frustrations climax in Hardy's novelistic career with the stories of Angel and Tess, Jude and Sue. Even when some minor consummations are allowed in the text, Hardy is begrudging, so that the marriage of the endlessly patient Diggory Venn to Thomasin Yeobright is withdrawn in a revealing footnote in which Hardy encourages the reader to 'choose between two end-540- ings,' of which the 'more consistent conclusion' is governed by an 'austere artistic code.' Consummation not only entails a kind of postcoital lapse from passion and disintegration of desire; it also means the dangerous crossing of class boundaries, social impropriety (with attendant punishment), and the thwarting of professional and social ambition.
The transition from seeing (or writing) to engagement, which may well be provoked by seeing or writing, is usually the point of crisis and peripety in Hardy (which is one of the reasons that so many of his stories center on those rare moments when seeing gives way to touching: if frustration is agonizing, the consequences of consummation are catastrophic). The narrative compulsion to distance is a function of the intensity of desire imagined or dramatized in his work, and of the ambition that is a condition of the work itself; desire and ambition in this world are not quite respectable. Distance is the potential instrument of evasion and disguise. The novels express implicitly a continuing sympathetic imagination of recklessness and abandonment of constraint while at the same time dramatizing the way such abandonment inevitably entails catastrophe. Many of the novels develop as stories of the consequences of some single «lapse» into passion, ambition, or recklessness-Elfride's kiss of Stephen Smith in effect generates the plot of A Pair of Blue Eyes; Bathsheba's childish valentine to Boldwood leads to something like tragedy, as does her succumbing to the magnificently conscienceless sexuality of Sergeant Troy; Two on a Tower traces Lady Constantine's fall into passion for the young astronomer, Swithin, and the deadly consequences of that fall. Most notoriously, The Mayor of Casterbridge begins with Henchard's sale of his wife as he releases himself to his ambitions-'If I were a free man again I'd be worth a thousand pound before I'd done o't.' Many of the novels explore the consequences of a protagonist's attempt to rise above his or her class-Stephen Smith, Swithin St. Cleve, George Somerset, Ethelberta, Clym Yeobright and Eustacia Vye, Grace Melbury, Jude. Their narratives tend to mix class ambition with sexual desire, social convention with «natural» force, in ways that often mean failure and death.
At the same time, they suggest ambition for power and recognition, fear of the consequences of such aspiration, refusal to impose on these patterns of frustration and disaster (or rare success) a George Eliot-like reading of the world as governed by moral Nemesis. Failure and defeat are not the consequences of the moral order of the universe but of the natural order itself and of the conflict between desire and the arbitrary -541- restraints of social systems. The asymmetry between desire and social order suggests, as does so much else in Hardy, that the rules and language humans use to deal with the world are mere constructions. In such a world breaking the rules, abandoning constraint, is not evil; it is simply not respectable.
The other side of Hardy's evasiveness and caution, the desire to see without being seen, is the strong desire to touch and control and to be seen, but seen favorably. It may be the «Laodiceans» who survive in Hardy's world, but it is the Mayors-and even the Sergeant Troys-who win the narratives' deepest sympathy. In the long run, the «Laodiceans» are only a little less likely to suffer disaster than the Henchards: preoccupation with safety and invulnerability rarely means success, precisely because the world is not governed by moral Nemesis but by material laws that have no relation to human consciousness except that they may be perceived by it. Invulnerability becomes very problematic even at moments when the distance is maximal and is dramatized within the stories themselves in the events and perspectives of the characters.
The visual provides the detachment that allows Hardy to admire and even exacerbate his own sense of vulnerability, and at the same time to resist it. It is the formal expression of the intensity of Hardy's preoccupation with the humiliations of public exposure and the anxieties produced by his recognition of his complicity with forces and energies he rejects. It shapes his nervous sensitivity to questions of class, propriety, community judgment; it threatens always to reveal the sexuality hidden under layers of decorum and to express the dangerous desire that animates the social and the natural worlds. The sexuality to which Hardy was reluctantly but inescapably attracted through the simple physical presence of women always threatens to thwart social advancement, to make rational control impossible, to undermine respectability and power. More dangerously still, sexuality threatens to break down the strategies of defense by which protagonists seek to keep themselves, like Hardy's narrators, invulnerable. Hillis Miller notes that 'all his life Hardy hated to be touched. To be touched is to be incarnated, to cease to be a spectator, and to be brought physically into the world of others, to become vulnerable to their energy and will. He wanted to remain invisible, untouchable, a disembodied presence able to see without being seen or felt.' -542-
The strong and persuasive readings of Hardy, particularly Miller's, account admirably for the formal features of his art, usually with attention to epistemological, phenomenological, or aesthetic concerns. J. B. Bullen keenly perceives the thematic and formal importance of seeing in Hardy, and connects it with aesthetic and pictorial traditions in ways that illuminate many of the novels. Talking of Far from the Madding Crowd, for example, he notes 'how deeply the matrix of the story is penetrated by the moral implications of perception.' Many of even the most pedestrian of Hardy's novels contain stunning moments of poetic vision that result from unexpected observations of people or events or natural phenomena unsuspectingly observed by acute, surprised, or wary eyes. In an extremely interesting discussion of Hardy's sense of the irrelevance of the material world to personal desire and feeling-an epistemological issue-Tom Paulin points to a Hardy sketch for his poem, 'In a Eweleaze Near Weatherbury.' The sketch superimposes a pair of spectacles on a drawing of the leaze, where the poet in his youth had danced with a lover. It is a striking, surreal image, evocative of Magritte both in the stark incompatibility of the human contrivance with the natural landscape and in the transparency of the spectacles, which allow the leaze to show through. Paulin sensibly emphasizes the 'random and gratuitous' relationship between spectacles and landscape and the implicitly 'anomalous relationship of man to the outer world which is the object of his knowledge.' But the image is particularly striking in another way: it projects with a mad sort of simplicity the sense projected by so many of Hardy's novels, that everything in the world is under silent scrutiny. Nothing in the almost barren landscape of the leaze-material and unconscious as it is-escapes the narrator's or poet's eye, and nothing is aware that it is being observed.
The image has an almost paranoid quality, like the narratives themselves, and what might be discussed comfortably as an epistemological concern must be understood as a tensely emotional one: somebody is watching and ready to expose you. The function of poet and narrator is, precisely, to observe, and it is impossible to imagine the most profoundly nonhuman landscape that is not infected with the self-consciousness of an observer while at the same time remaining entirely indifferent to that consciousness. In the poem Hardy's sketch accompanies, the speaker, Jocelyn-like, feels himself to be precisely who he was when he danced many years before with his lover-'I remain what I was then.' The longing for sexuality is there, but an irrepressible self-543- consciousness, intensely observant, detects the 'little chisel / Of nevernapping Time,' which, when it thinks the poet sleeping, he feels 'boring sly Within my bones.'
A pair of spectacles is superimposed on all of Hardy's worlds. The world is watching and being watched, and the poems and novels strain to a condition of awareness that will protect against the watchers. In vain, of course. The self-conscious poet cannot stop, though he can detect the 'boring.' Seeing becomes a defense only in that it allows the observer to anticipate the worst, to know at the very height of passion that the passion is temporary. Being observant of an observant world means being alert to the catastrophes of unself-conscious lapsing into touch, the vengeance of a class-bound culture and a temporally bound sexuality.
In the rest of this chapter I want to look closely at two exemplary moments of vision in Hardy's work (since they link with many others in the other novels) to suggest how the psychological, phenomenological, and aesthetic qualities analyzed so brilliantly by critics like Bullen and Miller can be best understood in their relation to issues of class and sexuality. What shapes Hardy's art, his extraordinary loving and frightened perception of the visible world, his seeing, and his understanding of seeing, is largely the ambition and the associated shame and guilt and vulnerability that become the narrative centers of most of his novels.
It is possible to think of Hardy's novelistic career as framed by two window scenes that intimate the painful paradoxes of his visual imagination-the impossibility of engaging or affecting what is observed, its power to wound the perceiver, and its extraordinary mystery and beauty. The first of these, in Desperate Remedies, describes Cytherea Graye's almost surreal observation of her father's fall to his death; the last, in Jude the Obscure, records Jude's deathbed observation of the crowds in the Christminster Street and then, while he lies dead by the side of the window, the sounds of the cheers of the young men as 'the doctors of the Theatre' confer 'honorary degrees on the Duke of Hamptonshire and a lot more illustrious gents of that sort.' The window is a constant resource for Hardy's storytelling, often opening up major new developments, providing the protagonists with access to important
