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Aporia and figurings of the real in Two on a Tower : Hardy's ‘betweenities’

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502360802622268

1470-1308

Edward Neill,

Crime and Detective Fiction Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Recent biographies include the reflective, intellectually un-sectarian Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life, by Ralph Pite (London: Picador, 2006) (522 pages) (although ‘his’ Hardy can be a little alarming at times, making it something of ‘an unguarded Life’), while Michael Millgate's revised version of the awesomely erudite (if less than wholly sympathetic) Thomas Hardy: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) (637 pages), (Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004]) (625 pages), was itself based on the earlier, also well-researched Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist (London: The Bodley Head, 1971) (428 pages). He is the editor of other ‘the-Hardy-of-biography’ work(s) including The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1984) (604 pages). Indeed, he must be accounted the doyen of Hardy biography and scholarship, despite, inter alia, the late Martin Seymour-Smith's (900-page) would-be ‘spanner in the works’ (Hardy [London: Bloomsbury, 1994]), which savagely attacks Michael Millgate and the influential scholar R.L. Purdy for what he takes to be their over-reliance on the testimony of second wife Florence as a depressed, and disloyal partner, nicely self-interested (and deeply problematic as a keeper of the posthumous ‘informatic flow’ about Hardy), and a sense of patronage towards Hardy ‘carried over’ from Robert Gittings' brilliantly researched but almost (one might say) philistine investigations of the 70s, which stunningly conveyed the remoteness and even savagery of Hardy's early nineteenth century social context in his Young Thomas Hardy (London: Heinemann, 1975) (259 pages) and The Older Thomas Hardy (London: Heinemann, 1978) (244 pages). More respectfully, I suggest some ideas as to what might be ‘wrong with’ biography and that of Hardy in particular in ‘Oh, Keep the Dog far Hence’: Hardy, Bersani and Biography,' Oxford Literary Review, 20 (1998), 163–171. Also well known is a recent intervention by Claire Tomalin in Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man (London: Penguin, 2006) (486 pages). She is a genuine literary scholar, but with little interest in developments in critical thought and theory, and the journalistic rapture which greets her biographical productions is a little suspect. And a number of other biographical works would be regarded as ‘essential reading’ if we assume biography to be ‘essential’, including James Gibson's Thomas Hardy: A Literary Life (London: Macmillan, 1996) (206 pages) and Paul Turner's The Life of Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) (326 pages). The first work on Hardy with a quotient of biography appeared in 1911. (There have been many since.) ‘The Ivy-Wife’ is the title of a poem in Wessex Poems (1898): now in The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976), p. 57. A phrase from ‘Wessex Heights’ (dated ‘1896’): in The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, p. 319. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 55. Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 14. This appeared in French as ‘Apories: Mourir-s'attendre aux limites de la vérité’, in Le Passage des Frontières: Autour du Travail de Jacques Derrida (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1994), 309–338, as part of a ‘Colloque de Cérisy’: ‘la liste interminable de tous les quasi-concepts dits indécidables qui sont autant de lieux ou de dislocations . . . (p. 314). Thomas Hardy, Two on a Tower: A Romance (1882) (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 3. Hardy finesses over the deployment of this word to describe male attractiveness but implies it, indicating, as he does throughout, gender asymmetricality. Even Professor Ralph Pite perhaps suggests this kind of lopsidedness in describing Viviette as ‘too susceptible to Swithin's charms to be quite admirable’, &c. in Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life (London: Picador, 2006), p. 271. Caroline Austen, Jane Austen's niece, writing in 1867: Deirdre Le Faye, Jane Austen: A Family Record (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 277. For starting-points see the Encyclopaedia of Postmodernism, ed. Victor E. Taylor and Charles E. Winquist (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 15–16, which refers to Jacques Derrida's Aporias (1993). In The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990): p. 152. According to Christina Ruse and Marilyn Hopton, in The Cassell Dictionary of Literary and Language Terms (London: Cassell, 1992), the word ‘novella’ is ‘now often used interchangeably with novelette’ (p. 199), a hard saying given the pejorative connotations often assigned to the word ‘novelette’; yet in a sense Two on a Tower might be seen as a sort of ‘apotheosis of the novelette’. Freud, Standard Edition of the Works IX, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1959), p. 238: ‘the child's imagination becomes engaged in the task of getting free from the parents of whom he now has a low opinion, and of replacing them by others, who, as a rule, are of a higher social standing’. See Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 48–49. Hardy ungallantly awarded her surname to the hero's grandmother here (p. 15). Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited, p. 188. The phrase occurs in an article of 1881. This essay is reproduced in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982), pp. 185–193: p. 187. Published as ‘Écrivains et Écrivants’, in Essais Critiques (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964), pp. 147–154: ‘Et le miracle, si l'on peut dire, c'est que cette activité narcissistique ne cesse de provoquer, au long d'une littérature séculaire, une interrogation au monde’ (p. 149). Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 33. The role of pieces on the chess board is not well explicated by histories of knights or castles. See Paul Turner, The Life of Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 87. The reference is to the 24th edition of the Eton Latin Grammar, ed. T.W.C. Edwards (1850). For some of the immediate scientific stimuli for Two on a Tower, see Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 286. Hardy's feeling for nature is that of the Romantic poets, but a contemporary mentor in such matters was J.S. Mill, eloquent on the theme of a Tennyson-like ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’ (‘In Memoriam’, 1850); see Mill's essay on ‘Nature’ in Three Essays on Religion (1874). Hardy would have found comic Edward Young's idea as expressed in Night Thoughts (1750) that ‘Nature is Christian; preaches to mankind . . .’ an idea which the Victorian Temper was attempting to ‘re-rehearse’. Presumably he would not have disagreed with Baudelaire's ‘La Nature est un temple o[ugrave] de vivants piliers/ Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles’ (1857), although of course this leaves unclear just how ‘helpful’ Nature as ‘communicator’ is capable of being: Stanley Burnshaw glosses confuses paroles as ‘indistinct words’, then, appropriately dissatisfied, has another try with ‘allows confused words to escape’, in The Poem Itself (London: Penguin, 1964). See also Nicole Ward Jouve, Baudelaire (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 32. To appropriate Ted Benton's words to apply to Hardy here, ‘[he] understands that Darwin's intellectual project is anti-anthropocentric, that his theory does not attribute conscious intention to natural forces, and that he does not think that living organisms are designed by a creator . . .’ although this is by way of being what Althusser would call (his) ‘theoretical raw material’ rather than the intellectual horizon of the novel's discourse: see ‘Science, Ideology and Culture: Malthus and The Origin of Species’, in Charles Darwin's ‘The Origin of Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. David Amigoni and Jeff Wallace (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 73–74, p. 90. Shakespeare, ‘Sonnet 20’, in: Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (London: Thomas Nelson, 1997), p. 20. As Richard Dawkins claims in A Devil's Chaplain: Selected Essays, ed. Latha Menon (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2003), p. 146: Ipse dixit. Margaretta Jolly, ‘Feminist Heterosexuality’, Critical Quarterly, 47 (October, 2005), p. 17. Or, as we might put it, ‘the spectre of feminism is haunting Two on a Tower’: see, e.g. ‘Hauntology or the Political? (Or, No Politics, not Now)’, in Julian Wolfreys, Occasional Deconstructions (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), pp. 209–226. The title of Hardy's minor work, Life's Little Ironies (1894), a collection of short stories, has won acceptance as a ‘set phrase’. This may be the narrator's notation of the astronomer's inveterate mode of observation, or Swithin's own thought in ‘free indirect discourse’. See Michael Toolan, Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction 2nd Ed. (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 130. F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. W. Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), p. 166. However, Hardy does not wish to be ‘crudely’ allegorical (with names which desert realism of presentation): ‘Cleeve’ is also a local (West Country) place-name (as in [e.g.] Cleeve Abbey in Somerset). This refers to the phenomenon of the planet's shadow falling on the surface of the sun. Jacques Derrida, Points: Interviews 1974–1994, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al., Ed. Elizabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). ‘Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie’, in the Pensées (posthumously published in 1670), now read off as an infidel voice which Pascal intended to combat: see [e.g.] Dictionnaire des Citations Françaises, ed. Robert Carlier, Jean-Louis Lalanne, Pierre Josserand and Samuel S. De Sacy (Paris: Larousse, 2001), p. 411. See Michael Toolan, Narrative, pp. 43–48. Simon During claims in Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing (London: Routledge, 1992), that ‘not very convincingly, Foucault argues that “authors” come into historical being only when writing is able to be censored, when an individual can, potentially at least, be punished for their writing’ (p. 124). In fact ‘Hardy’, already well used to a critical abuse which went so far as to suggest the necessity for censorship or legal intervention, became more provocative, even ‘getting his retaliation in first’, as if constituting himself as author with reference to the orthodoxies he ‘affronted’. As Maurice Blanchot put it, in what constitutes a blow ‘for’ ‘bio-graphy’, ‘writing changes us. We do not write according to who we are; we are according to what we write’: cited in Andy Stafford, Roland Barthes, Phenomenon and Myth: An Intellectual Biography (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), p. 151. The situation resulted from their being surprised by Viviette's brother Louis Glanville's precipitate arrival at Welland House on a wet night. See Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), p. 61. As Freud puts it in his essay in ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), ‘the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’, Standard Edition, ed. Strachey XVII (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 220. See Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), e.g. pp. 172–186. See Hugh J. Silverman, Inscriptions (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1997), pp. 328–32. Hardy probably has the ancient Greek concept of male beauty as advanced by archaeologist and art historian Johann Joachim Winkelmann (1717–1768) in mind. Winkelmann's ‘manly ideal’, described as ‘forbiddingly abstract’, is ‘overdetermined’ here by a quality Swithin derives from his chosen pursuit, but his boyish petulance when his discovery is forestalled contrasts with the outward and visible ‘grace’ which Winkelmann yokes to a sense of (inner) virtue(s). See David Glover and Cora Kaplan, Genders (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 60. Cf. Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard’ (1897). The Bible (O.T.): Deuteronomy 32:35. Roland Barthes, A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (London: Fontana Press, 1989), p. 187; ‘L’écrivain retrouve le monde, un monde étrange d'ailleurs, puisque la littérature le représente comme une question, jamais, en définitive, comme une réponse': Barthes, Essais Critiques (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964), p. 149. Hardy assigned Two on a Tower to a ‘Romance and Fantasy’ sub-genre in a late foray into taxonomic tidying-up for the collected (‘Wessex’) edition of the novels in 1912. The term is Émile Durkheim's, developed in his study of Suicide (1897), to express the individual's sense of alienation from society's regulatory norms. Cf. Hardy's use of the Latin title ‘Sine Prole’ for a poem about his own lack of offspring published in the collection Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs, and Trifles (1925). This phrase, which accompanied Viviette's command to the effect that he should leave her temporarily when her love for him is first known, turned out to be an unintentionally apt anticipation of the outcome of the affair (Chapter 14). ‘Sons’ is suggestively gender-specific here. We may object to ‘man’ or ‘men’ deployed as a quasi-inclusive point of reference, but we are used (if not reconciled) to this. The choice of this particular Psalm, recast as a hymn, is an essential choice here, much to be preferred to the alternative [‘Onward Christian Soldiers’], used in Sally Shuttleworth's informative ‘Penguin’ edition of the novel in 1999. The basis of the choice of text lies in differences between the version serialised in the Atlantic Monthly and the three-volume ‘version’ published in Britain, both in 1882. See Colin MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), p. 18. Raymond Williams, The English Novel: From Dickens to Lawrence London: Chatto and Windus, 1970), p. 156. See J. Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac Books, 1988); the phenomenon is one in which ‘experiences, impressions and memory-traces may be revised at a later date to fit in with fresh experiences or with a new stage of development’ (p. 111). The invocation of the comet may have been based on Hardy's response to the appearance of ‘Tebbut's comet’ on 25 June 1881, as seen from his recently occupied home in Wimborne. See Paul Turner, The Life of Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 82 For Hardy's ‘Frankensteining’ of Romantic topoi see Kevin Z. Moore's The Descent of the Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 1990), a wildly erudite but suggestive work which deals with the later Hardy novels in a sophisticated, ‘Barthesian’ register. There is a problem with the precise significance of the word for Pascal: see Michael Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 128. The narrator's sense of Viviette's ‘plenitude’ here (it is clearly ‘men’ who are ‘lacking’ by comparison), is a reminder of the paradoxicalities of prejudice enunciated by Toril Moi in ‘Patriarchal Thought and the Drive for Knowledge (1988)’, in: What is a Woman? And Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999): p. 357. Arnold's ‘Dover Beach’ was written in the summer of 1851 after his marriage to Frances Wightman, as a honeymoon-poem: ‘his accounts for 19–30 June include the entry “Journey to Dover and back – £9.9.0”’; in terms of creative currency we might say that Hardy seems to have got his money's worth. See Matthew Arnold [Selection of the Poems], ed. Miriam Allott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 92. Slavoj Žižek discusses this paradoxicality in Interrogating the Real, ed. and trans. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 68. Hardy's work may also be read as constituting a commentary on Jane Austen's paean to womanly love in Persuasion (1818) expressed by sorely tried Anne Elliot in Chapter 23: ‘we certainly do not forget you, as soon as you forget us . . . you have always a profession, pursuits . . . to take you back into the world’ &c., in (e.g.) Jane Austen, Persuasion (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 274. See Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited, p. 492. An anonymous reviewer of Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Athenaeum, 9 January 1892), opens with the thought that ‘Prof. Huxley once compared life to a game of chess played by man [sic] against an enemy, invisible, relentless, wresting every error and every accident to his own advantage’. Probably Hardy himself already knew of this passage. See Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, ed. R.G. Cox, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 183. Derrida, Aporias, p. 13. Hardy knew the Shakespeare play well, citing it in Chapter 5, and deploying its sense of the ironies of love in Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891). At such points Hardy illustrates Barthes' claim for Proust in his essay on ‘The Death of the Author’ to the effect that ‘instead of putting his life into a novel, as is so often maintained, he made of his own life a work for which his own book was the model’, in: Image Music Text, ed. and trans Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1984), p. 144. Recalling debates from Kant to Derrida about what is ‘inside or outside’ a work of art, with respect to its ‘frame’; see (e.g.) David Carroll, Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 138. Kant refers to ‘those things which do not belong to the complete representation of the object internally as elements, but only externally as complements’, in the Critique of Judgement: cited in the essay by Irene E. Harvey, ‘Derrida, Kant and the Performance of Parergonality’, in Derrida and Deconstruction, ed. Hugh J. Silverman (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 59. Barthes: ‘the author performs a function . . .’ (A Barthes Reader p. 186); see note 9 and discussion in Foucault's ‘What is an Author?’ as reprinted in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari (London: Methuen and Co., 1980), p. 143. The essay appears in a different (earlier) form in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, pp. 113–138. This work, and the essay, is listed in Textual Strategies (p. 432), and the difference in versions is discussed in Josué V. Harari's ‘Introduction’, p. 43. The first version of Foucault's essay originally appeared in the Bulletin de la Société française de la Philosophie, 63, No.3 (1969), 73–104. But he seems to argue that even Barthes' sophisticated notion of the primacy of writing ‘runs the risk of maintaining the author's privileges under the protection of writing's a priori status’, in ‘What is an Author?’ as reprinted in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari (London: Methuen and Co., 1980), p. 145. Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’ as reproduced in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, p. 137. As Derrida puts it in an interview, ‘from the perspective of dissemination, I would not say there are no authors, but whoever bears the name “author”, to whom the legitimate status of author is accorded, is someone who is himself determined by the text, and is situated in the text or by the text’: see French Philosophers in Conversation, ed. Raoul Mortley (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 98. Foucault is formally opposed to the Derridean emphasis on ‘textuality’, but in pursuing the idea that ‘the author is the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning’ (in ‘What is an Author?’ as reprinted in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, p. 159), a similarity with respect to Barthes and Derrida's treatment of the author-figure or -function is suggested. Derrida, Aporias, 24; or Derrida, ‘Apories: Mourir-s'attendre aux limites de la vérité’, in Le Passage des Frontières: Autour du Travail de Jacques Derrida (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1994), p. 318. Such quasi-authorial ‘moves’ also remind one of Bakhtin's claim to the effect that ‘the author is profoundly active but this action takes on a specific dialogic character’: cited in Seán Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida 2nd Ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), p. 49. Shelley: Prometheus Unbound (1820), 1. 628: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 222. Hardy referred to Shelley (in the fustian pages of The Life) as ‘our most marvellous lyrist’, telling his friend Mrs. Henniker he would have liked to meet him ‘not only for his unearthly, weird, wild appearance and genius, but for his genuineness, earnestness, and enthusiasms on behalf of the oppressed’: see Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy II, ed. Michael Millgate and R.L. Purdy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 144.