Reading Hardy s Landscapes
Also by Michael Irwin HENRY FIELDING: The Tentative Realist PICTURING: Description and Illusion in the Nineteenth-Century Novel STRIKER WORKING ORDERS
Reading Hardy s Landscapes Michael Irwin
First published in Great Britain 2000 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-41006-4 ISBN 978-0-230-59792-1 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9780230597921 First published in the United States of America 2000 by ST. MARTIN S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-22403-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Irwin, Michael, 1934 Reading Hardy s landscapes / Michael Irwin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-312-22403-5(cloth) 1. Hardy, Thomas, 1840 1928 Technique. 2. Hardy, Thomas, 1840 1928 Settings. 3. Wessex (England) In literature. 4. Landscape England Wessex. 5. Landscape in literature. 6. Description (Rhetoric) 7. Setting (Literature) I. Title. PR4757.L3I79 1999 823'.8 dc21 99 15880 CIP Michael Irwin 2000 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2000 978-0-333-74191-7 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00
Contents List of Plates Preface References and Abbreviations vii ix xi 1 Introduction 1 2 Hardy s Insects 25 3 Noises in Hardy s Novels 37 4 The Poetry of Motion 62 5 Erosion, Deformation and Reformation 88 6 Concatenations 115 7 This insubstantial pageant 143 Notes 166 Index 169
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List of Plates Claude Lorrain, Landscape with Hagar and the Angel (reproduced by permission of National Gallery Publications Limited) John Constable, The Cornfield (reproduced by permission of National Gallery Publications Limited) John Constable, The Leaping Horse (reproduced by permission of the Royal Academy of Arts, London) Medardo Rosso, Laughing Woman (reproduced by permission of Tate Gallery Publishing Limited) Giorgio Morandi, Natura Morta (reproduced by permission of Museo Morandi) vii
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Preface This book represents the coming together of two interests. One is specific: the work especially the fiction of Thomas Hardy. The other, more general, is the capacity of certain novelists to create the illusion of a physical world, with sights to see and sounds to hear. The ability to bring a narrative to life in this way is too easily taken for granted. The set-piece description of Count Fosco, or Egdon Heath, or Daniel Peggotty s boat readily lends itself to critical appreciation ; but much of the pictorial power of a work of fiction is likely to derive from a succession of brief allusions, artfully distributed. Unobtrusive patterns of detail can conjure up vivid mental images verbally-evoked faces, clothes, gestures, furnishings, buildings and streets. When I wrote a book on this aspect of nineteenth-century English fiction Hardy featured prominently, as one of our great visualizers. Over a period of years, however, my response to this aspect of his work has broadened. I now see these descriptive passages as central to his fiction. What in other novelists is enabling matter, in Hardy s case becomes the dominant force. The human drama seems virtually to lose itself in the background, or rather dissolve into it, and yet to take on the more significance for doing so. I will be arguing that the essential meaning of most of the novels must be traced to the tension and mutual dependency between background and characters, Landscape and Figures, either term capable as will be seen of absorbing, even annihilating, the other. Hardy himself remarks: The world often feels certain works of genius to be great, without knowing why: hence it may be that particular poets and novelists may have had the wrong quality in them noticed and applauded as that which makes them great. (Life, 117) I considered using the comment as an epigraph to this book, but decided that it would be presumptuous to do so. There has been a great deal of critical writing about Hardy, and much of it has been thoughtful and illuminating. This book will be attempting not so much to supplant established readings, as to fold them into what I take to be ix
x Preface a larger, more inclusive view. On occasion I will have to traverse fairly familiar ground in an attempt to explore beyond it. But I hope that the Hardy who emerges from this mode of analysis will seem a richer, more complex, more wide-ranging novelist than even his admirers have generally taken him to be. This book derives from a Hardy course which I have taught at the University of Kent, originally alongside Ian Gregor. No collaborative enterprise could have been pleasanter. It is a tribute both to Hardy and to Ian that the course has remained so exhilarating, continuing to develop year after year. I learned more than I can say both from Ian and from our many alert and responsive students in particular from Sarah Clark, my best student, some of whose ideas I have, with her consent, coolly purloined. I would like to thank her, and also various friends with whom I have from time to time discussed aspects of the text notably Keith Carabine and Nick Garland. Because my argument is to an extent idiosyncratic I happen to quote relatively little from the extensive Hardy criticism which I have read with pleasure and profit over the years. I am grateful to many a commentator whose name does not happen to figure in the pages that follow. The point is one I d like to emphasize, because Hardy critics are a convivial and mutually supportive fraternity. The conferences at Dorchester, where some of the ideas in this book were first aired, are as enjoyable as they are educative. My last tribute goes to Jim Gibson, a friend for years in a variety of contexts. He and his wife, Helen, have done much to make these conferences the great occasions they have become. MICHAEL IRWIN
References and Abbreviations Page references relating to Hardy s novels are based on the World s Classics Edition (General Editor: Simon Gatrell) except as indicated below. Novel titles are abbreviated as shown. DR FMC HE JO Lao MC PBE RN Tess T-M TT UGT W-B Wood Desperate Remedies (Macmillan: New Wessex pb.) Far from the Madding Crowd The Hand of Ethelberta (Macmillan: New Wessex pb.) Jude the Obscure A Laodicean The Mayor of Casterbridge A Pair of Blue Eyes The Return of the Native Tess of the d Urbervilles The Trumpet-Major Two on a Tower Under the Greenwood Tree The Well-Beloved The Woodlanders Discussion of the short stories is based on the texts as edited by Norman Page in The Complete Stories (London: Dent pb., 1996). Exceptions are An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress and Our Exploits at West Poley (Macmillan: New Wessex edition of The Stories of Thomas Hardy, Volume Three, 1977, edited by F. B. Pinion). Poems are quoted as from The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, edited by James Gibson (Macmillan, 1976). Where Life is cited the reference is to The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, edited by Michael Millgate (Macmillan, 1984). Essays by Hardy are quoted as from Thomas Hardy s Personal Writings, edited by Harold Orel (Macmillan, 1967). Quotations from The Dynasts are based on the Macmillan paperback edition of 1965. xi