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Thomas Hardy: A Victorian Modernist
| Article
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14430 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1988 |
4,188 Words |
| Author
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H.M. Daleski
H.M. Daleski is the author of The Divided Heroine: A Recurrent
Pattern in Six English Novels (Holner & Meier, 1984), The
Forked Flame: A Study of D.H. Lawrence (U. of Wisconsin Press,
1987), and many other books. |
Thomas Hardy published his first novel, Desperate Remedies, in 1871 and his last, Jude the Obscure, in 1895. As a novelist, therefore--and it is as a novelist that he is best known--Hardy is firmly located in the Victorian period; and indeed in many of his critical pronouncements and novelistic practices he appears as quintessentially Victorian. At the same time, however, in numerous ways he bursts out of such a period classification, revealing striking affinities with great modernists such as Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and, in particular, D. H. Lawrence. Hardy is perhaps best regarded, then, as a transitional figure, harking back in his work to the literary tradition he had inherited, but also pointing ahead to what was to come.
What Hardy inherited was a conception of the novel's form. For him the novel had above all to tell a story. In his essay "The Profitable Reading of Fiction," he held that the novel should be viewed as "an exemplification of the art of storytelling," and he asserted that, consequently, "the story naturally takes the first place." Story--what E. M. Forster called "this low atavistic form"--was precisely what the modernists tried to do without, reducing this element to the barest possible minimum since, as Forster saw, it was impossible to eliminate it altogether. Hardy's novels, however, seem to be conceived as stories, and accordingly they all have a strong narrative impetus and interest.
In Defense of Plot
Hardy was not concerned with storytelling per se. The "telling," he said in the same essay, had to be "artistically carried on" and the story had to be "an organism," by which he meant its parts should be organically related, held together in "well-knit interdependence." He accepted as fundamental, that is, the need for plot, the organization of the story in a tight mechanism of cause and effect, in what (in another essay) he called "a selected chain of action," from which anything not relevant to the ongoing drama of incident would be rigorously excluded. The confinement of the narrative within a plot seemed utterly artificial to modernists. "Is life like this?" asked Virginia Woolf; and she and her contemporaries experimented with other ways of organizing their narratives, seeking to find a place in them for all that novels with plots seemed constrained to leave out. For Hardy, however, a plot had its own aesthetic justification. "To a masterpiece in story," he said, "there appertains a beauty of shape, no less than to masterpiece in pictorial or plastic art"; a finely wrought plot, therefore, could be regarded as possessing "the quality which makes Apollo and Aphrodite a charm in
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