Fictions in the Criticism of Hardy's Fiction

204 FICTIONS IN THE CRITICISM OF HARDY'S FICTION By Robert C. Schweik (SUNY at Fredonia) Thomas Hardy's fiction has proven notoriously awkward to discuss, and, as a consequence, his novels have given rise to a body of commentary that is extraordinarily diverse. In its extreme and most simplistic forms this diversity extends to poles of direct contradiction! Jude the Obscure, for example, has been described as an "anti-Christian" and as a "pro-Christian" document, Hardy himself has been characterized as a "fatalist" or as "not a fatalist," and so forth.1 It is some features of this diversity that I intend to discuss here, and in order to clarify my intention I wish first to provide a brief explanation of the assumptions upon which my discussion will be based, the topics I intend to treat, and the kinds of conclusions I hope to reach. The wide diversity of responses to Hardy's fiction is, first of all, merely an extreme instance of what Morse Peckham has described as the nearly limitless "interpretation variability" of all works of art.2 Confronted with Hardy's fiction, a literary scholar is not unlike a historian facing the raw data of history: somehow, within the almost unlimited range of more or less plausible explanatory statements which might be made, he undertakes to endorse his own particular and limited account of the works he discusses - and, necessarily, all such accounts will be highly reductive. Scholars attempting to interpret a corpus of writings as complex as Hardy's fiction are inevitably obliged to adopt various kinds of simplifications, generalizations, gratuitious assumptions, and limitations of focus in order to do so, and it is in this sense that critics create "fictions" about the fiction they discuss. There is, of course, no other way that literary scholarship - or, indeed, any other kind of discourse - can proceed, and, hence, in talking about the "fictions" in the criticism of Hardy's fiction I intend no blanket condemnation. Rather, my purpose in this paper is to characterize some of the major kinds of fictions critics have exploited in dealing with Hardy's fiction, and the rhetorical strategies they have adopted to persuade readers to accept them; in doing so I hope to suggest why some of these fictions have been more useful and more revealing, while others have tended more to distort or to obscure. The Critic as Dramatist Commentators on Hardy's fiction often elect to dramatize their situations in an effort to persuade readers to accept the particular set of premises and the special points of view they adopt. Consider, for example, this passage from Albert Guerard's Thomas Hardy : The Novels and Stories: Many more books about Thomas Hardy have already appeared than their subject found time to write himself, and to read them is a long and harrowing task. One rises from this task with the impression that Hardy . . . wrote 205 depressing but profound and technically admirable realistic novels. Perhaps the chief motive for still another revaluation is the grossly misleading simplicity of this portrait and, even, its irrelevance .... There is another reason why Hardy asks for revaluation. Most of Hardy's critics, from Lionel Johnson (1895) "to Lord David Cecil (1946) belong to a "generation," and this generation is not ours. That earlier generation looked upon its everyday experience as placid, plausible, and reasonably decent; it assumed that the novel should provide an accurate reflection of this sane everyday experience and perhaps a consolation for its rare shortcomings . . . . We should look on [that] generation with envy rather than disrespect, and perhaps we shall have to win our way back to that sweet and gentlemanly confidence. But we have been to a different school. We have rediscovered , to our sorrow, the demonic in human nature as well as in political process ... .3 In short, readers of Guerard's book on Hardy are confronted first not with a statement of a thesis so much as with a dramatization of one: they are asked to see Guerard wearily rising from'the harrowing task of reading the misleading oversimplifications and irrelevancies of an older generation of sweetly complacent critics, and they are flatteringly invited to see themselves...