The Topographical Lexicon

BOOK REVIEWS provide answers. As for literary theory, one might argue that an explanation of the creative process has been the chief aversion of theorists since the 1920s, and most particularly of those who announce the death of the author at the hand of language, myth, form, or ideology. Garson's inability to locate the origins of the mythic subtext of Hardy's novels and therefore to describe the vital origins of his writing has consequences, the main one being the dulling of some of her sharpest observations. I can mention only three: [ Under the Greenwood Tree is] a fable about the battle of the sexes, a story of male success which covertly images female triumph. What I am suggesting is . . . that... [Hardy's] feelings about male and female, and about bodily integrity and vulnerability, are crucial to his vision (23-24). [Q: How do Hardy's feelings about male and female enter into his vision?] Far From the Madding Crowd is an exuberant attempt to invest the male with a wholeness borrowed from the female, and it almost succeeds (53). [Q: Whose attempt? Hardy's, the (or his) text's?] [In Return of the Native] Mrs. Yeobright has ... taken possession of the male word.... Through the lips of her son, whom she seems to have transformed into a virtually schizophrenic reader, the Quiet Woman is still talking (79). [How does Mrs. Yeobright come to possess a transformative power with words apparently unavailable to Hardy himself?] One effect of Garson's inability to answer such questions, or to provide an account of their unanswerability, is a suspended criticism rooted in an incomplete psychology of creativity, a criticism that only pretends to set aside the view of the writer as creative consciousness in favor of the view of the writer as created consciousness. Without denying for a moment that Garson throws light into some of the deeper recesses of Hardy's psyche and texts (if I can call them his[), one has to wish for the even more fascinating book she might have written had she tried—given her skill as theorist and critic—to answer rather than set aside the creativity question. Peter Casagrande ___________________ University of Kansas The Topographical Lexicon Margaret Faurot. Hardy's Topographical Lexicon and the Canon of Intent: A Reading of the Poetry. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. xi + 420 pp. $58.50 MARGARET FAUROT1S study of Hardy's poetry is particularly frustrating because it so often gives the impression that there, but for the grace of indulgent mentors and editors, might have gone a good book. Its 341 ELT : VOLUME 35:3 1992 central thesis potentially offers a provocative framework for considering Hardy's career as a poet. Faurot identifies in the poetry a "topographical lexicon, the insistent recurrence throughout the poetry of earth-measuring words, the language of geometry." This claim immediately generates a more loosely-phrased one: "Being earth-measure, Hardy's topographical lexicon naturally leads to a reexamination or re-measure of Hardy's ground, Wessex." Putting aside the approximateness of the phrasing— what can possibly be meant by saying a lexicon is earth-measure?—one can see that the relationship between the idea of Wessex and a topographical lexicon might be fruitfully explored, although such an exploration would require something that is never adequately provided here: clear and consistent indication of whether "Wessex" defines an imaginative construct, an actual geographical area (in which case the question of period has to be addressed), or a conflation of both. The extension of such an analysis to Hardy's "intellectual ground, principally the Victorian milieu that he responded to in his personal and literary notebooks," also sounds promising, especially if it does indeed lead to demonstration that "the logic inherent in the rather eclectic assortment of notes and occasional comment matches—is congruent with—the symbology of Wessex, and also that the sense or intent of the volumes [of poetry] paired in sequence is congruent with that logic and symbology." Regrettably it doesn't. Much of what follows is a stilted mish-mash of impressionistic speculation and unsupported assertion. The topographical lexicon, Wessex, and the intellectual context are so loosely linked that the strained...