Hardy, Conrad and the Senses by Hugh Epstein

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hardy, Conrad and the Senses by Hugh Epstein Brian Richardson (bio) Hugh Epstein. Hardy, Conrad and the Senses. Edinburgh: University Press, 2020. 304 pp. ISBN: 9781474449861. Hugh Epstein’s book is a revealing study of sensory experience, sight, and sound in the work of Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad framed largely by the perspective of Victorian science. The first chapter describes the relations between the work of both authors as perceived by their contemporaries, recent critics, and themselves. The most striking aspect of this account is the general lack of connections that have been made between these two figures who do in fact have much in common. Epstein starts by noting that both authors’ development occurred during the period where a simple concept of psychological materialism was replaced by an insistence on sense data; that is, we do not know things themselves, we know mental perceptions, and must therefore deduce those things from our perceptions. Epstein goes on to state that the two authors are alike insofar as they work within the encounters of the mind with experience, and are thus “drawn to sensation, to surfaces, to the meeting place of self and the surrounding world. Their novels are novels of inference” (4). Epstein usually examines a pair of novels, one by each author, in chapters devoted to related perspectives: Desperate Remedies and The Rescue and the physiology of sensation; Far From the Madding Crowd and Lord Jim for perceptions of sight and light; A Laodicean and “The End of the Tether” for visible space; The Return of the Native and Heart of Darkness for sonic imaging; Nostromo for the sound of history; The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Nostromo for the relations between self and world; and Jude the Obscure and Under Western Eyes for the senses in general. Given the subject of this journal, I will confine most of my remarks to the sections on Conrad and his works, while noting that Epstein makes a very powerful case for seeing the two authors as participating in a shared undertaking, one that distances them from seemingly similar projects by Henry James and Virginia Woolf. Epstein boldly states: “I am thus arguing for an impressionism in early Conrad which renders the physics of the scene that contains the mind, rather than the psychology of the mind that contains the scene. This ‘scenic realism’ draws Conrad closer to the modernity of Hardy than to the Modernism of James” (42; see also 25, 56). The first chapter explores the new role of “sensation” in later nineteenth-century science and culture, and stresses that the embodied mind organizes disparate sense perceptions into whole units. Epstein identifies numerous salient points of such contact in the work of both Hardy and Conrad. Discussing The [End Page 81] Rescue, he quotes a representative passage in which Lingard encounters the Traverses aboard their yacht; it is one which “deprived him in a manner of the power of speech. He was confounded. It was like meeting exacting spectres in a desert” (122). Epstein observes that “Conrad does not describe Lingard’s perception of the Traverses; rather, in a move typical of all his writing, to describe the sensation of being confronted by them, he leads away from perceptual veri-similitude, away from realistically accurate depictions of a seen surface, into stark and fantastic regions through the gateway of simile” (32). This chapter’s account of the act of sensation leads Epstein to reanimate earlier critical discussions as he contests Jesse Matz’s conception of Conrad’s impressionism (32–33) and astutely observes that Ian Watt’s term, “delayed decoding,” might more accurately be designated “delayed encoding” (34). We are able to get to the essence of much of Epstein’s contribution by looking at his treatment of the Victorian science of “sensationalism” and contemporary notions of vibrations and waves as he encourages us, while reading crucial passages reporting sensory effect, not “to construct convincing characters, each with a psychology formed of thoughts on their neural pathways,” but rather “to hear adjurations and assertions as participants in the vibrations of the moment, invested with human significance, caught in its passage over a particular...