Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism by Mattison Laci Ardoin Paul Gontarski S. E

Author:Mattison, Laci,Ardoin, Paul,Gontarski, S. E.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

I

Hardy described Tess Durbeyfield, in a Deleuzian phrase, as a “sheaf of susceptibilities,” and nothing distinguishes the novelist’s writing more than its pervading sense of a decentered world in which the personal and human are held in abeyance, while the mind, sprung open, discovers itself through the micrologic of its disjoined encounters of sensation, impression, and affect; and through the incidental, contemplative recoil of its articulations. Woolf quotes a phrase from Under the Greenwood Tree that conveys this sense of the mind’s physical condition in Hardy, a typical example of how his prose raises to expression a passing and subliminal impression. Her implication is that no other author could have written it:

And yet what kindly lover of antiquity, what naturalist with a microscope in his pocket, what scholar solicitous for the changing shapes of language, ever heard the cry of a small bird killed in the next wood by an owl with such intensity? The cry “passed into the silence without mingling with it.” (246–7)

This description of a cry passing into silence without mingling with it can also be taken as an index of a sensibility for which everything stands apart (or in parallel perhaps, in Marcel’s terms), according to an empiricist conception of external relations.13 Equally, empiricism is inscribed in the paratactic dimensions of Hardy’s style, in sentences that are dynamically discovering themselves in what they uncover, whether for good or ill, and forgetful of conventional notions of good composition.

Affectively, this excursive dynamism is evident in the ways the narrative is itself a vehicle for involuntary responses and affects. As Lawrence and Woolf suggest, the self in Hardy is always breaking with precedent, forging new sympathetic connections. Early in A Loadicean the hero George Somerset observes Paula Power (daughter of her industrialist father) refusing baptism. He is drawn to her by an unconscious affective divination that passes as a fluctuating relay of feeling, sensation, and observation between narrator, reader, and character.

She approached the edge, looked into the water, and turned away shaking her head. Somerset could for the first time see her face. Though humanly imperfect, as is every face we see, it was one which made him think that the best in woman-kind no less than the best in psalm-tunes had gone over to the Dissenters. He had certainly seen nobody so interesting in his tour hitherto; she was about twenty or twenty-one—perhaps twenty-three, for years have a way of stealing marches even upon beauty’s anointed. The total dissimilarity between the expression of her lineaments and that of the countenances around her was not a little surprising, and was productive of hypotheses without measure as to how she came there. She was, in fact, emphatically a modern type of maidenhood, and she looked ultra-modern by reason of her environment: a presumably sophisticated being among the simple ones—not wickedly so, but one who knew life fairly well for her age.14

Intelligence is identified here with the refusal of imposed clichés and with a ruminative exactitude that embraces inconclusiveness. George and

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