FATHOM a French e-journal of Thomas Hardy studies

5 | 2018 Desire and the Expressive Eye Le désir et l'expression du regard

Annie Ramel and Isabelle Gadoin (dir.)

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/fathom/728 DOI: 10.4000/fathom.728 ISSN: 2270-6798

Publisher Association française sur les études sur Thomas Hardy

Electronic reference Annie Ramel and Isabelle Gadoin (dir.), FATHOM, 5 | 2018, « Desire and the Expressive Eye » [Online], Online since 20 April 2018, connection on 03 May 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/fathom/ 728 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/fathom.728

This text was automatically generated on 3 May 2020. 1

EDITOR'S NOTE

This issue is dedicated to the memory of Annie Escuret. The very existence of FATHOM is indebted to her colossal and passionate work on Hardy.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Desire and the “Expressive Eye” Annie Ramel

Articles

Desire and Impaired Eyesight: Thomas Hardy’s Clinical Metaphors of Affect Catherine Lanone

Looking at Adders in The Return of the Native Anna West

The Medusean Eye in Thomas Hardy Annie Ramel

Unconscious Desires in “The Collector Cleans His Picture” Emilie Loriaux

Machinations versus Mechanization: Desire in Thomas Hardy’s “On the Western Circuit” Trish Ferguson

“A woman’s flush of triumph lit her eyes”: Hardy, Darwin, and the Blush Phillip Mallett

“Their glances met”: Looks and Desire in The Mayor of Casterbridge Fabienne Gaspari

The Abyss, the Image and the Turn: Writing Desire in Three Poems by Thomas Hardy Jane Thomas

Blank Letters and Ensnared Eyes in Far from the Madding Crowd Isabelle Gadoin

Other contribution

Hardy in France: Belles Lettres and Popular Culture Peggy Blin-Cordon and Laurence Estanove

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Introduction: Desire and the “Expressive Eye” Introduction : le désir et l’expression du regard

Annie Ramel

EDITOR'S NOTE

Several articles from this issue are being published jointly by FATHOM and the Hardy Review as part of a collaborative work.

“In a Eweleaze Near Weatherbury” (Illustrations 154)

1 Hardy’s famous drawing of a pair of glasses superimposed on a pastoral landscape, an illustration for the poem “In a Eweleaze near Weatherbury”, is chosen by Catherine Lanone as her starting-point in the essay she wrote for this volume. What better illustration could be found for our subject, whose problematics is the connection between desire and the gaze? Indeed the onlooker requires glasses to see the landscape better: are we not all afflicted by some kind of structural myopia, or “misvision”? Does not the Bible repeatedly assert that we have eyes, but cannot see? (see Jeremiah 5:21, Ezekiel 12:2, Mark 4:12 and 8:18). We cannot see, but we want to see. We want to open

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the gate in the foreground of the drawing and have access to what is represented. We want to rub the painting, like Hardy’s collector in “The Collector Cleans his Picture” (a poem studied here by Émilie Loriaux). The desire to see is what psychoanalysis calls the scopic drive.

2 But then, as we gaze at Hardy’s drawing, we are suddenly aware of a possibility: that the picture could be looking back at us, through the peeping-holes of the glasses. Several critics, quoted by Lanone in this volume, have commented on the drawing. Zietlow has pointed out that the glasses do not seem to have lenses, for the vision through them is not modified (Zietlow 4). They cannot assist defective eye-sight. As Linda M. Shires suggests, “maybe it is the present landscape that looks at us, the viewers, through lenses, rather than the reverse” (Shires 142). That analysis is all the more convincing as the arms of the glasses could be pointing either way, towards the onlooker, or towards the landscape. Worn by us, the spectacles might be a help to the human eye. Worn by a viewer at the back of the landscape, they might produce the uncanny effect of the Other’s gaze darting forth in our direction. Just as Linda M. Shires notes the instability of “eye” and “I”, Lanone in her essay suggests reading the “ewe” as a “you” – the “lost addressee”, which is missing in the poem. The “you-leaze” could then be attempting to return our gaze, with the optical aid of the spectacles – which in this case would prove just as ineffective as they are for the viewer, or for the poet.

3 If the viewer is exposed to the Other’s gaze, it can also be argued that the eye of the Other is precisely the object of the viewer’s desire. That beyond the representation of the meek ewes grazing on the leaze, what we really want to see is the “you”, the Other looking at us. Is not human desire a desire for the Other? (see Lacan 1966, 628: “Le désir de l’homme est le désir de l’Autre”). But of course, that desire can never be fulfilled, as the defective glasses clearly indicate, in whichever way one views them. The spectacles are sorely needed, but they do not work. Deprived of lenses, they are just an empty frame, and their equivocal representation – the “visual redundancy” noted by Laurence Estanove (Estanove n.p.) – makes them appear as holes in the picture. A blind spot in the field of vision prevents the viewer’s eye from reaching the Other, and the Other’s gaze from reaching him – which is rather fortunate, all things considered. From her reading of the drawing and of the poem, Lanone infers that the spectacles represent “the distance between the seeing and the scene, […] the split between the eye and the gaze”, in other words the Lacanian “object-gaze” (see Lacan 1973, Lacan 1986) – an analysis to which I wholly subscribe.

4 There are of course many different ways of formulating that idea, with or without Lacan. Most of the articles in this volume revolve around the idea, each in its own perspective, in sundry attempts to approach the question of desire in its relation to the gaze. Brilliantly condensed in Hardy’s drawing, the notion of an irreducible distance separating the “eye / I” looking at the picture from the “you / ewe” staring back at the eye is essential to our reading of Hardy, and we must not lose sight of it as we proceed through this volume on “Desire and the Expressive Eye”. “Distance” is indeed the most relevant word in any attempt to describe the relation between the desiring viewer and the unattainable object he aims at. “Distance as the source of desire”, and “desire as the energy behind attempts to turn distance into closeness”, to quote Joseph Hillis Miller’s famous phrasing (Miller xii). Words may differ from one essay to another: one may speak of “distance”, or of a “gap”, a “split”, but the idea is the same, and we have to start there in order to study desire in the scopic field.

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5 In “Desire and impaired eyesight: Thomas Hardy’s clinical metaphors of affect”, Catherine Lanone considers various clinical terms used by Hardy in several poems, then in Hardy’s fiction. Most of those terms refer to optical devices that attempt “to turn distance into closeness”. Focusing first on the “uncorrective glasses” of “In a Ewelease Near Weatherbury”, on the “emotional myopia” of the poet whose vision is at pains to recapture the lost past, she turns to “The House of Silence” and “At Castle Boterel”, introducing the idea of seeing through, as through an X-Ray device that could reveal the “bare bones” of the past. “Eyes couched of misvision” is a metaphor at the core of “The Spell of the Rose”: it is as though Emma’s death had the power to cure Hardy of the emotional cataract that had blurred his vision during the years of dissent, and to restore clear-sightedness like a surgical operation. In her reading of Far from the Madding Crowd, Lanone continues the paradigm of impaired vision, with the gutta serena that afflicts Bathsheba, the partial vision that first kindles Gabriel’s desire when he peeps at Bathsheba, Joseph Poorgrass’s “multiplying eye”, Boldwood’s blood-shot eyes (an expression to be taken literally) that cause him to turn a blind eye to the world, etc.

6 With the dark lantern carried by Bathsheba, whose shutter normally makes it possible to either mask or diffuse light, we come to a different approach: the lantern here is not an optical device correcting misvision, but one that suddenly emits a dazzling brilliance, which reveals to Bathsheba that she is hooked to a man “brilliant in brass and scarlet”. In this instance, the distance of desire is annulled – temporarily. As Lanone puts it, Bathsheba is literally “caught” by the gaze of the Other, by Troy’s “point-blank” eyes.

7 At this point we switch to a different perspective: from a consummation to be wished, the Other’s gaze turns into something to be dreaded. In an eye-to-eye relation, which tends to abolish the distance between the viewer and the viewed, the Other’s gaze becomes the “evil eye”, full of voracity, endowed with a Medusean power, the power to petrify or to kill. Then some kind of shield, like Perseus’, is necessary for its lethaI power to be deflected, or warded off. That is exactly what Clym says as the The Return of the Native draws to a close: “In the words of Job, ‘I have made a covenant with mine eyes; why then should I think upon a maid?’” (Hardy 1990, 402). A “covenant” with one’s eyes is necessary for tragedy to be ended, which means that some kind of law has to be restored if the gaze is to be tamed and its evil influence corrected. Lanone ends with the sad story of “The Blinded Bird”, a poem that calls for a reading in animal studies, but also raises the question of the connection between voice and gaze: what if voice could only be heard because we have eyes but cannot see all? That is what Žižek says: “we hear things because we cannot see everything” (Žižek 93; original emphasis). And that is also what the villagers in The Return of the Native seem to believe, as the last lines of the novel might suggest: only a man “who could not see” (to do anything else) could take to preaching on Blackbarrow hill. Could Clym’s impaired vision be the reason why his voice can resonate on the heath?

8 Several essays in this volume deal with the question of the gaze as potentially evil. Animal studies is the line followed by Anna West, in “Looking at Adders in The Return of the Native” – but the article goes far beyond the perspectives opened by that field of studies, for it is also a close reading of a literary text. Starting with the face-to-face and eye-to-eye encounter between Mrs Yeobright and the adder, West wonders why Mrs Yeobright averts her eyes in order not to see the adder looking at her. Beyond the readings that view the adder as a metaphor for Eustacia – the adder’s eyes being a

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replica of Eustacia’s ill-wishing eyes – and that situate the scene in the context of local superstitions on “overlooking” and “ill-wishing”, the author argues that animals looking back at humans threaten “the hegemony of human vision”, and so place humans in a position of exposure that they seek to avoid. Animals are not just metaphors in a literary fiction, they exist literally, they are a flesh-and-blood reality in the story, like their human counterparts. West quotes Derrida who feels “naked under the gaze of his cat” and sees the animal looking at him as the “absolute other”, a figure of “absolute alterity”. The essay moves on to the idea that the adder’s gaze deconstructs the narrator’s omniscient gaze, for it introduces the possibility of multiple viewpoints.

9 Annie Ramel, in “The Medusean Eye in Thomas Hardy”, follows a similar train of thought as she focuses on the extreme case of gazes that prove mortal because they stare the viewers in the face. When the distance of desire is abolished, “the energy behind attempts to turn distance into closeness” turns lethal. The article is based on Lacan’s theory of the gaze. It opposes two scenes in Far from the Madding Crowd: Oak surveying the scene of the “pastoral tragedy” that has annihilated his sheep and his hopes, and Boldwood staring at the red seal of the Valentine. In the first example, the frontal view of the pond which glitters like a dead man’s eye is avoided by Oak having to look awry to read the picture as a vanity. Whereas Boldwood’s eyes become one with the red seal of the Valentine, which turns into a bloodstain on his retina, till he faces his own uncanny image in the mirror – a death’s head which is both alien to him and his very double. Here, the Other’s gaze, which is not distinct from his own gaze, stares him in the face and has a lethal power. The author studies two scenes in The Return of the Native where the same logic prevails, and reads “The Withered Arm” in that perspective. It concludes by revisiting the traditional beliefs in “overlooking” and “the evil eye”.

10 With Emilie Loriaux’s “Unconscious Desires in ‘The Collector Cleans his Picture’”, the “evil eye” is not so much the Other’s gaze as the subject’s own eye: the parson- antiquarian telling his story seems to have little regard for the command implied by the biblical quotation under the title of the poem, in which God takes away from Ezechiel (24:16) “the desire of [his] eyes”: “Fili hominis, ecce ego tollo a te desiderabile oculorum tuorum in plaga; Son of man, behold, I take away from thee the desire of thine eyes with a stroke”. Impelled by an irresistible desire to see, he freely indulges his curiosity as he cleans a canvas covered with layers of grime until he discovers the picture of a Venus and finds himself “drunk with the lure of love’s inhibited dreamings”. But lo and behold, the lure of love turns into the lascivious “leer” of a hag, whose finger points slantwise to the horror of “a bosom eaten away of a rot from the lusts of a life-time”. Loriaux reads the poem, in which is encased an ekphrasis of the picture, with a detailed and sensitive attention paid to the poetics of the text, as well as to the textual differences between the successive manuscript versions. She also discusses the central question of art’s relation to truth: is art a means “to produce by a false thing the effect of a true” (Hardy 1989, 226), or is it sheer illusion? Is the picture a lure, or does it reveal the parson’s inhibited fears and desires? Loriaux notes that the parson goes back to his normal duties at the end of the poem: order is finally restored, it seems that the parson has, in conformity with God’s command in Ezechiel, and like Clym, “made a covenant with [his] eyes”.

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11 In her essay on “Machination Versus Mechanization: Desire in Thomas Hardy’s ‘On the Western Circuit’”, Trish Ferguson approaches the subject from the opposite stance: desire is not seen as a potentially lethal drive, but as a force that ensures the perpetuation of human life. Of course, as might be expected, such a view is anything but optimistic. Ferguson situates Hardy’s short-story in the context of the nineteenth century debate over free will and determinism, with references to Darwin’s theory of evolution, Lord Kelvin’s metaphor of the world as a machine, and the philosophical influence of Schopenhauer, Haldane, and Von Hartman, especially as regards Hardy’s concept of the Immanent Will. The merry-go-round where Charles Raye is first attracted to Anna, as he sees her being whirled round and propelled up and down on a mechanical horse, provides the central metaphor of “mechanization”: one might believe that Charles selecting Anna is an act of free will, but as the tale unfolds the “gaze of desire” turns out to be a biologically determined process ultimately leading to Anna’s pregnancy, i.e. serving the interests of the species. The merry-go-round initiates the paradigm of “circulatory systems” followed by Hardy all along the short-story. Edith sending letters to Charles in Anna’s name is a “machination” whereby she seems to be following her own desire and exerting her free will, but it is subordinate to the “animalistic” nature of her response to Charles, as she is sexually drawn to him. The narrator, as the “overseer” of the story (in Foucault’s sense), seems to maintain a superior perspective, the analytical gaze of objectivity – but Hardy the writer can by no means control desire through writing.

12 Phillip Mallett too, in “‘A woman’s flush of triumph lit her eyes’: Hardy, Darwin, and the Blush”, situates the discussion on Hardy’s novels in the context of contemporary science and philosophy. Mallet reads in parallel A Pair of Blue Eyes and Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, both published in 1872. Neither work could have influenced the other, but Darwin and Hardy agree on many points. A Pair of Blue Eyes provides a typology of the blush, whose various forms are also found in Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Woodlanders, Desperate Remedies, Tess of the d’Urbervilles. The central issue discussed by Mallett, with references to Darwin, but also Auguste Comte, G. H. Lewes, W. K. Clifford, etc., bears on the question of the relation between a human emotion and its physical manifestation, such as the blush, or the flush. A relation which Hardy, who was no philosopher but a poet and a novelist, condenses in the ambiguous preposition “of” when he writes that Elfride’s “flush of triumph” lit her eyes. The crucial point made here chimes with a statement made by Havelok Ellis that Hardy was “only willing to recognize the psychical element in its physical correlative”. Rather than probe into his characters’ psychology, Hardy shows their physical response to the gaze of others. Unlike George Eliot or Henry James, Hardy seldom resorts to Free Indirect Discourse or introspection. Instead, he chooses to make his readers see.

13 Fabienne Gaspari’s “‘Their glances met’: Looks and Desire in The Mayor of Casterbridge” always keeps closely entwined the two strands that are under scrutiny in this volume: desire and the gaze. The gaze is first envisaged in Hillis Miller’s perspective as the “energy” that initiates the “dance of desire” in which the protagonists find themselves carried along. Special attention is given to several scenes that start the “drama of fascination” between the characters. The minute textual analysis of the portrayal of Farfrae, in a narrative focalized by Elizabeth-Jane, highlights the pictorial quality of Hardy’s text: the text makes us see “a frozen moment”, as if the narrative were

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“suspended in time” and aspired to nothing but visibility. Here J. B. Bullen’s analysis of the pictorialism of Hardy’s prose comes in useful, as well as Liliane Louvel’s theorizing on “the text that strives towards its being-an-image without ever achieving it” (Louvel 90). Windows illustrate that aspiration, both in the diegesis, where they function as mediators of the gaze, and in Hardy’s writing, where they turn reality into images and serve the aspiration to the visual. Interestingly, the author also associates the pictorial with silence. “Books and looks”: Elizabeth-Jane is a reader of both. Reduced to invisibility, she becomes one of the watchers from a distance, who read gazes and faces like written texts. At the same time, Hardy makes her into a figure of the writer of the book we are reading (“like the evangelist who had to write it down”, Hardy 1977, 139). The article ends with the lethal power of the gaze, as Lucetta dies from the shock of her encounter with her double.

14 Jane Thomas’s “The Abyss, the Image and the Turn” is fully consonant with the logic of this volume: at the core of the essay is the idea that the abolition of distance between a subject and the object of his desire threatens him/her with annihilation. The author offers us a careful reading of three poems: “The Voice”, “Where the Picnic Was”, “The Shadow on the Stone”. The desiring subject is the “Expressive I” in the poems: “the spirit of the artist writer”, embodied in the first-person narrative voice – a voice whose gender is undecidable, in a perspective that goes beyond the limitations of a biographical reading. J. Thomas focuses on the “Orphic turn” away from the object1, whereby the “Expressive I” turns away from the abyss of the Real, “the realm of the unspeakable”, and instead chooses the “compromised arena of language”. As it ventures on the edge of the void – the “black nothing” around which the poems are constructed – the “I” comes dangerously close to “the dark abjection of death”, but always keeps on the safe side, as the poem encircles the hole within its traceries. For such is the power of Hardy’s poetry, which is essentially sublime (sub-limen): by attempting to express what cannot be represented, it takes us to the very limit, “the margin of the unexpressed” (Woolf2), but it also works as a barrier. A barrier which, however, is “semi-permeable”: it lets through some of the unbearable plenitude which it keeps at bay. Indeed symbols work in a double way: they convey definite meaning, but reach far beyond as they bring a little “surplus” to the poet and the reader.

15 Isabelle Gadoin’s “Blank Letters and Ensnared Eyes in Far From the Madding Crowd” provides us with a reading of the Valentine scene which uses tools different from those handled by Annie Ramel. But though perspectives may be different, both articles show how Hardy’s characters depart from regular forms of intersubjectivity. Gadoin points to a parody of communication between Bathsheba (the sender of the Valentine card) and Boldwood (the receiver), and thus to some dysfunctioning of linguistic exchanges. Whereas blanks normally play a fundamental part in communication, the card received by Boldwood is in itself a blank space, an unfathomable void, “the blank space of undecipherable ambiguity,” which opens an unbridgeable gap between the protagonists. The letter as an unreadable text ceases to function as a linguistic sign, it is reduced to sheer visibility and turns into an eye-catcher. Thus the semiotic takes over from the linguistic. A mere object among other objects, the letter is no longer a text but becomes a material thing. Therein lies the originality of the article, which provides a reading of the image presented to us by Hardy’s text, in its tragic magnificence: the vision of the snow-field set ablaze by the rising sun, which is also Boldwood’s vision – for the focaliser of the scene (narrated in internal focalization) is Boldwood. The “ intense pictoriality” of the description invites comparisons with paintings by Monet,

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and other French Impressionists, and we find ourselves at the very core of the question of “the expressive eye”. The author leads us to read the blank space of the landscape— which is analogous to Bathsheba’s blank letter – as another writing, outside language, which allows us to see what language cannot tell.

16 Thus we are led to understand how the art of the writer can turn to good account the power of the gaze: the gaze may be Medusean, it may be an “evil eye” which fascinates and spells disaster. Yet the power of the written word is, as Conrad wrote in the Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus, to make you hear, to make you feel, and “before all, to make you see!” – especially in the case of an “iconotext” (Louvel). Then the written text, like a painting, can act as a “dompte-regard” (Lacan 1973, 109): a taming of the gaze, which causes the reader/viewer to lay down his gaze, while allowing him to open his eyes and attempt to see what cannot be scripted black on white.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bullen, J. Barrie, The Expressive Eye, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.

Conrad, Joseph, Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus, ed. Robert Kimbrough, New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1979.

Estanove, Laurence, “Reality in Excess. Letters and Telegrams in Thomas Hardy’s Poetry”, FATHOM [Online] 1 (2013), (last accessed 4 Apr 2018).

‟Illustrations for Wessex Poems”, Victorian Poetry 17.1/2 ‟The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Commemorative Issue” (Spring-Summer, 1979): 135-154.

Hardy, Thomas, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate, London: Macmillan, 1989.

Hardy, Thomas, The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), ed. James K. Robinson, New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1977.

Hardy, Thomas, The Return of the Native (1878), Oxford: World’s Classics, 1990.

Lacan, Jacques, Écrits, Paris : Seuil, 1966.

Lacan, Jacques, “Du regard comme objet petit a”, Le Séminaire XI, “Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse”, Paris : Seuil, 1973, 63-109.

Lacan, Jacques, “Of the gaze as objet petit a”, The Seminar, Book XI (1979), trans. Alan Sheridan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, London: Peregrine Books, 1986, 65-119.

Louvel, Liliane, Poetics of the Iconotext, ed. Karen Jacobs, trans. Laurence Petit, Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.

Miller, Joseph Hillis, Distance and Desire, Oxford: OUP, 1970.

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Shires, Linda M., “‘Saying that now you are not as you were’: Hardy’s ‘Poems of 1912-3’”, Thomas Hardy and Contemporary Literary Studies, eds. Tim Dolin, Peter Widdowson, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 138-151.

Zietlow, Paul, Moments of Vision: The Poetry of Thomas Hardy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1974.

Žižek, Slavoj, “‘I hear you with my eyes’: or, The Invisible Master”, Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, eds. Slavoj Žižek & Renata Salecl, Durham & London: Duke UP, 1996, 92-96.

NOTES

1. The desired object may be “the object-gaze” or “the object-sound”. 2. The expression was first used by Virginia Woolf in her Common Reader, vol.2 (London: Hogarth Press, 1932), and later taken up by Roger Ebbatson as a title to his study on Hardy (Sheffield Academic Press, 1993).

INDEX

Mots-clés: désir, regard Keywords: desire, gaze

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Articles Articles

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Desire and Impaired Eyesight: Thomas Hardy’s Clinical Metaphors of Affect Le diagnostic de l’affect chez Thomas Hardy

Catherine Lanone

EDITOR'S NOTE

This article is being published jointly by FATHOM and the Hardy Review as part of a collaborative work.

1 Isabelle Gadoin stresses the reversibility of Hardy’s moments of vision, fits of blindness rather than epiphanies. Part of this paradox is the haunting return of those moments, and the enmeshing of distance and desire first traced by J. Hillis Miller. George O. Marshall, as early as 1966, pointed to Hardy’s obsession with eyes from A Pair of Blue Eyes onward. Following Hillis Miller, this has been unravelled in terms of the representation of desire: Rosemarie Morgan lays emphasis on the corporeality of Hardy’s work while Annie Ramel stresses the subconscious forces at work in blind spots and red stains. Besides, Hardy’s depiction of vision has often been analysed in terms of technological models, such as the diorama, the stroboscope or the telescope, by Matthew Campbell or Pamela Gossin for instance. Yet little has been said about his transposition of medical or physiological conditions to convey the shock of emotional blindness. Oliver Sacks reminds us that we see with our eyes, but we also see with our brains. Thomas Hardy might be said to anticipate neurological studies when he accounts for mental misvision in terms of clinical ophtalmological models. To delineate such metaphorical filters, we consider his drawing of spectacles upon a landscape as a first signal of this clinical gaze. We shall then study the process of seeing through, transposing models like X-Rays or the removal of cataract, in some of the poems1 that were written after Emma’s death. Finally, we shall suggest that Far from the Madding

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Crowd offers a paradigm shift, using the configurations of impaired eyesight to break new fictional ground.

1. The strange case of the uncorrective glasses

2 Let us begin with one of Hardy’s drawings, the iconic pair of spectacles oddly superimposed over the pastoral landscape, in the famous illustration of the poem “In a Eweleaze Near Weatherbury” (Hardy 2001, 70-71). At first glance, the incongruous glasses loom large against the backdrop of soft hills and sheep, and might suggest that our take on landscape is mediated by the cultural and the technological, either because we see through pictorial frames or because the Victorian age was fascinated by optical inventions, and ways of looking at the world differently. Kate Flint stresses the role of visual instruments that “together with the marvels of visual scale produced by the telescope and the increasingly domesticated microscope, served to challenge, at the level of popular perception, the quality of observations made by the unaided human eye” (Flint 5). However, if we consider the glasses as a visual device, Hardy’s drawing remains puzzling, since as Zietlow points out, the glasses are clear, devoid of gleams of light, as if they had no lens and produced neither heightened nor distorted vision (Zietlow 4). In terms of technology, they bring nothing to the “unaided human eye”. So that we must instead read the glasses not in terms of medical diagnosis (short- sightedness), but as a more abstract clinical metaphor, meant to diagnose a state of mind.

3 Thus the spectacles no longer refer to the poet’s persona’s short-sightedness, but to emotional myopia, forcing the reader/spectator to engage with visual disorientation. They hover in the air like a teasing trompe-l’œil2: we cannot ascertain whether we are meant to look at the landscape through the spectacles, or the opposite. Linda M. Shires notes the instability of “I” and “eyes”: “maybe it is the present landscape that looks at us, the viewers, through lenses, rather than the reverse. If so, does the landscape mock us by asserting its presentness?” (Shires 142) The thing which stares back corresponds to the Lacanian “Object-gaze”, materializing a lack or gap, the distance between the seeing and the seen, or the split between the eye and the gaze, that Annie Ramel locates at the heart of Hardy’s writing. The reversible glasses represent the very act of seeing, with the eyes and with the brain or mind, that is to say through the fantasmatic, deceptively transparent filter of desire. With the spectacles, Hardy enhances the double bind of distance and desire that for J. Hillis Miller characterizes Hardy’s work, or the tension between the scopic field and the fantasy-driven gaze that Ramel unravels.

4 The glasses thereby also stand for the transparent collage performed by memory, turning the landscape into a palimpsest, an old haunt where the spectral past and former love may still be glimpsed. For Laurence Estanove, it is because they are lensless, that the glasses’ “form of visual redundancy” “create the uneasiness of an unrealistic perception”, as we share the perspective of the speaker who lives in the past (Estanove 2013, n.p.). In “In a Eweleaze Near Weatherbury”, the poet’s persona conjures up a bygone dance3, while the present self feels both the same and essentially different – for separation induced change. For Linda M. Shires, the poem denies the consolation of nostalgia.4 Vision means revision, revisiting the landscape that both revives and denies the past – as if the eweleaze contained and withdrew not the “ewe” but the “you” of the lost addressee; but it also means foresight, dreading the

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continuous erosion of time and forthcoming decay. With its little “chisel” (Hardy 2001, 70), a “Donne-like image” (Johnson 181), Time is burrowing into the speaker’s physical frame, love-making is replaced by this more intimate, lethal penetration, “heaping/ Quaintest pains for by-and-by” (71). The lensless spectacles connote a way of looking simultaneously at the landscape, at the past, and at the shadow of things to come, so that the poem does not describe the view but depicts the perception of the landscape as the receptacle of memory, the palimpsest of former intimacy. Simultaneously, the ability to gaze at the past through the present also allows the speaker to catch a bleak glimpse of the future. The spectacles, here, focus on the mind’s eye as a prop that allows us, Janus-like, to look both ways.

2. Seeing through: mental X-Rays

5 In this 1890 poem published in 1898 in Wessex Poems, the glasses and the age-bitten bones do not simply recall the tradition of anamorphosis, they seem to hint at Hardy’s intuitive grasp of medical imaging, as if longing to see through, something which came into existence in 1895 when Wilhelm Röntgen discovered that X-Rays could photograph bone structure. Similarly, “The House of Silence” turns memory into an X-Ray device, where the speaker’s “visioning powers” can “pierce” the “screen” and access the past, whereas the child he is with can see no one: “— Ah, that’s because you do not bear The visioning powers of souls who dare To pierce the material screen. (Hardy 2001, 474)

6 For Jean-Jacques Lecercle, the house becomes “the vision of a vision” (Lecercle n.p.); the present is stripped to reveal the bare bones of the past, within the house of a mind.

7 Could this be a model we may use to engage with Hardy’s depiction of regret? Poems like “At Castle Boterel” (Hardy 2001, 351-352) for instance, demonstrate the hallucinatory quality of persistent memory through a kind of cinematic model, since the speaker sees himself and the beloved walking up the slope, as if he were watching a film of the past5; in the end, the phantom figure dwindles in the distance, recalling a tracking shot. For Laurence Estanove, Hardy transmutes disenchantment into poetry6, while for Hillis Miller7, the cruel irony in such poems is that the past self is still within the present self, and the former self has betrayed the present self, by betraying the love that might have led to a better present (Miller 1991, 123). But before the filmic projection takes place in “At Castle Boterel”, the poem may also be said to obey the logic of seeing through, as if the rain-drained present might be X-Rayed by the eye to exhume the living scenes of the past. The dimeter, “Distinctly yet” (Hardy 2001, 351), functions as a kind of lens, leading through the gap between stanzas and the run-on line to the close-up on the couple going uphill. The screen of rain is pierced, stripped like a curtain, to reveal the sunny past.

8 Yet perhaps the X-Ray model is not satisfactory, since in most of the striking poems written after Emma’s death, the point is not simply to pierce through the layers of time and to see the past that was once contained in a place, but rather to see what one failed to see along the way, to peel back misunderstanding. Another clinical ophtalmological model may come closer, i.e. the removal of cataract.

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3. Eyes couched of misvision

9 In the sequence of poems devoted to Emma’s absence, X-Rays, the ability to see the past through the present, give way to the speaker’s more specific, sudden ability to see through the years of dissent, to catch a glimpse of Emma, not as she was before her death, “changed from the one who was all to [him]”, but “as at first, when our day was fair”, as he puts in “The Voice” (Hardy 2001, 346). The eye is thus stripped of the cloudy, ugly present; the past is recalled with uncanny clarity. The clinical model, here, recalls the peeling off of cataract, as if death performed a kind of surgical operation, correcting sight and triggering an emotional anagnorisis.

10 The pain and danger entailed by the skilfull removal of cataract was something Hardy was aware of. In 1882, on the Cobb in Lyme Regis, Hardy and his wife met “an old man who had undergone an operation for cataract” (Florence Hardy 200). The depiction of the 40-minute ordeal left a lasting impression on Hardy8, who later recorded it in the (auto)biography written under Florence Hardy’s name: It was like a red-hot needle in yer eye whilst he was doing it. But he wasn’t long about it. Oh no. If he had been long I couldn’t ha’ beared it. He wasn’t a minute more than three quarters of an hour at the outside. When he had done one eye, ‘a said, ‘Now my man, you must make shift with that one, and be thankful you bain’t left wi’ narn.’ So he didn’t do the other. And I’m glad ’a didn’t. I’ve saved half- crowns and half-crowns out of number in only wanting one glass to my spectacles.’ (Florence Hardy 200)

11 The old man’s tale gives a graphic account of what eye operations were like before local anesthesia, which medical research still refers to today9.

12 The cataract as a metaphor lies at the core of “The Spell of the Rose” (Hardy 2001 355-356)10, a poem uncharacteristically spoken in Emma’s own voice. It deals with unfulfilled promises. A man never planted the rose bush he had promised his wife, and the marriage grew sour: “And misconceits raised horrid shows” (355). So that she was the one who planted roses at night, hoping to heal discord. But when the rose grew and the man remembered who the woman truly was, it was to late to tell her so – except if we read this poem as autobiographical, through the complex ventriloquy which enmeshes viewpoints and reverses the gaze here.

13 The poem plays on the Petrarchan rose as a symbol of life and love; but the most poignant image in the poem is not so much the rose as the clinical conceit, “Eyes couched of the mis-vision that blurred me –” (Hardy 2001, 356). Couching is a technical term that refers to the removal of the crystalline lens of the eye, to cut out the opacification or cataract that has developed. The hyphen (“mis-vision”) and the dash at the end of the line may be graphic symptoms of the layer of opacity and of the cut removing it. Using a technical, medical term, Hardy turns reconciliation, or rather the acknowledgement of regret and remorse, into a physical act of surgery, which destroys “misconceits” (355) or “mis-vision” (356). What is removed is the moment when the marriage failed, when love fled. The disappointment of the husband is construed as an encroaching opacity which strips the female subject of her qualities, of her integrity, as he overlooks or turns a blind eye to her feelings and her needs. Misconceit may be defined as a kind of anamorphosis, dissolving beauty, turning love into deadly alienation; between vision and mis-vision lies the space of error and missed opportunity. The awareness of the partner’s death, on the other hand, is the razor or

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surgeon that cuts through the layer of cloudy prejudice, cleans the survivor’s pupil, allowing him to retrieve the ability to see, though the object of the gaze is forever lost. The opaque, blinding sense of deceit and disappointment which literally shut the eye, is now “couched”. What is restored, here, through this refreshing of the eye, is a purified, renewed and rejuvenated object for the gaze, an untainted object of desire, forever elusive and caught in a process of endless deferral.

14 The image is a key to the sequence of poems following Emma’s death, a shock which is repeatedly construed as a kind of surgical removing of the painful, in-between years of dissent, so that the vision of the fresh girl (such as for instance the “Phantom Horsewoman” on the cliff; Hardy 2001, 353), returns with eerie clarity, “a phantom of his own figuring” (354). Here, through the polysemic “figuring”, the object of the gaze is both a quickened memory, (a fantasy or figment of the imagination for the outsider who views the scene at one remove), and a poetic creation.

15 Though it is arguably best exemplified by the poems following Emma’s death, Hardy’s entire work explores mistiming and misvision, and it is necessary to look at fiction to have a better grasp of the process.

4. From cataract to gutta serena

16 In the medical treatises of the first half of the nineteenth century, the cataract was often associated with its obverse, “gutta serena”, a partial or total loss of vision where the eye was not opacified by a milky layer, but remained apparently clear and tranquil, or “serene”11. It was defined as follows, for instance, by Samuel Cooper in his 1807 textbook The First Lines of the Practice of Surgery: Being an Elementary Work for Students and a Concise Book of Reference for Practice: GUTTA SERENA, OR AMAUROSIS. A BLINDNESS, depending on a paralytic affection of the retina and optic nerve, is termed gutta serena, or amaurosis. The disease is either complete or incomplete; inveterate or recent; continued or periodical. (Cooper 348)

17 The ophtalmoscope was invented in 1851, allowing the practitioner to cast light on the pupil, as if it were a hole giving direct access to the eye’s interior; and the diagnosis of unfathomable gutta serena disappeared12. Yet Hardy uses the term in 1874 in Far from the Madding Crowd. One wonders whether the scientific name, amaurosis, coming from the Greek signifier connoting darkness, might also have pleased Hardy, since through fake etymology or homophony we might hear the Latin amor, with its misleading rose- tinted glasses. Be that as it may, the by then anachronistic medical term, “gutta serena” comes at the climax of the novel, concluding the paradigmatic play on warped vision. The distorsion and restoration of optical systems lie at the heart of Thomas Hardy’s novels, which all explore distorted perception, but Far from the Madding Crowd offers a particularly interesting case study in terms of the use of clinical metaphor, allowing writer and reader to explore modalities as “complete or incomplete; inveterate or recent; continued or periodical” to pick up Cooper’s categories.

18 When commissioning the novel, Leslie Stephen, the editor of Cornhill Magazine had asked for a local pastoral, and Hardy duly invented his Wessex, but he also experimented with the paradigm of impaired vision, using the cluster of examples to

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play with genre (from the comic to the tragic) and explore the split between the eye and the gaze, and the corporeality of error and desire.

19 At first, we might be tempted to think that impaired vision merely plays a comedic part in the novel. Barrie Bullen points out that the scene in which Gabriel peeps at Bathsheba’s shape and hair from above, through the gaps in the shed’s roof which spread radiant “streaks and dots of light” (Hardy 1986, 15)13, plays on chiaroscuro in the manner of Dutch paintings. The roof becomes an optical device, creating the flickering vision that kindles desire, but voyeurism (he sees her figure, but not her face, from above, as “Milton’s Satan first saw Paradise”, 16) is tinged with humour, as Gabriel, who followed the light of the hut, appears as silly as the newborn calf, that also mistakes the lantern for the moon14. Note the similarity between the animal in this scene and Gabriel towards the beginning of the chapter, suggesting that the young man is unused to desire, as fresh and clumsy as the calf: Occupied thus, with eyes stretched afar, Oak gradually perceived that what he had previously taken to be a star low down behind the outskirts of the plantation was in reality no such thing. It was an artificial light, almost close at hand. (Hardy 1986, 15) Beside her Oak now noticed a little calf about a day old, looking idiotically at the two women, which showed that it had not long been accustomed to the phenomenon of eyesight, and often turning to the lantern, which it apparently mistook for the moon, inherited instinct having as yet had little time for correction by experience. (16)

20 The comic play on eyesight culminates with Joseph Poorgrass’s temporary optical condition, a fit of the “multiplying eye”, that strikes him whenever he lingers at a public house: “All that’s the matter with me is the affliction called the multiplying eye, and that’s how it is I look double to you – I mean, you look double to me” (Hardy 1986, 222). Hinged on the dash, the sentence playfully loops back upon itself, to mimic double vision and drunken confusion. The “multiplying eye” masks the task at hand, driving the coffin to the churchyard. For Lecercle, the scene of inebriation is an instance of Hardy’s “controlled bathos”15, enmeshing the grotesque and Fanny’s melodramatic death and funeral.

21 Bathos, however, does not preclude pathos, and a more melancholy play on vision. The treatment of that death also plays upon seeing and not seeing. An unidentified coffin is passed onto a cart by a peculiar door opening four feet above the ground. The door is a metatextual metaphor for the ellipsis – we shift from Fanny crouching on the threshold of Casterbridge Union-house, after having dragged herself with the help of a stray dog, to the coffin being lowered. The landscape seems to take upon itself to compensate for this gap, disseminating the spectral presence of the absent woman and shrouding the scene with mist: “The air was an eye suddenly struck blind” (Hardy 1986, 217). The eye that has been struck blind is Fanny’s, and the scene is a classic case of pathetic fallacy, as the mist swells in great atmospheric clouds which swallow the lane. In the silent, muffled landscape, the blurred trees become “spectre-like in their monochrome of grey” (217). The fog’s condensation breeds rain-drops akin to tears, an immaterial expression of sorrow, as if both mourning the dead woman and expressing her pain: “The fog had by this time saturated the trees, and this was the first dropping of water from the overbrimming leaves” (217). “The hollow echo of its fall” (217) recalls Fanny’s status as a fallen woman, and her continuous collapsing as she strove to reach shelter. The white substance of tearful mist, that turns the landscape into a blind eye, also

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brings to mind implicitly the equivalent of a cataract, as the mist dissolves the “horizontal division between clearness and opacity” (217), embedding the horse and cart “in an elastic body of monotonous pallor throughout” (217).

22 The dead eye and the sick eye are a motif in the novel. In this online number, Annie Ramel underlines the importance of the metallic moon Gabriel stares at, “the attenuated skeleton of a chrome-yellow moon” which reflects itself in the oval pond, “shaking and elongating” (Hardy 1986, 33) itself in the breeze, an anamorphic landscape which spells the death of love, following the slaughter of sheep. Struck by the young woman’s energy, Gabriel had constructed (as we saw in the scene of the hut) Bathsheba as the object of a partial gaze, moulding her to fit his idea of a woman and a wife. It is no wonder that the death of dreams should be marked by a reverse emblem of maimed vision, by a pathetic fallacy that projects visual distorsion onto the landscape. The anamorphic moon inscribes death in the landscape, a symbol which befits the “pastoral tragedy” (30). The downfall is sudden. Gabriel is moved by the plight of the sheep: his first thought is for their agony. He has also lost his capital, and is suddenly stripped of his social status and hopes; this makes Bathsheba’s refusal final, since he can no longer afford to dream – he is no longer rich enough to consider marriage. The rippling moon, the image of the skeleton, convey this sense of shock. Gabriel is literally standing at the “outer margin of the pit” (33), while his star, Bathsheba, is but “a phosperous streak upon the water” (30), a drowned fantasy. The pond glittering “like a dead man’s eye” may connote the flicker of suicidal temptation, an unspoken sensation that also leaves its traumatic persistent image upon the retina: “All this Oak saw and remembered” (33). For Annie Ramel, “[t]he effect of anamorphosis is precisely this: to give a ‘hollow’ form to the object-gaze, to make it somehow visible, yet to ‘extract’ it from our field of vision by placing it in a liminal position, on the edge of the painting, where it is indecipherable” (Ramel 2015, 89).

23 The dead eye of the moon, as object-gaze, gives a liminal shape to void. The scene soon veers to the evocation of the philosophical expectations of the calamitous dog responsible for the disaster. The dog is also mistaken, expecting congratulations whereas he is soon to be put down. Humour steers away from tragedy. The bleak moment reveals Gabriel’s ability to overcome his hopes, and to distance himself from that disembodied gaze. This may suggest that Gabriel dismisses, besides his plans, a partial and unsatisfactory vision of Bathsheba16. The dead eye, here, connotes the trauma of destitution, but it also strips Gabriel’s mind of mis-vision and objectification – we shall return to this.

24 For Isabelle Gadoin, the sick eye is not Oak’s but Boldwood’s, pierced by the words and the seal of the Valentine: as his gaze is magnetically drawn to the letter, “the large red seal [becomes] as a blot of blood on the retina of his eye” (Hardy 1986, 80). Not only is the text alluding to persistent image, but the blood-shot eyes must also be taken literally as a sign of optical damage, as the gaze is warped17 beyond repair. The shift is more sudden than the slow encroaching of cataract; it corresponds to an 1821 medical explanation for amaurosis, as “a mass of coagulated blood so situated as to compress the optic nerves” (Stevenson v). The shock of the letter triggers a mental process which has a neurological and physical impact, akin to visual damage.

25 Boldwood gives himself up entirely to the scotomizing red spot on the retina, to the prism of misprision, misconceit and mis-vision. He turns a blind eye to the world; once kindled, his interest in Bathsheba (whom he had not noticed before) instantly grows

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into an obsession: “It is the red wax of the seal, together with the cryptic ‘marry me’ inscribed upon the Valentine sent by Bathsheba, that force him to literally focus his gaze on her, with an intensity that is all the more acute as he had ignored her entirely up till then.” (Gadoin 2015, 157)18 Searching the envelope in the morning, Bolwood finds nothing else in it – because there is nothing to find, Bathsheba meant nothing with the card. The joke which was meant to peter out turns into a traumatic trigger. In Cranford, Mrs Gaskell already used the Valentine as a misplaced jest with unforeseen consequences, but the sender was male and the victims female. Hardy’s version is more daring, because it disturbs gendered boundaries. Bathsheba is the one doing the wooing and the mocking, playing with a fire which she cannot understand.

26 The scene is stressed by Hardy’s signature play on red and white, and by the use of viewpoint to frame the scene, as Isabelle Gadoin’s close pictorial analysis reveals: “it is the art of focalized description that suggests the desire that can be voiced neither by the text nor by the character”19. Once more, here, the landscape reflects the inscape of the soul. The Chapter’s Impressionistic title, “Effect of the Letter – Sunrise” begins a pictorial evocation of the snow-covered scene, lit by a curiously oxymoronic red but “rayless” sun (Hardy 1986, 81), an objective correlative for Boldwood’s devouring yet frigid passion. The eerie white light of the snow blurs the boundary between sky and earth, dissolving the horizon into a “preternatural inversion of light and shade” (81). Each detail stands out, etched in the mind, like the blades of grass turned into minute icicles, while the footprints of a bird – a light, ephemeral pattern upon the soft snow – are “now frozen to a short permanency” (82). Bathsheba’s words, like the bird’s trace, are now printed and frozen in Boldwood’s consciousness, while the oxymoron, “short permanency”, suggests both the fixation of the mind and the unbearable dissolution of what once seemed solid, when illusion melts. The “wasting moon” that lingers in the early morning light is “greenish-yellow”, like “tarnished brass” (82), recalling the yellow moon of Gabriel’s disaster, adding to the metallic tang a bitter sense of waste. During the previous night, the ominous moon had performed its secret ministry in Boldwood’s bedroom: “His window admitted only a reflection of its rays, and the pale sheen had that reversed direction which snow gives, casting shadows in strange places, and putting lights where shadows had used to be” (81). Snow and moonlight turn the scene into a blank card, inverting shadows and lights, a photographic negative of what Boldwood’s virgin world used to be. The light, here, is an objective correlative for a fantasy that takes hold of Boldwood’s mind and wreaks havoc, turning his personality inside out like a glove which will not fit.

27 In this chapter, Boldwood is all eyes, staring at the letter, then at the landscape. The letter placed on the mirror, the strange imaginary feminine shape conjured up by the unknown handwriting, which almost turns into a woman’s genuine hand, all connote the illusion that holds Boldwood in its grip, as he believes the words to be performative. Duplicated by the crimson rayless sun, the red seal stamps misconceit – i.e. corroding mis-vision – upon Boldwood’s eyes, “wide-spread and vacant” in the mirror before him (Hardy 1986, 81).

28 The magnetic pull of the letter smashes the balance of Boldwood’s life, hence the mathematical image: the “symmetry of his existence” is “distorted in the direction of an ideal passion” (Hardy 1986, 80). The letter colours everything, just as it is itself compared to a crystal that absorbs the colours of its surroundings (80): the boundaries of the object of the gaze are blurred, just as the self has become vulnerable,

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contaminated or permeated by the letter. The image reveals the crystallization, not of love, but of obsession and error.

29 The scene corresponds to what Raymond Boudon calls “the art of self-persuasion”. Indeed, Boldwood is led astray by induction, drawing conclusions that seem self- evident: “The letter must have had an origin and a motive” (Hardy 1986, 80). Hardy draws attention to what Boudon calls the “implicit statements” contained by all argument, while the mind perceives only “explicit statements” (Boudon 66): perfectly acceptable empirical statements open a line of reasoning, based on a “general hypothesis”, regarded as self-evident and introduced in an unconscious way; all the following elements of the argument are valid, prompting the subject to endorse the conclusion in a seemingly logical way (67). Hardy shares the same intuition as cognitive psychology, dissecting emotional error. The a priori unconscious hypothesis is that all letters mean what they say; he is not aware that there may be a discrepancy between the motive and the letter, that the motive may be of “the smallest magnitude” does not “strike him as a possibility even” (Hardy 1986, 80): “It is foreign to a mystified condition of mind to realize of the mystifier that the processes of approving a course suggested by circumstance, and of striking out a course from inner impulse, would look the same in the result” (80). The contorted syntax stresses his inability to even conceive of a frivolous impulse. Drawn to Bathsheba as to a magnet, as if the letter constituted in itself a performative wedding ceremony, Boldwood seeks to confirm the message by indulging in votive writing in his turn: hence the “extraordinary collection of articles” later discovered in a locked closet – the series of parcels wrapped in paper containing muffs, dresses, jewels, which all bear the name “Bathsheba Boldwood” (294). Each label is a metonymic letter addressed to a fantasized Bathsheba, the wife of Boldwood. The labels are a votive offering, a performative ritual; the parcels that were supposed to be opened years later, after the delay imposed by widowhood, function less as wedding presents than as symptoms of obsession. The red blot, the layer of fantasy opacifying the eye, cannot be peeled back and healed in the case of Boldwood. The diseased eye remains blind. At the party, Boldwood simply cannot take in the sight of Troy, cannot recognize him; Bathsheba’s cry then triggers a violent reaction and a will to obliterate that sight, by impulsively seizing the gun and shooting. This dooms the blind Boldwood to disappear in his turn: he enters the prison to be seen no more, and the text shuts him off.

30 In the case of Bathsheba and Troy, mis-vision takes a different shape. In this case, desire is triggered neither by partial vision nor by a blind eye, but by sudden, then intermittent sight. As an unknown man is walking past the young woman in the fir plantation in the dark, his spur is caught in her dress. The encounter thus pulls them together, an unexpected moment of physical contact, but it is vision that crystallizes desire, when the man pulls open Bathsheba’s dark lantern, releasing the shutter which makes it possible to either mask or diffuse light: A hand seized the lantern, the door was opened, the rays burst out from their prison, and Bathsheba beheld her position with astonishment. The man to whom she was hooked was brilliant in brass and scarlet. (Hardy 1986, 127)

31 The alliteration (“brilliant”/ ”brass”) enhances the sparkling shift from darkness to crimson and gold, displaying, unlike the aforementioned “tarnished brass” of the moon, a wondrous metamorphosis or “fairy transformation” (Hardy 1986, 127). The dark lantern becomes here a dramatic optical device, a magic lantern switching from

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shadows to bright light, from innocence to the projection of image and desire, from serendipity to a momentous encounter. The dark lantern is the instrument of the object-gaze, and Bathsheba is literally “caught” by the gaze of the Other, by Troy’s “point-blank” eyes: “He caught a view of her face” (127).

32 The effect is confirmed by Troy’s wondrous “aurora militaris” (Hardy 1986, 145), a spellbinding performance in which the various cuts become a swift sound-and-light show which no film adaptation has so far been able to transcribe convincingly; catching the sun, the blade reflects the ubiquitous beams of light that surround Bathsheba, a circular motion that may draw inspiration from the phenakistiscope – Bathsheba stands motionless, her eye is the fixed point, the axis of a revolution performed by the swift circular movements of the blade, animating the initial postures into one swift smooth succession. The demonstration is turned into a kind of magic, almost electrical circuit – the intermittent flashes are “emitted” by the blade –, in a centripetal and centrifugal pull that taps into cosmic forces20: These circling beams were accompanied by a keen rush that was almost a whistling – also springing from all sides of her at once. In short, she was enclosed in a firmament of light, and of sharp hisses, resembling a sky-full of meteors close at hand. (Hardy 1986, 144)

33 The initial radiance that glowed into streaks from the crevices of the roof of the hut (through which Gabriel peeped at Bathsheba), and which died in a single phosphorous elongated streak in the oval pond, is now mocked and magnified by the tremendous, electrifying performance. The ironic pun, however, signals the gap between aurora borealis and aurora militaris, since the performance has nothing to do with the sky, and suggests that Troy’s love may well be a Trojan horse, a way of entering the fortress of Bathsheba’s life, only to defeat her, leaving her wrecked by debts, doubts, and the pain of having been deceived.

34 The antithesis of this “aurora militaris” comes with the intermittent flashes of light during the storm scene. Hardy multiplies the single shift allowed by the dark lantern in the scene of first encounter between Troy and Bathsheba. Hardy uses lightning to switch light on and off, creating an effect which comes close to today’s stroboscopy. Brilliant phosphorescent flashes of light seem to etch or to photograph – literally to write with light – the landscape: “Every hedge, bush and tree was as distinct as in a line engraving. […] A poplar in the immediate foreground was like an ink stroke on burnished tin. Then the picture vanished […]” (Hardy 1986, 192). Just as the lantern illuminated and drew in the background the “[g]igantic shadows […] distorted and mangled upon the tree trunks” (128) of Troy and Bathsheba in the fir plantation, Gabriel is struck by his and Bathsheba’s elongated, but not misshapen, shadow: “Every knot in every straw was visible. On the slope in front of him appeared two human shapes, black as jet. The rick lost its sheen – the shapes vanished.” (193) Whereas Troy’s crimson and brass uniform dazed and dazzled, here the stroboscopic storm detaches every single detail of the ricks and the landscape, in a kind of hyper-realistic flash composed of multiple close-ups. The cosmic show rewrites Troy’s performance as a kind of macabre dance in the sky, mingling danger with magnificent beauty: It sprang from east, west, north, south, and was a perfect dance of death. 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)

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35 The echo with Troy’s swordsmanship is unmistakable, but this time, Gabriel resists the show, fighting to save the ricks, using his ricking-rod to create a makeshift “lightning- conductor” (Hardy 1986, 192). The sublime, blinding light of lightning is partially domesticated, while physical closeness is allowed between Oak and Bathsheba, allowing energy to circulate in the circuit of their connected bodies, as she clutches his sleeve or he grasps her arm. The stroboscopic play on light and darkness also removes misvision, and allows Bathsheba to reassess Oak as a man.

36 The resolution of the plot also plays upon cuts, to create a kind of proto-cinematic montage which brings together a kaleidoscope of simultaneous moments, like a textual magic lantern. The narrative structure grants the reader a “multiplying eye” that allows him/her to follow what the title of the chapter calls the converging courses of the main characters. Bathsheba, Boldwood, all dressed up for their parts, the beautiful widow, the aging suitor, and the melodramatic performer cloaked in travelling coat and cap, concealing his features; in the next chapter, “Concurritur – Horae Momento” (Hardy 1986, 282), the episodic vignettes merge into a single sequence, dramatizing Troy’s return and the subsequent murder.

37 Interestingly enough, the moment of revelation disturbs Bathsheba’s eyes; it may be considered that the opening of the coffin, forcing her to discover the body of her husband’s former mistress and baby, began to clear the metaphoric blind fog shrouding Fanny, couching Bathsheba’s own eyes of her misconception regarding Troy. But the image only literally appears in the final confrontation, where the shock of his reappearance stuns Bathsheba into “a state of mental gutta serena”, the “antique medical term” which the footnote in the Norton edition translates as “a kind of blindness that is unaccompanied by any apparent change in the eye itself” (Hardy 1986, 289). The eye infection is used as a metaphor for her sudden incapacity to think, her paralysis or blankness. Whereas Boldwood’s impaired vision is continued and complete, however, Bathsheba’s gutta serena is recent and incomplete, to use Cooper’s distinction21. The momentary blindness, the tragic moment also reopen Bathsheba’s eyes in a flash, so that when she recovers she happens to see clearly what should be done and said, and her simple call for a surgeon “had somehow the effect of setting the distorted images of each mind present into focus” (291).

38

39 Thus we have seen the part played by Hardy’s appropriation of medical terms to build his own model of emotional error, cognitive blindness, desire and belated anagnorisis. The playful spectacles lead to the more complex figuration of blind spots, in a kind of endless deferral of desire. Whereas at times the mental cataract can be removed and the eyes couched of misvision, a striking opposition remains between the catharsis of temporary blindness or gutta serena, and the incurable damaged sight of obsession. Hardy’s complex study of perception, and of the traumatic impact of the desire triggered by the letter, or of the murder of Troy rewiring Bathsheba’s mind, anticipates neurological discoveries. The optical system becomes more complex in novels like Tess of the d’Urbervilles22. Incidentally, the name itself might be connected with ophthalmology. A 1926 article published in The British Journal of Ophtalmology by R.R. James recalls that while the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries were “the heyday of ophthalmic quackery”, a certain Dawbigney Turberville from Salisbury actually helped people recover from blindness23 and was “not only a properly qualified medical man24, but also a member of an ancient English family”, going back to the days

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of King John25. James conjectures that “The name would appear to have been adapted by Thomas Hardy in his ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’” (James 465). Be that as it may, in Tess, however, the image of the cataract seems to be reversed when Angel sees Tess, after the confession, as a duplicate of herself, “another woman in her shape”, as if his eyes had been couched of misvision; yet this no longer corresponds to a release, but on the contrary to a sudden hoodwinking, as Angel adopts the blind gaze of social constructs and fails to see Tess, as an individual, the woman standing before him, and not a type.

40 The ironic reversal corresponds to Hardy’s own more tragic outlook in the later novels. This pessimistic equilibrium might be exemplified by “The Blinded Bird”, a poem which was published in Moments of Vision. It allows us to come full circle as the red-hot needle (“Blinded ere yet a-wing/By the red-hot needle thou”; Hardy 2001, 446) seems to echo the old man’s account of his operation; yet the needle is no longer used to remove the cloud of cataract, but to blind a helpless bird. Like the pheasants in Tess, the bird calls for compassion26. The poem, with its fragile echo (the opening and closing lines of each stanza are identical) must be read in terms of animal studies, since it is an outcry against the custom of blinding birds in the mistaken belief that it makes them sing better. A protest against Vikensport (making singing bullfinches compete), the poem echoes the New Testament: the bird is “alive ensepulchered”, but “endureth all things” and sings, divine. The image resonates with contemporary politics and the slaughter of World War One, bringing to mind the blinded soldiers enmeshed in wire; it reads as a comment on cruelty and on both the animal and the human conditions, including the poet’s; it celebrates resilience, and opposes song to the pain of the unbearable: Resenting not such wrong, Thy grievous pain forgot, Eternal dark thy lot, Groping thy whole life long, After thy stab of fire; Enjailed in pitiless wire; Resenting not such wrong! (Hardy 2001, 446)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boudon, Raymond, The Art of Self-Persuasion: The Social Explanation of False Beliefs, trans. Malcolm Slater, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994.

Boumelha, Penny, Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form, Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1985.

Bullen, Barrie, The Expressive Eye, Oxford: OUP, 1986.

Campbell, Matthew, Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (1999), Cambridge: CUP, 2004.

Cooper, Samuel, The First Lines of the Practice of Surgery: Being an Elementary Work for Students and a Concise Book of Reference for Practice (1807), London: Justin Hinds, 1815.

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Estanove, Laurence, “La poésie de Thomas Hardy : une dynamique de la désillusion”, unpublished PhD Diss., Université de Toulouse 2, 2008.

Estanove, Laurence, “Reality in Excess: Letters and Telegrams in Thomas Hardy’s Poetry”, FATHOM 1, 2013, >http://journals.openedition.org/fathom/140> (last accessed May 12, 2017).

Finucane, Brendan T., Tsui, Ban C. H. (eds.), Complications of Regional Anesthesia: Principles of Safe Practice in Local and Regional Anesthesia (1999), 3rd ed., Berlin: Springer, 2017.

Flint, Kate, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination, Cambridge: CUP, 2000.

Gadoin, Isabelle, Far from the Madding Crowd : Thomas Hardy, entre convention et subversion, Paris : PUF, 2010.

Gadoin, Isabelle, “‘Leaping Over Oblivion’: Thomas Hardy’s ‘Moments of Vision’”, L’Atelier 4.2 (2012), (last accessed May 12, 2017).

Gossin, Pamela, Thomas Hardy’s Novel Universe: Astronomy, Cosmology, and Gender in the Post- Darwinian World, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.

Hardy, Florence Emily, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy 1840-1891 [1928], Cambridge: CUP, 2011.

Hardy, Thomas, Tess of the d’Urbervilles [1891], Norton Critical Edition, New York: Norton, 1965.

Hardy, Thomas, Far from the Madding Crowd [1874], ed. Robert C. Schweik, Norton Critical Edition, New York: Norton, 1986.

Hardy, Thomas, The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

Hughes, John, “Visual Inspiration in Hardy’s Fiction”, Palgrave Advances in Thomas Hardy Studies, ed. Phillip Mallett, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 229-254.

James, R. R., “British Masters of Ophtalmology Series: 18.Turberville of Salisbury”, The British Journal of Ophtalmology, September 1926, 465-474.

Johnson, Trevor, A Critical Introduction to the Poems of Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1991.

Karlin, Daniel, The Figure of the Singer, Oxford: OUP, 2013.

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, “Thomas Hardy’s Silences”, Cycnos 26.2, (last accessed May 12, 2017).

Marshall Jr., George O., “Thomas Hardy’s Eye Imagery”, Colby Quaterly 7.6 (June 1966), 264-268.

Miller, Hillis Joseph, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire, Cambridge (Mass.): Belknap U. of Harvard P, 1970.

Miller, Hillis Joseph, Tropes, Parables and Performativity, Hemel Hampstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.

Milton, John, The Poetical Works, Vol. 1, London: J. Parker, G.B. Whittaker, 1824.

Morgan, Rosemarie, Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy, London: Routledge, 1988.

Ramel, Annie, The Madder Stain: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Thomas Hardy, Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2015.

Sacks, Oliver, Hallucinations, New York: Knopf, 2012.

Sherman, G. W., The Pessimism of Thomas Hardy, London: Associated University Presses, 1976.

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Stevenson, John, On the Nature, Symptoms, and Treatment of the Different Species of Amaurosis or Gutta Serena, London: W.M. Phillips, 1821.

Shires, Linda M., “‘Saying that now you are not as you were’: Hardy’s ‘Poems of 1912-3’”, Thomas Hardy and Contemporary Literary Studies, eds. Tim Dolin, Peter Widdowson, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 138-151.

West, Anna, Thomas Hardy and Animals, Cambridge: CUP, 2017.

Wolfreys, Julian (ed.), The J. Hillis Miller Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004.

Zietlow, Paul, Moments of Vision: The Poetry of Thomas Hardy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1974.

NOTES

1. Due to the sheer number of Hardy’s poems, all selection is bound to remain frustrating, as J. Hillis Miller points out: “All attempts that I know of to reduce Hardy’s poetry to manageable size by section are unsuccessful, including of course my own here discussing only a handful of Hardy’s poems.” (Miller in Wolfreys, 140) 2. The drawing may be read as a kind of visual experimentation (the incongruous object seems to foreshadow Magritte’s visual conundrums and surreal landscapes); it signals the preoccupation with age and vision, and it becomes the floating symptom of mistaken desire, and/ or a model of perception. 3. The poem plays on Petrarchan topoi – the woman’s beauty, blazons or sculpture – but those elements are displaced ironically: the woman is partly allegorical and the true betrayal is Beauty’s. 4. The discontinuous evolution of the self lies at the core of “Wessex Heights”, as J. Hillis Miller stresses, where the baffled speaker is only the “strange continuator” of his former selves that pursue him, with “weird detective ways”, the “chrysalis” of the present. (Miller 319) 5. The model may be proto-cinematic; like a phenakistiscope, the eye endlessly replays the couple’s ascent. For Matthew Campbell, “rote” means “a mechanical wheel-like movement”, enhancing the “dissonance” and the “restlessness” of meter (Campbell 221). Time’s “mindless rote” may also suggest the phenakistiscope, but also adds an irreversible separation as a single silhouette remains behind, recording separation. 6. For an in-depth study of Hardy’s nuanced exploration of disillusionment, see Laurence Estanove’s PhD thesis. 7. See Hillis Miller’s analysis of repetition in “Wessex Heights”, which may apply to all the Emma poems. 8. Perhaps the interest had been kindled earlier on. Indeed, in the 1860s, Horace Moule gave Thomas Hardy a copy of Jabez Hoggs’ 1853 Experimental and Natural Philosophy, which contains a passage on ocular perception that includes the cataract. Hoggs was the editor of the Journal of British Ophtalmology and had written an essay on cataracts (see Sherman 63). 9. See, for instance, Brendan T. Finucane’s book, where the passage is quoted (Finucane 4). Ether could not be used for eye operations, because of side effects; the breakthrough came in 1884, when ophtalmologist Carl Koller, after listening to Freud’s enthusiastic evocation of cocaine, realized that it could numb the eye and provide local anesthesia. 10. Emma did plant a rose bush that Hardy tended after her death; he felt that she would have been pleased with his efforts to care for the garden.

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11. It was also, in a way, a literary disease, since Milton had been diagnosed with “gutta serena”, a mysterious disease with no visible cause, mentioned in the famous line: “So thick a drop serene hath quench’d their orbs” (Milton 161). 12. This might entail a new reading of the way in which Angel delves into the depth of Tess’s eyes: “his plumbed the deepness of her ever-varying pupils, with their radiating fibrils of blue, and black, and gray, and violet” (Hardy 1965, 143) not so much as the phallic imagery discerned by Penny Boumelha, but as a reverse ophtalmological disagnosis, with an ironic twist, since Angel is the one who is blind, whereas Tess’s pupils open up the rainbow of her “pure” soul. This subtle use of eye imagery contrasts with the more conventional literal and symbolic near-sightedness of Angel’s brothers: “They were both somewhat short-sighted, and when it was the custom to wear a single eyeglass and string they wore a single eyeglass and string; when it was the custom to wear a double glass they wore a double glass; when it was the custom to wear spectacles they wore spectacles straightaway, all without reference to their particular defect of vision.” (134) 13. The novel creates a pattern of echoes and contrasts. At the fair, Troy also peeps at Bathsheba through a hole in the tent, and sees her sitting like a queen and facing him unbeknownst. Similarly, the storm scene, during which Gabriel and Bathsheba stand on the same ladder and strive to protect the ricks, rewrites the bee scene, in which a grotesquely dressed Troy climbs the ladder to help Bathsheba. 14. This may also recall the comical performance of the rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 15. “This silence, which is the silence of death, is duly called a ‘dead silence’ when Joseph Poorgrass takes the coffin back to Weatherbury, which he does not reach, as Hardy’s controlled bathos soon turns this scene of tragedy into a comic scene of rustic inebriation.” (Lecercle n.p.) 16. Though he cannot know this yet, when they later meet as mistress and bailiff – on more equal gendered, if not social, terms –, they may get closer and step beyond the limits of the gaze. 17. “Contrary to the soldier’s eye, that reach full mark ‘point-blank’, at first Bodwood’s eyes only perceive female figures as distant stars, shadowy presences, or constellations evolving in erratic motions.” “Contrairement aux yeux du soldat qui atteignent leur cible en plein cœur, ‘point- blank’, les yeux de Boldwood ne voient d’abord les figures féminines que comme astres lointains, présences nébuleuses, constellations aux mouvements erratiques.” (Gadoin 2010, 157) Translation mine. 18. “C’est le sceau de cire rouge marqué des deux mots cryptiques ‘marry me’, sur la carte de la Saint-Valentin envoyée par Bathsheba, qui va l’obliger très littéralement à focaliser son regard, avec une acuité aussi intense que son indifférence avait jusque là été complète.” Translation mine. 19. “C’est l’art de la description focalisée qui permet de suggérer le désir que le texte – pas plus que le personnage – ne saurait dire.” (Gadoin 158) Translation mine. 20. This offers an epiphanic version of the scintillating scotoma caused by migraine. 21. Stevenson, surgeon-oculist to the Duke of York and a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, mentions the same alternative as being a characteristic of amaurosis, “temporary suspension or total annihilation.” (Stevenson iii) 22. See note 13. 23. He performed operations of the cataract, and was asked to attend Queen Anne and high society, including Samuel Pepys (he is mentioned in Pepys’s diary); he also nursed the poor free. He cured Walter Pope, a Professor of astronomy at Gresham College London, who left a detailed account in 1697: “It was he who twice rescued me from blindness, which without his aid had been unavoidable, when both my eyes were so bad, that with the best I could not perceive a letter in a

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book, nor my hand with the other, and grew worse every day.” (Pope in James, 466). Pope described him as a true artist of a doctor, capable of curing not only the cataract, but other ailments: “for the cure of which, if curable, for there are several sorts of cataracts uncurable, consists wholly in this, viz., in knowing when the connate cataract is fit to be couched, in having a steady hand, and skill to perform that operation, to be able to prevent, or at least, remove the pains whih usually follow, and sometimes kill the patient; but to reduce fallen and inverted eyelids, to their proper place and tone, to cure inveterate ulcers, and inflammations of a blackish colour, requires a consummate artist.” (448) 24. Turberville studied in Oriel College, Oxford. Incidentally, James quotes letters by Dawbigney Turberville that describe cases very similar to those studied by Oliver Sacks, such as achromatopsia and the scintillating scotoma of migraines: “A maid, 22 or 23 years old, came to me from Banbury, who could see very well but no colour beside black and white. She had such scintillations by night with the appearance of bulls, bears, etc., as terrified her very much […]” (Turberville in James, 470). He also mentions treating gutta serena with leeches. 25. “Turberville was born in 1612 of an old-English family, ‘there being in the church of Beer only the tombs of no less than fifteen knights of that name, as I have been credibly informed, but I have not seen them.” (James 466) James is still quoting Pope, who devoted a whole chapter to Turberville; and James compares Parson Tringham’s account to the actual genealogy of Turberville. 26. This is a recurrent theme in Hardy’s work (Jude first encounters trouble when he refrains from chasing away the birds that come to eat the seeds he was supposed to look after). When, in 1924, he attended the centenary celebration of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Hardy spoke on behalf of birds. Daniel Karlin points out that the blinding of birds “was banned in 1920 […] following a campaign by blinded war veterans.” (Karlin 63) Regarding the importance of the motif of birds in Hardy’s work, and his sympathy towards animals, see Anna West’s Thomas Hardy and Animals.

ABSTRACTS

This paper considers the clinical terms used by Thomas Hardy to build a model of misvision and missed opportunity. The glasses laid on the landscape in one of Hardy’s iconic drawings sem to materialize the object-gaze, and may also be read as a representation of his appropriation of the medical gaze. He transposes ophtalmological conditions (the cataract, gutta serena) or technological tools (X-Rays) to engage with the corporeal, as well as mental, nature of desire and its misdirections, or to explore the haunting ability to strip the present, and see the past with its compelling hallucinatory presence. Drawing upon the readings of J. Hillis Miller, Linda M. Shires and Rosemarie Morgan, as well as Annie Ramel, Laurence Estanove and Isabelle Gadoin, this paper considers the mediation of the gaze and its paradoxical remediation through an operation that all but shatters the self, a process that shapes the poems written after Emma’s death. It then takes Far from the Madding Crowd as its central case study. The novel proves a landmark in Hardy’s writing career, as he experiments with visual modalities to diagnose misdirected desire and emotional flaws, the “phantom[s] of his own figuring” that he dramatizes as physiological flaws in the eye, thereby foreshadowing today’s neurological and trauma studies.

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C’est l’écart entre l’œil et le regard qui fascine Thomas Hardy, et c’est le diagnostic clinique du trouble visuel qui rend compte de l’aveuglement du désir. On se souvient de cette paire de lunettes incongrue qui flotte sur le paysage dans l’une des illustrations des poèmes, dévoyant la perspective, matérialisant le regard du locuteur ou du lecteur, mais aussi désignant l’objet- regard, le fantasme qui fausse le point de vue. Dans les poèmes, l’acuité du locuteur découpe le présent aux rayons X, pour permettre la résurgence d’un passé qui ne passe pas. En s’inspirant des lectures de J. Hillis Miller, Linda M. Shires et de Rosemarie Morgan, mais aussi d’Annie Ramel, de Laurence Estanove et d’Isabelle Gadoin, cet article propose d’explorer la façon dont la métaphore optique fonctionne à la manière des lunettes du dessin dans la fiction, notamment dans Far from the Madding Crowd. L’œil dysfonctionne, du kaléidoscope de l’ivresse à la projection de la mort dans le paysage ; le diagnostic clinique “gutta serena” montre à quel point Hardy s’approprie l’idiome médical pour rendre compte de la pathologie du désir, entre confusion et frustration, comme s’il préfigurait les études du traumatisme et la lecture de cas neurologique d’aujourd’hui.

INDEX oeuvrecitee In a Eweleaze Near Weatherbury, House of Silence (The), At Castle Boterel, Phantom-Horsewoman (The), Spell of the Rose (The), Blinded Bird (The), Far from the Madding Crowd Mots-clés: regard, aveuglement, cataracte, désir, objet-regard, gutta serena, vision Keywords: gaze, blindness, cataract, desire, object-gaze, gutta serena, vision

AUTHOR

CATHERINE LANONE Catherine Lanone is a Professor of English Literature at the University Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3. She has written a book on E.M. Forster and a book on Emily Brontë, as well as many articles on, among others, E.M. Forster, Emily Brontë, and Thomas Hardy.

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Looking at Adders in The Return of the Native Regards de vipères dans The Return of the Native

Anna West

EDITOR'S NOTE

This article is being published jointly by FATHOM and the Hardy Review as part of a collaborative work.

1 In his essay “Why Look at Animals?” (1980) art critic John Berger discusses the gaze between humans and animals. He argues that while the gaze of animals has the power to surprise humans (who see themselves being seen through the animals' eyes), this look has been “extinguished” with the marginalization of animals from society (Berger 37). In Thomas Hardy's novels, humans who encounter animals face-to-face and eye-to- eye often find themselves uncomfortable being seen through the gaze of the animal. In The Return of the Native (1878), for example, Mrs Yeobright shudders under the gaze of the adder. While Berger argues for the importance of metaphor in restoring the human-animal relationship, the adder in the scene can be read not only as a metaphor for the absent-yet-implicated Eustacia, but also as a living being in its own right. Of significance to this paper is the refusal of the human-animal gaze that occurs during the encounter: the turning away, or the desire not to see oneself being seen through the eyes of another, a desire that also occurs during interactions between humans in the novel. What happens to desire when the gaze flickers, is deflected, or becomes indifference? Furthermore, how might this affect the way one looks at – or away from – literary animals?

2 Berger frames his essay with a provocative titular question: why look at animals? Chronicling the human-animal relationship, he posits a history where animals existed with humans at the center of the human world, living alongside them in their homes and working beside them in the fields. In this world before what Berger describes as the

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process from nineteenth-century industrialization to twentieth-century corporate capitalism that utilized Cartesian dualism to transform animal bodies into “machines”, “raw material”, and eventually “manufactured commodities”, Berger describes the gaze between an animal and a human (Berger 23). He writes: The animal scrutinizes him across a narrow abyss of non-comprehension. This is why the man can surprise the animal. Yet the animal – even if domesticated – can also surprise the man. The man too is looking across a similar, but not identical, abyss of non-comprehension [...] when he is being seen by the animal, he is being seen as his surroundings are seen by him. His recognition of this is what makes the look of the animal familiar. (Berger 13-14)

3 This ability to return a gaze, to look back, indicates a power on the part of the animal. In the words of Ron Broglio, “[t]raditionally, sight is possession at a distance: we take in to human interiority and reason the object of our gaze. When the animal looks back, the hegemony of human vision becomes confounded” (Broglio 58). The ability to gaze back implies another point of view, and if seeing is a vital way of knowing – a primary empirical process through which knowledge of the material world is acquired – then an animal’s ability to look back at a human implies its own way of knowing.

4 This ability on the part of the animal has a similar effect to Hardy’s use of perspective in his writings. As J. Hillis Miller notes, “Hardy is adept at making sudden relatively small shifts in perspective which put his reader virtually, though not actually, at an infinite distance from events – as if they were suddenly seen through the wrong end of a telescope” (Miller 51). The result of these shifts in perspective is that “[t]he reader is made aware that there are two ways of seeing events, a way which takes what is seen as the whole span of reality, and one which sees any perspective as only one among many possibilities and therefore as relative in the value it gives to things” (51). He concludes, “[t]o embrace any view of things with a wider, more inclusive view, or even one merely different, is to put both views in question” (51). The recognition of an animal’s gaze back, then, places human perspective in question, gesturing for the possibility of ways of knowing and being outside those valued by humanist tradition. As George Levine has argued, becoming the object of another’s gaze is a form of exposure, placing the individual in a vulnerable position.1

5 The gaze, then, implies both power and vulnerability – in looking and being looked at – even without any further action or speech. Perhaps because of this felt power and exposure, the gaze has been studied as the site of the birthplace of ethical obligation, as can be seen in the writings of twentieth-century philosopher Emmanuel Levinas on face-to-face encounters. He argued that the face – which he defined as “[t]he way in which the other person presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me” – speaks more clearly than speech itself (Levinas 50). In the moment of the gaze, one’s “idea of the other” cannot remain an abstraction; it becomes a flesh-and-blood reality. Despite the brevity of the gaze, it communicates in a way speech itself cannot. In Levinas’s words, speech “does not have the total transparence of the gaze directed upon the gaze, the absolute frankness of the face to face proffered at the bottom of all speech” (182). He concluded, through the course of his work, that the face-to-face encounter demands ethical obligation to one’s neighbour, placing the needs of the other before the self.

6 Yet unlike the power and vulnerability that both the animal and the human experience in a face-to-face encounter, the extension of ethical obligation to the animal in such an encounter was not a given, at least not for Levinas. If the animal could not reciprocate

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the ethical imperative presented by the gaze – that is, if the animal, unlike the human, could not put the needs of the other before the self – then could an animal be said to have a face? Levinas considered this question directly when it was posed to him during an interview with a group of students. Perhaps a dog could have a face – could act in such a way, as arguably the dog who aids Fanny on the Casterbridge highway in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) behaves – but could a snake? “I don’t know if a snake has a face”, Levinas responded. “A more specific analysis is needed” (Wright et al. 171-172).

7 In Hardy’s The Return of the Native, such an analysis might be conducted. The novel’s focus on faces and its scene showing the encounter between Mrs Yeobright and an adder provide ample material for consideration of the human-animal – and specifically the human-snake – gaze. Having suffered an adder bite on her foot during her exposure on the heath on her attempted walk home from Eustacia and Clym’s house, Mrs Yeobright is carried by her son into a hut. A group of heath-folk gathers around her bedside, and they explain that the only cure for the bite requires oil extracted from the fat of other adders to be applied to the wound. Three adders are brought into the hut. Two are dead, but one is still “briskly coiling and uncoiling in the cleft of the stick” upon which it is being carried (Hardy 2005, 285).2 The narrator describes the moment: The live adder regarded the assembled group with a sinister look in its small black eye, and the beautiful brown and jet pattern on its back seemed to intensify with indignation. Mrs Yeobright saw the creature, and the creature saw her: she quivered throughout, and averted her eyes. (Hardy 2005, 285)

8 Mrs Yeobright’s discomfort at the gaze of the adder is striking: the act of seeing and being seen shakes her thoroughly, and she not only turns away but “avert[s]” her gaze – a verb that implies not only looking away but an attempt to “prevent or ward off (an undesirable occurrence)” (OED). With the previous discussion of the gaze in mind, one might ask, why does Mrs Yeobright react in the way that she does, averting her gaze away from the adder?

9 If the adder is read as a metaphorical stand-in for Eustacia, then the aversion of the gaze is linked to an earlier encounter between Mrs Yeobright and Eustacia, just before Mrs Yeobright’s long walk home across the hot heath. In this person-to-person encounter, Mrs Yeobright sees her daughter-in-law’s face framed in the window, looking out at her and turning away without letting her in. Annie Ramel argues that “Eustacia [...] ‘kills’ her mother-in-law by a Medusa-like gaze, a silent look through a window-pane”, noting that the scene between the woman and the adder “clearly repeats the deadly exchange of looks which caused the mother-in-law to walk away in utter desperation, and designates Eustacia, ‘the lonesome dark-eyed creature,’ as the murderess whose evil eye has stung to death the older woman” (Ramel 2011, 64). Several connections between Eustacia and the adder seem to link the two face-to-face encounters further. The adder’s coiling and uncoiling around the stick echoes the “twining and untwining” of Eustacia’s thoughts around a “single object” earlier in the novel as she gazes toward Wildeve’s house (Hardy 2005, 93). The group around Mrs Yeobright’s bed observes the gaze between the adder and the woman, and Christian Cantle exclaims, ‘“Tis to be hoped he can’t ill-wish us!”’ (285) – a statement that echoes his grandfather’s declaration of his willingness to marry Eustacia and ‘“take the risk of

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her wild dark eyes ill-wishing me”’ in the beginning of the novel (52). As Ramel notes, “the ‘small black eye’ of the adder” seems “a duplicate of Eustacia’s ‘wild dark eyes’ known for their ‘ill-wishing power’” (Ramel 2015, 102)3.

10 The superstitious suggestion of “overlooking” and “ill-wishing” – or the idea that the gaze has the potential to carry harm, whether intentional or accidental – does seem to connect Eustacia and the adder through the myth of the snake-haired Medusa, the figure perhaps most associated with the evil eye. But as Jacqueline Dillion and Phillip Mallett point out, the term “‘overlooked’ suggests a wider but less definite fear than the identifiable ‘evil eye’, for those who suspect they have been overlooked do not know who has overlooked them – or whether that person (or that animal?) consciously means harm – or whether they may have even unwittingly overlooked themselves” (Dillion & Mallett). Christian Cantle, in expressing his anxiety that the adder might “ill- wish” them (and justifying Mrs Yeobright’s aversion of gaze from a folkloric standpoint), adds that “there’s folk in heath who’ve been overlooked already” (Hardy 2005, 285)4. While this statement comments on the “paranoia follow[ing] from the possibility of being watched”, it also points to the lack of knowledge as to “who has the power to overlook, ill-wish, or look on with the evil eye” (Dillion & Mallett 21, emphasis original). In this case, while Mrs Yeobright may recognize the gaze of Eustacia in the adder’s eye, she may also be reacting to a power that the adder itself has the possibility of holding, albeit through superstitious belief.

11 Yet just because the aversion may be linked to a superstition does not render that fear as irrational. Dillion argues that Hardy complicates the easy dismissal by the reader of the heath-folk’s superstition by framing Christian’s anxiety with “another folkloric custom, applying fresh adder fat to an adder bite” (Dillion 24). While this “remedy” may seem out-dated – as Clym himself expresses – the doctor who attends Mrs Yeobright notes that the practice has some overlap with scientific knowledge. This mix of fact and folklore – with a difficulty of knowing “which seemingly outlandish folkloric beliefs and practices might nonetheless have some basis in truth”, as Dillion explains (24) – makes it difficult to dismiss the heath-folk’s worry of overlooking. Similarly, Mrs Yeobright’s physical reaction to the adder has a basis in biology. While the “universal abhorrence of these creatures” (to quote Carl Hagenbeck, the infamous exotic animal importer and creator of the modern zoological park) may seem like a stereotypical generalization, psychologist Paul Ekman notes that biologically speaking, humans are predisposed “to respond in a fearful way to snake-like shapes” (Hagenbeck 177; Darwin 44n). Aversion to reptiles is ingrained in the human body. As with Dillion’s note on Hardy’s depiction of overlooking in his supernatural short story “The Withered Arm”, his “portrayal of the act [of overlooking] from a variety of perspectives refuses to privilege any one view of reality” (Dillion 24). The adder may be a metaphorical stand- in for Eustacia through Mrs Yeobright’s eyes, or a potential “overlooker” from the heath-folk’s point of view, but he is at the same time a literal animal in the scene, behaving in the manner of a snake, with the power to look back, to hold the human as the object of his gaze.

12 If one considers the rendering of the adder as a “creature” in the act, his gaze does indeed seem to interrupt “the hegemony of human vision” in the scene (Broglio 58). When Hardy uses the term “creature” in his novels to indicate an animal during an interspecies encounter, the depiction of that animal usually interrogates a traditional boundary that would separate the human from the animal: in this case, the dominance

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of human perspective. As Broglio argues, “[i]n this look from another species, we realize there are more points of view than our own” (67). The repetition in the sentence in which the gaze occurs emphasizes the reciprocity of the act: “Mrs Yeobright saw the creature, and the creature saw her” (Hardy 2005, 285). In his essay, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)”, Derrida focuses on this act of looking that the animal performs during his encounter with his cat. He notes, it can allow itself to be looked at, no doubt, but also – something that philosophy perhaps forgets [...] – it can look at me. It has its point of view regarding me. The point of view of the absolute other, and nothing will have ever done more to make me think through this absolute alterity of the neighbor than these moments when I see myself seen naked under the gaze of a cat. (Derrida 380)

13 Derrida describes his cat as this irreplaceable being that [...] enters this place where it can encounter me, see me, even see me naked [...] here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized. And a mortal existence, for from the moment that it has a name, its name survives it. It signs its potential disappearance. (Derrida 378-379)

14 Does Mrs Yeobright “see [her]self seen” through the eyes of the adder, as Arabella later seems to experience upon locking eyes with the pig during the slaughter scene in Jude the Obscure (1895)? Does she recognize something of the adder’s “absolute alterity”, his “existence that refuses to be conceptualized”? Christian Cantle’s use of the gendered pronoun “he” rather than “it” to name the adder – usually reserved for humans in English, as Suzanne Keen notes in relation to the gendered representation of the slaughtered pig in Jude – reiterates the existence of the adder as a named, mortal creature (Keen 376). Ironically, while Mrs Yeobright bitterly felt the refusal of hospitality when Eustacia turned away from her at the window – “I would not have done it against a neighbour’s cat on such a fiery day as this!” she tells the young Johnny Nunsuch as he walks with her on the heath (Hardy 2005, 276) – she turns away from the adder much in the same way. Does she recognize her own failure to extend hospitality to another creature? Furthermore, the effect of this rendering of the adder as a creature places the reliability of Mrs Yeobright’s perspective in question: not just in relation to her view of the adder in this moment, but with her earlier view of Eustacia and assumption of her daughter-in-law’s character and motives.

15 Whatever the case, this face-to-face confrontation with the adder forces Mrs Yeobright to acknowledge her own exposure and mortality: perhaps it is this recognition that causes her to turn away. Mrs Yeobright and the adder – and Eustacia, as the novel soon reveals – are bound by their shared vulnerability, the vulnerability of all living things that is all the more poignant for the fact that in this interspecies face-to-face encounter, the animal is about to be put to death for possible human benefit. The thwarted desire of the animal gazing upon his killers parallels the undercurrent of desire in the relationships between the human characters in the scene (for Mrs Yeobright, the desire to restore her relationship with her son Clym), and the death of the adder marks a turning point in the plot. Mrs Yeobright dies, and shortly thereafter, so does Eustacia.

16 The linking of these deaths is perhaps appropriate in light of Hardy’s view of animals as kin. In a letter written to the Humanitarian League in 1910, he argued for a

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“readjustment of altruistic morals, by enlarging, as a necessity of rightness, the application of what has been called ‘The Golden Rule’ from the area of mere mankind to that of the whole animal kingdom” (Hardy 2001, 311). Nor did he limit his extension of a primary morality to exclude the snake: in his poem “Drinking Song” the speaker explains, We all are one with creeping things; And apes and men Blood-brethren, And likewise reptile forms with stings. (Hardy 1976, 906-907)

17 In his ghosted autobiography, Hardy even included as one of the only anecdotes from his early childhood an instance of being discovered with a large snake curled up with him in his cradle, “comfortably asleep like himself” (Hardy 1984, 19). For Hardy, there is no question that a snake has a face. Although he realized that nonhuman animals might not reciprocate this relationship, he believed humans had an ethical responsibility to all animals.

18 The characters’ (or perhaps readers’) failure to recognize the face of the adder – or the ethical demand of his gaze – in The Return of the Native points to a broader failure of human vision. If one must be able, in the words of Levinas, to “place the needs of the other before oneself”, to be “unreasonable”, in order to qualify as having a face and to be treated with moral consideration, this implies the existence of an always-already possibility of reciprocity. The condition “unreasonable” itself depends upon the fact there is no expectation of return for one’s action: if the possibility of reciprocity is a precondition, then such acts could be seen as reasonable. Rather than a lack of a face on the part of the adder, the scene seems to reveal (and perhaps subversively invite) deflection on the part of the human – whether face-to-face with nonhuman or human animals.5

19 In Philosophy and Animal Life, Cary Wolfe and Cora Diamond discuss the role of exposure and deflection in encounters with animals. Wolfe, writing on the work of J. M. Coetzee, points to moments that “acknowledge [...] not only the unspeakability of how we treat animals in practices such as factory farming but also the unspeakability of the limits of our own thinking in confronting such a reality” (Cavell et al. 3). Diamond suggests the phrase “difficulty of reality” to indicate moments in which reality resists thinking, becomes difficult to place into thought or words. She notes that when such moments occur, the result is often deflection, a notion she defines as “what happens when we are moved from the appreciation, or attempt at appreciation, of a difficulty of reality to a philosophical or moral problem apparently in the vicinity” (Cavell et al. 57). Deflection turns away from the present difficult reality to focus on a comprehensible problem that supposedly is related.

20 While the deflection of the gaze in the scene discussed is literal, Clym’s difficulty in grappling with the reality of his mother’s death – and his failure to reconcile with her before it – moves him to focus on the supposed “moral problem apparently in the vicinity”, that is, Eustacia’s refusal to admit Mrs Yeobright to their house – and to admit her suspected infidelity. As he approaches to question her about the day of his mother’s death, he meets Eustacia’s gaze through the reflection in a mirror, an echo perhaps of Perseus’s use of the reflection of his shield to slay Medusa. In their final moments together, Clym intentionally refuses to look at Eustacia, “turn[ing] his eyes aside” as he ties her bonnet strings, her hands too shaky with emotion to accomplish

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the task herself (Hardy 2005, 319). Faced with the difficult reality of Eustacia’s death, Clym becomes withdrawn from and nearly indifferent to the world around him, his deteriorating eyesight an external symptom of an internal loss of vision.

21 By the end of the novel, Clym’s gaze becomes similar to what Berger later calls the look of an animal in the zoo. In the zoo, Berger writes, “the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond. They scan mechanically. They have been immunized to encounter, because nothing can any more occupy a central place in their attention” (Berger 37, emphasis original). The animals, he argues, have been “ rendered absolutely marginal; and all the concentration you can muster will never be enough to centralize [them]” (34, emphasis original). In this marginal existence, the animals assume an attitude of indifference (35). Likewise, Clym’s existence after the deaths of his wife and mother is one of solitude and indifference: he walks the heath alone, is clueless to his cousin’s developing romance with the reddleman-turned- dairyman, and has “but three activities alive in him”: to visit his mother’s grave by day, his wife’s by night, and to prepare as a preacher of the “eleventh commandment” (Hardy 2005, 376). When Diggory Venn rescues Thomasin’s lost glove, she tells him, “[e]verybody gets so indifferent that I was surprised to know you thought of me” – a phrase revealing of her life as Clym’s tenant. Although Clym considers the possible necessity of offering his hand in marriage to Thomasin, he finds that his experiences have rendered all but the presence of his departed mother as marginal, unable to occupy a central place in his attention. Despite his turn as a preacher of the “eleventh commandment” – to love one’s neighbour as oneself – Clym ironically never finds his place in the community again.

22 One might consider the literary relevance of Berger’s example of the zoo further. For Berger, the zoo is the site that reveals the “historic loss [...] irredeemable for the culture of capitalism”: the completion of the removal of nonhuman animals from human society, at least in places where capitalism has shaped the environment. In turn, this loss also indicates the removal of humans from the rest of the animal world. The human creation of the zoo seems to preserve a relation lost, but as Berger notes, a trip to the zoo often evokes a sense of disappointment. Historically, zoos are sites of imperialism and of scientific knowledge, of power through the demonstration of dominance and the accumulation and compilation of knowledge. Yet we go to the zoo not with the desire to feel dominant or to learn; we go to the zoo expecting something, expecting an encounter. Instead, Berger notes, we are left with the unsaid but often felt question, “[w]hy are these animals less than I believed?” (Berger 33). It is this “unprofessional [...] but fundamental question” that concludes Berger’s essay, erecting the zoo as a “living monument” to a dead relationship, to an “irredeemable loss” (36-37).

23 The zoo is also the site where, according to Berger, animals provide their “last metaphor”, with the animals in captivity providing a model for understanding stresses upon humans in consumer societies (Berger 36)6. Yet he argues that while “[a]ll sites of enforced marginalization – ghettos, shanty towns, prisons, madhouses, concentration camps – have something in common with zoos [...] it is both too easy and too evasive to use the zoo as a symbol. The zoo is a demonstration of the relations between man and

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animals; nothing else.”7 Berger begins his essay with a reading of animals as metaphor that asserts the power and similitude of nonhuman animals in relation to human animals, but by the end he emphasizes the zoo as a literal site. This is notable because metaphors have a contentious place in the emerging field of animal studies: as Susan McHugh explains in “One or Several Literary Animal Studies?”, the field offers “multiple ways of reading animals”, but historically “metaphors have been the preponderant (if also most contested) form of literary animals” (McHugh 1-2). Animal studies scholars often “lament the metaphor as the ultimate means of reduction” (McHugh 8): transformed into a metaphor, the individual life of the animal in the text is reduced to a symbol. In contrast, Berger speculates that early animal metaphors were an indicator of the close relationship between human and nonhuman animals. Drawing on Rousseau, he suggests that the first language was likely figurative: attempting to convey a meaning by making a comparison (Berger 16). The essay juxtaposes two passages from the Iliad side by side: similar depictions of a soldier’s death and a horse’s death in battle (18-19). The overlap then indicates not a reduction of meaning from the animal, but rather a power, in that humans utilized animal comparisons to express meanings that they could not yet articulate in human terms. When humans began to view animals as machines – and later as raw material for human use – the occurrence of metaphor began to flatten animals into symbolic figures, a form of deflection that became habitual for writers and readers.8

24 In conclusion, then, thinking with metaphor can be productive, but to limit a reading to metaphor can be reductive. In the scene between Mrs Yeobright and the adder in The Return of the Native, the adder’s metaphorical presence, rendered not only by the depiction of the adder in the text but more importantly by the heath-folk’s view of the adder, is relevant. The adder’s metaphorical link to Eustacia through the superstition of overlooking suggests a power for the snake writhing in the hut: a mysterious, unknown power. Equally present in the text is a representation of the adder that suggests it is a being living out its own life of value9.

25 Furthermore, the look between Mrs Yeobright and the adder reminds the reader that the gaze between humans and animals has not been entirely “extinguished”, even in the most capitalist of societies (Berger 37). In the Victorian era, the artist Joseph Wolf noted that while the animals in the London Zoo seemed indifferent to the majority of the visitors who stopped by their cages, they responded to his prolonged gaze when he sat outside their enclosures to sketch them, as if to question why he continued to look, why he did not look away (Palmer 188). Animal studies scholar Erica Fudge also points out the many ways animals are still present in human life, especially in the form of pets10.

26 Looking at animals in Hardy rewards an extended gaze. His depictions of nonhuman animals engage with many of the philosophical and scientific debates over human- animal boundaries that were taking place in the Victorian era. Notably, Hardy’s animals do not appear in his texts simply as mirrors of or companions to the human world. They are more than symbols or movable parts of the landscape; they exist as creatures in their own right, carrying out lives of their own unrelated to the humans they encounter. Their appearance in pivotal scenes exposes characters to the recognition of

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points of view outside their own, and to the possibility that all may not be as it seems. His animals suggest that there is always more than one way of looking. In the act of looking at these literary animals, one can begin to attribute value not only to what is known and capable of being catalogued, memorized, and recited as forms of knowledge, but to the unknown, to the never-knowable: not just the mysterious or the somehow sacred, but to the acknowledgement of one’s own limits and boundaries, to the sense that there are other ways of knowing and being, “Earth-secrets” as the speaker of “An August Midnight” suggests (Hardy 1976, 147), animal secrets to paraphrase Berger. Looking at animals in Hardy reminds readers that looking closely does not necessitate a division or loss of attention elsewhere. Rather, it calls for a multiplicity in modes of looking.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berger, John, Why Look at Animals?, New York: Penguin, 2009.

Broglio, Ron, Surface Encounters: Thinking with Animals and Art, Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 2011.

Darwin, Charles, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, ed. Paul Ekman, 200th anniversary edition, Oxford: OUP, 2009.

Derrida, Jacques, “The Animal That Therefore I am (More to Follow),” trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry, 28.2 (2002), 369-418.

Cavell, Stanley, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, & Cary Wolfe, Philosophy and Animal Life, New York: Columbia UP, 2008.

Dillion, Jacqueline, Thomas Hardy: Folklore and Resistance, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Dillion, Jacqueline & Phillip Mallett, “‘The Evil Eye’: Looking and Overlooking in The Return of the Native”, Rivista di Studi Vittoriani 38-39 (2014-2015), 7-28. Also published in The Thomas Hardy Journal XXXI (Autumn 2015), 89-107.

Fudge, Erica, Animal, London: Reaktion Books, 2002.

Fudge, Erica, Pets, Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008.

Hagenbeck, Carl, Beasts and Men: Being Carl Hagenbeck’s Experiences for Half a Century Among Wild Animals, abridged trans. Hugh S.R. Elliot & A.G. Thacker, London: Longmans, 1909.

Hardy, Thomas, The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, eds. Richard Purdy and Michael Millgate, 7 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978–1988.

Hardy, Thomas, The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gibson, London: Macmillan, 1976.

Hardy, Thomas, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate, London: Macmillan, 1984.

Hardy, Thomas, Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice: The Essays, Speeches, and Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Michael Millgate, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001.

Hardy, Thomas, The Return of the Native (1878), ed. Simon Gatrell, Oxford: OUP, 2005.

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Keen, Suzanne, “Empathetic Hardy: Bounded, Ambassadorial, and Broadcast Strategies of Narrative Empathy,” Poetics Today 32.2 (Summer 2011), 349-389.

Levinas, Emmanuel, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969.

Levine, George, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988.

McHugh, Susan, “One or Several Literary Animal Studies?” H-Animal (2015), 1-13 (last accessed 15 Jan 2017).

Miller, J. Hillis, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire, London: OUP, 1970.

Morse, Deborah Denenholz & Martin A. Danahay (eds.), Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture, Surrey: Ashgate, 2007.

Palmer, A. H., The Life of Joseph Wolf: Animal Painter, London: Longmans, 1895.

Ramel, Annie, “Tess the Murderess, Eustacia the Adder: Two Women ‘Criminals’ in Hardy’s Fiction”, Fiction, Crime, and the Feminine, eds. Rédouane Abouddahab & Josiane Paccaud-Huguet, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011.

Ramel, Annie, The Madder Stain: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Thomas Hardy, Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2015.

Shakespeare, William, King Lear, ed. R.A. Foakes, London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001.

Wright, Tamra, Peter Hughes & Alison Ainley, “The Paradox of Morality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas”, The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, eds. Robert Bernasconi & David Wood, London: Routledge, 1988, 168-180.

NOTES

1. In Darwin and the Novelists, Levine argues, “[w]hat observation reveals is one’s own marginality and vulnerability” (Levine 232). 2. As others have noted, this scene recalls Shakespeare’s King Lear, both in the use of a hovel to escape the heath and in the frying of the adders, which links to the fool’s story of cooking eels alive (II. 2. 310-314). 3. Mrs Yeobright’s wound from the adder bite further connects Eustacia to this scene through the image of the bloodstain, as Annie Ramel explores in The Madder Stain (Ramel 2015, 101). 4. Christian sees the adder as a descendent of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, wondering if “something of the old serpent in God’s garden, that gied the apple to the young woman with no clothes, lives on in adders and snakes still?” (Hardy 2005, 285). Mixing Biblical stories with folklore, he resolves that he “will never kill another adder as long as [he] lives” – a statement that seems in some way to recognize the ethical demand of the adder’s gaze. 5. The terms “human animal” and “nonhuman animal” are often used in animal studies as a reminder that both exist within the same animal kingdom. See Erica Fudge’s conclusion to Animal, 159-165 and Morse & Danahay’s introduction to Victorian Animal Dreams, 2. Hardy himself used the term “nonhuman animal” in letters to friends (Collected Letters, iii, 232). 6. Berger refers to the zoologist Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape (1967) and The Human Zoo (1969).

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7. Berger extends this thought for a moment to the possible “marginalization and disposal of” the “middle and small peasant” classes, expanding on his earlier idea that “[t]he reduction of the animal, which has a theoretical as well as economic history, is part of the same process as that by which men have been reduced to isolated productive and consuming units [...] an approach to animals often prefigured an approach to man” (Berger 36, 23). 8. Perhaps this is why animal metaphors work so well in satirical writing, where the anthropocentric viewpoint becomes exaggerated for comedic effect. 9. One might think of Berger’s concept of being naked versus the nude here. While literary animals such as the adder may exist as naked creatures – as themselves, without disguise – humans have often constructed the animal as a nude: an object for appropriation and use as an object (for example, as a metaphor). 10. Fudge points out that Berger’s rendering of pets as “somehow not fully animal” in his essay is problematic, as it suggests a “category of the authentic animal” (Fudge 24). She also argues that Berger’s suggestion that pets are “deprived of almost all other animal contact” demonstrates a way his essay is undercut by a humanist “notion of the human as separate from animals” (given that pets are in nearly constant contact with the animal species Homo sapiens) (24).

ABSTRACTS

In his essay “Why Look at Animals?” art critic John Berger discusses the gaze between humans and animals. He argues that while the gaze of animals has the power to surprise humans (who see themselves being seen through the animals' eyes), this look has been “extinguished” with the marginalization of animals from society. In Thomas Hardy's novels, humans who encounter animals face-to-face and eye-to-eye often find themselves uncomfortable being seen through the gaze of the animal. In The Return of the Native (1878), for example, Mrs Yeobright shudders under the gaze of the adder. While Berger argues for the importance of metaphor in restoring the human-animal relationship, the adder in the scene can be read not only as a metaphor for the absent-yet-implicated Eustacia, but also as a living being in its own right. Of significance to this paper is the refusal of the human-animal gaze that occurs during the encounter: the turning away, or the desire not to see oneself being seen through the eyes of another, a desire that also occurs during interactions between humans in the novel. What happens to desire when the gaze flickers, is deflected, or becomes indifference? Furthermore, how might this affect the way we look at—or away from—literary animals?

Dans son essai “Pourquoi regarder les animaux ?”, le critique d’art John Berger aborde la question de l’échange de regards entre les hommes et les animaux. Il remarque que le regard des animaux a la capacité de surprendre les hommes (qui se voient eux-mêmes vus à travers les yeux des animaux), mais que ce regard a été « nié » par la marginalisation des animaux dans nos sociétés. Dans les romans de Thomas Hardy, les êtres humains qui se trouvent confrontés à des animaux, face à face, et les yeux dans les yeux, ressentent souvent une forme de malaise à se voir vus par les yeux des animaux en question. Ainsi, dans The Return of the Native (1878), Mrs Yeobright frissonne sous le regard de la vipère. Même si Berger souligne l’importance des métaphores dans le processus visant à rétablir des relations entre l’homme et l’animal, la vipère

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ne peut pas être interprétée uniquement comme métaphore rappelant le personnage de Eustacia, à ce moment-là absente de la scène : car elle est aussi et surtout un être vivant à part entière. Cet article se concentre sur le refus de l’échange de regards entre l’homme et l’animal dans cette confrontation : Mrs Yeobright se détourne, comme mue par le désir de ne pas être vue à travers les yeux de l’autre – un désir qui dans ce roman se manifeste également dans les relations entre humains. Que se passe-t-il lorsque le regard tremble, ou se détourne, ou devient indifférent ? Et surtout, comment ce type de scène peut-il influencer la manière dont nous regardons les animaux, ou nous en détournons ?

INDEX

Keywords: gaze, desire, adder, animal, metaphor, deflection, faces oeuvrecitee Return of the Native (The) Mots-clés: animal, évitement, regard, désir, vipère, visage, vue

AUTHOR

ANNA WEST Anna West is an early career researcher whose work focuses on Thomas Hardy and animal studies. She received her PhD from the University of St Andrews. Her first monograph, Thomas Hardy and Animals, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017.

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The Medusean Eye in Thomas Hardy L’œil méduséen chez Thomas Hardy

Annie Ramel

EDITOR'S NOTE

This article is being published jointly by FATHOM and the Hardy Review as part of a collaborative work.

1 The eye in Thomas Hardy’s fiction often appears as the “evil eye”, an eye full of voracity, endowed with the Medusean power to petrify and to kill. An article written jointly by Phillip Mallett and Jacqueline Dillion offers a brilliant analysis of “the evil eye” in The Return of the Native, relating it to the superstition known in Dorset as “overlooking” (Dillion & Mallett; see also Dillion 2016, and F.E. Hardy 268-269). I too have explored the question of the evil eye, mostly in Far from the Madding Crowd and The Return of the Native, in several articles (Ramel 2010a, 9, 26; Ramel 2010b, 91-92), and in my book on Hardy (Ramel 2015, 101-103). I fully agree with the reading provided by my two colleagues, but I tend to view things in a slightly different perspective, oriented by Lacanian psychoanalysis. Therefore I shall try in this article to bring something new to the debate on “overlooking”, and throw some light on the questions raised by the weird power of “the evil eye” in Hardy’s fiction.

1. The eye and the gaze

2 One point on which I (slightly) differ from my colleagues’ analysis is the positive value they give to the “face-to-face encounter”, the “shared humanity” and “ethical obligations” that go with it1. Indeed in Lacan’s perspective, there can be no absolute face-to-face encounter, because structurally speaking “you never look at me from the place where I see you”, and conversely “what I look at is never what I wish to see” (Lacan 1986, 103)2. If I saw what I really wish to see, that would mean reaching the object of my desire, that is to say putting an end to desire and thus to life. If the Other

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saw me at the innermost point from which I see him, such an intrusion would be deadly. Tess, as a sun-ray peers under her eye-lids and wakes her on Salisbury Plain (Hardy 1991, 381), is the victim of such an effraction. The gaze of the Other enters her and thus condemns her to death. As Joseph Hillis Miller writes: The sun is in this novel, as in tradition generally, the fecundating male source, a principle of life, but also a dangerous energy able to pierce and destroy, as Tess, at the end of the novel, lying on the stone of sacrifice at Stonehenge, after her brief period of happiness with Angel, is wakened, just before her capture, by the first rays of the morning sun which penetrate under her eyelids (Miller 1982, 122).

3 The sun-beam, here, symbolizes the gaze of the Other that enters her, representing the social and Symbolic order that sentences her to death. On the contrary, in the non- tragic sub-plot of The Return of the Native, Thomasin is shielded from the Other’s gaze by Venn, who has taken care to hang all the drapery in his possession around her couch (supposedly to keep her from any contact with the red material of his trade). Yet the invasive light of the lantern threatens to creep under her eye-lids when Mrs Yeobright is allowed into the van and shown the sleeping girl. One thing is sure: “she was not made to be looked at thus”, and the reddleman “cast his eyes aside with a delicacy which well became him” (Hardy 1990, 36). The girl is protected from the “watchful intentness” (4) of gazers.

4 The Lacanian concept of “object-gaze” (objet-regard, often translated as “gaze qua object”) is needed here to understand the fundamental dissymmetry between seeing and being seen. Sartre had posited a reciprocity between seeing the Other and being seen by him3; Lacan, on the contrary, argued that there is a split between the eye, which is on the side of the subject, and the gaze, on the side of the object, that is to say on the side of the Other. Why this lack of coincidence? Why this unbridgeable gap? Because of subjective division, which means that the self is divided between itself and the semblance it shows to the world, “the paper tiger it shows to the other” (Lacan 1986, 107). Access to the Other is always missed, the wall of semblances divides the subject from the object of his desire, as the French poet Louis Aragon knew very well before Lacan developed his theory of the gaze: In vain your image comes to meet me And does not enter me where I am who only shows it Turning towards me you can find On the wall of my gaze only your dreamt-of shadow. I am that wretch comparable with mirrors That can reflect but cannot see Like them my eye is empty and like them inhabited By your absence which makes it blind.4

5 Blind, that is what every human being is, fundamentally: Lacan argues that the Biblical words “they have eyes that they might not see” speak some truth about the “antinomic way” between the two terms involved in the scopic field: the eye and the gaze.

6 A few words may be necessary here about the gaze as distinct from the eye, the gaze of the Other: Lacan’s point is that, even before I start looking at the world around us, I am being looked at from everywhere: “I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides” (Lacan 1986, 72). Looked at, but not seen – for the Other’s gaze cannot reach me. The example he gives is the sardine-tin which he remembers a fisherman pointed out to him when, as a young man, he was sailing with him in Brittany. The man exclaimed: “You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it does not see

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you!” (95). Lacan kept asking himself questions about those words because, he says, “if what Petit-Jean said to me, namely, that the can did not see me, had any meaning, it was because in a sense, it was looking at me all the same. It was looking at me at the level of the point of light, the point at which everything that looks at me is situated” (95). The sardine tin here presentifies that point which he calls the “object-gaze”: the point from which the Other looks at me, prior to my looking back at him. It was from the memory of that scene that he deduced the object-gaze.

7 For this, Lacan is indebted to Merleau-Ponty and his idea of the visibility of things in his Phenomenology of Perception: The lighting directs my gaze and causes me to see the object, so that in a sense it knows and sees the object. If I imagine a theatre with no audience in which the curtain rises upon illuminated scenery, I have the impression that the spectacle is in itself visible or ready to be seen, and that the light which probes the back and foreground, accentuating the shadows and permeating the scene through and through, realizes before us some kind of vision. (Merleau-Ponty 278)

8 Commenting on this passage and its influence on Lacan as he developed his theory of the gaze, Jacques-Alain Miller writes: This is about a supplementary gaze which is always there – to take up Merleau- Ponty’s example – and which is contained in visibility itself. In addition to that vision which another may have of me, there is the supplementary gaze of the Other, of the hidden Other. One may glimpse it when the light not only offers a field of visibility but also, simultaneously, focuses on a luminous spot which may figure the gaze, which incarnates for a moment the all-seeing gaze of the big Other5.

9 What this analysis brings out is that Lacan’s object-gaze is the gaze of the big Other. Should that evanescent spot, briefly illuminated and glimpsed, become a fixture in the field of vision, then the subject could be assigned only one position, that of paranoia: under the gaze of a malevolent Big Other/Brother.

10 It is essential to understand that the normal subjective position is not that of paranoia: the Other may look at me, but does not see me. Thomasin may be threatened by the intrusive gaze of watchers as she sleeps in the reddleman’s van, but she remains unharmed by that “watchful intentness”. Visibility is no more than a potentiality. The object-gaze is but an evanescent point that may be briefly glimpsed, not a permanent all-seeing eye. Lacan defined the gaze as the “object” of the scopic drive, as one of the forms assumed by objet petit a6. From which one may infer that the object-gaze, like objet petit a, is an object which is forever missing, “a pure deficit in the symbolic order that does not have any imaginary protrusion to fill it out […] a vacuum, sucking other objects into its place” (Kaye 56). It is felt as an absence rather than as a presence, it is “extracted” from our reality. Its “extraction”, normally effected by symbolic castration, is what gives coherence to our reality: Lacan pointed out that the consistency of our “experience of reality” depends on the exclusion of what he calls the objet petit a from it: in order for us to have normal “access to reality”, something must be excluded, “primordially repressed”. In psychosis, this exclusion is undone: the object (in this case, the gaze or voice) is included in reality, the outcome of which, of course, is the disintegration of our “sense of reality”, the loss of reality. (Žižek 1996, 91)

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2. The Medusean eye in Hardy’s fiction

11 The best illustration that can be given to make all this clear is the one used by Lacan himself: the anamorphosis in Holbein’s famous painting, The Ambassadors7 (see comment in Ramel 2015, 85-86 & 89). But let us now turn to Hardy, who sometimes uses spatial constructions that “extract” the object-gaze, in likeness to the effect produced by The Ambassadors. In Far from the Madding Crowd, the presence / absence of the object- gaze is felt from the beginning: immediately after the sheep have fallen off the edge of the cliff, Oak looks down into the precipice, then shifts his gaze to survey the whole scene. Something on the outer margin of the pit catches his eye, it is a pond which looks like “a dead man’s eye”. But the eye – the gaze of the Other – is not staring Oak in the face, it is “attenuated” by a particular construction of space: By the outer margin of the pit was an oval pond, and over it hung the attenuated skeleton of a chrome-yellow moon which had only a few days to last—the morning star dogging her on the left hand. The pool glittered like a dead man’s eye, and as the world awoke a breeze blew, shaking and elongating the reflection of the moon without breaking it, and turning the image of the star to a phosphoric streak upon the water (Hardy 1986, 33).

12 The frontal view of the “dead man’s eye” is avoided by the pond having been placed on the edge of the scene – like Holbein’s hollow bone –, on the frame of the picture.8 The pond is “oval”, as if distorted by the gaze of the onlooker, who looks “awry” to see it. At the beginning of the description, death is figured by the moon as a “skeleton” – a memento mori, reminding Oak of the vanity of terrestrial things, as it only has a few more days to last. The skeleton is “attenuated” because the moon is on the wane, but the adjective also suggests that the horror is somehow screened, kept at a distance. Then we are shown the pond as a dead eye, and the “skeleton” of the moon comes to be reflected on the surface of the water. Death is now but a reflection, some object being interposed between its horror and the onlooker’s eye. The breeze which starts blowing shakes and “elongates” the reflection of the moon, turning it into a “phosphoric streak upon the water” – an image which conveys the idea of some will-o’-the-wisp exhaled from the phosphorus of skeletons. In that uncanny object, characterized by its “particular stretching” (Hardy 1986, 87), by its “pulsatile”, “spread out”, uncertain quality (89), we recognize the “anamorphic ghost” that Lacan writes about, the death’s head which looks at you from its empty sockets in Holbein’s Ambassadors, and gives figure to the unrepresentable object-gaze.

13 Hardy’s talent here lies in the construction of a picture that both shows the object-gaze and excludes it from the visual field: there is “more than meets the eye” in the anamorphosis, the split between the eye and the gaze is represented. To this scene one should oppose the passage in which Boldwood receives the Valentine card, whose effect is the exact reverse of that of anamorphosis. First, the card is a little surplus object – an incongruous thing which Bathsheba does not know what to do with, until she decides to send it to Boldwood, the only man who never looks at her. The Valentine finds its way to Boldwood’s parlour, where it is placed on the wings of an eagle surmounting the time-piece on the mantel-shelf. The feminine has thus intruded into the home of the hardened bachelor – the feminine as enigmatic, unrepresentable9, radically Other, especially to such a man as Boldwood. The alien, incongruous object then starts to exert a fascination on him: “Here the bachelor’s gaze was continually fastening itself till the large red seal became as a blot of blood on the retina of his eye” (Hardy 1986,

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80). The red seal enters Boldwood’s eye until it turns into a bloodstain on his retina, as if the wax and the blood on the retina became one and the same substance. Boldwood’s eye looking steadfastly at the red seal becomes the thing it is looking at, while the red seal becomes the eye staring at it. The split between the eye and the gaze is annuled: the gaze of the Other has entered Boldwood at the very point from which he sees. The Valentine has become Boldwood’s unheimlich double, and its voice, which orders him to marry the anonymous sender, logically becomes one with Boldwood’s own voice, as the farmer repeats its injunction: “‘Marry me,’ he said aloud” (81). Boldwood conflates the enunciation of the Valentine and his own.

14 We should also note that the construction of space in this scene is different from that of anamorphosis. We have seen that the Valentine is first placed on the mantel-shelf. Later, when Boldwood goes to bed, he moves the Valentine to the corner of the looking- glass, sticking it in the frame of the glass. So far, the “insistent red seal” has been staring at Boldwood from the periphery of his visual space. Suddenly Boldwood’s attention is drawn towards his own reflection in the mirror; the eye is no longer peripheral, it has migrated to the centre of the mirror: “The solemn and reserved yeoman […] caught sight of his reflected features, wan in expression, and insubstantial in form. He saw how closely compressed was his mouth, and that his eyes were wide- spread and vacant” (Hardy 1986, 81). It is Boldwood’s death’s-head which now appears in the looking-glass, staring him in the face from the eyes of a dead man, which Boldwood recognizes as his own yet perceives as totally strange. This uncanny encounter between Boldwood and his double reflected in the mirror cannot be reduced to a symmetrical relation for, as Žižek argues, the double is not just an imaginary other, the same as me: it is an image of “radical otherness”; “the double is the same as me, yet totally strange; his sameness all the more accentuates his uncanniness”. Žižek goes a step further by arguing that “at its most fundamental, the double embodies the phantom-like Thing in me […] In my double, I don’t simply encounter myself (my mirror image), but first of all what is ‘in me more than myself’ […] a pure substance of enjoyment exempted from the circuit of generation and corruption” (Žižek 2001, 125). The double, writes Žižek, is “the double qua Thing” (126).

15 A few words are necessary here to clarify Žižek’s formula, “the double qua Thing”. For Lacan “The Thing” (das Ding in Freudian terms) stands for what is most interior to the psyche (“in me more than myself”), and for what is most exterior to it. Lacan says it is “extimate” to the subject (Lacan 2008, 87-88)10. The Thing is “the absolute Other of the subject, that one is supposed to find again” (63) – as such, it is the primordial object of desire, the irreplaceable “object-cause” that the subject craves for. At the same time, it is a fantasy of perfect unity, where the subject dissolves into the Other and becomes one with it. So that “The Thing” is both what is most alien to the subject, and what represents his innermost being. Exactly like the image which the mirror sends back to Boldwood, which is both his own self and a figure of radical Otherness. The Thing is fantasized as the origin, the primeval unity11 to which every human being aspires to return, but never reaches – indeed Lacan equates it with “the maternal thing” (81)12. As the ultimate object of desire, the Thing is a figure of perfect jouissance – but reaching it would put an end to desire and to life.

16 To what extent is Žižek’s analysis relevant to Boldwood facing his double in the mirror? In particular, can it be argued that “the double qua Thing” is to Boldwood “a pure substance of enjoyment”? When the red wax and the man’s retina become

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consubstantial, is that jouissance? For one thing, the Valentine with its red seal, drawing Boldwood like a magnet, indicates that Boldwood’s desire is involved in a scene full of sexual undertones – for instance the word “curve” is used with reference to handwriting but also to a woman’s body (see Ramel 2016, 7-8). What desire, then? A desire for a particular woman? No, for Boldwood does not even know who wrote the Valentine. Desire is kindled here by the mystery of the origin of the anonymous letter, as if the fascination were caused by the opacity of what Pascal Quignard calls the “sexual night” (see Quignard) – the unfathomable mystery of the womb wherein everyone fancies lies his/her origin. Indeed the word “origin” occurs three times on two pages (Hardy 1886, 80-81). And we know that Boldwood will seek the “original” of the woman who wrote the message, and pursue the unique, primordial object-cause of his desire with unflinching determination. Undoubtedly, it is “The Thing” that Boldwood is concerned with. But why then should his vision of the woman writing give way to the vision of his own death’s head reflected in the mirror? Why is the image of the alluring red seal overturned to reveal the horror lurking just behind? Here Hardy speaks some truth about human desire at its most fundamental: for the drive towards the Thing is another name for the death drive. Death is the fate that awaits whoever attempts a backward course to his/her origin, but it is also his / her truest and most intimate desire. So after all Žižek’s theorizing about the double is perfectly relevant here: the double is indeed “the double qua Thing”, “a pure substance of enjoyment” which, one might say, is “in Boldwood more than himself”. The scene, in its subtle mixing of sexuality and the death-drive, is definitely about jouissance in the Lacanian sense of the term.

17 If the double stands for radical Otherness, the Otherness of the Thing, it logically ensues that the eyes in the mirror embody the gaze of the Other – that is to say, in Lacanian words, the object-gaze. The same inference can be made about the red seal turned into a mirror-image of the eye staring at it13. And also about Boldwood’s own eyes. That idea is developed by Žižek in a passage about the double: When I find myself face to face with my double, when I “encounter myself” among the objects, when “I myself” qua subject appear “out there”, what am I at that precise moment as the one who looks at it, as a witness to myself? Precisely the gaze qua object: the horror of coming face to face with my double is that this encounter reduces me to the object-gaze. (Žižek 2001, 126)

18 At this point, when the eye and the Other’s gaze coincide, “when the gaze qua object is no longer the elusive blind spot in the field of the visible but is included in this field, one meets one’s own death”. For indeed “’seeing oneself looking’ [se voir voyant], unmistakably stands for death” (Žižek 1996, 94). In the uncanny encounter between a man and his double (Doppelgänger), “the double strangely seems always to look askew, never to return our gaze by looking straight into our eyes – the moment he were to do it, our life would be over” (94). The die is cast for Boldwood from now on: when the eye and the gaze meet in an awful conflation, the gaze turns Medusean, and only death can ensue – Boldwood will not actually die, since he is reprieved, but he is symbolically dead (“he walked the world no more”, Hardy 1986, 290).

19 Thus it appears that the “evil eye” is the form assumed by the object-gaze when it ceases to be a vacillating, evanescent presence / absence. In The Return of the Native, the organization of space at the beginning of the novel is careful to show the split between the eye and the gaze14, in particular in chapter III (“The Custom of the Country”) where the flames of the bonfire on Egdon Heath throw an unstable light on the individuals

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standing round and produce an effect comparable to that of anamorphosis. But rather than dwelling on this, I will focus on the scene in which Mrs Yeobright is literally killed by Eustacia’s gaze, in a mortal face to face encounter. Clym’s mother, wanting to make peace with her son, knocks at the door of his cottage, but Clym is asleep and does not hear anything, while Eustacia is in the compromising company of Wildeve. Eustacia does not at first open the door, so Mrs Yeobright walks away, thinking her son rejects her. But she has seen something that will ultimately kill her, she has indeed been “overlooked” (see Dillion & Mallett): “I have seen […] a woman’s face looking at me through a window-pane” (Hardy 1990, 288). In her exchange on the heath with a little boy – Jimmy Nunsuch –, she explains to him that she has seen a “bad sight”, to which the boy replies: “once when I went to Throope Great Pond to catch effets I seed myself looking up at myself, and I was frightened and jumped back like anything” (288). The “bad sight” for Jimmy was clearly a case of “seeing himself looking” – and we know by now that such an experience “unmistakably stands for death”. The parallel made by the narrative between the “bad sight” encountered by Jimmy and that seen by Mrs Yeobright encourages us to believe that in the window of Clym’s cottage, what Mrs Yeobright has seen is not just her daughter-in-law refusing to let her in, but her own mirror-image, her true double – such a reading being of course perfectly consonant with Freudian analyses focusing on the mother’s desire to supplant her daughter-in- law and have her son all to herself. A few pages further, after she has been stung by an adder and carried into a hut, so that her wound might be anointed by the liquid fat of an adder, she finds herself facing the animal about to be sacrificed. In a mirror-relation, the eye of the creature meets her own eye: “The live adder regarded the assembled group with a sinister look in its small black eye, and the beautiful brown and jet pattern, on its back seemed to intensify with indignation. Mrs Yeobright saw the creature, and the creature saw her: she quivered throughout, and averted her eyes” (297). Averting her eyes – like the man attempting to look askew to avoid looking straight into the eyes of his double – is to no avail. What is repeated here is the deadly face-to-face relation between her and Eustacia through the window-pane: the “small black eye” of the adder, “like a villainous sort of black currant” (297), which the villagers fear might “ill-wish” them (298), is of course a duplicate of Eustacia’s “wild dark eyes” known for their “ill-wishing” power (48). The “scarlet speck” which appears on Mrs Yeobright’s foot (296-297) unmistakably identifies her with Eustacia who, in an earlier scene, showed to Clym “a scarlet little puncture”, “a bright red spot” on her round white arm (186-187). This confirms my interpretation of Mrs Yeobright’s “bad sight”: what she has seen in the window-frame is her own double, she has seen herself looking at herself. Like Žižek’s Doppelgänger, she finds herself “at the very point of a pure gaze”15. In this conflation of eye and gaze, she can only meet her death. The “evil eye” that has killed her, the Medusa-like gaze of her daughter-in-law, is no other than the object-gaze coinciding with her own eye.

20 Another mirror-scene takes place a little later. Johnny Nunsuch has just revealed to Clym the circumstances of his mother’s death. Clym comes home in a rage and arrives behind Eustacia, who is standing before a looking-glass: […] when he opened the door she was standing before the looking glass in her nightdress, the ends of her hair gathered into one hand, with which she was coiling the whole mass round her head, previous to beginning toilette operations. She was not a woman given to speaking first at a meeting, and she allowed Clym to walk across in silence, without turning her head. He came behind her, and she saw his face in the glass. It was ashy, haggard, and terrible. Instead of starting towards him

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in sorrowful surprise […] she remained motionless, looking at him in the glass. And while she looked the carmine flush with which warmth and sound sleep had suffused her cheeks and neck dissolved from view, and the deathlike pallor in his face flew across into hers. He was close enough to see this, and the sight instigated his tongue. ‘You know what is the matter,’ he said huskily. ‘I see it in your face’ (Hardy 1990, 328).

21 Clym has caught in the mirror-image of Eustacia what normally eludes the eye’s grasp, the object-gaze which is “more than meets the eye” (Žižek 2001, 127). The logic of the double prevails here: the subject’s eye and the Other’s gaze coincide, Eustacia sees herself looking, and Clym sees her seeing herself looking. In this uncanny encounter, Clym sees Eustacia’s eye looking at her mirror-image, and Eustacia sees Clym’s gaze peering into the mirror and seeing her at the very point from which she sees. The mirror has indeed become a looking glass, which both reflects and sees – unlike Aragon’s “mirror”, and unlike the mirror in Lacan’s mirror-stage. Clym knows that she knows that he knows that she knows, etc. Clym’s eye here is not blind, not empty, it is inhabited by Eustacia’s real presence. Such an eye/gaze is Medusean: Eustacia does not turn, her head, she remains motionless, petrified. Both Clym and Eustacia seem to have been turned to stone.

22 So Boldwood and Eustacia are both confronted to “looking-glasses” inhabited by the presence of the Other. “The Withered Arm” (Hardy 1988, 52-78) stages a similar mirror- relation between Rhoda and Gertrude, “the supplanted woman” (Rhoda) having found her double in Gertrude, the wife of Farmer Lodge16. In the attempt to find a cure for Gertrude’s “withered arm”, Rhoda and Gertrude visit conjuror Trendle, who shows Gertrude a glass filled with a strange mixture – in fact a mixture of water and egg- white – where, he says, she might be able to see an image of the “enemy” causing her trouble. Rhoda, who has been told to wait outside, sees all the proceedings, for the door has remained ajar, and then the glass is brought close to the window. She is “overlooking” the scene, indeed she is the focaliser in the passage, which is important. What does Gertrude see in the glass? The glass functions as a “looking-glass” – in the sense of “a glass used for looking” –, but also as a mirror, for it sends to Gertrude an image of Rhoda, the other woman looking at her in the glass. But a very special mirror, which is also a “looking glass” – without a hyphen –, a glass looking at Gertrude, now exposed to the gaze of the Other – the other woman, the “enemy” –, that is to say to the object-gaze. Indeed “the opaline hue of the egg fluid” staring Gertrude in the face is strongly reminiscent of “the uneasy depthless white” of a blind man’s eyes, which, according to Žižek is “an exemplary case” of the gaze qua object: “The exemplary case of the gaze qua object is a blind man’s eyes, i.e. eyes which do not see (we experience the gaze qua object when a partner in conversation suddenly takes off his black glasses, exposing us to the uneasy depthless white of his eyes”) (Žižek 2001, 117)17. It is as though the uneasy mixture of egg-white and water had turned into the white of an eye, an eye without a pupil18 – a figure given to the unspecularisable object-gaze. At the same time, the “looking glass” also functions as a mirror held to Gertrude, for as she sees her double in the mirror, she also sees herself. She sees herself seeing herself seeing. As for Rhoda, she sees herself being seen by Gertrude, and she sees herself seeing herself being seen by Gertrude, for the specular relation implies reversibility – indeed the same pallor creeps over the faces of the two women. The gaze of the Other “enters” them, reaches them at the innermost point from which they see. The

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shapeless, turbid image reflected by the looking-glass is “extimate” to Gertrude/Rhoda: both intimate, and alien to them, like Žižek’s Döppelganger, and like Boldwood’s mirror- image. The villagers are right to believe that Gertrude’s misfortunes have been caused by her being “overlooked” (Hardy 1988, 66): for when the eye and the gaze coincide – in popular superstitions and in works of fiction – the encounter is always mortal. That is what tradition calls the “evil eye”.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

André, Serge, Que veut une femme, Paris : Navarin, 1986.

Braunstein, Nestor, La jouissance, un concept lacanien, Paris : Point Hors Ligne, 1992.

Bullen, J. B., The Expressive Eye, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.

Dillion, Jacqueline & Phillip Mallett, “‘The Evil Eye’: Looking and Overlooking in The Return of the Native”, Rivista di Studi Vittoriani 38-39 (2014-2015), 7-28. Also published in The Thomas Hardy Journal XXXI (Autumn 2015), 89-107.

Dillion, Jacqueline, Thomas Hardy: Folklore and Resistance, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Hardy, Florence Emily, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy 1840-1891 (1928), Cambridge: CUP, 2011.

Hardy, Thomas, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), ed. Robert C. Schweik, W.W. Norton, New- York, 1986.

Hardy, Thomas, “The Withered Arm” (1888), Collected Short Stories, intro. Desmond Hawkins, London: Macmillan, 1988, 52-78.

Hardy, Thomas, The Return of the Native (1878), Oxford: World’s Classics, 1990.

Hardy, Thomas, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Oxford: World’s Classics, 1991.

Kaye, Sarah, Slavoj Žižek: A Critical Introduction, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003.

Lacan, Jacques, Le Séminaire XI, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, Paris : Seuil, 1973.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar, Book XI (1979), trans. Alan Sheridan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, London: Peregrine Books, 1986.

Lacan, Jacques, Autres écrits, Paris : Seuil, 2001.

Lacan, Jacques, Le Séminaire X, L’angoisse, Paris : Seuil, 2004.

Lacan, Jacques, Le Séminaire XVI, D’un autre à l'Autre, Paris : Seuil, 2006.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar, Book VII (1986), trans. Dennis Porter, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Abingdon: Routledge, 2008.

Louvel, Liliane, Poetics of the Iconotext, ed. Karen Jacobs, trans. Laurence Petit, Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, London: Psychology Press (Routledge Classics Series), 1962.

Miller, Jacques-Alain, “L’image du corps en psychanalyse”, La Cause freudienne 68.1 (2008) :94-104.

Miller, Joseph Hillis. Fiction and Repetition, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.

Miller, Joseph Hillis, Distance and Desire, Cambridge (Mass.): Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1970.

Morgan, Rosemarie, Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy, London & New York: Routledge, 1991.

Quignard, Pascal, La nuit sexuelle, Paris : Flammarion, 2007.

Ramel, Annie, “The ‘Passion for Particularity’ in The Return of the Native”, Miranda [Online] 1 (2010): (last accessed 10 Apr 2018).

Ramel, Annie, “The Scapegoat in Hardy’s Tragic Novels: Revisiting Ancient Theory”, Gramma 18 (2010): 81-96.

Ramel, Annie, The Madder Stain: A Psychanalytic Reading of Thomas Hardy, Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2015.

Ramel, Annie, “Bathsheba’s Lost Hat and Metonymic Substitution: Objects in Far from the Madding Crowd,” FATHOM [Online] 3 (2016), (last accessed 10 Apr 2018).

Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (1943), trans. Hazel E. Barnes, London: Methuen, 1958.

Wajcman, Gérard, L’Œil absolu, Paris : Denoël, 2010.

Žižek, Slavoj, “‘I hear you with my eyes’: or, The Invisible Master”, Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, eds. Slavoj Žižek & Renata Salecl, Durham & London: Duke UP, 1996, 90-126.

Žižek, Slavoj, Enjoy your Symptom, New York & London: Routledge, 2001.

NOTES

1. Though of course responding to the other’s gaze is essential in building intersubjective relations. Lacan’s “mirror-stage” provides the infant with a unified image of his/her self but also, simultaneously, introduces him to social relations (i.e. to the symbolic world) because the supporting role of other human beings (encouraging him to recognize himself/herself in the mirror-image) is an essential part in the process. The infant sees his/her own image and also sees the supporting other looking at it and identifying him/her with it. 2. The actual translation in the Peregrine Book (Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychanalysis, translated by Alan Sheridan (1977) from Le Séminaire, XI, “Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse”, reprinted in Peregrine Books, London, 1986) is: “you never look at me from the place from which I see you”, which does not make sense, and is erroneous – the French being “jamais tu ne me regardes là où je te vois” (Lacan 1973, 95). I have taken the liberty of correcting the translation. 3. For Sartre, the gaze is that which enables the subject to realize that the Other is also a subject: “My fundamental connection with the Other-as-subject must be able to be referred back to my permanent possibility of being seen by the Other” (Sartre 256). Lacan went along with Sartre in his early seminars, his conception of the mirror-stage is perfectly consonant with such a view. It was only in 1964 that he developed his own conception of the gaze as objet petit a and then took issue with Sartre on this question (Lacan 1973, 84).

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4. Lacan quotes this poem twice in The Seminar XI, first as an introduction to his second chapter, “The Freudian Unconscious and ours”, then to introduce his seventh chapter on “Anamorphosis”: Vainement ton image arrive à ma rencontre Et ne m’entre où je suis qui seulement la montre Toi te tournant vers moi tu ne saurais trouver Au mur de mon regard que ton ombre rêvée Je suis ce malheureux comparable aux miroirs Qui peuvent réfléchir mais ne peuvent pas voir Comme eux mon œil est vide et comme eux habité De l’absence de toi qui fait sa cécité (Louis Aragon, Le Fou d’Elsa, “Contre-chant”, 1963, quoted and translated in Lacan 1986, 17). 5. “Il s’agit d’un regard supplémentaire qu’il y a toujours – pour reprendre l’exemple de Merleau- Ponty – et qui est le regard contenu dans la visibilité même. Qu’en plus de la vision qu’un autre peut avoir de moi, il y a le regard supplémentaire de l’Autre, de l’Autre caché. On peut percevoir cela quand la lumière non seulement offre un champ de visibilité mais se concentre en même temps sur un point lumineux qui peut avoir valeur de regard, qui incarne un moment le regard omnivoyant du grand Autre” (Miller 2008, 103, my translation). 6. “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a” is the title of the second part of The Seminar XI, given by Lacan in 1964. Lacan defines the gaze as an object, which he adds to the four drive objects listed by Freud. The object-voice is another object added by Lacan, gaze and voice being interrelated forms of objet a. 7. The Ambassadors is reproduced on the front-cover of Lacan’s XIth Seminar. See chap. VII, entitled “Anamorphosis”, 79-90. In Holbein's painting, the anamorphic object, the death’s head, is “extracted" from the visual field by being placed at the bottom of the picture, where it is distorted and unrecognizable. At first, all you see is some sort of cuttlebone, until an oblique gaze allows you to catch a glimpse of the death’s head. 8. J.B. Bullen has shown the “pictorial” quality of Hardy’s descriptions (Bullen 6). Liliane Louvel, in Poetics of the Iconotext, has developed the concept of the “painting-effect” in texts, “an illusionistic effect so powerful that painting seems to haunt the text despite the absence of any direct reference to painting in general or to a particular painting” (Louvel 90). 9. “L’irreprésentable de la féminité” (“the unrepresentable of femininity”, André 263). 10. Lacan first introduced the word “extime” in his XVIth Seminar (Lacan 2006, 249). 11. Such primeval unity, conceived as anterior to subjective division, never existed: it is a mere effect of language, posterior to symbolic castration (Braunstein 78-79). 12. “Well now, the step taken by Freud […] is to show that there is no Sovereign Good – that the Sovereign Good, which is das Ding, which is the mother, is also the object of incest, is a forbidden good, and that there is no other good” (Lacan 2008, 85). 13. The red stain as a representation of the object-gaze should not surprise us, for Lacan has argued that the first model of the gaze is the stain: “[…] le premier modèle du regard est la tache” (Lacan 2001). The red stain as a figure of the object-gaze is the key-idea in my book on Thomas Hardy, The Madder Stain (Ramel 2015). 14. The tumulus from which Eustacia looks at Wildeve’s lit window through her telescope is some distance away from the tumulus where she means to be reached by Wildeve’s gaze (she keeps her private bonfire burning steadily there to attract his attention, Hardy 1990, 55). 15. “As a rule one focuses on the horror of being the object of some invisible, unfathomable, panoptical gaze (the ‘someone-is-watching-me’ motif) – yet it is a far

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more unbearable experience to find oneself at the very point of a pure gaze” (Žižek 2001, 126). 16. Rhoda’s boy stares at Gertrude, as if he “would read her through and through” (Hardy 1988, 54), and gives a full report to his mother, providing her with a mental image of Mrs Lodge “that was realistic as a photograph” (57). A photograph that works as a mirror-image, for what Rhoda seeks in it is her own image. Rhoda will end up being “wrinkled” (78) in perfect likeness to Gertrude. 17. In this Žižek is merely following Lacan: “Qu’est-ce qui nous regarde? Le blanc de l’oeil de l’aveugle, par exemple” (Lacan 2004, 293). 18. The pupil for Lacan is a structural “hole”, a blind spot which allows the subject to be “elided as subject of the geometral plane” (Lacan 1986, 108), i.e. which maintains the split between eye and gaze.

ABSTRACTS

The eye in Thomas Hardy’s fiction is often felt as a menace, like the “oval pond” in Far from the Madding Crowd, glittering “like a dead man’s eye”. The unblinking eye can be an “evil eye”, full of voracity, endowed with a Medusean power, the power to petrify or to kill. Indeed eyes do kill in Hardy’s stories: Mrs Yeobright is killed by the “bad sight” of her daughter-in-law looking at her from a window and not opening the door – the “small black eye” of the live adder later regarding her being a duplicate of Eustacia’s “ill-wishing” dark eyes. At what point does the gaze, which normally makes manifest the “positive, dynamic and productive dimension of desire” (Jane Thomas, Thomas Hardy and Desire: Conceptions of the Self, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, back cover) turn Medusean? Jacques Lacan’s concept of the unspecularizable “object-gaze” will help us to understand this, and throw a new light on the fictional use which Hardy made of “the evil eye” – a superstition known in Dorset as “overlooking”.

L’œil dans la fiction de Thomas Hardy est souvent perçu comme menace : c'est la cas de l’étang ovale éclairé par la lune qui luit “comme l'œil d'un mort” dans Far from the Madding Crowd. L’œil fixe, qui ne cille pas, peut être “le mauvais œil”, plein de voracité, doué d’un pouvoir méduséen, le pouvoir de pétrifier et de tuer. En vérité, l’œil tue dans la fiction de Hardy : Mrs Yeobright est tuée par un “spectacle” au pouvoir maléfique (“a bad sight”), la vue de sa belle-fille qui la regarde par une fenêtre et ne lui ouvre pas la porte – le “petit œil noir” de la vipère qui la regarde plus tard n’étant autre qu’une réplique de l’œil noir de Eustacia, capable de jeter le mauvais sort. À quel moment passe-t-on du regard porteur de désir, qui en rend manifeste la dimension “positive, dynamique et productive” (Jane Thomas, Thomas Hardy and Desire: Conceptions of the Self, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) au regard méduséen? Le concept lacanien de “l’objet- regard” nous aidera à comprendre cela, et éclairera d’un jour nouveau l’utilisation fictionnelle que fait Hardy de cette superstition connue dans le Dorset comme “overlooking” (“jeter le mauvais œil”).

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INDEX

Keywords: evil eye, desire, gaze, gaze qua object, overlook, anamorphosis, double, mirror oeuvrecitee Far from the Madding Crowd, Return of the Native (The), Withered Arm (The) Mots-clés: mauvais œil, regard, désir, objet-regard, anamorphose, double, miroir

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 edited or co-edited several publications: Rewriting/Reprising: the Paradoxes of Intertextuality, the first three volumes of the e-journal FATHOM, 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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Unconscious Desires in “The Collector Cleans His Picture” Désirs inconscients dans « The Collector Cleans His Picture »

Emilie Loriaux

EDITOR'S NOTE

This article is being published jointly by FATHOM and the Hardy Review as part of a collaborative work.

The Collector Cleans His Picture Fili hominis, ecce ego tollo a te desiderabile oculorum tuorom in plaga. ––EZECH, xxiv 16 How I remember cleaning that strange picture!... I had been deep in duty for my sick neighbour – His besides my own – over several Sundays, Often, too, in the week; so with parish pressures, Baptisms, burials, doctorings, conjugal counsel – All the whatnots asked of a rural parson – Faith, I was well-nigh broken, should have been fully Saving for one small secret relaxation, One that in mounting manhood had grown my hobby. This was to delve at whiles for easel-lumber, Stowed in the backmost slums of a soon-reached city, Merely on chance to uncloak some worthy canvas, Panel, or plaque, blacked blind by uncouth adventure, Yet under all concealing a precious artfeat. Such I had found not yet. My latest capture Came from the rooms of a trader in ancient house-gear Who had no scent of beauty or soul for brushcraft. Only a tittle cost it – murked with grimefilms, Gatherings of slow years, thick-varnished over, Never a feature manifest of man’s painting.

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So, one Saturday, time ticking hard on midnight Ere an hour subserved, I set me upon it. Long with coiled-up sleeves I cleaned and yet cleaned, Till a first fresh spot, a high light, looked forth, Then another, like fair flesh, and another; Then a curve, a nostril, and next a finger, Tapering, shapely, significantly pointing slantwise. ‘Flemish?’ I said. ‘Nay, Spanish . . . But, nay, Italian!’ Then meseemed it the guise of the ranker Venus, Named of some Astarte, of some Cotytto. Down I knelt before it and kissed the panel, Drunk with the lure of love's inhibited dreamings. Till the dawn I rubbed, when there leered up at me A hag, that had slowly emerged from under my hands there, Pointing the slanted finger towards a bosom Eaten away of a rot from the lusts of a lifetime . . . I could have ended myself at the lashing lesson! Stunned I sat till roused by a clear-voiced bell-chime, Fresh and sweet as the dew-fleece under my luthern. It was the matin service calling to me From the adjacent steeple.

1 “The Collector Cleans His Picture” (Hardy 2001, 617-618), published in the collection Late Lyrics and Earlier in 1922, is a narrative monologue. The opening of the poem (“How I remember cleaning that strange picture!...”) might prompt the reader to think of theatre, as when a character enters the stage and performs a monologue. This free- verse poem – quite an unusual form for Hardy who is more likely to write rhyming verse than blank verse – creates an impression of intimacy: we seem to enter the psychology of the parson (antiquarian), who confesses: All the whatnots asked of a rural parson – Faith, I was well-nigh broken, should have been fully Saving for one small secret relaxation, One that in mounting manhood had grown my hobby. (l.6-9)

2 The poem shows a rural character, who invites the reader to compassion. This monologue is a very intimate, almost stolen, moment that Hardy is “captur[ing]”. The poem offers an arresting moment of sensitiveness.

3 The narrator, a rural parson, collects works of art. One of them he has got from “a trader in ancient house-gear” (l.16) with “no scent of beauty or soul for brushcraft” (l. 17). Yet the main focus of the poem is not the parson (an antiquarian) but the painting itself. The latter is the very point of attention which mesmerizes the collector. “The Collector Cleans His Picture” seems to exemplify Hardy’s vision of how man’s desires might engender counterfeit impressions; in other words, it shows how man might be misled by his desires. But what does the parson’s eye really see? Is it just an illusion, or is it a way to discover a form of truth or to reveal reality?

4 To identify the nature of the eye, one has to consider who the gazer is: the parson. Hardy does not mention who this parson is. Could he be Hardy’s Dorset mentor and friend, the poet and philologist William Barnes (1800-1886)? The latter was ordained in 1847 and became the rector of Saint Peter’s Church in Winterborne Came (Dorset) from 1862 to his death. Indeed, in “The Collector Cleans His Picture”, Hardy is following Barnes’s writing style and lexicon.

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5 For instance, Hardy often resuscitates Barnesian compounds, as Ralph W. V. Elliott explains: It was probably Barnes’s example, familiar to Hardy from his early Dorchester days, that inspired his own frequent recourse to this traditional English mode of word- invention – again in both senses of this word. Hardy wrote to Coventry Patmore on 11 November 1886: ‘I have lived too much within his [Barnes’s] atmosphere to see his productions in their due perspective’; and in his poem about Barnes, ‘The Collector Cleans His Picture’, by the use of such Barnesian compounds as easel- lumber, soon-reached city, artfeat, brushcraft, and grimefilms – whether deliberately imitative or not – Hardy is exemplifying the older poet’s influence. (Elliott 174)

6 All those compounds – to which we could add “well-nigh” (l.7), “easel-lumber” (l.10), “soon-reached” (l.11), “house-gear” (l.16), “thick-varnished” (l.19), “coiled-up” (l.23), “clear-voice” (l.38), “bell-chime” (l.38) and “dew-fleece” (l.39) – are similar to Barnes’s compounds. Dennis Taylor associates Barnes with this poem, and writes: “Barnes’s son, W. Miles Barnes gave Hardy a copy of the Barnes biography by Leader Scott (Barnes’s daughter), which Hardy read and marked. The book is the proximate source of two Hardy poems, ‘The Collector Cleans His Picture’ […] and ‘The Last Signal’” (Taylor 1993, 105, n12). However, even if the style of writing in the poem, more particularly the use of compounds, is similar to Barnes’s, the parson described here cannot be Barnes at all, as we shall discover further down.

7 Indeed, what might reliably be heard as an echo of Barnes’s writing is the compounds, but Hardy’s and Barnes’s visions of artistic creation diverge. Barnes wrote an article well-known to Hardy, entitled “Thoughts on Beauty and Art”, where one can read: Harmony, or beauty of colour, is of great effect in clothing, and decoration of buildings, and house-gear. For this end some may have what is called taste, or an inbred feeling of fitness and unfitness of colour – a gift more largely bestowed, for wise ends, on women. Some may win a skill in colour by observation of the works of nature and good art; and others may gain it through optics as a science. (Barnes 1861, 126-137; Dugdale 285)

8 For Barnes colours must be in harmony. In Hardy’s “The Collector Cleans His Picture”, the compound “house-gear” (l.16) might be heard as an echo of Barnes’s assertion that “harmony, or beauty of colour, is of great effect in clothing, and decoration of buildings, and house-gear”. Yet, as we read in Hardy’s poem that “my latest capture/ Came from the rooms of a trader in ancient house-gear/ Who had no scent of beauty or soul for brushcraft” (l.15-17), we can see that the trader in the poem represents just the opposite of Barnes’s “inbred feeling of fitness and unfitness of colour” – with his taste and vision of beauty in Art.

9 On this particular point, Hardy and Barnes differ. If Hardy concluded in The Life that “one may say, Art is the secret of how to produce by a false thing the effect of a true…” (Hardy 1989, 216), Barnes noted: “Manifold are the kinds of beauty, and of manifold kinds are the beauties of painting – the beauty […] and the harmony, tone, and effect of colour, even with bad drawing, and in some cases, it may be with a want of depth” (Barnes 1861, 137; Dugdale 297). Barnes is definitely looking for harmony and claims that “We may [...] take a hint of the colour with which our door would harmonize with our wall and thus we may please our friends’ eyes rather than try to deceive their sight with a more or less ungainly falsehood” (Barnes 1861, 135; Dugdale 295) . Hardy’s approach is quite the opposite, since he tries to offer psychological depth in the depiction in his poem; in other words, he prefers thoughtful reading to colour and

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harmony – not just “Art for art’s sake”. As he wrote on 5 August 1888: “To find beauty in ugliness is the province of the poet” (Hardy 1989, 213). In Hardy’s vision, Art is therefore meant to get to a form of truth – either pleasant or awful –, it is not a mere question of harmony, beauty or even illusion, since in point of fact the sight of an artwork throws a light on repressed truth (“Art is the secret of how to produce by a false thing the effect of a true”). Consequently, how does Art lead us (the poet, the parson, the reader) to reach this “effect of a true [thing]”?

10 Part of the answer is the temptation man has to satisfy his constant curiosity. This interest is re-created by the poem’s narrator – and to some extent by the painting – through a mysterious place or through intriguing objects. In “The Collector Cleans His Picture”, the scene is not set in a church but in the parson’s house, just after midnight (“one Saturday, time ticking hard on midnight”, l.21).1 A peculiar and puzzling atmosphere sets the Hardyesque scene. Indeed, the entire poem reveals something formerly concealed in the painting, as the second stanza announces: This was [...] Merely on chance to uncloak some worthy canvas, Panel, or plaque, blacked blind by uncouth adventure, Yet under all concealing a precious artfeat.

11 The objects seem obscure, as they are “blacked blind”. The word “uncouth” is significant, as Hans Marchand etymologically brings together “unknown” and “uncouth”: “couth is orig. the second participle of OE cunnan, ‘know’” (Marchand 151). The “uncouth adventure” is therefore an “unknown adventure”. Beyond the painting, the parson’s wish is to try to unveil what he does not know or has not found yet. “Such I had found not yet” (l.15) is no canonical order for a sentence. It implies that the parson is not really sure of what he knows and what he does. He seems disorientated; is it necessary to do so? What is he looking for really? Yet, he is constantly mesmerized by the painting. It is the object of temptation: he has to see what lies beneath the opaque varnish.

12 There is a gradation in the poem. Line 23 “I cleaned and yet cleaned” is an echo of the first line (“How I remember cleaning that strange picture!”). As the collector is cleaning the painting, he is astounded to see a “first fresh spot” then “another, like fair flesh” appearing and last, a “curve” (l.26), which introduces him to a feminine body. Considering that “beauty spots” were added by women on their faces, in order to attract attention, the spot may also be interpreted as a form of seduction. The “curve” was also a subject of attention of Barnes in his article “Thoughts on Beauty and Art”, in a session called “Beauty of Form and Proportion” (Barnes 1861, 127-131; Dugdale 278-284). Likewise, Hardy is trying to find a proportion in his words. All the lines of this stanza seem to be harmonized in sound and shape. The /f/ alliterations enclosing the / ai/ diphthongs (“Till a first fresh spot, a high light, looked forth”, l.24) continued in the next line, with the presence of “another” at the beginning and at the end of the line (“Then another, like fair flesh, and another”, l.25), suggest a sense of continuity. The cleaning enables the light to shine on the picture and so to “highlight” the “fair flesh”. The words are short and beat the rhythm of these lines, while punctuating the gradual revelation of details: “Then another, like fair flesh, and another;/ Then a curve, a nostril, and next a finger”. The parson is wholly immersed in the process and cannot stop cleaning the canvas, just as he cannot help satisfying his human curiosity – almost a curse of the human condition. He cannot stop, as the words of the poem tell us: “Then

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another”, “and another” (l.25), “Then” (l.26), “Then” (l.29). Human desire seems endless. The imperious need to “see” is present in the tension created by the rhythm of the poem. The beat is given by the striking stress of the trochees and the relaxing and jaunty rhythm of the dactyl in the third foot, right in the middle of the long lines (l. 23-27). This classical imitation of Sapphics (see Taylor 1988, 259) emphasises the emotion of the parson and his burning desires. Is this tension caused by a feeling of longing? What kind of desire is it really?

13 Additionally, the biblical quotation under the poem’s title, “Fili hominis, ecce ego tollo a te desiderabile oculorum tuorum in plaga”, refers to Ezechiel in the Vulgate (XXIV: 16), translated as “Son of man, behold, I take away from thee the desire of thine eyes with a stroke; yet neither shalt thou mourn nor weep, neither shall thy tears run down” in the Authorized Version (1611). In this passage, God is announcing the death of the prophet’s wife. He then invites Ezechiel not to weep for the loss of his dead wife, and therefore not to respect the “mourning for the dead” (XXIV: 17). In the poem, the parson does not obey this biblical command since he cannot escape his “desiderabile oculorum”, which is the scopic drive or the desire to see what is “unknown” and “conceal[ed]”.

14 As we progressively enter the poem, the first stanza describes the “rural parson” (l.6); the second one is the first moment of (tentative) identification, “a precious artfeat” (l. 14), and the third stanza is the discovery of some Venus, whose geographical origin is unclear: “Named of some Astarte, of some Cotytto” (l.30, emphasis added). Interestingly, the preposition “of” is used twice, instead of “by”. Hardy could have extended his series of theonyms, since Venus is the goddess of love, the equivalent of the Greek goddess Aphrodite, who is not mentioned here and might be considered as the missing link. Aphrodite is the Greek theonym of various Semitic nouns “Ashtarte Ishtar” (Akkadian) and “Ashtoreth” (Hebrew and Phoenician) (Klein, entry “Aphrodite” ). However, the poet associates Venus and Astarte to Cottyto, the goddess of lechery, a figure of Thracian origin and honoured in Corinth (Bailly, e ntry “Koτυττώ” / “Kotytto”). The latter’s immodesty and lasciviousness is another proof that the priest in the poem cannot be Barnes. This is likely to be a provocation by Hardy, in a manner similar to A. C. Swinburne (1837-1909) in “Dolores”: “Where are they Cottyto or Venus,/ Astarte or Ashtaroth, where?” (52nd stanza).

15 The adjective “rank” attributed to “Venus” (l.29) signifies excess and means here “lustful, licentious” (OED), “libidinous” (NSOED). The poem’s narrator is supposed to be a parson yet this “ranker Venus” represents the antithesis of the Virgin Mary – an antithesis, moreover, that underlines the lecherous impression. This emphasis was, in fact, even more obvious in the manuscript, where Hardy wrote “warmer Venus” (Hardy 1979, 618, n29). The parson is tempted by this [half-seen] Venus and his human curiosity drives him to guess what is underneath the opaque upper layers which he is polishing away.

16 Gradually, the “cleaning” of the finally “rubbed” picture (l.33, last stanza) will reveal the illusory nature of the parson’s “projection” (a figment of his imagination). Indeed, there are inner contradictions here between the biblical quotation, given just beneath the poem’s title, referring to Ezechiel’s “desirable oculorum” (XXIV: 16) and, in the collector’s picture, the goddess “Venus” (l.29), who turns out to be “a hag”. The painting is blasphemous with regard to the biblical quote, as the picture is beyond the pale of Judaeo-Christian morals. Venus, alias “Astarte” and “Cotytto” (l.30) in the third

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stanza, is revealed to be a “hag” (l.34) in the fourth and last stanza. This transformation of the “ranker Venus” into a “hag” is a perfect example of “coincidentia oppositorum2”. The climactic point of the poem is the last sentence of the third stanza, where the parson is “Drunk with the lure of love’s inhibited dreamings” (l.32). The liquid /l/ smoothly continues, on the paradigmatic level, in the fourth stanza with “leered”, “slowly”, “slanted”, “lusts”, “lifetime”, “lashing lesson” and “luthern”. The sense of continuity in sounds (the repetition of the /l/ sound), contradicts the syntagmatic hiatus between the last two stanzas (with this transformation of the “ranker Venus” into a “hag”). The sense of oral flow and harmony belies the stark opposition between beauty (Venus) and ugliness (the hag).

17 Besides, the last stanza – which is the third moment of revelation – is an anticlimax compared with the one before. The frontier between dream and reality seems to be blurred. The noun “lure” (l.32) contrasts with the verb “leered” (l.33). After the attraction, there is now a movement of repulsion, as the verb “leered” attests. It is significant to notice that Hardy originally wrote “gazed” in the first and second editions of the collection (May and August 1922) (Hardy 1979, 618, n33). Now, “leer” connotes the idea of a sexual desire, the desire of the flesh, compared with “gaze”, which does not apparently denote any idea of sexual desire or attraction. This disclosure brought by Hardy’s revisions allows us to enter his own process of writing and the effect he sought to produce on the reader. The image given by “leered” is powerfully eye-catching. What is about to be revealed here is the parson’s inner self, his most repressed unconscious.

18 As for the “finger,/ Tapering, shapely, significantly pointing slantwise” (l.26-27), it turns out to be pointing, once the rubbing is done, towards “a bosom/ Eaten away of [= by] a rot from the lusts of a lifetime” (l.35-36). After being venerated by her admirers, Venus appears as the symptomatic carrier of venereal diseases, whose “rot” supposedly eats her bosom. She is the Venus-hag who conveys Death. The image provided is one of horror: There is not always a clear dividing line between the kinetic appeal of the melodrama and pornography, and distanced aesthetic appeal. What is fascinating in Hardy is partly the sensational material itself, the shock and horror of the sex and violence, and also what is revealed in the particularized affective life of the characters, the uninhibited compulsions of pleasure and the perversions of desire. (Barbara Hardy 163)

19 How could we interpret this transformation from Venus into a “hag”, an image of horror and death? Looking at the painting makes the parson see his inner fears. But could the painting also reveal a secret desire to see the horror? What is it that the parson truly wants? The “slanted finger” directs the parson’s gaze to the hag’s gaze (“there leered up at me a hag”, l.33-34).

20 There are two perceptible visions in the poem. The picture which emerges from the title of the poem and the first line (“How I remember cleaning that strange picture!...”) is the true portrayal of the parson, it reveals his soul, as in The Picture of Dorian Gray – albeit Dorian, unlike the parson, clearly sees his own picture in the painting. The parson doesn’t recognize his own self, until he sees an image of his desires reflected in the picture. Therefore, the Artistic process acts as a (distorting) mirror, or a means to help man to face who he really is.

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21 The ekphrasis (the poem written by the parson – in reality Hardy -, and describing the picture) is to be differentiated from the “painting” (l.20), the literal and physical object at the core of the poem. It is the actual painting, the object, which stimulates desire and is the object of contemplation. The “eye” is the organ which enables the collector to perceive the ideal woman in “the guise of the ranker Venus” (l.29), who is an “unknown” or “imagined” woman, being herself the object of desire. The “hag”, the unrepresentable horror beyond imaginary representations, is as elusive as a phantom in this “uncouth adventure” (see supra).

22 The “ranker” Venus also appears in Jude The Obscure. After the purchase of the plaster reproductions of statues of Venus and Apollo, Sue Bridehead exclaims: “Well, anything is better than those everlasting church fal-lals!” (Hardy 1998, 94); whereupon the narrator apprises the reader that she almost regrets her deed: “[she] seemed almost to wish she had not brought the figures”. Lexicographer Charles Talbut Onions (1873-1965) lays down that “fal-lal” dates from the eighteenth century and means a “piece of finery” as well as the notion of “something trivial” (Onions, entry: “fal-lal”). Sue refers to Apollo and Venus as contrasting the church “fal-lals” – frivolous artefacts and ornamentation – and tries to conceal the two pagan statues from her pious landlady, who is also her employer, fearing they would be perceived as blasphemous. Sue tries to argue that her figurine is a statue of Mary Magdalen – the sexual connotations in the novel, incidentally, are less striking than in the poem “The Collector Cleans His Picture.”

23 Going back to the poem, the ideal woman is both present on the page and in the parson’s gaze, and absent. In the third stanza, the image that the collector sees is fragmented, like the syntax in lines 24 to 26: “Till a first fresh spot, a high light, looked forth,/ Then another, like fair flesh, and another;/ Then a curve, a nostril, and next a finger”. In the fourth stanza, her presence is ghostly, as well as eroticized (“under my hands”, l.34; “a bosom”, l.35; “the lusts”, l.36). The only full possible image of her whole body appears in this last stanza in the form of a “hag”. At this stage, the image of the woman becomes elusive and she is associated with “rot” (l.36). She is both present and absent. A return to reality is clearly brought about by the “bell-chime” (l.38) and the canonical syntax: “It was the matin service calling to me/ From the adjacent steeple.” (l.40-41).

24 Beyond the field of syntax, Hardy’s words and linguistic signs are interesting to look at as they are meticulously chosen and changed by the poet. In line 37, in the manuscript, Hardy does not use the dash: “– I could have ended myself …”, but, instead, “I could have ended myself …” and, on the line above, he uses four suspension points for the ellipsis in the manuscript: “Eaten away of a rot from the lusts of a lifetime ....” instead of three suspension points in his later version, “Eaten away of a rot from the lusts of a lifetime . . .” This really means that Hardy wanted a break, between the horror figure of line 36 and the punishment the parson wants to inflict on himself. The dash is a salutary break on the page to stop the unsustainable vision.

25 The manuscript offers other significant differences: 1923 edition (Collected Poems), l.35-37: Pointing the slanted finger towards a bosom Eaten away of a rot from the lusts of a lifetime . . . – I could have ended myself at the lashing lesson! Manuscript version

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The significant finger pointed towards a bosom Eaten away of a rot from the lusts of a lifetime . . . I could have ended myself at the lashing heart-shook horror.

26 The manuscript makes it obvious that the finger is pointing towards a woman’s bosom. However, the re-writing of the line provides the direction of this finger with a more visual impression: “the slanted finger”. The graphic detail of the gesture is perfect. We can visualise this painting and like the parson, our “eye” is encouraged to follow the indicated direction. The visual effect is enhanced two lines further down with the added dash (“– I”) in the 1923 edition. At this point, the observation of Hardy’s meticulous attention to words and punctuation shows that the poet tries to catch all the details of the painting so as to make the illusion visually possible: what the parson’s eye perceives is also perceptible to readers. The poet makes the ephemeral moment of the collector’s desire perpetual (on the page).

27 But what is exactly the “lashing lesson” (l.37)? Instead of this expression, the original text spoke of “heart-shook horror”, which had a more Gothic and striking effect. By “lashing lesson”, Hardy means that the parson reproaches himself with his physical “desire” and, dumbfounded, realises his own fancies. Yet, after such a long sleepless night, the “clear-voice bell-chime” (l.38) calls the parson back to his duties, and everything falls into place – the same parson, who after gradually cleaning and rubbing the painting, “uncloak[ed]” the canvas that the goddess of love might turn into a “hag”, a polysemous term meaning either a “witch” or “an old woman with repulsive ugliness”.

28 There is thus a double function of the painting: the temptation to know what is unknown or concealed (the actual object, the painting), the representation of the parson’s suppressed desires (the “fantasy” in the true portrayal/ picture), as in “An Imaginative Woman”, which shows a function of a photograph: Accidentally found in a hotel room, a photograph triggers the development of the narrative, acts as a symbol of the main character’s suppressed desires and invites a conclusive statement on the dangers of blind trust in photography. (Straub 165)

29 In “The Collector Cleans His Picture”, the man’s look at his picture is thus a reflexion of his own being, made up of his own desires or “individual act[s] of imagination” (Barbara Hardy 164), which are mere illusions, a “lure” (l.32).

30 In “The Collector Cleans His Picture”, Hardy teaches his reader that the painting is a lure with a glimpse of the truth underneath. The woman progressively changes into a lecherous character within the picture, as a way to reveal the parson’s subconscious fears and desires: death (as in Holbein’s The Ambassadors). Art acts thus as a tranquilliser and appeases man’s inner soul. Only the description of the painting offers the possibility for the parson to transfer his inner fears (fears of lack, fears of death) into something creative and beautiful, the artistic nature of the object (here the painting). It is in the nature of the eye to pervert the object (although here, in point of fact, the eye has first ennobled the object). The translation into words of what a man’s eyes see is the translation of a man’s soul. If the parson finally becomes aware of his unconscious desires (and comes to the truth about himself), he is ready to let his fears go and realise that it is in the nature of human beings to be tempted, to “gaze”. There is a connexion between the “gaze” and the truth of one’s soul. Art is a means to disclose the repressed truth, in other words, to discover yourself as you are and to accept to deal with the reality of your life. Dorian indulges the weakness of his soul by hiding the

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painting in a remote corner of his mansion and depravity consumes his life. Unlike him, Hardy’s parson blames himself for his physical “desire” and finally accepts to face reality as he hears the “bell-chime” calling to him (a form of repentance?).

31 Consequently, Hardy’s lesson in “The Collector Cleans His Picture” is that the painting is an artistic mirror, which helps man to perceive “the effect of a true [thing]” by “making a covenant with [his] eyes”3 so as to find inner peace. Once the parson- collector accepts to face his inner bad self and his own fears (the truth), the desire in his eye disappears.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barnes, William, “Thoughts on Beauty and Art”, Macmillan’s Magazine, Vol. 4 (June 1861): 126-37, William Barnes of Dorset, ed. Giles Dudgale, London: Cassell & Company Ltd, Appendix Four 1953, 267-275.

Barnes, William, A Glossary of the Dorset Dialect with a Grammar (1863), Guernsey: The Toucan Press, second edition 1970.

Barnes, William, The Poems, ed. Bernard Jones, London: Centaur P, Vol.1 & 2, 1962.

Elliott, Ralph W.V, Thomas Hardy’s English, New York: Blackwell, 1984.

Hardy, Barbara, Thomas Hardy: Imagining Imagination in Hardy’s Poetry and Fiction, London: A&C Black, 2000.

Hardy, Thomas, Jude the Obscure, London: Penguin Popular Classics, 1998.

Hardy, Thomas, The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.

Hardy, Thomas, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate, London: Macmillan, 1989.

Hardy, Thomas, The Return of the Native, London: Penguin Classics, 1999.

Hardy, Thomas, The Variorum Edition of the Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gibson, London, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979.

Keshavjee, Shafique, Mircea Eliade et la coïncidence des opposés, ou L’existence en duel, Bern, Berlin, Frankfurt/M., New York, Paris, Wien: Lang, 1993.

Klein, Ernest, Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language: Dealing with the Origin of Words and their Sense Development Thus Illustrating the History of Civilization and Culture, Amsterdam: Elsevier, 6th ed., 1971.

Lacan, Jacques, Le Séminaire XI, chapitre IX « Qu’est-ce qu’un tableau ? », Paris : Seuil 1975.

Marchand, Hans, The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word-Formation. A Synchronic- Diachonic Approach (1960), München: Beck, 1969.

Onions, C. T. ed., The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: OUP, 1966.

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Straub, Julia, “Nineteenth-Century Literature and Photography”, ed. Gabriel Rippl, Handbook of Intermediality: Literature – Image – Sound – Music (Handbooks of English and American Studies), De Gruyter Mouton, 20 July 2015, 156-172.

Taylor, Dennis, Hardy’s Literary Language and Victorian Philology, Oxford: Clarendon P, 1993.

Taylor, Dennis, Hardy’s Metres and Victorian Prosody, Oxford: Clarendon P, 1988.

NOTES

1. This might imply a kind of mystery as in the microcosmic life of the insects in “An August Midnight” (Hardy 2001, 113), or echoing, by contrast, “The weakening eye of the day” (l. 4) in “The Darkling Thrush” (150). 2. This notion appeals to Shafique Keshavjee, who uses it as the core of his thought in Mircea Eliade et la coïncidence des opposes. It is one of the founding principles of Nicolas de Cuse’s thought. He was a German theologian and philosopher of the 15th century (1401-1464). The idea is well- known to Hardy, who rather uses this notion under the form “concordia discors” (l.13) in his poem “Genitrix Laesa” (Hardy 2001, 770-771). 3. At the end of The Return of the Native, the “gaze” (a deadly gaze throughout the novel) is pacified and Hardy refers to another Biblical quotation: “In the words of Job, ‘I have made a covenant with mine eyes; why then should I think upon a maid’” (Hardy 1999, 386).

ABSTRACTS

This paper examines both Hardy’s writing process and his vision of how man’s desires might engender mistaken impressions. I will mainly focus on the poem “The Collector Cleans His Picture”, whose central issue is the “gaze”; the gaze being a reflection of man’s desires. Here, the narrator, a rural parson (and antiquarian) collects works of art. However, the main focus in the poem is the painting itself – the very point of attention which mesmerizes the collector. Gradually, the “cleaning” and “rubbing” of the picture will reveal illusive desire(s) in the parson. Indeed, there are inner contradictions within the poem between the biblical quotation, after the poem’s title, referring to Ezechiel’s “desiderabile oculorum” and, in the painting evoked in the poem, the goddess Venus, who turns out to be only an old hag. The painting is blasphemous with regard to the biblical quote, for the picture belongs to a different sort of context than the Judaeo- Christian world. The man’s gaze on his picture reflects his unconscious, his desires, which seem to be mere illusions, a “lure”.

Cet article vise à comprendre les procédés d’écriture de Hardy et sa perception des désirs humains pouvant susciter une vision altérée de la réalité. Le poème « The Collector Cleans His Picture », dont le sujet central est le « regard », miroir des désirs humains, retiendra notre attention. Le narrateur, un pasteur de village, collectionne des œuvres d’art. Toutefois, le personnage principal n’est pas le pasteur mais le tableau, lui-même, objet de toutes les attentions qui fascine le collectionneur.

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Le tableau progressivement « nettoyé », puis « frotté », révélera un (des) désir(s) illusoire(s) dans les yeux du pasteur. Des contradictions inhérentes au poème sont en effet visibles entre la citation biblique, sous le titre du poème, se référant à Ezechiel dans la vulgate : « desiderabile oculorum » et, dans la peinture du poème, la déesse Vénus qui se révélera être une vieille sorcière. Du point de vue de la citation biblique, la peinture est blasphématoire, car cette dernière ne s’inscrit pas du tout dans un contexte judéo-chrétien. Le regard qu’a l’homme sur ce tableau est une réflexion sur son être propre, issue de ses propres désirs, qui semblent être de simples illusions, un « leurre ».

INDEX oeuvrecitee Collector Cleans His Picture (The), August Midnight (An), Darkling Thrush (The), Genitrix Laesa, Jude the Obscure, Return of the Native (The) Mots-clés: poésie, langage, esthétique, art et vérité, désir, illusion, réécriture, ekphrasis, coincidentia oppositorum Keywords: poetry, language, aesthetics, art and truth, desire, illusion, rewriting, ekphrasis, coincidentia oppositorum

AUTHOR

EMILIE LORIAUX Emilie Loriaux teaches English at the University of Artois (Arras), France. Her doctoral thesis, “A Study of William Barnes and Thomas Hardy in Connection with Language: Poetry and Philology”, was completed in 2016. She is the author of articles and conference papers on Hardy’s fiction and poetry as well as Barnes’s poetry, and the question of re-writing/re-creation. She recently co- organized a conference on “The Meaning of Dialects in English Poetry – From Late 19th Century to Early 21st Century”.

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Machinations versus Mechanization: Desire in Thomas Hardy’s “On the Western Circuit” Machinations et mécanisation : le désir dans “On the Western Circuit”

Trish Ferguson

EDITOR'S NOTE

This article is being published jointly by FATHOM and the Hardy Review as part of a collaborative work.

1 In the wake of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), questions were raised about the role played by evolution in our existence and the nature of human emotions. In 1887, the Aristotelian Society met to focus on questions on the intellect, passions and will within this context, such as whether mind is synonymous with consciousness, what takes place in a voluntary action, and the difference between will and desire1. Such concerns intrigued Hardy, whose first Literary Notebook opens with his sketch of a tree, labelled “Humanity”, that grows out of three interlocking roots representing “Intellect”, “Passions” and “Will” (Hardy 1974, 2). The first page of this notebook, which Hardy began to compile as early as the 1860s, reveals an interest that evolved over the course of the nineteenth century, as motive forces behind human behaviour were increasingly viewed within the context of a broader contemporary debate over free will and determinism. Lord Kelvin’s metaphor of the world as a machine fed into this debate, as did Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which pointed to biological forces operating on each individual, compromising free will. Hardy’s concern with the concept of the will in a seemingly deterministic universe has been examined in studies that have pointed to scientific and philosophical influences, considering the influences of Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, W. T. Clifford and James Sully2. These studies often focus on Hardy’s development of the concept of the Immanent Will as an unconscious energy behind phenomena that could potentially

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evolve and develop consciousness, or have been concerned with the biological compulsion underlying sexual selection. Hardy attested to a breadth of philosophical and scientific influences on his work, including Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Comte, Hume, Mill. (Hardy 1982, 6: Letter to Ernest Brennecke, 21st June 1924) and toward the end of the nineteenth century, Thomas Hardy’s reading also included articles and reviews published in Mind: a Quarterly Review of Philosophy, a publication that provided a forum for debate on contemporary issues in philosophy and psychology. A question that emerged in late-nineteenth-century publications in these disciplines was to what extent man differs from a machine. In 1884, drawing together evolutionary theory and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, J. S. Haldane published “Life and Mechanism”, in which he examined the difference between an organism, such as man, and a machine, such as a steam-engine.3 While Haldane noted that both man and machine consume fuel and expend energy, the difference, he argued, is that while, according to the law of entropy, a machine will cease to function, energy is reinvested in a living organism to ensure its continued survival. Haldane questioned whether a living organism’s ability to adapt to circumstances was inbuilt or consciously applied. Such a speculation finds an interesting fictional analogue in Hardy’s “On the Western Circuit” (1891), which examines the machinery that propels human action and, in the process, explores the nature of will and desire.

2 “On the Western Circuit” opens with the arrival of Charles Raye, a visitor to Melchester, whose attention is drawn away from the austere, lifeless setting of an empty Cathedral that he had intended to visit, and toward the vitality of a fair-ground that is temporarily resident in the city square. He hears a noise “compounded of steam barrel- organs, the clanging of gongs the ringing of hand-bells, the clack of rattles, and the undistinguishable shouts of men” (Hardy 1988, 455). We are to learn that this is a steam-circus, or merry-go-round, but initially it is merely a discordant machine that is at odds with the environment in which it has been placed, establishing a binary division of natural/unnatural as the first of a set of opposites that will be interrogated in the story. We are told that Raye “might have searched over Europe for a greater contrast between juxtaposed scenes”, but no sooner are such contrasts and oppositions established in the story than they immediately collapse with the narrator’s observation that: “The spectacle was that of the eighth chasm of the Inferno as to colour and flame, and, as to mirth, a development of the Homeric heaven” (455). The steam-circus, the focal point of the visitor’s attention, is also of indeterminate nature, a complex amalgamation of the machine world and the natural world, featuring human figures “like gnats against a sunset”, propelled forward on the backs of mechanical horses (455). The narrator notes that “[t]heir motions were so rhythmical that they seemed to be moved by machinery. And it presently appeared that they were moved by machinery indeed” (455), inviting the reader to examine the forces that drive human action in this story as a whole.

3 A merry-go-round is a very curious thing, the enjoyment of it dependent on the willing surrender of bodily volition. Viewing the figures on the merry-go-round, Charles Raye finds himself attracted by the appearance of a young woman who has abandoned herself to the experience of being propelled up and down on a mechanized horse. Hardy fully exploits the sexual implications of such a device as a means for introducing lovers, describing the propulsion of the “temporary erection” and its effects on “throbbing humanity” (Hardy 1988, 455). Anna is “absolutely unconscious of everything

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save the act of riding”, her features “rapt in an ecstatic dreaminess” so that she appears “as happy as if she were in a Paradise” (457). Raye’s paying to secure Anna a place on the merry-go-round for another ride seems to be an act of volition, but his free will is immediately brought into question when he is described as “dreading the moment when the inexorable stoker, grimly lurking behind the glittering rococo-work should decide that this set of riders had had their pennyworth, and bring the whole concern of steam-engine, horses, mirrors, trumpets, drums, cymbals, and such-like to pause and silence” (457). The steam-circus machine is set in motion through human agency, but the direction and duration of the mechanized ride are predetermined. The exposure of the workings of the machine thus reveal the story’s central concern with the nature of desire. What seems at first to be a Paradise of free will is, in fact, more like the hell of determinism.

4 For much of the opening scene of “On the Western Circuit” the central characters are unnamed, as underlying the interest in the specific unique circumstances of the individuals featured in the story is an exploration of the nature of desire as a universal experience. Raye’s selection of Anna, which he believes to be an act of free will may in fact, it appears, be a biologically-determined process of sexual selection fuelled by universally-experienced desire. Initially we are introduced to a gentlemanly young fellow who is “unlike the majority of the crowd”, but sexual desire pays no respect to individuality or to class hierarchies, and by the end of the chapter he has cast off his social role and is reduced to the same level as the rest of the figures in the scene as he joins the “motley crowd” (Hardy 1988, 458). As Raye loses his individuality by joining the crowd, he also loses his self-mastery, as he becomes subject to the effects of desire. Desire is centred in the gaze, and the universality of Raye’s experience is aptly suggested by his name, which conjures up the idea of beam extending between the viewer and the subject. While theories of the gaze are often predicated on an assumption that power is held by the surveyor, in “On the Western Circuit” visual fascination results in the suspension of the viewer’s self-mastery. Raye’s selection may be an act of choice, or merely Darwinian sexual selection, but once it has taken place, the gaze is subject to the will of the machine; having selected Anna, Raye “waited for her every reappearance, glancing indifferently over the intervening forms […] till his select country beauty followed on again in her place” (457). It is the intermittency of Anna’s appearance that sustains Raye’s desire; his loss of control over his vision of Anna as she is whirled around by the steam-circus, paradoxically makes her, for Raye, a fixed image, “the fixed point in an undulating, dazzling, lurid universe” (458). She becomes for Raye a mere fantasy of his own construction that has no reference to any reality attached to her or her consciousness (see Lacan 67-119). Over time, Raye’s fantasy of “pink and breezy Anna” as a product of nature is consolidated into a fixed image (Hardy 1988, 457, 464)4. The story thus reveals the predetermined course of desire overriding free will and the loss of self-mastery associated with desire.

5 According to John Berger’s analysis of the gaze, a man’s presence is dependent on the promise of power that he embodies, while women are subordinate to this power and can only have a limited agency, operating within a man’s field of vision. Thus “Men act. Women appear” (Berger 47). “On the Western Circuit” undercuts any assumption that the male gaze is associated with power. Not only is the gaze associated with loss of self- mastery but the power relations between the sexes that Berger associates with the male gaze appears to be reversed; while men become mechanical, it is women who act, and, rather than being objectified and denied agency, invisibly maintain power. Having

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begun his descent into the mechanized state prompted by desire at the end of the first chapter, Raye becomes subject to other factors that determine his fate. The second chapter introduces us to the middle-class household of Mr and Mrs Harnham, a childless couple who have taken Anna in as an orphaned young woman. We are later to learn that Edith Harnham’s facility for manipulating desire has secured her a husband, while, up to the point at which the story begins, she has not herself succumbed to desire and the loss of self-control that it entails. In the opening scene of the second chapter, going to find her young charge at the fairground, Edith sees the relationship between Charles and Anna begin. Thus far, the relationship arises naturally through the mechanical forces of desire – Anna states quite truthfully: “I didn’t capture him. I didn’t do anything” – but Edith intervenes so that the natural, mechanical forces of nature operating between Charles and Anna are superseded by the machinations of Edith, with her carefully manufactured letters that she writes to hide Anna’s illiteracy (Hardy 1988, 461).

6 Mindful of contemporary debates over the nature of human will, Hardy examines the unconscious motivations behind Edith Harnham’s machinations in “On the Western Circuit”. The narrator describes the “process of manufacture” of the letters, and Edith’s efforts to thrown into her tone “mechanical passiveness” in her reading of Charles’s responses (Hardy 1988, 467, 466). There is an art to maintaining this appearance of neutrality, but ultimately nature supersedes art. What begins as an artificial process then becomes subordinate to desire that has, from the outset of the story, been linked with mechanization. Edith’s desire, prompted by physical contact, leads to an attraction on a socio-cultural level, which Edith recognizes as a “magnetic reciprocity” between them (467). But this connection does not diminish or supplant the physical element of her attraction to Raye. Disillusioned by her marriage (brought about on account of her social parity with Mr Harnham), Edith is sexually drawn to Raye. Edith’s intervention into the incipient relationship between Charles and Anna happens literally and physically at first. Raye, mistaking Edith for Anna, clasps her hand. In Edith’s intervention into Charles and Anna’s relationship we see Lacan’s objet petit a in play, seemingly controlled by Edith, but the story also illustrates Thomas Huxley’s analysis of the subordination of free will to the deterministic nature of desire. In “On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata” (1874), Thomas Huxley arrived at the conclusion that “we are conscious automata endowed with free will in the only intelligible sense of that much-abused term – inasmuch as in many respects we are able to do as we like – but none the less parts of the great series of causes and effects which, in unbroken continuity, composes that which is, and has been and shall be – the sum of existence” (Huxley 244)5. The animalistic nature of Edith’s response is acknowledged in the description of her as “an interesting creature rather than a handsome woman”, a “she-animal”; she is only differentiated by her artfulness from Anna, who is described as a “domestic animal who humbly heard but understood not” (Hardy 1988, 473).

7 In “On the Metaphysics of Sexual Love”, Schopenhauer notes that “this high importance of [love] is not a question of individual weal and woe, as in all other matters, but of the existence and special constitution of the human race in times to come; therefore the will of the individual appears at an enhanced power as the will of the species” (Schopenhauer 534). Just as Schopenhauer conceives of a “life force” that overrides environmental forces, Haldane’s observation of the power of a living organism to adapt its actions to unusual circumstances is linked with the reinvestment of energy and the instinct for reproduction. Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) reflects this

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understanding of desire as a “life force” or energy serving the interests of procreation. Jude Fawley is described as obeying “conjunctive orders” from headquarters that are “unconsciously received” in a manner that renders him, for a time, incapable of exerting his will to further his ambitions and career prospects (Hardy 2002, 34). She can read exactly what is happening through her interpretation of his gaze, elicited infamously by her assault on Jude’s head with the “characteristic part of a barrow pig” (33). Ingham notes that in the manuscript, Hardy amended the wording of this phrase twice; first he wrote “in the automatic operation of a normal law” and then “in obedience to procreative orders from headquarters”, each highlighting that Jude’s response is automatic rather than willed (401n). While Jude’s will is subordinated to Arabella’s machinations, ultimately her will is motivated by a temporary instinct that she cannot understand and that is linked with her connection throughout the narrative to animal instinct. Likewise, in the selection process at play in “On the Western Circuit” – in Charles’s gazing at Anna, and in Edith’s desire for Charles – may be seen the life force that Schopenhauer conceives of not as the will of the individual, but the will of the species. Charles’s desire for Anna leads to her pregnancy, while Edith’s machinations are subordinated to her natural inclinations, from the moment that Anna is pregnant and Edith wishes she herself were carrying Raye’s child. Thus, any sense of free will in relation to desire is undermined in “On the Western Circuit”. As Schopenhauer writes: “nature can attain her end only by implanting in the individual a certain delusion, and by virtue of this, that which in truth is merely a good thing for the species, seems to him to be a good thing for himself, so that he serves the species, whereas he is under the delusion that he is serving himself” (Schopenhauer 538). Through sublimating her desires through the artful craft of writing, and denying her feelings out of solidarity with Anna, Edith’s machinations, rather than serving her self- interest, result in the marriage of Charles and Anna, who are expecting a child. The mechanical nature of desire wins out and, with a sense of fatalism, of an acceptance of forces beyond the characters’ control, the story concludes on a grim note of determinism after the marriage of Anna and Charles; Edith is described as walking “mechanically” homeward, Anna is described as “tied up”, and she and Charles are propelled mechanically to their future via the machinery of the train. The story closes with Raye reading all the letters signed Anna “with dreary resignation”, as he discovers that he has been duped all along by the machinations of two women, but, on a more fundamental level, deluded by the nature of desire.

8 Before settling on “On the Western Circuit” for his title, Hardy considered “The Amanuensis” or “The Writer of the Letters”. Each of the rejected titles highlights the autobiographical elements of the story, Hardy himself having acted as an amanuensis for young women in Dorchester, who wished to write love letters to their sweethearts when they were serving as soldiers abroad (Hardy 1999, 67). But in changing the title of his story from “The Amanuensis” to “On the Western Circuit”, Hardy offered a much more fitting title for a story that is concerned with the law, and the institutionalized regulation of human desires. In a story that depicts human endeavours to exert individual free will against inescapable determinism that serves the interest of the human race as a whole, the results of the story highlight forces that are beyond human control – biological determinism, sexuality and class. These forces cannot be overcome, but they can be analysed and understood, and the narrator of “On the Western Circuit” ultimately regains the control that is lost with the gaze of desire, through the application of the gaze of objectivity.6 In a letter of 1902, Hardy remarked, “Well: what

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we gain by science is, after all, sadness, as the Preacher saith. The more we know of the laws and nature of the Universe the more ghastly a business one perceives it all to be – and the non-necessity of it” (Hardy 1982, 5: Letter to Edward Clodd, 27th February 1902), as he reflected on his capacity to analyse human emotions in order to transcend the irrational forces of Nature.

9 In “On the Western Circuit”, having applied the distanced gaze of the disinterested spectator to his subject matter, Hardy writes a cautionary tale that points to the transient and migratory nature of desire. While it is a story that analyses the gaze of Charles Raye, and the machinations of Edith to secure Charles and Anna’s marriage, “On the Western Circuit” brings another gaze into play: the examining eye that was applied in the nineteenth century to all forms of life that could be regulated: the body, the soul and human sexuality. Foucault writes: “There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze that each individual under its weight will end by [internalising] to the point that they are their own overseer, each individual thus exercising surveillance over, and against themself” (Foucault 155). “On the Western Circuit” is not merely a story about desire, but is a story that foregrounds the analysis of desire, highlighted by an extra-diegetic gaze toward a readership, in what is one of the most sudden and jarring narrative intrusions in nineteenth-century fiction. When the narrator describes the moment of Charles and Anna gazing at each other for the first time, there is a sharp differentiation between the natural reaction they experience, in a sensory haze that involves a loss of control, and the judgment of the narrator who can read the scene’s significance with Foucault’s analytical gaze: “they gazed at each other with smiles, and with that unmistakeable expression which means so little at the moment, yet so often leads up to passion, heart- ache, union, disunion, devotion, overpopulation, drudgery, content, resignation, despair” (Hardy 1988, 458). This is the point at which the theme of the story becomes explicit for the first time, highlighting as it does that the merry-go-round is not just a device for bringing Charles and Anna together but is, in fact, a metaphor for desire. In shifting from “passion”, which suggests free will, to the “despair” of determinism, the narrator’s interjection highlights that desire itself is mechanized, a sort of propulsion that in a broader sense takes control in the forward movement of our lives, with a typical outcome: sexual desire, marriage, children, and the end of passion. What lies in the future for each individual in a relationship that begins with desire is disparity, whether socio-cultural or temperamental in nature.

10 “On the Western Circuit” is concerned with circulatory systems that are regulated by varying levels of control. On one level is the circulatory system of desire (‘le circuit de la pulsion’, Lacan, Seminar XI), represented in the revolving movement of the merry- go-round7. This is reflected in the circular relationship that develops between Charles, Anna and Edith, a relationship that is sustained by the circulatory system of the postal services. The title, “On the Western Circuit”, points to another circulatory system and another significantly autobiographical element of the story, namely, the legal profession shared by Raye and Hardy. The circulatory systems may be seen in the story as a series of ever-widening circles representing a hierarchy of perspectives. Each individual in the story is at a different level in this hierarchy, with Anna purely subject to the mechanical nature of desire as it is defined by Schopenhauer. Edith shares some of the ability to distance herself from desire that is held by the narrator/writer to the point that she can use the art of writing and the circulatory system of the postal service to manipulate Raye. The narrator appears to maintain a superior perspective to that of

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Edith, saying of her marriage: “That contract had left her still a woman whose deeper nature had never been stirred” (Hardy 1988, 467). Charles Raye can only objectively analyse desire intermittently. We are told that “[t]houghts of unpremeditated conduct, of which a week earlier he would not have believed himself capable, threw him into a mood of dissatisfied depression” (462). That the language used for his analysis of his circumstances (Anna has become pregnant) is given in legal language in the context of Raye returning to his life as a barrister, points to Foucault’s analytical and regulatory gaze, the gaze that Hardy’s narrator deploys. Jonathan Schroeder notes, “to gaze implies more than to look at – it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze” (Schroeder 58). While Charles Raye can philosophically reflect on desire from a distance, when he “mended his pens with a mind far away from the case in progress”, the narrator applies a removed, analytical gaze while watching each character drawn toward the “pleasure-machine” (Hardy 1988, 462). In distinguishing himself from these characters, he notably sets himself apart from the lawyer Raye, coolly commenting on his immanent social and intellectual fall: As he stood smiling there in the motley crowd, with his pipe in his hand, and clad in the rough pea-jacket and wideawake that he had put on for his stroll, who could have supposed him to be Charles Bradford Raye, Esquire, stuff-gownsman, educated at Wintoncester, called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn, now going the Western Circuit, merely detained in Melchester by a small arbitration after his brethren had moved on to the next county-town. (Hardy 1988, 458-459)

11 The distanced perspective seems to reflect the superiority of the narrator, who has not only mastered the nature of desire, but can also see how desire is circumscribed by the law, another deterministic force that inhibits free will. However, Hardy’s reflections on the levels of understanding of Nature’s operation revealed to him that humanity as a whole is deceived by “The Hypocrisy of things. Nature is an arch-dissembler. A child is deceived completely; the older members of society more or less according to their penetration; though even they seldom get to realize that nothing is as it appears.” (Hardy 1984, 182) While there may be a hierarchy of perspectives, as Hardy is aware, our position as cogs in the machine of Nature precludes the possibility of remote, analytical spectatorship. Just as Raye’s penmanship does not remove him from the object of his analysis and he is drawn back toward the object of his desire, thus Hardy’s analytical gaze is inherently subjective and driven by the force it is trying to control. Like Raye, Hardy is driven by the circulatory system of a process of involvement- removal-analysis (see Miller, 1970) and, like Edith Harnham, his authorial machinations that are meant to have a distancing effect, only enmesh him further into experiencing that which he would view analytically. At best, he can only analyse the circulatory system of desire-gaze-authorship and conclude by focusing on the failure of efforts to control desire through writing. In conclusion to this metanarrative, Charles reflects on the outcome of the story as he reads the letters that reflect the failure of efforts to control desire. In response to being asked what he is doing, as though he can enact his own will, he replies: “Reading over all those sweet letters to me signed ‘Anna’ […] with dreary resignation.” (Hardy 1988, 477)

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Hardy, Thomas, Thomas Hardy, Interviews and Recollections, ed. James Gibson, London: Palgrave, 1999.

Hardy, Thomas, Jude the Obscure, ed. Patricia Ingham, Oxford: OUP, 2002.

Huxley, T. H., “On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and Its History”, Nature 10 (1874), 362-366.

Keen, Suzanne, Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination Ohio: Ohio State UP, 2016.

Lacan, Jacques, “Of the Gaze”, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Vintage, 1998.

Miller, J. Hillis, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire, Harvard: Belknap Press, 1970.

Orel, Harold, “The Dynasts: Hardy’s Contribution to the Epic Tradition”, The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. Rosemarie Morgan, Farnham: Ashgate, 1988 (repr. 2010), 365-370.

Schopenhauer, Arthur, “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love”, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, New York: Dover Publications, 1958.

Schroeder, Jonathan E., Visual Consumption, London: Routledge, 2002.

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Shadworth, H. Hodgson, D. G. Ritchie, G. F. Stout, B. Bosanquet & S. Alexander, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1.1 (1887-1888), 74-90.

NOTES

1. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1887-1888), pp. 74-90 lists ‘Symposium: Is Mind Synonymous with Consciousness?’, ‘Symposium: The Distinction between Will and Desire’ as symposia held in the first year of the society’s existence. Subsequent issues deal with similar themes, with a focus on the relationship between the mind and the body and philosophical speculations about the nature of mind, consciousness, will and desire. 2. Studies of the scientific and philosophical context in which Hardy was writing include Suzanne Keen, Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2016); Mark Asquith, ‘Hardy’s Philosophy’, Thomas Hardy in Context, ed. Phillip Mallet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 285-95; Timothy Hands, ‘“A Bewildered Child and His Conjurors”: Hardy and the Ideas of His Time’, New Perspectives on Thomas Hardy, ed. Charles P. C. Pettit (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 137-55; Mark Asquith, ‘Philosophy, Metaphysics and Music in Hardy’s Cosmic Vision’, The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. Rosemarie Morgan (Farnham: Ashgate, 1988, repr. 2010), 181-197; Harold Orel, ‘The Dynasts: Hardy’s Contribution to the Epic Tradition’, The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy, 365-370. 3. J. S. Haldane, ‘Life and Mechanism’, Mind, 9.33 (1884), 27-47. 4. Raye’s fantasy of Anna as a product of nature is a useful illustration of how ‘objet petit a’ is related to Lacan’s “big Other”. 5. Hardy later echoed this philosophy in a letter of 1907 to Edward Wright in which he notes that the conception of ‘the Unconscious Will of the Universe’ is a theory that ‘seems to […] settle the question of Free-will v. necessity’, adding: ‘The will of man is … neither wholly free nor wholly unfree. When swayed by the Universal Will (which he mostly must be as a subservient part of it) he is not individually free; but whenever it happens that all the rest of the Great Will is in equilibrium the minute portion called one person’s will is free, just as a performer’s fingers will go on playing the pianoforte of themselves when he talks or thinks of something else and the head does not rule them’ (Letters vol. 3, 255-6, cited in Asquith, 2010, 186). 6. See J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire. Harvard, MA: The Belnap Press of Harvard University Press. 7. I am grateful to Annie Ramel for pointing out Lacan’s reference to circuitry in relation to desire.

ABSTRACTS

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Thomas Hardy’s reading included articles and reviews published in Mind: a Quarterly Review of Philosophy, a publication that provided a forum for debate on contemporary issues in philosophy and psychology. In the wake of the publication of Darwin’s

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On the Origin of Species, these disciplines explored questions related to the role played by evolution in our existence and the nature of human emotions. This paper argues that in “On the Western Circuit” Hardy examines desire in the context of debates over free will and determinism, positing that desire places humankind in a conundrum that involves both loss of an individual’s volition and also an increased need to exert free will to secure the object of desire. This paper will also contend that in “On the Western Circuit”, Hardy uses regulatory systems, such as the law, to explore the possibility of containing and managing desire, also considering the act of writing itself as a potential tool through which desire can be analysed and controlled.

Les lectures de Thomas Hardy dans les dernières années du dix-neuvième siècle comprenaient des articles et recensions d’ouvrages publiés dans le magazine Mind: a Quarterly Review of Philosophy (L’esprit : mensuel de philosophie), qui servait de forum aux débats du temps en matière de philosophie et de psychologie. Influencées par la publication de L’Origine des espèces de Darwin, ces deux disciplines cherchaient à analyser l’impact du processus d’évolution sur notre mode de vie et sur la nature des émotions humaines. Cet article utilise la nouvelle « On the Western Circuit » pour montrer comment Hardy interroge la nature du désir, à la lumière des débats contemporains sur le déterminisme ou le libre arbitre. Il démontre que le désir confronte l’être humain à un paradoxe : tout en abdiquant à l’autre sa volonté, il impose dans le même temps tout son libre arbitre pour s’assurer l’objet de son désir. L’article montre en outre que dans cette nouvelle, Hardy explore la manière dont des institutions telles que la loi tentent de contenir et de réguler les désirs ; l’acte d’écriture lui-même devient alors un instrument visant à analyser et contrôler le désir.

INDEX

Mots-clés: désir, regard, déterminisme, évolutionnisme, libre arbitre, philosophie, psychologie, volonté oeuvrecitee On the Western Circuit Keywords: desire, gaze, volition, philosophy, psychology, free will, determinism, evolutionism

AUTHOR

TRISH FERGUSON Dr Trish Ferguson is Senior Lecturer in English at Liverpool Hope University. She is the author of Thomas Hardy’s Legal Fictions (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), editor of Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and co-editor of Victorian Fiction Beyond the Canon (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

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“A woman’s flush of triumph lit her eyes”: Hardy, Darwin, and the Blush “Une lueur de triomphe lui enflamma le regard” : Hardy, Darwin et le rougissement

Phillip Mallett

“[The cheek is the] external arena of the emotions of the soul – that focus of every involuntary exhibition of internal feeling and sympathy” Thomas Burgess, The Physiology or Mechanism of Blushing, 1839 (Burgess 115)1

1 My title comes from a passage early in Hardy’s third published novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, serialized in Tinsleys’ Magazine between September 1872 and July 1873, and issued in volume form in the latter year. Elfride Swancourt, the owner of the blue eyes, persuades a reluctant Stephen Smith to agree that if forced to choose he would save her, and leave his mentor, Henry Knight, “the noblest man in England”, to drown: “‘There; now I am yours!’ she said, and a woman’s flush of triumph lit her eyes” (Hardy 2009, 62). The phrase is a striking one, and poses a number of questions: in particular, what is the connection between the emotion (“triumph”) and its physical manifestation (“flush”)? Are we to assume that the triumph occurs independently of the flush, of which it is then the cause, or instead that the emotion and its expression are mutually constitutive, two sides of a single coin? How, if at all, does a flush of triumph differ from (say) a flush of rage or jealousy?2 If, as we like to believe, emotion is at least in part under the control of the will, is that also true of the flush that expresses or accompanies it? And conversely, if the blush is “involuntary”, as Thomas Burgess proposed and common experience seems to suggest, what does that imply about the degree of our freedom to refuse or to allow the emotions that trigger it?3

2 The aim of this paper is to explore the blush or flush as it appears in Hardy’s fiction, and to do so in relation to Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published by John Murray in November 1872 – the month after the instalment of A Pair

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of Blue Eyes narrating Elfride’s triumph: neither work can have influenced the other – and an immediate bestseller (Richardson 69-79). Darwin had planned to discuss the emotions and their expression in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, published in 1871, only to find that he had too much material and needed a further volume; the Expression can thus be read as an extended coda to the Descent. Central to both books is an assertion of the continuity between (in Hardy’s noticeably relaxed phrase) “the human and kindred animal races” (Hardy 1976, 557). In the Descent Darwin argued that what we call the “moral sense” – a phrase often used to posit a separate mode of apprehension, like those of sight or touch – had in fact developed gradually from the various social instincts, including “love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason”, that we share with non-human animals. Our capacity to act as moral beings, on the basis of sympathy rather than the struggle to survive, affords no evidence for the existence of some special faculty, whether mental, emotional, or spiritual, unique to humanity. His conclusion is unequivocal: “the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind” (Darwin 2003, 126). One of his aims in Expression was to add substance to this claim by documenting the numerous points of likeness between the human emotions and the manner in which they are expressed – joy, grief, fear, and so on – and those of the higher animals. The significance of the blush in this context is that it seems not to meet the general rule: unlike other familiar forms of expression, such as the smile or frown, blushing occurs only among human beings.

3 Darwin set out to provide a natural history, in evolutionary terms, of the expression of the emotions. He offers three kinds of explanation. The first, the principle of “serviceable associated habits”, proposes that expressive behaviours that were useful to our progenitors have over time become innate, and continue to be called into play through association. So, for example, our ancestors learned to raise their eyebrows to increase their field of vision and take in new information; Darwin observes that we continue to raise our eyebrows in surprise, or “when we earnestly desire to remember something; acting as if we endeavoured to see it” (Darwin 1998, 224). The second is the principle of antithesis: some expressions and gestures have developed in opposition to other and more basic ones. In Darwin’s example, we shrug our shoulders to suggest impotence or uncertainty, as the antithesis to raising our arms to show readiness to fight. The third principle is the “direct action of the excited nervous system on the body” (69): a venting or overflow of excess psychic energy in otherwise purposeless movement, independent of the will, as for example when we writhe with misery as if in physical pain, or when intense happiness quickens the circulation and thus stimulates the brain, which in turn reacts on the whole body, as we see in “our young children, in their loud laughter, clapping of hands, and jumping for joy” (80).

4 In developing these principles, Darwin insists on the physical basis of the emotions, the universality of their expression, and the extent to which humans share forms of expressive behaviour with other, non-human animals. This gives a particular interest to Chapter 13 of Expression, covering “Self-attention – Shame – Shyness – Modesty: blushing”,4 in which he identifies the blush as “the most peculiar and most human of all expressions. Monkeys redden from passion, but it would require an overwhelming amount of evidence to make us believe that any animal could blush” (Darwin 1998, 310). Earlier theorists, such as Thomas Burgess in The Physiology or Mechanism of Blushing (1839), had argued that the capacity to blush proved that humans had been gifted by their creator with a conscience, and knew when they had crossed the line between

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right and wrong. 5 This is consonant with the idealist theories of Johann Lavater in the 1780s, and later of the anatomist Charles Bell, which held that by a wise decision of the deity the human face was essentially legible: the “moral life of man”, wrote Lavater, “reveals itself in the lines, marks, and transitions of the countenance” (Lavater 9)6. Darwin instead offers a naturalistic explanation, implicit in his chapter title: blushing derives from the habit of “self-attention”. Crucially, however, it also has a social dimension: “It is not the simple act of reflecting on our own appearance, but the thinking what others think of us which excites a blush” (Darwin 1998, 324). Darwin’s hypothesis is that the blush originated among our ancestors in the heightened self- awareness that occurs when we realise that others are regarding our personal appearance, and especially our face. This self-attention reacts through the vaso-motor system on the facial capillaries and causes them to relax, with the consequent familiar reddening of the cheeks. Reiterated through countless generations, the process has become so far habitual that we have learned to blush whenever we suspect that any one is blaming, praising, or simply noticing, not only our physical appearance but also, through the power of association, “our actions, thoughts, or character” (343). Whether in relation to our conduct or our appearance, the precondition of the blush is the belief that we are or might be observed by other people. It is this inter-subjectivity, the capacity to think of the self as seen by others, or thought of by others, that Darwin sees as distinctively human7.

5 At this point, a comment on terminology is necessary: my title refers to the blush but, inconveniently for my purpose, the quotation within it speaks of Elfride’s “flush of triumph”. Darwin makes a physiological distinction between the flush and the blush. The former, he suggests, is produced by strong emotions such as anger or great joy, which cause the face to redden by increasing the flow of blood to the heart, whereas what he calls the “true blush” is owing to changes in capillary circulation in the facial skin. At times Hardy seems to make a similar distinction, associating the flush with more urgent or violent emotions than the blush, but he is not consistent in doing so. Thus, for example, Stephen “flushes hot with impulse” when he proposes that he and Elfride should marry in secret, while she responds with “quick breathings, and hectic flush, and unnaturally bright eyes” (Hardy 2009, 93);8 Knight flushes “with mingled concern and anger at [Elfride’s] rashness” when she walks on the parapet of the church tower (153). However, Elfride’s “slow flush of jealousy” when she overhears a kiss and wonders if it was given by Stephen, and if so to whom, seems not to be of this sudden and overpowering kind (66). Later, when Knight recalls telling Elfride that he had never kissed a woman, he experiences a flush “which had in it as much of wounded pride as of sorrow” (284). This accords with Darwin’s argument that the blush arises from self- attention in relation to the opinion of others, and it’s not clear that any significance attaches to calling it a flush. When Elfride realises that Knight is allowing her to win at chess, she starts up with an “angry colour”; this might be an intense form of blush, but the fact that her heart is beating so “violently” that the table is “set throbbing by its pulsations” suggests the flush is dominant (159). The same point might be made about her “flush of triumph”. Whether this is wholly a flush, caused by an excited beating of the heart, or a blush, produced by the sense of her self as seen by others – and triumph seems to imply an awareness of others, whether as an audience to one’s success, or as rivals to be vanquished – is difficult to determine; perhaps there are elements of both. In this paper the flush is considered only when the context suggests that it might equally have been named a blush.

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6 There is no evidence that Hardy read Expression (or indeed that he read firsthand any of Darwin’s work, since none of Darwin’s books were in his library), but if he had he would have found it congenial. Like his own notebooks, Expression is a treasure-trove of curious details, anecdotes and observations, intermixed with bold speculation, and Hardy’s natural history of the blush chimes closely with Darwin’s. The narrator remarks that Stephen Smith has “a boy’s blush and manner” (Hardy 2009, 14); Stephen is twenty years old, but he is, as Hardy confessed of himself, late in development9, and his propensity to blush is a sign of his immaturity. Darwin notes that blushing is more common among women and the young, and the tendency is one of the characteristics shared by Elfride and Stephen: “The truth is,” said Stephen blushing, and rather ashamed of having pretended even so slightly to a consequence which did not belong to him […] (Hardy 2009, 33) “I suppose you are wondering what those scraps were?” she said, as they bowled along up the sycamore avenue. “And so I may as well tell you. They are notes for a romance I am writing.” She could not help colouring at the confession, much as she tried to avoid it. (36)

7 In both instances the blush reflects a fear of interrogation and subsequent exposure. Neither character wishes to colour up; the reaction is involuntary, and, if anything, intensified by the effort to control it. As Darwin noticed, one cannot blush at will: an actor can simulate a frown or a smile, but not a blush. Nor can we cause a blush by physical means, in the way that we can cause laughter by tickling: “It is the mind which must be affected” (Darwin 1998, 310). So far is this the case that among the causes of blushing is the fear that one might be about to blush, or is told, untruthfully, that one is already doing so.

8 Perhaps surprisingly, given his insistence that expression was bound up with sociality, Darwin shows little interest in the possible communicative power of the blush. A cultural or evolutionary explanation might be that it serves as a signal, however reluctant the signaller: the blusher implicitly acknowledges social norms or boundaries, such as the age one ought to be to carry out a professional task as an architect, or the qualifications one ought properly to have before appearing as an author; confesses that these norms have been overstepped; and through the blush tacitly apologises for the fault in doing so. The evolutionary benefit lies in the way the blush placates the group, and thereby lowers the chance of conflict.

9 This is plausible, but evidently the blush does not always or only function as a signal: as Darwin points out, we can blush when alone, or in the dark. Even in these cases, however, the cause of the blush “almost always relates to the thoughts of others about us – to acts done in their presence, or suspected by them” (Darwin 1998, 334). In the opening chapter of Far from the Madding Crowd, published two years after Expression, Bathsheba (the reader has yet to learn her name) looks round to make sure there are no spectators before she studies her face in her mirror: “she blushed at herself, and seeing her reflection blush, blushed the more” (Hardy 2002, 12). It is enough to raise a blush that she is regarded by herself, or by her own image in the looking-glass; though as much as shame, shyness or modesty, what we witness here is perhaps also a quasi- conspiratorial feeling of shared delight.

10 Elfride and Stephen colour up, in the above examples, with a sense of shame or fault, but as both Hardy and Darwin notice we can also blush at praise or admiration, even when unspoken, as Elfride does when playing and singing to Stephen: “So long and so earnestly gazed he, that her cheek deepened to a more and more crimson tint as each

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line was added to her song” (Hardy 2009, 21-22). The use of “cheek” rather than “cheeks” may have been off-hand, but it is intriguing; there is some evidence that where an observer’s attention is directed to just one side of the face, as Stephen’s is here as he watches Elfride in profile – he has just moved from her right to her left, so she must be aware of this – that side will turn a deeper red than the other.

11 If it is true that women and the young blush more often than (for example) a man of Knight’s assumed maturity, one reason might be that the pressure to obey social conventions weighs more heavily on them. In his professional life at least, Knight sets the norms, rather than having to defer to those set by others. Away from his work, however, he is hardly less vulnerable than Stephen: when he tells Elfride that he has never kissed a woman, “The man of two and thirty with the experienced mind warmed all over with a boy’s ingenuous shame as he made the confession” (Hardy 2009, 270-271)10. The “experienced mind” belongs to the reviewer and barrister-at-law, not to the first-time lover, who in this respect is little more than a boy – and, as appears later, has an adolescent terror that the woman he loves might be able to compare him unfavourably with a rival. The reviewer, his identity consolidated within the “huge” editorial “WE” of The Present (60), does his work invisibly, while the lover is all too painfully aware of being seen: when Elfride remarks that she thought he was “rather round-shouldered”, “Knight looked slightly redder” (165). He “get[s] red” again (282) when Mrs Swancourt tells him that his comments in praise of amatory clumsiness merely reflect his lack of experience. The key element in each case is the sense of exposure, as he finds himself stripped of the role in which he had clothed himself.

12 For the most part Victorian fiction treats the blush as a unitary phenomenon: heroine after heroine grows red, with no further detail offered11. Both Darwin and Hardy, however, discriminate between different physical kinds of blush. Elfride’s blush at the piano deepens by degrees as she becomes increasingly conscious of Stephen’s gaze, and her own reaction to it. Hardy anticipates here a distinction made by recent commentators between the classic and the “creeping” blush, which typically develops more slowly and lasts longer (Crozier 2010, 2012). The term itself occurs twice in The Woodlanders. When Fitzpiers pays a medical visit to Felice Charmond, he observes “a blush creep slowly over her decidedly handsome cheeks” (Hardy 2005, 169). Her blush develops in tandem with a process of mental reflection, as she wonders if Fitzpiers recognizes her from their earlier meeting, years before, and concludes that he does not. The interplay between an unspoken thought and a gradual change of colour is repeated when Grace Melbury reads the letter telling her that she will soon be free to marry again: “a creeping blush tinctured her white neck and cheek” (246). By contrast, when she guesses that her father has also written to Giles, urging him to renew his courtship, “the discovery sent a scarlet pulsation through her for the moment” (251). The three elements here are analytically distinct – a mental act (“discovery”), an internal physical response (“pulsation”), and its external manifestation (“scarlet”) – but they are experienced as virtually instantaneous.

13 Darwin asserts that the “tendency to blush is inherited” (Darwin 1998, 311). Hardy had reached the same conclusion. In Far from the Madding Crowd, the unlucky Joseph Poorgrass is an inveterate blusher, despite various attempts to cure him, including putting him to work as errand-man in the “horrible sinful situation” of the Women’s Skittle Alley at the back of a Casterbridge public house – presumably in the hope of inuring him to embarrassment, rather than as a form of aversion therapy. His affliction

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may reflect no more than Hardy’s desire to differentiate the minor characters, comparable with Andrew Randle’s involuntary alternation in the same novel between stammering and cursing (akin to Tourette’s syndrome, though this wasn’t identified until 1885), or Jan Coggan’s “multiplying eye”, but as Joseph explains with some complacency, “Blushes hev been in the family for generations” (Hardy 2002, 60).

14 Enough has been said to show how often Hardy and Darwin agree in their observations of the blush. One final example will suffice. Darwin remarks in Expression that “Every one must have noticed how easily after one blush fresh blushes chase each other over the face” (Darwin 1998, 312). Hardy certainly had: when in Desperate Remedies Edward Springrove invites Cytherea Graye to go rowing with him, the narrator, as so often in Hardy’s fiction, chooses to describe her physical response rather than her thoughts: she “looked uncertainly at the ground, then almost, but not quite, in his face, blushed a series of minute blushes, left off in the midst of them, and showed the usual signs of perplexity in a matter of the emotions” (Hardy 2003, 41). Between them, the naturalist and the novelist offer a detailed typology of the blush, both as experienced by the blusher and as interpreted by the beholders, but whether its various forms – the sudden blush, the creeping blush, the series of blushes – arise from or can be traced back to different mental states, remains for both an open question.

15 Hardy’s interest in how and why men and women change colour runs throughout his work12. This emphasis on what is visible on the body, and more particularly on the face, is not fortuitous. It is an aspect of his resistance, as Havelock Ellis noticed in one of the best contemporary essays on Hardy’s fiction, to the direct representation of the consciousness of his characters. His usual method of narration is instead impersonal: as Ellis puts it, “he is only willing to recognize the psychical element in its physical correlative. This dislike to use the subjective method or to deal directly with mental phenomena is a feature in Mr. Hardy’s psychology which has left a strong mark on his art” (Ellis 358-359). Hillis Miller makes a similar point in Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire when he observes that almost every sentence Hardy wrote is “objective”: “His selfawareness and that of his characters are always inextricably involved in their awareness of the world. Their minds are turned habitually outward” (Miller 1). We learn what characters think or feel either through their bodily reaction, or through what they see, or the novelist sees on their behalf13. Consider, for example, the scene in which Clym confronts Eustacia after having discovered, or so he supposes, her part in his mother’s death. She is coiling her hair, and sees his face reflected in the looking- glass, “ashy, haggard, and terrible”: “And while she looked the carmine flush with which warmth and sound sleep had suffused her cheeks and neck dissolved from view, and the deathlike pallor in his face flew across into hers” (Hardy 2006, 269). Clym’s conclusion is that she “knows what is the matter”, because “[he] see[s] it in [her] face”. But the narrator tells us no more than her change of colour: we have no access to her thoughts14. As the scene progresses, we “see” a number of physical reactions: a “shudder” which causes the fabric of her nightdress to shake, a “slight laugh”, a deep flush (“the red blood inundated her face”), a fit of sobbing. There are individual words suggestive of her feelings (“weary”, “bitterness”, “indifferently”), but there is no attempt to get behind them. Finally we are told that her hands “quivered so violently” that she is unable to tie her bonnet-strings: moments later, she leaves (270-274).

16 This is a method of narration all Hardy’s readers will recognize15. My point, of course, is that the blush is one of the physical actions he finds most helpful to this method. In A

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Pair of Blue Eyes, taken here as a representative text, Elfride, Stephen and Knight blush, flush or turn pale with pique, triumph, jealousy, perplexity, mortification, embarrassment, vexation, anger, gladness, and shame; their faces become rapid red, vivid scarlet, crimson, vermillion, lively red, an angry colour, lily-white, livid, cold, heated, and bright. We are told a good deal about the precise physical change, as when Elfride reacts to seeing Stephen Smith again for the first time after her engagement to Knight: “She pressed a hand to her eyes, as if to blot out the image of Stephen. A vivid scarlet spot now shone with preternatural brightness in the centre of each cheek, leaving the remainder of her face lily-white as before” (Hardy 2009, 248). But it is left for the reader to judge how this specific change of colour correlates with the psychical event that in some way prompts it.

17 That way of putting it leaves open several questions: in particular, whether the relation between the emotion and the blush is causative or merely associative. In Notebook N, begun in 1838 and marked “Private”, Darwin proposed that emotions could be described as “effects on the mind, accompanying certain bodily actions”, but then hesitated over the verb: “but what first caused this bodily action. if the emotion was not first felt?” Yet he was reluctant to assign priority, and a clearly causative role, to either mind or body: better, perhaps, to regard an emotion and its expression as a single event, each a constituent part of the other. The note continues: “without flush, acceleration of pulse. or rigidity of muscles. – man cannot be said to be angry” (Darwin 1987, 581-582)16. Or, as Hardy might have responded, without a sudden flush and a brightening of the eyes a woman cannot be said to feel triumph.

18 The mind, Darwin remarked elsewhere in the notebook, “is function of body” (Darwin 1987, 564). Hardy didn’t have access to Darwin’s early thoughts, but he did read and take notes from Auguste Comte, and from G. H. Lewes expounding Comte’s ideas, including in 1877 an abridged quotation from his essay on “The Course of Modern Thought”: Physiology began to disclose that all the mental processes were (mathematically speaking) functions of physical processes, i.e. – varying with the variations of bodily states; & this was declared enough to banish for ever the conception of a Soul, except as a term simply expressing certain functions. (Björk I, 92; Hardy’s underlining)

19 Comte in particular was so far persuaded of the physical basis of our affective life that he saw no reason for a science of psychology: physiology alone would suffice. That Hardy had some sympathy with this position is suggested by the tendency of the novels to register subjectivity somatically, in terms of physical sensation or changed perception of the outer world, rather than through introspection or free indirect discourse, as in the work of George Eliot or Henry James: hence the recurrence in Hardy’s fiction of such words as “palpitating”, “irradiated”, “faint”, “trembling”, “listless”, “tremulous”, and the frequent references to the waves of the blood, and the throbbing of the pulse. Deleuze suggests that Hardy’s characters are not so much “people or subjects” as “collections of intensive sensations” (Deleuze 39-40). So, of Bathsheba, kissed by Troy in the hollow amid the ferns: That minute’s interval had brought the blood beating into her face, set her stinging as if aflame to the very hollows of her feet, and enlarged emotion to compass which quite swamped thought. It had brought upon her a stroke resulting, as did that of Moses in Horeb, in a liquid stream – here a stream of tears. She felt like one who has sinned a great sin. (Hardy 2002, 185)

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20 Similarly, Tess Durbeyfield is such “a sheaf of susceptibilities” that her blood is “driven to her finger-ends” by Angel’s touch (Hardy 1986, 253); the “highly charged” Eustacia Vye is alternately “fired” and cooled” by a “cycle of visions”, each change visible on her features (Hardy 2006, 102). As Hardy noted from Comte’s Social Dynamics, “Feeling” is “the great motor force of human life”, and feeling takes its origin in the body (Björk I, 68).

21 But Hardy was reluctant simply to assign priority to the body over the mind. In 1882 he transcribed part of a Spectator review arguing that the external “framework” of the universe might have “inner qualities analogous to those which we call mental” (Björk I, 148). The context here is W. K. Clifford’s proposition, in an essay of 1878 entitled “On the Nature of Things-in-Themselves”, that while a molecule of inorganic matter does not possess consciousness, it does possess “a small piece of mind-stuff […] When matter takes the complex form of a living human brain, the corresponding mind-stuff takes the form of a human consciousness, having intelligence and volition” (Clifford 57-67). Lewes’s essay on “Modern Thought” reaches a similar conclusion, albeit by a different route: “all physical facts are mental facts expressed in objective terms, and mental facts are physical facts expressed in subjective terms” (Lewes 321; italics in original)17, These ideas appealed to Hardy, as ever anxious to oppose “our old friend Dualism”18, though it is not clear in either case that they are a solution to the problem of the mind-body relation rather than merely a restatement of it. But as Hardy often insisted, he was a poet and a novelist, not a philosopher. Physical and mental facts are not identical in his fiction, but – so far as he could come to a conclusion – they appear as twin halves of a single event. It may be that the ambiguous work done by the little word “of”, in “a woman’s flush of triumph”, reaches as far as the more formal discussions of Clifford, Bergson, Lewes, or Herbert Spencer19.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bell, Charles, Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression, London: John Murray, 1824.

Björk, Lennart A. (ed.), The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, 2 vols, London: Macmillan, 1985.

Burgess, Thomas, The Physiology or Mechanism of Blushing: Illustrative of the Influence of Mental Emotion on the Capillary Circulation, London: John Churchill, 1839.

Clifford, William Kingdon, “On the Nature of Things-in-Themselves”, Mind 3 (1878): 57-67.

Crozier, Ray, “The Puzzle of Blushing”, The Psychologist 23 (May 2010): 390-393.

Crozier, W. Ray & Peter J. de Jong (eds.), The Psychological Significance of the Blush, Cambridge UP, 2012.

Darwin, Charles, “Notebook N (1838-1839)”, Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836-1844: Geology, Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Enquiries, eds. Paul Barrett et al, British Museum and Cambridge UP, 1987: 561-596.

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Darwin, Charles, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), ed. Richard Dawkins, London: Gibson Square Books, 2003.

Darwin, Charles, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), ed. Paul Ekman, Oxford: OUP, 1998.

Davis, Mike, “Hardy, Tess, and Late Victorian Theories of Consciousness”, Thomas Hardy Journal XXVII (2012): 46-69.

Deleuze, Gilles & Claire Parnet, Dialogues (1977), trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam, New York: Columbia UP, 1987.

Dillion, Jacqueline & Phillip Mallett, “‘The Evil Eye’: Looking and Overlooking in The Return of the Native”, Rivista di Studi Vittoriani 38-39 (2015): 7-28.

Eliot, George, Middlemarch (1874), ed. David Carroll, Oxford: World’s Classics, 1997.

Eliot, George, Daniel Deronda (1876), ed. Terence Cave, London: Penguin, 2003.

Ellis, Havelock, “Thomas Hardy’s Novels”, Westminster Review 119 (April 1883): 334-364.

Hardy, Thomas, Desperate Remedies (1871), ed. Patricia Ingham, Oxford: World’s Classics, 2003.

Hardy, Thomas, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1872), ed. Alan Manford, Oxford: World’s Classics, 2009.

Hardy, Thomas, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), ed. Suzanne B. Falck-Yi, Oxford: World’s Classics, 2002.

Hardy, Thomas, The Return of the Native (1878), ed. Phillip Mallett, New York: Norton, 2006.

Hardy, Thomas, The Woodlanders (1887), ed. Dale Kramer, Oxford: World’s Classics, 2005.

Hardy, Thomas, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), eds. Juliet Grindle & Simon Gatrell, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.

Hardy, Thomas, The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gibson, London: Macmillan, 1976.

Hardy, Thomas, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate, London: Macmillan, 1984.

Irwin, Michael, Reading Hardy’s Landscapes, London: Macmillan, 2000.

Lavater, Johann Caspar, Essays on Physiognomy (1789), trans. Thomas Holcroft, London: Tegg & Co, 1853.

Lewes, G. H., “The Course of Modern Thought”, Fortnightly Review XXI (1877): 317-327.

Miller, J. Hillis, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire, Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 1970.

O’Farrell, Mary Ann, Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush, Durham: Duke UP, 1997.

Richardson, Angelique, “‘The Book of the Season’: the Conception and Reception of Darwin’s Expression”, After Darwin: Animals, Emotions, and the Mind, ed. Angelique Richardson, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013: 51-88.

Scarry, Elaine, “Work and the Body in Hardy and Other Nineteenth-Century Novelists”, Representations 3 (Summer 1983): 90-123.

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NOTES

1. Burgess opens his discussion by proposing that “Blushing may be considered the poetry of the Soul!” (Burgess 7). The Oxford English Dictionary, more prosaically, defines a blush as the “reddening of the face caused by shame, modesty, or other emotion”. 2. I am not concerned here with the further question of whether or how a woman’s flush differs from a man’s. 3. Pallor, in which blood drains from rather than flows into the face, can readily be explained with reference solely to physiology: fear, etc., causes blood to flow from the skin towards the skeletal muscles, where it will be needed to assist flight or defence. 4. Darwin’s choice of terms here is a little odd. Shyness and modesty are usually seen as traits of character rather than emotions. Most recent investigators speak instead of embarrassment. 5. The “change of colour” is “a genuine example of moral instinct – it is the result of a consciousness of guilt, and as such leads us to infer, that it was with this intent the blush was originally designed by our Maker” (Burgess 26). 6. Darwin consulted both Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy (1789) and Charles Bell’s Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression (1824), which extended the principles of natural theology to the human system of facial muscles. 7. Mary Ann O’Farrell argues for a distinction in the nineteenth-century novel between an expressive blush, which is the sign of “deep personal truth (expressive of character, of self, of the body)”, and the obligatory or social blush, which forms the “appropriate local response to and inevitable product of the pressure of social circumstance”, but the idea of an expressive blush, innocent of social or cultural pressures, is unconvincing (O’Farrell 111). 8. Both Hardy and Darwin notice that where the flush reflects an excited emotion it may also produce an apparent brightening of the eyes: “a woman’s flush of triumph lit her eyes.” 9. “I was a child till I was 16; a youth till I was 25; a young man till I was 40 or 50” (Hardy 1985, 408). 10. Darwin noticed as “a curious question” that while the blush causes only the face, ears and neck to redden, “the whole surface of the body often tingles and grows hot”, as presumably happens here to Knight (Darwin, 1998, 314). 11. The notable exception is George Eliot, another close reader of Darwin, though she is unwilling to allow that a blush can be interpreted: “A blush is no language: only a dubious flag-signal which may mean either of two contradictories” (Eliot 2003, 420). 12. The outlier is Jude the Obscure, in which Jude (as a boy) and Sue each blush once, and Arabella not at all. 13. A memorable example of the latter occurs when Tess stands outside the locked door of Angel’s parents’ house: “A piece of blood-stained paper, caught up from some meat-buyer’s dust- heap, beat up and down the road without the gate; too flimsy to rest, too heavy to fly away; and a few straws kept it company” (Hardy 1986, 409). In its evocation of the futility of movement, the impossibility of peace, and the aching loneliness that conjures up an image of “company” between paper, dust and straw, the passage conflates the narrator’s sense of the fragility of human consciousness, and Tess’s own desolation. 14. For further discussion of the scene, see Dillion & Mallett. 15. In contrast, George Eliot’s account of the interview between Dorothea and Rosamond in Chapter 81 of Middlemarch spells out the relation between the physical and the psychical before moving (as Hardy rarely does) into free indirect speech: “Rosamond, wrapping her soft shawl around her as she walked towards Dorothea, was inwardly wrapping her soul in cold reserve. Had Mrs Casaubon come to say anything to her about Will?” (Eliot 1997, 779). 16. The punctuation and emphasis are Darwin’s; “slight” is an interlinear insertion. 17. For the quotation and useful discussion, see Davis.

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18. Hardy used the phrase when reading Henri Bergson in 1915 (Hardy 1984, 400), and recalled it as the title for a satirical poem in his posthumous collection, Winter Words (Hardy 1976, 892). 19. An earlier version of this paper made the further point that there is something more at issue for Hardy, as not for Comte or Lewes. It has often been noticed that Hardy’s characters exist in a process of constant interchange with the external world, especially through their work; they are both marked by it, and leave traces of themselves on it (Scarry 1983; Irwin 88-115). But in insisting on the physical basis of our affective life, Hardy also marks our continuity with the universe around us. The human body throbs and pulses; so does the outer world. Blood flows in waves; so do sound and colour. This is more than a matter simply of analogy, but to make the case properly would require extensive quotation, and a separate essay.

ABSTRACTS

Thomas Hardy’s third novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, began appearing in serial form in September 1872; Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals was published in November of the same year. Darwin provides a detailed study of the blush, which he views as unique to human animals; Hardy’s novel offers a virtual typology of blushing. The three principal characters, Elfride, Stephen and Knight, blush or flush with pique, triumph, jealousy, perplexity, mortification, vexation, embarrassment, anger, gladness, and shame; their faces become red, vivid scarlet, an angry colour, vermillion, crimson, lily-white, pale, livid, cold, heated, and bright. Drawing on Darwin’s work, this paper asks what Hardy might have meant by a “flush of triumph”, and in particular, how a physical response (“flush”) relates to the mental one (“triumph”): whether one causes the other, is a function of the other, or a constituent part of the other. It then seeks to situate that discussion in regard to Havelock Ellis’s remark in 1883 that Hardy was “only willing to recognize the psychical element in its physical correlative”.

Le troisième roman de Hardy, Les yeux bleus, fut publié en feuilleton à partir de septembre 1872. L’ouvrage de Charles Darwin sur L’expression des émotions chez l’homme et l’animal parut au mois de novembre suivant. Le scientifique y livre une analyse approfondie des mécanismes du rougissement, une réaction selon lui limitée à l’espèce humaine. Le roman de Hardy offre une sorte de typologie du rougissement. Elfride, Stephen and Knight, les trois personnages principaux, rougissent sous les effets de multiples émotions, telles que dépit, triomphe, jalousie, perplexité, humiliation, contrariété, embarras, colère, joie ou honte. Leurs visages apparaissent tour à tour rouges, écarlates, enflammés, vermillon, cramoisis, échauffés, brillants, ou encore blancs comme neige, pâles, livides, froids. Cet article se fonde sur l’ouvrage de Darwin pour interroger ce que signifiait pour Hardy un regard « enflammé par une lueur de triomphe » – et la manière dont une émotion (telle que le « triomphe ») se traduit sous forme de réaction physique (telle qu’un rougissement ou un regard enflammé) : le rapport de l’un à l’autre est-il de cause à effet, ou les deux réactions vont-elles de pair ? L’article relie ensuite ces analyses à la remarque faite en 1883 par Havelock Ellis, selon qui Hardy « se contentait là de reconnaître les déterminations psychiques dans leurs manifestations physiques ».

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INDEX oeuvrecitee Pair of Blue Eyes (A) Keywords: Darwin (Charles), gaze, desire, expression, blushing, embodiment, psychology, physiology Mots-clés: Darwin (Charles), expression, rougissement, incarnation, psychologie, physiologie

AUTHOR

PHILLIP MALLETT Phillip Mallett is Honorary Senior Lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews, a Vice- President of both the Hardy Society and the Thomas Hardy Association, and since 2008 editor of the Hardy Society’s journals. In addition to essays on writers from John Donne to Larkin and Heaney, his published work includes a biography of Rudyard Kipling as well as an edition of his Limits and Renewals, and scholarly editions of Hardy’s The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Under the Greenwood Tree. He has also edited a number of collections of essays, most recently Thomas Hardy in Context for Cambridge University Press and The Victorian Novel and Masculinity for Palgrave. He is currently working on new editions of Tess for Norton, and of the Mayor for the Cambridge edition of Hardy’s novels and stories.

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“Their glances met”: Looks and Desire in The Mayor of Casterbridge “Their glances met” : regards et désir dans The Mayor of Casterbridge

Fabienne Gaspari

EDITOR'S NOTE

This article is being published jointly by FATHOM and the Hardy Review as part of a collaborative work.

1 The association between distance and desire in Thomas Hardy’s work has often been noticed and in his study Distance and Desire, J. Hillis Miller has defined these two terms as two “outlining threads”, “distance as the source of desire and desire as the energy behind attempts to turn distance into closeness” (Miller xii). Relationships are built on the interplay between distance and desire, illustrated by the “dance of desire” (144) or “circulation of mutually fascinated characters around one another, in a graceful dance of crossings and exchanges” (145). Hardy was “fascinated by the theme of fascination” (73) and this interweaving of distance and desire involves the gaze, which has a central function in the creation and circulation of desire between the characters. A “nightmare of frustrated desire” for Miller (178), a novel about couples being formed then broken, The Mayor of Casterbridge focuses on ways of seeing, exploring how they can be related to the intricate dance in which the characters participate. We will see how first encounters enable Hardy to stage the initial exchange of glances leading to fascination and thus to establish the connection between desire and the eye. We will then study how he introduces the power of the gaze of those who watch from a distance and trace signs of desire in looks and faces. Yet Hardy’s exploration of ways of seeing is not limited to visual exchanges in the story, we will therefore show that the association between desire and the gaze is also characteristic of the narrative mode itself, of its desire for the visible and of its emphasis on pictorial elements. Finally, this image-

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making process that runs through the text will lead us to examine the function of windows as frames and mediators of desire articulating accessibility and inaccessibility.

“Their glances met”: first encounters

2 If, as J. Hillis Miller writes, “the drama of fascination begins with a look” (Miller 119), it seems relevant to show how first encounters are narrated in The Mayor of Casterbridge by focusing on three scenes that introduce these meetings. They foreground the fundamental function of the gaze in the creation of fascination and of the intricate “system of looks” (119) ruling the “dance of desire” in this novel. The first scene takes place between Elizabeth-Jane and Farfrae and what is interesting here is how Hardy conveys the sense of the young woman’s incipient desire through the description of Farfrae’s face. The encounter occurs in chapter 7, at the Three Mariners, the inn where Farfrae has taken a room and where Susan Newson/Henchard and her daughter are staying. Working as a maid to pay for their board and lodging, Elizabeth-Jane goes up to the young man’s room to bring him a tray for his supper and gets a full view of him. The picture that is then made of Farfrae has to be contrasted with the first glimpse, caught in the previous chapter, of a man “ruddy and of a fair countenance, bright-eyed, and slight in build” (Hardy 1977, 29): He was now idly reading a copy of the local paper, and was hardly conscious of her entry, so that she looked at him quite coolly, and saw how his forehead shone where the light caught it, and how nicely his hair was cut, and the sort of velvet pile or down that was on the skin at the back of his neck, and how his cheek was so truly curved as to be part of a globe, and how clearly drawn where the lids and lashes which hid his bent eyes (Hardy 1977, 34).

3 It is clear that Elizabeth-Jane’s fascination starts to be expressed here: the fragmentary perception made of close ups on certain elements (effects of light on Farfrae’s forehead, the down on the nape of his neck, the curve of his cheek) reveals it and somehow transfigures the person described if we compare it to the first description in chapter 6. This portrait cannot be considered as factual or realistic, for it selects unexpected details and leaves out many other features. What prevails is the impression that the description is as much about the sensations of the focalizer as about the object of the gaze. Elizabeth-Jane’s involvement (sensual and emotional) in the act of seeing and her great appreciation of the sight that is offered can be easily traceable in the adverbs and marks of emphasis or intensifiers that punctuate the passage (“how nicely”, “so truly”, “how clearly drawn”) and in the enumeration, accumulation and rhythm created by the repetition of “and”, “how” and of the consonant [k] (see bold characters in the quotation). Farfrae is reading and this immobility turns him into an object that can be gazed at. The creation of a frozen moment framed inside a single paragraph and almost suspended in time, starting when Elizabeth enters the room and ending when she moves and sets down the tray, gives a pictorial quality to the scene. The mention of curved lines, of light and of “drawn” lids and lashes adds a graphic quality and suggests a pictorial approach.

4 The next first encounter that illustrates the theme of fascination involves Elizabeth- Jane again and Lucetta, who is to become a rival and vie with her for Farfrae’s love but also for the affection of her stepfather, Henchard. The two women come across each other in a churchyard, near Susan’s grave, and the encounter is viewed from Elizabeth- Jane’s eyes. As with Farfrae, the passage focusing on Lucetta is clearly more about the

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observer’s impressions than about what is seen. The vision she has of Lucetta is a mix of curiosity, of a sense of the uncanny and of surprise (not to say shock) that could be related to a nascent fascination: “she allowed herself the pleasure of feeling fascinated” (Hardy 1977, 103). Lucetta, who is to become “the lady of her fancy” (112), appears as “her wraith or double” (102) in mourning too and about her age and size. However, the beauty of her dress causes the observer’s eyes to be “arrested by the artistic perfection of the lady’s appearance” (103). Beyond its taking place in a graveyard, the encounter is gothic as regards its impact, since this double seems to steal from the observer her “freshness and grace” (103). For Jane Thomas, the device of doubling employed here has to be interpreted in terms of the young woman’s desire, as Lucetta “represents an elevated and gentrified image of herself” (Thomas 2013a, 48). The sense of loss felt by Elizabeth-Jane foreshadows her being cast in the role of an observer, receding in the background, displaced or even erased by Lucetta who finds herself centre stage and becomes an object of desire.

5 Last but not least, another first meeting is characterized by an emphasis on looks suggesting the first tremors of desire detected through a close attention to facial expressions, more particularly to blushing. When Farfrae pays a visit to Elizabeth-Jane who is staying at Lucetta’s, Elizabeth-Jane is away and he becomes acquainted with the other woman. Visual exchanges and their effects punctuate a long dialogue: “Lucetta regarded him with a critical interest. He was quite a new type of person to her. At last his eye fell upon the lady’s and their glances met” (Hardy 1977, 122). The fleeting effects that these looks have, such as blushing for both Lucetta “colouring a shade” (122) and Farfrae “who showed the modest pink” (122), are evoked. When the man leaves the house, it becomes manifest that he is aware of Lucetta’s eyes following him and the result of this interview is that Elizabeth-Jane has indeed been displaced and replaced by Lucetta and that Henchard – who was the person Lucetta expected – has also lost his place. These scenes are instances of the importance of looks on at least three levels: the glances that meet are the starting point of a “drama of fascination” between the characters; visual exchanges are part and parcel of the construction of relationships by the narrative; the narrator’s own gaze is foregrounded through its close attention to manifestations of desire such as blushing, through the pictorial dimension and play with focalisation, as in the depiction of Farfrae from Elizabeth- Jane’s point of view.

6 These three levels stage the workings of the eye in connection with manifestations of desire. The narrator therefore recurrently mentions looks in order to relate the process that leads the characters to fall in love (or not) and to chart the ups and downs of their relationships. If he underlines that Farfrae is first interested in Elizabeth-Jane (“[his] gaze […] was now attracted by the Mayor’s so-called stepdaughter” [Hardy 1977, 73]), he also shows how Elizabeth-Jane strives to create this attraction, or rather to recreate “a fleeting love at first sight” (85) that Farfrae may have felt on a previous evening when she danced with him. She attempts to do so by wearing the same clothes, checking in the mirror to see if it works: “The picture glassed back was, in her opinion, precisely of such a kind as to inspire that fleeting regard, and no more” (86). “Regard” means attention but also look, or gaze. Elizabeth is acutely aware of the ephemeral nature of the desire that her appearance might trigger. The fleeting regard she elicits from Farfrae is not enough to turn her into a lasting source of attraction and to prevent her erasure and invisibility.

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“Watching from a distance”, reading gazes and faces

7 Elizabeth-Jane becomes an observer, one of “those watchers from a distance” (like Gabriel Oak in Far from the Madding Crowd) as J. Hillis Miller calls them: “[Hardy] frequently presents a scene in which one character sees another without being seen, watches from an upper window or a hill, peeks in a window from outside at night, or covertly studies a reflection in a mirror” (Miller 7). From the moment her mother and herself arrive in Casterbridge, she is shown as an onlooker, seeing without being seen and first observing the uses of the place through her “unpractised eyes” (Hardy 1977, 48), but little by little exercising and perfecting her powers of observation and analysis. This is how for example “her quiet eye discern[s]” (69) the almost excessive affection that Henchard feels for Farfrae and later the tensions between them. Elizabeth-Jane is a great reader, of books and looks, she deciphers faces, whose “lines and folds” are like “verbal inscriptions” (83). The looks that are exchanged between the characters are under her close scrutiny (and that of Henchard who, after Lucetta’s death, spies on her and Farfrae, telescope in hand). As Annie Ramel shows, the metaphor of reading and of the visage as a printed page, the presence of “intextuated” bodies and “the deciphering of the Real of human bodies, an uncovering of the mysteries of origin, death, or sexuality” (Ramel 1998, 269) are central here and encompass issues of origins, past secrets, and potential revelation. We find here an illustration of what William A. Cohen, studying Hardy’s “material account of perception and interiority in his portrayal of the human face”, defines as “the multiple functions of the face, as a screen onto which thoughts and feelings are projected and as a physiological receptacle for sensory encounters with the world” (Cohen 438).

8 There are in the novel many secrets that lie buried beneath the surface and often come close to being revealed, both through disguised confessions and through facial expressions. Duplicating the complexity of visual exchanges, Hardy creates an elaborate pattern of embedded storytelling with Lucetta and Henchard using a narrative trick, an anonymous “he” and “she”, to tell the story of their past connection. Henchard repeats and resumes his tale three times in chapters 12, 26 and 34 where he reads to Farfrae letters addressed to himself by a woman (in fact Lucetta, now Farfrae’s wife). Relationships are constructed on a triangular basis implying secrets and rivalry and on a “system of looks” articulating the ebb and flow of desire. One may first evoke the complex plot built on issues of filiation, with the triangular relation between Elizabeth-Jane and her two fathers, Newson and Henchard who “glance[s] in her face” (Hardy 1977, 52) and wonders why her hair is now light brown while it promised to be black. The secret of her lineage is brought to light by Susan’s letter, a deathbed confession, and Newson’s paternity is soon confirmed upon Henchard’s close inspection of the sleeping girl’s face. This exploration of features in order to establish genealogical facts might be regarded as emblematic of more specific instances in which it is Elizabeth who, rather than a mere spectator, is a kind of investigator intent on discovering truths and detecting manifestations of desire.

9 As for the second secret, the past relationship between Lucetta and Henchard, it lies at the heart of the triangle formed by Lucetta, Henchard and Farfrae, but neither Elizabeth-Jane nor Farfrae first know about it, though many signs point to it. One particular scene reveals a few elements which lead the young woman to keep a wary

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eye on her companions’ visual exchanges and facial expressions. As the two women have left their vantage point – the windows through which they observe market scenes – to go and look at a new bright-red agricultural machine gathering a fascinated crowd, it seems that Lucetta, attired in a bright-red dress, becomes another focus, the “cherry- coloured person” (Hardy 1977, 127) that “alone rival[s] it in colour” (128). Elizabeth- Jane witnesses a strange scene that leads her to believe that Lucetta and Henchard, whom she has just introduced to each other, are in fact already acquainted: “Then something seemed to occur which his stepdaughter fancied must really be a hallucination of hers. A murmur apparently came from Henchard’s lips in which she detected the words, ‘You refused to see me!’ reproachfully addressed to Lucetta” (129). Similarly, Elizabeth-Jane begins to look for clues that reveal Lucetta’s growing interest in Farfrae, like a “fact”, “printed large all over Lucetta’s cheeks and eyes to any one who could read her as Elizabeth-Jane was beginning to do” (131). Farfrae’s next visit highlights the “supersession” of Henchard (133) and the parallel exclusion of Elizabeth from the circle formed by Lucetta and Farfrae. She is now invisible to Farfrae who seems “not to see her at all” (133) and she becomes “like an awkward third point which that circle would not touch” (134). The emphasis on this invisibility turns the young woman into a kind of “seer” (131), “surveying the position of Lucetta between her two lovers from the crystalline sphere of a straightforward mind” (137).

10 In a scene in chapter 26, the blindness of the two men, who know nothing of each other’s connection with Lucetta yet feel latent tensions and are both fascinated by her, is exposed. Dramatic irony climaxes in the representation of a dinner scene that, to the narrator’s eyes, looks like a Tuscan painting of the supper at Emmaus: They sat stiffly side by side at the darkening table, like some Tuscan painting of the two disciples supping at Emmaus. Lucetta, forming the third and haloed figure, was opposite them; Elizabeth-Jane, being out of the game, and out of the group, could observe all from afar, like the evangelist who had to write it down: that there were long spaces of taciturnity, when all exterior circumstance was subdued to the touch of spoons and china, the click of a heel on the pavement under the window, the passing of a wheelbarrow or cart, the whistling of the carter, the gush of water into householders’ buckets at the town-pump opposite; the exchange of greetings among their neighbours, and the rattle of the yokes by which they carried off their evening supply. (Hardy 1977, 139)

11 The iconic reference is an ironic reinterpretation of the love triangle which Hardy rearranges visually, playing with light and darkness and turning Lucetta into the resurrected figure of Jesus Christ surrounded by a halo and Henchard and Farfrae into the two disciples, while 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. The bread broken by Henchard and Farfrae as they pick the same slice might be seen as the ironical outcome of their rivalry, the bread or Christ/ Lucetta’s body being figuratively torn and in that case not shared but eventually destroyed.

12 That Hardy is a “highly visual author” has been demonstrated by Jane Thomas in “Hardy and the Visual Arts” (Thomas 2013b, 436), and in this passage the writer’s pictorialism serves his purpose which is “subtly to communicate visual effects, ideas, sentiments and emotions” (437). Hardy adds a sonorous dimension to this ironic visual rendering of tensions between lovers and future rivals, of a crisis conveyed through a moment of stasis and visually encapsulated inside the frame of a paragraph (like the description of Farfrae in chapter 7). He somehow unfreezes the picture by mentioning

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silence and the sounds that seem to break it. Yet the wealth of auditory sensations coming from the streets and from the text itself (with, for instance, the alliterations in [s], [t] and [d] and then in [w] – see bold characters in the quotation) rather seems to increase the force of the silence inside that feeds latent tensions. What Annie Ramel calls the silent voice and the haunting musicality of the text, “la voix silencieuse du texte ”, “la musicalité lancinante du texte” (Ramel 2009, 279-280), are representative of Hardy’s “fascination for muffled sounds, for a delicately-poised state of quasi audibility” (Ramel 2015, 164) and of the connection between gaze and voice that appear as “inextricably entwined” (167).

Writing and the desire for the visible

13 The narrator’s extreme attention to looks and to the pictorial potential of some scenes introduces another characteristic of Hardy’s play with the gaze: far from being limited to a means to express desire between the characters in the story, it is a complex force felt and conveyed on the level of the narrative. It shapes Hardy’s writing that is in some passages of The Mayor of Casterbridge saturated with pictorial terms and characterized by “a proliferation of visual detail” which testifies to an “unwavering attention to the significance of observed phenomena” (Bullen 140). This phenomenon is not limited to “interpictoriality” (Louvel 66), that is to say “a direct citational effect” (89) due to the few direct references to painters or schools of painting found in this novel (Titian, Correggio, Tuscan painting). An aspiration to the visual, a longing to create images, seems to run through the writing in which the pictorial markers identified by Liliane Louvel in Poetics of the Iconotext (a technical vocabulary, framing effets, focalization, -ing forms and a suspension of movement) (90) are to be found. Here desire in its close association with the eye is manifested in the text that “strives towards its being-an- image without ever achieving it” (90). In the words of Edward Said, writing “can desire and, in a manner of speaking, move towards the visible” (quoted in Louvel 90).

14 As Jane Thomas shows, this pictorialism is part of an artistic practise based on selecting, editing and ordering so as to reveal signifying patterns and to reach deeper truth. It corresponds to the vision of the artist as a seer. Connecting Hardy with Ruskin, J. B. Bullen’s definition of the “unconscious” Hardy as “the watcher, the observer, the recorder of impressions”, as opposed to the “conscious” Hardy or polemicist (Bullen 4), underlines the centrality of the visual dimension. J. Hillis Miller explains that Hardy strove to remain “invisible, untouchable, a disembodied presence able to be seen without being seen or felt” (Miller 55), a fact which is linked with his tendency to see things as “a spectacle viewed from the outside” (4). However, Miller, still focusing on the interplay between distance and desire, defines this way of seeing as “double”, not only a combination of the narrator’s and of the character’s perspectives but also “a superimposition of the small and the large” (50), varying from bird’s eye views to close- ups.

15 The first pages which combine descriptions of the landscape and of the characters are particularly relevant for a discussion of the workings of the gaze (and its inseparability from the voice) and of Hardy’s pictorialism: The man was of fine figure, swarthy, and stern in aspect; and he showed in profile a facial angle so slightly inclined as to be almost perpendicular. […] What was really particular, however, in this couple’s progress, and would have attracted the attention of any casual observer otherwise disposed to overlook them,

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was the perfect silence they preserved. They walked side by side in such a way as to suggest afar off the low, easy, confidential chat of people full of reciprocity; but on closer view it could be discerned that the man was reading, or pretending to read, a ballad sheet […]. The chief – almost the only attraction of the young woman’s face was its mobility. When she looked down sideways to the girl she became pretty, and even handsome, particularly that in the action her features caught slantwise the rays of the strongly coloured sun, which made transparencies of her eyelids and nostrils and set fire on her lips. (Hardy 1977, 3)

16 It seems that, beyond making a description of the surroundings, the narrator aims at underlining the difference between two orders of perception: the characters’ blindness, which might be equated with Henchard’s limitations and the characters’ isolation from each other and from their own surroundings, is contrasted with the superior powers of the narrative gaze and its acute rendering of impressions, both visual and auditory. The narrator adopts the position of an observer first attracted by the silence between the walking couple. This association between sight and hearing is interesting in so far as, from the very first words of the novel, it makes the workings of the gaze and the question of perception problematic. In a somewhat paradoxical way, it is their silence which renders the characters conspicuous and therefore visible and which transforms the initial inattention of a “casual observer” into a close inspection. What is related here is first and foremost the emergence of the gaze presented as a prerequisite and as a justification for the description of the characters.

17 Furthermore, the perceptions of this eye are right from the start constructed on the doubleness defined by Miller, this combination of distance and proximity so essential to an understanding of Hardy’s treatment of the gaze. They are based on the redefinition of the impression of reciprocity between the couple seen from a distance into a feeling of estrangement when viewed closely. The organisation of the portrait of the silent couple mirrors these tensions: we see first the husband, then the wife and between these descriptive parts, the silence between them is mentioned. Henchard’s pretence of reading (probably for him a means of not communicating with his wife by look or word), is an occupation that isolates him from his companion. Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s study of “Thomas Hardy’s silences” mentions five types or “gradients” of silence, and it seems that in this passage two of them are present: the first, a linguistic gradient “that is sheer lack of speech, which means a lack of communication and shared meaning, the silence of infantia” (Lecercle § 5) and the fourth, a narrative gradient, the world “created, wrested out of the silence of inexistence to which it returns” (§ 9). These two forms of silence are used to stage the visual emergence of this world and of the narrative gaze.

18 The description of Henchard’s and Susan’s faces has multiple functions: it is symbolic more than realistic, programmatic (he has in a way already cast her off, which he will soon do by selling her to a stranger) and aesthetic. Hardy seems to use one technique to express Henchard’s harshness and another to suggest Susan’s vulnerability: the geometric drawing, harsh angles and lines of the man’s face (the facial angle seems to be prolonged by the knife protruding from the basket that he carries on his back) are contrasted with the mobility of the woman’s face, with the rendering of the effects of sunlight on eyelids and nostrils (made transparent) and lips (of a vivid red), effects that could be defined as impressionistic. Neither “the reader” Henchard nor Susan with “her eyes fixed ahead” look at the landscape which is described through references to what it is not: “a road neither straight not crooked, neither level nor hilly, bordered by

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hedges, trees, and other vegetation” (Hardy 1977, 4). As if the dust covering all things and deadening the walkers’ footsteps were also thrown in the reader’s eyes, the absence of clear visual details on the landscape seems to make way for other senses than sight (here, for hearing), allowing “every extraneous sound to be heard” (4).

Windows: framing devices and mediators of the gaze and of desire

19 The first lines display an interest in complex ways of seeing as much as in the things that are seen. Windows are for Hardy another way to stage the act of looking and to play on what is seen and what remains unseen. In his description of the architecture of the buildings of Casterbridge, he mostly focuses on windows (open or closed, with blinds, curtains and shutters, themselves open or closed) which, together with evocations of the exchanges that they create between inside and outside, may be regarded in the light of the association of desire and the eye. These architectural elements enable Hardy to stress the reversibility of the gaze (from inside to outside and vice-versa) and to explore the conditions of visibility, accessibility and inaccessibility, setting down or removing obstacles that might thwart both vision and desire. Curiosity, which very often becomes fascination, accounts for the frequent references to windows in The Mayor of Casterbridge. For Robert Kiely who has studied vision and viewpoint in this novel which greatly “depends on inquisitiveness”, the characters “include some of the busiest amateur spies” (Kiely 197).

20 In chapter 5, the description of the King’s Arms Hotel where a public dinner is presided by Henchard is in fact limited to an emphasis on the bow-window of the building, insisting on transparency by mentioning open sashes and unclosed blinds. The function of this bow-window is to give access to the interior and to become a frame that turns into a representation the scene inside, viewed from the outside first by a group of passers-by then by Susan, observing the man that sold her years before: “A spacious bow-window projected into the street over the main portico, and from the open sashes came the babble of voices, the jingle of glasses, and the drawing of corks. The blinds, moreover, being left unclosed, the whole interior of this room could be surveyed from the top of a flight of stone steps to the road-waggon office opposite, for which reason a knot of idlers had gathered there” (Hardy 1977, 25). The banquet is one of the first instances of other similar scenes in which social comedy prevails and the theatricality of public life is stressed, before it finally degenerates into “a masquerade or a puppet show” (Goater 137).

21 Because of their multiple connections with the gaze, windows become emblematic of Hardy’s exploration of human relationships based on the desire to see, of the link between the private and the public and they serve to mediate an intricate web of looks. In chapter 6, the description of the bay window of the Three Mariners articulates visibility and invisibility: “The bay window projecting into the street, whose interior was so popular among the frequenters of the inn, was closed with shutters, in each of which appeared a heart-shaped aperture, somewhat more attenuated in the right and left ventricles than is seen in Nature” (Hardy 1977, 32). Contrary to the easy access given to the dinner scene by the bow-window of the first building, it is only through a hole in each shutter that a curious onlooker might view the scene. Besides it is through these heart-shaped holes that Henchard hears Farfrae’s singing and realizes his great

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interest in the young man (who has just refused to work for him as a corn-factor manager), or “how that fellow does draw [him]” (44).

22 It can be noticed that in these two examples, the windows “project” into the street, perhaps a way to illustrate the incursion or even intrusion they allow from inside to outside and vice-versa. Windows serve as frames enclosing the object of desire and enhancing the part played by the gaze in the construction of fascination. For Elizabeth and Lucetta, who are often shown each posted at a window in Lucetta’s room compared with a “gazebo” (Hardy 1977, 138), watching the animated scene of the market beneath, the windows frame sights the perception of which combines desire and the eye. While Lucetta is looking for Henchard, the other woman detects the presence of Farfrae behind a tree and, from their facial expressions, the tense exchange of looks between the two men. Lucetta, who remains unaware of the young man’s presence (as he is still concealed behind the tree), only becomes conscious of her companion’s sigh and asks if she is “particularly interested in anybody out there” (118), which makes Elizabeth Jane blush as she lies and says no. This is only the first stage in the construction of a complex game of looks set as the basis of the “dance of desire” between the characters. When Farfrae pays his first visit to Lucetta, he asks her if she looks out often and then if she looks for anyone in particular. Lucetta’s answer, “I look as at a picture merely” (122), is not just a clever evasion (she actually wants to spot Henchard) but also a reminder of the function of the window which, with its frame, turns reality into an image. In the same scene, the enforced separation between two lovers witnessed by Lucetta and Farfrae is like a spectacle that moves them to tears and leads to an exchange of looks and an awareness of their shared emotion: “Lucetta’s eyes, full of tears, met Farfrae’s. His, too, to her surprise, were moist at the scene” (124).

23 Furthermore, the effects of light produced by the sun coming from outside and steeping Lucetta’s room contribute to a dramatization of these fantasies fuelled by looks. Linked with Hardy’s interest in Turner and the visual effects produced by “light as modified by objects” (Bullen 198), the “fantastic series of circling irradiations upon the ceiling” (Hardy 1977, 128) of Lucetta’s room created by the movement of wheels outside and the sun shining on them attract the women to the window. These circles of light on the ceiling could be considered as images of the irradiations of desire produced by the arrival of the new agricultural machine associated with Farfrae, thus clearly revealing Hardy’s play on the connection between windows, gazes and desire. Similarly, when light suddenly fills Lucetta’s room (a light sent by the passing of a waggon bearing Farfrae’s name and accompanied by its owner), she is transfigured, a change that goes unnoticed by Henchard who focuses on her voice and words and doesn’t look at her: Lucetta’s face became – as a woman’s face becomes when the man she loves rises upon her gaze like an apparition. A turn of the eye by Henchard, a glance from the window, and the secret of her inaccessibility would have been revealed. But Henchard in estimating her tone was looking down so plumb-straight that he did not note the warm consciousness upon Lucetta’s face. (Hardy 1977, 136)

24 Henchard’s blindness is both literal and figurative (not observing her face, he is also unable to wonder what might have produced this expression) and is implicitly contrasted with the narrator’s ability to decipher manifestations of desire on a face.

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25 The evocation in the first pages of Elizabeth-Jane’s black eyes closing, opening, then closing again as the baby falls asleep (Hardy 1977, 6), then of Lucetta’s “large lustrous eyes ha[ving] an odd effect upside down” (116) as she reclines on a sofa in a pose evoking a picture by Titian, and eventually the mention of Argus’ eyes, the dead monster’s hundred eyes set in the tail of Juno’s peacock (232), when Henchard, telescope in hand, takes to spying on Elizabeth-Jane and Farfrae’s courtship at the end of the novel, could be regarded as emblems of Hardy’s ways of envisaging the gaze. First there is the intermittent blinking that alternates seeing and not seeing; second a focus on eyes and new ways of seeing that turn things upside down, perhaps a hint at the unsettling effects that looks have in this novel; and third the dream of unlimited powers of vision, though here the mythological reference is linked with Elizabeth- Jane’s limited perception since she doesn’t possess these powers. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, the gaze finally has a lethal power, and looking at their effigies or doubles has tragic consequences for Lucetta (“She’s me” [214]) and Henchard (“the image o’ me!” [228]). A former confrontation with the mirror, another semiotic mediator of images and another frame involving the I/Eye, suggested Lucetta’s degradation imagined by Elizabeth-Jane herself, “eyeing her as a critic eyes a doubtful painting” (133). The woman dies from the shock of her encounter with her double, she changes “from the object of fascinated desire to an artwork of dubious value, a debased effigy and finally to a corpse” (Thomas 2013a, 50). Henchard organizes his own erasure, moving from the centre to the margins, “bent upon getting out of sight and sound” (Hardy 1977, 240), an echo of his initial departure after having sold Susan when he seemed to be glad that a dog was “the only positive spectator” (13) of his exit. Hardy narrates the degradation of fascination into destruction, the lethal force of the eye being best summed up in this passage from As You Like It, an intertextual reference that stages (though in a playful and comic way) the dance of desire and its connection with the eye: Thou tell’st me there is murder in mine eye: ’Tis pretty, sure, and very probable That eyes, that are the frail’st and softest things, Who shut their coward gates on atomies, Should be called tyrants, butchers, murderers! (Shakespeare III, 5, 10-14)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bullen, J. B., The Expressive Eye, Fiction and Perception in the Works of Thomas Hardy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.

Cohen, William A., “Faciality and Sensation in Hardy’s The Return of the Native”, PMLA 121.2 (2006): 437-451.

Goater, Thierry, “An ‘Uncanny Revel’: the Poetics and Politics of the Grotesque in Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge”, The Grotesque in the Fiction of Charles Dickens and Other 19th-

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Century European Novelists, eds. Isabelle Hervouet-Farrar & Max Vega-Ritter, Newcastle upon Tyne: CSP, 2014, 133-149.

Hardy, Thomas, The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), ed. James K. Robinson, New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1977.

Kiely, Robert, “Vision and Viewpoint in The Mayor of Casterbridge”, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 23.2 (1968): 189-200.

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, “Thomas Hardy’s Silences”, FATHOM [Online] “Silence” 2 (2013), (last accessed 19 June 2017).

Miller, Joseph Hillis, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire, London: Oxford UP, 1970.

Ramel, Annie, “The Crevice in the Canvas: A Study of The Mayor of Casterbridge”, Victorian Literature and Culture 26.2 (1998): 259-272.

Ramel, Annie, “‘A peculiar poetical-like murmur’: répétition et poéticité dans The Mayor of Casterbridge”, Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens 69 (April 2009): 267-281.

Ramel, Annie, The Madder Stain: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Thomas Hardy, Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2015.

Shakespeare, William, As You Like It, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012.

Thomas, Jane, Thomas Hardy and Desire: Conceptions of the Self, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Thomas, Jane, “Thomas Hardy and the Visual Arts”, Thomas Hardy in Context, ed. Phillip Mallett, New York: Cambridge UP, 2013, 436-445.

ABSTRACTS

Starting from J. Hillis Miller’s work on distance and desire as two of the “outlining threads” of Hardy’s work, this paper aims at exploring the emphasis on complex ways of seeing in The Mayor of Casterbridge and their connection with the theme of fascination. These ways of seeing range from the association between desire and the gaze, which shapes the feelings of the protagonists and organizes the intricate “dance of desire” in which they participate, to the “verbal-visual effects” (Bullen) that remind us of the influence of painting on Hardy’s writing. This study examines the role of the gaze and of the play on focalisation and pictorial effects in the expression of desire. It begins with first encounters and the way the visual exchanges that then take place generate fascination, before focusing on characters who watch from a distance and become readers of the manifestations of desire in the others’ looks and faces. The link between desire and the gaze is also found in the writing itself, through the presence of visual details that saturate the text and that may be envisaged as a manifestation of a desire for the visible. There is in The Mayor of Casterbridge an image-making process which the pictorial characteristics of the writing and the outstanding function of windows illustrate.

Prenant pour point de départ l’étude de J. Hillis Miller qui fait de la distance et du désir deux des fils conducteurs de l’œuvre de Hardy, cet article s’attache à explorer l’accent mis sur des modalités complexes du voir dans The Mayor of Casterbridge en lien avec le thème de la fascination. Ces modalités du voir vont de l’association entre le désir et le regard, qui façonne les sentiments des protagonistes et organise les circonvolutions de la danse du désir à laquelle ils participent, aux « verbal-visual effects » (Bullen) qui rappellent l’influence de la peinture sur l’écriture de Hardy. Cette analyse porte sur le rôle du regard et du jeu sur la focalisation et sur les

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effets picturaux dans l’expression du désir. Elle débute par les premières rencontres et la manière dont les échanges visuels qui ont alors lieu engendre la fascination, elle se concentre aussi sur les personnages qui observent à distance et deviennent les lecteurs des manifestations du désir sur le visage et dans le regard des autres. Le lien entre le désir et le regard est également exprimé dans l’écriture même, par la présence de détails visuels qui saturent le texte et qui peuvent être envisagés comme la manifestation d’un désir pour le visible. Il y a dans The Mayor of Casterbridge un processus de faire-image que les caractéristiques picturales de l’écriture et la fonction majeure des fenêtres illustrent.

INDEX oeuvrecitee Mayor of Casterbridge (The) Keywords: desire, gaze, fascination, first encounter, pictorial, window Mots-clés: désir, regard, fascination, première rencontre, pictural, fenêtre

AUTHOR

FABIENNE GASPARI Fabienne Gaspari is a senior lecturer at the University of Pau (France) where she teaches nineteenth-century British literature. She focuses on the relationships between writing and the body and also analyzes the intermedial connections between text and image. She has published “Morsels for the gods”: l’écriture du visage dans la littérature britannique (1839-1900), a study of novelistic treatments of the visage, and various papers on nineteenth-century British authors including George Moore.

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The Abyss, the Image and the Turn: Writing Desire in Three Poems by Thomas Hardy L’abysse, l’image et le retournement : l’écriture du désir dans trois poèmes de Thomas Hardy

Jane Thomas

1 This essay centres on three themes: the relationship between the desiring subject, the power of the gaze and the writing process. Here I revisit the final chapter of my book Thomas Hardy and Desire: Conceptions of the Self (2013) and acknowledge a debt to Annie Ramel’s most recent study of Hardy: The Madder Stain: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Thomas Hardy.

2 I understand “desire” as “the energy of the human spirit as it struggles for articulation and recognition against, on the one hand, the impossible and unspeakable nature of the Real and, on the other, the productive constraints of language” (Thomas 2). The “gaze” I define here as the “Orphic turn” away from its object: not exactly the “look awry” (askew or to one side) but the deliberate turn away from the object of desire in order to draw or lead it out of the realm of the unspeakable and into the compromised arena of language. My “desiring subject” is Orpheus: the spirit of the artist writer, embodied in the texts of Hardy’s elegiac (and other) poems, in the form of their various first-person narrative “voices”: what we might call (in a nod to J. B. Bullen) the “Expressive I” (Bullen 1986). I take as my test cases three poems by Hardy: “Where the Picnic Was”, “The Voice” and “The Shadow on the Stone”.

3 In “The Freudian Unconscious and Ours”1 Lacan focusses on the “stumbling”, the “impediment”, the “failure” in language in which he locates the “discovery” or “surprise” wherein the poet seeks to push beyond the apparent limits of language in order to grasp at, and perfect, a fleeting moment of plenitude. For Lacan, desire inheres in the gap between signifier and signified – it is what cannot be represented in language and yet strives for material form in the only medium available to it. The urge to move beyond the constraints of language into the pre- or “post” linguistic realm

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carries with it the threat of incoherence, dissolution, silence. In a formal sense, and on the page, such stumblings reveal themselves in Hardy’s poetry in the broken line, the ellipsis, the ejaculation, and the image or symbol which adds further resonance to the sign – which is itself a substitute for the absent “thing”. For Lacan: Th[e] discovery is, at the same time, a solution – not necessarily a complete one, but, however incomplete it may be, it has that indefinable something that touches us, that peculiar accent…surprise, that by which the subject feels himself [sic] overcome, by which “he” finds both more and less than he expected but in any case, it is, in relation to what he expected, of exceptional value (Lacan 25).

4 The “discovery” is the solution, and by “solution” we may understand that which resolves and settles as well as that which dissolves and disperses: the solvent which breaks up the arrogance of the sign. The image or symbol strives to substantiate the fugitive moment in language and yet “as soon as it is presented it becomes a rediscovery and, furthermore, it is always ready to steal away again, thus establishing the dimension of loss” (Lacan 25). As soon as we turn to grasp our desire it vanishes back into the Abyss of the Real. The image or symbol stands between the sign and the abyss of the Real. Lacan acknowledged the role of the artist – and particularly the poet – in the struggle to wrestle language into meaning and how the urge to get behind, beyond or inside the sign in order to exploit its potential to the full in the work of art carries with it the risk of incoherence, failure and dissolution.

5 Hardy copied a passage from John Addington Symonds’ essay on Pater’s “The School of Giorgione” in Essays Speculative and Suggestive – including Symonds’ thoughts on the role of symbols in Art (Symonds 188-189). Symonds declares that it is “the business of Art to use […] symbols in a double way. They must be used for the direct representation of thought and feeling; but they must also be combined by so subtle an imagination as to suggest much which is there is no means of directly expressing” (Hardy 1985 II, 43, n1865). For Pater the symbol constitutes “the expiration” of the sign’s “definite meaning”. The poetic symbol reaches beyond its manifest meaning as a sign to bring that which is beyond or surplus into the realm of consciousness.

6 In his elegiac poems of 1912-13 Hardy’s bereaved narrators are situated – Orpheus- like – on the boundary between life and death, between the attainment of the lost object of desire and the annihilation of self, on the very edge of the unspeakable abyss where the subject dissolves. Some of Hardy’s best elegies imagine, describe and embody this dilemma: the narrator’s agonized attempt in “The Voice” (Hardy 1984, 56-57) to hear and read the thin oozing of the wind through the thorn tree as the voice of the dead beloved, who calls him to join her in the “air-blue” realm of death; the ungendered narrator of “Under the Waterfall” (45-46) reliving the imagined retrieval of a long-lost picnic glass in the physical sensation of washing in a bowl of cold water, the narrator of “Where the Picnic Was” (69-70) gazing into the “abyss” of the burnt circle for one who has “shut her eyes for evermore”, or the mourner of “The Shadow on the Stone” who is tempted to try and bring the dead woman out of the abyss but who, in the end, refuses to turn and “unvision” her. Through such potent, suggestive and articulate symbols as the wind, the “chalice” of “Under the Waterfall”, the burnt circle and the shadow, Hardy raises the sign to what Symonds describes as “a higher power” wherein each “continues to be an articulate sound & a logical step in the argument; but it becomes also a musical sound & a centre of emotional force” (Hardy 1985 II, 43, n1865).

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7 For Annie Ramel, the “absolute negativity” of the Real equates to Virginia Woolf’s idea of the “centre of complete emptiness” which is a prerequisite for any creation, which is always a creation ex nihilo (out of nothing): like Heidegger’s vase “all art is characterised by a certain mode of organisation around this emptiness” (Ramel 159). The burnt circle and the imagined chalice shape themselves around empty or blank space while the wind and the shadow, in their visual and haptic intangibility, embody precisely what cannot be apprehended or grasped. Each modifies or offers a semi- permeable barrier which allows us, in Ramel’s words, “to approach the very limit beyond which lies the impossible Thing without being blinded by its absolute negativity” (124). What is also retrieved is a retrospectively imagined time of plenitude: “that day” when the now dissolved “band” came to picnic on the spot, “the fugitive day” of the lover’s picnic by the waterfall; the “day” (“our day”) that “was fair” in “The Voice” and in “The Shadow on the Stone”, the gardening days of the now dead woman. Each “fugitive day” is “Fetched back from its thickening shroud of gray” to be relived again and again by narrator, poet and reader.

8 “Where the Picnic Was” was originally published in 1914 and added to the “Poems of 1912-13” in 1919 thus constituting, as Tim Armstrong declares, “the last poem of the sequence in its extended final version” (Hardy 2009, 173). The narrator climbs a hill to the sea, “Through winter mire”, to revisit the site of a picnic which took place in the previous summer. His gaze, and the translation of its object – the dark circle – into text, is suggested by the verbs “scan” and “trace”, and the “charred stick ends” that “still strew the sward” can be read as symbols of the writing instrument – the charcoal that shapes living words out of carbon (the key component of life) and ash. A “burnt circle” marks the spot of lost plenitude and, as Armstrong suggests, the traces of the picnic fire link to the epigraph from Virgil’s Aeneid that Hardy appended to the sequence: “Veteris vestigia flammae” (“ashes” or “traces” of the old fire). The words are spoken by Dido to describe the rekindling, by Aeneas, of feelings of love which died with her husband Sychaeus. On one level the reference suggests the rekindling of desire in its original site (“Where we made the fire”). However, in Virgil’s Aeneid the abandoned Dido immolates herself on a funeral pyre as she watches Aeneas’s ships sail away. In Hardy’s poem, the burnt circle and the charred sticks divert the narrator’s gaze from the dark abjection of death while simultaneously offering the means of expression to the “I” that seeks to gaze past and through it to oblivion. The “vestigia” or “vestigio” can be translated as the” vestige” or faint mark or visible sign left by something which is lost: the “burnt circle” is the visible sign of the lost object of desire made manifest in the visible sign of the symbol – the black nothing – around which the poem organises itself. The boundary between the narrator and the abyss of the dark circle, and what it symbolises, is literally figured in the poem by a sequence of three dashes. The first occurs in line four of the second stanza and physically separates the “burnt circle” and the word “aye”, which functions here as an affirmation of the discovery and presence of the physical “spot” – one which perhaps the narrator feared might have greened over in the intervening time. The second dash occurs in the final stanza, separating the “band” containing the narrator from the moment of the band’s imminent dissolution: the removal of two of its members to “the urban roar / Where no picnics are”. This leaves our narrator still companioned by the third member of the “band”. The necessary separation of the narrator from the “one” who “has shut her eyes /For evermore” in death is accomplished by the third dash in the final line which takes “him” to the very brink of the abyss whilst holding “him” in the “here”. It is as if the

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narrator, like Conrad’s Marlow in Heart of Darkness, peers into the pit of abjection into which Kurtz has descended but remains balanced on its edge. If we read the narrator’s ejaculation on discovering the burnt circle as “Aye”: the archaic word for “forever”, we recognise an echo of the final word of the poem “’evermore” suggesting how the fugitive moment that both caused, and is embodied in, the “burnt circle” is given permanence by the words themselves and the symbolic function they perform.

9 Hardy’s “The Voice” likewise movingly enacts the way in which the symbolic forms what Ramel calls “a rim around the void of the Real” (Ramel 20). The process is worked through in this sublime (sub-limen) poem in the narrator’s agonised attempt to translate the sound of the “wind oozing thin through the thorn” into the recognisable voice of the dead woman and to bring her, in person, out of the realm of memory and into the material world. The unbearable object which the narrator seeks access to is the object-gaze in “his” request to “view you then”. It is also the object sound – the sound of the silence of “non-being” or extinction symbolised by the intangible breath of the wind that is caught, concentrated and “riddled” by the net of the thorn tree.

10 As in “Where the Picnic Was”, the narrator negotiates the barrier between the abyss of death and the faltering ground of life in the poem’s stumbling punctuation and metre. The barrier or rim is figured twice in the second stanza in the form of the interrogation mark in the first line “Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you then”, and the colon in the third line “Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then”. Here the narrator seeks access to the imagined realm of the past – willing the dead woman to facilitate “his” passage. The dangerous translation from life to death, from presence to “air-blue” dissolution, is given momentum by the dactylic metre that runs almost unbroken throughout the stanza, and the run-on second and third line that almost propels us across the strong caesura of the colon. The resolution is reached in the powerful final stanza and figured in the semi-colon between “Thus I” and “faltering forward”.

11 The narrator’s reluctant movement away from the other side is suggested by the broken, stumbling shift in the rhythm as the dactylic / trochaic metre of the first three stanzas falters to spondees before briefly regaining momentum in the penultimate line in the turn away from the “calling woman”, whose echo is nevertheless immortalised in the reversed iambs of the final line. Now a separation is enacted between the voice of the woman and the sound of the wind which is onomatopoeically rendered in the sublime line: “Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward”. To read the line aloud is to form the lips as if to blow or to kiss, as if the dead woman herself acknowledges the narrator’s necessary retreat. As the narrator moves, albeit reluctantly, away from the rim, turning his back on the net of sound that threatened to catch him in its interstices, he carries the image of the calling woman into the realm of the symbolic where it echoes evermore in the final lines of the final stanza. The question “Can it be you that I hear?” remains unanswered – necessarily so perhaps, for if the breath of the wind had actually shaped itself to the voice of the dead woman, if the summons to her to show herself “‘Yes, as I knew you then” were obeyed, the narrator would be drawn into the abyss of non-being-dissolved (like the wind and the lost beloved) “to wan wistlessness / Heard no more again far or near”. If we accept that the breath of the wind – intangible, invisible until modified by objects – fails to shape itself into the voice of the dead beloved, then whose is “The Voice” of the poem’s title? Are we “listening” to and imagining, in that sublime penultimate line, the voice of the

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dead woman calling or the voice of the poet giving substance to that of the narrator who has “his” being only in and as the text of the poem?

12 The Orphic “turn” features quite literally once again as the turning point of “The Shadow on the Stone”. This has been recognised and usefully commented upon by Melissa Ziegler who notes the role of the “phantom woman” as a muse for the male elegist who is eventually led “to exchange the dead female body for poetic empowerment” (Ziegler 45). Whilst acknowledging Hardy’s revisionary contribution to the elegiac tradition, she questions his yearning nostalgia and persistent recalling of “Emma” “often literally as a ghost”, as “somewhat paradoxical in light of [his] notorious estrangement” from his wife in real life (45). Zeigler’s reservations typify the constraints of the biographical reading of these superb poems. Can the life be used as a measure of the success of the art? How can we accept the idea of the violence done to the body / phantom of Emma by her elegist husband unless we constrain the art in the straitjacket of biography and the assumption of gender? The “I” and “You” of “Shadow on the Stone” exist only as text, as marks on a page that nonetheless figure loss. In Symonds’ words they “introduce an equivalent for what [they] cannot represent” (Hardy 1985 II, 36, n1833). While the “you” is clearly gendered as female, no such assumption can be made concerning the gender of the narrator – the expressive “I”. Are we as readers confined to an appreciation of the poem that has resonance for us only if we imagine ourselves as Thomas Hardy and Emma? Clearly not. The affective power of the “Poems of 1912-13” goes far beyond the fraught relationship between the poet and his wife, even though her sudden death was indisputably the catalyst for these elegies. Maintaining the undecidability of gender – in so far as the poems allow (and so many of them do just this) – opens them out to any reader in all the richness and resonance of their evocation of loss. Indeed, the poems take on new significances if we gender the narrators of poems such as “The Voice” or “The Shadow on the Stone” against the biographical bias, as bereaved daughters, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, civil partners. In the process of mourning, in the “turning back” to, or the “turning away” of the bereaved from the lost beloved, and the lonely faltering forward, all mourners are Orpheus. The addendum of “The Shadow on the Stone” offers the information: “Begun 1913: finished 1916”, demonstrating how the raw material of personal loss is refined in the crucible of art – just as the lost picnic glass of “Under the Waterfall” is opalised by the gentle scouring of water and time.

13 Zeigler reads “The Shadow on the Stone” as evidence of the fatal turn of Orpheus to gaze at the dead Eurydice thereby condemning her to Hades forever. However, unlike Orpheus who turns to reassure himself that his wife is indeed behind him, our narrator resists the impulse. In his imagination the shadows on the stone shape themselves to “the shade that a well-known head and shoulders / Threw there” – a shape which fails to materialise as the dead woman herself, just as the inarticulate “voice” of the wind through the thorn fails to become that of the “woman much missed”. Like the burnt circle and the thorn, the shadow mediates between the narrator and the object of his desire translating it from a yawning “nothing” to a compromised yet comforting presence. Like Orpheus the narrator has to trust that Eurydice is indeed behind him. To glance back would be to destroy the conceit to “unvision” both the “Expressive I” and “Expressed You”. We snag on that typically Hardyian neologism “unvision’: the verbification of “vision” suggesting the gaze, the act of gazing and the object of the gaze while the negation suggests to disabuse or undeceive – even blind. And to whom

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does it apply? The would-be gazer or the “shape” that throws her shade against the Druid stone?

14 The shadow on the stone can be read here as the object that provides a correlative for the absolute negativity of death: the object that modifies the unbearable emptiness of the abyss that the narrator eventually turns away from. The “shade” of “the well- known head and shoulders” – with its connotations of ghost and shadow – figures, in its partialness, the absolute darkness of the realm beyond or before representation, forming the edge or border between reality and the Real. Contrary to what Zeigler assumes, here the orphic narrator does not turn around to confront the dead beloved. It follows then that instead of losing her forever, and losing him/herself in the abject certainty of that loss, she is preserved in the image of the shadow on the stone – a metaphor for the shadow of the sign, the word, the symbol and the material record of the sublime elegy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bullen, J. B., The Expressive Eye: Fiction and Perception in the Work of Thomas Hardy, Oxford: OUP, 1986.

Hardy, Thomas, Selected Poems, ed. Tim Armstrong, Harlow: Pearson, 2009.

Hardy, Thomas, The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, ed. Samuel Hynes, Vol. 2, 1984.

Hardy, Thomas, The Literary Notes of Thomas Hardy, ed. Lennart Björk, 2 vols., Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985.

Lacan, Jacques, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan, London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1977.

Ramel, Annie, The Madder Stain, A Psychoanalytic Reading of Thomas Hardy, Leiden: Brill-Rodopi, 2015.

Symonds, John Addington, Essays Speculative and Suggestive, London: Chapman Hall, 1890.

Thomas, Jane, Thomas Hardy and Desire, Conceptions of the Self, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Ziegler, Melissa, Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the Changing Shape of Elegy, New York and London: Ithaca, Cornell UP, 1997.

NOTES

1. Chapter 2 in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.

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ABSTRACTS

This essay examines the relationship between the desiring subject, the power of the gaze and the writing process. “Desire” is understood as “the energy of the human spirit as it struggles for articulation and recognition against, on the one hand, the impossible and unspeakable nature of the Real and, on the other, the productive constraints of language” (Thomas 2). The “gaze” is defined here as the “Orphic turn” away from its object: not exactly the “look awry” (askew or to one side) but the deliberate turn away from the object of desire in order to draw or lead it out of the realm of the unspeakable and into the compromised arena of language. The “desiring subject” is Orpheus, the spirit of the artist writer, embodied in the texts of Hardy’s elegiac poems, in the form of their various first-person narrative “voices”: what might be called (in a nod to J. B. Bullen) the “Expressive I”. The essay takes as test cases three poems by Hardy: “Where the Picnic Was”; “The Voice” and “The Shadow on the Stone”.

Cet article se propose d’étudier la relation entre le sujet désirant, le pouvoir du regard et le procédé d’écriture. Le « désir » s’entend ici au sens de « l’énergie de l’esprit humain dans sa lutte pour l’expression et la reconnaissance face, d’une part, à l’impossible et indicible nature du Réel et, d’autre part, aux contraintes productives du langage » (Thomas 2). Le « regard » est quant à lui défini comme le « retournement orphique » qui l’éloigne de son objet : il ne s’agit pas véritablement d’un « regard détourné » (de travers ou de côté) mais plutôt d’un détour délibéré qui éloigne de l’objet du désir afin de l’extraire du domaine de l’indicible pour le faire entrer dans l’espace compromis du langage. Le « sujet désirant » est Orphée, esprit de l’écrivain artiste présent dans le texte des poèmes élégiaques de Hardy sous la forme des diverses « voix » narratives de la première personne : ce que l’on pourrait nommer (en référence à J. B. Bullen) « the Expressive I ». Trois poèmes de Hardy viennent illustrer cette étude : “Where the Picnic Was”, “The Voice” et “The Shadow on the Stone”.

INDEX

Mots-clés: désir, regard, écriture, sujet, voix, élégie, retournement, Orphée Keywords: desire, gaze, writing, subject, voice, elegy, turn, Orpheus oeuvrecitee Where the Picnic Was, Voice (The), Shadow on the Stone (The)

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. Source: http://www.hull.ac.uk/faculties/staff-profiles/jane-thomas.aspx

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Blank Letters and Ensnared Eyes in Far from the Madding Crowd Le blanc de la lettre dans Far from the Madding Crowd

Isabelle Gadoin

EDITOR'S NOTE

This article is being published jointly by FATHOM and the Hardy Review as part of a collaborative work.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This article was kindly translated by Catherine Lanone.

1 It might seem something of a paradox to put words on paper, or dribble ink on a white sheet, while claiming that all meaning rests on white spaces or blanks... Yet the blanks and gaps on the page draw the eye and allow language to make sense, by building and signalling the various signifying units. Thence proceeds all discourse, as readers must leap from word to word, from sentence to sentence, or from one idea to the next: “interruption is what allows the flow of words, intermittence breeds becoming”, says Maurice Blanchot (Blanchot 1964, 870), the thinker whose very name and work make him the tutelary figure of all reflexion on textual white space1. Blanks indeed play a fundamental part in all communication, for without them there can be no understanding and no exchange, be it written or oral: “even the most coherent of speeches splinters when shifting from one speaker to the next. Each switch entails an interruption […]; such discontinuity ensures the continuity of communication”, Blanchot claims (870). In dialogues especially, each speaker’s own silences or blanks may be pregnant with meaning. But written texts widen this signifying gap, by creating visual intervals that materialize the distinctions which in spoken dialogue could only be heard or surmised. Even the narrow space between letters beckons, like a sign in

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itself, endowed with its own definite function, since it allows the eye to make sense of words and sentences.

2 Should we shift from alphabetical letters to epistolary letters, blanks carve their own visual spaces which become even more meaningful. Letters travel within the diegetic world of the novel, they bridge gaps by crossing concrete, measurable distances, linking different geographic spaces. They also they add a graphic dimension within the text, as embedded visual spaces of their own, framed by blanks or a white parergon (Derrida 1978, Part I), prompting repetition, when written and then read. Finally, letters create a metatextual mise en abyme that prompts the actual reader to reflect upon the fictional writer and reader of a letter, as well as on the way the whole text or novel works. Epistolary letters thus use blanks to make sense, as do alphabetical letters and words, but they expand on this to use white space as an emotional clue, a creative visual device, a way of prompting a self-reflexive meditation on the scripter, and on the way the message has been voiced or constructed.

3 However, it is the very opposite that occurs in Far from the Madding Crowd, with the mocking, desultory Valentine which the mischievous Bathsheba sends in a moment of boredom and defiance to her neighbour, the confirmed bachelor Farmer Boldwood: its playful, elliptic and teasing “marry me” will wreak havoc rather than allow any construction of meaning, ensnaring Boldwood’s eye rather than delivering any sense (Hardy 1986, 80).

The unreadable card

4 The card received by the solitary Boldwood creates an unfathomable blank space, that of the utmost lack of understanding. In bewilderment, Boldwood’s empty gaze, bleached out of expression, stares blankly at the snow-covered scene outside his parlour, a scene that itself appears as a petrified, marmoreal and meaningless landscape: “[Boldwood’s] eyes were wide-spread and vacant” (Hardy 1986, 81)2; “[he] was listlessly noting how the frost had hardened and glazed the surface of the snow, till it shone in the red eastern light with the polish of marble” (82). Although it fails to reach a firm conclusion, Boldwood’s analysis of the situation follows an irreproachable logic, in spite of his perplexity: “The letter must have an origin and a motive [...] Somebody’s—some woman’s hand had travelled softly over the paper bearing his name; her unrevealed eyes had watched every curve as she formed it; her brain had seen him in imagination the while” (80). Yet the argument only leads to another blank, when its three piercing questions are cut short by stumbling reflexion – or repressed desire: “Why should she have imagined him? Her mouth – were the lips red or pale, plump or creased? – had curved itself to a certain expression as the pen went on – the corners had moved with their natural tremulousness: what had been the expression?” (80). In Boldwood’s rational mind, as in Roman Jakobson’s linguistic theory, communication relies upon at least four definite factors: the sender, the receiver, the message and the code. But in this scene, all of these prove deficient: 1) the sender, Bathsheba, remains unknown; 2) the receiver is only addressed as “Mr Boldwood, farmer”, so that his identity shrinks to mere social status, his personality being erased; furthermore, the complete ellipsis of the addressee in the imperative form “marry me”, as well as the strangely undefined “me” that fails to present itself as a subject, coming as it does in the grammatical position of the verb complement, all negate, conceal or mask the real

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subjects: in this message, there neither is an active “I” nor a “you”, neither truly identified sender nor receiver. Finally, 3) the two-word message remains cryptic; and ultimately, 4) the linguistic code itself is transgressed, since the Valentine, which should have implied an intimate message unveiling or indirectly adumbrating someone’s feelings, here appears as an unexpected speech-act, premised upon performative power. The whole communicative system is emptied out by blanks which suspend or thwart meaning, but which also carve a corresponding blank or void within Boldwood himself.

5 Whichever level we consider – whether the sender, the addressee, the code or the actual message – the card remains a blank which does not bode well, and which can only belong to the realm of broken relationships, such as hopeless proposals, illicit liaisons, divorce or fatal separation. Far from building up communication, it perverts or parodies it. The paradoxical blank of that letter that splits rather than connects beings might be defined as a “hymen” in Derrida’s sense, that thin tissue which simultaneously unites and divides, opens and protects, the blank that both opposes and calls for penetration, perpetrating the act of what comes in, consummates, and sows confusion between both partners, but also, conversely, unconsummated marriage, the vaginal wall, the virginal screen of the hymen which remains in-between inside and outside, desire and fulfilment, penetration and memory – the suspense of perpetual allusion. (Derrida 1972, 382, translation Catherine Lanone)

6 As a coded address supposed to express love, the Valentine would seem to call for intimate union through its injunction to marry; but it does this within a situation of utter disjunction, where one of the two partners remains carefully in hiding – which subverts this fiery “Marry me” into an icy “Noli me Tangere”... This innermost discrepancy between utterance and deed does not open the white space of tacit understanding, beyond words, but the blank space of undecipherable ambiguity, born of the disjunction between text and context.

7 Far from weaving the organic unity of texts, letters / missives in Hardy’s world nearly always signify division, both in terms of diegesis – they divide characters rather than bridge gaps and silences – and in terms of the visual space of the novel itself, since they flicker in and out of the page, glimpsed only in haunting fragments. They do not foster the shock of surprise and revelation that shapes coherent detective or sensation fiction, the timely reprieve of melodrama that still worked in Hardy’s earliest novels like Desperate Remedies (1871), where the writer still abode by conventional forms and the protagonist’s past surfaced thanks to a two-page letter that acted as a will – an alibi of a letter, disclosing the doings of a character.

8 Bathsheba’s letter, on the contrary, suspends revelation. Whereas letters often bring a dénouement in novels, here it is used to trigger the plot: will Boldwood ever find out who sent him the Valentine, will he ever marry the bold young woman? This is another alibi of a letter, in the etymological sense this time, a floating signifier which remains elsewhere, which always lies where it should not, in the wrong place at the wrong time, like the letters which Tess attempts to send to Angel, but which disappear under the carpet or remain by the side of a kitchen table, waiting for the return of the prodigal husband, lost in the Brazilian jungle. Such are the blank letters that remain unread, or not read in time. Weaving but a parody of communication, those stray letters wander as much as the characters do. Thus Tess’s desperate plea for help circulates via

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Emminster and Angel’s father’s vicarage, before reaching him in Brazil – it then prompts his belated return and steers his search for her, only to bring her downfall. Stray letters are part of Hardy’s broken web of communication, of half-delivered messages and misread clues, as characters keep gazing at each other or spying through keyholes, eavesdropping or peering from behind thick curtains or over garden walls, with a keen, frustrated or leering eye, like the devilish Alec d’Urberville.

9 Geographic, spatial and temporal diegetic distance merely stresses the emotional distance between characters that are already divorced by their cryptic or invisible letters, whether Bathsheba and Boldwood, or Tess and Angel. In Hardy’s world, such human relationships are crippled both by the denial of touch and by the blank or white space of separation, as Hillis Miller recalls in Distance and Desire, quoting from Hardy’s journal: “Love lives on propinquity but dies of contact” (Miller 1970, 134). And such a death is no mere metaphor, since in Far fom the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, death does come in the end, when Boldwood murders Bathsheba’s husband or Tess is hanged: Boldwood enters jail and vanishes from the text, just as, after a gap or ellipsis, the black flag floats over the prison of Wintoncester and Tess is seen no more…

10 Thus division strikes home: Bathsheba, who impulsively sent the Valentine, is torn between the thoughtless impulse of teasing youth and the rational mindset of the respectable land-owner she has by now become; while Boldwood knows not what to think, divided against himself, spurred by the card’s glaring message, “feeling uneasy and dissatisfied with himself for his nervous excitability” (Hardy 1986, 81). Torn from the other by the fantasmatic white space of the letter—the symptom of shattered or rather impossible communication—but also unhinged, as if split from his former self, the character remains stunned, bewildered, “dis-located” as Hillis Miller puts it, that is to say denied his or her proper place, elsewhere, astray, as if looking for his own self. Hillis Miller draws upon Kafka’s letters to Milena to dwell on this paradoxical sense of estrangement through epistolary connection: Writing is a dis-location, in the sense that it moves the soul of the writer outside of himself, over there, somewhere else. Far from being a form of communication, the writing of a letter dispossesses both the writer and the receiver of themselves. Writing creates a new phantom written self and a phantom receiver of that writing. There is correspondence all right, but it is between two entirely phantasmagorical or fantastic persons, ghosts raised by the hand that writes. Writing calls phantoms into being. (Miller 1990, 172)

11 Bathsheba herself is such a spectral woman in white, created by the nearly blank card, eerily blurred by fantasmatic distance, while her original flesh-and-blood self is turned into a chimerical fantasy, supplanted by the written surplus of a thoughtless note which itself acquires a compelling, resilient presence, a reversal in keeping with Derridean deferral: The vision of the woman writing, as a supplement to the words written, had no individuality. She was a misty shape, and well might she be, considering that her original was at that moment sound asleep and oblivious of all love and letter- writing under the sky. Whenever Boldwood dozed she took a form, and comparatively ceased to be a vision: when he awoke, there was the letter justifying the dream. (Hardy 1986, 81, emphasis added)

12 At the other end of the spectrum, dazed by the total suspension of sense, the proud Boldwood also begins to vanish, like a broken heap of spectral features: “He caught sight of his reflected features, wan in expression, and insubstantial in form” (Hardy

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1986, 81). Like a ghost desperately seeking its missing reflexion in a mirror, his “phantom self” longs for substance, his image barely discernible in the glass before him.

From readable to visible signs?

13 The letter, as a readable text, revealing or calling for a union, is hereby replaced by the letter as a visible signifier. Departing from the linguistic code, where the blanks within the sentences might be construed into meaning, it is redirected to circulate as a semiotic code, where the white space beckons and opens up. And just as Tess must look for her own letter beneath the carpet of Angel’s room, the reader must decipher meaning by focusing on this clear and original visual signifier in order to retrieve what lies beneath the blank. This scene from Tess of the d'Urbervilles seems to materialize the definition Hardy gives of fiction, where meaning must be inferred from a network of images that lies within the thick carpet of words, a striking metaphor which echoes Henry James’s image of the “figure in the carpet” (1896). Hardy thus writes: “As, in looking at a carpet, by following one colour a certain pattern is suggested, by following another colour, another; so in life the seer should watch that pattern among general things which his idiosyncrasy moves him to observe, and describe that alone” (Millgate 158). The message of the letter may well be a blank which does not make any sense, but the letter weaves a meaningful web of relations between the protagonists. In Boldwood’s house, the Valentine is not so much a text as a material thing, lost among an assemblage of furniture and decorative objects clearly meant to create a reality effect: “At dusk on the evening of Saint Valentine’s Day Boldwood sat down at supper as usual, by a beaming fire of aged logs. Upon the mantleshelf before him was a time-piece, surmounted by a spread-eagle, and upon the eagle’s wings was the letter Bathsheba had sent” (Hardy 1986, 79-80). This object, artfully displayed, then starts signalling to Boldwood, though not as a clearly readable text but as a beautiful multi-faceted surface ambiguously reflecting everything that surrounds it: “The pert injunction was like those crystal substances, which, colourless themselves, assume the tone of objects about them” (80). Explicitly, the letter starts blending with the objects around it, like a mere emanation, a shifting reflection hovering on the brink of materiality and devoid of intrinsic significance.

14 Thus Hardy makes us see the letter instead of reading it; he turns it into an object-gaze or a semiotic object rather than a text, a reversal that harks back to the pictorial paradigm shift initiated by Rembrandt or Vermeer. Breaking away from the realistic obsession of the likes of Van Eyck or other early Flemish painters intent on making us read the words or minutely painted micro-texts in their canvases, Vermeer loved to show characters poring over letters, books, atlases, etc. – yet nowhere are words precisely readable in his paintings: it is mostly blank letters that work as strictly visual eye-catchers rather than linguistic signs, in Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (c. 1657, Dresde, Gemäldegalerie), in Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (c.1663, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum), in Mistress and Maid (c.1667, New York, Frick Collection), or in Love Letter (c.1669-1670, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum). From that angle, it is rather interesting to note that Vermeer treated music scores in nearly the same figurative way as written letters, for instance in The Concert (1658-1660, Boston, Isabella Gardner Museum) or in Girl Interrupted in Her Music (1660-1661, New York, Frick Collection). The viewer is

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offered no pretence of writing or scribbling, as the missives held by the characters most of the time appear only as pure white spots. Only rarely do we see the back of a love letter, with its little round seal.

15 Ironically enough, Rembrandt had painted a melancholy Bathsheba (1654, Paris, Louvre museum) even before Vermeer specialised in intimate paintings of women-readers. In the Louvre version of that famous biblical subject, Bathsheba is not seen at her bath – when King David spies on her and falls in love with her – but at the moment when she receives from him a letter asking her to come to him and thus betray her husband – an interesting reversal of Hardy’s scene, and of the love triangle in the novel. In Rembrandt’s canvas, Bathsheba no longer gazes at the letter, with its scarlet seal upon a piece of paper that hardly seems to show any written trace. In the painted tradition, these unread or unreadable letters do not serve to bridge geographic distance but are fused within a domestic scene, mingling with the shades of white of private possessions, from baskets of linen set on spotless floors to lace bonnets or shimmering pearls, all connoting immaculate intimacy and the stronghold of inviolate virginity. Ironically enough, Bathsheba Everdene’s letter no longer exposes a girl to the gaze, but catches Boldwood in the very stronghold of his room, of his own self, amidst military metaphors – like the eagle on the mantelpiece – and the endless pattern of reflections created by the mise en abyme of window and mirror. The melodramatic letter that was supposed to heal the narrative into a seamless whole now becomes an abyss, carving its void within Boldwood’s innermost thoughts. The unreadable gnaws at the invisible core of the self.

The unseen

16 The mesmerizing white spaces of Bathsheba’s nearly blank card reverse all the characteristics of reading. To begin with, Boldwood reads it in his mind rather than with his eyes, since he keeps repeating and pondering over a text which lies too far for him to actually see it: “as he ate and drank he still read in fancy the words thereon, although they were too remote for his sight” (Hardy 1986, 80). He stares at the envelope while eating his supper, ingesting words rather than food, as if switching the material against the textual, literalizing signifiers. The word no longer springs from the white piece of paper through the regulated, intentional act of reading, but sears his eyes like a painfully penetrating weapon, prints its own trace or scar within the helpless character’s flesh and mind: “Here the bachelor’s gaze was continually fastening itself, till the large red seal became as a blot of blood on the retina of his eye” (80). Obviously, such a seal no longer declares and fixes the identity of the sender of a letter, as does the stamp which prints on wax any sort of revealing sign or emblem: it becomes the red stain covering or concealing the origin of the letter, while the narrative voice itself seems to stutter and stumble upon the consonants of the phrase “blot of blood.” Curiously enough, Boldwood is contemplating the letter from the wrong side – the side of the missive showing not the address but the seal. And, as if logically depending on this, everything in the scene seems strangely reversed, with the landscape itself appearing to be upset, literally turned upside down. At that point the emphasis in the passage has shifted from the textual to the visual, or rather from the readable to the invisible or unseen:

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The moon shone to-night, and its light was not of a customary kind. His window admitted only a reflection of its rays, and the pale sheen had that reversed direction which snow gives, coming upward and lighting up his ceiling in an unnatural way, casting shadows in strange places, and putting light where shadows had used to be. (Hardy 1986, 81; emphasis added) There was here too, that before-mentioned preternatural inversion of light and shade that attends the prospect when the garish brightness: commonly in the sky is found on the earth, and the shades of earth are in the sky. (81, emphasis added)

17 Just as the incandescent seal seems to invade the white rectangle of the envelope, the stain of live blood seems to encroach upon the white of the contemplative eye; the white hearth blazes red; and the immaculate snow is set ablaze by a vivid light: a host of vivid images endlessly repeat the shift from the readable to the visible, from the dead word to the living sign, from the linguistic to the semiotic. This highly visual shift is intensely pictorial, and comes very close to the French Impressionists’ attempt to pierce through the surface of things and to reconfigure the visual as a mental, chromatic impression. In Claude Monet’s Snow near Honfleur3 for instance, the contrast between the shining light of the snow-bound ground and the faint grey of the sky seems to correspond to that “preternatural inversion of light and shade” that is blinding Boldwood; and Monet’s signature mingles with the shrubs’ shadows on the snow, as if to blend words and things. Similarly, in The Cart, or Snow-covered road at Honfleur4, or in The Break-up of the Ice at Vétheuil5, the wind blows and bends the boughs of the trees but also, it seems, the very letters of the painter’s signature.

18 In the intensely pictorial scene that stretches before Boldwood’s eyes, a scene set under the oxymoronic sign of a fire burning white, the whole landscape seems to be reversed, things become their obverse, and one can no longer read or decipher frontal messages: “When Boldwood went to bed he placed the valentine in the corner of the looking- glass. He was conscious of its presence even when his back was turned upon it.” The letter itself functions like the obverse of a narrative, substituting an image for a text, displacing the very notion of addressor and addressee – and this may well be because the scene itself rewrites and subverts, or literally reverses, the text of the Bible (2 Samuel 11): in the biblical narrative, David, having fallen in love with Bathsheba, manoeuvres so that Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah, will be sent to his death in perilous battle. Bathsheba, who knows nothing of the wrongful plot, weeps for her beloved husband. Conversely, in Far from the Madding Crowd, Bathsheba becomes the almighty one who sends the letter that will lead the warrior – Boldwood – to his doom. Overturning the text, Hardy reverses the traditional gender roles, giving the woman frightening agency. As for Boldwood, he is literally upset, and everything in the scene seems to follow a neat pattern of inversions: when seeing his own reflection in the mirror, he cannot recognize it; he wakes up at night, being unable to sleep; and when he watches the sky at dawn, it is not the image of the break of light, but that of a weird sort of crepuscular noon, which is evoked. Nothing is as it seems, and one is reminded of Monet’s preternatural snow scenes in which the ground is rendered by blue spots and lines, whereas the sky is painted with touches of muddy brown... “Then the dawn drew on. The full power of the clear heaven was not equal to that of a cloudy sky at noon, when Boldwood arose and dressed himself”. The character is now the opposite of everything he had been up to that point, as Bold-wood, a steady, sturdy, hardy man. He feels Bathsheba’s presence behind him, haunting him, although he himself had shunned her in the church of Weatherbury – just as, in a continued play on inversions,

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she will turn a cold shoulder to his repeated proposals. The white light of the text delineates his reverse, unknown inner self, like a photographic negative.

19 Thus the overwhelming white space of the nearly blank card does not actually deny meaning, quite the contrary; beneath the seal, the blank envelope seems to call for some kind of inscription, it reveals itself as the potential space for some new, inverted kind of relationship, while the snow-bound landscape becomes the map of the unseen, as if signalling repression, pointing obscurely to feelings that Boldwood can neither articulate nor understand, the unknown subconscious. The obscure, the unsaid, the erased, best reveal his personality.

20 This projection of a troubled state of consciousness – which neither the character nor the narrative voice seem willing to unravel – over the blank screen of the virgin landscape, seems less a case of pathetic fallacy than an intuitive form of internal focalization, as defined by Gérard Genette in Figures III. This use of “point-of-view narration,” Genette explains, implies “in its purest forms, that the focaliser should not be described, or even designated from the outside, and that his/her perceptions or thoughts should not be analyzed by the narrator” (Genette 1972, 209). In reality, the vision of the snowfield is attributed to Boldwood right before the description of the field of snow starts: “He descended the stairs and went out towards the gate of a field to the east, leaning over which he paused and looked around” (Hardy 1986, 81). The gate is the threshold which signals a pause, while the character becomes all eyes, his panoramic gaze taking in the whole of the landscape. At that point, the scene still seems factual and objective, a picturesque composition with its expected topographical landmarks, clearly positioned and named: It was one of the usual slow sunrises of this time of the year, and the sky, pure violet in the zenith, was leaden to the northward, and murky to the east where, over the snowy down or ewe-lease on Weatherbury Upper Farm, and apparently resting upon the ridge, the only half of the sun yet visible burnt rayless, like a red and flameless fire shining over a white hearthstone. The whole effect resembled sunset as childhood resembles age. (Hardy 1986, 81)

21 Yet however cold the style, however frozen the landscape, affect simmers beneath, as betrayed by the adverb “apparently,” by the repetition of the verb “to resemble,” by the implicit metaphors in the adjectives “leaden” and “murky,” and by the image of fire, pointing to the character’s unspeakable, deeply-buried emotion. Boldwood is literally placed before a blank slate of snow, an empty field overwritten with tiny traces, over which he unconsciously projects his state of mind, seeking to decipher both, as it were, while the narrative voice becomes less and less insistent, less and less intrusive: Boldwood was listlessly noting how the frost had hardened and glazed the surface of the snow, till it shone in the red eastern light with the polish of marble, how, in some portions of the slope, withered grass-bents, encased in icicles, bristled through the smooth wan coverlet in the twisted and curved shapes of old Venetian glass; and how the footprints of a few birds, which had hopped over the snow while it lay in the state of a soft fleece, were now frozen to a short permanency. (Hardy 1986, 82)

22 Some meaning slowly crystallises in those metaphors, chiselled as delicately as Venetian glass. But it hardly pierces through the softly shimmering “fleece” of snow as yet: what the whole passage metaphorises is the slow and incredibly brittle emergence of some sort of sign, as light as birds’ footprints. Once more, Monet’s snow-fields come to mind, particularly the canvas of a field watched by a solitary magpie6 posted, like

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Boldwood, by one of these five-barred gates so typical of Hardy’s Wessex. Diffracted by anaphora (“how”) or atomized by modifiers connoting the minute and the rare (“some”, “few”), the scene gives us something to see that words cannot fully say: the vague sign of some fire smouldering under an appearance of inert frigidity.

Dawning desire

23 What Boldwood sees unbeknownst to his conscious mind, when he gazes at the pristine whiteness of the landscape, is his own reflection. In this subversive moment which substitutes the figuration of a state of mind for the objective perception of the world, the burning secret which Boldwood will not, or cannot confess, even to himself, starts showing through its immaculate cover of innocence. Indeed, the colour white which suffuses the landscape bristles with the energy of something emerging but not yet entirely revealed, still hovering between vulnerable virginity – recalling Tess’s “feminine tissue [...] blank as snow yet” – and the potential sterility of unrequited passion, buried and denied.

24 Such a landscape, at one and the same time pointing and erasing signs, however, does not only reflect Boldwood’s blank mind. It also manifests the absence, or lack, of the necessary Other, the female counterpart, Bathsheba. It becomes clearer and clearer that the spectral, shimmering light haunting the surface connotes the flickering presence of desire, troping the presence / absence of the idealized female image, and hinting at the depth of possible passion beneath the frozen surface. But in this layer of white, pale as marble yet bristling with concretions, the visual also flirts with the tactile and optic and haptic merge with synaesthetic intensity, as if the pale skin of the desired body offered itself to some timid sense of touch, in utmost proximity and infinite distance.

25 Indeed, Boldwood’s emotional experience of space rests on an incomplete inter- subjective model: by definition a Valentine is never signed, and Bathsheba withholds her own offer by not inscribing her name. Never actually oriented by the compass of some reciprocal gaze, Boldwood’s field of perception remains blank. The desired other remains absent, that is to say alien, unknowable as well as unreachable. Disoriented, deprived of the human landmarks that might help to survey life itself, Boldwood remains dispossessed, distanced from the living world, separated by the very concrete and significant obstacle of the barrier on which he is leaning. Unable to reach self- definition through someone else’s eyes, he can no longer identify his own self, becomes an abstract white shape, the spectral victim of what Barthes calls that “panic-stricken suspension of language, the blank erasure of codes, the white rupture that stops the inner narrative that constitutes our own self” (Barthes 97).

26 Painting the perception of the landscape rather than the landscape itself, Hardy lets us glimpse the inscape of a being who strives to define himself in relation to another – but a fantasmatic, unresponsive, absent other – with a hitherto unknown passion, buried beneath layers of outside impassive coldness, like the “red light” simmering beneath the frozen marble of the white landscape. What surfaces, beneath the delicate bits of grass piercing the snow, like some mysterious handwriting, whose message is precisely the blank inversion of the snow-bound plain, is a new, hitherto unforeseen Boldwood. That inversion of narration and description reaches beyond words, to offer a visual,

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significant form, showing rather than telling, corresponding to Blanchot’s superb definition of writing: To write at the edge of the book, outside the book. This writing outside language: a writing that would be a kind of originary manner rendering impossible any object (either present or absent) of language. (Blanchot 1993, 427)

27 This blank is not that of deconstructive nihilism, but that of a potentially new language, that of a new birth, or a new understanding of life and death, connoted perhaps by the oxymoron “short permanency.” This white scene may signify nothing explicitly, yet it resonates with infinite meaning deep inside the character’s self. In Concerning the Spiritual in Art – and Painting in Particular, the painter Wassily Kandinsky considers the echoing wonder of the colour white: White [was] often considered as no colour (a theory largely due to the Impressionists, who saw no white in nature […]). This world is too far above us for us to perceive its various sounds. A great silence, like an impenetrable wall, shrouds its life from our understanding. White, therefore, has this harmony of absolute silence, which works upon the deepest of our psyches and, works like many pauses in music that break the melody without ever interrupting it. It is not a dead silence, but one pregnant with possibilities. It sounds as a silence that might all of a sudden yield some meaning. White has the appeal of the nothingness that is before birth, of the world in the ice age. (Kandinsky 39, translation slightly revised)

28 Kandinsky’s evocation of the echoing capacity of white unravels the expressive potential of an infinite “wall of white,” held in mysterious suspense, whose unreadable silence voices the promise of a new birth. This silent, secret layer of white, hovering between immanence and the imminent destruction of equilibrium, corresponds to the white surface of Bathsheba’s letter, and to the blank space of the landscape. The perception of the scene says nothing, as if masking the unspeakable event – the birth of erotic desire and blood-red passion – beneath layers of whiteness. Internal focalization betrays the birth to self and other, the sudden arousal of bold, or rather mad, desire. Interestingly, Boldwood’s irrational access to life and desire occurs through vision, not speech. Focalization lets us glimpse what narrative discourse could not tell, like the other side of a card, a sheet of paper or an envelope, what cannot be laid down or scripted black on white. The mute letter triggers the plot, with its visual impact, more powerfully than narrative comment might, for it preserves all the potential of suspense. Seeing Boldwood gazing at the blank space of letter and landscape, opens up the possibility of a figurative event, in the troubled space of “I” and eye.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barthes, Roland, L’Empire des sens, Paris : Flammarion (coll. Champs), 1970.

Blanchot, Maurice, “L’interruption”, Nouvelle Revue Française 137 (1964) : 869-881.

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Blanchot, Maurice, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson, Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P (Theory and History of Literature Vol. 82), 1993.

Bullen, J. B., The Expressive Eye: Fiction and Perception in the Work of Thomas Hardy, Oxford: OUP, 1986.

Derrida, Jacques, La dissémination, Paris : Seuil, 1972.

Derrida, Jacques, La vérité en peinture, Paris : Flammarion, 1978.

Gadoin, Isabelle, Far from the Madding Crowd: Thomas Hardy entre convention et subversion, Paris: PUF, 2010.

Genette, Gérard, Figures III, Paris : Seuil, 1972.

Hardy, Thomas, Far from the Madding Crowd (1876), ed. Robert Schweik, New York & London: Norton, 1986.

Kandinsky, Wassily, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1914), trans. M. T. H. Sadler, New York: Dover Publications, 1977.

Miller, Joseph Hillis, “Thomas Hardy, Jacques Derrida and the Dislocation of Souls”, Tropes, Parables and Performatives: Essays on Twentieth-Century Literature, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990.

Miller, Joseph Hillis, Thomas Hardy, Distance and Desire, Oxford: OUP, 1970.

Millgate, Michael (ed.), The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy – by Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1984.

NOTES

1. The name “Blanchot” indeed recalls the word “blanc”, meaning “white” in French. 2. All the references to the novel henceforward will refer to that particular chapter. 3. Claude Monet (1840-1926), Environs de Honfleur, neige, around 1867, oil on canvas, 81 cm x 102 cm, Paris, Musée du Louvre. 4. Claude Monet, La charrette. Route sous la neige à Honfleur, around 1867, oil on canvas, 65 cm x 92,5, Paris, Musée d’Orsay. 5. Claude Monet, La débâcle près de Vétheuil, oil on canvas, 1880, 65 x 93 cm, Musée du Louvre. 6. See Claude Monet, La Pie, 1868-1869, 89cm x 130 cm, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay.

ABSTRACTS

This article focuses on just one scene in Far from the Madding Crowd: that of Boldwood’s bewildered reception of Bathsheba’s Valentine. Far from showing us an “expressive eye,” the passage does the opposite, since it shows an immaculate, yet unreadable, landscape of snow stretching out before Boldwood’s blank gaze, his dazed eyes. Yet this scene which deploys in so many different ways the image of the unreadable and the invisible uses the narrative technique

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of internal focalization to make the reader “see” through the text itself what lies beneath the surface: the birth of unavowed, unsaid, repressed, desire.

Cet article se concentre sur la scène de Far from the Madding Crowd où Boldwood, interloqué, reçoit la carte de la saint Valentin envoyée par Bathsheba, par plaisanterie et goût du défi. C’est alors l’inverse d’un « œil expressif » que le passage met en scène : sous le regard hagard et vide de Boldwood s’étend un paysage de neige immaculé, mystérieux, illisible. Mais c’est bien le désir que fait sentir cette scène, par le biais de stratégies de focalisation interne. Car au-delà, ou en-deça, des métaphores démultipliées de l’illisible et de l’invisible, le lecteur est conduit à saisir ce qui se cache sous la surface du texte : la naissance de l’émotion que le personnage de Boldwood lui- même ne peut se figurer, celle du désir, non-dit, inavoué, refoulé.

INDEX

Mots-clés: blanc, désir, dislocation, focalisation, inconscient, inversions, lettre, paradoxe, répression, sémiotique, communication (théorie) Keywords: gaze, communication theory, desire, dislocation, focalisation, inversions, letter, paradox, repression, semiotics, unconscious, white oeuvrecitee Far from the Madding Crowd

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.

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Other contribution Autre contribution

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Hardy in France: Belles Lettres and Popular Culture Hardy en France : des Belles Lettres à la culture populaire

Peggy Blin-Cordon and Laurence Estanove

EDITOR'S NOTE

This article was originally published in The Hardy Review 17.2 (Autumn 2015): 15-32. It is reproduced here by special authorization from the Hardy Review editor.

1 One experience common to all doctoral students is having to explain your dissertation subject to relatives and acquaintances foreign to the discipline. When studying literature, the existence of a national or international literary canon can usually serve as a point of reference to guide the lay(wo)man. Yet for a French student working on Thomas Hardy, this only rarely proves efficient, and both of us discovered early in our research that the surest way to give people a sense of what our hours of intense reading might be like was to invoke Roman Polanski. His 1979 adaptation of Tess is undoubtedly the reference to Hardy most French people would know, if any. Tess is, after all, a French film, its main producer having been the late famous director Claude Berri. It was also co-written by French screenwriter Gérard Brach (a regular collaborator of Polanski’s), its score composed by Philippe Sarde, and a majority of the crew (assistant director, art and sound etc.) was French. As such, it won three awards (best film, best director and best cinematography) at the French national “César” film ceremony in 1980.

2 Aesthetically and visually, Tess offers a representation of the mid-nineteenth century English countryside that is indeed a reconstruction in both time and space, as the film was shot exclusively in France, mainly on location in the northwestern regions of Brittany and Lower Normandy. A lot of this “Frenchness” is incidental, a consequence of Polanski’s personal life and judicial situation at the time.1 Yet Tess is also one of those classics that are regularly broadcast on French TV, and the film was digitally restored

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and re-issued in cinemas as well as DVD and Blu-Ray in 2012. The DVD bonuses include a documentary by French journalist Serge July, Il était une fois Tess, one of a series which aimed at having a film resonate with its time. In a 2009 interview, July explained the Frenchness of Tess, or at least how the film resonated with the French society of the late 1970s: “Polanski’s Tess, a period film set in the 19th century, is, in its own way, a testimony to late 1970s France, since the film, which is so essentially rural, was shot just at the time when rural society was disappearing in our country” (Odicino; translation ours)2.

3 The example of Tess and of cinema may point to the enduring force of Hardy’s talent as a storyteller, a talent thus naturally transferred to the gripping narrative mode of filmmaking; yet the very cinematic power of Hardy’s work, his vision and sense of kinetics are not restricted to his skills as a novelist. They’ve been appealing to all reading publics, whatever the culture, context, or time, because of “something else and something more”, what Charles Du Bos pointed as “the sense of life in general”, (Du Bos 854; translation ours)3 the very essence of universality.

4 What follows is not intended as an exhaustive account of the distribution and reception of Hardy’s work in France. It is rather a selective outline (counting a few oddities showing Hardy’s presence where least expected) of what, in the discreet yet persistent presence of his writings in the French cultural and academic landscape, may testify to his universality and account for the recent revived interest in him, manifest mostly in the creation and activities of the French Association for Thomas Hardy Studies (FATHOM) but also more tenuously in a few repercussions on popular culture. Hopefully, this may encourage some further examination of the relationship between Hardy and France.

1. Cinema and popular culture

5 If we further dwell on the subject of Hardy on screen, we might want to mention a recent manifestation of his presence in French popular culture, that is the French release (June 3rd, 2015) of Danish film director Thomas Vinterberg’s Far from the Madding Crowd. The film stars Carey Mulligan as Bathsheba, Tom Sturridge as Sergeant Troy, and quite surprisingly for French viewers, Matthias Shoenaerts as Gabriel Oak. Schoenaerts, though not French but Belgian, is one of the French-speaking budding talents who count in the French film industry4. It is also worth noting that the part of Bathsheba is played by an actress who is allegedly better known in France than Julie Christie was for the release of Schlesinger’s own 1967 adaptation5. Julie Christie, the icon of Great Britain in the 1960s, possibly had a more confidential notoriety in France compared to Mulligan’s today. The young Hollywood star appears as quite a “mainstream” ambassadress for Hardy in France, probably even more than Kate Winslet in her time, when Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation of Jude was released 6. Consequently, her reputation only could attract spectators in cinemas, and thus make Hardy better known for an audience who have never heard, or possess very little knowledge of the author. For some French people, Bathsheba may be remembered as bearing the features of Carey Mulligan, in the same way that for others, Tess is and always will be Nastassja Kinski.

6 Notably enough, Vinterbeg’s adaptation triggered the release of a new pocket edition of the novel, Loin de la foule déchaînée, its front cover displaying a picture of Mulligan and

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Schoenaerts along with an explicit reference to the film. In its time, the 1996 film adaptation of Jude had also prompted the re-edition of the 1901 French translation by Firmin Roz, with the poster of the film displaying couple Eccleston and Winslet as new front cover (Hardy 1996). No doubt the caption “based on Thomas Hardy’s classic love story” as featured in the trailer for Vinterberg’s film will also appeal to a large audience.

7 Although it might appear at first as cultural epiphenomena when we consider the presence of the author in the French artistic background, such films based on Hardy’s novels contribute – for better or worse – to the dissemination and positioning of Hardy’s works in French popular culture. Which also seems to be the consequence of the 2013 French edition of an abridged version of Tess aimed at a younger readership, since the novel was released in a collection for young adults entitled “Black Moon” and described as “the collection for readers keen to experience strong emotions” (Hardy 2013)7. The hint at the film adaptation by Polanski appears in the shortened title of the book, echoing the movie, and is blatant on the front cover showing a picture of a back- lit young woman in a romantic haze, bearing a strong resemblance to a younger N. Kinski and wearing the exact same dress as one of those sported by the latter in the film.

8 What is conspicuous in the way Hardy’s novel has recently been marketed, whether it be via the embodiment of one of his heroines by Hollywood stars or the release of one of his masterpieces as young adult fiction, is that very progressively, Hardy has been infusing in French culture through popular media since the early 1980s.

9 As we have just seen, sometimes in unexpected circumstances, reception is naturally linked to diffusion, hence of course to the accessibility of the texts, and therefore to the translations of an author’s works. Entire books or dissertations could (and certainly ought to) be devoted to examining the French translations of Hardy’s works – linguistically speaking of course, but also from an editorial perspective: one may study how the very first Hardy novel translated into French was actually The Trumpet Major, whose historical recapturing of the Napoleonic era certainly offers an interesting entry point into the contemporary definition of readers’ expectations; how out of the fourteen novels published by Hardy, only one – A Laodicean – remains untranslated today; how Far from the Madding Crowd initially bore the glamorous title of Barbara, after its eponymous renamed heroine; how The Hand of Ethelberta appeared in 1931 under the misguiding title “Had He Insisted” (S’il avait insisté) and has known no subsequent edition since, as is incidentally also the case of Under the Greenwood Tree. The case of Tess is particularly interesting in that despite its being the most famous Hardy novel in France and most often re-published, read and studied, it has never been re-translated in full8 since Madeleine Rolland (sister of writer Romain Rolland) delivered her version, duly “authorized by the author”, in 1901 (Hardy 1901).

2. Hardy and contemporary French writers: Zola, Hugo, Proust

10 Tess has again been central to a recent revived interest in Hardy from a purely academic viewpoint as was shown first in 2008 by the choice of the novel as part of the national syllabus for the Agrégation in Comparative Literature, coupled with Emile Zola’s Nana (1880) and Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest (1894) to explore the question of

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“Female destinies in the context of European Naturalism”. Parallels between Hardy and contemporary French writers have not always been convincing and accurate. Here, the problem is of course the apparently undisputed definition of Hardy as a naturalist; yet on the other hand there are some extremely good points to be made from a joint exploration of three female characters as drawn by the hands of three contemporary European novelists.

11 When parallels with Zola were made in Hardy’s own lifetime, they appeared solely in harsh reviews and were systematically made with little justification other than base attack on indecency, most notably so when criticizing Jude. Zola is the undisputed standard bearer and main initiator of the naturalist trend, a writer who influenced generations of authors worldwide, including in Britain. The strained artistic proximity between Hardy and Zola was much condemned by the former. Hardy obviously resented the association, so much so that he openly evoked his disapproval in “Candour in English Fiction”, and even more markedly in “The Science of Fiction” where he mainly argued that literature does not need science or accurate descriptions to make the reader fathom reality, thus offering an answer to Zola’s Roman expérimental (The Experimental Novel, 1881). Naturalism and Zola did trigger a great many debates in the 1890s, and Hardy directly refers to Zola when condemning naturalism in the essay in strong words: As this theory of the need for the exercise of the Dædalian faculty for selection and cunning manipulation has been disputed, it may be worth while to examine the contrary proposition. That it should ever have been maintained by such a romancer as M. Zola, in his work on the Roman Expérimental, seems to reveal an obtuseness to the disproof conveyed in his own novels which, in a French writer, is singular indeed. To be sure that author – whose powers in story-telling, rightfully and wrongfully exercised, may be partly owing to the fact that he is not a critic – does in a measure concede something in the qualified counsel that the novel should keep as close to reality as it can; a remark which may be interpreted with infinite latitude, and would no doubt have been cheerfully accepted by Dumas père or Mrs. Radcliffe. It implies discriminative choice; and if we grant that we grant all. But to maintain in theory what he abandons in practice, to subscribe to rules and to work by instinct, is a proceeding not confined to the author of Germinal and La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret. (Brennecke 86-87)

12 Even after such violent criticism, the reviews of Hardy’s last novels almost systematically included a reference to Zola, the critics seldom resisting the pleasure of inserting a bon mot in French, often fraught with sexual innuendo. Take, for example, the review of Jude in World, referring to Zola not only for his generic stance but also for the amoral aspects of the French author’s probably most sulphurous novel of the Rougon-Macquart series. The reviewer stated indeed that Hardy had based himself on “the methods of Zola and Tolstoi – Zola of La Terre” (“Hardy the Degenerate”, World, 13 November 1895; quoted in Millgate 341). Another reviewer wrote that Hardy’s Jude was similar to Zola’s novels “which disgust rather than allure,” and that Hardy had actually succumbed to Zola’s “poisoned flower of lubricité,” his novel also relying on “an ugly weed called gauloiserie” (R. Y. Tyrrell, Fortnightly Review, June 1896; quoted in Cox 302). What is mainly pointed at in the reviews is the seeming generic link between the two authors, but in truth, it is most of all the transgressive quality of their art, their ability to shock and their apparent propensity to advocate loose morals.

13 Another monument of French literature one might feel inclined to conjure up, perhaps more rightfully, is Victor Hugo. Though the parallels between them might not be so

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striking, it is worth considering how Hardy and Hugo – remarkable storytellers of their country and their time – both had that distinctive trait of being at once novelists and poets. Very recently, Marie Panter precisely wrote a PhD in French Comparative Studies showing how the two writers shared the same poetics of the novel (Panter). The two never met, but there is proof that Hardy had actually read Hugo and highly respected him. In 1902, on the occasion of the centenary of Hugo’s birth, he wrote in a French review: “His memory must endure. His works are the cathedrals of literary architecture, his imagination adding greatness to the colossal and charm to the small.” (F. E. Hardy 92) Such a tribute is a noteworthy compliment coming from a man of letters who placed so much of his craftsmanship as a former stonemason in his novel writing. In 1903, he addressed another comment on Hugo in a letter to Sir George Douglas. Explicitly stating his admiration, he paid homage to Hugo’s radicalism, another aspect that the two artists shared: I am a Victor-Hugo-ite still. If he often crosses the line into the extravagant his ideas are so arresting even when he does so cross that they never fail to hold me. As you say, his misérables are not so real as Dickens’s, but they show, to my mind, one great superiority, that of universality, while those of Dickens express the particular only. (Purdy 81)

14 Conveying a sense of “the great superiority of universality” is indeed a feature that is undeniably both Hardy’s and Hugo’s, justifying the instinct one might have of likening the two when introducing Hardy to a French neophyte9.

15 Even more convincing and justified have been connections with Proust. A number of studies have examined the famous reciprocal admiration of both writers or analyzed their works jointly. In recent years, this is the case, among others, of Diane de Margerie, a translator of several Hardy texts who devoted the final part of her aptly named study Proust et l’obscur to the parallels between Proust and Hardy, as well as Proust and French painter Gustave Moreau. Given the visual force of Hardy’s writing, amply analyzed by several critics, it is no surprise to see him thus appear alongside a painter. Incidentally, it is also a French painter, Jacques-Emile Blanche (1861-1942), who offered both Hardy and Proust an enduring presence in people’s minds: Blanche’s Portrait de Marcel Proust (1892), now exhibited at the Musée d’Orsay10, is by far the most famous representation of the French writer, while Blanche’s sketch portrait of Hardy is now in the Tate collection, a second “finished” version, painted later by Blanche, being held by the Manchester City Art Gallery11.

16 As is widely known, Hardy himself established connections between his writing and Proust’s by referring to the essentially subjective nature of love as exhibited in The Well Beloved, copying in July 1926 two quotations from Proust’s À l’Ombre des jeunes filles en fleur as given in the magazine Marsyas12. Proust’s own direct reference to Hardy in La Prisonnière (published posthumously in 1923) famously pointed to the “geometry” of the latter’s art – its “stonemason geometry”13. I came back to Hardy’s stone-cutters. “You remember them in Jude the Obscure, but do you remember how in The Well-Beloved the blocks of stone that the father quarries on the island are brought by water and piled up in the son’s workshop where they become statues; how in A Pair of Blue Eyes there are the parallel graves, and the parallel lines of the ship, and the row of wagons where the lovers are next to the corpse, and the parallelism between The Well-Beloved, where the hero loves three women, and A Pair of Blue Eyes, where the woman loves three men, and so on, all those novels that could be superimposed on each other, like the houses piled vertically, one above the other, on the rocky soil of the island? […]” (Proust 346)14

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3. Contemporary reviewers: French champions of Hardy’s work

17 This ties in with the sense that Hardy’s work is always best thought of in visual terms or through spatial projections. Nowhere is the sheer force of Hardy’s pictorial and spatial writing better staged than in The Dynasts. As marginal as that opus might appear, it nonetheless drew the fascinated attention of one French reviewer, Valéry Larbaud, in 190815. Such Franco-British literary connection was naturally not unusual at the time, and that one in particular is the subject of an article by David Roe, an extremely enlightening read both as regards the reception of Hardy in France and the French literary journalism of the time. What surfaces is that Hardy was, at the turn of the 20th century, still little known in France, the French literary taste of the time being more attracted to Russian flavours. Yet a few critics, mostly related to the famous periodical Mercure de France, followed the progress of The Dynasts as it was published 16, and Roe sees Larbaud’s eight-page article as “an excellent introduction” to it, the French critic acting as both “scholar and explicator” of Hardy’s work (Roe 89). Very interestingly for us here, Roe points at Larbaud’s perception of Hardy as a European rather than an English writer: In his later references to Hardy, Larbaud chose to take him completely out of the English context and insist on his stature as a European writer. He did so in a note on the selection of a new Poet Laureate in 1913: Thomas Hardy, qui est sans doute, depuis la mort de Tolstoï, le plus grand nom de la littérature européenne, est justement trop européen pour n’être que le poète-lauréat de l’Angleterre. [Thomas Hardy, who is doubtless, since the death of Tolstoy, the greatest name in European literature, is, precisely, too European to be only the Poet Laureate of England.] (La Nouvelle Revue Française, October 1913; Roe, 96)17

18 Interest in Hardy among his French contemporaries and counterparts would thus deserve further investigation, since his work and name were not entirely absent from literary reviews of the time – more so once he had given up novel writing. Several French writers, influential critics and translators of Hardy in the first thirty years of the 20th century asserted with one accord that his work represented a landmark in European literature. In Larbaud, Du Bos, Jaloux, Roz or Davray18, Hardy found real champions of his work in France, even during the times when his last novels were causing serious havoc in his own country. Little by little, he came to be consecrated and appeared less marginal in the French cultural landscape. Firmin Roz, the first man of letters to translate Jude in French, very well detected the change in mentalities imposed by Hardy’s perception of the society and gratified readers of La Revue Française, which published Jude l’obscur in 1900, with a committed preface. In those lines, he strongly argued in the defence of Hardy against the puritanism of late Victorian Britain, condemning the general reaction to the book in Hardy’s country, but also more specifically targeting the review of the Athenaeum, or Mrs Oliphant’s criticism in Blackwood’s Magazine for example. He also insisted on the visionary dimension of Hardy’s novel and on the author’s compassion and empathy: No other work appears to me as less dogmatic. It seems impossible to me to bring out of it either the glorification or condemnation of free love. […] What we have here is a thinker, both a poet and an artist. He observes and ponders. When dealing with Hardy, meditation combines with compassion. An immense pity

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fills his heart, and soon, this thought takes over any other thought, and a humble thought it is, much deeper than any system, a much more human thought too, much more moving […]. (Roz 322-323; translation ours)19

19 As is quite known, Hardy wasn’t always happy with the critical interest he garnered, particularly when it took on a biographical form: the famous case of Frank Hedgcock’s Thomas Hardy, penseur et artiste: Essai de critique, published in 1911, certainly offers a very clear example of Hardy’s resentful sense of violated secrecy, as underlined in Rosemarie Morgan’s Ashgate Research Companion: He indignantly annotated Frank A. Hedgcock’s Thomas Hardy, Penseur et Artiste, as “too personal, & in bad taste, even supposing it were true, which it is not … It betrays the cloven foot of the “interviewer”’, and in 1922 he and Florence effectively killed off plans for an English translation. (Morgan 468)

20 The following studies of Hardy published in France did not seem to repeat the biographical mistake. Yet from our present standpoint, they are not entirely cut off from Hardy’s biography, since the bulk of them appeared around the time of his death.

21 Indeed, Hardy’s death in January 1928 year triggered the publication of a few retrospective tributes, such as Louis Gillet’s celebration of the “lesson in courage” the author was leaving as “supreme teaching” to us all (La Revue des Deux Mondes, February 1928)20. The most notable tribute from French literary figures was undoubtedly the special issue published by La Revue Nouvelle (January-February 1928). The issue included a letter from James Joyce (actually declining the offer to contribute) as well as short texts from John Middleton Murry, Marcel Proust, Edmond Jaloux, and a few others. One of these was Pierre d’Exideuil, who published that very year the PhD dissertation he’d recently completed, Le Couple humain dans l’œuvre de Thomas Hardy: Essai sur la sexualité dans les romans, contes et poèmes du Wessex. There’s little doubt that the translation into English which appeared the following year, complete with an introduction by Havelock Ellis, would have taken longer to be published had Hardy not just passed away.

22 Another passionate commemorator was Charles Du Bos, an underestimated writer and devoted critic of Victorian literature whose “Lectures on Hardy” delivered in 1925 did not appear in print until that special tribute number, and only in a much shorter version (Du Bos 833-834). Sadly, they have not been translated into English, and one of their sole examination, provided by Bénédicte Coste in 2011, is also inaccessible to those who do not read French. Yet Du Bos’s study of Hardy is among the most powerful to have been written – a unique appreciation and incredibly insightful understanding of Hardy’s writing, also unique in that Du Bos unquestioningly combined novels and poems in his analysis. He thus seemed to suggest that only an all-inclusive study of Hardy’s entire oeuvre could do his writing justice: Hardy’s enduring cosmic viewpoint, his faithful devotion to that viewpoint, barely ever implies any radical differentiation between his various works; and that is why, in the rich aquarium of our memory where so many masterpieces lead their mysterious lives, the overall impression left by Hardy’s entire work is more powerful yet than the impression left by whichever single one of his greatest books if considered separately. (Du Bos 847; translation ours)21

23 Du Bos also beautifully pointed at the essentially compassionate spirit of Hardy’s writing, at how the author’s modernity is inextricably tied in to the “adamantine honesty of his soul” (Du Bos 833) 22, and at “that meaning of life in general with which Hardy both refreshes and stifles us, [and which] is always, ultimately, a vivifying, healthy, salty breath of air” (Du Bos 854; translation ours)23.

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24 Celebrated by literary reviewers, Hardy’s work also gradually became a legitimate academic concern, as symbolically proven by the preface to Jude l’obscur written by Edmond Jaloux in 1931. Jaloux was an académicien, a member of the French Academy of Letters, the respectable institution founded in the 17th century to regulate matters relative to the French language, notably via the publication of the official dictionary of the French language. The members of the academy are valued writers, philosophers and thinkers and even scientists whose works have remarkably honoured the French language. They have included, among others, Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Marguerite Yourcenar… Admittedly, Edmond Jaloux is not a very well-know académicien, either in France or abroad, yet his name is worth mentioning for, as a critic, he was dedicated to broadening the French literary horizons to foreign literatures, most particularly promoting the work of Rainer Maria Rilke in the country. In his promotion of British literature in the 1931 preface to Jude l’obscur, he surprisingly addresses the reader in quite similar terms to those used by Larbaud before him: Je crois bien que Thomas Hardy a été le dernier des grands romanciers européens du XIXe siècle. Je ne dis pas qu’il n’en naîtra pas demain de nouveaux, mais je ne vois pas dans l’Europe actuelle un homme de cette classe. [I am quite convinced that Thomas Hardy was the last of the great European novelists in the 19th century. I am not saying that others won’t emerge tomorrow, but I can’t see a man with such literary standards in present day Europe.] (Hardy 1950, 5; translation ours)

25 Jaloux not only introduces Jude in his preface, but also discusses (sometimes at length) a great variety of works by Hardy, proving his extensive knowledge of both poetry and prose, lesser known (Two on a Tower) and major (Tess) works. Echoing both Larbaud and Du Bos, he suggests that Hardy’s work is best envisaged as a whole.

4. Hardy criticism and interest in France since the 1980s

26 After that relative concentration of interest, the number of studies in French devoted to Hardy – of whatever length – returned to its original scarcity, with only three PhDs completed between 1928 and the early 1980s: d’Exideuil’s was followed in 1932 by the publication in Brussels of Louise De Ridder-Barzin’s Le pessimisme de Thomas Hardy, and more than twenty years later, one finds an unpublished study by another woman, Blanche Jacquet, who analysed Hardy’s work from a medical perspective in her dissertation La Médecine et les médecins dans l’œuvre de Thomas Hardy. L’œuvre de Thomas Hardy vue sous l’angle medical – a fascinating undertaking which would certainly deserve attention.

27 A thorough research might reveal more, but that seems to be the bare extent of interest in Hardy over several decades in France, leaving aside a few novels that were re- published and new additions to the catalogue of translated works which appeared in the aftermath of Hardy’s death: The Hand of Ethelberta (S’il avait insisté) in 1931, The Woodlanders (Les Forestiers) in 1932, The Mayor of Casterbridge (Le Maire de Casterbridge) in 1933. Another notable and impressive addition came out in 1947 with Les Dynastes.

28 Hardy’s work also appeared in the popular form of radio dramatization, first with an adaptation of Jude broadcast by France Culture in the summer of 1969, yet rather

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timidly so since listeners had to wait a full thirteen years to hear the second adaptation, Tess being broadcast in the Spring of 1982.

29 Hence came the turn of 1980s which saw a definite revival of interest with several publications and new translations – one novel (Under the Greenwoord Tree), some poems and short stories – as well a new academic focus, undoubtedly led by the colossal and seminal work of Annie Escuret. In keeping with Du Bos’s global vision of Hardy’s work, Annie Escuret’s first idea was to study the novels as well as the poetry, but the latter subject had been taken by a colleague, barring her from using it herself – a colleague who shamefully did not pursue his research. Yet what Annie delivered has been a goldmine to all ensuing Hardy scholars in France: her major contribution was not only to remind French academics of the tremendous power of Hardy’s work in its humbling entirety, but also to offer a much-needed contextual study of that work, linking it to the scientific and philosophical upheavals of its time. Escuret’s work is also a great piece in epistemocriticism, and remains sadly untranslated into English.

30 The 1980s was also the period when Hardy’s writing found its way into the minds and pages of some French humanities scholars and thinkers for whom literature was nonetheless of primary concern. The most interesting case was certainly that of Yvonne Verdier, an ethnologist and sociologist who analysed Hardy’s novels from an anthropological perspective in an unfinished study she left upon dying suddenly in 1989. Like Larbaud, she considered Hardy from a European perspective, explaining that “[e]ssentially Hardy invented – simultaneously to other European novelists […] – a monographic eye” (Verdier 19; translation ours)24. To her, Hardy’s novels thus combined the ethnographic vision of a community and its custom with the idea of individual destiny typical of great tragic literature. How Hardy moved “from rite to novel” (77) was thus the core of her analysis which forms a unique contribution that has mostly gone unnoticed so far25.

31 Verdier’s attachment to community, place and geography resonates with the attachment to space prominent in the scarce but powerful references to Hardy delivered by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. As self-proclaimed champion of Anglo- American literature, Deleuze lamented how the French novel “spends its time plotting points instead of drawing lines, active lines of flight or of positive deterritorialization,” while “[t]he Anglo-American novel is totally different. […] Hardy to Lawrence, from Melville to Miller, the same cry rings out: Go across, get out, break through, make a beeline, don’t get stuck on a point. Find the line of separation, follow it or create it, to the point of treachery.” (Deleuze & Guattari 186-187)26 In the Dialogues with Claire Parnet, he focused even more specifically on the way Hardy’s characters may exemplify his notion of “individuation without subject.” The extract deserves quoting in full: Take as an example the case of Thomas Hardy: his characters are not people or subjects, they are collections of intensive sensations, each is such collection, a packet, a bloc of variable sensations. There is a strange respect for the individual, an extraordinary respect: not because he would seize upon himself as a person and be recognized as a person, in the French way, but on the contrary because he saw himself and saw others as so many ‘unique chances’ – the unique chance from which one combination or another had been drawn. Individuation without a subject. And these packets of sensations in the raw, these collections or combinations, run along the lines of chance, or mischance, where their encounters take place – if need be, their bad encounters which lead to death, to murder. Hardy invokes a sort of Greek destiny for this empiricist experimental world. Individuals,

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packets of sensations, run over the heath like a line of flight or a line of deterritorialization of the earth. (Deleuze & Parnet 39-40)

32 The renewal of interest testified by Annie Escuret’s work did not truly bear its fruit in academia before the 1990s. Yet the handful of doctoral dissertations and articles which have appeared since have been of decisive importance, covering the whole gamut of Hardyan colourings: Isabelle Gadoin offered an examination of the spatial and visual traits of Hardy’s fiction through a complete pictorial and phenomenological redefinition of Wessex (1993); Thierry Goater explored the novels in the light of the dynamics of alienation that sustain them (2000); Stéphanie Bernard took an intertextual perspective by considering the pre-modernism of Hardy in parallel with the work of Joseph Conrad (2004); Peggy Blin-Cordon looked at the generic hybridity and experimentation of Hardy’s novels and their context of publication (2005); Laurence Estanove took up the task of examining Hardy’s poetry in the context of post- evolutionist intellectual history (2008); Nathalie Bantz devoted herself to the short stories as testing grounds of writing, with a particular focus on gender issues (2009); Gildas Lemardelé studied the structural presence of infernal and diabolical representations throughout several Hardy’s novels (2013); and, as previously mentioned, Marie Panter chose the comparative approach by analysing the poetics of the novel in works by Victor Hugo, Theodor Fontane and Hardy (2013). The latest addition is due to come from Emilie Loriaux who is currently writing a doctoral dissertation looking at the poetic and philological connections between Hardy and William Barnes. In the past twenty years or so, this tenuous yet constant academic interest has also been sustained by enlightening contributions in article form by Catherine Lanone, Marc Porée, André Topia, and Paul Volsik.

33 The growing number of consistent researches on Hardy throughout the 1990s and 2000s definitely paved the way for what was to permanently revive and officialise the interest in Hardy in French academia: the birth of FATHOM, the French Association for Thomas Hardy Studies. FATHOM was created in June 2009 at the Hardy conference held by Stéphanie Bernard in Rouen, and was in reality the outcome of conferences held in the previous years in Montpellier by Annie Escuret (2008), in Lyon by Annie Ramel (2007), and in Toulouse by Catherine Lanone (2006). Annual conferences have been organized since, and in 2013 the association also launched its online peer-reviewed journal, http://journals.openedition.org/fathom. Devoted to publishing conference proceedings and theme-based issues, the journal also welcomes submissions of individual contributions, both in English and in French.

34 Two years after the Agrégation in Comparative Literature, 2010 marked further institutional interest and recognition of Hardy with the choice of Far from the Madding Crowd for the national syllabus of the Agrégation in English Studies. For several years now, the Agrégation English syllabus has been including the joint study of a novel and film. Interestingly again, it was John Schlesinger’s own 1967 adaptation which was chosen in 2011, thus confirming the continuing interest of French academia for the cinematic potential of Hardy’s writings. In addition to several publications specifically devoted to Far from the Madding Crowd for the Agrégation, Thierry Goater’s Thomas Hardy. Figures de l’aliénation, which came out in late 2010, offered the first monograph on Hardy’s novels to have appeared in more than fifty years, and Nathalie Bantz ideally completed it the following year with her own Les Nouvelles de Thomas Hardy. Stratégies narratives d’une écriture sous contrainte, devoted to Hardy’s short stories. Even more recently and this time in English rather than French, Annie Ramel has also just

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delivered her psychoanalytical reading of Hardy in The Madder Stain, released earlier this year by Dutch publishers Rodopi. Book-length Hardy French criticism has been so far extremely scarce – before those three books, one needs to go back to d’Exideuil’s and Rider-Barzin’s works published around the time of Hardy’s death.

35 The creation of FATHOM has facilitated exchanges and collaborations between Hardy scholars across Europe, as shown by the Hardy seminar held at the ESSE Conference in Istanbul in 2012, and expertly co-convened by Annie Ramel, Isabelle Gadoin and Phillip Mallett. In the same year, the first conference devoted to Hardy’s poetry was organized in France by Adrian Grafe at the University of Arras, again gathering scholars from across the world.

36 The interest in Hardy’s poetry in France has always been much more limited compared to his fiction, an obvious reason naturally being that the translation of poetry is probably the trickiest, most demanding of all. Poetry is also a much less popular and accessible medium than novel writing, yet part of Hardy’s poetic work is now featured in a widely distributed collection which might help its opening to the French public. Gallimard have indeed included Hardy in their notable poetry collection, publishing in July 2012 Poèmes du Wessex suivi de Poèmes d’hier et d’aujourd’hui et de La Risée du Temps – selections of poems from the three collections (Wessex Poems, Poems of the Past and the Present and Time’s Laughingstocks) with the original pieces in English facing the translations. The latter are by French poet Frédéric Jacques Temple, and had actually been first published in two separate volumes by a small publisher, Éditions de la Différence, in 1991 (Poèmes du Wessex) and 1993 (La Risée du Temps). One notable feature of the Gallimard edition is the highly questionable choice of a cover illustration, collaging a photograph of Hardy’s head and a close-up of his eyes with the Union Jack as backcloth. This is certainly a sad misguided choice from the editor’s part, and one which betrays a poor knowledge of what the book actually contains. One would imagine a reader ignorant of Hardy’s poetical work catching a glimpse of that cover and probably thinking that this must be the work of a patriotic poet, or, with more subtle associations, that Hardy might at least be a true representative of a distinctive British – or English, as the French will inevitably say – culture and identity.

37 Such misreading of Hardy’s relation to his country and culture is assuredly not a blunder to be found in Eric Christen and Françoise Baud’s own translation of a carefully selected hundred poems by Hardy. Their Cent Poèmes, issued by a small Swiss publisher in November 2008, pauses to reflect on the contextual importance of each poem, pointing at connections between the poet’s words, his life and time – something imperative if one aims to recapture that “meaning of life in general” which Hardy’s poetic writing so powerfully conveys.

38 It is again with cinema that we wish to conclude here. A couple of years ago, Hardy found his way into the references quoted by French filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin for his film Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian (2013). That might appear as a surprising connection to make, as the film is an adaptation of French psychoanalyst Georges Devereux’s accounts of his treatment of a Native American war veteran in the aftermath of WW227. Yet almost all the interviews given by Desplechin while promoting that film had a reference to Hardy. Several times in particular, he referred to the model

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of the Hardyan tragic character – “a Thomas Hardy kind of feeling” (Titze). He also explained that he saw his characters as if they came from a Hardy novel, and that he aimed at giving protagonists from a humble background the nobility of characters from a Hardy novel (Dupont).

39 There might not be much that hasn’t been considered already there: Hardy’s skills in characterization go beyond the mere dynamics of efficient narrative and truthful storytelling. However, whether he anticipated psychoanalysis or not, what remains undeniable is the acuteness and permanence of Hardy’s eye for the complex minutiae of life. He has provided us with timeless explorations of the human psyche that can appeal to all cultural contexts, periods and places – including the re-telling by a French filmmaker of a Blackfoot Native American’s life in post-war USA.

40 That, too, is part of Hardy’s ability to enlighten us universally with the meaning of life.

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NOTES

1. Escaping the charges for sexual assault held against him in the US he fled to France, arriving there in February 1978. The decision to shoot the film in France was also to avoid the risk of being arrested in the UK. 2. “On a conçu ce concept : faire résonner un film avec son époque. Par exemple, Tess, de Roman Polanski, un film en costumes se déroulant au XIXème siècle, témoigne, à sa façon, de la fin des années 1970 en France, puisque ce film si rural fut tourné juste au moment où la société rurale disparaissait dans notre pays” (Odicino). 3. “il est tout pénétré, habité par le sens de la vie en général, qui chez le grand romancier est quelque chose d’autre et quelque chose de plus que le sens de la vie des personnages qu’il crée.” (Du Bos 854) 4. Schoenaerts came to be famous mostly after landing a part in the film of one of today’s most prominent French film directors, Jacques Audiard. Indeed, the director of Un prophète (“A Prophet”), Audiard’s most famous opus until now, chose the Belgian actor to play Ali in Rust and Bone (2012), a film also starring Marion Cotillard. Schoenaerts's remarkable performance allowed him to be awarded “Most Promising Actor” at the 2013 César Awards, the French national film awards earlier mentioned. 5. The film has had a fairly wide distribution in France, since, similarly to Schlesinger’s 1967 adaptation produced by MGM, Vinterberg’s is distributed by another big film company, Fox

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Searchlight, sister company to 20th Century Fox. One slight difference though: contrary to MGM, Fox Searchlight mainly aims at distributing more independent productions. 6. Mulligan is familiar now to French spectators since she starred in big productions which achieved considerable success in France, such as The Great Gatsby (Baz Luhrman, 2013), Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (Oliver Stone, 2010), or even in more stylish but appraised independent films such as Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011). 7. The publisher’s promotional piece on the back cover starts with: “So young and pretty, Tess makes every man’s head spin…” and finishes in equally sensational tones: “Will she endlessly be the victim of her shameful past?” Here, it is hard to resist the temptation of mentioning that this edition appeared in the wake of the tremendous commercial success of erotic bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey (E. L. James, 2011) in France. The heroine of the editorial phenomenon is offered a copy of Tess by the main male character, which, according to the marketing director of Hachette editions, apparently constituted reason enough to republish Tess with a new editorial line, a younger readership as target and a new marketing strategy explicitly using the connection, presenting Tess as “Fifty Shades heroine Anastasia Steele’s favourite book.” Hardy, for better – or worse, more likely. See www.20minutes.fr/culture/1117811-20130313-20130313-cinquante- nuances-grey-vendre-classique 8. The “Black Moon” YA edition mentioned above is only an abridged version of the novel. 9. Of course, the praise of Hugo by Hardy was not limited to those comments. He also paid tribute to Hugo the poet in the “Imitations, etc.” section of his Poems of Past and Present from 1901, in a poem simply called “From Victor Hugo.” The poem is an adaptation of Hugo’s “A une femme” (“To a woman”), published in Feuilles d’automne in 1831. 10. Jacques-Émile Blanche (1861-1942), Portrait de Marcel Proust, 1892, Huile sur toile – 73,5 x 60,5 cm, Paris, Musée d’Orsay. (last accessed 16 April 2018). 11. “Blanche had been corresponding with Hardy for some time and had been trying to arrange to paint his portrait, but he didn’t actually meet him until the afternoon on which this portrait sketch was painted […] in an hour and a half” (Alley 57). See (last accessed 16 April 2018). 12. “July 1926. Note. – It appears that the Theory exhibited in ‘The Well-Beloved’ in 1892 – has been since developed by Proust still further: – ‘Peu de personnes comprennent le caractère purement subjective du phénomène qu’est l’amour, et la sorte de création que c’est d’une personne supplémentaire, distincte de celle qui porte le même nom dans le monde, et dont la plupart des éléments son tirés de nous-même’ (Ombre. I. 40.) ‘Le désir s’élève, se satisfait, disparait – et c’est tout. Ainsi, la jeune fille qu’on épouse n’est pas celle dont on est tombé amoureux’ (Ombre. II, 158, 159) &c. see ‘Marsyas.’ Juillet 1926.” (Taylor 92) 13. The most recent translation by Carol Clark refers to “the pattern of the stone-cutters” (Proust 345). 14. See also McGarry and Eells. 15. Even more remarkable than a French critic's appraisal of The Dynasts is the actual existence of a French translation of such a fantastical work. It was done by Yvonne Salmon and Philippe Neel and appeared in 1947 (Paris: Delamain et Boutelleau, collection Le Cabinet cosmopolite no 90), no doubt a huge task which must have thus been carried out during WW2, quite adequately. 16. See also Morgan 47-48. 17. Roe further indicates that Larbaud made another similar comment in January 1925, placing Hardy next to other “European” writers: Proust, Pirandello, Ramon Gomez de la Serra. 18. See “Lettres anglaises”, the series of chronicles published in the highly respectable magazine Mercure de France, written from 1896 to 1930 by Henry Davray, a French critic and translator and a starch supporter of British literature. For further analysis of these reviews, see Escuret 2013.

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19. “Aucune œuvre ne m’apparaît moins dogmatique. Il ne me semble possible d’en dégager ni une glorification ni une condamnation de l’amour libre […]. Nous avons affaire à un penseur, qui est en même temps un artiste et un poète. Il observe et songe. Sa méditation se double de sa sympathie. Une immense pitié emplit son cœur et bientôt cette pensée domine toutes les autres, cette humble pensée, plus profonde que tous les systèmes, et bien plus humaine aussi, bien plus touchante.” (Roz 322-323) 20. La Revue des Deux Mondes had already published an article on Hardy in 1906, written by Firmin Roz whose translation of Jude the Obscure had appeared in 1901, as previously mentioned. 21. “La permanence du point de vue cosmique, l’entière fidélité à ce point de vue, ne comporte presque jamais l’extrême différenciation des œuvres entre elles ; et c’est pourquoi, dans le riche aquarium de notre mémoire où tant de chefs-d’œuvre poursuivent une existence mystérieuse, l’impression globale que dépose l’ensemble de l’œuvre de Hardy est plus puissante encore que celle de l’un, quel qu’il soit, de ses plus grands livres envisagé séparément.” (Du Bos 847) 22. Du Bos borrows the phrase from John Middleton Murry’s “The Poetry of Mr. Hardy” published in The Athenaeum in 1919. 23. “ce sens de la vie en général dont Hardy nous aère et nous suffoque est toujours, en dernier ressort, tonifiant, salubre et comme chargé de sel” (Du Bos, 854). 24. “Au fond, Hardy invente, parallèlement à d’autres romanciers européens […], un regard monographique.” (Verdier 19) The quotation is from Claudine Fabre-Vassas and Daniel Fabre’s preface to the book, “Du rite au roman : Parcours d’Yvonne Verdier”. 25. Jean-Jacques Lecercle is one of the few to have noted the importance of Verdier's study of Hardy. 26. See also Deleuze’s Dialogues II: “To fly is to trace a line, lines, a whole cartography. One only discovers worlds through a long, broken flight. Aglo-American literature constantly shows these ruptures, these characters who create their line of flight, who create through a line of flight. Thomas Hardy, Melville, Stevenson, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe, Lawrence, Fitzgerald, Miller, Kerouac. In them everything is departure, becoming, passage, leap, daemon, relationship with the outside. They create a new Earth; but perhaps the movement of the earth is deterritorialization itself. American literature operates according to geographical lines: the flight towards the West, the discovery that the true East is in the West, the sense of the frontiers as something to cross, to push back, to go beyond. The becoming is geographical. There is no equivalent in France. The French are too human, too historical, too concerned with the future and the past. They spend their time in in-depth analysis. They do not know how to become, they think in terms of historical past and future.” (Deleuze & Parnet 36-37). 27. Georges Devereux, Reality and Dream: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, New York: International University Press, 1951.

ABSTRACTS

Starting with the role of popular culture and more specifically cinema in the possible dissemination of Hardy’s name in the perceptions of a French audience, we briefly evoke the existing translations of Hardy’s works to look back at their reception in his own time. We evoke in particular the major French writers who have been most commonly associated with him as well as the contemporary critics who celebrated his work. We trace the presence of Hardy in French criticism throughout the 20th century up to the most recent academic activities, heralded

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by the French Association for Thomas Hardy Studies (FATHOM). Through such connections, it is (unsurprisingly) the universal strength of Hardy’s writing that stands out as a key feature in French critics’ appraisal of his work, both in his time and today.

Cet article s’intéresse tout d’abord au role qu’a pu jouer la culture populaire, et plus spécifiquement le cinéma, dans la dissémination possible du nom de Thomas Hardy dans les représentations du public français. Il évoque ensuite brièvement les traductions françaises des œuvres de Hardy et leur réception de son temps, en s’arrêtant plus particulièrement sur les grands auteurs français qui lui ont souvent été associés ainsi que sur les critiques contemporains ayant célébré son écriture. Il est ainsi possible de suivre le fil de cette critique hardyenne française tout au long du vingtième siècle jusqu’aux activités de recherche les plus récentes, portées ces dernières années par FATHOM, French Association for Thomas Hardy Studies. En tissant ces liens, on voit (sans surprise) se révéler la force universelle de l’écriture de Hardy, élément central de la célébration critique de son œuvre en France, tant aujourd’hui qu’à son époque.

INDEX

Mots-clés: France, réception, traduction, littérature française, critique littéraire, cinéma, culture populaire, Proust (Marcel), Zola (Emile), Hugo (Victor) Keywords: France, reception, translation, French literature, literary criticism, cinema, popular culture, Proust (Marcel), Zola (Emile), Hugo (Victor) oeuvrecitee Jude the Obscure, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Far from the Madding Crowd

AUTHORS

PEGGY BLIN-CORDON Peggy Blin-Cordon, holder of the “agrégation” in English Language and Literature, is a Lecturer at University of Cergy Pontoise, where she teaches literature and translation. A founding member and the treasurer of the FATHOM association (French Association for Thomas Hardy Studies), she wrote a thesis on generic experiments in the novels of Thomas Hardy. She specialises in Hardy and literary genres and also works on the influence of the publishing practice on 19th century fiction.

LAURENCE ESTANOVE Laurence Estanove teaches at Université Paris Descartes. In 2008, she completed and defended her PhD thesis entitled The Dynamics of Disillusionment in Hardy’s Poetry. She has published on Hardy’s verse as well as his fiction and other writings. In parallel, she conducts research on contemporary popular music.

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