from a parasol to a set of bed-clothes can be a weapon; anything “homely”, tame, familiar, can be rendered “unhomely”, untamed, disruptive, in an instant. Finally, there is the possibility that weapons – like the many threatening, jaundiced, solemn, antagonistic objects in Hardy – have an agency of their own.
24 I would now like to take up the carving-knife in The Secret Agent, which is also of course implicated in the murder of a man who has used a woman selfishly. Adolf Verloc, pornographer and agent provocateur, has through a mixture of venal motives brought about the death of his simple-minded brother-in-law Stevie in a botched terrorist explosion. After the visit of the police, Verloc makes a long speech to his wife Winnie, Stevie’s sister, in which he tries to shift the blame for Stevie’s death onto her. He then lies down on the sofa and tries to assert his “marital authority” by calling Winnie to his side “in a peculiar tone […] intimately known to Mrs Verloc as the note of wooing” (Conrad 202). Instead she gives full rein to her loathing for him and stabs him with a carving-knife: She started forward at once […]. Her right hand skimmed slightly the end of the table, and when she had passed on towards the sofa the carving knife had vanished without the slightest sound from the side of the dish. Mr Verloc heard the creaky plank in the floor, and was content. He waited […]. He was lying on his back and staring upwards. He saw partly on the ceiling and partly on the wall the moving shadow of an arm with a clenched hand holding a carving knife. It flickered up and down […] Mr Verloc, the Secret Agent, turning slightly on his side with the force of the blow, expired without stirring a limb […] She was giddy but calm. She had become a free woman […]. Nothing moved in the parlour till Mrs Verloc raised her head slowly and looked at the clock with inquiring mistrust. She had become aware of a ticking sound in the room. It grew upon her ear, while she remembered clearly that the clock on the wall was silent […]. Tic, tic, tic. (202-203)
25 Did Conrad have the stabbing of Alec in mind when he composed this scene? Hardy, of course, does not actually describe the murder. Was Conrad conscious of trying to surpass Hardy, to stage a scene Hardy had left out? There are numerous touchpoints:
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Winnie, like Tess, has bargained herself in exchange for the man’s promise to take care of her family; her “footsteps” are heard “overhead” as she prepares to go out in hat and veil, like Tess; the murder weapon is the same; the “Tic, tic, tic” of Verloc’s dripping blood recalls the “Drip, drip, drip” Mrs Brooks hears through the door in Tess. Fleeing the scene of the crime, Winnie bumps into Ossipon, who has always wanted to seduce her, and instantly enrols him in her plan of escape. Ossipon has always thought the Verloc marriage was sound, but Winnie sets him straight, saying: “‘You thought I loved him! [...] I was a young girl. I was done up. I was tired. I had two people depending on what I could do, and it did seem as if I couldn’t do any more […]. He seemed good- natured, he was freehanded, he had money, he never said anything […]. Do you know what he was? […] He was a devil!’” (275-276). Next to Verloc, Alec d’Urberville seems almost a gem, but Winnie’s description of her husband would serve as well for Tess’s lover and tormentor, who also practised upon a young girl oppressed by family responsibilities. Ossipon does not understand at first what Winnie has done: “He wondered what was up with her, why she had worked herself into this state of wild excitement” (277). Angel, too, struggles to believe what Tess is telling him, “thinking from the strangeness of her manner that she was in some delirium” and has only imagined herself killing Alec (Hardy 2008b, 407). It is not a case of borrowing or indebtedness: Conrad did not need the example of Tess to create this scenario for The Secret Agent. But the example was there; it is almost inconceivable that Conrad did not know Hardy’s novel, the occasion of so much attention and controversy just at the time (the early 1890s) that Conrad was beginning to imagine a literary career for himself, and it does not seem far-fetched to suggest that something of Tess and Alec d’Urberville made its way into Winnie and Adolf Verloc.
26 I want to suggest that something of the lodging-house carving-knife in Tess went into Winnie’s carving knife in The Secret Agent. At the very least we may say that one of the resources Conrad had available to him when stockpiling affect in this object was Hardy’s novel. Conrad, however, follows Chekhov’s law more closely. In The Secret Agent the carving knife is introduced early on and toyed with several times in the novel. When Stevie is aroused to anger at a newspaper account of a military officer’s brutality, “I had to take the carving knife from the boy,” Mrs Verloc says: “He was shouting and stamping and sobbing. He can’t stand the notion of any cruelty. He would have stuck that officer like a pig if he had seen him then […]. Some people don’t deserve much mercy” (Conrad, 60). Later, laying out the table for her husband’s meal, Winnie examines “the sharp edge of the carving knife” (193) before placing it on the dish and calling Verloc’s attention to the beef. Verloc tries to win his wife’s sympathy for the terrible risks he has run as a secret agent: “What was the good of telling you that I stood the risk of having a knife stuck into me any time these seven years we’ve been married? I am not a chap to worry a woman that’s fond of me” (238). On balance, however, Verloc is optimistic: “He really believed that it would be upon the whole easy for him to escape the knife of infuriated revolutionists” (249). When Verloc finally decides to eat: “He partook ravenously, without restraint and decency, cutting thick slices with the sharp carving knife, and swallowing them without bread” (253). Mrs Verloc decides to run away from him, but fears he will simply overpower her: “She could scratch, kick, and bite – and stab too; but for stabbing she wanted a knife” (256). Thus the scene is set for murder. Unlike Hardy, Conrad gives us plenty of intimations that the carving-knife is going to feature in this “domestic drama”. As Chekhov might
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have said, if there is a carving-knife on the table in the first act, by the third act it must be used.
27 However, what I want to point to is the way that the suggestion of the carving-knife’s agency is woven into the handling of the scene. It would be more precise to say that agency is distributed between human and object. Just as Mrs Brooks registers the absence of the carving-knife, though we never see anyone take it, so the narrator of The Secret Agent notes only that the carving-knife has vanished from the table, not that Winnie has scooped it up. Mr Verloc does not see who stabs him, only “the moving shadow of an arm […] holding a carving knife”. On the surface, Conrad’s approach to imbuing the domestic carving knife with menace is more direct than Hardy’s; but both writers seem to blur the boundaries between human and object and hint at the way agency is shared. For all that Conrad’s novel is set in a completely different milieu to Hardy’s, they are both, as the Assistant Commissioner observes of the Greenwich bomb affair, essentially “domestic drama”; but the drama is acted as much by the objects as by the humans who make up its cast.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009.
Conrad, Joseph, The Secret Agent (1907), ed. Roger Tennant, Oxford: OUP, 1991.
Hardy, Thomas, The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson, London: Macmillan, 1976.
Hardy, Thomas, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), ed. Suzanne B. Falck-Yi, Oxford: OUP, 2002.
Hardy, Thomas, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), ed. Alan Manford, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.
Hardy, Thomas, The Trumpet-Major (1880), ed. Richard Nemesvari, Oxford: OUP, 1991.
Hardy, Thomas, A Laodicean (1881), ed. John Schad, London: Penguin, 1997.
Hardy, Thomas, The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), ed. Dale Kramer, Oxford: OUP, 2008.
Hardy, Thomas, The Woodlanders (1887), ed. James Gibson, London: Penguin, 1988.
Hardy, Thomas, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), eds. Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell, Oxford: OUP, 2008.
Hardy, Thomas, Jude the Obscure (1895), ed. Patricia Ingham, Oxford: OUP, 2008.
Hyde, Walter Woodburn, “The Prosecution and Punishment of Animals and Lifeless Things in the Middle Ages and Modern Times”, University of Pennsylvania Law Review and American Law Register 64.7 (May 1916): 696-730.
Kirton-Darling, Edward, “Searching for Pigeons in the Belfry: The Inquest, the Abolition of the Deodand and the Rise of the Family”, Law, Culture, and the Humanities 14.3 (Dec. 9, 2014): 439-461.
Latour, Bruno, We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993.
Leys, Ruth, The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2017.
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Ramel, Annie, The Madder Stain: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Thomas Hardy, Leiden: Brill, 2015.
Ray, Martin, Thomas Hardy Remembered, Abingdon: Routledge, 2016.
Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), London: Penguin, 1976.
NOTES
1. I am grateful to Dr Annie Ramel for pointing out the connection between “unhomely” and “uncanny”. 2. I am grateful to Yui Kajita (University of Cambridge) for suggesting these examples.
ABSTRACTS
This paper explores a particular sub-category of objects, namely weapons. In Hardy’s work, guns, swords, cannons, and other tools of destruction are put to use with disturbing frequency not in the public arena of battle but in private spaces, for courtship (as in Troy’s sword), or to settle what the police might call domestic incidents (as in Boldwood’s gun). The insinuation into private/domestic space by weapons designed for impersonal combat is met by a movement in the opposite direction which sees the conversion of everyday objects into weapons. The suddenness with which weapons appear in the narrative, the fact that any object may be repurposed as a weapon, and the suggestion that weapons, like other objects in Hardy, have agency, contribute to the production of the uncanny. I conclude by suggesting grounds for comparison between Conrad’s The Secret Agent and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. In both novels, a woman is practised upon by an unscrupulous man and eventually revenges herself in the same way, using the same object, a carving-knife, as weapon. Although the two novelists use different techniques to stockpile affect in the object for sudden, cataclysmic disbursement, they both leave open the question of the object’s agency.
Cet article étudie une catégorie bien particulière d’objets, à savoir les armes. Dans l’œuvre de Hardy, les fusils, épées, canons et autres armes de destruction sont utilisés avec une régularité inquiétante, non pas dans la sphère publique mais dans des espaces privés, qu’il s’agisse de séduire une femme (ce que fait l’épée de Troy) ou de régler ce que la police pourrait nommer des « incidents domestiques » (ce que fait le fusil de Boldwood). Et en retour de ce mouvement, par lequel des armes conçues pour les combats collectifs s’insinuent dans l’espace privé et/ou domestique, un mouvement inverse voit des objets du quotidien se convertir en armes. La soudaineté avec laquelle les armes apparaissent dans le récit, le fait que tout objet puisse être reconfiguré comme arme, et la suggestion que les armes sont douées d’agentivité, comme bien des objets chez Hardy, contribuent à produire un sentiment d’inquiétante étrangeté. L’article s’achève en proposant des éléments de comparaison à ce sujet entre Tess of the d’Urbervilles et le roman de Conrad The Secret Agent. Dans les deux romans, une femme est manipulée par un homme sans scrupule, et finit par se venger en utilisant en guise d’arme le même objet, un couteau de cuisine. Même si les deux romanciers utilisent des techniques différentes pour charger d’affect les objets, en vue d’un dénouement brutal et destructeur, ils posent tout deux la question ambiguë d’une possible agentivité des objets.
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INDEX oeuvrecitee Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Secret Agent (The) Mots-clés: objet, arme, couteau, fusil, épée, inquiétante étrangeté, deodand, matière vibrante, Conrad (Joseph) Keywords: object, weapon, sword, gun, knife, uncanny, deodand, vibrant matter, Conrad (Joseph)
AUTHOR
ANDREW HEWITT Andrew Hewitt is a part-time PhD student at the University of Hull, where his supervisor is Professor Jane Thomas. His focus is the role of emotion and affect in Hardy’s fiction. He has presented at a number of conferences and study days and his papers have appeared in the Thomas Hardy Society Journal. He works for the examination board of the University of Cambridge
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Objects or Subjects? Pictoriality and Domesticity in Tess of the d’Urbervilles Objets ou sujets ? Picturalité et domesticité dans Tess d’Urberville de Thomas Hardy
Ludovic Le Saux
1 In his journal entry for 1 July 1892, Hardy notes: “The art of observation […] consists in this: the seeing of great things in little things, the whole in the part – even the infinitesimal part” (Hardy 1984, 262). His novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles stages the heroine’s struggle to comply with the Victorian ideal of feminine morality, as she strives for redemption after her initial “downfall”. One of the key features of that ideal was perfect domesticity, embodied in the figure of the Angel in the House – a figure which Tess is desperately trying to impersonate throughout the novel, as the subtitle, “A Pure Woman”, already suggests. In that sense, the omnipresence of household objects in Tess could be read as the presence of “little things”, insignificant details, hinting at “greater things” – that is, the struggle for domesticity. Yet the proliferation of objects leads the reader to see them also as part of the aesthetic aspirations of the novel, which is fraught with pictorial reminiscences – especially still-lifes and genre paintings, in which objects play a key role to the extent of sometimes becoming the sole subject of the picture.
2 Among these pictorial influences, Hardy had a special interest in Dutch painting, notably from the seventeenth century, also called Dutch Golden Age, which favoured pictorial genres (still-life, vanitas, genre painting) that had hitherto been deemed inferior to history painting in particular. As Barrie Bullen specifies in his article “Hardy and the Visual Arts”, “Hardy’s most prized possessions were several pictures of the Dutch school”, among which an “early seventeenth-century canvas” of “a wooded landscape”, “two Dutch merry-making scenes”, and a “picture attributed to the Dutch painter Godfried Schalcken (1643-1703) – a candle-lit interior with a group of figures” (Wilson 2009, 219). In 1872, Hardy’s “familiarity with the Dutch and Flemish schools of
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realistic genre painters” (68) even led him to entitle his second novel Under the Greenwood Tree: A Rural Painting of the Dutch School. Besides, Hardy’s interest was part of a more general growing fascination for seventeenth-century Dutch painting in late Victorian England: many Dutch Golden Age painters were rediscovered and introduced to the public during the nineteenth century, by Théophile Thoré especially, who literally went on a treasure hunt to find as many pictures by Vermeer as possible (Todorov 43). As Isabelle Gadoin underlines, Meindert Hobbema’s famous 1689 picture The Avenue at Middelharnis was for instance acquired by the National Gallery in 1871 only, and soon became one of Hardy’s favourite (Gadoin 290). Hardy’s keen appreciation of seventeenth-century Dutch painting has led many critics to analyse the influence of these artists on his literary practice, to secure Hardy’s position as a realist novelist1 or to highlight the aesthetic networks of his novels.2
3 Taking its inspiration from these different critics, this study will explore the way the object acts as a catalyst in Tess, signaling these pictorial reminiscences, these “traces” (Goater 329) of Golden Age Dutch painting: as Barrie Bullen explains, Hardy “rarely employs ekphrasis” and even, in his own words, “hated ‘word-painting’” (Wilson 2009, 220). The painted works mentioned will therefore be used to illustrate the way Hardy resorts to indoor, household objects, in order to draw pictures of domesticity, redolent of seventeenth-century Dutch genre and still-life painting; but also to create an aesthetics of objects, which blurs the frontier between animate and inanimate, moving the latter to the foreground – perhaps at the expense of the former?
1. Pictures of domesticity
4 The novel does not provide many indoor scenes. Chapter 34 however could be described as the indoor chapter: as Tess and Angel are moving in together after their marriage, the novel offers one of the few domestic scenes between the two lovers. The sun was so low on that short last afternoon of the year that it shone in through a small opening and formed a golden staff which stretched across to her skirt, where it made a spot like a paint-mark set upon her. They went into the ancient parlour to tea, and here they shared their first common meal alone. Such was their childishness, or rather his, that he found it interesting to use the same bread-and- butter plate as herself, and to brush crumbs from her lips with his own. (Hardy 1998, 217)
5 The serenity that characterizes this description – despite the paint-mark on Tess’s skirt, which already stands out – appears as the result of its pictorial quality. This everyday-life scene is indeed captured as a canvas: the “dramatic light” (Yeazell 134) slanting in through the small window brings about a feeling of narrowness and intimacy, echoed by the adjectives (“low”, “short”, “small”) and the fact that the newly-weds are using one plate only – just as they “washed their hands in one basin” (Hardy 1998, 217) earlier on in the scene. This description of a serene indoor scene in soft lighting is highly reminiscent of Dutch genre paintings from the seventeenth century, which were painted on small canvases, such as Pieter de Hooch’s Interior with a Young Couple (ca. 1662-1665; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City). The series of intersecting perpendicular and vertical lines frames the composition of the painting, all the while establishing a close connection between the characters and the objects. The immobility of the door, the chair or the piece of cloth in the woman’s hand echoes and contaminates, as it were, the female character who is standing erect, suffusing the
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scene with the same out-of-time, peaceful numbness we find in the description from the novel. Youri Kouznetsov describes the impression conveyed by Dutch genre painting as one of “sweet numbness”, while Todorov talks about a “peaceful, immobile world, where time is frozen” (Todorov 134). And indeed a few lines down, Tess and Angel are still “s[itting] on over the tea-table” (Hardy 1998, 218; my emphasis), the piece of furniture somehow structuring the composition of the scene.
6 Yet, besides the ominous paint-mark on Tess’s skirt, the apparent peacefulness of the scene was already debunked by the presence of two objects described just before the couple sat down: the pictures of “those horrid women” (Hardy 1998, 217) hanging on the wall, which are the only actual framed paintings ever described in the novel. Barrie Bullen notes that “actual works of art rarely appear in [Hardy’s] texts, and Tess’s inspection of the d’Urberville portraits is unusual in this respect” (Wilson 2009, 220). These are no pleasant sight, with their crooked nose and pointed features. The description of their terrifying looks turns them into haunting ghosts, escaped from the “two life-size portraits built into the masonry” (Hardy 1998, 217) and now hovering ominously over the serene tea-table. As Todorov pinpoints in his Éloge du quotidien, many seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings include the small-size reproduction of another painting, which acts as the key to understanding the unvoiced meaning of the picture – such as Vermeer’s music scene The Concert (ca.1664, missing), which can be interpreted from an erotic perspective thanks to the inclusion of an explicitly erotic painting – The Procuress (ca.1622, Boston) by Dirck van Baburen (Todorov 47). The presence of the two portraits in the novel could therefore be interpreted as the key to an ironic, fatalistic reading of the domestic scene between Angel and Tess, which thus morphs into an oppressive parody of genre painting. And like the heavy portraits riveted in the wall, objects start to mushroom in the house and take on dwarfing or enthralling qualities as the chapter unfolds. On the other hand, the proliferation of objects in Golden Age Dutch genre paintings, such as Cornelis de Man’s The Chess Players (ca. 1670; Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest) hints rather at the comforts of home, since they are all in place and ready to be used. The woman is sitting pleasantly, her feet perched on a footrest; the bellows and the logs in the bottom-left-hand corner evoke the warmth of a family hearth.
7 In Hardy’s novel, the pictorial description of such abundant objects does not provide the same soothing quality, as evidenced by this passage taking place just before Tess confesses her past: A steady crimson glare from the now flameless embers painted the sides and back of the fireplace with its colour, and the well-polished andirons, and the old brass tongs that would not meet. The underside of the mantel-shelf was flushed with the blood-coloured light, and the legs of the table nearest the fire. Tess’s face and neck reflected the same warmth, which each gem turned into an Aldebaran or a Sirius – a constellation of white, red, and green flashes, that interchanged their hues with her every pulsation. (Hardy 1998, 223)
8 The isotopy of warmth and light, and the details about the fireplace objects introduce a parallel with genre painting. Yet here the pictorial quality given by the references to the colours of the scene leads to a degraded version of a genre painting. The light and colours are vivid and violent, as indicated by strong nouns such as “glare” and “flashes”. The chromatic scale is reduced to one deep colour at first, that of the fire, conveying a feeling of oppressive, monochromatic atmosphere. This is reinforced by the accumulation of words referring to this colour: “crimson”, “flushed”, “blood-
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coloured”. The excess of colour and light draws the reader’s attention both to the pictoriality of the scene and, also, to its unsettling dimension: the abundance of warmth and of violent hues makes this indoor scene stifling. The presence of the objects also adds to this feeling of a suffocating atmosphere. Indeed, the objects described are at the same time too clean and too old: the clean andirons will get dirty and sooty with smoke and ashes; the brass tongs cannot be used either, since they “would not meet”, the modal insisting on this uselessness, somehow reproaching these tongs for a conscious refusal. Besides, these objects are somewhat heavy objects, as shown by the reference to the metals out of which they are made. These precisions may be linked to Tess’s position in her new domestic life, a connection being made between the objects and herself, as they share and reflect the “same warmth”. These metallic objects keep Tess tethered to her new social position – just as her necklace seems to rope her down, since the hues of its gems are inherently connected to her breathing, suggesting that the necklace sticks to her body. The objects in this scene build quite a different atmosphere compared to their presence in seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting. In Hardy’s novel, they rather hint at an oppressive, stultifying domesticity to which women are to be submitted. The reference to Dutch genre painting therefore acts as a reminder of the discrepancy between these two types of domesticity.
9 Tess tries hard, but she does not fit: she will never be the domestic Angel in the House. Her inalterable identity is that of a woman “with a basket and a bundle” (Hardy 1998, 272) – similar to Golden Age Dutch portraits of “anonymous people” (Todorov 18) characterized only by the objects they wear or carry in the pictures.3 Her position is that of an outcast, stuck in a marginal in-betweenness, just like the blood-stained paper floating in front of Angel’s parents’ house when she contemplates the possibility of asking them for help in chapter 44 – she is “too flimsy to rest, yet too heavy to fly away” (Hardy 1998, 298). The veiling of her past, as well as the showy jewels Angel made her wear before her confession, are described by him as a “grotesque prestidigitation” (228). Tess’s inability to fit in is mirrored in her grotesque, yet moving, misuse of domestic objects. The carving knife from the breakfast table at the end of the novel is indeed used not for cooking but for murder. Likewise, the distressing scene of Sorrow’s burial in chapter 14 is made even more stirring by the references to objects: Tess bravely made a little cross of two laths and a piece of string, and having bound it with flowers, she stuck it up at the head of the grave […] putting at the foot also a bunch of the same flowers in a little jar of water to keep them alive. What matter was it that on the outside of the jar the eye of mere observation noted the words ‘Keelwell’s Marmalade’? The eye of maternal affection did not see them in its vision of higher things. (Hardy 1998, 97)
10 The objects are out of place, just as Tess is doing what she is not expected to do. While the original function of the marmalade jar hints at a proper form of domesticity (cooking), Tess’s use of it is linked to “higher things”, that is honouring a dead child. In so doing, the text seems to suggest an absurd discrepancy between the “maternal affection” expected from women and the down-to-earth way it should be materialised – in domesticity, symbolized by the jar. Tess is here an epitome of “maternal affection”, not because she uses the jar properly (for cooking), but precisely because she misuses it, to honour her dead child. While testifying to Tess’s marginalization, the objects still hint at the dignity she shows facing the unstoppable chain of events she has to cope with.
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11 Tess cannot escape her fate: all happiness is bound to collapse for her; and again, objects signal this inevitability throughout the novel. Commodified by her mother who embellishes her before meeting the d’Urbervilles – “Do what you like with me mother” (Hardy 1998, 49) –, and by Alec whose first question when meeting her is “Where do you live? What are you?” (41), Tess sees her baby objectified as well when she is about to breastfeed him as she is working in the fields in chapter 14: she is described as “carrying in her arms what at first sight seemed to be a doll” (89). More clearly, Tess and Angel’s chapter of bliss at the dairy is doomed to be threatened by the metaphorical presence of doors – an object, or part of the house, which, when open, seems to announce Tess’s unfortunate choices to come, for instance when she will meet Alec again, magically transformed into a preacher, and of whom she will catch a glimpse through an open door4. At these non-human hours they could get quite close to the water-fowl. Herons came, with a great bold noise as of opening doors and shutters, out of the boughs of a plantation which they frequented […] or, if already on the spot, hardily maintained their standing in the water as the pair walked by, watching them by moving their heads round in a slow, horizontal, passionless wheel, like the turn of puppets by clockwork. (Hardy 1998, 131)
12 The unsettling comparison of such noble birds as the herons with doors introduces here an ominous element in the peaceful setting. The reification of the herons – which is also the name of the place where Tess will stab Alec to his death – is complete in this description as they are turned into puppets, pieces of machinery as the word “clockwork” suggests. The jarring quality of the passage therefore stems from the materialization of danger in the shape of doors and shutters, and at the same time, from the textual annihilation of human figures: the poetic “non-human hours” then take on a literal, much darker connotation, as objects storm the place. Objects are indeed fraught with symbolical functions in the novel; but such is their omnipresence that they also progressively become genuine subjects, leading Hardy to let us hear “the voices of inanimate things” (Hardy 1998, 118).
2. An aesthetics of objects
13 As the voices of inanimate things grow louder, the characters are sometimes silenced, creating an inversion of properties. As Angel leaves the dairy in chapter 25, a series of hypallages has the parts of the house itself cry out Tess’s mute despair. In a sort of “object” version of pathetic fallacy, gables, brick, windows, mortar, door beckon, smile, coax, breathe forth “Stay!”, while Tess remains silent and is reduced to her professional position – albeit in a poetic, sentimental way – as “a milkmaid” (Hardy 1998, 154).
14 Progressively, objects manage to take up more and more space; and in highly visual descriptions, they become the subjects of paintings highlighting their durability contrary to human characters. As Isabelle Gadoin suggested in her analysis of Far from the Madding Crowd, the word “vanity” crops up throughout Hardy’s novels and may act as a caption for a literary vanitas (Gadoin 296). This is what can be found in chapter 34: the jewels offered by Angel, which Tess is wearing while confessing her past, trigger a pictorial reflection upon vanity. Angel muses over these luxurious items, “these showy ornaments”, and acknowledges that “they gleamed somewhat ironically now” before thinking eventually that “it was but a question of vanity throughout” (Hardy 1998, 220).
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The ashes under the grate were lit by the fire vertically, like a torrid waste. Her imagination beheld a Last Day luridness in this red-coaled glow, which fell on his face and hand, and on hers, peering into the loose hair about her brow, and firing the delicate skin underneath. A large shadow of her shape rose upon the wall and ceiling. She bent forward, at which each diamond on her neck gave a sinister wink like a toad’s; and […] entered on her story. (Hardy 1998, 225)
15 A sense of ending and mortality prevails in this passage, and the whole scene revolves around the jewels. The passing of time is suggested by the reference to the “ashes” which, as the remains of a fire, insist on the inevitability of burning away and progressive decomposition, the violence of which is reinforced by the striking “Last- Day luridness” the glow from the coals is endowed with. With the accumulation of words referring to colours and contrasting light and shadows, Hardy is almost overdoing it here, clearly paving the way for the vanitas in which Tess and her jewels appear. The reflection on mortality is put to the fore through the “firing” light peering through Tess’s hair, whose pate – and skull – is protected only by “her delicate skin”. But the most striking element borrowed from this pictorial genre is evidently the presence of the necklace Tess is wearing. The figure of the woman wearing or touching jewels (while looking at herself in a mirror) is recurrent in vanitas paintings, such as Paulus Moreelse’s Vanitas, A Young Woman Seated at Her Dressing Table (1632, private collection). The grotesque comparison between Tess’s glittering necklace and “a toad’s” glistening skin debunks the prestige implied in the jewels, thereby stressing again the discrepancy between these vain ornaments and the confession Tess is about to make – as is also suggested by the adjective “sinister” applied to the no-less ironical “wink” of the necklace. The presence of the toad itself refers to the tradition of vanitas and still- life painting, in which debasing animals (such as a mouse or a rat) often appear to emphasise the vanity of man, whose flesh instincts are as violent as these animals’. The object signals the pictorial dimension of this scene, echoing the tradition of vanitas, as it hints at the decomposition about to take place – that of Angel’s love and respect for Tess after her confession.
16 After Tess’s confession, the description of objects moves onto yet another pictorial tradition, devoid of human figures and highlighting objects: still-lifes. The inanimate things appear frozen, unchanged, contrasting sharply with the dramatic watershed that has occurred in Tess and Angel’s relationship. Clare arose in the light of a dawn that was ashy and furtive, as though associated with crime. The fireplace confronted him with its extinct embers; the spread supper-table, whereon stood the two full glasses of untasted wine, now flat and filmy; her vacated seat and his own; the other articles of furniture, with their eternal look of not being able to help it, their intolerable inquiry what was to be done? (Hardy 1998, 235-236)
17 A change has thus taken place in the setting as well – the ashes of the fire from the precedent scene have been moved onto the colour of the dawn, and the fire is now but “extinct embers”. It looks as though the objects here had attentively witnessed the scene and mirrored this change. Yet in this excerpt they are no longer witnesses. They become the subjects of the scene, and Angel is but a spectator. This impression is conveyed by the verb “confronted”, which gives the fireplace an actual, almost conscious presence, the noun “fireplace” being the subject of the verb. The objects on and around the table however do not really look affected by the change that has occurred (if the wine has turned “flat and filmy”, the glasses themselves have not changed, nor have they been moved). A freezing spell seems to have been cast on these
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objects, causing them to be immortalised in their position, as evidenced by the nominal phrases and the verb “stood”. Even the element that has altered, the wine, is somehow caught up in an inert state: the alliteration in [f] (“full”, “flat”, “filmy”) endows the description of the glasses of wine with a monotonous, unchanged rhythm, which is in keeping with the frozen aspect of the other objects, precisely designated with definite articles, whereas the new dawn, synonymous with change, is “a dawn”. Therefore, the immobility of objects and their position as the subjects of the scene, give to the passage the appearance of a still-life painting, as the phrase “their eternal look” also suggests.
18 This scene from the novel is reminiscent of still-lifes, such as Pieter Claesz’s Still-life with Wine Glass and Silver Bowl (1635; Gemäldegalerie, Berlin), which foregrounds the disproportionate presence of the objects and, in so doing, stresses the ephemerality of (vain) pleasures and the absence – or at least, the powerlessness – of human figures, just like the empty chairs from the novel – the object of absence par excellence. This oppressive dimension of the indifferent objects is very close to the suggestive force they are given in still-lifes, which makes the tragic tone of the novel even more harrowing as it is progressively devoid of human presence. In chapter 35, this invasion of objects and their powerful presence even turn them into hellish beings more likely to be found in one’s nightmares. The fire in the grate looked impish – demoniacally funny, as if it did not care the least about her strait. The fender grinned idly, as if it too did not care. The light from the water-bottle was merely engaged in a chromatic problem. All material objects around announced their irresponsibility with terrible iteration. (Hardy 1998, 227)
19 Yet, as Hardy advocated “Art as disproportion” (Higonnet 29), the aggrandizing of objects is also a way for the novel to voice the beauty of the insignificant, to which Tess appears particularly sensitive. When Tess’s family are being forced out of their dwelling in chapter 52 and are waiting outdoors for another house, with all their possessions, the objects are given a genuine living presence. Tess gazed desperately at the pile of furniture. The cold sunlight of this spring evening peered invidiously upon the crocks and kettles, upon the bunches of dried herbs shivering in the breeze, upon the brass handles of the dresser, upon the wicker-cradle they had all been rocked in, and upon the well-rubbed clock-case, all of which gave out the reproachful gleam of indoor articles exposed to the vicissitudes of a roofless exposure for which they were never made. (Hardy 1998, 362)
20 Tess’s displacement here again parallels the way the indoor objects themselves are displaced outdoors. Yet it is also a sign of Hardy’s beautiful fascination for the microcosm, the world of details. A sense of exposure and uneasiness prevails in this passage with the peering light and the herbs that look cold in the breeze. The repetition of the word “upon” insists on this violent ill-treatment of the objects. Besides, their accumulation is both physical – they are “a pile of furniture” – and textual, as the length of the sentence and the enumeration of nouns suggest. This accumulation makes the presence of the objects very strong, as though they were genuine living beings. The contrast between the fine materials referred to – “the brass handles” or “the well-rubbed clock-case” – and the way the objects are treated create a very moving tone. To me, this excerpt discloses Hardy’s refusal of any polarization, as the objects that may be deemed insignificant are given as much importance – and beauty – as the human figures.
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21 Purely realistic approaches to Hardy’s novel could lead one to overlook the abundant presence of objects in Tess or, at the very least, to see them as mundane realia, sheer tokens of an accurate description of country life in late Victorian England. Yet Hardy’s insistence on these domestic presences, and the way they are connected to the pictoriality of his writing, invites the reader to take another look and examine their importance. As parts of Hardy’s reappropriation of Golden Age Dutch painting, objects are used both to create pictorial reminiscences and to question the stability and legitimacy of such values as domesticity. Far from erasing human presences, the importance given to objects is a sign of Hardy’s highly humane and sensitive perception in his novels.
22 As Tess is walking towards Angel’s parents’ house and finds herself facing again the Vale of Blackmoor, the narrator notes that “[b]eauty to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized” (Hardy 1998, 297). But all in all, I would argue that Hardy’s close, sometimes humble attention to little things and his aesthetics of objects in Tess of the d’Urbervilles are a way for him to offer a pictorialization of the ordinary, revealing that, to him, beauty does also lie in the thing.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arasse, Daniel, Le Détail : Pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture (1992), Paris : Flammarion, 2014.
Berger, Sheila, Thomas Hardy and Visual Structures: Framing, Disruption, Process, New York: New York UP, 1990.
Bullen, Barrie, The Expressive Eye: Fiction and Perception in the Work of Thomas Hardy, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986.
Franits, Wayne, Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting: Its Stylistic and Thematic Evolution, Yale: Yale UP, 2008.
Gadoin, Isabelle, “Thomas Hardy, peintre hollandais ?”, Études anglaises 63 (2010): 289-304.
Goater, Thierry, Thomas Hardy, Figures de l’aliénation, Rennes: PU de Rennes, 2010.
Hammer-Tugendhat, Daniela, The Visible and the Invisible: On Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015.
Hardy, Thomas, The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, eds. R. L. Purdy, Richard & M. Millgate, Oxford: Clarendon, 1978.
Hardy, Thomas, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Millgate, Michael, London: Palgrave, 1984.
Hardy, Thomas, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), ed. Tim Dolin, London: Penguin, 1998.
Hecht, Peter, Senses and Sins: Dutch Painters of Daily Life in the Seventeenth Century, Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2004.
Hedgcock, F.A., Thomas Hardy, Penseur et Artiste, Paris: Hachette, 1911.
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Higonnet, Margaret, “Introduction”, in Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ed. Tim Dolin, London: Penguin, 1998.
Jackson-Houlston, C. M., “Phenology or Dutch Genre Painting? A Case Study of a Hardy Description in Far from the Madding Crowd”, Thomas Hardy Journal 18.3 (2002): 60-71.
Le Floc’h, Sylvain, Sous le silence du ciel : Tess d’Urberville de Thomas Hardy, Pau: Vallongues, 2008.
Munshower, Susans S. and Roland Fleischer, The Age of Rembrandt: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting, Pennsylvania: Penn State Department of Art History, 2002.
Nishimura, Satoshi, “Thomas Hardy and the Language of the Inanimate”, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 43.4 (Autumn 2003): 897-912.
Page, Norman, Thomas Hardy (1977), Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2012.
Schwartz, Gary, Machiel Keestra, Anna Tummers & Thijs Weststeijn, Emotions: Pain and Pleasure in Dutch Painting of the Golden Age, Rotterdam: nai010 Publishers, 2015.
Tapié, Alain (dir.), Les Vanités dans la peinture du XVIIe siècle, Paris: Musée du Petit Palais, 1990.
Todorov, Tzvetan, Éloge du quotidien : Essai sur la peinture hollandaise du XVIIe siècle, Paris : Seuil, 1997.
Yeazell, Ruth B., Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel, Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007.
Wilson, Keith (ed.), A Companion to Thomas Hardy, Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
Wilson, Keith (ed.), Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate, Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006.
NOTES
1. See Yeazell. 2. See Jackson-Houlston, Bullen, Gadoin. 3. This “anonymous” quality is particularly noticeable in Frans Hals’s portraits: whereas his numerous portraits of wealthy, renowned personages bear, as titles, only the name of the figure represented (Jacob Pietersz Olycan, for instance in Portrait of Jacob Olycan (1596–1638), 1625, Mauritshuis), the titles of his less numerous portraits of common people put the stress on the objects depicted with “a boy” or “a woman“, such as Young Man with a Skull (ca. 1626, National Gallery) or A Boy with a Glass and a Lute (1626, Guildhall Gallery). 4. Contrary to the few seventeenth-century Dutch exterior genre paintings, in which open doors often appear, as an invitation to go back into the indoor peacefulness, such as Pieter de Hooch’s A Boy Bringing Bread (ca. 1663, Wallace Collection) or his The Courtyard of a House in Delft (1658, National Gallery).
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ABSTRACTS
In his entry for 1 July 1892, Hardy notes: “The art of observation […] consists in this: the seeing of great things in little things, the whole in the part – even the infinitesimal part.” His novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles stages the heroine’s struggle to comply with the Victorian ideal of feminine morality, as she strives for redemption after her initial “downfall”. One of the key features of that ideal was domesticity, embodied in the figure of the Angel in the House – a figure which Tess is desperately trying to impersonate throughout the novel. In that sense, the presence of household objects in Tess could be read as the presence of “little things”, insignificant details, hinting at “greater things” – that is, the struggle for domesticity. Yet the proliferation of objects leads the reader to see them also as a part of the aesthetic aspirations of the novel, which is fraught with pictorial reminiscences, such as genre paintings or still-lifes, in which objects play a key role, to the extent of sometimes becoming the sole subject of the picture. This study aims at exploring the way Hardy questions the frontier between subject and object by blurring the characteristics of animate and inanimate, the two being united in the motionless world of painting. Hardy’s novel leads one to wonder whether the way he lends a voice to what is ordinary, sometimes barely noticeable and perhaps almost insignificant, necessarily implies a reification of the human figures. In a word, can the object be a subject?
Hardy affirme dans son journal à la date du 1er juillet 1892 : « L’art de l’observation […] consiste en ceci : savoir distinguer de grandes choses dans les petites choses, le tout dans la partie, même dans la partie infinitésimale. » L’héroïne éponyme de son roman Tess d’Urberville s’efforce de correspondre à l’idéal victorien de moralité féminine, dont l’un des traits les plus importants était la domesticité, incarnée par la figure de l’Ange du foyer, que Tess essaie désespérément de devenir tout au long du roman. En ce sens, la présence d’objets du quotidien dans Tess pourrait être perçue comme celle de « petites choses », de détails insignifiants, révélant de « grandes choses », telle la poursuite de cet idéal de domesticité. La prolifération d’objets conduit toutefois à les considérer également comme partie prenante des aspirations esthétiques du roman, qui est ponctué de réminiscences picturales (peinture de genre, nature morte), dans lesquelles les objets jouent un rôle essentiel, au point d’en devenir parfois l’unique sujet. Cette étude se propose donc d’explorer la façon dont Hardy, grâce à ces tableaux littéraires, interroge la frontière entre sujet et objet, entre animé et inanimé, qu’il réunit dans le monde immobile de la peinture. Le roman de Hardy invite à se demander si la voix qu’il offre à ce qui est ordinaire, peut-être même insignifiant, induit nécessairement une réification des sujets humains. En un mot, l’objet peut-il être un sujet ?
INDEX oeuvrecitee Tess of the d’Urbervilles Keywords: object, painting, pictorial, domesticity Mots-clés: objet, peinture, pictural, domesticité
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AUTHOR
LUDOVIC LE SAUX Ludovic Le Saux is a PhD student at Sorbonne Université where he teaches literature and translation. His main field of study is nineteenth-century British literature (especially poetry) and art (painting and decorative arts). His thesis focuses on William Morris’s poetry and its connections with art, materiality and the senses.
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The Footprint as Object in Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887) and Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly (1895) La trace de pas comme objet dans The Woodlanders de Thomas Hardy (1887) et Almayer’s Folly de Joseph Conrad (1895)
Jane Thomas
1 This paper focuses on the motif of the footprint in Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887) and Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly (1895) and seeks to demonstrate the ways in which “objects” become “things” by virtue of their “excess” – and in particular by their enhanced relationship to a subject in this case George Melbury and Kaspar Almayer – the fathers of the individuals who, unconsciously, made the marks. I have no evidence that Conrad read Hardy’s twelfth published novel before he published his first, but the plots are remarkably similar in their focus on the attempts by two fathers – the timber merchant George Melbury and the trader Kaspar Almayer – to improve and secure their social status through the education and politic marriages of their daughters Grace and Nina1. We might speculate on the complementary roles of Marty South and Taminah, the Siamese slave girl owned by the rice farmer Bulangi, who personify the more extreme disempowerment of individual woman by the impersonal forces of class and slavery. We might also explore how both Grace and Nina, the latter more decisively, reject the culture that has been imposed upon them in favour of what they come to regard as their true origins, the frequent use of tribal and racial metaphors to describe the rural inhabitants of Hintock and their comparison to Pacific islanders and note that, having dropped her purse in the woods, Grace comments: “‘Money is of little more use at Hintock than on Crusoe’s island; there’s hardly any way of spending it’” (Hardy 1981, 135). For the purpose of this paper, however, the footprint as object/thing is my focus.
2 In 1978 the earliest fossil hominin footprints in the world were unearthed in Laetoli, northern Tanzania, on a cemented ash layer produced by a volcanic eruption. They are
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3.66 million years old and were made by two bipedal individuals moving on the same palaeosurface and in the same direction (see Masao et al.). From these tracks palaeontologists gleaned information regarding the stature, weight, and gait of these individuals, as well as their sexual dimorphism, behaviour and variability and direction of travel. In 2012 Robert McFarlane described the experience of following a prehistoric footprint trail just north of Liverpool, UK, at Formby Point – one of several thousand footprint trails “laid down in the stacked silt strata like a growing pile of pages” (McFarlane 362-363). There is something deeply moving about these fossil records which have transformed the ethereal, delible and immaterial naked footprint into records of individual journeys made by our remotest ancestors in certain moments in deep time. In the case of the footprints at Formby Point the record, once uncovered, will last only until “the next strong tide or storm, when it in turn is lifted off to uncover the one beneath” (361). Each of these footprints represents a single, unrepeatable and probably unconscious act. For their modern-day human discoverers however, they are ciphers; revealing the text of the life of a human being in a series of codes which form partial narratives which we inform with our own experience. The footprints invite us to inhabit them, to imagine who made them, the circumstances of their journey and the relationships between the individuals: to imagine ourselves walking in the literal footsteps of our ancient ancestors and to decipher their story and its relevance to ourselves.
3 The idea of a subjective, if imaginary, encounter with our remote progenitors through the marks they made in the ash of an extinct volcano, or in ancient estuarine mud, accords well with Bill Brown’s definition of the “object” and the “thing” in Critical Enquiry (2001). Objects, he suggests, disclose information about history, society, nature, culture – about us – but “we only catch a glimpse of things” in our direct and subjective encounter with the object. We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily. The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation. (Brown 4)
4 “Things” suggest “what is excessive in objects”, what exceeds the objects’ material or utile properties, when they become “values, fetishes, idols, and totems […]. [T]hingness amounts to latency (the not yet formed or the not yet formable) and to an excess (what remains physically or metaphysically irreducible to objects) […]. [A]ll at once, the thing seems to name the object just as it is even as it names some thing else (sic)” (Brown 5, original italics). Human actors encode things with significance so that the question is not what things are but what work they perform. As Bruno Latour asserts, “things do not exist without being full of people” (Latour qtd in Brown 12), and the footprint is one of the most pregnant examples of this co-dependency.
5 For the Norse and Celtic races, the carved image of a shod foot going towards water symbolised the soul, within in its physical body, approaching death and dissolution. The naked footprint is the image of the disembodied soul returning to its spiritual home. It is a sign of purity and vulnerability – baring one’s soul – removing the actual and spiritual barrier between oneself and the natural world: for, to quote Gerard Manley Hopkins in “God’s Grandeur”, “nor can foot feel being shod”. The Buddha is
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supposed to have left an imprint of his foot on a stone near to Kusinara as reminder to his followers of his continuing presence on earth. The footprint also functions as a metaphor for the outline of the space a building takes up on the earth, as well as for the total impact that a thing – a building, a human, a car, a city – has on the earth in terms of its carbon emissions.
6 In human terms, the footprint marks the direct point of contact between an individual and the material world. It is also the mark of the material world’s contact with the individual her/himself. As such the footprint offers itself as a thing to be filled with significance – to be encountered. Just as an intaglio design carries the ink which will produce the image, the human footprint, Palaeolithic or Anthropocene, carries a signifying power beyond its object-function. Grace Melbury’s reference to “Crusoe’s island” is relevant here in relation to the effect of the “print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to see in the sand”, and which leaves Robinson Crusoe, who has longed for human company, “thunderstruck”, “terrified”, “like one pursued” (Defoe, chapter 11). Nor is it possible, he tells the reader, “to describe how many various shapes affrighted imagination represented things to me in, how many wild ideas were found every moment in my fancy, and what strange unaccountable whimsies came into my thoughts by the way” (Defoe).
7 A curious doubling, or splitting, occurs between Crusoe and the “apparition” he imagines has made the print, which leads him to feel “out of himself”. Initially Crusoe is comforted by the thought that the footprint is his own, until discovering that his foot is larger than the naked shape in the sand before him. While his reaction demonstrates what Stephen Curkpatrick describes as “an antipathy to the other” (Curkpatrick 249), it also demonstrates an antipathy to the spectre (or apparition) of his colonial self, as he imagines his island, his kingdom under threat of hostile invasion. This “haunting trace of another” initially provokes a paradoxical desire “to eliminate any discernible trace of his existence on the island for others to find […], to remove all traces of himself”. Crusoe follows this with a frantic attempt to strengthen his fortress against an imagined assault and to curtail all his activities for fear of betraying his existence to a hostile invader. As Curkpatrick suggests, this has the effect of “closing down Crusoe’s sense of future” for two years during which “his imagination turns from inventiveness for survival to inventions of violence” and the urge to destroy the other (250).
8 Several of Hardy’s reviewers and critics have examined thematic and stylistic features common to both Hardy and Conrad, but I’d like to pick up on J. Hillis Miller’s discussion of Hardy’s modernism in the Blackwell Companion to Hardy edited by Keith Wilson, in which Miller discerns in Hardy and Conrad, among other indicators of modernism, “an increased attention to the registering of ‘irrelevant details’” which goes beyond their quotidian or historical function. The modernist text, Miller suggests, “often involves the careful and deliberate synthesizing of a whole text around a complex system of recurrent metaphors and symbols, so that every detail counts” (Miller 434). I argue here that the footprint provides just such an “irrelevant detail” in both The Woodlanders and Almayer’s Folly and, in the former particularly, performs the synthesizing function that Miller regards as symptomatic of the modernist text. In addition, the footprint illustrates the transition from object to thing in its representation of the objectification of, and subjective investment in, Grace Melbury and Nina Almayer by their respective fathers, which, as in Defoe’s novel, assumes an enhanced significance for the future of George Melbury and contributes to the stultification and paralysis of Kaspar Almayer.
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9 The footprint functions as a leitmotif in The Woodlanders from the reader’s introduction to Little Hintock on the opening page of the novel – where the narrator invites us to imagine “the blistered soles” that have trodden and formed the “forsaken coach-road” from Bristol to the south shore of England which both passes and leads out from it – to Grace’s encounter with Tim Tang’s man trap, from which she is saved by her fleetness of foot, but which effects her reconciliation with the errant Fitzpiers. It features less so in Almayer’s Folly, but is of equal significance, not least in the poignant scene of Nina’s final confrontation with her father before she abandons him for the Balinese prince, Dain Maroola.
10 Shortly before Grace Melbury’s return to Hintock from boarding school, the insomniac Melbury is discovered by his wife inspecting the path leading from his cottage. Tormented by the “wrong” he did to Giles Winterbourne’s father, by luring his fiancée away to become his own first wife and Grace’s mother, Melbury’s guilt is exacerbated by his lack of provision for Grace’s future and his vow to give her as a gift to Giles by way of amends. He has spared no expense in educating Grace “so as to make the gift as valuable a one as it lay in his power to bestow” but in consequence fears he is “wasting her (sic) to give her to a man of no higher standing than he” (Hardy 1981, 20): He took the candle from her hand, held it to the ground, and removed a tile which lay in the garden path. “Tis the track of her shoe that she made when she ran down here, the day before she went away all those months ago. I covered it up when she was gone; and when I come here to look at it I ask myself again, why should she be sacrificed to a poor man?” (Hardy 1981, 21).
11 For Melbury, Grace’s footprint is a synecdochic representation of Grace herself, not as she is but as he projects her, not as she was then but what she will become in her journey away from her home and her father. It is also therefore the spectre or apparition of Melbury’s self-projection through his daughter. It embodies his subjective investment of his capital in her, and her subsequent commodification as capital with the potential for his own social advancement. Though claiming to be adding value to his gift, Melbury also confesses that his determination to educate Grace is the result of his own humiliation as a boy by the Parson’s son when questioned about the Iliad: “They may laugh at me for my ignorance; […] [b]ut they shall never laugh at my children, if I have any: I’ll starve first!” (Hardy 1981, 32).
12 Kaspar Almayer’s hopes are likewise pinned on his beautiful daughter, Nina, whom he has sent away for ten years at the age of six to be educated by nuns in Singapore. Awaiting the return of Dain, who has agreed to search for the river and fabled treasure promised to him by Almayer’s father-in-law (the English adventurer and trader Tom Lingard, who adopted and educated Nina’s Malayan mother), Almayer dreams of a life in Europe with his daughter: “They would be rich and respected. Nobody would think of her mixed blood in the presence of her great beauty and of his immense wealth. Witnessing her triumphs he would grow young again, he would forget the twenty-five years of heart-breaking struggle on this coast where he felt like a prisoner” (Conrad 5). In rebellion against her convent life where, like Grace Melbury, she has been subjected to disdain because of her origins (though in Nina’s case it is because of her mixed blood rather than her social class), Nina rejects “the white side of her descent represented by a feeble and traditionless father” and embraces her Malayan heritage: “After all it was her life; it was going to be her life, and so thinking she fell more and more under the influence of her mother’ and her tales of the vanished glories of the Rajahs ‘from whose
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race she had sprung’” (43). Finally, Nina deserts Almayer to accompany her lover Dain, who is in flight from the Dutch authorities. The final meeting between father and daughter takes place on a small islet in the mouth of the river from where she and Dain plan to escape to Bali by boat. A stunned Almayer regards the footprints made in the sand by his departing daughter, whom he will never see again: Now she was gone his business was to forget, and he had a strange notion that it should be done systematically and in order […]. [H]e fell on his hands and knees, and creeping along the sand, erased carefully with his hand all traces of Nina’s footsteps. He piled up small heaps of sand, leaving behind him a line of miniature graves right down to the water. After burying the last slight imprint of Nina’s slipper he stood up, and, turning his face towards the headland where he had last seen the prau, he made an effort to shout out loud again his firm resolve to never forgive. […] He brought his foot down with a stamp. He was a firm man – firm as a rock. Let her go. He never had a daughter. He would forget. He was forgetting already. (Conrad 196)
13 The fathers’ fetishization of the daughters’ footprints reveals both the latency and excess of the object-as-thing. In each case the footprint represents not only the idealised, triumphant future figure of the daughter as lady, but also the father as sole proprietor, and beneficiary, of that triumph. As in Robinson Crusoe the footprint represents a spectral other manifested in and by the social ambitions of the man who seeks to profit from patriarchal and colonial systems of exchange, but which threatens to close down the futures of both father and daughter as self-determining human beings. Almayer’s defiant attempt to replace Nina’s departing footprints with his own (“He brought his foot down with a stamp”) emphasises his futile attempt to obliterate her subjectivity with his own while drawing attention to the pathos of his folly.
14 In contrast to Nina, Grace capitulates to the pull of wealth and position instilled in her by her father and is eventually reconciled with her philandering husband. Though she is saved from serious injury and possible death by her light step on the mantrap set for Fitzpiers by the cuckolded Tim Tangs, the symbolism is inescapable. Evading the jaws of the trap, which has sunk its teeth into the silk of her discarded gown, Grace enters the circumscribing arms of her husband who removes her from her father’s sight to a Midland town two hundred miles away.
15 Almayer’s systematic burial of Nina’s footprints symbolises not only the death of his ambitions but also the death of the spectral self through which he has lived since his forced marriage to her mother. Nina is more than dead to him, he seeks to erase all trace of her existence from his own: “Certain things had to be taken out of his life, stamped out of sight, destroyed forgotten” (Conrad 199). Almayer’s attempt to stamp Nina out of his memory by obliterating her footstep with his own is futile as he has no existence outside of his existence in and through her. As with Crusoe, the “haunting trace” of the other obliterates all traces of himself and, in a shocking act of symbolic filicide (or natacide), Almayer’s burial of Nina’s footprints foreshadows his own near entombment in his unfinished and rotting house. Ironically, and fittingly perhaps, each “miniature grave” lends the delible footprints an enhanced symbolic significance, serving less to obliterate than to emphasise by bringing them into stark relief. The artificial preservation of Grace’s print (and Melbury’s ambitions) is achieved through a similar act of entombment beneath a tile. Both fathers fetishize the footprints left by their daughters in the act of leaving them for journeys that will separate them irrevocably in terms of sympathies as well as miles.
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16 Bill Brown reminds us of W.J.T. Mitchell’s recognition of how the discovery of “a new kind of object”, the fossil, “enabled romanticism to recognize and to refigure its relation to the mortal limits of the natural world” (Brown 5). Pat Shipman broadly defines a fossil as “any trace, impression, or remains of a once-living organism” (Shipman 1). Like those of Grace and Nina, the fossilised footprints of the Laetoli hominins made 3.66 million years ago are daily subjected to the depredations of time and tides, though the process is many times more protracted. Nevertheless, in each case the traces left by the departing daughters force their fathers to reconsider their relationships to their romanticized conceptions of their daughters and to their own mortality. If a footprint measures the impact of a thing, those of Grace and Nina measure their impact upon the men who seek to live vicariously through them. They represent the future selves each man has projected onto the young women, and their own metaphoric deaths: in Almayer’s case his actual death. At the same time, the footprint as “object-thing” serves as an emblem of patriarchal control and exchange and, in their clear direction of travel away from the father and towards the husband, those of Grace and Nina function as a poignant reminder of the limited journeys available to women in the late nineteenth-century colonial world.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brown, Bill, “Thing Theory”, Critical Inquiry 28.1, “Things” (Autumn 2001): 1-22.
Curkpatrick, Stephen, “The Footprint in the Sand: Providence, Invention, and Alterity in Robinson Crusoe”, Pacifica 15 (October 2002): 247-265.
Conrad, Joseph, Almayer’s Folly and Tales of Unrest, J.M. Dent: London and Toronto, 1923.
Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe (1719),
Hardy, Thomas, The Woodlanders (1887), ed. Dale Kramer, Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1981.
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, The Poems, ed. Robert Bridges, London: Humphrey Milford, 1918.
Masao, Fidelis T., Elgidius B. Ichumbaki, Marco Cherin et al., “New footprints from Laetoli (Tanzania) provide evidence for marked body size variation in early hominins”, e-Life (14 December 2016),
Miller, J. Hillis, “Modernist Hardy: Hand-Writing in The Mayor of Casterbridge”, in A Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. Keith Wilson, Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2009, 433-449.
McFarlane, Robert, The Old Ways, London: Penguin, 2012.
Purdy, R.L. & Michael Millgate (eds.), Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy (6 vols.), Oxford: OUP, 1987.
Shipman, Pat, Life History of a Fossil: An Introduction to Taphonomy and Paleoecology, Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1981.
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Wilson, Keith (ed.), A Companion to Thomas Hardy, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2009.
NOTES
1. In Thomas Hardy: Poet and Novelist (1921), presented to Hardy by the author, Samuel Chew notes a similarity between the opening of Conrad’s and Ford Maddox Ford’s Romance: A Novel (1903) and the setting of Hardy’s “A Distracted Preacher”. In Florence Hardy’s notes on Chew’s book, Hardy adds “It should be vice versa, ‘The Distracted Preacher’ having been written thirty years before the other” (Purdy & Millgate, vol. 6, 155-157).
ABSTRACTS
The paper looks at the significance of the footprint in Hardy’s The Woodlanders and Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly. Both texts feature a footprint (or set of footprints) made by a daughter who is forced to carry the hopes and social/imperial ambitions of her father. In both cases the empty footprint is a signifier of the presence and absence of the person who made it. Where Melbury seeks to preserve Grace’s footprint by placing a slate or flat stone over it, Almayer carefully and methodically seeks to erase the prints left by the departing Nina, not by brushing them but by burying each of them in its own small tomb of sand. We could also read Melbury’s attempts to preserve Grace’s footprint as a form of entombment, in which case the footprint can be read as signifying the death of the daughter as autonomous subject and her preservation as signifier and carrier of fatherly ambition. Linking these texts to the most famous footprint of all, that left by Man Friday on Robinson Crusoe’s “desert” island, the paper reads both texts in the light of theories of Empire and Imperialism. Both Melbury and Almayer seek to cultivate, and trade their daughters on the marriage market, in order to secure social (and trade) advantages for themselves. In The Woodlanders this may be set against the colonisation and cultivation of Hintock Wood and the labour of the woodlanders themselves. In Almayer’s Folly, the attempted trading of the mixed-race Nina takes place against the background of her father’s failed trading enterprises in the Borneo Jungle.
L’article se penche sur la signification donnée à une trace de pas dans le roman de Hardy The Woodlanders, et celui de Conrad, Almayer’s Folly. Ces deux textes montrent un père cherchant à imposer ses ambitions sociales/coloniales à sa fille ; et dans les deux cas, une trace de pas laissée par la jeune-fille fonctionne comme le signifiant de sa présence-absence. Mais alors que Melbury cherche à préserver la trace de pas de sa fille Grace en la recouvrant d’une pierre plate, Almayer s’emploie avec méthode et acharnement à effacer les traces de sa fille Nina, non pas en les balayant mais en enterrant chacune d’elles sous un petit monticule de sable. Il est possible de lire le geste de Melbury comme un enterrement lui aussi, ce qui ferait de la trace ensevelie le signifiant de la mort de sa fille comme sujet autonome, alors que sa préservation impliquerait que la fille endosse l’ambition de son père. Un lien possible entre ces textes est la trace de pas la plus célèbre de toutes, celle de Vendredi dans Robinson Crusoé, qui permet de relire les épisodes à la lueur des théories sur l’Empire et l’impérialisme. Melbury tout comme Almayer cherche à cultiver et à « vendre » sa fille en mariage, de manière à s’assurer un avantage social ou commercial. Cela se fait dans The Woodlanders sur fond de colonisation et de culture des bois de
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Hintock, par le travail des forestiers eux-mêmes. Dans Almayer’s Folly, la tentative de vendre Nina s’inscrit dans le contexte des entreprises commerciales ratées de son père sans la jungle de Bornéo.
INDEX oeuvrecitee Woodlanders (The), Almayer’s Folly Mots-clés: objet, marchandise, objectivation, colonisation, inhumation, fétichisme, trace de pas, paléontologie, sujet, femme, sujétion Keywords: object, commodification, colonisation, entombment, fetichism, footprint, palaeontology, subject, women, disempowerment
AUTHOR
JANE THOMAS Professor Thomas is an internationally-recognised expert and author of several book and articles on the life and work of Thomas Hardy. Her media appearances include Radio 4's In Our Time and Woman's Hour, BBC 2's Great British Railway Journeys and BBC 4's Books that Made Britain. Professor Thomas also publishes on Victorian sculpture and visual arts, modern and contemporary women's writing, and literature and place. Her research has been funded by the British Academy and the AHRC, she was appointed Research Fellow of the Henry Moore Institute in 2013 and she has been Academic Director of the International Thomas Hardy Conference since 2010. (https://www.hull.ac.uk/faculties/staff-profiles/jane-thomas.aspx, last accessed 23 Sept 2019)
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