Essays on Hardy

Book Reviews have distinguishable features and clothing. But the photos show another facet of a world that no longer exists, a world of streets crowded with carts, wagons, omnibuses, hansom cabs, coaches—aU drawn by horses. Though written for and of special interest to the Sherlock Holmes enthusiast, Sherlock Holmes in London is also a fine photographic record of late-Victorian and Edwardian London during almost exactly the period covered by ELT. Edward S. Lauterbach Purdue University Essays on Hardy Lance St. John Butler, ed. Alternative Hardy. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989. xxi + 229 pp. $39.95 ALTERNATIVE HARDY is a patchy coUection of essays, the surface of which is primarily concerned with displaying wide-ranging contemporaneity of critical or ideological approach, and the subtext of which is that things are very much as they were. All trades have their particularized technical vocabulary, which has grown up over time to enable rapid or precise communication of ideas amongst practitioners of the trade; such a vocabulary also comes often to serve the guild-like function of excluding outsiders, non-initiates. This volume is an excellent sample of how swift and fuU is the perpetual growth in the business of accounting for texts of a wide range of subtrades , each with its own particularized vocabulary which aUows initiates to express complex ideas to each other with economy and accuracy, but which also carries the side-effect of excluding those who have not served an apprenticeship in the appropriate sub-trade. Evidence in this volume is provided most vividly in "Hardy's Alternatives in The Woodlanders, Chapter 39" by Henri Quéré and Janie Sénéchal. I have nothing useful to say about this essay because it is unreadable, being written in a language often resembling English, but with its own syntax, vocabulary and sign-system. There are two further French contributors to the volume, and two more who teach or have taught at French universities. Jean Jacques Lecercle's "The "Violence of Style in Tess of the d'Urbervilles" mingles standard EngHsh with the remote dialect of Quéré and Sénéchal. Lecercle also centres his discussion around diagrams and equations, and 101 ELT: VOLUME 34:1, 1991 in doing so simplifies the text in order to establish what he sees as its fundamental structure (this is only natural, since complex diagrams tend to lose their point). On the other hand, Annie Escuret has, for once, built in 'Thomas Hardy and J. M. W. Turner" an effective, allusive, rhetorical argument. She is one of a number of recent critics who emphasise a movement in the progress of Hardy's fiction away from his acceptance in early novels of mechanistic, "illusionistic" naturalism, in the direction of profound hostility towards the limitations of the technique (ultimately turning to poetry rather than pioneering radicaUy new fictional approaches ). Escuret's account of this process uses both Hardy's references to Turner in The Life and Turner's own artistic development as a basis for discussion, and though I am not sure that she reaches a new conclusion, the road she takes to arrive at it is full of fragmentary and startling insights concerning many novels, dashed off with stylistic brilliance and much idiosyncrasy. If international reputation is the test, then the stars of this collection are Christine Brook-Rose and HiIHs Miller. Brooke-Rose writes on Jude the Obscure (indeed it is a feature of this collection that there is in it no extended discussion of any of Hardy's novels published before The Woodlanders of 1886—ten out of fourteen). Her focus is on the treatment of knowledge in the narrative, and her discussion raises significant questions, both theoretical and specific to the novel. She answers some of them, and it is particularly pleasing that she engages more in dialogue with the seminal theorists she invokes than do other critics in the volume, and she draws them more fully for the reader into relevant connection with the text under discussion. Hillis Miller's "Prosopopoeia in Hardy and Stevens" is to my mind the most satisfying of the critical essays in the volume, although he takes as his topic the trope with...