Demands of History: Narrative Crisis in Jude the Obscure

“You know not by what a frail thread we equally hang; It is said we are images both—twitched by people’s desires; And that I, as you, fail like a song men yesterday sang!”

Hardy, “Aquae Sulis”

“Time’s Unflinching Rigour”

For readers of Hardy’s poems or novels, the phrasing of history as the “twitching” of desire is so expected that it earns the status of a signature. In this instance, Hardy’s Christian “God” is responding to the pagan “Goddess” who complains of a Gothic cathedral erected on the site of her “boiling” “springs.” Invoking historical priority, the Goddess implores “Jove” to remove the Christian temple; and Hardy’s “God” addresses the demand with the sober, resigned account of historical deities as the perpetual—and perpetually unstable—projections of desire: “we are images both—twitched by people’s desires.” The impermanence of faith is stressed from the outset, for the recorded exchange is not witnessed (“Nothing was seen”), but merely “overheard,” the fading echo of “a song men yesterday sang.”

Compressed in these lines are issues present throughout Hardy’s work concerning the demands of history and their consequences: the demands placed upon history and the demands to historicize. These demands are more than thematic, for they comprise the very “problematic” of Hardy’s narrative and poetic project. ¹ The problematic is, moreover, doubly historical: throughout Hardy’s work, history functions both as an object of representation and as the condition of representation itself. The double demand—and potential double bind—of history is marked in “Aquae Sulis” by deep uncertainty and ambivalence: the wayward and unpredictable course of desire, the fragility of the past, and the unstable status of the past as aesthetic object, as “song.”

This poetic exchange regarding the status of history and its inscription in physical “sites” is as emblematic of Hardy’s prose as it is his poetry; and it demonstrates that the attention to historical “sites” remains less a testimony to an enduring and sustaining historical presence than to the unfulfilled desire for it. The poem reveals that our attention to the sites of history, to history’s material sedimentations, does not recover the continuous tradition which binds us in a meaningful way to the past. Instead, we find an overwritten site, one marked by contending voices, in which the coherence of tradition is denied. Such a denial of the pressing demands for a coherent and informing historical tradition is linked in Hardy’s work to a sense of the resistant material of time itself, to what he identifies in the poem “At Castle Boterel” as “time’s unflinching rigour.”

The phrase—”time’s unflinching rigour”—might serve well to address the expectations and exhortations in recent years that cultural and literary theory be made responsive to the demands of history. One encounters objections, voiced in many contexts and spoken from many different quarters, that the refinements of critical discussion about narrative and poetic language—the refinements of “theory”—have flourished at the expense of an understanding of history. From the new historicizing perspective, the “theoreticist” attention to the text and to the “impossibilities” of reading winds up in a formalism that effaces the material conditions of social history. Jerome McGann has suggested that the effacement of social history has taken place through an “uncritical absorption” in the text’s “own representation.” The phenomenologically and rhetorically oriented analyses of romantic poetry, for all their differences, are thus regarded by McGann as reproducing the “romantic ideology”; and this ideological circle can be broken only by the turn to the sociohistorical context. ² The pages that follow propose a quite different thesis: the desire to give voice to history—articulated most recently by the “new historicisms”—is itself the very desire that motivates and haunts Hardy’s literary representations in the first place. In the inflections of his Wessex dialect and with the vocabulary of the Victorian novel, Hardy’s work is an allegory of the confrontations between the historicizing impulse and the textual resistances posed by the narrative medium through which history is to be conveyed. To...