Hardy & Narratological Perspectives

KEN IRELAND sets himself a daunting task in attempting what Palgrave’s promotional blurb terms “the first book-length study of all of Hardy’s fourteen novels from narratological perspectives.” Its aim is to examine how Hardy’s “development of themes, characters and ideas” across his novel-writing years is “matched by a corresponding development of narrative devices and techniques, and his handling of time” (1). Dealing with fourteen novels in a little over 200 pages, stripped of endnotes, glossary, bibliography and index, is no job for the fainthearted. Ireland addresses his demanding project with bracing assertiveness, buttressed by a formidable statistical base whose calculations are advanced as needed in the chapters on individual novels and summarized in a detailed table of narrative features provided in the book’s conclusion.

Thus should one surprise in oneself the desire to know the number of chapters in any given novel that end with direct speech (for example, six in Desperate Remedies, twenty in Jude the Obscure), or the average chapter length in lines as printed in the rarely used for scholarly purposes New Wessex Edition (304 in A Pair of Blue Eyes, 233 in A Laodicean), or the percentage comprising speech (49 percent in Under the Greenwood Tree, thirty percent in Tess of the d’Urbervilles), Ireland’s table provides these and many other figures for all Hardy novels. Nowhere else in the vast body of textual and critical work on Hardy that has accumulated over the last century or so can such calculations be found in this degree of subcategorized statistical detail. It may even be possible to make a convincing case for their significance to an argument about Hardy’s distinctive and developing narrative practices. But, unfortunately, even after the reader’s arrival at this study’s end, what that argument really is and how the narratological statistics support it are still open questions.

A part of the problem is that the book’s conclusion does not actually conclude anything of significant substance. Of the conclusion’s twelve and a bit pages, two are taken up with the statistical table and much of the rest with piecemeal comments derived from earlier critics about aspects of Hardy’s narrative practices and incipient modernity. To add another statistic to those deployed by Ireland, of the fifty-four notes to the conclusion, more than forty document observations by others on a whole range of matters loosely relating to narrative technique. When we do arrive at the author’s own findings, this is the form that they take in one of the two main paragraphs devoted to them:

In his first and last novels, time functions almost as a second level of plot, the chronometric subsections and micro-rhythms of DR, and the twenty-year rhythms of WB being especially remarkable. Temporal simultaneity (RN, JO), parallel scenes condensed into a single chapter (FFMC), future-in-the-past sequences affording double perspectives (TM), seasonal calendars (UGT) synchronized with publication dates (FFMC), and striking narrative gaps (MC, TDU) reinforce the key role of time. By imaginative expansion of the point-present through epiphany (PBE), chronotype (JO), filmic transformation (WB, TM) or prismatic viewing (WL), the narrative moment is invested with force and significance, while a stop-time portrait (RN) or a virtual time-free ambience (WL), rapid topographical movements (HE, AL) or a high rate of events (MC) crucially affect tempi.

(216)

In short, this heterogeneous collection of disparate narrative phenomena “reinforce the key role of time,” invest “the narrative moment . . . with force and significance,” and “crucially affect tempi.” But how, and why, and to what end? After all, Hardy’s fascination with temporal and spatial perspective has long been a critical commonplace. What does this shorthand list really tell us that we did not already know?

One should, of course, have been given indications of the answers to these fundamental questions about purpose—both Hardy’s as a novelist and Ireland’s as a critic—in the preceding chapters on individual [End Page 112...