1According to The Concise Oxford Dictionary, an “object” is “a thing placed before the eye or presented to one of the senses”. The word comes from the Latin objectum, itself derived from objicere, which means “to throw” (jacere) “before” (ob). An “object”, whether an artefact or not, may be put to some purpose. But the object, as “thrown before” the subject, as a “person or thing to which action or feeling is directed”, may also refer to the thing aimed at by human desire. Therefore the object is not just what is owned, or could be owned, but also what one desires.

2The life of objects extends over the years, sometimes over millennia, during which they become loaded with meaning and memories. They can be exhumed, like the “Druid Stone” buried three feet deep in the earth at Max Gate, which Hardy discovered, brought to the surface, and exhibited in his garden. In his mind, it was undoubtedly associated with Stonehenge, a fact which J.B. Bullen uses as a starting-point for his essay on “Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Apollo, Dionysus, and Stonehenge”. The essay focuses on a dialectic between Apollo, the sun god, and Dionysus, the chthonic god of the underworld, where the harp-playing Apollo is figured by Angel Clare and Dionysus by Alec d’Urberville, whose cigar looks like a “phallic thyrsus”. It concludes with a parallel between two scenes: the violation of Tess by Alec d’Urberville/Dionysus in the forest of The Chase, which anticipates the “imminent immolation” of Tess at Stonehenge, viewed as a sacrifice to the sun god. Both Dionysus and Apollo “surfeit” on the object offered to them in sacrifice: Tess.

3Objects may be a trace of bygone civilizations left in the present, or the productions of an age when “commodity culture” was beginning to spread, not just in Victorian England, but all over the world, at a time when “the sun never set on the British Empire”. Such objects can be given, exchanged, sold, in complex circulations of meaning and emotions. Robert Hampson, in his essay on “Conrad’s Objects”, focuses on objects as cultural artefacts, seen in an ethnographic perspective, and on the trading networks through which commodities are exchanged in Conrad’s fiction. The article shows “the pervasiveness of commodity culture” in an inter-related, globalized world, of which Conrad had a first-hand experience. It also shows how those objects were sometimes recoded, recycled, in various forms of “cultural detournement”. Hampson goes further when he considers the object as fetish, and notes the sense of “hollowness” which overcomes the characters when their fetish objects lose their magical power. The essay ends with another form of magical thinking: “charms and talismans”, which can be given and thus have power in a man’s life. But to be able to relate what Yael Levin calls “the otherwise present” (Levin quoted by Hampson) — like haunting, ghosts, hallucinations — the writer needs a power of imagination that goes beyond the techniques that could be learnt from Flaubert.

4With Hardy, and then with Conrad, the nineteenth century was drawing to a close. In the Victorian era, especially after the Great Exhibition of 1851, objects multiplied in the daily life of English people. Homes became cluttered with decorative objects, and Victorian novels were said to be “crowded novels” (Brown 1986, 786-794), filled with a multitude of useless details or objects. Victorian realism has often been associated with an aesthetics where fullness prevails, in which proliferating objects come to punctuate the narrative, thus producing numerous effets de réel. Yet those objects can be powerfully symbolic, they can serve as metonyms, or metaphors, which represent personalities, situations, ideological positions. Dickens used them as elements of characterization, revealing the psychology of his characters, sometimes producing micro-comical effects.

6Indeed objects in Hardy and Conrad have the power to make us see and hear what the text in its discursive dimension fails to show. That point is made by Adrian Grafe in his essay on Human Shows, Hardy’s penultimate poetry volume. The article deals with Hardy’s deep sense of the “aliveness” of objects (Winnicott, quoted by Grafe) — objects which may speak in Hardy’s poems, or be addressed to by the speaker of the poem. They may seem to be insignificant details, but under their frozen outer surface they have a life of their own which means a lot to the poet. They both serve as metaphors and as realia linking the poet to the phenomenal world. Hardy “particularizes” them, he takes them as they are, in sheer wonder at their density and vividness, which inspire his “poetics of wonder”.

7If, beyond their “immediacy” (A. Grafe), objects point to some truth that lies beneath the surface of the text, could it not be argued that they have the power to make visible the invisible? The idea is developed by Isabelle Gadoin in her essay on looking-glasses, inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s ideas on visibility/invisibility. There is more than meets the eye in Hardy’s looking-glasses: instead of providing the onlooker with the perfect image of a unified self, they work as “hour-glasses”, like Vanities, and they also allow moments of “unvision” when the subject glimpses the enigma of his subjective division. In fact the glass “abstracts” human subjects into shadows, it “empties out the universe” as it shows it peopled with phantoms.

8The question then is: what is that thing pointed out by objects in literature, the “thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing” (Woolf 138), the “deep hidden truthfulness” (Conrad 168), “the heart and inner meaning” of things, which art makes “vividly visible” (Hardy 183)? For if something transcends the material reality of objects, what may be visioned — or unvisioned — in that beyond? What is the essence of the “invisibility” that the visible both conceals and reveals? In George Herbert’s Anglican hymn (“The Elixir”), it was a vision of Heaven that could be glimpsed (I. Gadoin). In those days, the presence of some transcendent reality was conceived as the equivalent of Kant’s “supra-sensible thing”. But with Hegel (and with Conrad), “the transcendent presupposition has vanished into thin air”, “the truth of the supra-sensible thing is just appearance as appearance” (Josiane Paccaud). Conrad “finds no salutary hope in transcendence” (S. Bernard). The First Cause is not a caring God but an indifferent knitting machine for which “nothing matters” (Ian Watt, quoted by Bernard). According to Žižek, the sublime points to a void, “the pure Nothing of absolute negativity” (Žižek 1989, 206). Hegel calls that abyss “the night of the world” (Žižek 1999, 136). For Conrad, that “thing of nothing” (Paccaud) is “a depth of horrible void”.

10In her study of timepieces, Catherine Lanone opposes the “ecology of kairos” (as exemplified by Gabriel Oak’s skilful handling of communal and organic time in Far from the Madding Crowd) to Jim’s inability to act at the right moment in Lord Jim. After the fatal jump (“an anti-kairotic moment”), a “temporal faultline” opens between before and after, an abyss which makes Jim feel as if he “had jumped into a well — into an everlasting deep hole” (Conrad 70). What has happened is “a drama of no-thing” (Paccaud, quoted by Lanone), a “temporal vortex” that the text can only circle round. Thus it appears that the fullness, the solidity of the Victorian world, crowded with a profusion of material objects, turns into some bottomless void in the writings of our two authors.

11In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek (following Lacan) distinguishes between three types of objects of desire: first, “the object cause of desire”, which we must leave behind and whose very absence sets desire into motion. Should it fail to be a radical absence, a missing object that may be replaced by another, it would block the metonymy of desire and lead to tragedy. In “Karain” it is embodied by Karain’s mother and the Queen of England (Josiane Paccaud). In Far from the Madding Crowd, Bathsheba is “the object cause” of Boldwood’s desire. The second object, a “massively intrusive presence, the mute embodiment of impossible jouissance” (Paccaud), is the Lacanian object-gaze and object-voice, which may haunt a character’s life if it ceases to be an evanescent punctum and turns into a permanent fixture in his/her reality. Annie Ramel’s article on “gaze and voice as surplus objects in The Mayor of Casterbridge” deals with such an object. So does Paccaud’s article, in its handling of voice and gaze (the voice and the sunken eyes of Matara’s ghost pursuing Karain). The logical outcome of this disorder is the destruction of social links: Henchard becomes alien to his community, and only death can ensue, with the absolute silence reached at the end of the novel. Žižek’s third variety of the object makes possible a restoration of the symbolic order: in “Karain”, it is the gilt sovereign, the jubilee sixpence, a portable object of exchange in the image of the Queen of England, which is “a mere semblance for an absence” (Paccaud). Yet that insignificant leftover stabilizes the cruel gaze and hushes the haunting voice. Bernard also writes about Conrad’s characters who need to cling to objects (like the sovereign in “Karain”) as well as to “the salutary value of work”, which saves them “from the devouring terror of emptiness”.