English Losses: Thomas Hardy and the Memory of Wessex

Abstract

This chapter explores the relationship of subject to place, through the lens of phenomenology. Rather than simply offer a phenomenological reading of Hardy’s poetry and its formations of subjectivity, perception, memory, and the subject’s ability to reconstitute through memory the initial impression and experience of an event, I argue that, in a number of significant ways, Thomas Hardy is readable as a proto-phenomenologist. More than this, I also explore the ways in which landscape serves as a material and phenomenal place of memory, opening to the subject the phantasm of past events, and constituting the subject’s sense of selfhood. Language is thus understood not merely as a mimetic tool or means by which the world can be recast, but, instead, the very medium of a phenomenological apperception that makes plain the haunting taking place between the subject and the landscape. The poem for Hardy thus becomes the material manifestation of that which haunts subjectivity, and which goes by the name of Wessex in the text of Thomas Hardy. In apprehending this, we come to see an analogy between Hardy’s verse and photography, to the extent that, apropos Hardy, it becomes possible to speak of a photopoesis.

The ultimate aim of the poet should be to touch our hearts by showing his own.

Leslie Stephen

We must regard [the sky at night], just as we see it, as a distant, all-embracing vault…. To find the ocean nevertheless sublime we must regard it as the poets do, merely by what the eye reveals.

Immanuel Kant

‘Gone’, I call them, gone for good that group of local hearts and heads.

Yet at mothy curfew-tide,

And at midnight when the noon-heat breathes it back from walls and leads,

They’ve a way of whispering to me—fellow wight who yet abide—

Thomas Hardy, ‘Friends Beyond’