Haunted Selves, Haunting Places in English Literature and Culture

1800–Present

Julian Wolfreys

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319980881
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319980898
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Haunted Selves, Haunting Places in English Literature and Culture offers a series of readings of poetry, the novel and other forms of art and cultural expression, to explore the relationship between subject and landscape, self and place. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach grounded in close reading, the text places Jacques Derrida's work on spectrality in dialogue with particular aspects of phenomenology. The volume explores writing and culture from the 1880s to the present day, proceeding through four sections examining related questions of identity, memory, the landscape, and our modern relationship to the past. Julian Wolfreys presents a theoretically informed understanding of the efficacy of literature and culture in connecting us to the past in an affective and engaged manner.

Part IPoem, Subject, Place

© The Author(s) 2018

Julian WolfreysHaunted Selves, Haunting Places in English Literature and Culturehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98089-8_3

Begin Abstract

English Losses: Thomas Hardy and the Memory of Wessex

Julian Wolfreys¹

(1)

University of Portsmouth, Bembridge, UK

Julian Wolfreys

The ultimate aim of the poet should be to touch our hearts by showing his own.

Leslie Stephen

We must regard [the sky at night], just as we see it, as a distant, all-embracing vault…. To find the ocean nevertheless sublime we must regard it as the poets do, merely by what the eye reveals.

Immanuel Kant

‘Gone’, I call them, gone for good that group of local hearts and heads.

Yet at mothy curfew-tide,

And at midnight when the noon-heat breathes it back from walls and leads,

They’ve a way of whispering to me—fellow wight who yet abide—

Thomas Hardy, ‘Friends Beyond’

End Abstract

1 I

Every time I approach Thomas Hardy’s poetry, I hesitate, and this is no exception. Hardy’s poetry is as infinitely demanding as it is intractable in its call. Such hesitation is, in no small measure, a problem summed up by J. Hillis Miller. Hardy’s poems, he observes with characteristically ironic understatement, ‘seem to slip away from commentary’. They ‘defy the techniques of analysis or do not seem to need them. Each poem’, Miller quietly asserts in a manner that appears an echo of Hardy’s poetic practice, as well as being a statement about the problem of Wessex and how one finds it (if it is to be located at all), ‘seems to say clearly what it means’ (Miller 1985, 269; emphasis added). Of this, there can be no doubt. That seems though; we should attempt to catch its register, much as we would what appear seemingly the most transparent of phrases in any one of Hardy’s poems.

The other difficulty in orienting one’s critical practice is, again as Miller observes, the sheer volume; as you may be aware, there are more than 900 poems. For a reader to do justice to Hardy, as the poet does justice in each of these poems to his subjects, both those who speak and those about whom the narrating subject is speaking, one would have to offer close readings of each. Every poem demands our equal attention and an appropriate response. This is the responsibility Hardy’s poems and their diverse speakers, subject matter, their various tones, and allusions or figures of speech require. As a result, all ‘attempts’, Miller wryly opines, ‘to reduce Hardy’s poetry to manageable size by selection are unsuccessful…. We need all of Hardy’s poetry’, even though this too will prove equally unsatisfactory, in any effort to ‘survey the whole and organize it…by noting similarities from poem to poem and generalizing on that basis’ (1985, 270). In large part this has to do with the singularity of each poem, as I have just implied in passing. Every poem’s singularity, each poem’s inescapable difference from every other, despite surface resemblances (of tone, subject matter, and so forth), offers what is described by Miller as mapping the ‘uniqueness of each moment of experience, as well as of each record in words of such a moment…’. In this, each, in being ‘incommensurable with all the others’ (Miller 1985, 270–71) forestalls much, if not all generalization or thematic ravelling. Thematization merely restates the obvious, and leaves before us a diverse textual body as resistant as it appears transparently visible. Thematization presents us with a convenient excuse for knowing what we want to take away ahead of any reading. We take the motorway to ‘Hardy country’ or a version of ‘Wessex’, avoiding the surprise of discovery that B-roads afford. Thematization misses ‘Thomas Hardy’ to the extent that his memory-work and the archive of individual attestations he produces are of a piece, however internally heterogeneous the archive may be. That archive is, on the one hand, the material collection of the poems, while, on the other, there is a virtual archive of human perception and the memory of forceful experience, which leaves every time its trace on the self.

Here are the difficulties, and in part I wish not to sidestep these so much as come at them from a different perspective, hence what my title identifies as ‘English losses’ and the ‘memory of Wessex’. My approach to Hardy’s poetry will seek to identify modes of perception and presentation in Hardy’s text, which speak of aspects of Englishness, facets of cultural and philosophical selfhood, for which the name of Wessex serves as synecdoche, rather than as material place, directly comprehended. Wessex as place, real or imaginary, is of significance, but for my purposes, it is less in the notion of place as verifiable territory than in the idea and all that it names which remains occluded in any sense of modern identity and Being. If I have any justification in this, it comes from Hardy himself, and from his sense of what writing should achieve, or strive for at least. This is illustrated by an entry in his journal from March 4, 1886, when thinking about novel writing in general, and subsequently editorialized regarding the structure of The Dynasts :

March 4. Novel-writing as an art cannot go backward. Having reached the analytic stage it must transcend it by going still further in the same direction. Why not by rendering as visible essences, spectres, etc., the abstract thoughts of the analytic school?

This notion was approximately carried out, not in a novel, but through the much more appropriate medium of poetry, in the supernatural framework of The Dynasts as also in the smaller poems. And a further note of the same date enlarges the same idea:

The human race to be shown as one great network or tissue which quivers in every part, when one point is shaken, like a spider’s web if touched.…

The Realities to be the true realities of life, hitherto called abstractions. The old material realities to be placed behind the former, as shadowy accessories, etc. (Hardy 1962, 177)

Here—and I do not think this can be overstressed—we read Hardy as a properly experimental writer, perhaps even, in hindsight, a proto-modernist. That network and the endless resonance of touch to which Hardy refers is what I am indicating through talking of a virtual archive and the traces of Being that resonate within it and for us, as readers of the poetry. Certainly, taking seriously the idea of Hardy as a writer of the phenomenal, of perception and subjective interpretation, leads us to understanding a writer whose later interests in Bergson , Proust, and others seems inevitable. It is important that we note here the stress on the poetics of language, of making visible the abstract and invisible, which Hardy takes as the true realities of our Being (and, indeed, by implication, the very notion of Being itself), as if he were striving towards both a phenomenology and an existential mode of perception. That he remarks Being as a network, in which the singular experiences of one person touching however indirectly on each and every other, and that this is at work not only in The Dynasts but ‘also in the smaller poems’, provides a clue for reading, which would avoid any thematic reductiveness.

Returning for a while longer to Miller though, I want to borrow from him a seemingly outlandish proposition, in order to amplify the implications of what has been said so far: for Thomas Hardy, ‘strict and humble fidelity…to the “impression” of each passing moment means becoming in turn a whole series of disconnected persons’ (1985, 281). This appears on the face of it, if neither illogical nor outrageous, then, at the least, a somewhat odd remark. How can a moment, or the impression thereof, become a ‘person’, much less various impressions of different transient instances become transformed into a ‘whole series’, a people, if you like, the people who populate, albeit in a ghostly manner, an equally penumbral Wessex? Or, to turn this around, is it that ‘Wessex’ names not a lost people or culture but instead what is ‘lost’ in, if not to, us all, which, as I shall go on to show, is a sense of how one bears one’s relation to the past? The self is haunted perpetually by a ‘past’, various pasts, which are, themselves, sites of the self having always already been haunted. The suggestion, made by Miller , proposes a complex chain of events in the act of writing poetry, which traces the motion from the celerity of phenomenal subjective registration to the ontological determination of the self, given shape by distinct moments of being, traced constitutionally on the self as a map of Being, the co-ordinates of which disappear from conscious perception. Hardy, the argument runs, strives to be faithful to the experience of what passes, of what the poet’s characters and narrators encounter and experience. Each evanescent event registers itself on Hardy’s subjects as the impression, a kind of brief illumination in the dark, where what is otherwise unremarkable is thrown into relief, however fleetingly. The materiality of the world at a given time, in a specific location, leaves behind it a trace on the consciousness of the beholder. What has occurred recedes as an event but leaves an after-image. This imprint is not retained by the retina however, but on the ‘mind’s eye’, to use this inaccurate if apparently, momentarily helpful metaphor, hence ‘impression’. An impression is never objective, never just there, it is always for someone. In this, it is an image produced by one person, often in Hardy’s poetry the figure who speaks, who offers confession or bears witness—to event, to place, and to the past. Importantly, the registered but now disembodied voice is transmitted to us, as those who are its recipients, who read its transcription, a transcription that is not merely of the voice, but of the event and place filtered, translated through the voice, to be turned into the impression, the image, the snapshot, often subsumed by the ‘I’ as if we were there, the effect being one which is ours to register, which leaves its trace on us. This has to be recognized all the more, for the good reader will note that rarely is the speaker of a Hardy poem ever, simply, identifiable as Hardy. (It would be at best an irrelevance, and at worst a misreading, to make some facile auto- or psychobiographical correlation, beyond that of perceiving Thomas Hardy as a writer who understands his responsibility to lie in giving voice to those who have no voice in the wider world, through literature, the arts, history, or other forms of widely disseminated discourse.)

Clearly though, Miller is not wholly comfortable with the idea of an impression, placing it as he does in quotation marks, even though it the word is adopted from Hardy’s 1901 preface. The problem with both ‘impression’ and the idea of a metaphorical psychic optic nerve and viewing apparatus is that both make too direct a connection to representation, and to a more or less direct means of connecting, whilst keeping separate, the viewing subject and the world witnessed. ‘Impression’ is both too vague; it suggests that which is, if not inchoate, then certainly unformed, insufficiently focused. Obviously many, if not all, of the poems are vivid; they cause the experience of the other to seem to ‘live’¹ spectrally in what and how they present, having that revelatory starkness of a night-time landscape revealed by a sudden lightning strike. The poems cause to return that which is felt, seen, heard, or apprehended with a sense of intense reality, image translated through apperception into the analogical equivalent of the vivid picture, the graphic mark, the self’s mnemic trace as revenant graphē itself.

At the same time, though, ‘impression’ tends towards a misapprehension of mimetic faithfulness, the fidelity of which is assumed on the ground that we, or at least the speakers of various poems, have in some fashion ‘processed’ the moment, and its data, in order to offer or reconstitute a somewhat painterly representation. To see the poems as being in some way representations misses the purpose and point, therefore. Hardy’s poetry does not aspire to representation. Its image-making powers are not those of the painter, but instead those of the photographer. Hardy might best be understood then as producing a text that is informed by, even as it causes to return, an apparently instantaneous registration, as the photographer would catch an image, in an instant, through a play of light and dark, through illumination and the effect of shadows.

The idea of representation and its assumption on the part of the reader should be abandoned, if we are to talk of Hardy’s poetry. Its implied plenitude is misleading, and those who know Hardy’s prose will appreciate this in recalling the rapidity with which he captures landscape, which, in photographic mode, can be dense if not overwhelming in its detail, and yet shaped from often sharp, bold lines, geometries of the world, and from a restricted tonal palette. Impressionistic, and yet sharp in a manner few impressionist painters desire, Hardy’s writing eschews representation in favour of presentation. Another problem with representation is that, whether in a prose passage describing a landscape, or in the form of a mental image, the act of representation implies that what was past can be recovered, can be brought back to the present, can be reassembled whole. To complicate this more, Hardy’s fidelity to the real, and to his subject’s experiences, might come from the endless effort to begin from representation, but to move from within the representational act beyond it, leaving behind the merely visible and visual, to convey that which, having left its trace on memory, returns as something indirectly perceived and, perhaps more to the point, felt. Temporal moment is destabilized from within representation, so that ano...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction
• The Chapter Before the First: Dwelling and the Uncanny
• Part I. Poem, Subject, Place
• Part II. Haunted Victoriographies, Late-Victorian and Neo-Victorian
• Part III. Rural Hauntings, English Losses, Cultural Memory
• Part IV. Voices in a Landscape
• Afterword
• Back Matter