Glasses and speculations : on Hazzard’s transits

In The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759), Tristram laments that human beings don’t have a ‘Momus glass’ placed in their chests, a kind of window that would allow us to know others’ secret thoughts and feelings. With this apparatus we could peer into the body as into a glass beehive, perceive the motions and machinations of the soul, and simply write them down. Such inspection, Tristram muses, would afford certain and lucid knowledge of human being. This is a profane proposal: Momus was the son of night and the god of satire, mockery and censure and Sterne’s purpose here is mischievous and a provocation. Yet what figures in this allegory is the primacy of interiority, that which we are privileged to keep invisible and wholly beyond scrutiny. Against glassy penetration is preserved the recognition that seeing is not knowing, that the Momus glass is, in the end, an offence and an absurdity. Likewise fiction is also caught within dialectic of knowing and not knowing. Just as we presume in our narratives to enter the bodies of others, in the end we are rudely limited by our dull speculations: “our minds shine not through our bodies”, Sterne writes, “but we are wrapt up here in a dark covering of uncrystalized flesh and blood”. Essentially murky and “uncrystalized”, we necessarily fail to render lucid that which is always already in shadow. These comments are by way of introduction to a somewhat predictable topic – the centrality in Hazzard’s work of vision as errant knowing. The link between optics and character, and the vitreous means by which we attain forms of visibility, is yet to be exhausted. Writing itself is a contraption of remarkable seeing, but it is also presumptuous, limited and finally without unmediated inspection. Hazard has never been modern (to borrow from Bruno Latour); what marks her fiction is a kind of treasured antiquity, a deliberate anachronism or polychronism – in terms of registrations of character and architectonics of plots, and in relation both to aesthetic modes and to moral conclusions. So in this chapter I shall essay on seeing and knowing and mount my own provocation by way of discontinuous speculation, digression, and a Hazzardous and Shandyesque play of tropes and antique critical resources.