Reading with the Senses in Victorian Literature and Science by David Sweeney Coombs, and: Hardy, Conrad and the Senses by Hugh Epstein (review)

Nineteenth-century studies maintains a certain privileged position in critical efforts to defend humanistic methods because so many of its canonical texts remain widely beloved. One strand of this defense has centered on exploring how Victorian novels remain so vivid after all this time. In particular, the work of James J. Gibson, a twentieth-century American psychologist of visual perception, and Alva Noë, a working American philosopher, have begun to appear regularly in scholarship on fiction in order to validate literature as, in Noë's words, a "modality of openness to the world" (qtd. in Coombs 34) and to explore the consequences of reframing readerly consciousness—a contained, individualistic experience—as sentience. Their work is cited not only in scholarship concerned with the environment as an object of perception, but also in accounts of how reading the work of Victorian writers—so often so preternaturally vivid—constitutes a model of sense perception. Criticism that explores reading as an "embodied practice" asks, in Jonathan Kramnick's words, how "writers evoke and render palpable a process understood to be mental and imperceptible" (Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness [University of Chicago Press, 2018], 116). Why is the question of how humans perceive a distinctly literary one?

Recent books by David Sweeney Coombs—Reading with the Senses in Victorian Literature and Science—and Hugh Epstein—Hardy, Conrad and the Senses—take up these grounding questions, joining work by Kramnick, Elaine Auyoung, Audrey Jaffe, Catherine Gallagher, Nicholas Dames, Anna Henchman, and Elaine Scarry, among others. Though, as I will discuss below, these monographs offer quite different orientations toward argument as well as archive, it is worth observing first where they converge: on the virtual reality of Egdon Heath in Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native (1878), where the novel dwells upon visual and auditory sensations perceptible to no particular character, raising questions about how readers achieve such a potent sense of immediacy and enmeshment in this openly unreal surround of whispery, mummified bluebells. For Epstein and Coombs, Hardy's well-known narrative extravagance in this novel's depiction of the Heath indexes his profound fascination with what he would call, in his essay "The Science of Fiction" (1891), "mental tactility," or the way natural and textual environments generate sensations that feel profoundly real despite their lack of referentiality, and touchable despite their lack of solidity (qtd. in Epstein 74).

Epstein explores how both Hardy and Joseph Conrad depict human existence as a struggle "not to allow the necessary and vivifying receptiveness of the senses to absorb one into the present moment, but to maintain the self-possession which enables one to negotiate the world" (19). Epstein brings these authors together because, despite Conrad's far stronger association with modernist experimentation, they were both skeptical of the cohesiveness of a "perceiving consciousness" and were deeply engaged with developments in psychology and physics that called attention to the "elusive substance of the space in which perception is stimulated" (30). Both writers, Epstein compellingly demonstrates, came to the end of their novelistic careers in Jude the Obscure (1895) and Under Western Eyes (1911) by narrowing their scope to individual consciousness in order to all the more powerfully illustrate the capacity of the inhuman universe to engulf individual existence. Drawing occasionally on how the two novelists' knowledge of physics complicated their human-centered understandings of physiology, Epstein tracks their careers across sensory modalities including sight, hearing, and touch to demonstrate their ambivalence toward the mind as a center of knowledge. Despite the role scientific context plays, the book's most satisfying achievement is a wonderfully attuned account of the moment-to-moment sensibilities of each writer's major novels. This orientation to some extent reflects back...