TY - JOUR
AU - Carr, Holly Corfield
AB - Thomas Hardy’sprefacetothe 1912 reissue of The Well-Beloved ends with a line from Robert Browning’s poem ‘The Last Ride Together’ – ‘The petty done, the undone vast!’ – offering a model of the chiastic reciprocity operating within the peculiar structure of the novel. This extraordinary and extraordinarily ‘undone’ work reproduces chronology as parallelism, attending to time as vertical strata, banded by repetition. The verticality of time is proposed by the novel’s insistence upon repeatedly returning its protagonist to the sedimental landscape of the Isle of Slingers – a fictionalised Portland peninsula in Dorset – establishing a complex series of overlaps between human and geological scales within the narrative and without, finding continuities across Hardy’s wider body of work. For the reader, The Well-Beloved requires a divided attention, alert to the differences and repetitions between the stacked temporalities of the narrative as well as the contradictions and duplications present in the novel’s publication history. As Sheila Berger diagnoses Hardy’s imagination with ‘double vision’, it is worth attempting to read The Well-Beloved against the deep blur of the double in Hardy’s writing, the space of overlap presenting itself as, or gesturing towards, stratified depth.1The Well-Beloved rewards this mode of deep reading, which prioritises the parallel over the sequential in constituting a valuable document of seeing – and thinking – in depth at the start of the twentieth century. To begin biographically, the publication of The Well-Beloved marks the end of Hardy’s career as a nineteenth-century novelist and the beginning of his work as a twentieth-century poet, producing nine volumes of poetry until (and, with the posthumous publication of Winter Words, just after) his death in 1928. Within this chronology, The Well-Beloved occupies a space of overlap, positioned both at the turn of the century and the turn of Hardy’s writing career, while simultaneously reproducing these turning points within the material of the work, as Hardy’s prose folds lines of poetry into both epigraph and the body of the novel. In writing The Well-Beloved, then, Hardy was already looking in two directions at once, writing – and, indeed, rewriting – the novel as an exercise in transition. Yet it is Hardy’s rewriting that renders this point of overlap as a doubling or a doubled-over fold worth closer examination. The Well-Beloved both is and is not Hardy’s final novel, as the 1897 publication is a rewriting of the earlier text, The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved: A Sketch of A Temperament, serialised in the London Illustrated News between 1 October and 17 December 1892. In reorganising one to become the other, Hardy substantially altered the narrative’s events and the identity of the protagonist, who transforms from the recalcitrant Pearston to the reclusive Pierston. The revision of the protagonist’s name recalls the character of Edgar Fitzpiers, the serial adulterer from Hardy’s 1887 novel The Woodlanders, whose surname, in turn, rendered as son-of-Piers, gestures towards another fold in the chronology of Hardy’s writing. This is not to suggest that there is a direct lineage to be diligently traced through Hardy’s (re)writing. Even if this were possible or profitable to the reader, the bifurcating narratives of Pearston and Pierston complicate the ancestry of Fitzpiers, who is, considering that the publication of The Woodlanders precedes the arrival of Pierston by a decade, Hardy’s predecessor to both. Instead, it is helpful to consider the distances of Hardy’s movements between the two versions of The Well-Beloved, and through the different densities of the prose and poetry that constitute its text, as a contingent site of that extraordinary ‘vastness’ towards which the novel’s epigraph gestures. Indeed, to reconsider the ambiguities of the ‘undone’ is to look in two directions; both towards the unrealised and back at the done for, just as the spirits of both the unborn and the dead are vividly present in the landscape of The Well-Beloved. It is within the vertical spaces of the rock faces of Portland that that Hardy sees deep time compacted into what might be termed a vast simultaneity. The account of Pearston/Pierston’s own undoing(s) is complicated in the revision between the publication versions. The serialisation of 1892 sees Pearston dashed into the island’s ‘vertical face of stone’, while the publication of 1897 repurposes the same line to describe Pierston’s ‘well-beloved’ and her lover descending the ‘vertical faces of the rock’ in order to elope.2 The first Pearston’s suicidal leap into the island’s rock is, then, superposed with the second Pierston’s abandonment of his pursuit of the ‘well-beloved’, a migratory spirit that comes to rest in three iterations of the same woman: Avice Caro, her daughter and her granddaughter, at intervals of twenty years. While Pearston bigamously marries the third Avice Caro and attempts suicide, Pierston catches a cold and marries his former companion Marcia in order to provide his life and his relationship with Caro (who marries Marcia’s stepson) a ‘geometrical shape’.3 It is in the meticulous geometry of the novel that vertical readings between versions might continue horizontally across differences in parallel texts, rupturing and respecting the integrity of both. Rather than disregard the 1892 serialisation as an earlier draft of the 1897 novel, absorbed into the totality of the final version, a stratified and vertical reading recognises the vibrant simultaneity of the ‘undone’ in Hardy’s writing practice. This accommodation of vast simultaneity in The Well-Beloved is articulated in the vocabulary and syntax of geological formation. As Adelene Buckland proposes, the study of stratigraphy, maps, and geological surveys after 1815 prompted geologists to query the utility and suitability of the linear narrative mode in thinking and writing about the earth. Buckland writes that ‘the production of maps and surveys forcefully redirected geological attention from the causal relationships between geological events to a consideration of the structure and order of the earth’s strata’.4The Well-Beloved acknowledges and wilfully inhabits this unsuitable narrative mode, arranging the order of a single human life within three cycles, measuring Pearston/Pierston’s life against a geological scale so grand it might accommodate both the dust settling on the cliff’s edge and the cliff itself. These three cycles nominally move forward in time, yet a rapid oscillation between doubling and tripling is operating on various scales within the three cycles, as each successive pursuit of the ‘well-beloved’ approaches the ideal and exclusive pairing of romantic love, while within the span of the novel, three non-exclusive relationships are held in triplicate in a space of synchronic unity. Pearston/Pierston insists on renaming three women ‘Avice Caro’, blurring them into one ageless muse, whose identity and, even, agelessness are at once contradicted by the women’s overlapping and overtaking each other as two pairs of mother and daughter, a sequence within which one ‘Avice Caro’ is both mother and daughter, belonging to both pairings at different stages in her life. Between them, then, the placeholder ‘Avice Caro’ is fixed in static synchronicity at the vanishing point of the book’s landscape, allowing the narrative to progress as if by parallax rather than linear progression. In this way, the causal relationships between stages in Pierston’s life (and, indeed, the parallels with his double Pearston) are diminished. Instead, the banded rock of the novel’s location, the Isle of Slingers, plots the axes of narrative against the ‘infinitely stratified walls of oolite’, slabs of Roachstone composed from countless shells of prehistoric bodies and, Hardy writes, the ‘composite ghost’ of the recently drowned sailors and tradesmen whose bodies have ‘rolled each other to oneness’ amongst the sediment continuously accruing on the Portland peninsula of Dorset’s Jurassic coast (WB, p. 133). Again, Hardy overwrites himself, overlaying the ‘composite ghost’ of his prose writing in The Well-Beloved with the ‘softness and smoothness’ of dead soldiers returning from war to Portland Bill in ‘Souls of the Slain’, a poem written at the close of 1899 and published in 1901.5 In the second stanza, a tumbling anaphoric structure drags the reader under the ‘criss-crossing tides’ to the ‘base’ of the land hitting the sea bed: No wind fanned the flats of the ocean, Or promontory sides, Or the ooze by the strand, Or the bent-bearded slope of the land, Whose base took its rest amid everlong motion Of criss-crossing tides. A fault line of polysyndeton suggests an array of variables: the ‘promontory sides’, the ‘ooze by the strand’, and ‘bent-bearded slope of the land’ are opposed either side of the repeated ‘Or’. Yet the ‘promontory’ and the ‘strand’ are nearly synonymous with the ‘land’. Equally, the ‘sides’ and the ‘slope’ are equivalent to that which is ‘by’ the strand. Each variation of Portland is, instead, a reinforcement of the same site, capturing the landscape by degrees of difference in the language, as if watching it build up over stages. At the same time, the lineation is a descent that follows that same chiastic structure, with a rhyme scheme that repeats either side of a couplet at the centre, here ‘strand’ and ‘land’. Within the phonic balance of the stanza, the ‘flats of the ocean’ correspond to the ‘everlong motion’, a contradiction that finds sense in the inversion of the scene from the top of the stanza to the ‘base’ of Portland where the ‘criss-crossing tides’ are a shaping force in both the poetic structure and the seemingly calm seas. In both, the movement is in the depth of the image, and it is the stacked, striated structure of the revised landscape that helps to clarify the peculiarity of The Well-Beloved’s narrative. Pierston, like Hardy himself, is the son of a stonemason, and when he admits that he feels it is in ‘his weaknesses as a citizen and a national unit that his strength lay as an artist’, he describes the same relationship between personal and artistic value as is equated between Hardy’s doubled drafts. Indeed, this line remains unchanged between the serialised and final versions of the text, with the exception of the erasure of a hyphen in ‘national-unit’. The Oxford English Dictionary records that the first instance of ‘unit’ referring to a saleable item is found in 1885, exactly halfway between Hardy’s writing and rewriting of The Well-Beloved. By 1908 the meaning of ‘unit’ had narrowed to a measure of investment. Previous to this, ‘unit’ had, since 1570, been understood to refer to a state of oneness, a unified whole. In Hardy’s two texts, ‘unit’ becomes both a measure of unity and the dispersal of registered goods, at once a ‘whole’ body and the privatisation of the body, just as his (re)writing records the progress of a fossil language, compacted with all its subsequent meanings and utterances. Indeed, to move outwards from the scale of the single word, the unity of Pearston/Pierston’s experience is conjured from the similarity of its differences, just as his ‘well-beloved’ is attributed ‘one quality […] nothing was permanent in her but change’ (WB, p. 35). This contradictory compound, which is echoed in the ‘oneness’ of the ‘composite ghost’ and again repeated in the ‘flat […] everlong motion’ of the tides that the ghost must haunt in ‘The Souls of the Slain’, contributes to the image of humanity as conglomerate.6 This follows a trajectory of thought plotted from Darwin’s Origin of Species, which overlaid the fossil records of William Smith’s 1815 map of Britain’s strata to demonstrate that humanity could be considered the most recent sediment to settle upon the earth’s surface. The novel opens with an image that explicitly presents the generational inhabitation of the land as a geological, and distinctly vertical, sediment: ‘The towering rock, the houses above houses, one man’s doorstep rising behind his neighbour’s chimney, the gardens hung up by one edge to the sky, the vegetables growing on apparently almost vertical planes, the unity of the whole island as a solid and single block of limestone four miles long’ (WB, p. 3). This sense of deep (and deeply present) geological time informs the vast simultaneity present in The Well-Beloved and contributes to ‘the unity of the whole island’. On a greater scale is Marcel Proust’s observation, recorded in In Search of Lost Time, that the entire structure of The Well-Beloved is ‘a parallelism’ itself, superimposed in reverse, another chiasma over Hardy’s 1873 novel A Pair of Blue Eyes, in which a woman courts three men. Proust recalls the vertical organisation of the Portlanders’ houses to outline the arrangement of Hardy’s practice of overwriting his earlier works: ‘in short, all those novels […] can be superimposed on one another like the houses piled up vertically on the rock soil of the island’.7 At the same time, Proust locates another ‘unity’ in the island’s profound influence upon the characters’ experience of time – and death – as a ‘vertical’ phenomenon. In the third stage of his life, as ‘A Young Man of Sixty’, Pierston is confronted by his own ghost when ‘by chance the looking-glass had swung itself vertical’, reflecting back to him a Pierston from another age, unrecognisable for being ‘too grievously far, chronologically, in advance’ of himself (WB, p. 121). The three sections of the novel cast (and recast) Pierston as the perpetual ‘Young Man’ who, despite being ‘of Sixty’, is nominally the same ‘Young Man’ as the ‘Young Man of Twenty’ or the ‘Young Man of Forty’. In his agelessness, and his pursuit of the ageless muse, Pierston preserves his identity in the horizontality of his youth, perpetually moving back and forth between Portland and London, inadvertently following the progress of the island’s disrupted strata as they are relocated to build the city. As the island’s deep time is reorganised into the skyline, so too the ‘Young Man’ rearranges his life in parallel, trying to disrupt decisions made by the ‘Young Man of Twenty’ by repeating them and himself. Despite these efforts, the forward distance of projected time positions the mature Pierston ‘too […] far’ from himself. This contradiction precipitates a dangerous collapse of vertical time, and Pierston observes all the repeated layers of his life accelerate to one overwhelming image of simultaneity. In the vertical mirror, Pierston witness the composite image of his life which is necessarily also a vision of his death. Indeed, the verticality of death as an image is doubled between A Pair of Blue Eyes and The Well-Beloved just as layers of language and seams of Hardy’s wider reading run between the two texts. In A Pair of Blue Eyes, the protagonist falls down a rock face but, unlike Pearston, whose fall results in a severe head injury, Henry Knight arrives at an encounter with the fossil of a trilobite. The fossil is described with cryptic concision as ‘a creature with eyes’, calling to mind the work’s title and the reciprocity of the creature’s gaze doubled in Knight’s eyes.8 There is, in fact, a pair of pairs of eyes. What follows is a remarkably visual account of time that has ‘closed up like a fan’, in which evolution is documented in terms of deictic placements, with ‘behind him’, ‘Farther back, and overlapped’, ‘folded behind’, ‘underneath’ all suggestive of temporalities existing in strata: Time closed up like a fan before him. He saw himself at one extremity of the years, face to face with the beginning and all the intermediate centuries simultaneously. […] Behind them stood an earlier band. No man was there. Huge elephantine forms, the mastodon, the hippopotamus, the tapir, antelopes of monstrous size, the megatherium, and the mylodon – all, for the moment, in juxtaposition. Farther back, and overlapped by these, were perched huge-billed birds and swinish creatures as large as horses. Still more shadowy were the sinister crocodilian outlines – alligators and other horrible reptiles, culminating in the colossal lizard, the iguanodon. Folded behind were dragon forms and clouds of flying reptiles: still underneath were fishy beings of lower development; and so on, till the life-time scenes of the fossil confronting him were a present and modern condition of things. (PBE, p. 214) The positioning of the bodies of prehistory takes place over a fold, a space of synchronicity that might allow for those trilobite eyes to return Knight’s gaze. What is also helpful to note here is the intersection with another line of sight, the overlay of another, more recent ‘intermediate’ century and what J. Hillis Miller calls the ‘subterranean battle’ with Percy Bysshe Shelley, or what might be considered fossil fragments from Shelley’s poetry.9 To fully excavate these deposits, we must return to The Well-Beloved, where Hardy has embedded artefacts from earlier works within the text of the novel, including those borrowed from his own writing but also quotations from earlier writers. Each of the three sections of the 1897 novel opens with an epigraph, respectively taken from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, Richard Crashaw’s ‘Wishes for the Supposed Mistress’, and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73. More unusually, within the body of the text, poetic fragments from Shelley’s ‘Revolt of Islam’ and ‘Epipsychidion’ as well as from Thomas Wyatt and John Milton, interrupt and disrupt Hardy’s prose with their different densities, presenting themselves as textual fossils scattered in the rockfall of Hardy’s writing. Buckland describes the fossil in the late nineteenth century as a ‘cultural artefact’ whose meaning is dislocated from the site of discovery and instead embedded within the contexts of private or museum collections, artistic and writerly representations and other material conditions.10 Hardy’s own reading record, his fossil ‘collection’, is arranged like a subterranean seam of influence that erupts as ‘artefacts’ of recontextualised meaning and, elsewhere, as with Knight’s encounter with the ‘fan’ of time, remains underground in the outline of the text’s landscape. Hardy, moving between prose and poetry both at the time of writing The Well-Beloved and within the novel’s text, shifts his position between contemporary philological discourses that James Persoon helpfully outlines in his study of Hardy’s early poetry. Persoon details the expansion in nineteenth-century visions of language from its status as a sacramental gift to empirical models of language as an evolutionary behaviour or a means by which natural scientists might communicate their ideas about nature.11 In his survey, Persoon lifts from Richard Chenevix Trench’s 1851 publication On the Study of Words the phrase ‘fossil poetry’, which Trench himself has excavated from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1844 essay ‘The Poet’, in which Emerson writes ‘Language is fossil poetry’.12 This appealing aphorism sets up an equivalence, substituting the divine provenance of logos with a model of language as geological accretion. Language is, Emerson suggests, a composite of dead matter derived from poetry. Poetry is not formed from language but rather, as Emerson conceives, the Platonic ideal of language, a text that was ‘written before time was’.13 This formulates the poet as a carrier of this text, an imperfect stenographer who must make ‘transcripts’ of poetry’s ‘primal warbling’.14 Indeed, while Emerson’s description of ‘fossil poetry’ begins as if amongst the quarries of Hardy’s Portland, where ‘the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules’, he establishes here another equivalence with language as a landscape within which the poet stands as ‘the Namer or Language-maker’.15 Implicit within this comparison is, of course, the figure of Adam, ideal man and point of origin, complicating the aphorism’s arithmetic so that the equivalence of language and geology might become a vivid ambivalence that accommodates language in the dual positions of the subterranean fossil and the contemporary landscape, even a whole country: ‘Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination.’16 Indeed, the compound noun ‘fossil poetry’ suggests a healthy tolerance of anachronism, as a fossil perforates time, appearing as a historical marker within the present, whether on the beach or in the cabinet. Trench then digs up Emerson’s ‘fossil poetry’ and makes his own additions of ‘fossil ethics, or fossil history’, explaining that all words are petrifactions, not just of their etymologies but of the ‘revolutions in nations and in the feelings of nations’ through which they have passed.17 Indeed, Trench was involved with the Philological Society of London’s New English Dictionary, a precursor to the Oxford English Dictionary that was published in a series of fascicles throughout Hardy’s writing career, in an attempt to record and situate the developments and moral perversions of language. Trench, however, does not share Emerson’s ambivalence; nor does he locate a ‘fossil poetry’ within Emerson’s limestone and its ‘infinite masses of the shells of animalcules’, but instead insists that humans are driven to language by divine reason: ‘Man makes his own language, but’, he writes, ‘he makes it as the bee makes its cells, as the bird its nest; he cannot do otherwise.’18 Trench goes further to name Adam explicitly as Emerson’s true poet, the language maker endowed with the ‘power of naming’ each species presented to him by God, which is, incidentally, a power also provided to the nineteenth-century fossil collector, who encounters and names species delivered from before the birth of man.19 This parallel is not made by Trench, nor suggested by Emerson, but it is a connection made within Hardy’s writing. In A Pair of Blue Eyes, for instance, Henry Knight’s occupation as a geologist classifies him as a ‘pioneer of the thoughts of men’, an originator who sifts through taxonomies, ‘Zoophytes, mollusca, shell-fish’, until he might find ‘an intelligence worthy of the name’ (PBE , p. 214). His pained acknowledgement that the ‘slaty layers’ of the strata represent the indifferent millennia that had ‘known nothing of the dignity of man’, positions the geologist as both the most recent dusting of sediment and, simultaneously, the pinnacle of creation, the finale of evolved and named life (PBE , p. 214). Hardy fidgets between Emerson’s and Trench’s visions of ‘fossil poetry’, instead locating in the fossil itself a poetic capacity for synchrony and compression. In the opening to The Well-Beloved, then, the ‘infinitely stratified walls of oolite’ crush Hardy’s voice into that of Shelley, as Hardy’s prose continues directly into the quotation from Prometheus Unbound, ‘The melancholy ruins | Of cancelled cycles’ and, returning to the typesetting of prose, resumes Hardy’s voice ‘with a distinctiveness that called the eyes to it as strongly as any spectacle he had beheld afar’ (WB, p. 3).20 In the 1892 serialisation, Shelley’s voice sounds out for another line, jumping ahead within Pan’s speech at the close of Act IV, scene i, of Prometheus Unbound to ‘prodigious shapes | Huddled in grey annihilation’, which recasts the inhumane suffering at the hands of Zeus as Hardy’s inhuman (and godless) oblivion within deep geological time.21 However, these two lines are brought together, omitting over ten lines of Shelley’s original text which remain in the substrata of Hardy’s first draft and exist only in the shadow cast between drafts. To return to Shelley’s original at length allows the reader to excavate what might be considered a fossil record of The Well-Beloved, at the same time as finding its broader landscape in A Pair of Blue Eyes.     The beams flash on, And make appear the melancholy ruins Of cancelled cycles; anchors, beaks of ships; Planks turned to marble; quivers, helms, and spears, And gorgon-headed targes, and the wheels Of scythed chariots, and the emblazonry Of trophies, standards, and armorial beasts, Round which Death laughed, sepulchred emblems Of dead destruction, ruin within ruin! The wrecks beside of many a city vast, Whose population which the earth grew over Was mortal, but not human; see, they lie, Their monstrous works and uncouth skeletons, Their statues, homes and fanes; prodigious shapes Huddled in grey annihilation, split, Jammed in the hard, black deep; and over these, The anatomies of unknown winged things, And fishes which were isles of living scale, And serpents, bony chains, twisted around The iron crags, or within heaps of dust To which the tortuous strength of their last pangs Had crushed the iron crags; and over these The jagged alligator, and the might Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once Were monarch beasts, and on the slimy shores, And weed-overgrown continents of earth, Increased and multiplied like summer worms On an abandoned corpse, till the blue globe Wrapt deluge round it like a cloke, and they Yelled, gasped, and were abolished; or some God Whose throne was in a comet, past, and cried, Be not! And like my words they were no more.22 Here, I have highlighted the split citation used in The Well-Beloved in bold type, with the text between the two sections retained to record its influence in A Pair of Blue Eyes, in which the concertinaed centuries fold over the infinite regress of Shelley’s ‘ruins within ruins’. The landscape is ‘not human’, preceding Hardy’s vision where ‘No man was there’, while a similarly specific series of spatial locators positions one animal ‘over these’ and ‘over these’ until the reader arrives at ‘the jagged alligator’ and the ‘behemoth’ instead of the ‘colossal lizard’ at which Henry Knight arrives. In both Prometheus Unbound and A Pair of Blue Eyes, the ‘fishy beings’ swim underneath the scene which clouds – with either Shelley’s ‘worms’ or Hardy’s worm-like ‘dragon forms’ – until a halt is called. For Shelley ‘some God’ announces an end which is achieved in silence and, presumably, the impact of the comet within which the god is seated. For Hardy, the authority of the god and cosmic forces are substituted with the inevitable accrual of ‘scenes’ to which the fossil trilobite has borne witness, arriving not at Shelley’s ‘no more’ but, instead, simply ‘more’ of the progress of time and the confrontational difficulty of seeing it all at once, the ‘modern condition’ from which both Knight and Pearston/Pierston suffer. The difficulty of seeing, and of trusting sight, preoccupies Pearston/Pierston as he glimpses what he believes to be emanations of ‘the well-beloved’. The poetic ‘fossil’ that Hardy selects as the epigraph to ‘Part First: A Young Man of Twenty’ elides two stanzas from different sections of Crashaw’s poem ‘Wishes for the Supposed Mistress’ and omits the rest, suspending invisibly in its lacuna the line that projects the image of the idealised woman in ‘crystal flesh, through which to shine’. As earlier, the reader’s excavation of the text’s strata disregards its edited finality, instead ‘undoing’ the differences to record the depth of the intertextual blur. The body of the woman with ‘crystal flesh’ is buried in the body of Hardy’s book, and the fact that Miller characterises this presence as the result of a ‘subterranean battle’ is indicative of the critical reception of Hardy’s use of quotations, a mode that sees Hardy as indebted to or inspired by Shelley and struggling to resist his voice. Instead, I would propose that Hardy’s positioning of the ‘fossil’ record within the body of his text is a constituent of that great ‘composite ghost’ that haunts both Portland and the double vision of the novel. The prismatic ‘crystal flesh’ of the ‘well-beloved’ is both brightly physical and multiply projected in what is best described as stereoscopic dimensionality. In 1859, the year in which Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published, Oliver Wendell Holmes was studying what he called the ‘doubleeyed or twin pictures’ of the stereoscope, an apparatus invented by Charles Wheatstone in Britain in 1838 but which, thanks to a patent-free model that Holmes himself would introduce in 1861, would shortly achieve widespread popularity across both North America and Europe, enjoying an energetic revival throughout the 1890s.23 Indeed, the material culture of Victorian museums and lecture halls collected those ‘cultural artefacts’ and concentrated popular interest in natural history, yet it is the proliferation of stereoscopes that cultivated the depth of private space and introduced natural history across the classes, from quarrymen to geographers. In England, scenes of geological points of interest were popular subjects, allowing viewers to experience the illusion of depth in the image of a petrified tree in Portland (Figure 1) or the panorama of the Portland Race (Figure 2), where the ‘composite ghost’ of the drowned gathers in front of Hardy in both The Well-Beloved and the poem ‘The Souls of the Slain’. Figure 1 View largeDownload slide William White, ‘Portland: Petrified Tree’. Weymouth: The Royal Library, c.1860s Figure 1 View largeDownload slide William White, ‘Portland: Petrified Tree’. Weymouth: The Royal Library, c.1860s Figure 2 View largeDownload slide ‘Calm weather off Portland. Instantaneous’. Weymouth: The Royal Library, c.1860s Figure 2 View largeDownload slide ‘Calm weather off Portland. Instantaneous’. Weymouth: The Royal Library, c.1860s As for Hardy himself, Anna Henchman notes that The Popular Educator, a magazine to which Hardy subscribed as a young man, published ten articles on optics, including the stereoscope.24 Then, in his 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, Hardy compares the steaming depth of a bull’s nostrils to ‘the Thames Tunnel as seen in the perspective toys of yore’.25 It seems probable, then, that he encountered stereoscopic ‘toys’ as a child, offering the young writer access to the stereoscope’s peculiar combination of depth perception without movement. It is from this understanding that I suggest the stereoscopic viewer as a reading model for the horizontal axis of the plural vantages of The Well-Beloved’s texts, allowing the array of stratified differences to come to rest in a gesture of static depth. The stereoscope’s ‘twin pictures’ merge two parallel perspectives to construct a private perception of depth, reconfiguring the receptive position of looking towards an interior construction of layered reality. In the case of the petrified tree, the fossil stump is set apart from its background, the ‘stratified walls’ of the island’s cliff edge, and has only been revealed as its contextualising sediment has been eroded by time and tides. When the stereograph of the petrified tree is viewed through a stereoscope, it is the shift in the relative position of the fossil against the strata that produces the effect of depth. A similar shift takes place in Hardy’s account of the same fossil tree. Opening a chapter entitled ‘The Past Shines in the Present’, Hardy describes Portland as a ‘treeless rock’, suggesting that in order to find a tree, ‘it was necessary to recede a little in time – to dig down to a loose stratum of the underlying stone-beds, where a forest of conifers lay as petrifactions’ (WB, p. 62). His proposal of temporal recession is made as effortlessly as if he is recommending that the viewer shift perspectives from eye to eye to distinguish the tree from its surroundings. For Hardy, Portland is a ready resource of deep time that the visitor can move through with ease, occupying different temporalities in stereo so that they might strip back the strata simply to find shade from a tree that was ‘blown down by a gale in the Secondary geologic epoch’ (WB, p. 62). As Hardy visited Portland’s petrified trees and incorporated them into the landscape of The Well-Beloved, it is convenient to consider these images as a photographic record of Hardy’s coastline and, indeed, the immersive quality of the stereoscope might prove a useful resource for many researchers. However, the stereograph as an artefact of Hardy’s environment, culturally and conceptually, also offers a useful model for accessing the written site of that same coastline. Here, the term ‘site’ is employed to refer at once to the precise geographical location and the textual surface of Hardy’s writing, within which the places and geologies of the south-west are at once entirely specific and wholly imagined. Indeed, when the stereograph is considered independently and handled as an object, it presents itself as an odd double portrait. The doubled framing and, to the naked eye, the almost indiscernible difference between the images insist that their viewer reconsider the representational mode of the photograph itself. In a speech delivered on the occasion of being awarded the freedom of Dorchester in 1910, Hardy described the Casterbridge of his novels as a ‘dream-place’, a twinned town that was and was not Dorchester. What he dismisses in the same speech is the idea that his writing might render ‘a photograph in words’, describing realism as ‘that inartistic species of literary produce’.26 It is perhaps then useful to think of the stereoscope as the photographic rendering of the ‘dream-place’, a twinned perspective that, in juxtaposing two versions of the same scene, gestures towards the bifurcation of potential realities, the vast undone. In this sense, the stereoscope is the inversion of Hardy’s dismissal and constitutes ‘words in a photograph’ or, rather, language in image. A century after Holmes published ‘The Stereoscope and the Stereograph’, Roland Barthes wrote about the ‘stereographic plurality of the text’, a readerly double vision that makes explicit the legacy of the nineteenth century’s stereoscope and its capacity for experiencing a new and newly conscious ‘depth’, but also a tolerance for unity in plurality.27 The double image is an accurate portrait of a heightened anxiety inherent in a provisional, evolving language. Categories of linguistic ambiguity and arbitrary difference result in endless bifurcation, a process of change that moves language along horizontally, through synonym and homonym, error and tactic. Beyond the divergent double, time and language progress as if in a ‘fan’, a complex and irregular expansion of undoing. Hardy, then, is writing across this split site, an environment seen in double vision and a textual landscape in which the biblical Tree of Knowledge has been reconfigured as a pair of anachronistically emergent fossil stumps. The paradox of the ‘stereographic’ text is that it achieves complex unity within its difference, and a stereographic reading process focuses on the blur of the double, locating depth in the third space of the gap between the two. On the reverse of the second stereograph considered here (the lower half of Figure 2) is the handwritten note ‘Calm weather off Portland. Instantaneous’. This instantaneity is considered remarkable by the note’s author as it would have required a dedicated camera, built with two apertures and two shutters set apart at the same distance as human eyes sit in the skull. It is in this short distance that depth is conjured, yet many stereographic images were taken in quick succession, with the photographer shifting their body weight from leg to leg to approximate the distance between the eyes. These stereographs (of which Figure 1 is an example) included another axis of variation in the minor differences recorded in the short delay between one photograph being taken and the next, as Holmes finds when he notices the appearance and immediate disappearance of a woman on the shore of the Lake of Brienz, as he closes one eye and opens the other: ‘This is life; we seem to see her come and go. All the longings, passions, experiences, possibilities of womanhood animate that gliding shadow which has flitted through our consciousness, nameless, dateless, featureless, yet more profoundly real than the sharpest of portraits traced by a human hand.’ This is, surely, a description of the ‘Well-Beloved’ herself, her ‘crystal flesh’ dug up from Crashaw, now animated in sequences of silver halide. Indeed, in recalling the first Avice Caro, Pierston regrets that his ‘Well-Beloved’ later ‘learnt the unconscionable trick of inhabiting one image only’ (WB, p. 117). Marjorie Garson adds a helpful footnote to her essay ‘Written in Stone: Hardy’s Grotesque Sublime’, noting that despite Hardy’s insistence that he never read Holmes’s essays, there are fossils of Holmes’s ‘On the Stereoscope and the Stereograph’ scattered throughout his writing; in particular, Garson highlights in detail the similarities between Holmes’s description of a photographic negative and Hardy’s description of the dancers in The Return of the Native: there is ‘so much in common … the demonic ambience, the emphasis on depth, the image of gilt, the dark/bright eye – that one feels [Holmes] could have been in the back of Hardy’s mind when he was writing this passage’.28 Garson’s account is persuasive, yet regardless of whether Hardy read Holmes or would admit to it, there is certainly what Trench might identify as a ‘fossil history’ embedded within Hardy’s visual imagination, the inadvertent infolding of vocabularies introduced by popular texts and public fashion, amongst which Holmes’s widely read essay might be included. Hardy does indeed have ‘so much in common’ with Holmes, but perhaps because both men were keen observers of their worlds, perceiving unity in difference within a ‘dark/bright eye’. Hardy’s observations are profoundly active, and he often describes himself writing and looking simultaneously, even at risk of injury. On the publication of The Well-Beloved in 1897, Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote to Hardy to express his admiration of the work, and on 1 April 1897 Hardy replied, informing Swinburne that his own poetry is one of the texts fossilised as quotation within The Well-Beloved as ‘I used to read your early works walking along the crowded London streets, to my imminent risk of being knocked down’.29 Indeed, three years before Holmes followed the composite ghost of the woman, David Brewster had already speculated that the stereoscope’s ‘superposition is effected by turning each eye upon the object, but the relief is given by the play of the optic axes in united, in rapid succession, similar points of the two pictures’.30 Brewster’s explanation suggests that depth is produced in the rapid sidestepping between two different perspectives, with the brain blurring the two into a unified image. While this is inaccurate, Brewster’s notion of optics persisted and does perform the etymological difference between ‘spectator’ and ‘observer’, the latter implying the onlooker’s complicity and physical engagement, a distinction which Jonathan Crary is keen to delineate in Techniques of the Observer.31 Hardy is, then, an observer, an active participant in looking, for whom, as Sheila Berger writes, seeing is ‘not a metaphor for knowing; it is a form of knowing’.32 The immediacy of Hardy’s vision is demonstrated at the close of Wessex Poems, published directly after The Well-Beloved in 1898. The final poem of the collection is accompanied by Hardy’s own illustration of a scene ‘near Weatherbury’ on which is superimposed the outline of the writer’s spectacles (Figure 3). Figure 3 View largeDownload slide Thomas Hardy, ‘In a Ewelease Near Weatherbury’, Wessex Poems (London 1898), p. 197 Figure 3 View largeDownload slide Thomas Hardy, ‘In a Ewelease Near Weatherbury’, Wessex Poems (London 1898), p. 197 The layering of landscape and the observer’s private frame of vision has the dual effect of positioning the viewer within the embodied sight of the writer and highlighting the doubled nature of human vision; the spectacles divide the landscape between two discrete areas of focus, between which the bridge of the nose functions as a ligature or tie. Peculiarly, the areas within the frames, supposedly seen through the spectacles’ lenses, are not noticeably more or less visible, suggesting an immersive environment in which the embodied viewer’s ‘knowledge’ of the environment is structured less by clarity of vision than by the figure of double vision, which is to say both unclear and twinned. Simon Gatrell reads the troubling transparency of the lenses similarly, arguing that, as Hardy moved from writing novels to poetry and as he moved back and forth between Dorset and London, the interior dream-place of Wessex merged with ‘more of the environmental detail’ of the real south-west, until ‘after the publication of the map of Wessex accompanying the first collected edition of his work in 1895, the only distortion of the real caused by the lenses of the imagination worn by the writer was the presence of the lenses themselves, transparent, but not quite imperceptible’.33 David Trotter, too, notices a tactile and intimate point of contact in this type of looking, writing that modernism’s stereoscopy was an exploration of the haptic fastnesses of the image (‘in both senses’, he adds, of rapidity and attachment).34 For Crary this interior depth takes place in an ‘aggregate space’ of the body projected into space, producing a compartmentalised, compacted – and distinctly bodily – depth.35 Holmes writes that ‘The mind feels its way into the very depths of the picture’, while for Crary, the mind trips across a torn and distinctly geometrical surface that allows for concentrations of time and wrinkles in time: ‘an assemblage of local zones of three-dimensionality, zones imbued with a hallucinatory clarity, but which when taken together never coalesce into a homogenous field’.36 Here, too, are Hardy’s spectacles, holding apart the local zones of the left and the right eyes’ perspectives. This, of course, has the effect of mapping the stereoscopic onto the landscape, as Hardy’s illustration demonstrates the discrepancy between each eye’s ‘knowledge’ which is, in a complex pleat, folded into the body in an illusion of unity. What Crary calls the ‘binocular’ body is organised through the ‘optical chiasma’, a point behind the eyes where sight folds, each eye’s image crossing over to the other side of the brain.37 This consideration of the stereoscopic adjusts the frame from the double image to a series of planar surfaces that are fastened to each other and, as Trotter points out, fast in their dynamism and change. This seems at odds with the vastness of geological time but that is exactly the strangeness of the folded surfaces in The Well-Beloved; that time moves both rapidly and nowhere at once. Hardy’s doubled man Pearston/Pierston is described as ‘haunting’ the Thames wharves, as if temporarily detached from the ‘composite ghost’ of Portland’s humanity, watching quarried portions of his homeland, pieces of Portland stone, arrive so that he might ‘contemplate the white cubes and oblongs, imbibe their associations, call up the genius loci whence they came, and almost forget that he was in London’ (WB, p. 59). Hardy permits the dislocated stone to be both the deep accretion of personal memory and also the siteless metonymy of stone as cultural artefact and capital value, as it is the sight of the stone as cargo arriving into London that dislocates the viewer in a brief paradox of body out of place. Miller accuses Hardy of working with a ‘stonemason’s geometry’, and perhaps it is true that Hardy works as a sculptor might with his material.38 The categorical division of Lessing’s Laocoön: An Essay Upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry, which locked sculpture and poetry into separate dimensions, persists from its publication in 1766, maintaining sculpture as the viewer’s autonomous interaction with static, synchronic space and literature as its binary opposite, the reader’s experience of diachronic, temporal progression. Hardy’s The Well-Beloved is a text in which visual thinking and embodied seeing test the novel’s potential as site of synchronic – potentially sculptural – space. Indeed, in 1897 Hardy wrote separately to both Edmund Gosse and Florence Henniker to remind them that he had conceived of the whole plot of The Well-Beloved early in 1889 when a sculptor told him of how he ‘had often pursued a beautiful ear, nose, chin, &c, about London in omnibuses & on foot’.39 However, instead of the ‘stonemason’s geometry’, it is arguably the complex geomorphology of the stereoscopic photographer that better describes the shifts in the lines of sight and the excavations through the strata of Hardy’s literary landscape in The Well-Beloved. The stereoscope renders the delicate animation of that ‘one image’ of the Well-Beloved decades before cinema might be considered the unrealised medium that Hardy was blindly ‘groping for’, as Dallas Bower declared in his 1936 essay ‘Plan for Cinema’.40 The stereograph holds up the twin frames of the unresolvable contradiction, the vast undone that operates at the very heart of Hardy’s writing and, particularly in The Well-Beloved, which captures a double portrait Hardy as prose writer and poet, both within and without the text. At the same time, the stereograph gestures towards the deep synchrony of the ‘dream-place’, the stratified landscape that is composed of all times and all traces at once. Between the two, in the deep blur of the overlay, the complex pleat of the closed fan creates a structure in which Hardy allows distant objects to touch, to fasten. Hardy’s own notebooks are littered with instances of this deep blur. In a hurried note recorded in 1906 and titled ‘Simultaneousness’, he attempts to fasten together his beloved Shelley with ‘Mary Godwin coming out at dawn on July – 1814, to meet Shelley: J. Keats at H. at the moment: Byron at – doing what? Wworth at – doing what? Etc.’41 Similarly, Hardy later recorded an idea for a poem in which the poet ‘feels his way into a church at midnight’ where there is a ‘marriage going on at the altar in costumes of 100, 200, 300, years ago. &c.’ or, most distressingly, another idea titled ‘The Unborn & The Dead hold a meeting. The former have summoned the latter to ask their opinion on being born’.42 Hardy returns repeatedly to the image of the composite ghost, whose splintered chorus haunts the landscape in which he worked, as well as the landscapes depicted in his texts. In visualising Hardy’s writing in stereo, it is possible to measure the accrual of other, earlier sediments as overlaps rather than antecedents. Across a difficult, wrinkled plane it becomes possible, even necessary, to learn to read his work as Hardy might have read the Portland cliff face, deep in the text’s ‘criss-crossing tide’, looking – and reading – in both directions at once. 1 Sheila Berger, Thomas Hardy and Visual Structures: Framing, Disruption, Process (New York 1990) p. xi. 2 Thomas Hardy, The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved & The Well-Beloved, ed. Patricia Ingham (London 1997) pp. 163, 322. 3 Thomas Hardy, The Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament (1895), ed. J. Hillis Miller (London 1976) pp. 149–50. Further references in the text are to this edition (WB). 4 Adelene Buckland, ‘Thomas Hardy, Provincial Geology and the Material Imagination’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 6 (2008) p. 2. 5 Thomas Hardy, Poems of the Past and Present, 2nd edn. (London 1903) p. 24. 6 Ibid. 7 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: The Captive [and] the Fugitive, rev. D. J. Enright, 7 vols. (London 1992) v. 430. 8 Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes (London 1998) p. 213. Further references, to PBE, are to this edition. 9 Hillis Miller, Introduction to The Well-Beloved, p. xii. 10 Buckland, ‘Thomas Hardy, Provincial Geology and the Material Imagination’, p. 5. 11 James Persoon, Hardy’s Early Poetry: Romanticism through a ‘Dark Bilberry Eye’ (Lanham, Md. 2000) p. 50. 12 Richard Chenevix Trench, On the Study of Words: Lectures Originally Addressed to the Pupils at the Diocesan Training-School, Winchester, 18th edn. (London 1882) p. 5; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Essays (Harmondsworth 1982) p. 271. 13 Emerson, Selected Essays, p. 262. 14 Ibid., pp. 262–3. 15 Ibid., p. 271. 16 Ibid., p. 281. 17 Trench, On the Study of Words, pp. 5, 10. 18 Ibid., p. 15. 19 Ibid., p. 14. 20 Percy Bysshe Shelley and others, Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts, with Other Poems (Cambridge 2013) p. 137. 21 Ibid., p. 138. 22 Ibid., pp. 137–8. 23 Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘The Stereoscope and the Stereograph’, The Atlantic, June 1859. 24 Anna Henchman, The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature (New York 2014) p. 21. 25 The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character (London 2003) p. 237. 26 Florence Emily Hardy, The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892–1928 (Cambridge 2011) p. 144. 27 Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London 1977) p. 159. 28 Marjorie Garson, 'Written in Stone: Hardy’s Grotesque Sublime’, in Keith Wilson (ed.), Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate (Toronto 2006) pp. 96–117: 117. 29 The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, viii: Further Letters 1861–1927, ed. Michael Millgate and Keith G. Wilson, 2 vols. (Oxford 2012) ii. 158. 30 David Brewster, The Stereoscope: Its History, Theory, and Construction, with Its Application to the Fine and Useful Arts and to Education (London 1856) p. 53. 31 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass. 1990). 32 Berger, Thomas Hardy and Visual Structures, p. xii. 33 Simon Gatrell, Thomas Hardy’s Vision of Wessex (Basingstoke 2003) p. xii. 34 David Trotter, ‘Stereoscopy: Modernism and the “Haptic”’, Critical Quarterly, 46/4 (2004) pp. 38–58: 39. 35 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 126. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., p. 133. 38 Miller, Introduction to The Well-Beloved, p. xv. 39 Hardy, Collected Letters, p. 158 (1 Apr. 1889); p. 169 (3 July 1889). 40 Dallas Bower, Plan for Cinema (London 1936) p. 70. 41 Thomas Hardy’s ‘Poetical Matter’ Notebook, ed. Pamela Dalziel and Michael Millgate (Oxford 2009) p. 54. 42 Ibid., pp. 61, 59. © The Author, 2017. 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TI - Composite Ghosts: A ‘Doubleeyed’ Reading of Thomas Hardy’s The Well-Beloved
JF - The Cambridge Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/camqtly/bfw038
DA - 2017-03-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/composite-ghosts-a-doubleeyed-reading-of-thomas-hardy-s-the-well-3uXsIXYYPC
SP - 1
EP - 20
VL - 46
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
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