A Route To Modernism: Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf

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A Route to Modernism Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf

Rosemary Sumner

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-17

A Route to Modernism

10.1057/9780230599154 - A Route to Modernism, Rosemary Sumner

Also by Rosemary Sumner THOMAS HARDY: Psychological Novelist


WILLIAM GOLDING'S THE SPIRE


Rosemary Sumner

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A Route to Modernism Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf

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First published in Great Britain 2000 by

MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

ISBN 0-333-77046-3

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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 0-312-22423-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sumner, Rosemary, 1924— A route to modernism : Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf / Rosemary Sumner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-312-22423-0 (cloth) 1. English fiction —20th century —History and criticism. 2. Modernism (Literature)—Great Britain. 3. Hardy, Thomas, 1840-1928—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert). 1885-1930—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941 —Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PR888.M63S86 1999 820.9'll2-dc21 99-27616 CIP

© Rosemary Sumner 2000 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 OLR 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 her 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 09 08

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire



A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.


In memoriam H.R.




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'Life presents question after question which must be left to sound on and on after the story is over in hopeless interrogation.' Virginia Woolf: 'Modern Fiction'





List of Plates

xi

Acknowledgements

xii

Preface

xiii

List of Abbreviations

xiv

1

Introduction

1

2 The Experimental and the Absurd in Two on a Tower

22

3 Some Surrealist Elements in Hardy's Prose and Verse

34

4

Chance and Indeterminacy in Hardy's Novels and Poetry

49

5

Discoveries of Dissonance: Hardy's Late Fiction

66

6

The Well-Beloved: a Modernist Experiment?

81

7 The Adventure to the Unknown: Hardy, Lawrence and Developments in the Novel

93

8

A Language of the Unconscious: The Rainbow 'Anna Victrix' The dance by the stacks

107 107 116

9

Women in Love Towards harmony? A language for 'the whole man alive'

126 126 140

10 Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence Harmony and dissonance 'The thing that exists when we aren't there'

150 150 160

11 Hardy to Woolf: a Route to Modernism

170

12 'Books open: no conclusion come to'

185

Notes

189

Bibliography

200

Index

205



Contents




1 Hardy's illustration for 'In a Eweleaze near Weatherbury' 2 Hardy's illustration for 'Heiress and Architect' 3 Max Ernst: 'The Wheel of Light' 4 Max Ernst: 'Visible Poem'



List of Plates

My thanks are due in the first place to the critics who have preceded me in writing about the novelists this book deals with, and perhaps especially to those with whom I have disagreed, since they have forced me to justify my ideas or to reconsider them. Former colleagues and students, members of the Hardy and Lawrence Societies, friends who have discussed this book and others with me have all helped to keep critical faculties functioning. The London Library has been an essential source for books, both by their postal service and in St James's Square, where silent, book-surrounded corners provide congenial working places. I am also indebted to the Librarian and her colleagues at the St Ives Public Library. I have come to depend on their helpfulness and efficient handling of the InterLibrary Loan Service. I owe thanks to The Hardy Journal and its editors, James Gibson and Simon Curtis, for permission to use versions of articles published there in 1989 and 1995, to the Virginia Woolf Bulletin and its editor, Stuart N. Clarke, for articles published in 1999 and to Melissa Hardie and the Patten Press for versions of articles published in A Mere Interlude and in A Spacious Vision (edited by Phillip Mallett and Ronald Draper). For her typing skills and her patience with my confusing and illegible manuscripts I have to thank Frances Diamond. Finally, my son, Alaric Sumner, has kept me mentally alert by occasional incisive discussions of my work and by frequent requests for critical analyses of his own writing.



Acknowledgements

The title of this book is A Route to Modernism: Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf. The bringing together of these three novelists highlights some of the less noticed aspects of modernism, and distinguishes their work from other kinds of modernism. This is not to disparage other modernist prose writers such as Stein and Joyce; their works have their own interest, their own innovations, their own distinctive merits and greatness. But my aim is to explore the modernism of my three writers rather than to emphasize the ways in which they differ from other modernist novelists. In this process, their distinctive qualities and the relationships between them will emerge. Most critics comparing Hardy and Lawrence have focused mainly on Lawrence's a Study of Thomas Hardy; for this reason I have examined what they have in common mainly from other angles. Woolf wrote interestingly and briefly on both of them but this is not the connection I dwell on. The way all three push out the boundaries of the novel, extending it into unknown regions of the universe and of the psyche (moving fiction away from the relatively realistic and social concerns of nineteenth-century fiction into more mythic and cosmic regions) is central to my thesis. The long introduction weaves together some of the main lines of thought the book will follow in relation to the three novelists. The subsequent chapters dwell mainly on each novelist separately, but without losing sight of their relationships to one another. My aim throughout and in conclusion is 'not rounding off. Opening out'. In this I follow Stanley Fish who said (in 7s There a Text in this Class? (p. 16)) 'the business of criticism was n o t . . . to determine a correct way of reading but to determine from which of a number of possible perspectives reading will proceed. This determination . . . will not be made once and for a l l . . . but will be made and remade again. . . .' This book is a study of 'the adventure to the unknown', the unconscious, the enigmatic in the fiction of Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf. R.S.

Xlll



Preface

Hardy RN TonT MofC W TD JO WB Life CP

The Return of the Native Two on a Tower The Mayor of Casterbridge The Woodlanders Tess of the d'Urbervilles Jude the Obscure The Well-Beloved The Life of Thomas Hardy by RE. Hardy Thomas Hardy: the Complete Poems (ed. James Gibson)

Lawrence SandL R WinL CP

Sons and Lovers The Rainbow Women in Love The Complete Poems (ed. de Sola Pinto and Warren)

Woolf MrsD Mrs Dalloway TTL To the Lighthouse TW The Waves BTA Between the Acts CE Collected Essays (ed. Leonard Woolf) Diary The Diaries of Virginia Woolf (Penguin)

XIV



List of Abbreviations

1

'The fact about contemporaries', wrote Virginia Woolf, 'is that they're doing the same thing on another railway line; one resents them distracting one, flashing past the wrong way.'1 The right way for Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf took them 'flashing past' other modernist writers - Joyce and Stein for instance - on another line. The works of these three novelists show that there is a route to modernism which is on a different track from Joyce's, though it is important to note that, in spite of this, 'they're doing the same thing'. It was the 'tricky, startling, doing stunts' 2 aspects of Joyce which Woolf rejected, saying that he 'respects writing too much for that'. My aim is to interest readers in concepts of modernism rather than to formulate a definition of it. The focus of this book is on the particular kinds of innovation brought to the novel by Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf and on the particular 'lines' they follow, rather than to argue minutely their precise differences from Joyce, Stein and others. I am not maintaining that the kind of modernism of these three novelists is totally different from all others. Obviously, Woolf's recognition that 'they're doing the same thing' implies that her 'railway line' runs parallel to or crosses others from time to time. It might be claimed, for instance, that the use of the single day in Mrs Dalloway is directly derived from Ulysses; but the differences between these two novels are more striking than their similarities. Joyce creates a rigid structure (not only the Homeric framework but all the other 'schematic systems'); 3 the hour of the day of each section is just one controlling feature among many. Time in Mrs Dalloway is also important - the booming of Big Ben reverberates throughout the novel, but the time struck is often l



Introduction

unspecified. (John Sutherland's 'Mrs Dalloway's Taxi'4 amusingly highlights the difference from Joyce, who worked on Ulysses with a stopwatch.) Clarissa gets home from Bond Street earlier than anyone with a stopwatch would expect. Whether or not she went by taxi (as Sutherland maintains) is utterly irrelevant to Mrs Dalloway. The carefully calculated structures of Ulysses are alien to Woolf's methods; to what Hardy called 'my own unmethodical books'; and to the spontaneity which was central to Lawrence's conception of art. He saw Joyce's work as 'too terribly would-be and done-onpurpose, utterly without spontaneity or real life'. Herbert Read asked of Ulysses 'Is it not an erudite crossword puzzle?' 5 and therefore capable of solution. Joyce defines, analyzes, solves. Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf are concerned with the undefinable, the unanalyzable, the unresolved. Genette suggests that it is 'foolish to search for "unity" at any price, and in this way to force the coherence of any work'. 6 The route I'm mapping goes in the direction of new forms, not as exciting for their own sake, but as enabling exploration of the inconsistent, the irrational, the unresolved, the unknown. This journey starts in 1868 with Hardy's first, unpublished, novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, with its subtitle, 'A Story with no Plot Containing some original verses'. A novel without a plot in the middle of the Victorian period is clearly signalling its author's experimental intentions. Plotless and with verses, it must have been a novel in a completely new form. But, 'form is content, content is f o r m . . . writing is not about something; it is that something itself'.7 A new kind of novel necessarily 'meant mischief or so the potential publishers thought. It appears from their comments (our main source of information about the book) 8 that Hardy attacked the whole social structure, questioning the relationship between the classes and the sexes and undermining the hierarchy. He referred to it in later years as 'a striking socialist' novel. Apparently it was both content and form which so alarmed the publishers. Their fear of new form was expressed in their advice to Hardy to 'write a story with a more complicated plot'. 9 It is tantalizing to think of the challenging experimental novels Hardy might have written if his first attempt had not been rejected.10 Instead, he found ways of giving publishers the plots they wanted, while simultaneously challenging, their preconceptions both about the nature of society and about the nature of the novel; but the energy wasted on such things as the desperate overplotting of Desperate Remedies and on the tangled rivalries between lovers (both living and dead) in A



2 A Route to Modernism

3

Pair of Blue Eyes might have been given to the creation of a wholly new kind of novel. Happily, however, after his initial acquiescence in the advice about plot, Hardy refused to be thwarted. In the last 30 years of the nineteenth century he wrote novels which his contemporary readers found challenging and disturbing and which were springboards for his twentieth-century successors. Young Lawrence, like the young Hardy, planned to write novels without plots. According to Jessie Chambers, he told her, 'I don't want a plot, I should be bored with it'. 11 Years later he was still embattled about it. Garnett, questioning whether The Sisters was a viable form, drove Lawrence to despair. He even thought he might abandon his experiments: 'Then I should propose to write a story with a plot and to abandon the exhaustive method entirely'. 12 But, fortunately, he did not allow his creative originality to be crushed. He persisted in - even intensified - 'the exhaustive method'. With three published novels behind him, he was in a stronger position than Hardy had been with The Poor Man and the Lady. The Rainbow was published, and banned. But, unlike The Poor Man and the Lady, it survived. It was almost 50 years later than Hardy's first novel. Changes in attitudes, in society, in science, in beliefs in those 50 years were knit up with startling innovations in all the arts. The Rainbow's survival became a possibility. In the 1860s oblivion was inevitable for Hardy's experimental novel, 'too soon' as he said, for its date. 13 Fifty years later, Lawrence was not alone in challenging the rigidities of publishers and public. Woolf was even more emphatic than Hardy and Lawrence in rejecting plot. In 'Modern Fiction' she wrote, 'If a writer could write what he chose, not what he must. . . there would be no plot'. 14 In 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown' she jokingly suggested that she had felt herself 'tempted to manufacture a three volume novel about the old lady's son', though hastily adding that 'such stories seem to me the most dreary, irrelevant and humbugging affairs in the world'. 15 She attacked 'the appalling narrative business of the realist; getting on from lunch to dinner; it is false, unreal, merely conventional'. 16 Her characters, too, begin to voice objections. Even Bernard, the story-teller in The Waves, says, 'How tired I am of stories' 17 and Miss La Trobe, the playwright in Between the Acts, seems to imply, 'The plot's nothing'. 18 It seems fairly safe to risk assuming that Woolf endorses these views of her characters, especially as she said she was writing The Waves 'to a rhythm, not a plot. . . it is completely opposed to the tradition of fiction'.19



Introduction

These three novelists' unanimous rejection of plot is indicative of their shared desire for change - in fiction and in society. The hypnotic effect of plot on readers, its linearity, its movement towards resolution and conclusion tend to reassure rather than disturb. Hardy saw that such tendencies thwart the expression of those 'ideas and emotions which run counter to inert crystallized opinion - hard as a rock - which the vast body of men have vested interest in supporting'. 20 Although he had decided, when he wrote this passage, that he might express such ideas 'more fully in verse', he had, in fact, found a way of overcoming the 'unfortunate consequences of the advice to "write a story with a plot"'. 21 He created stories with plots which undermined nineteenth-century conceptions of realism, 'ran counter to crystallized opinion' and left endings open and questioning. Such questions about plot are still a preoccupation of literary theory, in spite of the innovations of modernism. At the 1979 Symposium 'On Narrative' at the University of Chicago, Robert Scholes commented on much the same lines as Hardy; 'traditional narrative structures . . . inhibit both individual human growth and significant social c h a n g e . . . narrativity itself, as we have known it, must be seen as an opiate'. He fears it 'may be too deeply r o o t e d . . . to be dispensed with'. 22 Hardy thought it was worth trying. He subverted the novel with the strong plot by using it to reinforce his battle against the conventional morality which the fiction of his day was expected to uphold. His essay, 'Candour in English Fiction' 23 states the case for those changes in attitudes which his novels so vividly embody. His early desire to discard plot was just one sign of a radical divergence from the established traditions of fiction and from the assumptions on which those traditions were based. He wrote the kind of novels which Barthes describes as 'the text of bliss: the text that discomforts... unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions. . . brings to a crisis his relationship with language'. 24 He occupies a pivotal position between nineteenth-century and modernist fiction. His novels now may not seem as revolutionary as those of Lawrence and Woolf, but he disrupted the temporal linearity which was based on nineteenth-century assumptions about continuity, causality, progress long before they were abruptly shattered by Einstein. The characteristic modernist gaps in narration, strange juxtapositions, unexpected language, daring subject matter are all present in Hardy's middle and late work. It was, in its time, as disturbing, as challenging and as new as the fiction of the period we now call Modernist - roughly




1900 to 1940 - because we can no longer call it modern. Instead of the kind of modernist fiction which plays conceptual games and offers puzzles which we can solve if we are perceptive, intelligent and knowledgeable enough, Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf create mysteries; they offer no solutions, no certainties, no conclusions. Their novels, on rereading, expand, deepen, become more, not less, complex. Instead of plot, Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf focused on the unknown, the unconscious; there had been enough of what Lawrence calls 'daytime consciousness' in nineteenth-century fiction - 'unreal', Woolf suggests, in its realism. Hardy led the way. He aimed to keep his novels 'as near to poetry in their subject as conditions would allow, and had often regretted that those conditions would not let him keep them nearer still'. 25 Lawrence, writing The Rainbow, was prepared to flout these conditions, but he found it 'hard to express a new thing'; he was struggling towards 'a deeper sense than we've been used to exercise'. In DH Lawrence: Thinker as Poet Fiona Beckett argues that even in his discursive, non-fictional writing. Lawrence 'poetically thinks his way through and around questions of consciousness, using figures like . . . the flame . .. the poppy . . . the phoenix'. She emphasizes the 'neighbourly nearness' (Heidegger's phrase) between poetry and thought and claims this distinguishes him from his modernist contemporaries such as Joyce and Pound; they, she thinks, have 'the kind of modernist consciousness which might actually impede the real "neighbouring"'. 26 This seems to me a valid distinction. Lawrence warned Garnett not to 'look for the development of the novel to follow the lines of certain characters: the characters fall into the form of some other rhythmic form'.27 The Rainbow is, like The Waves, 'written to a rhythm, not a plot'. Roger Fowler makes a similar point about Woolf's 'spectacular subordination of meaning to music' in the opening voices of the children in The Waves: it is 'incantatory, a dawn-song, in a rhythm which imitates the rise and fall of the waves'. 28 This distinction between Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf and some of their contemporary modernists is central to the argument of this book. By bringing fiction into 'neighbourly nearness' with poetry and music, they escaped from the linearity, the logical cause and effect, the determinism implied by plot. They knew 'when to put aside the writer's conscious intention in favour of some deeper intention of which he may perhaps be unconscious'. 29 Derrida points out that the 'intermixing of genres' existed 'even before the advent of what we call "modernism"'; 30



Introduction 5

the implication of this is that the 'intermixing' is specifically, but not exclusively, modernist. New depths, new rhythmic forms gave readers a shock. Forms that are new are difficult to recognize; they tend to seem formless. 'I tell you it's got form', Lawrence had to insist to Garnett, pleading for acceptance of the new thing he was creating. Woolf begged her readers to 'tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary'. 31 His claim that the work in progress towards The Rainbow had form corresponds to her vision of a new, unwritten novel: 'It will be necessary for the writer of this exacting book to bring to bear upon his tumultuous and contradictory emotions the generalizing and simplifying power of a strict and logical imagination'. 32 But this hypothetical and paradoxical novel, both tumultuous and simplified, both contradictory and logical was not as wholly innovative as Woolf suggests. In the 1895 Preface to Jude the Obscure Hardy said it was 'an endeavour to give shape and coherence to a series of seemings. . . the question of their consistency or their discordance, of their permanence or their transitoriness, being not regarded as of the first moment'. The juxtaposition of coherence and discord is as paradoxical as Woolf's 'exacting' unwritten book. In discarding concern for consistency, Hardy recognized the possibility of balancing intellectual control with the possibility of allowing the processes of the unconscious to contribute to the shaping of the novel. The Preface to Jude challenged presuppositions about the nature of art and questioned whether order and harmony are necessarily of its essence. Awareness of the complexities and incoherences of the human mind made an impact on form in art. The notion of artistic perfection is threatened by a sense of a dangerous instability. The more the novel is concerned with the life of the mind, the greater the risk of fragmentation. Modernist forms of fiction reflect and emphasize this concern. Foucault in 'What is an author?' questions the assumption that 'there must be . . . a point where contradictions are resolved'. But reluctance to accept contradictions persists even now, in art as well as in literature. During a talk on Mondrian, Bridget Riley, contemplating the Mondrian she had had hung among her own paintings in the exhibition, said dubiously, 'I think it isn't quite resolved'. Asked if she was implying that she wanted resolution, she replied eagerly. 'No, it is the shifting surfaces that interest me'. 33 The mind's complex relationship with the body became of particular significance to Hardy as he explored it in his late novels. His risky




statement that Angel 'with more animalism might have been a nobler man' 34 is amplified in his treatment of Sue's similar but more extreme disjunction. Her desire for and fear of physical sexual relationships epitomize the discord between mind and body which Lawrence, too, saw as dangerous. In 'A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover', he says, 'Life is only bearable when mind and body are in harmony' 35 and widens this out to encompass relationships with people, nature, 'the circumambient universe'. These relationships evoke questions about chaos and harmony in art. How much chaos, how much fragmentation, dare artist or writer allow into his/her work? Beckett presents this question as a continuing problem: 'What I am saying does not mean there will henceforth be no form in art. It only means there will be new form, and that this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else. The form and the chaos remain separate. The latter is not reduced to the former. That is why form itself becomes a preoccupation, because it exists as a problem separate from the material it accommodates. To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now'. 36 Before Beckett, Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf (and other modernist writers, painters and composers) were facing this problem. Hardy's essay 'Candour in English Fiction' corresponds to 'A Propos'. Lawrence in 'A Propos' (and in much of his non-fiction) is concerned with what is desirable in life - harmony of mind and body, of the individual with others, of humanity with the cosmos - and how all this can be treated in the novel. 'Candour in English Fiction' focuses more on what is desirable in the novel. In his attack on the prudishness of the publishers and public of his time, Hardy writes, 'Life being a physiological fact, its honest portrayal must be largely concerned with . . . the relations between the s e x e s . . . To this, English society opposes a well-nigh insuperable bar.'37 He adds that novelists are forced to create 'the spurious effect' of the characters being in harmony with their society. This was written in 1890 when his fiction also was making some of its most extreme challenges to contemporary attitudes (such as his comment on animalism in Tess). Hardy and Lawrence are both challenging a society which fears the body. Both investigate the 'halfness' which results from such fears, Hardy by splitting mind and body between two characters (Angel and Sue are all mind, Alec and Arabella all body), Lawrence by exploring in Women in Love Gerald's 'fatal halfness'. They are, inevitably, concerned with the lack of harmony between mind and



Introduction 7

body. Harmony, if it does occur in their novels, is rare, ephemeral, ecstatic, threatened. In Tess, a transitory moment of harmony between mind and body and between two characters is shown in the episode in the empty house in the New Forest. There is even a faint hint of physical sexual fulfilment, but it is distanced by being what the caretaker saw: 'the faces of the pair, wrapped in profound slumber, Tess's lips being parted like a half-open flower near his cheek'. 38 Some 25 years later, Lawrence is able in Women in Love to be much more open about sexual harmony. In 'Excurse' he creates a moment in Sherwood Forest similar to the one in Tess, but much more explicit, of course, about the physical nature of the relationship. His rhythms and repetitions, the balanced and matching sentences ('She had her desire fulfilled. He had his desire fulfilled...') create a sense of musical chords and harmonies. Lawrence uses the rhythmical and sonic resources of language to evoke harmonies that are physical, sensual, emotional. Heidegger maintains that 'It is. . . the property of language to sound and to ring and to vibrate, to hover and to tremble.. . . But our experience of this property is exceedingly clumsy, because the metaphysical-technical explanation gets in the way, and keeps us from considering the matter properly.'39 Lawrence's physical, sensual, emotional rhythms escape the clumsiness feared by Heidegger and create a new kind of fictional prose to express a previously forbidden experience of harmony. However, 'there must be mutation .. . inconclusiveness, immediacy, the quality of life itself'4" in poetry, said Lawrence, but it applies to fiction, too. And so the novels deal with conflict and the struggle towards harmony more than with its achievement. The problem of realizing this in words is shown in a particularly sharp way in Lawrence's 1912 short story 'New Eve and Old Adam'. Here, he is already experimenting, trying out different methods of conveying intellect and 'blood', consciousness and unconsciousness. Though this story gives a simple, even crude outline of dislocation between mind and body, it is an important stage in the process towards finding a form and a language which will express, both imaginatively and intellectually, the complexities of this relationship between harmony and chaos. Women in Love is that new form. It oscillates between harmony and chaos. That moment of harmony in 'Excurse' is placed in a context of violent clashes. Birkin's meditation on the African statuette is designed to clarify the dangers of separation of mind and body. Just as Hardy separated them by allotting mind to one character,




body to another, so Birkin makes the African statuette represent purely sensuous knowledge, in stark opposition to the abstract, 'icedestructive knowledge', which he tentatively identifies with Gerald's 'halfness'. Birkin is simplifying for the sake of clarifying; these opposites, he implies, rather in the manner of Lawrence's essays, need to combine in harmony; Gerald cannot achieve such a combination: 'His consciousness had gone into his wrists, into his h a n d s . . . his wrists were bursting, there would be no satisfaction till his hands had closed on her.' This is not a harmonious synthesizing of mind and body but a damaging eruption of the repressed instinctive element into consciousness. Even when the Gerald-Gudrun relationship seems to be running smoothly, they are 'separate like opposite poles of one fierce energy', in contrast to Birkin's idea of polarity, with stars harmoniously balancing one another. The novel's structure may seem to be the simple one suggested by Leavis: one couple heading towards chaos, the other towards harmony. But this is complicated by many cross-currents; Birkin's analysis of Gerald's 'halfness' is juxtaposed to his anxiety about his own 'duality', 'so spiritual on the one hand, so degraded on the other'. 'That chaos called consciousness' (the phrase is Hardy's)41 is a vital element in the shaping of Women in Love and of the novels of Hardy and Woolf. Their exploitation of the relation of consciousness to the external world adds another dimension of complexity to the form of the novel. In the first chapter of The Return of the Native Hardy suggests that humanity no longer feels in harmony with mild and gentle landscapes but is more attuned to the sombre and the desolate. Wild places like Egdon Heath correspond to the unconscious; they are 'the original of those wild regions of obscurity which we encounter in dreams of flight and disaster'. This razor edge where chaos harmonizes with chaos is epitomized in Eustacia's paradoxical relation with the heath; as she goes through the storm to her death, 'Never was harmony more perfect than that between the chaos of her mind and the chaos of the world without.' 42 The episode of Tess in the uncultivated garden, listening to Angel's harp, is similarly equivocal: 'the harmonies passed like breezes through her' 43 and even slug-slime and sticky blights are harmless, merely making 'madder stains' on her skin (this is the colour, rose madder, not the incipient dementia of some urban critics' imaginations); but Hardy does not let us forget that she cannot help crushing snails underfoot. Breezes pass through Tess; 'this coolness and subtlety



Introduction 9

of vegetation passing into one's blood' is Birkin's experience when he rolls naked among the plants. There is no equivalent of the crushed snails here; the harmony between man and nature seems complete. But perhaps the harmony is even more tentative than in Tess; it is brought into question much later when, facing Gerald's corpse, Birkin feels his blood turn to ice-water. Both novelists emphasize the physicality of the relationship with the external world. In Woolf it is sometimes even more intensely physical, sometimes violently, so that harmony is on the brink of slipping over into dissonance: 'a jar was so green that the eye seemed sucked up through a funnel by its intensity and stuck to it like a limpet'. 44 Woolf frightens us with a green jar, Hardy frightens us with the universe. For the characters in Two on a Tower outer space, observed through a telescope, has 'a vastness they could not cope with, even as an idea'.45 This experimental novel suggests that the immensities of space make any notion of harmony between 'man and his circumambient universe' inconceivable. In Women in Love Lawrence seems to acknowledge this, postponing its achievement until Birkin's vision of 'a finer created being' of 'miraculous unborn species' replaces humanity. In his essays, on the other hand, he sees 'connecting ourselves up with the cosmos' as a necessity for humanity. While these three novelists are vividly conscious of chaos, they also know how human beings long for harmony. Clym and Eustacia, newly married, live in 'a harmonious mist' which veils anything inharmonious. Jude, on arriving at Christminster, his 'heavenly Jerusalem', 'When he passed objects out of h a r m o n y . . . he allowed his eyes to slip over them as if they were not there'. Lawrence treats this tendency with greater complexity. He exposes how Gerald's concept of harmony as the equivalent of organization and so reducible to the laws of mechanics, in its operation in the mines, turns into chaos. Any contrasting moves in the novel towards harmony are transitory and unstable. Birkin's hankering for 'an eternal union' with a man is left hanging in a void when the novel stops. Woolf treats such longings more harshly. In Between the Acts the mockery of Mrs Swithin's 'unifying' is merciless: Sheep, cows, grass, trees - all are one. If discordant, producing harmony - if not to us, to a gigantic ear attached to a gigantic head. And thus - she was smiling - the agony of the particular sheep or cow, or human being is necessary; and so . . . we reach the conclusion that all is harmony, could we hear it.




11

Such longings are probably the reason why human beings invented art and why, in some periods, pictures stay inside their frames, poems obey established metrical rules and novels end with a satisfying sense of completeness. But in the period I am dealing with, roughly 1880-1940, the changes, contradictions and cross-currents of ideas challenge the concept of harmonious form in art. The endings of Hardy's last two novels question that idea, Jude mournfully, The Well-Beloved ironically. The first version of The Well-Beloved ends enigmatically in a gurgle of icy laughter, the second version apparently conventionally in marriage, but only because neighbours want 'to round off other people's histories in the best machine-made conventional manner'. 46 Hardy's view of such endings is implicit in the grotesque ceremony with the aging bride in the wheelchair and the closing of the natural springs - both of water and of creativity. Such ironic foregrounding of technique is one of the reasons why The Well-Beloved has been described as 'a key text in the transition from Victorian to modern fiction'.47 Jude ends with clashing contrasts. His dying murmurs of lines from the Book of Job are crashed through and chopped up by shouts of holiday crowds and raucous brass bands. The white, silent corpse is juxtaposed to explosions of noise and colour. Finally, Sue's claim that she has found peace is set against Arabella's assertion that she will never find it. The gap between what is desired and what is is one of the subjects of the novel. The clashes and contrasts of its form demonstrate that gap. Both Hardy and Lawrence were aware of the problem. Eagleton writes 'it is precisely in its Assuring of organic form . . . that [Women in Love] enforces a "progressive" discontinuity with a realist lineage already put into profound question by Jude the Obscure'.4* This suggests that Hardy and Lawrence were on their way to finding the form Beckett looked for. It is surprising, therefore, that Eagleton argues that 'after Jude there was nowhere for Hardy to go; having "exploded" the organic forms of fiction, he was forced to disembark'. 49 He also describes Lawrence as 'beset' by contradictions. 50 The question of resolution continues to perturb, both in literature and in the visual arts. Bridget Riley's interest in 'shifting surfaces' parallels Woolf's treatment of form: 'She invented many different forms, and each was like a container within which could be held in suspension a variety of different statements about what life is, in constant agitated motion'. 51 Woolf wanted to 'achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords . . . some kind of whole made of shimmering fragments'. 52 In



Introduction

To the Lighthouse she uses an artist to examine directly questions of harmony and chaos in art. Lily, the artist, tries to achieve 'that razor edge of balance between two opposite forces'. In each of the three sections of the book a woman creates harmony, makes 'Time stand still', Mrs Ramsay in family life, Lily in art, the charwoman in stemming, with mop and bucket, the flow of the house towards disintegration. This patterning is matched by the ending, where, by a cunning shift of tenses, the arrival at the lighthouse is made to coincide with the final brushstroke on Lily's painting, which makes the whole cohere. Brilliantly Woolf has drawn the threads together and brought the novel harmoniously to a close. But, is it too neat? Earlier, Lily had felt, 'Beauty had this penalty - it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life - froze it'. Lawrence's discussion of this idea in the Introduction to New Poems proposes a kind of poetry in which there is 'no static perfection, none of that finality which we find so satisfying because we are so frightened'.53 Woolf expressed her awareness of the dangers of beauty in a letter to Ethel Smythe: 'I will broach the subject of b e a u t y . . . and burst out in ecstasy at your defence of me as a very ugly writer - which is what I am - but an honest one, driven like a whale to the surface in a snort - such is the effort and anguish to me of finding a phrase (that is, saying what I mean) - and then they say I write beautifully! How could I write beautifully when I am always trying to say something that has not been said and should be said for the first time, exactly.'54 To the Lighthouse seems to veer towards that finality Lawrence saw as dangerously 'satisfying' as Woolf so perfectly brings together the completion of the voyage, of the picture and of the novel. In doing this, she seems in danger of diminishing in the novel, the power of suffering, fear, war, death, entropy and of making chaos too easily controlled and shaped. But, at the last moment, she undercuts her perfection. In the last few lines of the book, Lily's picture is demoted from its status as a work of art to an amateur's attempt which will lie forgotten in an attic. She thus destabilizes that static perfection which, for a moment, she had seemed to endorse. Between the Acts more daringly explores her early idea of 'symmetry by means of infinite discords'. Here, she creates a form in which words are broken, sentences shattered and human beings are 'orts, scraps and fragments', reflected scrappily in the broken mirrors of the actors. Chaos is here creative. A tree full of starlings becomes 'a rhapsody, a quivering cacophony... birds syllabling discordantly, life, life, life, without measure, with-




13

out stop.' 55 Woolf crystallizes what has been apparent in Hardy's and Lawrence's novels; both harmony (in Between the Acts imaged in the white empty room at its centre) and chaos are necessary to human existence. Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf have created forms of fiction based on a creative tension between harmony and chaos. Structurally these novels are both shaped and fragmented so that they are able to contain 'that chaos called consciousness' and its even more chaotic partner, unconsciousness. As Josipovici says, 'Modern art relinquishes the notion of art as a bulwark against chaos.' 56 It is Elizabeth-Jane in The Mayor of Casterbridge who experiences 'that chaos called consciousness' as she sits at her dying mother's bedside and hears the unsynchronized ticking of clocks. Clock-time, mind-time, life-time are jangled together. It comes as a surprise that it is Elizabeth-Jane who has this sense of the chaotic nature of consciousness, since one of her functions in the novel is to form a contrast, in her stability and self-control, to Henchard's 'unruly volcanic stuff beneath the rind'. But, just as Hardy rejected consistency of form in the preface to Jude, so he also rejects consistency in characterization, especially in his late novels. Both Alec and Arabella have brief, apparently out of character, religious conversions. Such inconsistencies are psychologically more complex in the treatment of Sue, with her sudden and violent fluctuations of feeling and attitude. Hardy explores but does not explain these emotional changes. Sue is 'puzzling and unstateable' not only to Jude, but to the reader, to Hardy himself. Little Father Time moves out into another world, 'our rude realms far above'. 57 In creating these characters, Hardy is exploring the unconscious, but hesitating on the brink of interpreting it, leaving the reader to experience its unexplained complexities. 58 In his more intense way, Lawrence flings the reader into the midst of the experience, with startling imagery, powerful, repetitive rhythms, alliteration and assonance. In this way, modes of being which seem utterly alien to the human are created. The moonlight dance in The Rainbow, by starting with the rhythm of the earth and sea, can lead to Ursula's unearthly, violent relationship with the moon. Her fearful repudiation of this experience when she returns to 'daytime consciousness' reinforces rather than denies it. Her glimpse of an affinity between her own incomprehensible experience and a bunch of oats glistening in the moonlight affirms the strangeness. Imagery, sounds, rhythm ensure a reading that is sensuous and imaginative, rather than cerebral. The most profound sexual experience of Ursula and Birkin 'can never be transmuted into mind content'. Terms



Introduction

such as 'unstateable' (Sue) and 'untranslatable' (Birkin) are used of characters not only in extraordinary psychological states but also in their ordinariness. (Birkin is 'untranslatable' just going into a shop.) This strangeness is highlighted by the characters' responses to one another. Sue is a 'conundrum' to Jude; Ursula thinks the way Gudrun adds Birkin up and draws a line underneath is 'such a lie';59 Birkin, the 'changer', the 'chameleon', is crossed out, 'summed up, paid for, settled, done with' in Gudrun's sum. Bernard in The Waves maintains that Louis is 'adding us up like insignificant items in some grand t o t a l . . . one day . . . the addition will be complete; our total will be known'; 60 Rhoda agrees, feeling that 'if we submit, he will reduce us to order'. 61 Gudrun and Louis are presented as trying to be omniscient authors of their friends' lives (like the neighbours at the end of The Well Beloved) and, in the process, reducing them to insignificance. In this way they sharpen the focus, in the novels they occur in, on the multiple nature of character. This distinguishes these novels utterly from the tradition of omniscience. The plain statements that 'Mrs Dalloway would never say of anyone that they were this or were that' and that 'more than fifty pairs of eyes' were needed to see round Mrs Ramsay do the same job, but in a more obvious and less vivid way. The recognition that 'no thing was simply one thing' (as James understands on nearing the lighthouse) was, according to David Lodge, 'perhaps the central assertion of the modernist novel'. 62 This is a central part of modernist novelists' effort to break out of confinement to place, time, consistency, 'daytime consciousness'. It was the sight of some yellow-hammers ('They are of another world.. . . The universe is non-human, thank God') which prompted Ursula's fierce rejection of Gudrun's attitude to people and to creatures - 'making everything come down to human standards'. 63 In The Return of the Native a mallard brings to Venn communication 'from regions unknown to man', as do the birds from 'behind the North Pole' in Tess. These are means of expressing that 'leap from the known to the unknown' in The Rainbow, that 'miracle of leaping from a pinnacle of a tower into the air - startling, unexpected, unknown' 64 in To the Lighthouse. Hardy experiments with bringing this 'something inhuman' into even closer relationship with the human by creating the character of Little Father Time, a character out on the rim of the world, gazing across 'some vast Atlantic of Time'. In his poem, 'Midnight on the Great Western', Hardy asks,




Introduction

15

Hardy's questioning, uncertain treatment of the journeying boy in this poem has not caused the consternation aroused by Little Father Time. The incongruity of such a strange character in a novel is the problem. It is an overt challenge to traditional assumptions about the nature of the novel. In his 'Study of Thomas Hardy', Lawrence asserts that Hardy's 'little drama [of human beings] falls to pieces... but the stupendous theatre outside goes on enacting its own incomprehensible drama'. 66 But his use of 'theatre' and 'drama' implies that a relationship between the human and the 'incomprehensible' outside does exist in Hardy's work. Woolf puts it in these terms: 'how it is not oneself, but something in the universe one's left with. . . . One sees a fin passing far out. What image can I reach to convey what I mean? Really there is none, I think.' 67 Yet she persisted: 'It is to be an endeavour at something mystic, spiritual; the thing that exists when we aren't there'. 68 She writes of 'worshipping the impersonal world which is proof of some existence other than ours'. 69 Things (she had, for instance, chests of drawers in mind) are just as 'unstateable' and 'untranslatable' as the characters in these novels. And, because they are alien, the stretching of the imagination is even greater. Lawrence's 'carbon' ('that which is non-human in humanity') 70 is inanimate and so, according to Langbaum, 'a step further than Hardy who roots his characters in a vegetated landscape'.71 But Hardy's birds connect with the unknown and the inanimate; the trilobite's eyes, dead and turned to stone, but fixed on Knight, saw a world long before the existence of humanity. Woolf's 'solid objects' - a piece of glass looking like 'a creature from another world' and a piece of iron which was 'evidently alien to the earth and had its origin in one of the dead stars or was itself the cinder of a dead moon' 72 - succeed in connecting the reader (as well as the possessors of the objects) with 'that something in the universe' for which she had felt there was 'no image'. 'The world without a self'73 - something difficult to write about challenged and fascinated these three writers. They treated it indirectly, through imagery, and also directly by incorporating the problems of this kind of writing explicitly in their work. In Hardy's



Knows your soul a sphere, O journeying boy, 'Our rude realms far above, Whence with spacious vision you mark and mete This region of sin you find you in But are not of.'65

poem, 'The Fallow Deer at the Lonely House',74 'One without looks in tonight', while 'We sit and think/At the fender brink' but 'we do not discern those eyes'; so the poem raises the question, quite explicitly, of who is observing the eyes, the deer, the people, the house, the whole scene. Likewise, in the manuscript of Between the Acts, Woolf asks 'who observed the dining room . . . noted absence?' In the published version, it is the room itself which expresses itself: Empty, empty, empty; silent, silent, silent. The room was a shell, singing of what was before time was; a vase stood in the heart of the house, alabaster, smooth, cold, holding the still, distilled essence of emptiness, silence.75 Lawrence, too, imagines 'a world empty of people'. In Kangaroo he writes of 'the soft, blue, humanless sky of Australia. "Tabula rasa". The world a new leaf. And on the new leaf, nothing. The white clarity of the Australian fragile atmosphere. Without a mark, without a record'.76 In evoking the special 'humanless' quality of Australia, he also insists that it is 'unwritten', unmarked, unrecorded. He simultaneously denies and makes a 'record'. Woolf does the same, not in a strange land but in an English country garden, where the sky was blue, pure blue, black blue; blue that had never filtered down; that had escaped registration. It never fell as sun, shadow, or rain upon the world, but disregarded the little coloured ball of earth entirely. No flower felt it; no garden. 77 To register what has 'escaped registration' it is necessary to use negatives. Lawrence and Woolf, especially in Women in Love and Between the Acts, use innumerable negatives (to Hardy's 'unstateable' they add 'untranslatable', 'unliving', 'inhuman', 'eyeless' (of winds and flowers), 'unblowing', 'ungrowing'). In Between the Acts, this negativity is, near the end, compressed into two negative fragments, detached from what they negate: 'un-' and 'dis-' concentrate the essence of negativity. 'The struggle with words and meaning', so central to modernist writing, is made even more explicit by the characters' debates about it. Such discussions pervade Women in Love. Lawrence uses Birkin to articulate a notion of a relationship 'where there is no speech', 78 where 'words themselves do not convey meaning. . .. Yet it must be s p o k e n . . . to give utterance was to break a way through the




17

walls of the prison'. 79 Birkin's later realization that 'it must happen beyond the sound of words' 80 is no solution for the novelist who has to use words to suggest what is beyond them. In Kangaroo the struggle becomes less abstract and even more anguished: 'speech was like a volley of dead leaves and dust, stifling the air. Human beings should learn to make weird, wordless cries, like animals, and cast off the clutter of words.' 81 Somers here is almost identical with Bernard in The Waves who needs 'a howl, a cry'. In desperation, these novelists look to times and places without language 'beyond words', in the unconscious in Women in Love, before words, in the unintelligible syllables of the song of the ancient woman outside Regent's Park Station in Mrs Dalloway. Illness, for Woolf, provides yet another way of experiencing words: In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning, gather instinctively this, that and the other - a sound, a colour, here a stress, there a pause . . . incomprehensibility has enormous power over us in illness . . . in health, meaning has encroached upon sound. Our intellect dominates over our senses. But in illness. . . words give out their s c e n t . . . meaning is all the richer for having come to us sensually first, by way of the palate and nostrils, like some queer odour.82 In Between the Acts, Miss La Trobe, too, in her exultation with 'words without meaning, wonderful words', enjoys their sensuousness, but her new play - 'The curtain rose. They spoke' - leaves the reader at the end of Between the Acts confronted by a void the blank page. 'The defining characteristic of Modernism was its insistence that the mind be subjected to a wholly new kind of stress. . . . Obsessive attempts to say "the unsayable" made extreme demands on the mind's elasticity. Not only literature but all the art of the period seemed intent on stretching the mind beyond the very limits of human understanding.' 83 By ending Between the Acts in the way she does, Woolf makes that stretching seem to be going on indefinitely. The reader is put in the position of Wallace Stevens' listener, . . . who listens in the snow And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.84



Introduction

The modernist writer, 'nothing himself explores a universe no longer centred on humanity. In Hardy's later fiction, characters recognize their own insignificance. Henchard's grand statement of negatives in his will claims to erase himself - '& that no man remember me' - even in the act of asserting himself, 'To this I put my name, MICHAEL HENCHARD'. By the time of Tess and Jude the erasure of the self is no longer treated ironically. Tess would have her life 'unbe' and Jude submerges himself in Job, identifying with his 'Let the day perish wherein I was born'. While Hardy gives these three characters individual reasons for wanting extinction, he also implies that this might be a universal desire. He sees little chance of happiness for 'higher existences' on this planet, but it might be found on other planets 'though it is hard to see how'. 85 In Tess, he momentarily imagines an improved society but concludes that 'it is not to be prophesied or even conceived as possible'. The beginning of 'To an unborn pauper Child' endorses the idea that 'not to have been born is best' ('Breathe not, hid heart: cease silently') yet the poem ends . . . such are we Unreasoning, sanguine, visionary That I can hope Health, love, friends, scope In full for thee; can dream thou'lt find Joys seldom yet attained by human kind. 86 Hardy created an art which can hold in tension such contraries, such cross-currents. It is an art which contemplates being and non-being. Lawrence goes to even greater extremes. His despair of the human race is so intense that its possible extinction becomes a focus for his imagination in Women in Love. Birkin sees life as 'a blotch of labour, like insects scurrying in filth'87 and says, 'I abhor humanity. I wish it were swept away.' He imagines a more desirable world, 'empty of people, just grass and a hare sitting up'. In response to Ursula's accusation that he wants there to be 'nothing', he challenges her: 'Do you think creation depends on man? .. . Man is a mistake, he must go'. 88 Birkin has leapt from the decentring of the human race to its extinction. At the end of the novel, Lawrence softens the harshness of this stark elimination of humanity. After Gerald's death, Birkin thinks of the 'non-human mystery' of the universe, and envisages the processes of evolution replacing




19

humanity as it replaced the ichthyosauri; he imagines 'some finer, more wonderful, some new, more lovely race, to carry on the embodiment of creation... . Human or inhuman mattered nothing.' The statement that 'It was very consoling to Birkin to think this' is interestingly ambiguous. It hints that Birkin's despair of human existence is such that, like Eliot in Ash Wednesday, he is having to construct something Upon which to rejoice. On the other hand, his claim that he 'would die like a shot to know that the earth would be really cleaned of all the people' 89 may be taken as selflessly affirmative; it is not nihilistic, since he hopes for forms other and better than the human to evolve. Lawrence makes Birkin's position more challenging than consolatory. The post-Darwinian displacement of humanity, not just from its central position, but altogether is echoed in Woolf's investigations into the possibility of seeing 'the thing that exists when we aren't there'. In her work there is no overt debate on the world without a human element, but it is there by implication. In her diary notes of her first thoughts on The Moths (later to become The Waves) a character might 'think about the age of the earth: the death of humanity'. This idea is explored differently and more explicitly in Between the Acts. Isa's tentative and wistful longing is to escape from her role as an overburdened donkey into an imagined world which is wholly empty and negative: some harvestless dim field where no evening lets fall her mantle; nor sun rises. All's equal there. Unblowing, ungrowing are the roses there. Change is not; nor the mutable and lovable; nor greetings nor partings; nor furtive findings and feelings, where hand seeks hand and eye seeks shelter from the eye.90 This world involves both a release from growth, change man contact and a sense of loss. A similarly equivocal humanity occurs abruptly just before the end of Between Without explanation or comment, the characters in the room at Pointz Hall become insects:

and huview of the Acts. drawing-

The circle of readers, attached to white papers was lit up. There in that hollow of the sun-baked field were congregated the



Introduction


In Birkin's vision of human beings as insects, they were 'scurrying in filth'; Woolf's, though shrunk to insignificance (like Birkin's) have a 'rosy', 'glistening', 'sun-baked' setting. They seem to be viewed benignly. In 1923 she wrote: my own view of humanity in general falls and falls... now I can see little good in the race and I would like to convey this in writing. . . but then (and this is my weakness) tolerance keeps breaking in and I excuse the creatures instead of blighting them. 92 By 1939 there is less tolerance and more blighting, but not with the ruthless vehemence of Birkin in Women in Love. After the 'insect' paragraph in Between the Acts, the human characters become first fox and vixen, then Stone Age man and woman who, in Mrs Swithin's reading of H.G. Wells's Outline of History has just 'raised himself from his semi-crouching position and raised great stones'. No such positive development is offered by the blank page of Between the Acts after 'They spoke'. Instead, confronted by that nothingness, the reader may feel exposed to something indefinable and beyond consciousness. Gillian Beer discerns, in To the Lighthouse, this sense of exposure to 'an expanse of the world beyond the human'. 93 In the novels of Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf this awareness comes with a strong sense of the everyday. In The Rainbow, Lawrence gives Tom Brangwen the understanding that, 'There was the infinite world, eternal and unchanging, as well as the world of life'. In To the Lighthouse, for Mrs Ramsay, these two worlds are so intermingled that at a dinner party 'partook, she thought, helping Mr Bankes to an especially tender piece, of eternity'. Michael Bell implies that the 'concern with the intimate, pervasive connection between the everyday quality of experience and an ultimate metaphysical vision' 94 is specific to Lawrence's fiction. I suggest that this concern is shared with Hardy and Woolf and is a vital aspect of their modernism. 'In modernism words after speech reach into the unknown', says Josipovici.95 The unknown into which the words of Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf reach is both 'the world beyond the human' and that other unknown, the inner world. Ricoeur pinpoints only



grasshopper, the ant and the beetle, rolling pebbles of sun-baked earth through the glistening stubble. In that rosy corner of the sun-baked field Bartholomew, Giles and Lucy polished and nibbled and broke off crumbs. 91

21

one of these when he says (in a discussion of Mrs Dalloway) that 'the art of fiction consists of weaving together the sense of everydayness and that of the inner self.96 The mingling together of the everyday with unknown regions, whether of mind or universe, is a crucial aspect of modernism and the main line down which this study of the fiction of Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf travels. Hardy in Two on a Tower brings all these elements together in a sentence: 'At night, when human discords are hushed .. . there is nothing to moderate the blow with which the infinitely great, the stellar universe . . . strikes down upon the infinitely little, the mind of the beholder.' 97



Introduction

The Experimental and the Absurd in Two on a Tower

Though usually and rightly classified as a minor novel, Two on a Tower contains some of Hardy's most original and adventurous experiments. It explores imaginatively an idea he expressed theoretically nine years later in 'The Science of Fiction': 'with our widened knowledge of the universe and its forces and man's position therein, narrative, to be artistically convincing, must adjust itself to the new alignment.' 1 Yet his use of 'the stupendous background of the stellar universe' has come in for a good deal of criticism, on the grounds that it is not integral to the novel, that it does dwarf the characters in spite of Hardy's claim to the contrary in the Preface, and that it is too remote from human concerns to function effectively in a novel. This dismissive attitude is strange since it is generally accepted that the way the background is used is one of the distinctive features of Hardy's major novels. As Lawrence says in his 'Study of Thomas Hardy': ' . . . this is the quality Hardy shares with the great writers, Shakespeare or Sophocles or Tolstoi, this setting behind the small action of his protagonists the terrific action of unfathomed nature.' 2 In Hardy's exploration of this theme in Two on a Tower he arrives at a vision of the universe which is fundamentally different from that presented in his earlier novels. It exemplifies Lawrence's view that 'The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe'. 3 The heath in The Return of the Native (published four years before Two on a Tower) at first sight seems to function in a similar way to the 'stellar universe' in that it provides 'the terrific action of unfathomed nature'. But, even in the first chapter, in which no characters 22



2

appear, Hardy stresses the heath's affinity with humanity; it is 'like man, slighted and enduring', it is 'the hitherto unrecognized original' of unconscious terrors but at the same time a stabilizing influence, giving 'ballast to the mind adrift on change, and harassed by the irrepressible New'.4 Hardy is, of course, far from suggesting that it is benevolent, but he does emphasize the closeness of the tie between the heath and the people. Even Eustacia's stormy relationship with it is a kind of harmony: 'Never was harmony more perfect than that between the chaos of her mind and the chaos of the world without'. 5 The sky above the heath shares in this intimacy with the human beings; Clym looks at the moon which 'depicted a small image of herself in each of his eyes' and feels himself 'voyaging bodily through its wild scenes, standing on its hollow hills, traversing its deserts, descending its vales. . .'.6 Hardy brings it down to almost manageable proportions by making the lovers use the eclipse, that 'remote celestial phenomenon', as a signal for a meeting. Two on a Tower suggests a more extreme attitude and feeling about humanity's position in the cosmos which Hardy did not express so fully or so clearly again until his later poetry, and even then not quite with the combination of the horrifying and the absurd which gives this novel from time to time its modern flavour. The 'stellar universe' in Two on a Tower offers no 'ballast' to the mind. It may indeed, like the heath, 'reduce to insignificance . . . the turmoil of a single man', 7 but instead of inducing a sense of balance, it is shattering, reducing 'everything terrestrial to atomic proportions'. 8 Lady Constantine's (and the reader's) first look through Swithin's telescope reveals the sun as 'a whirling mass, in the centre of which the blazing globe itself seemed to be laid bare to its core. It was a peep into a maelstrom of fire, taking place where nobody had ever been or ever would be.' 9 This immediate emphasis on the alien nature of the universe seen through the telescope highlights the difference between Two on a Tower and The Return of the Native, where the indifferent heath has its affinity with humanity. The remote moon is reflected in Clym's eyes, but in Two on a Tower the connection is much more tenuous and 'the ghastly chasm' is 'bridged by the fragile line of sight.' 10 Instead of identifiable shapes of mountains and valleys on the moon, we confront 'monsters of magnitude without known shape. Such monsters are the voids and waste places of the sky."1 Using his astronomer as his vehicle, Hardy creates a sense of the size and formlessness of the universe, and of its decay. Swithin points out dying stars: 'Imagine them all extinguished, and



'Two on a Tower' 23

your mind feeling its way through a heaven of total darkness, occasionally striking against the black, invisible cinders of those stars'.12 The characters are facing an experience that 'reduces the importance of everything'.13 In the other novels, Hardy is usually concerned with the closeness of the relationship between people and their surroundings. The laws of nature are not made for humanity, but Hardy usually shows that people can, if they will, adapt themselves to the nature of things, cover their stacks, bend a spout {Far from the Madding Crowd) or allow for the changeableness of the English summer (The Mayor ofCasterbridge). Just occasionally we are reminded that though we are 'part of the great web of human doings', the great web itself is, from some views, insignificant. This is the effect of the birds from behind the North Pole in Tess of the d'Urbervilles: 'gaunt spectral creatures with tragical eyes - eyes which had witnessed scenes of cataclysmal horror in inaccessible polar regions of a magnitude such as no human being had ever conceived, in curdling temperatures no man could endure'. 14 Here, as in Two on a Tower, Hardy is creating the sense of a universe not made for people, extending infinitely beyond human comprehension. The possibility that the universe is infinite and meaningless is contemplated. His use of 'the voids and waste places of the sky' to suggest this expresses that awareness of worlds beyond human comprehension which becomes increasingly prominent in subsequent writing. Before Lawrence and Woolf, Conrad in Nostromo used the experience in the gulf to confront Decoud with 'the universe as a succession of incomprehensible i m a g e s . . . the solitude appeared like a great void and the silence of the gulf like a tense thin cord to which he hung suspended.. .'.15 This is similar to Hardy's 'monsters without known shape' and the thin cord linking Decoud to the universe is like the 'fragile line of sight' which connects Swithin and Viviette to it. Conrad's account of the 'crushing, paralyzing sense of human littleness' 16 corresponds to Hardy's account of 'the blow with which the infinitely great, the stellar universe, strikes down upon the infinitely little, the mind of the beholder' 17 and Conrad's 'abyss of waters without earth or sky'18 to Hardy's 'deep wells for the human mind to let itself down into .. . and side caverns and secondary abysses to right and left'.19 Both writers create for the reader the nightmarish imaginative experience of physically entering these abysses while simultaneously suggesting the inexplicable nature of the universe and our position in it.




The Marabar Caves in A Passage to India function in a similar way. Forster places them in time and space: 'the sun who has watched them for countless aeons may still discern in their outlines forms that were his before our globe was torn from his bosom'. 20 The emptiness of the caves ('Nothing is inside them . . . if mankind grew envious and excavated, nothing, nothing would be added to the sum of good or evil') 21 corresponds to the 'voids and waste places' of Two on a Tower. The overwhelming of Mrs Moore by the echo with its message that 'Everything exists. Nothing has value', is essentially the same kind of experience as that of Viviette and Swithin as 'they more and more felt the contrast between their own tiny magnitudes and those among which they had recklessly plunged till they were oppressed with the presence of a vastness they could not cope with even as an idea'. 22 Forster, however, makes this vision of the possible total meaninglessness of existence central to the novel: for Hardy, it is one of 'a series of seemings'. But all these writers are tentative about the implications of their vision. Hardy perhaps sums it up for all of them in saying 'I am utterly bewildered to understand how the doctrine that, beyond the knowable, there must always be an unknown, can be displaced'. 23 These comparisons throw some light on Hardy's pivotal position between the nineteenth century and the twentieth century and on the relation of Two on a Tower to his other novels. His Preface indicates that he saw 'the stellar universe' as one of the two main concerns of the novel, though the lesser of the two. Yet even though he calls it 'a slightly-built romance', he embodies in this novel a way of seeing existence which was for many of his contemporary readers either shattering or outrageous. It was not, of course, a totally new conception; because of the work of Darwin, it was being more widely discussed in the 1880s than before. In nineteenthcentury literature it tended to find expression in poetry rather than in the novel, perhaps because it is easier, as Hardy suggested, to get away with 'ideas and emotions which run counter to the inert crystallized opinion' 24 in verse than in prose. Hardy's notion that to make an impact a writer must be 'five and twenty years ahead of his time' 25 applies even to works he regarded as slight. I think that to take the comparisons even further into the twentieth century is helpful here. A critic writing on a group of post-war writers states that 'for many intelligent and sensitive human beings the world of the mid-twentieth century has lost its meaning and has simply ceased to make sense. .. Suddenly man sees himself



'Two on a Tower' 25


a challenge to accept the human condition as it is, in all its mystery and absurdity, and to bear it with dignity, nobly, responsibly; precisely because there are no easy solutions to the mysteries of existence, because man is ultimately alone in a meaningless world.26 Much of this, by Martin Esslin on the Theatre of the Absurd, could be applied to the bulk of Hardy's work; but what is particularly interesting in relation to Two on a Tower is the association of man 'ultimately alone in a meaningless world' with the idea of the absurd, for it is probably the absurdities in the novel which have been responsible for its relegation to the second class among Hardy's works. This is an experiment that does not wholly succeed; yet in setting 'the emotional history of two infinitesimal lives against the stupendous background of the stellar universe' and adding a third element of farcical human behaviour embodied in absurd intricacies of plot Hardy is being just as daringly experimental as he was when he explored Sue Bridehead's psychological complexities 12 years later. Hardy's perception of the nature of existence as it is expressed in Two on a Tower has much in common with Beckett's, whom Esslin described as the most poetic of the absurdist dramatists. In Lessness, everything is pared away except the tiny human figure and the void: 'All sides endlessness earth sky as one no sound no stir. Grey face two pale blue little body heart beating only upright.' By focusing exclusively, as I have been doing, on the universe revealed by the telescope in Two on a Tower we get something of the same effect of tiny human beings facing a formless vastness. As Lance St John Butler says in an essay aptly entitled 'How it is for Thomas Hardy', for both Hardy and Beckett, 'On the ultimate level, there is nothing'. 27 But, as Butler emphasizes, 'the world is only finally empty, not immediately'. Though the world outside the window in Endgame is 'corpsed', like Swithin's cinder of stars, we can be only intermittently conscious of our place in space. Critics who complain that 'the stellar universe' is merely episodic (and therefore insignificant) have not seen that its intermittent recurrence is a way of using the structure of the novel to correspond to our capac-



faced with a universe that is both frightening and illogical - in a word, absurd.' He claims that in spite of 'extravagant fantasies' these writers are essentially realistic, and their work is

ity for exposure to it. Though Swithin welcomes his 'emancipation from the trammelling body' he also knows that it is 'impossible to think at all adequately of the sky - of what the sky substantially is, without feeling it as a juxtaposed nightmare. It is better - far better - for men to forget the universe than to bear it clearly in mind'. 28 Hardy, like Eliot in Burnt Norton, realizes that 'human kind/Cannot bear very much reality', and that 'the changing body/Protects mankind from heaven and damnation/Which flesh cannot endure'. Hardy uses various means in the novel to blot out, from time to time, the nightmare of the universe. A spell of continuous rain makes it seem 'as if the whole science of astronomy had never been real, and the heavenly bodies, with their motions, were as theoretical as the lines and circles of a bygone mathematical problem'. 29 But a function of his art in Two on a Tower is to ensure that we do, at least intermittently, 'think adequately of the universe', while ironically drawing attention to the ways in which we try to shield ourselves from these thoughts. In The Rainbow Ursula has to reassert her 'daytime consciousness' after her terrifying experience in the moonlight at the open-air dance. It is probably because of our own inability to endure much of this kind of experience that Woolf makes 'Time Passes' the shortest section of To the Lighthouse. Though Hardy exposes us less harshly and continuously than Beckett does in, for instance, Happy Days, some aspects of his treatment of Viviette are similar in their impact. Winnie's desperate efforts to sustain 'the old style' and to structure her day with trivia so as to hide from the horror she is faced with are in their absurdity similar to Viviette's frenzied efforts to keep up the conventions. The concealment of her marriage to Swithin in case her county neighbours won't ask her to tea, the secret meetings, the repeated escapes from imminent discovery function in the same way as Winnie's use of her bag. An inexorable bell governs Winnie's sleeping and waking, just as a rigid social law drives Viviette to marry the Bishop. It is usually argued that the absurd complications of the plot in Two on a Tower are entirely due to Hardy's tendency in the lesser novels to get knotted up in pointless complications. It is true that this happens here, as it does in Desperate Remedies and A Laodicean, but I think there is also a realization in Two on a Tower that the very absurdity of such complications has its function in the novel. Hardy is struggling to twist the publisher's demand for a complicated plot to his own purposes in Two on a Tower. It is significant that most of these complications arise from conflicts in Viviette's



'Two on a Tower' 27

personality, on the one hand sensitive and passionate, both in her love for Swithin and in her perception of the universe ('it annihilates me') and on the other, ludicrously concerned to conform to the social conventions of her day. Hardy explores with compassion, as Beckett does, the absurd and sometimes heroic ways in which the characters try to stave off the recognition of possible ultimate nothingness while exposing readers painfully to that void. One of the difficulties in bringing together these incongruous elements is the use of language which (unless disintegration of syntax and other experimental devices are employed) tends to impose a form and structure which implies a sense of order, however little the author wishes to create this effect. Hardy draws attention to this when he contrasts the sky in the northern hemisphere, with its named constellations and accretions of legend 'without which it had almost seemed that a polar sky could not exist', with, in the southern hemisphere, 'the limitless vacancy... of an even more unknown tract of the unknown. Space here, being less the historic haunt of human thought than overhead at home, seemed to be pervaded with a more lonely loneliness.' 30 This southern, unnamed and unlegendary sky is a forerunner of Lawrence's 'unrecorded' Australian sky in Kangaroo and Woolf's 'unregistered' blue in Between the Acts. Hardy makes a similar point about the stars in the northern sky which are not visible to the naked eye and which had 'for infinite ages spent their beams without calling forth from a single earthly poet a single line'. 31 This juxtaposition of a universe given shape by language with one that recedes infinitely, unknowably and unnamed, is for Camus the essence of the absurd. In The Myth of Sisyphus he says: 'A world that can be explained by reasoning, however faulty, is a reasonable world. But in a universe suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger... This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity.' Swithin's comment that the inept name of 'Coal-sack' for one of the 'voids and waste places of the sky' has 'a farcical force from its very inadequacy' 32 makes explicit Hardy's sympathy with the concept of the absurd. It is an acknowledgement that any attempt to render the universe familiar is futile, whether by rational, explanatory or farcical means; yet the farcical method is more powerful than any conceptual approach. The incongruity of the name has the same kind of effect as Winnie up to her waist in the earth cleaning her teeth and doing her hair. The use of the word 'burlesque'




when Swithin is rebuked by the Bishop is another indication that Hardy is consciously using this element in the novel. Swithin feels it incongruous that 'he who had soared amid the remotest grandeurs of nature' should have his 'tender and refined passion . . . debased to burlesque lines'. 33 Seen in the light of these burlesque, farcical and absurd qualities in the novel, the final sentence, perhaps Hardy's most startling ending, begins to make sense, as a final jolt to the reader's sense of order and congruity. The shock of jumping abruptly from the genuinely moving death of Viviette to the savage irony of the last sentence might have worked if the last two chapters had not led us right away from the absurd mode. But the Bishop has fulfilled his function and disappeared from the novel. Viviette has made use of him, but not, in Hardy's view, in an immoral way. There are later indications of his views on the subject in Jude's attitude to 'the beggarly question of parentage. . . . What does it matter?' 34 and in Hardy's unpublished letter of 1906 to the Fawcett Society, in which he suggests that the father of a woman's child is nobody's business but her own. The last sentence of Two on a Tower is one final example of an idiotic sexual convention; it diminishes instead of enhancing our response to the infinitesimal lives against the stupendous background. We have long ago abandoned the idea of a naive, unconscious Hardy whose stories 'started up in his head' 35 of their own volition, yet many people have felt that the incongruities of Two on a Tower are accidental. I do not think so. In a letter to Gosse,36 he referred to critics who had privately praised Two on a Tower as his most original novel so far. This suggests he was aware of making some kind of experiment. His delight in incongruity shows itself frequently in his work, and it is more than a humorous chuckle at 'Life's Little Ironies'. In the Apology to Late Lyrics and Earlier he makes an elaborate, tongue-in-cheek defence of 'the juxtaposition of unrelated, even discordant effusions', which, he says, caused the poems 'to be read as misfires because they raise the smile that they were intended to raise'. Though he half-apologizes for not foreseeing that 'people might not perceive when the tone altered', he concludes by saying that he must trust to 'those whose intuition is proof against accidents of inconsequence'. This is characteristic of Hardy's convoluted manner when he is on the defensive, but it is none the less evident that he sees the inconsequential as a vital element in his work.



'Two on a Tower' 29

Beckett said 'the chaos is all around us . . . the only chance is to let it i n . . . to find a form that accommodates the mess - that is the task of the artist now'. In both drama and prose works, he has combined a sense of chaos with a highly patterned structure - with, for instance, the correspondence of the two acts of Waiting for Godot and Happy Days and the intricate plotting of the sentences in Lessness. Hardy is tentatively doing something similar in Two on a Tower. The incongruities are combined with a tight pattern of correspondences and contrasts - stars and human beings, passion and science, youth and maturity, two unhappy marriages, two nearly illegitimate children (Viviette solves her maid's problem and her own by marriage), two characters disappearing into Africa, and so on. Such structuring is Hardy's common practice, but here, as in many of the minor novels, he piles on top of this so many complications of plot, with various trivial problems being set up and solved (as with the bracelets) that this diverts attention from the central image of two little figures against the stars. Unlike Beckett's, Hardy's patterning does not intensify the concentration on the centre. In Two on a Tower he is groping towards the kind of technique which uses the grotesque (two characters in dustbins, a woman up to her waist in earth) as a way of jolting us into imaginative apprehension of the human condition. He is only partly successful. But in the treatment of Viviette, he wholly succeeds in his aim. She is, perhaps, Hardy's most heroic character. In combining in her intensity of feeling, psychological complexity and a capacity for altruism, he makes her embody an idea of human potential which, even though set against a 'stupendous background', does indeed make the reader feel 'that of these contrasting magnitudes the smaller might be the greater'. He creates a sense of the 'magnitude' of her emotional life from the beginning. When Swithin is ill, she is 'in that state of anguish in which the heart is no longer under the control of the judgement, and self-abandonment, even to error, verges on heroism'. 37 This high value placed on the human heart and even the capacity for 'self-abandonment' is central to Hardy's conception. The sheer ability to feel is for him what gives human life a grandeur to match 'the stellar universe'. On the night when Swithin suggests marriage, 'human life at its highest excitement was beating within the dark and isolated tower'. 38 In 'Candour in English Fiction' (1890) Hardy pleaded for 'fiction dealing with human emotion on a comprehensive scale', and for long before that he had himself embodied in both his major and his minor fiction 'the strongest




passion known to humanity'; 39 in Two on a Tower, in proposing a high evaluation of spontaneity, he was being as challenging as he was in Tess and Jude. Viviette's conflicting impulses between what is conventionally regarded as right and what she feels with such intensity is vividly presented in numerous scenes where 'her intention wheeled this way and that like the balance of a watch', 40 and where she contradicts herself from moment to moment - 'I c a n n o t . . . yes, I'll come'41 and 'Yes, go! No, - I cannot bear it'. 42 This is very like the behaviour of Sue Bridehead, and even the dialogue is almost identical, with Sue saying 'Go' and 'I can't - bear -', when she simultaneously spurns and kisses Jude; but Sue is masochistically indulging herself emotionally, whereas Viviette is as vividly aware of Swithin's problems as her own. Though 'unstable of mood', she is not at all unstable psychologically. She has none of the neurotic self-absorption of characters like Sue or Boldwood. Hardy has an almost Lawrentian delight in Viviette's sensuality. An amusing example occurs when she is entertaining the Bishop at dinner and 'recently gratified affection lent to her manner just now a sweet serenity, a truly Christian contentment'. 43 The sensual and spontaneous nature of her love is an essential starting point for a great step forward in her development - her attainment of the kind of love which puts the needs of the loved one far above the self. Viviette's struggle to control her powerful instincts and feelings in order to reach something even better is unusual in Hardy's novels and probably in life. He more often shows characters behaving like Eustacia, who 'let things fall out as they may rather than wrestle hard to direct them'. Years later, in 'Thoughts at Midnight', he wrote: Mankind, you dismay me When shadows waylay m e ! . . . Acting like puppets Under Time's buffets. But Viviette does not act like a puppet. 'Her life during that morning and afternoon was wholly introspective' (ch. 35). This is reminiscent of Isabel Archer's night of meditation in The Portrait of a Lady, published in the previous year. Both characters' fluctuations of thought and feeling are minutely explored. The striking difference between them is that Isabel's meditation is wholly restrospective, directed towards understanding her own past behaviour,



'Two on a Tower' 31

but with little suggestion that she can actively take steps to make a better future, though she will understand it better; Viviette does take a new look at the past, but the essence of the passage is concerned with her struggle to change herself. She gradually comes to recognize that 'true benevolence' lies in freeing Swithin, and that 'it could be done', however painful it would be to herself. The impressiveness of her struggle is partly due to the success and sympathy with which Hardy has created her as a passionately emotional woman. James is interested in how Isabel comes to a retrospective understanding of the choices she has made in the past. Viviette is involved in the process of making a better self. In his Thomas Hardy: the Will and the Way, Roy Morrell illustrates Hardy's 'basic Existential concern with choice', and shows how in the novels' 'being' is essentially meaningless. What counts is the way man is oriented to the future, to what can be done.' 44 Viviette is like the little body in Lessness: 'One step in the ruins in the sand on his back in the endlessness he will make it.' Viviette gains no reward for her step except 'a sweet sense of rising above self-love'. Hardy has made her great as well as 'infinitely little'. The scientific half of the contrast between the scientific and the intuitive interests Hardy less, precisely because the scientific mind, as he conceives it, offers little scope for the exploration of inner struggles. Away from Viviette, Swithin's life narrows down to his one interest, astronomy. He does not even notice 'the novel forms of human and vegetable life' in the new countries he visits. An account of his year after leaving her would not give 'a single additional glimpse... of Swithin in his relations with his old emotions'. The reason, Hardy says, is that in science there is 'little food for the sympathetic instincts which create the changes in a life'.45 Thus Swithin is detached from what for Hardy, as for Lawrence, is the essence of existence; 'it is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives.'46 Though Swithin can feel pity for dying stars, and he recognizes that what has happened to Viviette is 'fearful, catastrophic... instead of musing over it, he shunned the subject'. He first appears in the novel gazing in amazement at outer space. At the end he is gazing at human beings with equal detachment; 'He was as one who suddenly finds the world a stranger place than he thought; but is excluded by age, temperament and situation from being much more than an astonished spectator of its strangeness.' 47 Making Swithin a character who is 'too literal, direct and uncompromizing'




to understand the 'customary complication of feeling' of Viviette has perhaps resulted in an oversimplified idea of 'the scientist'; but in shaping the book so that Swithin first introduces the grandeurs of space which are then overshadowed by the possibly greater grandeur of Viviette's human capacities, Two on a Tower both endorses and rejects human littleness. Hardy has created a form which embodies this tension. Yet Two on a Tower remains a minor novel. The trouble lies in the interesting but not wholly successful experiment with 'the Absurd'. Gillian Beer suggests that 'the absolute gap between our finite capacities and the infinite time and space of the universe burden Hardy's texts with a sense of malfunction and apprehension.' 48 This is true of this novel. Hardy's imaginative perceptions are rather swamped by excessive plotting: brother, Bishop, bequest, bracelets diminish the stark image of the little struggling valiant figures set against 'the stupendous background'. Two on a Tower veers towards modernism in putting in the balance, in one scale the little human beings and in the other scale, the universe. It was probably inevitable that in 1882 Hardy should suggest in the Preface that 'the smaller might be the greater'. The displacement of the human from the centre of things was still unfamiliar and disturbing. It was too soon for Hardy to do more than hint at something like Lawrence's 'world empty of people' or Woolf's 'unregistered' blue of the sky, receding beyond human conception.



'Two on a Tower' 33

3

Surrealism has been defused, made harmless. In its debased form, it can be used to give a touch of the wittily bizarre to an advertisement. But surrealism itself was a challenge, an attempt to create a revolution in consciousness, to enlarge our concept of reality, to intensify our ability to see - both the visible and the invisible; the inner world and the unconscious are as 'real' as the known and the seen. During the 50 years preceding the Surrealist movement, Hardy was making a similar challenge. His theories on art and on the nature of things resemble theirs, his hopes for the development of consciousness are like theirs, his visual images are so close to theirs that often they might almost seem to be a description of their pictures - though they had not yet been painted. In the Life, Hardy said, 'Art is a disproportioning - (i.e. distorting, throwing out of proportion) - of realities, to show more clearly the features that matter in those realities, which if merely copied or reported, inventorially, might possibly be observed, but would more probably be overlooked. Hence, "realism" is not Art.' There is an example of such 'disproportioning' at the beginning of The Return of the Native, where the road across the heath is compared to a parting in a head of hair. If we imagine this, the heath becomes a scalp, beneath the scalp a head, beneath the head a vast body stretching down into the earth. The jolt to our normal sense of proportion is similar to the effect of Magritte's apple, filling a room. Of course, we only get this jolt if we respond fully to the implications of Hardy's image. 34



Some Surrealist Elements in Hardy's Prose and Verse

2 Hardy's illustration for 'Heiress and Architect' (Wessex Poems).



7 Hardy's illustration for 'In a Eweleaze near Weatherbury' (Wessex Poems).

'

|

3 Max Ernst, 'The Wheel of Light' (by kind permission of Thames & Hudson, © DACS 1999).

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