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Thomas Hardy as a psychological realist, few critics have gone so far in the other direction as Gilles Deleuze, who states that Hardy’s characters ‘are not people or subjects, they are collections of intensive sensations’ (Deleuze and Parnet 39-40). This is to suggest not that Hardy is uninterested in people but that he is interested in them as material objects, as agents of sensory interaction with the world, rather than as beings that transcend it. To read Hardy’s portrayal of sensory experience as part of an ant humanist impulse allows one to attend to his interest in people, in landscapes, and in the relations between them. Among other critics, have noticed how Hardy’s attention to people works against the establishment of deep, round characters with vivid inner lives (Cohen 2006,p.437). Hardy focuses his material account of perception and inferiority in his portrayal of the human face, a process he undertakes most rigorously in The Return of the Native (1878).
This novel depicts the multiple functions of the face, as a screen onto which thoughts and feelings are projected and as a physiological receptacle for sensory encounters with the world. Psychologists of the later nineteenth century argued that facial expression derived from physiological and evolutionary conditions, not from divine essence. Hardy’s treatment of the face affirms this view, for which he found support in a statement of Lewes’s that he copied into his notebook while preparing to compose ‘The Return of the Native’ Physiology began to disclose that all the mental processes were (mathematically speaking) functions of physical processes (p.438). Hardy demonstrates how the body can territorialize the face, for by emphasizing the function of the face both as an inlet for bodily sensation and as a material entity inseparable from the world of objects, he resists its absorption into the universality of racialized determinants (p.439). Hardy’s attention to the palpable qualities of perception often leads him to substitute one sensory modality for another, a shift that generally moves in the direction of greater direct contact between percipient subject and perceived objects (p.443). Hardy erases distinctions between the human body and its exterior surroundings. IN writing of the wind, for instance, Hardy shows the organic phenomenon to interpenetrate the human objects encounters: Its tone was indeed solemn and pervasive (p.444). Whatever its sensory modality, landscape description in Hardy relies on a homology with the human body. The features of the land-Â scape that he notes implicitly require human presence in order to be perceived; processes of human perception and intention, in turn, become organic features of the natural world.
Beyond the inroads sensory perception makes on Faciality, then, it can also extend across the body to the natural world, so relentlessly dwelled on in ‘The Return of the Native’ that commingles with human forms (p.445). Hardy’s account of face, sensation, and landscape helps to explicate the sometimes baffling logic of Deleuze and Guattari: it suggests how the percipient body supplies some means of resistance to the conventions of Faciality, how sensation intermingles the body and the landscape, and how interior entities, such as thought and feeling, might be understood in material terms. No doubt Hardy sometimes writes for the sheer pleasure of evoking specific geographic locations and rendering the sensuous particulars of a given perceptual experience. By amalgamating subject and object, person and landscape, interior and exterior, however, Hardy works toward larger goals as well: of moving agency away from individuals and showing how human beings have a palpable, categorical connection with the natural world. Putting the human in contact with a material location may not require a diminution of psychological motives, but it tends to have that effect. In its insistence that will or motive is always embodied, Hardy’s narrative links nineteenth-century physiological theories of soul, mind, and body to twentieth-century philosophical concepts of sensation and becoming. By means of sensory perception, Hardy demonstrates the continuity between an extremely wide spatiotemporal vantage on human action that of the geological, the epochal, the historical and the minute one supplied by the individual body (p.449).
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