Hardy's Dynasts Revisited

BOOK REVIEWS project's overall mandate, displaying as it does a refreshingly unhackneyed photograph of Hardy at his very last public appearance, the laying of the commemoration stone of Dorchester Grammar School in July 1927. Needless to say, the speech he gave on this occasion can be found between the covers that the photograph enfolds, introduced by a detailed headnote that includes the poignant information that "the weather was unseasonably windy and cold, and .. . his doctor believed the exertion and exposure to have been directly contributory to Hardy's death less than six months later." It is inevitable that at this substantial price (albeit a far from excessive one for a work of this importance and production quality) many more copies will be sold to research libraries than to private owners. It is to be hoped that Clarendon Press plans a paperback edition of a book that will be at once an essential reference tool for every Hardy scholar and a delight for the general Hardy enthusiast. KEITH WILSON ________________ University of Ottawa Hardy's Dynasts Revisited G. Glen Wickens. Thomas Hardy, Monism, and the Carnival Tradition: The One and the Many in The Dynasts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. xix + 255 pp. $60.00 THE DYNASTS has received remarkably little by way of fullscale commentary, and a quarter of a century has elapsed since Susan Dean published the last monograph devoted entirely to it. Now, in Thomas Hardy, Monism, and the Carnival Tradition, G. Glen Wickens attempts a fresh approach to The Dynasts that combines a wide-ranging effort to situate Hardy's epic-length drama within a richly dense context of contemporary philosophical speculation and to relate that context to a larger examination of the ways The Dynasts is a "model of Bakhtin's 'notion of the novel as a tapestry woven out of a variety of discourses.'" Although some earlier commentators have noted novel-like qualities in The Dynasts, it is Bakhtin's broader concept of "novelizing"—i.e., of the way that genres such as epics or dramas take on the character of novels when they incorporate "layers of literary language" and become "permeated with laughter, irony, humor, elements of self-parody" as well as "an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openness"—that informs Wickens's approach. He occasionally turns to other theorists—e.g., to Elias Canetti for a discussion of "crowds" that inform what I judge to be one of his less successful chapters—but the bulk of the book is an attempt to read The 303 ELT 46 : 3 2003 Dynasts as a specimen of what Bakhtin has called "carnivalization," and Wickens puts his thesis this way: In the broadest, generic terms, a Bakhtinian reading redefines The Dynasts as a novel and relocates it within the serio-comical genres. All the defining features of the menippea also characterize The Dynasts: the combination of fantasy and history, of philosophical dialogue (the Spirits) and slum naturalism (stragglers, deserters, and camp followers), the concern with the ideological issues of the day (monism), the two-planed construction of world and Overworld, the destruction of the hero's epic and tragic wholeness, the many scenes of scandal, eccentric behaviour, and inappropriate speech (in the domestic intrigues of the dynasts), the wide use of inserted genres (everything from ballads and letters to decrees and proclamations), the multi-styled and multi-toned scenes, the mixing of poetry and prose, the appearance of the comic alongside the tragic, the misalliances of all sorts as war brings together people and things normally separated. In the first chapter, titled "Hardy's Longest Novel," it is Bakhtin's conception of "heteroglossia"—his idea that the sense of any utterance is dependant on its context in ways that make it all but impossible to reduce to any determinate meaning—that shapes Wickens's investigation into how divergent views of monism may be said to appear in Hardy's epic drama. In doing so, he undertakes to qualify the views of a wide variety of critics on the issues of the world view of the poem and the relationship of the Spirits to one another. For example, Ernest Brennecke, Katherine Kearney Maynard, Harold Orel, Harvey Curtis...