Thomas Hardy’s Excluded and Collaborative Stories

HARDY'S EXCLUDED STORIES 467 goes up in smoke, paradoxically turns out to be the commodity that actually secures the English their first major colony in America - Virginian tobacco. As this account is meant to suggest, despite Knapp's formidable energy and ingenuity, despite the wealth of wonderful material he processes, the chief value of his book is as a graphic example of the tendency in New Historicism to thematize the paradoxicality of its own interpretive activity. Tudor England's colonialists inscribe what they wish to reject, reproduce what they wish to escape, but by staging their dilemma they paradoxically effect some kind of agency. For those readers who have no interest in this theme, Knapp's account of the genesis of English colonialism will often 'appear strangely incoherent or merely epideictic, what Dominick La Capra might call 'a rather precious play of analogies, anecdotes, and associations' (Profession 89). And even for those readers sympathetic to Knapp's project, it is difficult not to concede that the brilliant paradoxes he constantly needs in order to articulate his postmodern theme do occasion a sometimes stunning indifference to alternative explanations or elementary distinctions. The central category of trifling, for instance, the category on which so many of his paradoxes depend, is so generously defined that it is hard to imagine what could not be subsumed under its rubric. Like one of the categories in Borges's Chinese encyclopedia, Knapp's trifles at one time or another include glass beads, unworldliness, hatchets, distraction, disgrace, England, introvertion, popery, poetry, superstition, pastoral, gnats, and Queen Elizabeth. The overall effect of this style of argumentation is, then, not so much one of incoherence as of heterogeneity, fascinating details orchestrated into recursive paradoxical patterns which on analysis reveal, as I have argued, a process of selfallegorization . In this, Knapp's argument allows a view of New Historicism that conforms to .Fredric Jameson's perception of the poshnodem as a 'new depthlessness,' 'a weakening of historicity' (Postmodernism, 1991). By historicity Jameson means 'a relationship to the present which somehow defamiliarizes it and allows us that distance from immediacy which is at length characterized as a historical perspective.' My point is that in its suspicion of all explanatory narratives other than those that thematize the poststructuralist ironies of its own textual practice, New Historicism, at least as it appears in Knapp's book, has a price to pay. And that price, like the one paid by its fonnalist precursor, New Criticism, is to keep the present familiar by denying us too much distance from it. Thomas Hardy's Excluded and Collaborative Stories SIMON GATRELL Pamela Dalziel, editor. Thomas Hardy: The Excluded and Collaborative Stories Clarendon Press 1992. ix, 443 The stories included in tlUs edition are of widely varying quality and interest; it is not unnatural thatearly reviews should havefocused on this aspect of the book. The 468 SIMON GATRELL closest Dalziel herself comes to addressing the question is on the first page of her introduction: 'these works occupy significant, if sometimes minor, positions within Hardy's career as a writer of fiction.' She somewhat overstates the case, unless we are willing to consider every word Hardy put on paper as significant; but, at the very least, 'Destiny and a Blue Cloak,' 'An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress,' and the collaborative 'The Spectre of the Real' are interesting in their own right, and are important as markers of Hardy'S habits and his development. We have lacked texts of these works on which we can wholeheartedly rely, and it is perhaps more appropriate that a review ofDalziel's collection should assess the natureand quality of her editorial work. The substantial introductory essays prefixed to each text are excellent investigations into all aspects of that story's production and dissemination - they also represent important additions to Hardy's biography. Dalziel has omitted nothing relevant that I know of, and has added much that I did not know; her research is a model of exhaustive accuracy and incisive perception. The apparatus associated with each text is scrupulously accUIate, and pitched at the extreme ofthe spectrum ofinclusiveness, somethingIvery much welcome, since it enables the user of the edition to recreate...