Haunted Hardy

ELT 45 : 1 2002 Haunted Hardy Tim Armstrong. Haunted Hardy: Poetry, History, Memory. New York: Palgrave , 2000. viii + 198 pp. $59.95 TIM ARMSTRONG describes one of his major objectives in writing Haunted Hardy is to acknowledge the way in which Hardy's "poems often read as if they had already theorized themselves" and to see him "as a poet whose legacy is various precisely because he haunts so many important contexts." As that last phrase suggests, he exploits the vast metaphoric domain of such terms as haunted to incorporate discussions of Hardy's poetry that touch on very diverse topics—e.g., "Randy's hand, or the lost son" and "Zionism and typology"—as well as to include in it adaptations of previously published articles on "Hardy and old age," "Hardy's Dantean purples," and "history as coincidence." All of these get fitted into Haunted Hardy by finding in history a "haunted discourse," speaking of textual "ghosts," seeing Hardy as "haunting contexts" and the like. By way of an apologia for this violent yoking of some very heterogeneous ideas, Armstrong invokes Derrida: "Haunting, Derrida suggests , is never unitary, it multiplies into heterogeneous legacies which can never be united; into a slippery coinage (speculation) which demands exchange___"I will later point to some instances where it seems to me that Armstrong's invocation of the spirit of Derrida lacks adequate power to exorcise doubts raised both by the slippery speculation in which he sometimes indulges and by his readings of some Hardy poems "as if they had already theorized themselves." But first I want to emphasize that Haunted Hardy is a product of much solid scholarship. Notable is the sure familiarity with which Armstrong ranges over Hardy's writings, the judiciousness with which he usually engages with previous commentary on them, and the admirable circumspection evident in the wide-ranging references he makes to the contexts in which Hardy wrote. One of the most significant contributions made by Armstrong to illuminate Hardy's poetry is by way of contextualizing it with extensive reference to the records of Hardy's readings as well as to secondary scholarship. About the problem of seeing Hardy's poetry in the context of the current thought of his day, Armstrong shrewdly observes that "to follow Hardy into these issues is to deal with all the contingency of forgotten debates as they are mediated by local contexts." Hence, in one chapter he places Hardy's poems within the context of the writings of Leslie Stephen, Frederick Lange, Emmanuel Kant, T. H. Huxley, Arthington Worsley, W K. Clifford, Arthur Schopenhauer, Henry Maud90 BOOK REVIEWS sley, Herbert Spencer, R. B. Haldane, August Comte, J. H. Bridges, George Romanes, Frederic Harrison, Frederick Myers, Eduaard von Hartmann, and William James—accompanied, as well, by references to Hardy's comments artificially "recorded" in William Archer's "Real Conversations " and Hardy's own record, in his Later Years, of an exchange of ideas about ghosts with Caleb Saleeby—and supplemented by references to secondary scholarship on such topics as "voice and vision" in Hardy's elegies and "music, performance, and death in Victorian culture ." The result of such scrupulous attention to this complex background is that Armstrong is able to "place" many of Hardy's poems in their contemporary thought-context and to document Hardy's awareness ofthat context by frequent reference to evidences of his reading. In this way, for example, the competing notions of Herbert Spencer and Frederic Harrison about what ontological status Spencer's "Unknowable" has in relationship to primitive ideas of ghosts and to the origins of abstract thought are related to Hardy's (characteristically inconsistent and ambivalent ) treatment of "ghostly" presences in such poems as "Aquae Sulis ," "At the Piano," "The Souls of the Slain," "Channel Firing," "In a Whispering Gallery," and "Old Furniture." Here, as often elsewhere in Haunted Hardy, Armstrong does not engage in detailed examination of poems, but, rather, seeks to add other dimensions to them. A "meditation" is what Armstrong calls his "Mourning and Intertextuality " chapter, and, certainly, that is an apt name for the part of it subtitled "Cinders." Here Armstrong moves associatively through the allusions and other meaning traces of the...