Form and Matter in Hardy's Fiction: Some Current Theories and Methods of Analysis

133 FORM AND MATTER IN HARDY'S FICTION» SOME CURRENT THEORIES AND METHODS OF ANALYSIS By Robert C. Schweik (State University of New York) Penelope Vigar, The Novels of Thomas Hardyι Illusion and Reality (Lond» Athlone P, 197^571 Dale Kramer, Thomas Hardy ι The Forms of Tragedy (Detroit» Wayne State UP, 1975)¡ Ian Gregor, The Great Web: The Form o¿ Hardy's Ma.i or Fiction (Totowa, NJ« Rowman & Littlefield, 1974) ; Lennart A. Bjô'rk, The Literary Notes of Thomas Hardy. Vol. 1 ( Göteborg Sweden» Göteborg U, 1974); Robert Gittings, Young Thomas Hardy (Boston» Little, Brown & Co, 1975). The axiom that the form of the question asked will determine the answer arrived at is borne out in some recent studies of Hardy's fiction, particularly those by Penelope Vigar, Dale Kramer, and Ian Gregor, all of which focus directly on the question, "What kind of fiction did Hardy write?" That apparently simple question is in fact notoriously difficult, and almost invariably it is posed" in a way which narrows the focus of the inquiry and more or less shapes the kind of conclusion reached. One tempting strategy in talking about the character of Hardy's fiction is to put the question in such a way as to radically simplify the terms of the inquiry. In The Novels of Thomas Hardyι Illusion and Reality, for example, Penelope Vigar begins by announcing that she will be concerned with Hardy's technique as a novelist, and that to this end she will deliberately omit any detailed consideration of his thought, any reference to his moral and religious convictions, to his poetry, and to his private life. There is in this a covert - and I think untenable assumption that it is indeed possible to separate a consideration of Hardy's technique as a novelist from the rest of his life. It would be more reasonable (though much less simple) to assume that the technique of a novelist would be illuminated by attention to the total experience he brought to his art» predictably, any inquiry about the kind of fiction Hardy wrote that asks the question in such a radically more limited way would be bound to yield at best a partial and distorted view of his craft and so it does. To give but one example, in discussing the scene in Tess where Alec d'Urberville's blood appears on the ceiling of the room below, Vigar emphasizes that it was Hardy's intention to exploit an obviously impossible event for symbolic purposes! "whoever," she asks with emphatic italics, "heard of blood dripping right through a ceiling?" Well, among many others, Hardy had heard of precisely such an instance» he read it in the Dorset County Chronicle for August, 1888, and pasted a cutting of that article in a copy of Tess which he gave to Florence Dugdale in 1911. Such information, to be sure, cannot be found by an inquiry restricted as Vigar's is, but it is information which certainly would be perilous to ignore in any consideration of what Hardy was attempting as a novelist. 134 Then, having cut herself off from so many sources of information which might be of assistance in a study of Hardy's technique , Vigar compounds the error by further limiting her inquiry ; for, in spite of an admirably broad preliminary review of Hardy's concept of his art, her subsequent general consideration of his technique as a novelist focuses on the pictorial element in Hardy's technique, the difference between the impressionist and the photographic elements in his art, and the strategies he adopted for showing the strangeness and irrationality of the world by the contrasting perspectives in which he presents it. Not surprisingly, an approach to Hardy's fiction which puts such emphasis on picture, appearance, perspective, and incongruity leads her to conclude that the "pervasive theme in all his novels - the contrast between appearance and reality is also, consistently, the most important factor in their artistic construction." Yet, paradoxically, the very artificial limitation of her study enables Vigar to see with special clarity the kinds of technique she does concentrate on, and the result is that the analyses she makes of the...