Hardy's Stories

ELT 37:3 1994 that are seen to have inculcated repressive and brutal ideals of masculinity and encouraged sadomasochistic responses to suffering. The value of the book is in its attention to the cultural continuities that ensured that the Great War not only disrupted but also continued and heightened pre-war patterns of behaviour—emotional, sexual, political, literary . Its main weakness lies, I think, in the looseness of its predication of the idea of sadomasochism. Here, for all Caesar's impatience with "traditional," "humanist" approaches, there is something of a theoretical vacuum. Foucault is unexpectedly absent from this book about suffering , sexuality and ideology. Freud's ideas are invoked from time to time, but none of the works where these ideas appear is cited (and there is no bibliography, rather extraordinarily). "Sadism" and "masochism" float around, too promiscuously attaching themselves to this and that. (Soldiers may love one another partly because they suffer together, but does that make their love sadomasochistic?) Pain, grief, suffering and masochism sometimes seem to be treated as synonyms, and not enough distinction is observed between the representation and the infliction of pain, or between witnessing it and suffering it. Caesar begins and ends by talking about the "voyeuristic thrill" of reading the war poets, but he does not say enough of the role played by the reader in all this. Would he simply find the reader complicit in the sadomasochism which he sees as the driving force of the poems? Sooner or later someone should set out to try to investigate the question of why we enjoy reading the poetry of Owen and the rest—an investigation that would be difficult, and might be painful. Douglas Kerr University of Hong Kong Hardy's Stories Thomas Hardy: The Excluded and Collaborative Stories. Pamela DaIziel , ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. ix + 443 pp. $100 IN SPITE OF a thriving industry in Thomas Hardy studies, scant attention has been paid to the narratives that did not appear in the definitive Wessex edition, whose publication was carefully overseen by Hardy toward the end of his life. Now Pamela Dalziel has filled that gap, and she has done so splendidly. Her scholarly edition of the excluded and collaborative stories offers a great deal: reliable printings of obscure or hitherto unavailable texts; meticulous annotations and notes; complete listings of textual variants; and thoroughly researched, engagingly 374 BOOK REVIEWS written introductions. Dalziel has travelled to libraries and private collections across Britain and North America and has assembled a large body of evidence useful for an understanding of the composition and/or publication history of each of these little-known works. Dalziel's unflagging energy in discovering copious textual witnesses and relevant facts is matched only by her sense of proportion: her work is exhaustive without ever being trivial—and it is delightfully readable. Stories that might be taken as the paltry crumbs left behind by more than a century of voracious Hardy critics are given by Dalziel a context that makes them important, if not in their own right, at least as representative examples of Hardy's fictional techniques—and sometimes also as focuses for intriguing chapters in Hardy biography. After Dalziel's edition, no critic can follow Hardy's own strategy of excluding these narratives from the author's corpus. Two of Dalziel's copy-texts make their first appearance in The Excluded and Collaborative Stories: the typescript of The Unconquerable," hitherto unpublished in any form, which was composed by Florence Emily Hardy but "carefully worked over" by Hardy; and the ribbon copy of the first typescript of The Spectre of the Real," with Hardy's holograph revisions, a version that is "not only the first to recover TH's pointing and wording firom the three pre-publication witnesses but also the first since the original 1894 publication to be free of bowdlerization" by Hardy's collaborator, Florence Henniker. The remaining eight stories have been available in some published form for a number of years; in these cases Dalziel's contribution lies chiefly in her thorough editorial apparatus and her informed introductions, all of which offer new material on Hardy's life and on the conditions under which his works were...