Hardy, Conrad and the Senses by Hugh Epstein

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hardy, Conrad and the Senses by Hugh Epstein Yael Levin Hugh Epstein, Hardy, Conrad and the Senses. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. 312 pp. Hugh Epstein’s Hardy, Conrad and the Senses brings together an impressive array of known and lesser-known Victorian scientists, philosophers, and psychologists to stage a defamiliarizing return to Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad. Testing assumptions of historical periodization that have traditionally separated critical approaches to their work, the book shows that the labels Modernism and Victorian have muffled significant connections between the two authors’ representation of sensory impressions. Epstein uses this new focus to reframe the comparative analysis beyond the critical tendency to read the two authors [End Page 374] together through their shared pessimistic vision of a human existence bereft of providence. A book of criticism can offer no greater reward than allowing us to see works we know and love in a new light. Reading these novels alongside a historically informed conceptualization of the senses, Hardy, Conrad and the Senses does precisely this. The book proceeds as an interrogation of the work of the senses, a preoccupation that Victorian art shared with the physical sciences. Epstein asks that we view what has been deemed a uniquely modernist preoccupation through Victorian discourse and ideas. This is a theoretically simple yet original move. Distinguishing between the literary impressionism associated with modernism and the work of the authors in question, Epstein shows that the focus here is not on the consciousness of the focalizer. Unlike Henry James, Walter Pater, and Virginia Woolf, Hardy and Conrad look to the “vibrations in the ether,” “the relations between things” that we associate with atmosphere. Conrad’s sensationism, he writes, “conceives of receptiveness and understanding as a continual process of exchange rather than as a raid whose haul is secreted within imprisoning walls; and the action of each novel is to disallow their desire to remain onlookers in an unassailed subjectivity” (42). The drama unfolds as a tension between the “vivifying receptiveness of the senses” that threaten “to absorb one into the present moment” and the need to “maintain the self-possession which enables one to negotiate the world” (19). It shuttles from mind to mood, from interiority to exteriority, a “physical involvement in a scenic moment that is also active in producing consciousness” (49). This is a recording of the present that contains consciousness rather than being contained by it. Epstein terms this literary method scenic realism. It is the particular form which marks the contribution of Hardy and Conrad to the swelling of novelistic description in the age of the observation of phenomena. It asks for a responsiveness to atmospheres and vibrations, a bodily cosmic awareness, such that the components of a scene as a whole, including human consciousness, infuse the rendering of moments as they pass. The written scene that results thus belongs neither entirely to a personal inner conception, nor entirely to a visible external social or physical reality, but to the moment in which those two coalesce to realise themselves as an event. (70) Such literary exploration proves significant against the backdrop of a conceptualization of subjectivity that is seen as inherently passive. American historian and diplomat Henry Adams (1903) describes the subject as “a conscious ball of vibrating motions, traversed in every direction by infinite lines of rotations or vibration” (qtd. in Epstein 50). It is precisely the anxiety owing to this passivity that generates the need to re-establish one’s sense of identity and individuality. This is an important qualification to a conceptualization of a passive subjectivity, as current insights on the same speak to the way one becomes with the world [End Page 375] rather than as a separate entity. Epstein compares the two conceptualizations to suggest that though contemporary ideas might recall the scientific and literary Victorian experiments, they cannot be squared with Victorian thought. The immanent conception of self as it is viewed today is often associated with moral development rather than with a threat to our place in the world. Though he highlights this important distinction, Epstein also persuasively shows how Hardy and Conrad anticipate this new way of thinking. ________ While the title suggests an...