Hugh Epstein, Hardy, Conrad and the Senses (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020) 312 pp. £27.99 Ebook ISBN: 9781474449885
Hugh Epstein’s book offers a persuasive and deftly managed reconsideration of Hardy and Conrad, through which they emerge as ‘compatible’ writers and as particularly eminent figures in late-Victorian culture more broadly (18). Indeed, Hardy, Conrad and the Senses does important work not only because it explores what the two writers shared rather than their differences but, especially, because it offers a refreshing and extremely well-documented re-reading of their work through the lens of the scientific discourse of their time. Ultimately, Epstein’s contention is that Hardy’s and Conrad’s ‘vocabulary and thinking’ (2) dialogically intertwine them with contemporary developments pertaining to the senses (most prominently sight and hearing) and the concerns about man’s place in the world, identity and subjectivity that arose from them.
From the outset, the book operationalises the cultural dynamics for which Epstein argues. The opening chapter, for instance, reviews Desperate Remedies (1871) and The Rescue (1920) against the backdrop of texts such as Alexander Bain’s The Senses and the Intellect (1855), Edward Youmans’s The Correlation and Conservation of Forces (1865) and G. H. Lewes’s The Physical Basis of Mind (1877). Parallel readings of these works prove very productive. On the one hand, they reveal mid- to late-nineteenth-century scientific understandings of experience and knowledge as deriving from physical impressions while exploring the literary translation of these ideas. On the other hand, the focus on Hardy’s and Conrad’s ‘intense attention to the impact of sight, sound and touch’ (36) leads Epstein to propose ‘delayed encoding’ as a historically more accurate reading of their portrayal of characters’ encounters with the external world than Ian Watt’s ‘delayed decoding’ (34).
To further elucidate how Hardy’s and Conrad’s thinking about nature and artistic representation aligns, through their desire to capture the truth ‘“underlying”’ reality (64), Epstein then zooms in on their personal letters, notebooks and critical writing. Moreover, drawing on a wide array of texts spanning from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, chapter 2 also serves to establish Hardy’s and Conrad’s distinctive take on realism. Description in these writers’ works, Epstein posits, demonstrates that ‘knowing is not, primarily, mental contemplation’ (71). Rather, the ‘scenic realism’ Epstein ascribes to Hardy and Conrad requires ‘a responsiveness to atmospheres and vibrations’ (70) that in turn demands a scene-by-scene reading of their novels.
Chapter 3 practically illustrates Epstein’s point through paired examinations of Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and Lord Jim (1900), A Laodicean (1881) and ‘The End of the Tether’ (1902) in the context of late nineteenth-century theories of light and vision emerging from the work of James Clerk Maxwell and Herman von Helmholtz. Epstein first surfaces different aspects of the contemporary debate on whether vision results from ‘direct involuntary participation in physical processes’ or whether it involves ‘indirectness and re-presentation to mediate any engagement with the surrounding world’ (85). This paves the way for the nuanced variations he encounters in the ‘lit moments’ of the novels (87). Indeed, Epstein both notes the strategies which help vision ‘escape from mental containment’ in Hardy (e.g., through the subtle shifts in narrative perspective in the opening scene’s portrayal of Bathsheba) and acknowledges the ‘more metaphysical dimension’ of light and its association with ‘psychic need’ in Conrad’s Lord Jim (92; 103).
Delving deeper, chapter 4 studies Hardy’s and Conrad’s engagement with the competing theories of sound – as a property of objects or as waves – also gaining ground from the 1860s, starting with Helmholtz’s publication of On the Sensations of Tone (1862) and of John Tyndall’s lectures on Sound (1867). Here, Epstein punctuates his argument about the significance of sound in Hardy and Conrad – and especially of how it helps to render ‘more unsettling […] less easily closed’ scenes (147) – with exquisitely piercing semantic and grammatical analysis. His comparison of the use of sighs in The Return of the Native (1878) and of whispers in ‘Heart of Darkness’ (1899) is especially fascinating. It demonstrates how Hardy and Conrad anticipated a more modern theory of sounds – as events in themselves – at the same time as furthering Epstein’s interest in the link between attention to the auditory dimension and readers’ immersion in the text.
Immersion is a prominent feature of chapter 5, too, although in this instance it refers to Hardy’s and Conrad’s portrayal of their characters’ existence. In this chapter, indeed, Epstein’s concern is with the ways in which The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Nostromo (1904) bring the physical and the mental closer together than had been the case in previous works. Frequent references to Bain, Lewes, and Herbert Spencer serve once more to link Hardy’s and Conrad’s thinking and writing with contemporary developments in physiology and psychology while allowing for the varied – sometimes opposite – experiences to which the ever-evolving relationship between self and environment can be attached. A highlight of this chapter is Epstein’s careful analysis of Hardy’s construction of the ‘uncertain distinction between the objective and the subjective world’ and how it frustrates straightforward interpretations of the scene of Tess’s rape (213).
The final chapter provides another example of brilliant argumentative progression. Here, Epstein studies Jude the Obscure (1895) and Under Western Eyes (1911), paying particular attention to how words and debates – and, consequently, the human and mental – prevail in these later novels. Convincingly, he connects the most pessimistic turn of these texts with their ‘tragic divorce from the senses’ (256). Moreover, Epstein reads the sense of disconnection and distress that emerges as bringing Hardy and Conrad closer to the modernist critique of idealism.
Elsewhere in the book, however, Epstein proves how Hardy’s and Conrad’s overarching predilection for sensations over emotions and thoughts brings them together and separates them from both George Eliot’s ‘analysed moral world’ (76) and the interest in the perceiving mind preferred by modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf or Henry James. In the process, Epstein exposes the artificiality of literary periodization and of genre-related parameters while masterfully demonstrating how contextually situated readings can shed new light into matters of literary style. All in all, Hardy, Conrad and the Senses deftly combines a deep concern with literary style with a strong interest in empirical science. Indeed, Epstein effectively deploys the powers of observation associated with the latter to offer historicised close readings of the texts which are superbly attentive to turns of phrase, semantic inclinations, shifts in narrative perspectives and even authorial revisions.
Encarnación Trinidad Barrantes, The Open University
