Hardy's walk: Subjectless perception

The last line of Thomas Hardy's short poem 'The Walk' evokes 'the look of a room on returning thence'. One of the Poems of 1912-13, written after the death of his wife Emma, 'The Walk' is an eminently realist poemIt gives a clear-sighted account of an emotional state. If, as I want to argue, realism, aesthetic realism rather than scientific or philosophical, concerns truth to perception, then Hardy gives a detailed description, unburdened by sentiment, of a change in his perception.

What makes it so valuable, above and beyond its finely tuned autobiographical account of personal loss, is its play on absence and presence, on solitude which is not the same as emptiness. There is of course its Victorian atheist dalliance with death including, undoubtedly, his own (his auto-haunting) – the honest (if not entirely admirable, and all the more honest for that) self-pity where, all the same, the indifference of the universe is not exclusively about how existentially gruesome it is to be human. Instead indifference appears as the persistence of the room without her, or him. This is not the indifferent iceberg forming while the Titanic is being built that he would write about in 'The Convergence of the Twain': it has none of that poems inevitability. If anything, the absence of 'The Walk' is entirely evitable: he just has to go for his familiar solitary walk – except that the empty room now accompanies him.

So who is doing the perceiving? Emma indeed, specifically absent-Emma; and also Hardy-when-he's-not-there. And thirdly the room itself, as it waits, synchronously wit the walk, self-perceiving, precisely at the moment when he is pre-occupied with another scene ('the familiar ground'). The real (in the loose sense) is both this familiar room and its unfamiliarity now she has gone, a space that now ejects him, his consciousness, most specifically his perception of it. It is the room that is empty and which he is not present in that changes where he is and what he sees when he is elsewhere, his habitation of the landscape of his walk.

The rather forced rhyme of sense/thence only deepens the alienation that binds him to the affect of absence; and it is this alienation from his own perception that makes this so profoundly realist. It is a poem about the illegibility of a perception.

In theatre there is always an audience. The great fiction of cinema is that there is not. This is Ozu's mystery: what does a room look like when there is no-one there to see it? But this is the very point: seeing without there being a person to see, the purity of perception that has no perceiver (no desire, no revulsion, the scientific principle revealed as not so much objective as non-subjective. The room sees itself because the camera, given the fiction of the absent audience, is in the room and part of the room, furniture. The work of death, of the dead, in Hardy's hard-won atheism, is to impersonate the absence of a perceiver, in order to realise (as all realism is a practice of making real) a subjectless perception in all its purity.

The poem has the medium-specific opportunity to see without a point of view. Ozu works with a tripod: the camera must occupy a point. Hardy was surely not inventing Steadicam. But he is, straddling two epochs in British and European culture, inventing a mode of perception that, having already rejected divine omniscience, is no longer exclusively human.