Dialogic Imagination in Hardy

ÊI/Γ : VOLUME 35:4 1992 of tragedy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—and the accuracy with which she places Hardy's achievement in that development—'that this book makes its most important contribution. Yet, although there is much to praise in this study, there are some weaknesses as well—particularly a tendency to dwell on or explain the obvious. The Dynasts receives, appropriately, an extended chapter, but parts of it are plodding. Thus Maynard's extensive and illuminating comparison of Hardy's view with Darwin's, for example, is prefaced by a superfluous summary of Darwin's argument in The Origin of Species, and, in the same chapter we are solemnly informed (via an extended quotation from William Rutland) what few if any today would seriously think otherwise: The Dynasts is partially the product of Hardy's research, including battlefield tours, and partially a product of his imagination. As William Rutland wisely observes, "The Dynasts must stand or fall by its value as literature; in other words, it is a work mot of science but of art; and the interest of Hardy's sources lies in seeing how he turned them to artistic use." Similarly, Maynard's discussion of the impact of The Golden Treasury on Hardy's poetry is prefaced by a long outline of the structure of the work, with information about why living poets were excluded from it, with an extended quotation from Palgrave on the lyric, with Christopher Clausen's comments on Palgrave (he believed, Clausen noted, "that the instruction of the soul should be conducted in a 'modest, indirect way' ")—all by way of leading up to the point that many of Hardy's remarks about poetry reveal "that he similarly esteemed the compression of the lyric." This same weakness extends to Maynard's discussions of individual lyrics and no doubt is partly the product of the book's origins in a doctoral dissertation. But it must be added that even when Maynard lapses into the superfluous, she never does into obscurity. This is a book whose clarity and precision of style cannot enough be praised and whose solid contribution to Hardy scholarship makes it required reading for anyone wishing to understand Hardy's place in the history of tragedy. Robert C. Schweik SUNY College at Fredonia Dialogic Imagination in Hardy Deborah L. Collins. Thomas Hardy and His God: A Liturgy of Unbelief. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990. 190 pp. $35.00 482 BOOK REVIEWS MY SINGLE argument with this book is that the discussion of individual works (e. g., Tess, chapter 5) gives the appearance of intruding on the theoretical line of argument which is in itself arrestingly sound and potentially useful for anyone who has given any thought to applying Bakhtin's theories of dialogic imagination to the Hardy canon. Far better for my taste if Collins had played more freely with the entire Hardy oeuvre in all of the chapters, or simply restricted the book's focus to an expanded discussion of Bakhtinian theory with Hardy as background . As it is, Collins gives the impression that the theory that underpins the examination of Tess in chapter 5 (to continue this one, but—I think—representative example) is limited in scope to Tess. Hence, I get the impression that Tess and most of the other Hardy selections have been neatly shoehorned into chapters where they are made to fit whatever tangential "voice" happens to be the chapter's center of attention. Perhaps I'm asking for more than one book can handle. In fact, I believe there is a lot more to be said about Hardy and dialogics, and Collins's study, in spite of its lack of cohesion, is an excellent place to begin. The study is one that Hardy scholars must read for the dialogic framework that she builds, a framework that subsequently can be applied at random to selections from the entire Hardy canon. She begins by considering Bakhtin's theory of "authoritative discourse," the idea that the authorial voice must pronounce the final truth about issues raised in the text. One looks in vain for the authoritative voice in Hardy, she suggests, because he is an...