Hervey's Dichotomy

The authorial account of the marital conflict is interspersed with the references to the shifting hierarchy of surface and depth or appearance and reality that represent Hervey’s commitment, but also a growing discontent with the metaphysical. His longing to find truth about the wife in order to elevate her as an embodiment of the ideal reverses the surface/depth dichotomy and thus points to its instability. By turning towards the hidden depth which is associated with the quest for the ideal he exposes the illusory nature of surface. Now his gaze which communicates the intention to understand conveys the logocentric obsession with reaching the truth, of revealing what is behind the veil of the appearances: “He stopped and looked into her eyes
Moreover, the “concentrated intensity” of Hervey’s rigid, assertoric look confined to one point is symptomatic of its monocular nature, which finds any perspectivist circumspection unwelcome. His ocular strategy amounts to a concentration on one point and the exclusion of everything that might distort the precision of representations produced in the process of contemplating a tiny segement of reality. Yet, the narrative discourse which includes the vocabulary of desire conflates the search for understanding with sexual appropriation and subverts the juxtaposition of the superior objective ideal against inferior subjective appearance. Here the gaze, against the ocularcentric tradition which identifies it with the quest for knowledge, aspires to exercise power over those who are subject to its scrutiny. An act of seeing no longer participates in the cognitive activity which aims at establishing the objective truth, but mutates into an act of
Committed to logocentrism which is articulated in the formulas of “indestructible faith that would last forever” (144), “an irresistible belief in an enigma” (161), “the very secret of existence” (161), Hervey contemplates “his innermost beliefs” at the same time “staring at the carpet, with a portentously solemn face and with a dull vacuity of eyes that seemed to gaze into the blankness of an empty hole” (152). Thus, the intensity and immobility of the gaze which is at the same time implicated in the search of essences correlates with the failure to perceive things as they appear. This failure of the eyes to fix any object gives the impression that the visual surface has dissolved into nothingness and that the dichotomy of the empirical and the rational no longer structures the process of cognition. The combination of the three words which connote void, “the blankness of an empty hole,” as well as the metaphor of empty eyes strengthen the dominant position of nothingness which displaces the