Hardy's Visualizations

BOOK REVIEWS "One of the ominous signs of the time is that the public can no longer read history. The historian is retired into a shell to study the whole truth; which means that he learns to attach insensate importance to documents . The documents are liars. No man ever tried yet to write down the entire truth of any action in which he has been engaged. All narrative is parti pris. And to prefer an ancient written statement to the guiding of your instinct through the maze of related facts, is to encounter either banality or unreadableness. We know too much, and use too little knowledge." No more apt comment can be made about Wilson's book. Stephen E. Tabachnick The University of Oklahoma Hardy's Visualizations Sheila Berger. Thomas Hardy and Visual Structures: Framing, Disruption , Process. New York: New York University Press, 1990. xvi + 225 pp. $40.00 ONE OF THE STRENGTHS of Thomas Hardy and Visual Structures: Framing, Disruption, Process is that it was written with a realization of the complexity of Hardy's mind and art, and hence it is imbued with an awareness of what Sheila Berger calls Hardy's "sense of contradiction" and of the unresolved tensions and ambiguities in his work. Berger carefully points out that even when Hardy speaks of his art as one of "impressions," the term has a double sense: both of personal and subjective observation on the one hand, and of confused and fleeting images on the other. Berger attempts to identify what she calls "Hardy's fundamental visualizing tendencies" by organizing "hundreds of individual poetic structures into four patterns." Those "patterns" Berger describes as (1) "the conversion of image to icon," (2) "the framed image," (3) "relationships within the image," and (4) "disrupted images." Given such general objectives and given Berger's title, Thomas Hardy and Visual Structures might be assumed to share the concerns of some exceptionally fine studies of how Hardy used visual structures: one thinks of such works as Joan Grundy's Hardy and the Sister Arts and J. B. Bullen's The Expressive Eye: Fiction and Perception in the Work of Thomas Hardy. But Berger states that her study does not "explain how visual structures are used or what they mean" (as Grundy and Bullen certainly attempt to do) but, rather, she claims, it "teaches a new way to see them." That is a bold—even daring—assertion. And at issue is the extent to which, in describing these "patterns," Berger does indeed validate her 93 ELT : VOLUME 35:1 1992 claim to teach us "a new way to see" Hardy's visual structures. The result, I think, is in many respects disappointing. For example, some of the most commonplace observations about Hardy's writing are that he makes frequent use of shifting visual and authorial perspectives and conflicting and contradictory views; that his characters frequently watch one another unobserved; that he alternates realistic narrative techniques with others more akin to expressionism; and that his characters often struggle to find order and meaning in an ambiguous and chaotic world. These, and many others like them, constitute the kind of features of Hardy's work that Berger points to. Often they are little more than commonplaces to those familiar with the history of Hardy criticism. This is not to say that Berger does not make many illuminating observations in the course of examining the four "patterns" she identifies . Her discussions of the effect of Hardy's typographical effects is subtle and sure, and in the course of an analysis she has remarkably accurate comments to make on the views of other critics. J. Hillis Miller's thesis in Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire is justly corrected by her, and in Thomas Hardy and Visual Structures there are many such places where Berger's good critical sense is evident. Her remarks on Hardy's use of spirits and of visual effects in The Dynasts is a particularly fine instance of how very illuminating her analyses can be. Berger's chapter on Hardy's "framed images" is, I think, characteristic of both the weaknesses and the strengths of her approach. At its conclusion, Berger emphasizes that "framing" is...