A Route to Modernism Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf
Rosemary Sumner
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A Route to Modernism
10.1057/9780230599154 - A Route to Modernism, Rosemary Sumner
Also by Rosemary Sumner THOMAS HARDY: Psychological Novelist
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WILLIAM GOLDING'S THE SPIRE
10.1057/9780230599154 - A Route to Modernism, Rosemary Sumner
Rosemary Sumner
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10.1057/9780230599154 - A Route to Modernism, Rosemary Sumner
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A Route to Modernism Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf
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First published in Great Britain 2000 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world
ISBN 0-333-77046-3
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First published in the United States of America 2000 by
ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 0-312-22423-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sumner, Rosemary, 1924— A route to modernism : Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf / Rosemary Sumner. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-312-22423-0 (cloth) 1. English fiction —20th century —History and criticism. 2. Modernism (Literature)—Great Britain. 3. Hardy, Thomas, 1840-1928—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert). 1885-1930—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941 —Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PR888.M63S86 1999 820.9'll2-dc21 99-27616 CIP
© Rosemary Sumner 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P OLR Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 09 08
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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In memoriam H.R.
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10.1057/9780230599154 - A Route to Modernism, Rosemary Sumner
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'Life presents question after question which must be left to sound on and on after the story is over in hopeless interrogation.' Virginia Woolf: 'Modern Fiction'
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List of Plates
xi
Acknowledgements
xii
Preface
xiii
List of Abbreviations
xiv
1
Introduction
1
2 The Experimental and the Absurd in Two on a Tower
22
3 Some Surrealist Elements in Hardy's Prose and Verse
34
4
Chance and Indeterminacy in Hardy's Novels and Poetry
49
5
Discoveries of Dissonance: Hardy's Late Fiction
66
6
The Well-Beloved: a Modernist Experiment?
81
7 The Adventure to the Unknown: Hardy, Lawrence and Developments in the Novel
93
8
A Language of the Unconscious: The Rainbow 'Anna Victrix' The dance by the stacks
107 107 116
9
Women in Love Towards harmony? A language for 'the whole man alive'
126 126 140
10 Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence Harmony and dissonance 'The thing that exists when we aren't there'
150 150 160
11 Hardy to Woolf: a Route to Modernism
170
12 'Books open: no conclusion come to'
185
Notes
189
Bibliography
200
Index
205
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Contents
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1 Hardy's illustration for 'In a Eweleaze near Weatherbury' 2 Hardy's illustration for 'Heiress and Architect' 3 Max Ernst: 'The Wheel of Light' 4 Max Ernst: 'Visible Poem'
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List of Plates
My thanks are due in the first place to the critics who have preceded me in writing about the novelists this book deals with, and perhaps especially to those with whom I have disagreed, since they have forced me to justify my ideas or to reconsider them. Former colleagues and students, members of the Hardy and Lawrence Societies, friends who have discussed this book and others with me have all helped to keep critical faculties functioning. The London Library has been an essential source for books, both by their postal service and in St James's Square, where silent, book-surrounded corners provide congenial working places. I am also indebted to the Librarian and her colleagues at the St Ives Public Library. I have come to depend on their helpfulness and efficient handling of the InterLibrary Loan Service. I owe thanks to The Hardy Journal and its editors, James Gibson and Simon Curtis, for permission to use versions of articles published there in 1989 and 1995, to the Virginia Woolf Bulletin and its editor, Stuart N. Clarke, for articles published in 1999 and to Melissa Hardie and the Patten Press for versions of articles published in A Mere Interlude and in A Spacious Vision (edited by Phillip Mallett and Ronald Draper). For her typing skills and her patience with my confusing and illegible manuscripts I have to thank Frances Diamond. Finally, my son, Alaric Sumner, has kept me mentally alert by occasional incisive discussions of my work and by frequent requests for critical analyses of his own writing.
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Acknowledgements
The title of this book is A Route to Modernism: Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf. The bringing together of these three novelists highlights some of the less noticed aspects of modernism, and distinguishes their work from other kinds of modernism. This is not to disparage other modernist prose writers such as Stein and Joyce; their works have their own interest, their own innovations, their own distinctive merits and greatness. But my aim is to explore the modernism of my three writers rather than to emphasize the ways in which they differ from other modernist novelists. In this process, their distinctive qualities and the relationships between them will emerge. Most critics comparing Hardy and Lawrence have focused mainly on Lawrence's a Study of Thomas Hardy; for this reason I have examined what they have in common mainly from other angles. Woolf wrote interestingly and briefly on both of them but this is not the connection I dwell on. The way all three push out the boundaries of the novel, extending it into unknown regions of the universe and of the psyche (moving fiction away from the relatively realistic and social concerns of nineteenth-century fiction into more mythic and cosmic regions) is central to my thesis. The long introduction weaves together some of the main lines of thought the book will follow in relation to the three novelists. The subsequent chapters dwell mainly on each novelist separately, but without losing sight of their relationships to one another. My aim throughout and in conclusion is 'not rounding off. Opening out'. In this I follow Stanley Fish who said (in 7s There a Text in this Class? (p. 16)) 'the business of criticism was n o t . . . to determine a correct way of reading but to determine from which of a number of possible perspectives reading will proceed. This determination . . . will not be made once and for a l l . . . but will be made and remade again. . . .' This book is a study of 'the adventure to the unknown', the unconscious, the enigmatic in the fiction of Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf. R.S.
Xlll
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Preface
Hardy RN TonT MofC W TD JO WB Life CP
The Return of the Native Two on a Tower The Mayor of Casterbridge The Woodlanders Tess of the d'Urbervilles Jude the Obscure The Well-Beloved The Life of Thomas Hardy by RE. Hardy Thomas Hardy: the Complete Poems (ed. James Gibson)
Lawrence SandL R WinL CP
Sons and Lovers The Rainbow Women in Love The Complete Poems (ed. de Sola Pinto and Warren)
Woolf MrsD Mrs Dalloway TTL To the Lighthouse TW The Waves BTA Between the Acts CE Collected Essays (ed. Leonard Woolf) Diary The Diaries of Virginia Woolf (Penguin)
XIV
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List of Abbreviations
1
'The fact about contemporaries', wrote Virginia Woolf, 'is that they're doing the same thing on another railway line; one resents them distracting one, flashing past the wrong way.'1 The right way for Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf took them 'flashing past' other modernist writers - Joyce and Stein for instance - on another line. The works of these three novelists show that there is a route to modernism which is on a different track from Joyce's, though it is important to note that, in spite of this, 'they're doing the same thing'. It was the 'tricky, startling, doing stunts' 2 aspects of Joyce which Woolf rejected, saying that he 'respects writing too much for that'. My aim is to interest readers in concepts of modernism rather than to formulate a definition of it. The focus of this book is on the particular kinds of innovation brought to the novel by Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf and on the particular 'lines' they follow, rather than to argue minutely their precise differences from Joyce, Stein and others. I am not maintaining that the kind of modernism of these three novelists is totally different from all others. Obviously, Woolf's recognition that 'they're doing the same thing' implies that her 'railway line' runs parallel to or crosses others from time to time. It might be claimed, for instance, that the use of the single day in Mrs Dalloway is directly derived from Ulysses; but the differences between these two novels are more striking than their similarities. Joyce creates a rigid structure (not only the Homeric framework but all the other 'schematic systems'); 3 the hour of the day of each section is just one controlling feature among many. Time in Mrs Dalloway is also important - the booming of Big Ben reverberates throughout the novel, but the time struck is often l
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Introduction
unspecified. (John Sutherland's 'Mrs Dalloway's Taxi'4 amusingly highlights the difference from Joyce, who worked on Ulysses with a stopwatch.) Clarissa gets home from Bond Street earlier than anyone with a stopwatch would expect. Whether or not she went by taxi (as Sutherland maintains) is utterly irrelevant to Mrs Dalloway. The carefully calculated structures of Ulysses are alien to Woolf's methods; to what Hardy called 'my own unmethodical books'; and to the spontaneity which was central to Lawrence's conception of art. He saw Joyce's work as 'too terribly would-be and done-onpurpose, utterly without spontaneity or real life'. Herbert Read asked of Ulysses 'Is it not an erudite crossword puzzle?' 5 and therefore capable of solution. Joyce defines, analyzes, solves. Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf are concerned with the undefinable, the unanalyzable, the unresolved. Genette suggests that it is 'foolish to search for "unity" at any price, and in this way to force the coherence of any work'. 6 The route I'm mapping goes in the direction of new forms, not as exciting for their own sake, but as enabling exploration of the inconsistent, the irrational, the unresolved, the unknown. This journey starts in 1868 with Hardy's first, unpublished, novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, with its subtitle, 'A Story with no Plot Containing some original verses'. A novel without a plot in the middle of the Victorian period is clearly signalling its author's experimental intentions. Plotless and with verses, it must have been a novel in a completely new form. But, 'form is content, content is f o r m . . . writing is not about something; it is that something itself'.7 A new kind of novel necessarily 'meant mischief or so the potential publishers thought. It appears from their comments (our main source of information about the book) 8 that Hardy attacked the whole social structure, questioning the relationship between the classes and the sexes and undermining the hierarchy. He referred to it in later years as 'a striking socialist' novel. Apparently it was both content and form which so alarmed the publishers. Their fear of new form was expressed in their advice to Hardy to 'write a story with a more complicated plot'. 9 It is tantalizing to think of the challenging experimental novels Hardy might have written if his first attempt had not been rejected.10 Instead, he found ways of giving publishers the plots they wanted, while simultaneously challenging, their preconceptions both about the nature of society and about the nature of the novel; but the energy wasted on such things as the desperate overplotting of Desperate Remedies and on the tangled rivalries between lovers (both living and dead) in A
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2 A Route to Modernism
3
Pair of Blue Eyes might have been given to the creation of a wholly new kind of novel. Happily, however, after his initial acquiescence in the advice about plot, Hardy refused to be thwarted. In the last 30 years of the nineteenth century he wrote novels which his contemporary readers found challenging and disturbing and which were springboards for his twentieth-century successors. Young Lawrence, like the young Hardy, planned to write novels without plots. According to Jessie Chambers, he told her, 'I don't want a plot, I should be bored with it'. 11 Years later he was still embattled about it. Garnett, questioning whether The Sisters was a viable form, drove Lawrence to despair. He even thought he might abandon his experiments: 'Then I should propose to write a story with a plot and to abandon the exhaustive method entirely'. 12 But, fortunately, he did not allow his creative originality to be crushed. He persisted in - even intensified - 'the exhaustive method'. With three published novels behind him, he was in a stronger position than Hardy had been with The Poor Man and the Lady. The Rainbow was published, and banned. But, unlike The Poor Man and the Lady, it survived. It was almost 50 years later than Hardy's first novel. Changes in attitudes, in society, in science, in beliefs in those 50 years were knit up with startling innovations in all the arts. The Rainbow's survival became a possibility. In the 1860s oblivion was inevitable for Hardy's experimental novel, 'too soon' as he said, for its date. 13 Fifty years later, Lawrence was not alone in challenging the rigidities of publishers and public. Woolf was even more emphatic than Hardy and Lawrence in rejecting plot. In 'Modern Fiction' she wrote, 'If a writer could write what he chose, not what he must. . . there would be no plot'. 14 In 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown' she jokingly suggested that she had felt herself 'tempted to manufacture a three volume novel about the old lady's son', though hastily adding that 'such stories seem to me the most dreary, irrelevant and humbugging affairs in the world'. 15 She attacked 'the appalling narrative business of the realist; getting on from lunch to dinner; it is false, unreal, merely conventional'. 16 Her characters, too, begin to voice objections. Even Bernard, the story-teller in The Waves, says, 'How tired I am of stories' 17 and Miss La Trobe, the playwright in Between the Acts, seems to imply, 'The plot's nothing'. 18 It seems fairly safe to risk assuming that Woolf endorses these views of her characters, especially as she said she was writing The Waves 'to a rhythm, not a plot. . . it is completely opposed to the tradition of fiction'.19
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Introduction
These three novelists' unanimous rejection of plot is indicative of their shared desire for change - in fiction and in society. The hypnotic effect of plot on readers, its linearity, its movement towards resolution and conclusion tend to reassure rather than disturb. Hardy saw that such tendencies thwart the expression of those 'ideas and emotions which run counter to inert crystallized opinion - hard as a rock - which the vast body of men have vested interest in supporting'. 20 Although he had decided, when he wrote this passage, that he might express such ideas 'more fully in verse', he had, in fact, found a way of overcoming the 'unfortunate consequences of the advice to "write a story with a plot"'. 21 He created stories with plots which undermined nineteenth-century conceptions of realism, 'ran counter to crystallized opinion' and left endings open and questioning. Such questions about plot are still a preoccupation of literary theory, in spite of the innovations of modernism. At the 1979 Symposium 'On Narrative' at the University of Chicago, Robert Scholes commented on much the same lines as Hardy; 'traditional narrative structures . . . inhibit both individual human growth and significant social c h a n g e . . . narrativity itself, as we have known it, must be seen as an opiate'. He fears it 'may be too deeply r o o t e d . . . to be dispensed with'. 22 Hardy thought it was worth trying. He subverted the novel with the strong plot by using it to reinforce his battle against the conventional morality which the fiction of his day was expected to uphold. His essay, 'Candour in English Fiction' 23 states the case for those changes in attitudes which his novels so vividly embody. His early desire to discard plot was just one sign of a radical divergence from the established traditions of fiction and from the assumptions on which those traditions were based. He wrote the kind of novels which Barthes describes as 'the text of bliss: the text that discomforts... unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions. . . brings to a crisis his relationship with language'. 24 He occupies a pivotal position between nineteenth-century and modernist fiction. His novels now may not seem as revolutionary as those of Lawrence and Woolf, but he disrupted the temporal linearity which was based on nineteenth-century assumptions about continuity, causality, progress long before they were abruptly shattered by Einstein. The characteristic modernist gaps in narration, strange juxtapositions, unexpected language, daring subject matter are all present in Hardy's middle and late work. It was, in its time, as disturbing, as challenging and as new as the fiction of the period we now call Modernist - roughly
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4 A Route to Modernism
1900 to 1940 - because we can no longer call it modern. Instead of the kind of modernist fiction which plays conceptual games and offers puzzles which we can solve if we are perceptive, intelligent and knowledgeable enough, Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf create mysteries; they offer no solutions, no certainties, no conclusions. Their novels, on rereading, expand, deepen, become more, not less, complex. Instead of plot, Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf focused on the unknown, the unconscious; there had been enough of what Lawrence calls 'daytime consciousness' in nineteenth-century fiction - 'unreal', Woolf suggests, in its realism. Hardy led the way. He aimed to keep his novels 'as near to poetry in their subject as conditions would allow, and had often regretted that those conditions would not let him keep them nearer still'. 25 Lawrence, writing The Rainbow, was prepared to flout these conditions, but he found it 'hard to express a new thing'; he was struggling towards 'a deeper sense than we've been used to exercise'. In DH Lawrence: Thinker as Poet Fiona Beckett argues that even in his discursive, non-fictional writing. Lawrence 'poetically thinks his way through and around questions of consciousness, using figures like . . . the flame . .. the poppy . . . the phoenix'. She emphasizes the 'neighbourly nearness' (Heidegger's phrase) between poetry and thought and claims this distinguishes him from his modernist contemporaries such as Joyce and Pound; they, she thinks, have 'the kind of modernist consciousness which might actually impede the real "neighbouring"'. 26 This seems to me a valid distinction. Lawrence warned Garnett not to 'look for the development of the novel to follow the lines of certain characters: the characters fall into the form of some other rhythmic form'.27 The Rainbow is, like The Waves, 'written to a rhythm, not a plot'. Roger Fowler makes a similar point about Woolf's 'spectacular subordination of meaning to music' in the opening voices of the children in The Waves: it is 'incantatory, a dawn-song, in a rhythm which imitates the rise and fall of the waves'. 28 This distinction between Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf and some of their contemporary modernists is central to the argument of this book. By bringing fiction into 'neighbourly nearness' with poetry and music, they escaped from the linearity, the logical cause and effect, the determinism implied by plot. They knew 'when to put aside the writer's conscious intention in favour of some deeper intention of which he may perhaps be unconscious'. 29 Derrida points out that the 'intermixing of genres' existed 'even before the advent of what we call "modernism"'; 30
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Introduction 5
the implication of this is that the 'intermixing' is specifically, but not exclusively, modernist. New depths, new rhythmic forms gave readers a shock. Forms that are new are difficult to recognize; they tend to seem formless. 'I tell you it's got form', Lawrence had to insist to Garnett, pleading for acceptance of the new thing he was creating. Woolf begged her readers to 'tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary'. 31 His claim that the work in progress towards The Rainbow had form corresponds to her vision of a new, unwritten novel: 'It will be necessary for the writer of this exacting book to bring to bear upon his tumultuous and contradictory emotions the generalizing and simplifying power of a strict and logical imagination'. 32 But this hypothetical and paradoxical novel, both tumultuous and simplified, both contradictory and logical was not as wholly innovative as Woolf suggests. In the 1895 Preface to Jude the Obscure Hardy said it was 'an endeavour to give shape and coherence to a series of seemings. . . the question of their consistency or their discordance, of their permanence or their transitoriness, being not regarded as of the first moment'. The juxtaposition of coherence and discord is as paradoxical as Woolf's 'exacting' unwritten book. In discarding concern for consistency, Hardy recognized the possibility of balancing intellectual control with the possibility of allowing the processes of the unconscious to contribute to the shaping of the novel. The Preface to Jude challenged presuppositions about the nature of art and questioned whether order and harmony are necessarily of its essence. Awareness of the complexities and incoherences of the human mind made an impact on form in art. The notion of artistic perfection is threatened by a sense of a dangerous instability. The more the novel is concerned with the life of the mind, the greater the risk of fragmentation. Modernist forms of fiction reflect and emphasize this concern. Foucault in 'What is an author?' questions the assumption that 'there must be . . . a point where contradictions are resolved'. But reluctance to accept contradictions persists even now, in art as well as in literature. During a talk on Mondrian, Bridget Riley, contemplating the Mondrian she had had hung among her own paintings in the exhibition, said dubiously, 'I think it isn't quite resolved'. Asked if she was implying that she wanted resolution, she replied eagerly. 'No, it is the shifting surfaces that interest me'. 33 The mind's complex relationship with the body became of particular significance to Hardy as he explored it in his late novels. His risky
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6 A Route to Modernism
statement that Angel 'with more animalism might have been a nobler man' 34 is amplified in his treatment of Sue's similar but more extreme disjunction. Her desire for and fear of physical sexual relationships epitomize the discord between mind and body which Lawrence, too, saw as dangerous. In 'A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover', he says, 'Life is only bearable when mind and body are in harmony' 35 and widens this out to encompass relationships with people, nature, 'the circumambient universe'. These relationships evoke questions about chaos and harmony in art. How much chaos, how much fragmentation, dare artist or writer allow into his/her work? Beckett presents this question as a continuing problem: 'What I am saying does not mean there will henceforth be no form in art. It only means there will be new form, and that this form will be of such a type that it admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else. The form and the chaos remain separate. The latter is not reduced to the former. That is why form itself becomes a preoccupation, because it exists as a problem separate from the material it accommodates. To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now'. 36 Before Beckett, Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf (and other modernist writers, painters and composers) were facing this problem. Hardy's essay 'Candour in English Fiction' corresponds to 'A Propos'. Lawrence in 'A Propos' (and in much of his non-fiction) is concerned with what is desirable in life - harmony of mind and body, of the individual with others, of humanity with the cosmos - and how all this can be treated in the novel. 'Candour in English Fiction' focuses more on what is desirable in the novel. In his attack on the prudishness of the publishers and public of his time, Hardy writes, 'Life being a physiological fact, its honest portrayal must be largely concerned with . . . the relations between the s e x e s . . . To this, English society opposes a well-nigh insuperable bar.'37 He adds that novelists are forced to create 'the spurious effect' of the characters being in harmony with their society. This was written in 1890 when his fiction also was making some of its most extreme challenges to contemporary attitudes (such as his comment on animalism in Tess). Hardy and Lawrence are both challenging a society which fears the body. Both investigate the 'halfness' which results from such fears, Hardy by splitting mind and body between two characters (Angel and Sue are all mind, Alec and Arabella all body), Lawrence by exploring in Women in Love Gerald's 'fatal halfness'. They are, inevitably, concerned with the lack of harmony between mind and
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Introduction 7
body. Harmony, if it does occur in their novels, is rare, ephemeral, ecstatic, threatened. In Tess, a transitory moment of harmony between mind and body and between two characters is shown in the episode in the empty house in the New Forest. There is even a faint hint of physical sexual fulfilment, but it is distanced by being what the caretaker saw: 'the faces of the pair, wrapped in profound slumber, Tess's lips being parted like a half-open flower near his cheek'. 38 Some 25 years later, Lawrence is able in Women in Love to be much more open about sexual harmony. In 'Excurse' he creates a moment in Sherwood Forest similar to the one in Tess, but much more explicit, of course, about the physical nature of the relationship. His rhythms and repetitions, the balanced and matching sentences ('She had her desire fulfilled. He had his desire fulfilled...') create a sense of musical chords and harmonies. Lawrence uses the rhythmical and sonic resources of language to evoke harmonies that are physical, sensual, emotional. Heidegger maintains that 'It is. . . the property of language to sound and to ring and to vibrate, to hover and to tremble.. . . But our experience of this property is exceedingly clumsy, because the metaphysical-technical explanation gets in the way, and keeps us from considering the matter properly.'39 Lawrence's physical, sensual, emotional rhythms escape the clumsiness feared by Heidegger and create a new kind of fictional prose to express a previously forbidden experience of harmony. However, 'there must be mutation .. . inconclusiveness, immediacy, the quality of life itself'4" in poetry, said Lawrence, but it applies to fiction, too. And so the novels deal with conflict and the struggle towards harmony more than with its achievement. The problem of realizing this in words is shown in a particularly sharp way in Lawrence's 1912 short story 'New Eve and Old Adam'. Here, he is already experimenting, trying out different methods of conveying intellect and 'blood', consciousness and unconsciousness. Though this story gives a simple, even crude outline of dislocation between mind and body, it is an important stage in the process towards finding a form and a language which will express, both imaginatively and intellectually, the complexities of this relationship between harmony and chaos. Women in Love is that new form. It oscillates between harmony and chaos. That moment of harmony in 'Excurse' is placed in a context of violent clashes. Birkin's meditation on the African statuette is designed to clarify the dangers of separation of mind and body. Just as Hardy separated them by allotting mind to one character,
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8 A Route to Modernism
body to another, so Birkin makes the African statuette represent purely sensuous knowledge, in stark opposition to the abstract, 'icedestructive knowledge', which he tentatively identifies with Gerald's 'halfness'. Birkin is simplifying for the sake of clarifying; these opposites, he implies, rather in the manner of Lawrence's essays, need to combine in harmony; Gerald cannot achieve such a combination: 'His consciousness had gone into his wrists, into his h a n d s . . . his wrists were bursting, there would be no satisfaction till his hands had closed on her.' This is not a harmonious synthesizing of mind and body but a damaging eruption of the repressed instinctive element into consciousness. Even when the Gerald-Gudrun relationship seems to be running smoothly, they are 'separate like opposite poles of one fierce energy', in contrast to Birkin's idea of polarity, with stars harmoniously balancing one another. The novel's structure may seem to be the simple one suggested by Leavis: one couple heading towards chaos, the other towards harmony. But this is complicated by many cross-currents; Birkin's analysis of Gerald's 'halfness' is juxtaposed to his anxiety about his own 'duality', 'so spiritual on the one hand, so degraded on the other'. 'That chaos called consciousness' (the phrase is Hardy's)41 is a vital element in the shaping of Women in Love and of the novels of Hardy and Woolf. Their exploitation of the relation of consciousness to the external world adds another dimension of complexity to the form of the novel. In the first chapter of The Return of the Native Hardy suggests that humanity no longer feels in harmony with mild and gentle landscapes but is more attuned to the sombre and the desolate. Wild places like Egdon Heath correspond to the unconscious; they are 'the original of those wild regions of obscurity which we encounter in dreams of flight and disaster'. This razor edge where chaos harmonizes with chaos is epitomized in Eustacia's paradoxical relation with the heath; as she goes through the storm to her death, 'Never was harmony more perfect than that between the chaos of her mind and the chaos of the world without.' 42 The episode of Tess in the uncultivated garden, listening to Angel's harp, is similarly equivocal: 'the harmonies passed like breezes through her' 43 and even slug-slime and sticky blights are harmless, merely making 'madder stains' on her skin (this is the colour, rose madder, not the incipient dementia of some urban critics' imaginations); but Hardy does not let us forget that she cannot help crushing snails underfoot. Breezes pass through Tess; 'this coolness and subtlety
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Introduction 9
of vegetation passing into one's blood' is Birkin's experience when he rolls naked among the plants. There is no equivalent of the crushed snails here; the harmony between man and nature seems complete. But perhaps the harmony is even more tentative than in Tess; it is brought into question much later when, facing Gerald's corpse, Birkin feels his blood turn to ice-water. Both novelists emphasize the physicality of the relationship with the external world. In Woolf it is sometimes even more intensely physical, sometimes violently, so that harmony is on the brink of slipping over into dissonance: 'a jar was so green that the eye seemed sucked up through a funnel by its intensity and stuck to it like a limpet'. 44 Woolf frightens us with a green jar, Hardy frightens us with the universe. For the characters in Two on a Tower outer space, observed through a telescope, has 'a vastness they could not cope with, even as an idea'.45 This experimental novel suggests that the immensities of space make any notion of harmony between 'man and his circumambient universe' inconceivable. In Women in Love Lawrence seems to acknowledge this, postponing its achievement until Birkin's vision of 'a finer created being' of 'miraculous unborn species' replaces humanity. In his essays, on the other hand, he sees 'connecting ourselves up with the cosmos' as a necessity for humanity. While these three novelists are vividly conscious of chaos, they also know how human beings long for harmony. Clym and Eustacia, newly married, live in 'a harmonious mist' which veils anything inharmonious. Jude, on arriving at Christminster, his 'heavenly Jerusalem', 'When he passed objects out of h a r m o n y . . . he allowed his eyes to slip over them as if they were not there'. Lawrence treats this tendency with greater complexity. He exposes how Gerald's concept of harmony as the equivalent of organization and so reducible to the laws of mechanics, in its operation in the mines, turns into chaos. Any contrasting moves in the novel towards harmony are transitory and unstable. Birkin's hankering for 'an eternal union' with a man is left hanging in a void when the novel stops. Woolf treats such longings more harshly. In Between the Acts the mockery of Mrs Swithin's 'unifying' is merciless: Sheep, cows, grass, trees - all are one. If discordant, producing harmony - if not to us, to a gigantic ear attached to a gigantic head. And thus - she was smiling - the agony of the particular sheep or cow, or human being is necessary; and so . . . we reach the conclusion that all is harmony, could we hear it.
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10 A Route to Modernism
11
Such longings are probably the reason why human beings invented art and why, in some periods, pictures stay inside their frames, poems obey established metrical rules and novels end with a satisfying sense of completeness. But in the period I am dealing with, roughly 1880-1940, the changes, contradictions and cross-currents of ideas challenge the concept of harmonious form in art. The endings of Hardy's last two novels question that idea, Jude mournfully, The Well-Beloved ironically. The first version of The Well-Beloved ends enigmatically in a gurgle of icy laughter, the second version apparently conventionally in marriage, but only because neighbours want 'to round off other people's histories in the best machine-made conventional manner'. 46 Hardy's view of such endings is implicit in the grotesque ceremony with the aging bride in the wheelchair and the closing of the natural springs - both of water and of creativity. Such ironic foregrounding of technique is one of the reasons why The Well-Beloved has been described as 'a key text in the transition from Victorian to modern fiction'.47 Jude ends with clashing contrasts. His dying murmurs of lines from the Book of Job are crashed through and chopped up by shouts of holiday crowds and raucous brass bands. The white, silent corpse is juxtaposed to explosions of noise and colour. Finally, Sue's claim that she has found peace is set against Arabella's assertion that she will never find it. The gap between what is desired and what is is one of the subjects of the novel. The clashes and contrasts of its form demonstrate that gap. Both Hardy and Lawrence were aware of the problem. Eagleton writes 'it is precisely in its Assuring of organic form . . . that [Women in Love] enforces a "progressive" discontinuity with a realist lineage already put into profound question by Jude the Obscure'.4* This suggests that Hardy and Lawrence were on their way to finding the form Beckett looked for. It is surprising, therefore, that Eagleton argues that 'after Jude there was nowhere for Hardy to go; having "exploded" the organic forms of fiction, he was forced to disembark'. 49 He also describes Lawrence as 'beset' by contradictions. 50 The question of resolution continues to perturb, both in literature and in the visual arts. Bridget Riley's interest in 'shifting surfaces' parallels Woolf's treatment of form: 'She invented many different forms, and each was like a container within which could be held in suspension a variety of different statements about what life is, in constant agitated motion'. 51 Woolf wanted to 'achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords . . . some kind of whole made of shimmering fragments'. 52 In
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Introduction
To the Lighthouse she uses an artist to examine directly questions of harmony and chaos in art. Lily, the artist, tries to achieve 'that razor edge of balance between two opposite forces'. In each of the three sections of the book a woman creates harmony, makes 'Time stand still', Mrs Ramsay in family life, Lily in art, the charwoman in stemming, with mop and bucket, the flow of the house towards disintegration. This patterning is matched by the ending, where, by a cunning shift of tenses, the arrival at the lighthouse is made to coincide with the final brushstroke on Lily's painting, which makes the whole cohere. Brilliantly Woolf has drawn the threads together and brought the novel harmoniously to a close. But, is it too neat? Earlier, Lily had felt, 'Beauty had this penalty - it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life - froze it'. Lawrence's discussion of this idea in the Introduction to New Poems proposes a kind of poetry in which there is 'no static perfection, none of that finality which we find so satisfying because we are so frightened'.53 Woolf expressed her awareness of the dangers of beauty in a letter to Ethel Smythe: 'I will broach the subject of b e a u t y . . . and burst out in ecstasy at your defence of me as a very ugly writer - which is what I am - but an honest one, driven like a whale to the surface in a snort - such is the effort and anguish to me of finding a phrase (that is, saying what I mean) - and then they say I write beautifully! How could I write beautifully when I am always trying to say something that has not been said and should be said for the first time, exactly.'54 To the Lighthouse seems to veer towards that finality Lawrence saw as dangerously 'satisfying' as Woolf so perfectly brings together the completion of the voyage, of the picture and of the novel. In doing this, she seems in danger of diminishing in the novel, the power of suffering, fear, war, death, entropy and of making chaos too easily controlled and shaped. But, at the last moment, she undercuts her perfection. In the last few lines of the book, Lily's picture is demoted from its status as a work of art to an amateur's attempt which will lie forgotten in an attic. She thus destabilizes that static perfection which, for a moment, she had seemed to endorse. Between the Acts more daringly explores her early idea of 'symmetry by means of infinite discords'. Here, she creates a form in which words are broken, sentences shattered and human beings are 'orts, scraps and fragments', reflected scrappily in the broken mirrors of the actors. Chaos is here creative. A tree full of starlings becomes 'a rhapsody, a quivering cacophony... birds syllabling discordantly, life, life, life, without measure, with-
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13
out stop.' 55 Woolf crystallizes what has been apparent in Hardy's and Lawrence's novels; both harmony (in Between the Acts imaged in the white empty room at its centre) and chaos are necessary to human existence. Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf have created forms of fiction based on a creative tension between harmony and chaos. Structurally these novels are both shaped and fragmented so that they are able to contain 'that chaos called consciousness' and its even more chaotic partner, unconsciousness. As Josipovici says, 'Modern art relinquishes the notion of art as a bulwark against chaos.' 56 It is Elizabeth-Jane in The Mayor of Casterbridge who experiences 'that chaos called consciousness' as she sits at her dying mother's bedside and hears the unsynchronized ticking of clocks. Clock-time, mind-time, life-time are jangled together. It comes as a surprise that it is Elizabeth-Jane who has this sense of the chaotic nature of consciousness, since one of her functions in the novel is to form a contrast, in her stability and self-control, to Henchard's 'unruly volcanic stuff beneath the rind'. But, just as Hardy rejected consistency of form in the preface to Jude, so he also rejects consistency in characterization, especially in his late novels. Both Alec and Arabella have brief, apparently out of character, religious conversions. Such inconsistencies are psychologically more complex in the treatment of Sue, with her sudden and violent fluctuations of feeling and attitude. Hardy explores but does not explain these emotional changes. Sue is 'puzzling and unstateable' not only to Jude, but to the reader, to Hardy himself. Little Father Time moves out into another world, 'our rude realms far above'. 57 In creating these characters, Hardy is exploring the unconscious, but hesitating on the brink of interpreting it, leaving the reader to experience its unexplained complexities. 58 In his more intense way, Lawrence flings the reader into the midst of the experience, with startling imagery, powerful, repetitive rhythms, alliteration and assonance. In this way, modes of being which seem utterly alien to the human are created. The moonlight dance in The Rainbow, by starting with the rhythm of the earth and sea, can lead to Ursula's unearthly, violent relationship with the moon. Her fearful repudiation of this experience when she returns to 'daytime consciousness' reinforces rather than denies it. Her glimpse of an affinity between her own incomprehensible experience and a bunch of oats glistening in the moonlight affirms the strangeness. Imagery, sounds, rhythm ensure a reading that is sensuous and imaginative, rather than cerebral. The most profound sexual experience of Ursula and Birkin 'can never be transmuted into mind content'. Terms
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Introduction
such as 'unstateable' (Sue) and 'untranslatable' (Birkin) are used of characters not only in extraordinary psychological states but also in their ordinariness. (Birkin is 'untranslatable' just going into a shop.) This strangeness is highlighted by the characters' responses to one another. Sue is a 'conundrum' to Jude; Ursula thinks the way Gudrun adds Birkin up and draws a line underneath is 'such a lie';59 Birkin, the 'changer', the 'chameleon', is crossed out, 'summed up, paid for, settled, done with' in Gudrun's sum. Bernard in The Waves maintains that Louis is 'adding us up like insignificant items in some grand t o t a l . . . one day . . . the addition will be complete; our total will be known'; 60 Rhoda agrees, feeling that 'if we submit, he will reduce us to order'. 61 Gudrun and Louis are presented as trying to be omniscient authors of their friends' lives (like the neighbours at the end of The Well Beloved) and, in the process, reducing them to insignificance. In this way they sharpen the focus, in the novels they occur in, on the multiple nature of character. This distinguishes these novels utterly from the tradition of omniscience. The plain statements that 'Mrs Dalloway would never say of anyone that they were this or were that' and that 'more than fifty pairs of eyes' were needed to see round Mrs Ramsay do the same job, but in a more obvious and less vivid way. The recognition that 'no thing was simply one thing' (as James understands on nearing the lighthouse) was, according to David Lodge, 'perhaps the central assertion of the modernist novel'. 62 This is a central part of modernist novelists' effort to break out of confinement to place, time, consistency, 'daytime consciousness'. It was the sight of some yellow-hammers ('They are of another world.. . . The universe is non-human, thank God') which prompted Ursula's fierce rejection of Gudrun's attitude to people and to creatures - 'making everything come down to human standards'. 63 In The Return of the Native a mallard brings to Venn communication 'from regions unknown to man', as do the birds from 'behind the North Pole' in Tess. These are means of expressing that 'leap from the known to the unknown' in The Rainbow, that 'miracle of leaping from a pinnacle of a tower into the air - startling, unexpected, unknown' 64 in To the Lighthouse. Hardy experiments with bringing this 'something inhuman' into even closer relationship with the human by creating the character of Little Father Time, a character out on the rim of the world, gazing across 'some vast Atlantic of Time'. In his poem, 'Midnight on the Great Western', Hardy asks,
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14 A Route to Modernism
Introduction
15
Hardy's questioning, uncertain treatment of the journeying boy in this poem has not caused the consternation aroused by Little Father Time. The incongruity of such a strange character in a novel is the problem. It is an overt challenge to traditional assumptions about the nature of the novel. In his 'Study of Thomas Hardy', Lawrence asserts that Hardy's 'little drama [of human beings] falls to pieces... but the stupendous theatre outside goes on enacting its own incomprehensible drama'. 66 But his use of 'theatre' and 'drama' implies that a relationship between the human and the 'incomprehensible' outside does exist in Hardy's work. Woolf puts it in these terms: 'how it is not oneself, but something in the universe one's left with. . . . One sees a fin passing far out. What image can I reach to convey what I mean? Really there is none, I think.' 67 Yet she persisted: 'It is to be an endeavour at something mystic, spiritual; the thing that exists when we aren't there'. 68 She writes of 'worshipping the impersonal world which is proof of some existence other than ours'. 69 Things (she had, for instance, chests of drawers in mind) are just as 'unstateable' and 'untranslatable' as the characters in these novels. And, because they are alien, the stretching of the imagination is even greater. Lawrence's 'carbon' ('that which is non-human in humanity') 70 is inanimate and so, according to Langbaum, 'a step further than Hardy who roots his characters in a vegetated landscape'.71 But Hardy's birds connect with the unknown and the inanimate; the trilobite's eyes, dead and turned to stone, but fixed on Knight, saw a world long before the existence of humanity. Woolf's 'solid objects' - a piece of glass looking like 'a creature from another world' and a piece of iron which was 'evidently alien to the earth and had its origin in one of the dead stars or was itself the cinder of a dead moon' 72 - succeed in connecting the reader (as well as the possessors of the objects) with 'that something in the universe' for which she had felt there was 'no image'. 'The world without a self'73 - something difficult to write about challenged and fascinated these three writers. They treated it indirectly, through imagery, and also directly by incorporating the problems of this kind of writing explicitly in their work. In Hardy's
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Knows your soul a sphere, O journeying boy, 'Our rude realms far above, Whence with spacious vision you mark and mete This region of sin you find you in But are not of.'65
poem, 'The Fallow Deer at the Lonely House',74 'One without looks in tonight', while 'We sit and think/At the fender brink' but 'we do not discern those eyes'; so the poem raises the question, quite explicitly, of who is observing the eyes, the deer, the people, the house, the whole scene. Likewise, in the manuscript of Between the Acts, Woolf asks 'who observed the dining room . . . noted absence?' In the published version, it is the room itself which expresses itself: Empty, empty, empty; silent, silent, silent. The room was a shell, singing of what was before time was; a vase stood in the heart of the house, alabaster, smooth, cold, holding the still, distilled essence of emptiness, silence.75 Lawrence, too, imagines 'a world empty of people'. In Kangaroo he writes of 'the soft, blue, humanless sky of Australia. "Tabula rasa". The world a new leaf. And on the new leaf, nothing. The white clarity of the Australian fragile atmosphere. Without a mark, without a record'.76 In evoking the special 'humanless' quality of Australia, he also insists that it is 'unwritten', unmarked, unrecorded. He simultaneously denies and makes a 'record'. Woolf does the same, not in a strange land but in an English country garden, where the sky was blue, pure blue, black blue; blue that had never filtered down; that had escaped registration. It never fell as sun, shadow, or rain upon the world, but disregarded the little coloured ball of earth entirely. No flower felt it; no garden. 77 To register what has 'escaped registration' it is necessary to use negatives. Lawrence and Woolf, especially in Women in Love and Between the Acts, use innumerable negatives (to Hardy's 'unstateable' they add 'untranslatable', 'unliving', 'inhuman', 'eyeless' (of winds and flowers), 'unblowing', 'ungrowing'). In Between the Acts, this negativity is, near the end, compressed into two negative fragments, detached from what they negate: 'un-' and 'dis-' concentrate the essence of negativity. 'The struggle with words and meaning', so central to modernist writing, is made even more explicit by the characters' debates about it. Such discussions pervade Women in Love. Lawrence uses Birkin to articulate a notion of a relationship 'where there is no speech', 78 where 'words themselves do not convey meaning. . .. Yet it must be s p o k e n . . . to give utterance was to break a way through the
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walls of the prison'. 79 Birkin's later realization that 'it must happen beyond the sound of words' 80 is no solution for the novelist who has to use words to suggest what is beyond them. In Kangaroo the struggle becomes less abstract and even more anguished: 'speech was like a volley of dead leaves and dust, stifling the air. Human beings should learn to make weird, wordless cries, like animals, and cast off the clutter of words.' 81 Somers here is almost identical with Bernard in The Waves who needs 'a howl, a cry'. In desperation, these novelists look to times and places without language 'beyond words', in the unconscious in Women in Love, before words, in the unintelligible syllables of the song of the ancient woman outside Regent's Park Station in Mrs Dalloway. Illness, for Woolf, provides yet another way of experiencing words: In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning, gather instinctively this, that and the other - a sound, a colour, here a stress, there a pause . . . incomprehensibility has enormous power over us in illness . . . in health, meaning has encroached upon sound. Our intellect dominates over our senses. But in illness. . . words give out their s c e n t . . . meaning is all the richer for having come to us sensually first, by way of the palate and nostrils, like some queer odour.82 In Between the Acts, Miss La Trobe, too, in her exultation with 'words without meaning, wonderful words', enjoys their sensuousness, but her new play - 'The curtain rose. They spoke' - leaves the reader at the end of Between the Acts confronted by a void the blank page. 'The defining characteristic of Modernism was its insistence that the mind be subjected to a wholly new kind of stress. . . . Obsessive attempts to say "the unsayable" made extreme demands on the mind's elasticity. Not only literature but all the art of the period seemed intent on stretching the mind beyond the very limits of human understanding.' 83 By ending Between the Acts in the way she does, Woolf makes that stretching seem to be going on indefinitely. The reader is put in the position of Wallace Stevens' listener, . . . who listens in the snow And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.84
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Introduction
The modernist writer, 'nothing himself explores a universe no longer centred on humanity. In Hardy's later fiction, characters recognize their own insignificance. Henchard's grand statement of negatives in his will claims to erase himself - '& that no man remember me' - even in the act of asserting himself, 'To this I put my name, MICHAEL HENCHARD'. By the time of Tess and Jude the erasure of the self is no longer treated ironically. Tess would have her life 'unbe' and Jude submerges himself in Job, identifying with his 'Let the day perish wherein I was born'. While Hardy gives these three characters individual reasons for wanting extinction, he also implies that this might be a universal desire. He sees little chance of happiness for 'higher existences' on this planet, but it might be found on other planets 'though it is hard to see how'. 85 In Tess, he momentarily imagines an improved society but concludes that 'it is not to be prophesied or even conceived as possible'. The beginning of 'To an unborn pauper Child' endorses the idea that 'not to have been born is best' ('Breathe not, hid heart: cease silently') yet the poem ends . . . such are we Unreasoning, sanguine, visionary That I can hope Health, love, friends, scope In full for thee; can dream thou'lt find Joys seldom yet attained by human kind. 86 Hardy created an art which can hold in tension such contraries, such cross-currents. It is an art which contemplates being and non-being. Lawrence goes to even greater extremes. His despair of the human race is so intense that its possible extinction becomes a focus for his imagination in Women in Love. Birkin sees life as 'a blotch of labour, like insects scurrying in filth'87 and says, 'I abhor humanity. I wish it were swept away.' He imagines a more desirable world, 'empty of people, just grass and a hare sitting up'. In response to Ursula's accusation that he wants there to be 'nothing', he challenges her: 'Do you think creation depends on man? .. . Man is a mistake, he must go'. 88 Birkin has leapt from the decentring of the human race to its extinction. At the end of the novel, Lawrence softens the harshness of this stark elimination of humanity. After Gerald's death, Birkin thinks of the 'non-human mystery' of the universe, and envisages the processes of evolution replacing
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18 A Route to Modernism
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humanity as it replaced the ichthyosauri; he imagines 'some finer, more wonderful, some new, more lovely race, to carry on the embodiment of creation... . Human or inhuman mattered nothing.' The statement that 'It was very consoling to Birkin to think this' is interestingly ambiguous. It hints that Birkin's despair of human existence is such that, like Eliot in Ash Wednesday, he is having to construct something Upon which to rejoice. On the other hand, his claim that he 'would die like a shot to know that the earth would be really cleaned of all the people' 89 may be taken as selflessly affirmative; it is not nihilistic, since he hopes for forms other and better than the human to evolve. Lawrence makes Birkin's position more challenging than consolatory. The post-Darwinian displacement of humanity, not just from its central position, but altogether is echoed in Woolf's investigations into the possibility of seeing 'the thing that exists when we aren't there'. In her work there is no overt debate on the world without a human element, but it is there by implication. In her diary notes of her first thoughts on The Moths (later to become The Waves) a character might 'think about the age of the earth: the death of humanity'. This idea is explored differently and more explicitly in Between the Acts. Isa's tentative and wistful longing is to escape from her role as an overburdened donkey into an imagined world which is wholly empty and negative: some harvestless dim field where no evening lets fall her mantle; nor sun rises. All's equal there. Unblowing, ungrowing are the roses there. Change is not; nor the mutable and lovable; nor greetings nor partings; nor furtive findings and feelings, where hand seeks hand and eye seeks shelter from the eye.90 This world involves both a release from growth, change man contact and a sense of loss. A similarly equivocal humanity occurs abruptly just before the end of Between Without explanation or comment, the characters in the room at Pointz Hall become insects:
and huview of the Acts. drawing-
The circle of readers, attached to white papers was lit up. There in that hollow of the sun-baked field were congregated the
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Introduction
20 A Route to Modernism
In Birkin's vision of human beings as insects, they were 'scurrying in filth'; Woolf's, though shrunk to insignificance (like Birkin's) have a 'rosy', 'glistening', 'sun-baked' setting. They seem to be viewed benignly. In 1923 she wrote: my own view of humanity in general falls and falls... now I can see little good in the race and I would like to convey this in writing. . . but then (and this is my weakness) tolerance keeps breaking in and I excuse the creatures instead of blighting them. 92 By 1939 there is less tolerance and more blighting, but not with the ruthless vehemence of Birkin in Women in Love. After the 'insect' paragraph in Between the Acts, the human characters become first fox and vixen, then Stone Age man and woman who, in Mrs Swithin's reading of H.G. Wells's Outline of History has just 'raised himself from his semi-crouching position and raised great stones'. No such positive development is offered by the blank page of Between the Acts after 'They spoke'. Instead, confronted by that nothingness, the reader may feel exposed to something indefinable and beyond consciousness. Gillian Beer discerns, in To the Lighthouse, this sense of exposure to 'an expanse of the world beyond the human'. 93 In the novels of Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf this awareness comes with a strong sense of the everyday. In The Rainbow, Lawrence gives Tom Brangwen the understanding that, 'There was the infinite world, eternal and unchanging, as well as the world of life'. In To the Lighthouse, for Mrs Ramsay, these two worlds are so intermingled that at a dinner party 'partook, she thought, helping Mr Bankes to an especially tender piece, of eternity'. Michael Bell implies that the 'concern with the intimate, pervasive connection between the everyday quality of experience and an ultimate metaphysical vision' 94 is specific to Lawrence's fiction. I suggest that this concern is shared with Hardy and Woolf and is a vital aspect of their modernism. 'In modernism words after speech reach into the unknown', says Josipovici.95 The unknown into which the words of Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf reach is both 'the world beyond the human' and that other unknown, the inner world. Ricoeur pinpoints only
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grasshopper, the ant and the beetle, rolling pebbles of sun-baked earth through the glistening stubble. In that rosy corner of the sun-baked field Bartholomew, Giles and Lucy polished and nibbled and broke off crumbs. 91
21
one of these when he says (in a discussion of Mrs Dalloway) that 'the art of fiction consists of weaving together the sense of everydayness and that of the inner self.96 The mingling together of the everyday with unknown regions, whether of mind or universe, is a crucial aspect of modernism and the main line down which this study of the fiction of Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf travels. Hardy in Two on a Tower brings all these elements together in a sentence: 'At night, when human discords are hushed .. . there is nothing to moderate the blow with which the infinitely great, the stellar universe . . . strikes down upon the infinitely little, the mind of the beholder.' 97
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Introduction
The Experimental and the Absurd in Two on a Tower
Though usually and rightly classified as a minor novel, Two on a Tower contains some of Hardy's most original and adventurous experiments. It explores imaginatively an idea he expressed theoretically nine years later in 'The Science of Fiction': 'with our widened knowledge of the universe and its forces and man's position therein, narrative, to be artistically convincing, must adjust itself to the new alignment.' 1 Yet his use of 'the stupendous background of the stellar universe' has come in for a good deal of criticism, on the grounds that it is not integral to the novel, that it does dwarf the characters in spite of Hardy's claim to the contrary in the Preface, and that it is too remote from human concerns to function effectively in a novel. This dismissive attitude is strange since it is generally accepted that the way the background is used is one of the distinctive features of Hardy's major novels. As Lawrence says in his 'Study of Thomas Hardy': ' . . . this is the quality Hardy shares with the great writers, Shakespeare or Sophocles or Tolstoi, this setting behind the small action of his protagonists the terrific action of unfathomed nature.' 2 In Hardy's exploration of this theme in Two on a Tower he arrives at a vision of the universe which is fundamentally different from that presented in his earlier novels. It exemplifies Lawrence's view that 'The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his circumambient universe'. 3 The heath in The Return of the Native (published four years before Two on a Tower) at first sight seems to function in a similar way to the 'stellar universe' in that it provides 'the terrific action of unfathomed nature'. But, even in the first chapter, in which no characters 22
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2
appear, Hardy stresses the heath's affinity with humanity; it is 'like man, slighted and enduring', it is 'the hitherto unrecognized original' of unconscious terrors but at the same time a stabilizing influence, giving 'ballast to the mind adrift on change, and harassed by the irrepressible New'.4 Hardy is, of course, far from suggesting that it is benevolent, but he does emphasize the closeness of the tie between the heath and the people. Even Eustacia's stormy relationship with it is a kind of harmony: 'Never was harmony more perfect than that between the chaos of her mind and the chaos of the world without'. 5 The sky above the heath shares in this intimacy with the human beings; Clym looks at the moon which 'depicted a small image of herself in each of his eyes' and feels himself 'voyaging bodily through its wild scenes, standing on its hollow hills, traversing its deserts, descending its vales. . .'.6 Hardy brings it down to almost manageable proportions by making the lovers use the eclipse, that 'remote celestial phenomenon', as a signal for a meeting. Two on a Tower suggests a more extreme attitude and feeling about humanity's position in the cosmos which Hardy did not express so fully or so clearly again until his later poetry, and even then not quite with the combination of the horrifying and the absurd which gives this novel from time to time its modern flavour. The 'stellar universe' in Two on a Tower offers no 'ballast' to the mind. It may indeed, like the heath, 'reduce to insignificance . . . the turmoil of a single man', 7 but instead of inducing a sense of balance, it is shattering, reducing 'everything terrestrial to atomic proportions'. 8 Lady Constantine's (and the reader's) first look through Swithin's telescope reveals the sun as 'a whirling mass, in the centre of which the blazing globe itself seemed to be laid bare to its core. It was a peep into a maelstrom of fire, taking place where nobody had ever been or ever would be.' 9 This immediate emphasis on the alien nature of the universe seen through the telescope highlights the difference between Two on a Tower and The Return of the Native, where the indifferent heath has its affinity with humanity. The remote moon is reflected in Clym's eyes, but in Two on a Tower the connection is much more tenuous and 'the ghastly chasm' is 'bridged by the fragile line of sight.' 10 Instead of identifiable shapes of mountains and valleys on the moon, we confront 'monsters of magnitude without known shape. Such monsters are the voids and waste places of the sky."1 Using his astronomer as his vehicle, Hardy creates a sense of the size and formlessness of the universe, and of its decay. Swithin points out dying stars: 'Imagine them all extinguished, and
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'Two on a Tower' 23
your mind feeling its way through a heaven of total darkness, occasionally striking against the black, invisible cinders of those stars'.12 The characters are facing an experience that 'reduces the importance of everything'.13 In the other novels, Hardy is usually concerned with the closeness of the relationship between people and their surroundings. The laws of nature are not made for humanity, but Hardy usually shows that people can, if they will, adapt themselves to the nature of things, cover their stacks, bend a spout {Far from the Madding Crowd) or allow for the changeableness of the English summer (The Mayor ofCasterbridge). Just occasionally we are reminded that though we are 'part of the great web of human doings', the great web itself is, from some views, insignificant. This is the effect of the birds from behind the North Pole in Tess of the d'Urbervilles: 'gaunt spectral creatures with tragical eyes - eyes which had witnessed scenes of cataclysmal horror in inaccessible polar regions of a magnitude such as no human being had ever conceived, in curdling temperatures no man could endure'. 14 Here, as in Two on a Tower, Hardy is creating the sense of a universe not made for people, extending infinitely beyond human comprehension. The possibility that the universe is infinite and meaningless is contemplated. His use of 'the voids and waste places of the sky' to suggest this expresses that awareness of worlds beyond human comprehension which becomes increasingly prominent in subsequent writing. Before Lawrence and Woolf, Conrad in Nostromo used the experience in the gulf to confront Decoud with 'the universe as a succession of incomprehensible i m a g e s . . . the solitude appeared like a great void and the silence of the gulf like a tense thin cord to which he hung suspended.. .'.15 This is similar to Hardy's 'monsters without known shape' and the thin cord linking Decoud to the universe is like the 'fragile line of sight' which connects Swithin and Viviette to it. Conrad's account of the 'crushing, paralyzing sense of human littleness' 16 corresponds to Hardy's account of 'the blow with which the infinitely great, the stellar universe, strikes down upon the infinitely little, the mind of the beholder' 17 and Conrad's 'abyss of waters without earth or sky'18 to Hardy's 'deep wells for the human mind to let itself down into .. . and side caverns and secondary abysses to right and left'.19 Both writers create for the reader the nightmarish imaginative experience of physically entering these abysses while simultaneously suggesting the inexplicable nature of the universe and our position in it.
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24 A Route to Modernism
The Marabar Caves in A Passage to India function in a similar way. Forster places them in time and space: 'the sun who has watched them for countless aeons may still discern in their outlines forms that were his before our globe was torn from his bosom'. 20 The emptiness of the caves ('Nothing is inside them . . . if mankind grew envious and excavated, nothing, nothing would be added to the sum of good or evil') 21 corresponds to the 'voids and waste places' of Two on a Tower. The overwhelming of Mrs Moore by the echo with its message that 'Everything exists. Nothing has value', is essentially the same kind of experience as that of Viviette and Swithin as 'they more and more felt the contrast between their own tiny magnitudes and those among which they had recklessly plunged till they were oppressed with the presence of a vastness they could not cope with even as an idea'. 22 Forster, however, makes this vision of the possible total meaninglessness of existence central to the novel: for Hardy, it is one of 'a series of seemings'. But all these writers are tentative about the implications of their vision. Hardy perhaps sums it up for all of them in saying 'I am utterly bewildered to understand how the doctrine that, beyond the knowable, there must always be an unknown, can be displaced'. 23 These comparisons throw some light on Hardy's pivotal position between the nineteenth century and the twentieth century and on the relation of Two on a Tower to his other novels. His Preface indicates that he saw 'the stellar universe' as one of the two main concerns of the novel, though the lesser of the two. Yet even though he calls it 'a slightly-built romance', he embodies in this novel a way of seeing existence which was for many of his contemporary readers either shattering or outrageous. It was not, of course, a totally new conception; because of the work of Darwin, it was being more widely discussed in the 1880s than before. In nineteenthcentury literature it tended to find expression in poetry rather than in the novel, perhaps because it is easier, as Hardy suggested, to get away with 'ideas and emotions which run counter to the inert crystallized opinion' 24 in verse than in prose. Hardy's notion that to make an impact a writer must be 'five and twenty years ahead of his time' 25 applies even to works he regarded as slight. I think that to take the comparisons even further into the twentieth century is helpful here. A critic writing on a group of post-war writers states that 'for many intelligent and sensitive human beings the world of the mid-twentieth century has lost its meaning and has simply ceased to make sense. .. Suddenly man sees himself
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'Two on a Tower' 25
26 A Route to Modernism
a challenge to accept the human condition as it is, in all its mystery and absurdity, and to bear it with dignity, nobly, responsibly; precisely because there are no easy solutions to the mysteries of existence, because man is ultimately alone in a meaningless world.26 Much of this, by Martin Esslin on the Theatre of the Absurd, could be applied to the bulk of Hardy's work; but what is particularly interesting in relation to Two on a Tower is the association of man 'ultimately alone in a meaningless world' with the idea of the absurd, for it is probably the absurdities in the novel which have been responsible for its relegation to the second class among Hardy's works. This is an experiment that does not wholly succeed; yet in setting 'the emotional history of two infinitesimal lives against the stupendous background of the stellar universe' and adding a third element of farcical human behaviour embodied in absurd intricacies of plot Hardy is being just as daringly experimental as he was when he explored Sue Bridehead's psychological complexities 12 years later. Hardy's perception of the nature of existence as it is expressed in Two on a Tower has much in common with Beckett's, whom Esslin described as the most poetic of the absurdist dramatists. In Lessness, everything is pared away except the tiny human figure and the void: 'All sides endlessness earth sky as one no sound no stir. Grey face two pale blue little body heart beating only upright.' By focusing exclusively, as I have been doing, on the universe revealed by the telescope in Two on a Tower we get something of the same effect of tiny human beings facing a formless vastness. As Lance St John Butler says in an essay aptly entitled 'How it is for Thomas Hardy', for both Hardy and Beckett, 'On the ultimate level, there is nothing'. 27 But, as Butler emphasizes, 'the world is only finally empty, not immediately'. Though the world outside the window in Endgame is 'corpsed', like Swithin's cinder of stars, we can be only intermittently conscious of our place in space. Critics who complain that 'the stellar universe' is merely episodic (and therefore insignificant) have not seen that its intermittent recurrence is a way of using the structure of the novel to correspond to our capac-
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faced with a universe that is both frightening and illogical - in a word, absurd.' He claims that in spite of 'extravagant fantasies' these writers are essentially realistic, and their work is
ity for exposure to it. Though Swithin welcomes his 'emancipation from the trammelling body' he also knows that it is 'impossible to think at all adequately of the sky - of what the sky substantially is, without feeling it as a juxtaposed nightmare. It is better - far better - for men to forget the universe than to bear it clearly in mind'. 28 Hardy, like Eliot in Burnt Norton, realizes that 'human kind/Cannot bear very much reality', and that 'the changing body/Protects mankind from heaven and damnation/Which flesh cannot endure'. Hardy uses various means in the novel to blot out, from time to time, the nightmare of the universe. A spell of continuous rain makes it seem 'as if the whole science of astronomy had never been real, and the heavenly bodies, with their motions, were as theoretical as the lines and circles of a bygone mathematical problem'. 29 But a function of his art in Two on a Tower is to ensure that we do, at least intermittently, 'think adequately of the universe', while ironically drawing attention to the ways in which we try to shield ourselves from these thoughts. In The Rainbow Ursula has to reassert her 'daytime consciousness' after her terrifying experience in the moonlight at the open-air dance. It is probably because of our own inability to endure much of this kind of experience that Woolf makes 'Time Passes' the shortest section of To the Lighthouse. Though Hardy exposes us less harshly and continuously than Beckett does in, for instance, Happy Days, some aspects of his treatment of Viviette are similar in their impact. Winnie's desperate efforts to sustain 'the old style' and to structure her day with trivia so as to hide from the horror she is faced with are in their absurdity similar to Viviette's frenzied efforts to keep up the conventions. The concealment of her marriage to Swithin in case her county neighbours won't ask her to tea, the secret meetings, the repeated escapes from imminent discovery function in the same way as Winnie's use of her bag. An inexorable bell governs Winnie's sleeping and waking, just as a rigid social law drives Viviette to marry the Bishop. It is usually argued that the absurd complications of the plot in Two on a Tower are entirely due to Hardy's tendency in the lesser novels to get knotted up in pointless complications. It is true that this happens here, as it does in Desperate Remedies and A Laodicean, but I think there is also a realization in Two on a Tower that the very absurdity of such complications has its function in the novel. Hardy is struggling to twist the publisher's demand for a complicated plot to his own purposes in Two on a Tower. It is significant that most of these complications arise from conflicts in Viviette's
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'Two on a Tower' 27
personality, on the one hand sensitive and passionate, both in her love for Swithin and in her perception of the universe ('it annihilates me') and on the other, ludicrously concerned to conform to the social conventions of her day. Hardy explores with compassion, as Beckett does, the absurd and sometimes heroic ways in which the characters try to stave off the recognition of possible ultimate nothingness while exposing readers painfully to that void. One of the difficulties in bringing together these incongruous elements is the use of language which (unless disintegration of syntax and other experimental devices are employed) tends to impose a form and structure which implies a sense of order, however little the author wishes to create this effect. Hardy draws attention to this when he contrasts the sky in the northern hemisphere, with its named constellations and accretions of legend 'without which it had almost seemed that a polar sky could not exist', with, in the southern hemisphere, 'the limitless vacancy... of an even more unknown tract of the unknown. Space here, being less the historic haunt of human thought than overhead at home, seemed to be pervaded with a more lonely loneliness.' 30 This southern, unnamed and unlegendary sky is a forerunner of Lawrence's 'unrecorded' Australian sky in Kangaroo and Woolf's 'unregistered' blue in Between the Acts. Hardy makes a similar point about the stars in the northern sky which are not visible to the naked eye and which had 'for infinite ages spent their beams without calling forth from a single earthly poet a single line'. 31 This juxtaposition of a universe given shape by language with one that recedes infinitely, unknowably and unnamed, is for Camus the essence of the absurd. In The Myth of Sisyphus he says: 'A world that can be explained by reasoning, however faulty, is a reasonable world. But in a universe suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger... This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity.' Swithin's comment that the inept name of 'Coal-sack' for one of the 'voids and waste places of the sky' has 'a farcical force from its very inadequacy' 32 makes explicit Hardy's sympathy with the concept of the absurd. It is an acknowledgement that any attempt to render the universe familiar is futile, whether by rational, explanatory or farcical means; yet the farcical method is more powerful than any conceptual approach. The incongruity of the name has the same kind of effect as Winnie up to her waist in the earth cleaning her teeth and doing her hair. The use of the word 'burlesque'
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28 A Route to Modernism
when Swithin is rebuked by the Bishop is another indication that Hardy is consciously using this element in the novel. Swithin feels it incongruous that 'he who had soared amid the remotest grandeurs of nature' should have his 'tender and refined passion . . . debased to burlesque lines'. 33 Seen in the light of these burlesque, farcical and absurd qualities in the novel, the final sentence, perhaps Hardy's most startling ending, begins to make sense, as a final jolt to the reader's sense of order and congruity. The shock of jumping abruptly from the genuinely moving death of Viviette to the savage irony of the last sentence might have worked if the last two chapters had not led us right away from the absurd mode. But the Bishop has fulfilled his function and disappeared from the novel. Viviette has made use of him, but not, in Hardy's view, in an immoral way. There are later indications of his views on the subject in Jude's attitude to 'the beggarly question of parentage. . . . What does it matter?' 34 and in Hardy's unpublished letter of 1906 to the Fawcett Society, in which he suggests that the father of a woman's child is nobody's business but her own. The last sentence of Two on a Tower is one final example of an idiotic sexual convention; it diminishes instead of enhancing our response to the infinitesimal lives against the stupendous background. We have long ago abandoned the idea of a naive, unconscious Hardy whose stories 'started up in his head' 35 of their own volition, yet many people have felt that the incongruities of Two on a Tower are accidental. I do not think so. In a letter to Gosse,36 he referred to critics who had privately praised Two on a Tower as his most original novel so far. This suggests he was aware of making some kind of experiment. His delight in incongruity shows itself frequently in his work, and it is more than a humorous chuckle at 'Life's Little Ironies'. In the Apology to Late Lyrics and Earlier he makes an elaborate, tongue-in-cheek defence of 'the juxtaposition of unrelated, even discordant effusions', which, he says, caused the poems 'to be read as misfires because they raise the smile that they were intended to raise'. Though he half-apologizes for not foreseeing that 'people might not perceive when the tone altered', he concludes by saying that he must trust to 'those whose intuition is proof against accidents of inconsequence'. This is characteristic of Hardy's convoluted manner when he is on the defensive, but it is none the less evident that he sees the inconsequential as a vital element in his work.
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'Two on a Tower' 29
Beckett said 'the chaos is all around us . . . the only chance is to let it i n . . . to find a form that accommodates the mess - that is the task of the artist now'. In both drama and prose works, he has combined a sense of chaos with a highly patterned structure - with, for instance, the correspondence of the two acts of Waiting for Godot and Happy Days and the intricate plotting of the sentences in Lessness. Hardy is tentatively doing something similar in Two on a Tower. The incongruities are combined with a tight pattern of correspondences and contrasts - stars and human beings, passion and science, youth and maturity, two unhappy marriages, two nearly illegitimate children (Viviette solves her maid's problem and her own by marriage), two characters disappearing into Africa, and so on. Such structuring is Hardy's common practice, but here, as in many of the minor novels, he piles on top of this so many complications of plot, with various trivial problems being set up and solved (as with the bracelets) that this diverts attention from the central image of two little figures against the stars. Unlike Beckett's, Hardy's patterning does not intensify the concentration on the centre. In Two on a Tower he is groping towards the kind of technique which uses the grotesque (two characters in dustbins, a woman up to her waist in earth) as a way of jolting us into imaginative apprehension of the human condition. He is only partly successful. But in the treatment of Viviette, he wholly succeeds in his aim. She is, perhaps, Hardy's most heroic character. In combining in her intensity of feeling, psychological complexity and a capacity for altruism, he makes her embody an idea of human potential which, even though set against a 'stupendous background', does indeed make the reader feel 'that of these contrasting magnitudes the smaller might be the greater'. He creates a sense of the 'magnitude' of her emotional life from the beginning. When Swithin is ill, she is 'in that state of anguish in which the heart is no longer under the control of the judgement, and self-abandonment, even to error, verges on heroism'. 37 This high value placed on the human heart and even the capacity for 'self-abandonment' is central to Hardy's conception. The sheer ability to feel is for him what gives human life a grandeur to match 'the stellar universe'. On the night when Swithin suggests marriage, 'human life at its highest excitement was beating within the dark and isolated tower'. 38 In 'Candour in English Fiction' (1890) Hardy pleaded for 'fiction dealing with human emotion on a comprehensive scale', and for long before that he had himself embodied in both his major and his minor fiction 'the strongest
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30 A Route to Modernism
passion known to humanity'; 39 in Two on a Tower, in proposing a high evaluation of spontaneity, he was being as challenging as he was in Tess and Jude. Viviette's conflicting impulses between what is conventionally regarded as right and what she feels with such intensity is vividly presented in numerous scenes where 'her intention wheeled this way and that like the balance of a watch', 40 and where she contradicts herself from moment to moment - 'I c a n n o t . . . yes, I'll come'41 and 'Yes, go! No, - I cannot bear it'. 42 This is very like the behaviour of Sue Bridehead, and even the dialogue is almost identical, with Sue saying 'Go' and 'I can't - bear -', when she simultaneously spurns and kisses Jude; but Sue is masochistically indulging herself emotionally, whereas Viviette is as vividly aware of Swithin's problems as her own. Though 'unstable of mood', she is not at all unstable psychologically. She has none of the neurotic self-absorption of characters like Sue or Boldwood. Hardy has an almost Lawrentian delight in Viviette's sensuality. An amusing example occurs when she is entertaining the Bishop at dinner and 'recently gratified affection lent to her manner just now a sweet serenity, a truly Christian contentment'. 43 The sensual and spontaneous nature of her love is an essential starting point for a great step forward in her development - her attainment of the kind of love which puts the needs of the loved one far above the self. Viviette's struggle to control her powerful instincts and feelings in order to reach something even better is unusual in Hardy's novels and probably in life. He more often shows characters behaving like Eustacia, who 'let things fall out as they may rather than wrestle hard to direct them'. Years later, in 'Thoughts at Midnight', he wrote: Mankind, you dismay me When shadows waylay m e ! . . . Acting like puppets Under Time's buffets. But Viviette does not act like a puppet. 'Her life during that morning and afternoon was wholly introspective' (ch. 35). This is reminiscent of Isabel Archer's night of meditation in The Portrait of a Lady, published in the previous year. Both characters' fluctuations of thought and feeling are minutely explored. The striking difference between them is that Isabel's meditation is wholly restrospective, directed towards understanding her own past behaviour,
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'Two on a Tower' 31
but with little suggestion that she can actively take steps to make a better future, though she will understand it better; Viviette does take a new look at the past, but the essence of the passage is concerned with her struggle to change herself. She gradually comes to recognize that 'true benevolence' lies in freeing Swithin, and that 'it could be done', however painful it would be to herself. The impressiveness of her struggle is partly due to the success and sympathy with which Hardy has created her as a passionately emotional woman. James is interested in how Isabel comes to a retrospective understanding of the choices she has made in the past. Viviette is involved in the process of making a better self. In his Thomas Hardy: the Will and the Way, Roy Morrell illustrates Hardy's 'basic Existential concern with choice', and shows how in the novels' 'being' is essentially meaningless. What counts is the way man is oriented to the future, to what can be done.' 44 Viviette is like the little body in Lessness: 'One step in the ruins in the sand on his back in the endlessness he will make it.' Viviette gains no reward for her step except 'a sweet sense of rising above self-love'. Hardy has made her great as well as 'infinitely little'. The scientific half of the contrast between the scientific and the intuitive interests Hardy less, precisely because the scientific mind, as he conceives it, offers little scope for the exploration of inner struggles. Away from Viviette, Swithin's life narrows down to his one interest, astronomy. He does not even notice 'the novel forms of human and vegetable life' in the new countries he visits. An account of his year after leaving her would not give 'a single additional glimpse... of Swithin in his relations with his old emotions'. The reason, Hardy says, is that in science there is 'little food for the sympathetic instincts which create the changes in a life'.45 Thus Swithin is detached from what for Hardy, as for Lawrence, is the essence of existence; 'it is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives.'46 Though Swithin can feel pity for dying stars, and he recognizes that what has happened to Viviette is 'fearful, catastrophic... instead of musing over it, he shunned the subject'. He first appears in the novel gazing in amazement at outer space. At the end he is gazing at human beings with equal detachment; 'He was as one who suddenly finds the world a stranger place than he thought; but is excluded by age, temperament and situation from being much more than an astonished spectator of its strangeness.' 47 Making Swithin a character who is 'too literal, direct and uncompromizing'
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32 A Route to Modernism
to understand the 'customary complication of feeling' of Viviette has perhaps resulted in an oversimplified idea of 'the scientist'; but in shaping the book so that Swithin first introduces the grandeurs of space which are then overshadowed by the possibly greater grandeur of Viviette's human capacities, Two on a Tower both endorses and rejects human littleness. Hardy has created a form which embodies this tension. Yet Two on a Tower remains a minor novel. The trouble lies in the interesting but not wholly successful experiment with 'the Absurd'. Gillian Beer suggests that 'the absolute gap between our finite capacities and the infinite time and space of the universe burden Hardy's texts with a sense of malfunction and apprehension.' 48 This is true of this novel. Hardy's imaginative perceptions are rather swamped by excessive plotting: brother, Bishop, bequest, bracelets diminish the stark image of the little struggling valiant figures set against 'the stupendous background'. Two on a Tower veers towards modernism in putting in the balance, in one scale the little human beings and in the other scale, the universe. It was probably inevitable that in 1882 Hardy should suggest in the Preface that 'the smaller might be the greater'. The displacement of the human from the centre of things was still unfamiliar and disturbing. It was too soon for Hardy to do more than hint at something like Lawrence's 'world empty of people' or Woolf's 'unregistered' blue of the sky, receding beyond human conception.
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'Two on a Tower' 33
3
Surrealism has been defused, made harmless. In its debased form, it can be used to give a touch of the wittily bizarre to an advertisement. But surrealism itself was a challenge, an attempt to create a revolution in consciousness, to enlarge our concept of reality, to intensify our ability to see - both the visible and the invisible; the inner world and the unconscious are as 'real' as the known and the seen. During the 50 years preceding the Surrealist movement, Hardy was making a similar challenge. His theories on art and on the nature of things resemble theirs, his hopes for the development of consciousness are like theirs, his visual images are so close to theirs that often they might almost seem to be a description of their pictures - though they had not yet been painted. In the Life, Hardy said, 'Art is a disproportioning - (i.e. distorting, throwing out of proportion) - of realities, to show more clearly the features that matter in those realities, which if merely copied or reported, inventorially, might possibly be observed, but would more probably be overlooked. Hence, "realism" is not Art.' There is an example of such 'disproportioning' at the beginning of The Return of the Native, where the road across the heath is compared to a parting in a head of hair. If we imagine this, the heath becomes a scalp, beneath the scalp a head, beneath the head a vast body stretching down into the earth. The jolt to our normal sense of proportion is similar to the effect of Magritte's apple, filling a room. Of course, we only get this jolt if we respond fully to the implications of Hardy's image. 34
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Some Surrealist Elements in Hardy's Prose and Verse
2 Hardy's illustration for 'Heiress and Architect' (Wessex Poems).
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7 Hardy's illustration for 'In a Eweleaze near Weatherbury' (Wessex Poems).
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3 Max Ernst, 'The Wheel of Light' (by kind permission of Thames & Hudson, © DACS 1999).
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4 Max Ernst, 'Visible Poem' (by kind permission of Thames & Hudson, © DACS 1999). 10.1057/9780230599154 - A Route to Modernism, Rosemary Sumner
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HPT • ys
Sometimes he spells it out for us, for example, in his treatment of the blood on the ceiling in Tess: 'The oblong white ceiling, with the scarlet blot in the midst, had the appearance of a gigantic ace of hearts.' 1 The emphasis on 'the oblong white ceiling' makes us visualize the huge playing card overhead. The 'disproportioning' is a bit unsettling; while there is nothing lurid or sensational about an outsize playing card, blood spreading on the ceiling certainly is sensational and horrifying. I think Hardy is here, as so often, making us respond in diverse, even contradictory, ways simultaneously. On the one hand, there is the cool detachment of observing accurately that the ceiling is the shape of a playing card and that the red patch is the same shape and in the same position as the single red heart on a card; and on the other hand, there is the shockhorror of dripping blood and murder. I find that for many people the sensational image is so powerful that is swamps the invitation to detached observation. Perhaps such detachment seems incongruous at such a horrifying moment. However, it is characteristic of Hardy to want to pull us in opposite directions simultaneously. It parallels Lawrence's exploitation of 'the tension of opposites'. Such images create a sense of uncertainty, of being in a strange, inexplicable world. When Grace is sheltering in Giles' hut, she feels that a bough striking the roof is 'a gigantic hand smiting the mouth of an adversary. . . followed by a trickle of rain, as blood from a wound'. 2 Here, Grace's disturbed mental state intensifies the effect of human forms grown monstrous or of trees turning into human creatures as in Max Ernst's 'Zoomorphic couple'. This disproportioning can be just as disturbing the other way round. In Desperate Remedies Cytherea's father is reduced to the size of a pigeon when she sees him through a window which frames and distances the scene of his fall from the scaffolding to his death. The effect of perspective accounts logically for the reduction in size, but at the same time there is the suggestion of a visual image of a man among the pigeons, in size like one of them. A similar image can enlarge rather than diminish: 'Marty stood encaged amid the mass of twigs like a great bird.' Magritte also fuses the opposites of enlargement and diminution in a single picture. In Magritte's 'Presence of Mind', it is uncertain whether we are looking at a miniature man or a giant bird and fish. The examples I have given so far might seem to suggest that Hardy and the Surrealists were simply concerned with the bizarre, the unreal. This is not so. Both he and they were seeking a wider
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Some Surrealist Elements 35
notion of what constitutes reality. One way of doing this is by looking with closeness and accuracy at the visible world. Clym furzecutting is an example of this, and of the merging of the human with other forms of life (and even with inanimate things) which is central to Hardy's work and theirs. By focusing on the minute creeping and flying creatures Hardy shifts our normal angle of vision and makes us see with unusual vividness and minuteness: 'His familiars were creeping and winged things, and they seemed to enrol him in their band. Bees hummed around his ears with an intimate a i r . . . tribes of emerald green grasshoppers leaped over his feet, falling on their backs, heads or hips like unskilful acrobats.'3 Andre Masson's 'Summer Frolic' might almost have been painted to illustrate this passage. Hardy insists that we look. He circumvents our tendency to explain away anything that conflicts with our concept of what is normal by giving us description first; explanation (rationalizing about the experience) may follow - or may not: 'the coffin with its twelve legs crawled across the i s l e . . . a fishing boat far out in the Channel being momentarily discernible under it'. 4 This is a description of what is actually seen (rather than what is known to be there). This makes us see each thing afresh, individually, instead of as a known phenomenon; he prevents us from just seeing a coffin carried by six men. This is necessary because, as he said in the Preface to Wessex Tales, 'our imperfect memories insensibly formalize the fresh originality of living fact - from whose shape they insensibly depart, as machine-made castings depart by degrees from the sharp handwork of the mould'. Long before Shklovsky, Hardy understood the need for 'defamiliarizing'. This insistence on accurate looking is highlighted by some of Hardy's own drawings for Wessex Poems. The drawing of the pair of spectacles superimposed on the landscape gives again the 'disproportioning' effect and also stresses the relationship of the act of seeing to the thing seen. I think Tom Paulin got this wrong in his otherwise interesting and illuminating Poetry of Perception: 'What we see are two physical objects - a landscape and a pair of spectacles - which have no apparent or necessary connection with each other and whose relationship is random and gratuitous, like objects in a surrealist picture. His looking at the scene, like his and our general experience of the outer world, has no relation to what he sees and is purely accidental. There is an eerie sense that no objects . .. have any relation to each other or to us . . . the illustra-
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36 A Route to Modernism
tion expresses the total lack of relation between object and perceiver.'5 There is some misunderstanding here, both about Hardy and about Surrealism. Surrealists do not suggest that 'no objects have any relation to each other', but precisely the opposite of this; they are centrally concerned with relationships between things, and show us things oddly juxtaposed in order to suggest that there are relationships between things which we usually fail to recognize. In 1926 de Chirico wrote: 'Have you ever noticed the singular effect of beds, wardrobes, armchairs, tables, when one suddenly sees them in the streets in the midst of unaccustomed surroundings as happens when one is moving? We then see the furniture grouped on the pavement in a new light, clothed by a strange solitude . . . we can imagine that if a man suddenly seized by panic were to seek asylum in one of these chairs, he might feel immune there from the persecution of gods and men and wild crowds. . . . Furniture in empty spaces, in the midst of nature's infinity, can profoundly move us.' 6 He painted such scenes of furniture in empty landscapes - an interest which Hardy shared of course. His novels are full of carts laden with furniture creaking round the lanes - the Durbeyfields setting up house in the fourposter bed outside the church being perhaps the most striking episode. This is the Durbeyfields at their most insecure, yet the children settle down for the night in their fourposter contentedly enough. Again, contradictory states of mind - disorientation and reassurance - are suggested by the scene, as they are even more sharply in 'During Wind and Rain': Clocks and carpets and chairs On the lawn all day, And brightest things that are theirs . . . Ah, no; the years, the years; Down their carved names the raindrop ploughs. Hardy usually gives some explanation for these odd juxtapositions, unlike the Surrealists who leave it to our intuition, but he emphasizes their oddity; and this is crucial. De Chirico's use of a passage from Schopenhauer is relevant here, especially as he is an author Hardy also took some interest in: 'To have original, extraordinary and perhaps even immortal ideas one has to isolate oneself from the world for a few minutes so completely that the most commonplace happenings appear to be new and unfamiliar and in this way reveal their true essence.' This 'revelation of their true essence' is
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Some Surrealist Elements 37
central to Hardy's conception of his art ('Art is a disproportioning of realities, to show more clearly the features that matter in those realities') and to the Surrealist's aim of achieving 'surrealism'. So, far from suggesting as Paulin says, 'an eerie sense that no objects have any relation to each other or to us', these scenes and images heighten and enlarge our sense of possible relationships. Much of Hardy's imagery intensifies our awareness of the relationship between human beings and the natural world. There are thousands of examples of this closeness, of the human and the natural world merging into one another: Giles is seen as 'Autumn's very brother', his face wheat-colour, his eyes cornflowers, his hands clammy with apples, his hat covered with apple pips, a portrait which is very similar to Penrose's 'Portrait of Valentine', with eyes made of butterflies and birds mingling with her hair. Of course, such perceptions can be terrifying. Hardy said 'Apprehension is a great element in the imagination... a semi-madness which sees enemies etc. in inanimate objects', and many of his descriptions are as macabre as Max Ernst's La Joie de Vivre and his other woodland scenes, which seem almost designed to illustrate The Woodlanders: roots whose mossed rinds made them like hands wearing green gloves . . . huge lobes of fungi grew like lungs . . . the smooth surface of glossy plants came out like weak lidless e y e s . . . and peeps of sky between the trunks were like sheeted shapes and on the tips of boughs sat faint cloven tongues. 7 Ernst's painting even has the hands in green gloves and hints of leaves like weak lidless eyes, though he has nothing as macabre as 'rotting stumps rising from their setting like black teeth from green gums'. 8 Like Hardy, Ernst recognized the part played by fear and 'semimadness' in stimulating the imagination. In Hardy and the Sister Arts, Joan Grundy says that 'we seem to be in the surrealist world of Max Ernst. In fact, we are probably in the world of Max Ernst's ancestor, Grunewald'. 9 But there is no reason why we cannot place him in both worlds. Breton pointed out the close affinity of Surrealism with medieval art, an affinity lost through later over-dominance of the intellect; thus gargoyles and other early or primitive forms of art were of great interest to the Surrealists as they were to Hardy. Writing of the gargoyle in Far From the Madding Crowd, he says,
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38 A Route to Modernism
'there is no truer criterion of the vitality of any given art-period than the power of the master-spirits of that time in grotesque', and he goes on to speak of gargoyles 'of the most original design that a human brain could conceive' and of 'symmetry in their distortion'. 10 His recognition of the value of the primitive in art is highlighted in the Life,11 where he quotes Clodd: 'the persistence of the barbaric idea which confuses persons and things', and then punctures this by adding in parenthesis, 'this "barbaric idea" is, by the way, also common to the highest imaginative genius - the poet'. This view is the essence, too, of Ernst's art, which, says Nicolas Calas, 'gives life that powerful animistic interpretation where plants and human beings, insects, birds and fishes are found in everchanging appearances of existence as opposed to the death-like rigidity of pure abstraction'. 12 This 'confusion of persons and things' is not restricted to things in nature, though this tends to predominate in Hardy, while the surrealists focused as much on human artefacts and machinery. But Hardy, too, shows how things of this kind and people merge into one another; for instance, in Far From the Madding Crowd, where Gabriel 'stared at one lengthy and two round faces, which confronted him with the expressions of a fiddle and a couple of warming-pans'. 13 Here there is the same kind of merger as Picasso made between human beings and musical instruments in his 'Three Musicians' or his 'Man with a Guitar'. Hardy says he almost always noticed 'such bizarre effects' as the view in Paris of the cemetery behind the heads of the can-can dancers, or a scene in church: The red plumes and ribbons of the two stylish girls' hats in the foreground match the red roses of the persons round Christ on the Cross in the east window. The pale crucified figure rises from a parterre of London bonnets and artificial hair-coils, as viewed from the back where I am . .. the congregation rises. .. every woman has a single thought - to the folds of her clothes. They pray the litany as if under enchantment. Their real life is spinning on beneath this apparent one of calm, like the District Railway trains underground just by - throbbing, rushing, h o t . . .'14 I suppose can-can dancers seen in juxtaposition to a cemetery, or even a fashionable congregation in juxtaposition with the Crucifixion, could be said to have something intrinsically bizarre about them. But, looked at with really open eyes, even the most everyday
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Some Surrealist Elements 39
occurrences take on this bizarre quality: 'The door opened and threequarters of the blooming young schoolmistress's face and figure stood revealed before him: a slice on her left-hand side being cut off by the edge of the door'. 15 The language here is interesting. Though I agree with Joan Grundy that there is an echo of contemporary Victorian paintings of girls leaning flirtatiously round doorways, I think the language points forward to a Surrealist way of looking at the scene. The words 'slice' and 'cut off suggest both a mathematical exactitude and an actual slicing of the body. The oddness of seeing people like this obviously made a deep impression on Hardy: his curious sketch in Wessex Poems of the coffin being carried downstairs, with the heads and feet of the bearers cut off because of the angle from which the scene is observed, has the same sort of disconcerting effect. Even more surprisingly, Andre Breton reacted to this kind of experience in a similar way. In the First Surrealist Manifesto he tells how the phrase 'There is a man cut in two by a window' kept impinging on his consciousness and led to his recognition of the importance of allowing elements from the unconscious to emerge into art. And this can happen as a result of really looking, using one's eyes. This is why Hardy's books, like Surrealist art, are full of eyes. Ernst's drawings of stones containing a single eye are reminiscent of the trilobite in A Pair of Blue Eyes whose stone eyes regard Knight as he hangs on the cliff: both suggest that the human, the animal and the inanimate are not as differentiated as we usually think. Also they both create the feeling of being watched by inanimate objects. The two sovereigns left by the hairdresser for Marty's hair are jaundiced eyes staring at her, trees have inquisitive eyes, human glances can be like slaps to Jude, and Tess feels even her back is 'endowed with sensitiveness to ocular beams'. One would feel the same running the gauntlet of Ernst's avenue of eyes (his Third Visible Poem, no. 2). Conversely, the vulnerability of the eye figures conspicuously in these works. Perhaps the best-known Surrealist example is the eyecutting scene in Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou. Magritte and Brauner painted portraits with damaged, bleeding eyes. This combination of blood and eyes fascinated Hardy too. In The Mayor of Casterbridge the setting sun is like a drop of blood on an eyelid, and in Far From the Madding Crowd the seal on the Valentine is a blot of blood on the retina of his eye to Boldwood. The bonfires on Egdon Heath first look like wounds in a black hide and then like eyes. The pre-
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40 A Route to Modernism
cariousness of seeing is also suggested when Grace, lost in the woods, feels 'the darkness intense, seeming to touch her pupils like a substance'; a pool is like the white of an eye without its pupil; in Far From the Madding Crowd, in the fog, the air is 'an eye struck blind'. In these instances, there is almost a feeling that the thing observed is touching the pupil and that there is barely any distinction between the eye and the thing it looks at, as for instance, in Magritte's painting of an eye socket entirely filled with blue sky and clouds (The False Mirror). It is not surprising to find Hardy and the Surrealists obsessed with eyes since their whole emphasis is on seeing, but not, of course, merely on what is visible; 'an observative response to everything within the cycle of the suns' is essential, but this includes 'what cannot be discerned by eye and ear, what may be apprehended only by the mental tactility that comes from a sympathetic appreciativeness of life in all its manifestations'.16 Though they are dealing with 'what cannot be discerned by eye and ear', the function of their art is to render such things in visual terms: 'My art is to intensify the expression of things, as is done by Crivelli, Bellini, etc., so that the heart and inner meaning is made vividly visible'. 17 In spite of the reference to Crivelli and Bellini, the painter Hardy felt the greatest affinity with was 'the mad late-Turner', and a year after this statement, in 1887, he clarified his point: 'I don't want to see landscapes, i.e., scenic paintings of them, because I don't want to see the original realities - as optical effects, that is. I want to see the deeper reality underlying the scenic. . . . The "simply natural" is interesting no longer. The . . . mad, late-Turner rendering is now necessary to create my interest.' 18 Hardy states this point again in an astonishing passage in The Woodlanders (which he was finishing at this time). It is a description of Mr Melbury in a state of acute anxiety: 'Could the real have been beheld instead of the corporeal merely, the corner of the room in which he sat would have been filled with a form typical of anxious suspense, largeeyed, tight-lipped, awaiting the issue.'19 The 'real. .. instead of the corporeal merely' is precisely what Surrealist art aims to show; as Herbert Read said, a better translation of the word would have been 'superrealism'. Nearly 20 years after his praise of 'the mad lateTurner', Hardy compared him to Wagner, whose music gives a 'spectacle of the inside of a brain at work like the inside of a hive'. 20 In the interval, his fiction had moved more and more away from the outer world towards exploring the inner subconscious and
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Some Surrealist Elements 41
unconscious world, a world which is 'real' rather than 'merely corporeal'. The central issue for the Surrealists was the redefining of reality so as to include both the conscious and the subconscious. Breton wrote: 'I believe in the future resolution of these two states which are dreams and reality, in a kind of absolute reality, surreality one might call it',21 and Ernst, almost echoing Hardy's comment on Wagner, spoke of 'exploring uncharted depths of reality, tapping life's most secret sources... the painter gives form to what is visible inside him'. 22 This interest is fundamental both to Surrealist art and to the writing of Lawrence and Woolf as well as that of Hardy. Neither landscape nor people are simply optical phenomena to these writers, in spite of the intense vividness of their evocations of the visual. There is in their works a combination of unusually concentrated observing with a sense that purely 'optical effects' are inadequate. A scene of Gerald swimming in Women in Love is 'one of the many indications that pictorialism is not Lawrence's primary concern' says Fiona Beckett,23 yet he 'recovers a special kind of seeing from ordinary optical seeing'.24 This combination of ordinary and extraordinary seeing is explored in Michael Bell's penetrating analysis of 'The Horse Dealer's Daughter'. 25 He quotes the passage where the doctor 'was like a clairvoyant, seeing with the mind's eye rather than with ordinary sight. . . yet he could see her positively enough, whilst he kept his eye attentive'. Bell parallels this with Heidegger's comment that 'adequate attention to the Being of what is openly there to view' leads to an intensity of perception of 'the real' as opposed to 'the corporeal merely'. 26 The doctor sees in the way Hardy suggests the reader should see the 'real rather than corporeal' Mr Melbury. In The Waves the greenness of a green jar compelled an act of attention by the eye so intense that it seems 'sucked up through a funnel by its intensity and stuck to it like a limpet'. 27 In this instance, 'two objects or domains are so interfused that they seem to have merged, creating a single object that could exist nowhere but in some mental or inner universe'. 28 Magritte's The False Mirror an eye socket filled with clouds and sky - is a surrealist illustration of such interfusion. These are 'unheard of combinations' (the phrase is used by Fiona Beckett to describe Lawrence's juxtaposition of 'blood-knowledge' and 'mind-knowledge') which, she says 'announce Lawrence's credentials as a modernist thinker'. 29 According to Breton, the 'unheard of combinations' of surrealism are 'based on the belief in the reality of certain forms of association hitherto neglected.
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42 A Route to Modernism
I hope it will be known for having tried nothing better than to throw a conductor wire ["fil conducteur"] between the two far too dissociated worlds of waking and sleeping, of external and internal reality, of reason and folly.'30 The link between internal and external reality was already explicit in 1887 in The Woodlanders; and the Surrealists' contemporaries, Lawrence and Woolf were also forging and developing such links. Fiona Beckett points out that 'Rather than polarizing the naturalistic and the abstract, Lawrence has them interacting, thereby stressing their relationship.' 31 Woolf wrote in her diary of 'a consciousness of what I call "reality"; a thing I see before me; something abstract; but residing in the downs or s k y . . . . Reality I call it'. 32 These writers illustrate Barthe's statement on the function of narrative in Image Music Text- 'it is not to represent, it is to constitute a spectacle still very enigmatic for us, but in any case not of a mimetic order'. 33 Surrealism's enigmatic spectacle involves, says Breton, the whole sensibility - dreams, erotic experiences, the shiver felt in front of some mysterious types of beauty, moments when normality is shaken by something 'other', as in the loss of control in panic. The Surrealists used the word 'convulsive' for this kind of experience. Hardy uses the same word for what happens to Carline in 'The Fiddler of the Reels'; the combination of the aesthetic (her response to the music), the erotic (her attraction to Mop), and her loss of control (in the compulsive dancing) corresponds precisely to what Breton meant by 'convulsive'. Anything which defies the established order is likely to be fruitful for the artist. The Surrealists collected newspaper cuttings about criminals, just as Hardy did. They felt that these defiers of the established order might be as significant for artists as the erotic or madness because they create a disturbance which overwhelms reason. Like Hardy, they felt that the mind could be open to all possibilities, however strange, and it was this enlargement that they sought, not just as an aesthetic experience for themselves, but as something possible and valuable for all humanity. Magritte said: 'I make a point as far as possible of painting only pictures that evoke the mystery of all existence . . . images of everyday objects combined and transformed in such a way that their agreement with our preconceived ideas, simple or sophisticated, is obliterated.'34 Similarly, Duchamp's ready-mades were meant to disturb the sense of reality and give a glimpse of the marvellous. Again, Hardy sees this quality in Turner: '[Turner] said in his maddest and greatest days: "What pictorial drug can I dose a man
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Some Surrealist Elements 43
with, which shall affect his eyes somewhat in the manner of this reality which I cannot carry to him?".' 35 Always the stress is simultaneously on the reality of what the artist perceives and on its difference from what is commonly regarded as normal. The Surrealists saw chance as lying behind these moments when normality is shaken by something 'other'. As Hardy put it: 'A perception of the FAILURE of THINGS to be what they are meant to be, lends them, in place of the intended interest, a new and greater interest of an unintended kind.' 36 Here Hardy is tentatively anticipating not only Surrealist ideas but also the concept of 'the death of the author'. Barthes, in what he calls 'the prehistory of modernity', maintains that Surrealism 'contributed to the desacrilization of the image of the Author by ceaselessly recommending the abrupt disappearance of expectations (the famous surrealist "jolt")'.37 Duchamp commented on the breaking of his 'Large Glass': 'There is almost an intention here - a curious extra intention that I am not responsible for, an intention made by the piece itself.38 A reviewer brings this statement close to Hardy's thought about 'the failure of things to be what they are meant to be' - 'Duchamp is accepting not randomness but an appearance of organization alien to his own plans . . . a combination of. . . "the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed" . . . Duchamp spent his life trying to extend the notion of art beyond all recognized boundaries'. 39 Similarly, Hardy explains the value of the 'unforeseen' in 'metre that infringes all the rules'. Perhaps this throws some light on the much discussed subject of his use of chance and coincidence in the novels. It has in the past been a common criticism that he overuses chance as a plot device and as a way of closing down all options for his characters, though this charge has been less frequently made since Roy Morell's Thomas Hardy: the Will and the Way (1965). In fact, the chance occurrence is frequently used to highlight the possibilities open to the characters. Tess's 'too ready acquiescence in chance' when the letter slips under the mat and Troy's giving up because 'Providence is jeering at him' when the rain ruins the flowers on Fanny's grave are examples of characters using chance as an excuse for closing their minds to possible options. They are often balanced between alternatives 'so finely a feather would turn them', like Angel on the point of departure for Brazil. They have the opportunity to rethink their concept of reality, just as the surrealist image with its 'delicate hesitation between oppo-
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44 A Route to Modernism
sites' (Breton) enlarges our perception of possibilities. The chance meeting with the cosmopolitan traveller is Hardy's way of making the external world, with its multiplicity of attitudes and cultures, eventually impinge on Angel. Chance was used by the Surrealists as a way of gaining access to the unconscious. Found objects, ready-mades and 'frottage' are used to 'irritate' the vision and so allow chance to provoke inspiration. Ernst found that what seemed to come from outside corresponded to his inner self. Hardy gives a perfect example of this in his poem 'The Abbey Mason', where the mediaeval mason is struggling to invent the Perpendicular style; he needs new forms to solve the technical problem of making the transition from the columns to the new, high, pointed arch, but is unable to think how to do it. For weeks he struggles, until one day the board on which he has been despairingly drawing diagrams is left out in the freezing rain. He is just about to clean it when He closelier looked; then looked again; The chalk-scratched draught-board faced the rain, Whose icicled drops deformed the lines Innumerous of his lame designs, So that they streamed in small white threads From the upper segments to the heads Of arcs below, uniting them Each by a stalactitic stem. - At once, with eyes that struck out sparks, He adds accessory cusping-marks, Then laughs aloud. The thing was done So long assayed from sun to s u n . . . The mason has used the patterns created by nature in exactly the same way as Ernst did when he made frottages, taking a rubbing of a rough surface and then 'venturing to acclimate the phantom' (Aragon) by adding a pencil line or a little colour. But the mason's troubles are not over, for the abbot saw his moment of inspiration and its source, and watches him suspiciously as his fame grows, till the mason begins to feel guilty and decides to make public the way he got his idea. Then ensues the kind of debate which followed the exhibition of Duchamp's ready-mades and, later in the century, the Carl Andre bricks at the Tate Gallery. Hardy shows the townspeople accepting his method -
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Some Surrealist Elements 45
"Tis your own doing, even with that !' but they defer to the abbot's view that: ' . . . the devices deemed so great You copied, and did not create.' Only after sixty years does a later abbot recognize that: 'He did but what all artists do, Wait upon Nature for his cue.' Though such methods are often regarded as a freakish modern development, Turner used a similar method: he 'began by pouring wet paint on to paper till it was saturated. Then he tore, he scratched, he scrubbed at it in a kind of frenzy, and the whole thing was chaos - but gradually and as if by magic the lovely ship with all its exquisite minutiae came into being.' 40 Writers, too, from Dada onwards have used similar devices to give access to the unconscious. Schwitters used scraps of old newspapers from dustbins as starting-points, others use cut-up techniques or words picked out at random from a text and then edit their fragmentary raw material. This sounds utterly remote from Hardy's kind of writing, yet Millgate describes how he worked through a passage from the Old Testament or the Book of Common Prayer, picking up particular words and using them in modified grammatical forms and totally different contexts, evidently with the objective of developing and exercising a literary vocabulary of his own, generating new expressive phrases from the impulsion of great models of the past or even evolving the outline of a possible poem. Years later Hardy was to tell his second wife that the best way to find a starting point for a piece of writing was to go to some work by a major writer - Carlyle, for instance - and read it at random until one came across an image or idea that stimulated one's own inventiveness. 41 I think Millgate is right to emphasize that it was inspiration that Hardy was seeking, rather than self-education through imitation. The use of extracted phrases in different contexts and especially the 'reading at random' as a stimulus to 'one's own inventiveness' indicate that Hardy was interested in the possibilities of 'writing by chance', in much the same way that Ernst in painting and Schwitters in writing worked to let chance into their art. The random element allows unforeseen connections, not perceived by the
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46 A Route to Modernism
Some Surrealist Elements 47
Salvador Dali relates how a splash of paint on his palette had assumed unknown to his conscious mind the shape of a distorted skull which he had consciously and vainly been trying to discover.42 Read sees this as evidence of 'the superreality, the something-morethan-conscious naturalism, which encompasses all our actions'. Hardy puts it in different terms but, I think, implies a similar view: 'My own interest lies largely in non-rationalistic subjects, since nonrationality s e e m s . . . to be the principle of the Universe'.43 However, a non-rationalistic universe does not imply chaos. For the Surrealists the interrelationship of all things was central, underlying the images they produced. Breton felt that man has difficulty in perceiving his relationship to the sensory world and especially to 'other creatures whose desires and sufferings he is less and less capable of appreciating the further down he goes on the scale he has constructed . . . the most effective means he has of doing this is the poetic intuition'. 44 The connection with Hardy is obvious. This poetic intuition is one of the most distinctive qualities of his imagination. It is shown in his concern about animals and plants and in his ability to see, for instance, the Battle of Waterloo from the point of view of a worm. He not only connects but identifies the natural world with the human: 'In spite of myself I cannot help noticing countenances and tempers in objects of scenery, e.g. trees, hills, houses'. 45 As Eluard said: 'It is not far - through the bird - from the man to his vision . . . everything is transmutable into something else'. 46 Hardy said the same in more abstract terms: '. . . all things merge in one another - good into evil, generosity into justice, religion into politics, the year into the ages, the world into the universe'. 47 To compare Hardy to the Surrealists is not to make very special or extraordinary claims for him, but merely to draw attention to one of the many ways in which his outlook and methods are modern. All writers of any significance are bound to be indebted both to their predecessors and to be exploring new possibilities, some of which may be developed, knowingly or not, by their successors. To call Hardy's 'idiosyncratic mode of regard' surrealist puts some of
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logical mind, but emerging from the unconscious, to play a part of the shaping of a work of art. Herbert Read tells a story similar to that of 'The Abbey Mason':
his ways of seeing and techniques of writing in a new light, and emphasizes his position among the innovators of the last 100 years. Norman Page has suggested that Hardy's 'pictorialism' as a method of telling a story 'shows marked originality and individuality'; 48 recognition of the surrealist element in this 'pictorialism' adds an extra dimension of modernity. Hardy's acceptance of chance as a stimulus to the imagination extends the implications of his phrase 'a series of seemings'. When he said that 'Unadjusted impressions have their value, and the road to a true philosophy of life seems to lie in humbly recording diverse readings of its phenomena as they are forced upon us by chance and change', 49 he was repeating his point that his work does not express a coherent philosophy, in a way which reinforces the sense of his openness to experience, of his willingness to see things in a new light, to accept impressions without 'adjusting' them to some preconceived norm. An accident gives Knight a glimpse of a 'white border on a black sea' which in other circumstances would have been 'a deep neutral blue'. Alertness to the unforeseen, to the thing not seen before, enables Hardy to see tree stumps as black teeth in green gums and Christian's 'painfully circular eyes' as 'surrounded by concentric lines like targets'. Joan Grundy says, 'No one's eyes ever really looked like that.' 50 It depends what you mean by 'really'. By associating this kind of image with caricature she highlights one aspect of it, but I think it also has another kind of reality. If you insist on adjusting your impression to a standard, preconceived eye, then you will probably reject as 'unreal' anything that deviates too far from this norm. Intense looking can bring out things unobserved before, and the artist's 'disproportioning' enables others to see this too. The similarity of the visual element in Hardy's writing to surrealist painting is an indication of the innovations he made in order to express 'ideas and emotions which run counter to the inert crystallized opinion - hard as a rock - which the vast body of men have vested interests in supporting'. 51 He was fully aware that innovation in ideas and emotions required innovations in treatment for 'treatment depends on the mental attitude of the novelist, thus entering into the very substance of the narrative... a writer who is not a mere imitator looks upon the world with his personal eyes and in his peculiar moods'. 52 It is entirely appropriate that his claim to be an innovator is based on his way of looking.
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48 A Route to Modernism
Chance and Indeterminacy in Hardy's Novels and Poetry
The Surrealists were not the first, nor the last, to use aleatory techniques. But no doubt their procedures in painting, and, to a very limited extent, in writing, were an encouragement to further developments in music and in writing in the middle of the twentieth century. John Cage is an interesting example of a composer taking chance probably as far as it is possible to go. His 4'33" almost succeeds in eliminating the composer. It is based on his knowledge that 'there is no such thing as silence, something is always happening that makes a sound'. 1 At each performance of 4'33", as the pianist sits motionless at the piano, different sounds occur; the 'music' is totally dependent on chance. But even so, the composer has intervened to the extent of allotting his audience four minutes and thirty-three seconds in which to listen to 'no such thing as silence'. Literature, using words, cannot incorporate within itself the external world in such a direct way, though Woolf suggested an identical procedure some years before 4'33" in Between the Acts. Her playwright, Miss La Trobe, arranges for 'nothing' to happen on her stage; wind, cows and rain perform the same function as the random noises in Cage's concert hall. 2 These and other chance techniques, designed said Cage to 'free himself from his own taste', anticipate by over 20 years Foucault's 'What is an author?' and Barthes' 'Death of the Author'. Woolf's attempts to envisage in her novels 'a world without a self and 'the thing that exists when we're not there' are even earlier. Devices in literature for enhancing the element of chance and diminishing authorial intention have mainly entailed deconstructing existing literary structures: Dada 49
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4
poems, William Burroughs' cut-ups, B.S. Johnson's four part book in a box. Schwitters' favourite sources - written material found in dustbins and gutters - bring chance writing close to the found objects of surrealist and other visual artists. Francis Bacon suggested that 'involuntary marks on the canvas.. . may suggest much deeper ways by which you can trap the fact you are obsessed by'. 3 For all of them, it was a way of escaping from extreme rational control and allowing the external world - in a virtually raw state - to enter a work of art. Hardy's technique of flicking through the Bible or some other book for inspiration shows that he too was seeking a technique which would free the mind from logic and rational control. The outcome is not wildly experimental; he is closer to Turner, creating a beautiful ship out of chaos, than to Cage. Hardy gives an illustration (in the Preface to Wessex Tales) from his own short story 'The Withered Arm' to demonstrate the tendency of the mind to conventionalize and the need for chance to jolt it into a recognition of 'the fresh originality of living fact'. This is an almost exact parallel to Shklovsky's theory of 'defamiliarizing' (first outlined in 'Art as Technique' 1917): if we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic . . . all our habits retreat into the area of the unconscious automatic' In view of Hardy's denial that his works were vehicles for preconceived philosophical theories, his insistence that his impressions were 'unadjusted' is crucial. In a letter to Havelock Ellis, he wrote,'.. . in my own unmethodical books. . . the peculiarities of the stories .. . are the result of temporary accidents connected with the time of their production rather than deliberate choice'. 4 He defended what he called 'breaking the rules' by saying that 'such apparently irregular modes of narrating are often to be countenanced for reasons of Vraisemblance'. 5 This is his defence of his use of an unknown passerby when Tess and Angel are walking by the river after her confession. Like the passing cyclist during the quarrel of Birkin and Ursula in Women in Love it does more than heighten realism. The low-key, everyday occurrence heightens tension too, jarring against the agonizingly taut relationship between the main characters. It also reflects the inconsequential nature of the universe as Hardy sees it. In his letters he writes of 'the inconsequence of life'6 and says 'that the world exists is a fact absolutely logicless and senseless'.7 These views, expressed in more extreme forms in his letters than in his published writings, correspond to the increasing
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50 A Route to Modernism
ambiguity and fragmentation of his later fiction. In these works he was discovering how to avoid 'falling into a contrived moral and supernatural order'. It was a struggle to create a new form which could accommodate his vision of a senseless universe, the 'chaos', the 'mess' which Beckett thought was the problem 'for the artist now'. Hardy's emphasis on chance echoes the iogicless' universe. Chance in his novels is an important aspect of his modernity. The difficulty early readers and critics had with it highlights its challenging unfamiliarity. The 'shock of the new' was so great that they could not recognize his newness and insisted on seeing him as a fatalistic writer dooming his characters to inevitable disaster at the hands of an external fate. There is an amusing exchange of letters, quoted by Hardy in The Life, where Alfred Noyes tells Hardy that he (Hardy) 'believes that the power behind the universe is malign'. Hardy replies 'No'. Noyes writes back, 'Yes, you do'. Roy Morrell's Thomas Hardy, the Will and the Way was the first to give a detailed refutation of views such as those of Noyes. For readers accustomed to the relative certainties of nineteenth-century fiction, it was difficult to recognize that Hardy's text was deliberately oscillating between contraries. They might have been alerted to his complexities by his children's story, Our Exploits at West Poley, which illustrates the crosscurrents of chance and character, accident and intention in a more overt way than in his major fiction. The story starts with boys accidentally diverting the stream which runs through their village to another village, leading to advantages and disadvantages all round. Chance has precipitated the boys into the role of gods, able to decide whether the water goes to the just or the unjust - except that they are led to see that no such categories exist. Eventually, through a desperate and dangerous scheme, the stream is returned to its original course. The plan succeeded 'by the merest chance'. The 'man who had failed' (an appealing character) advises against such reckless attempts. His advice is said to be valuable because he had failed 'not from want of sense but from want of energy', and because 'he knows the seamy side of things'. The final irony is that the hero 'probably' followed this advice in favour of caution 'for he is now the largest gentleman farmer in those parts'. It is possible to extract a series of moral and philosophical lessons from this story: (1) Don't meddle with nature. (2) If you do meddle, you'll find there is no clear answer to the problems you create. (3) The problems might possibly be solved by reckless measures, but (4) it's
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Chance and Indeterminacy 51
probably too risky to try them. (5) Moderation is probably best, especially if you want to be rich and powerful, although (6) the author of this suggestion has achieved only failure. Even in a children's story Hardy indicates the multiplicity of possible ways of responding to chance occurrences. Gambling is another powerful way of creating uncertainty. It enables Hardy to show, in for instance, the scenes at the Casino in A Laodicean 'a hundred diametrically opposed wishes issuing from the murky intelligences round the table and spreading down across each other upon the figured diagram in their midst, each to its own number'. 8 Hardy sets up on the one hand 'the hundred opposed wishes' and on the other William Dare claiming 'almost mathematical certainty' for his system of gambling derived from the eighteenth-century mathematician De Moivre. At several points in the novel there are references to the laws of chance, which can be calculated, and to the impossibility of applying them to an individual's chances, even in such a limited sphere as gambling. By this focusing on something that is simultaneously calculable (based on the laws of chance) and incalculable (in relation to a single individual) indeterminacy is characteristically built into the structure of the novel. In The Return of the Native the interplay of human intention and chance is vividly presented in the gambling on the heath. The drift into chaos is initiated by Mrs Yeobright choosing such a daft messenger as Christian. His chance involvement in the raffle enables Wildeve to play on his new-found success with his tales of lucky gamblers. But intention is shown to be no more reliable than chance. Wildeve had meant to win the money so as to be the one to give it to Thomasin, but 'men are drawn from their intentions even in the course of carrying them out, and it was extremely doubtful by the time the twentieth guinea had been reached, whether Wildeve was conscious of any other intention than of winning for his own personal benefit'. Venn combines determination to get Thomasin her money with luck and a mysterious power which emanates from him (he is 'like an Arab or an automaton') and from the sky, the heath-croppers and the glow-worm light. But, again, intention proves unreliable and Venn's good intentions have disastrous results because of his ignorance of Mrs Yeobright's plans for the money. The array of 'diametrically opposed wishes' creates chaos. When Bathsheba tossed the prayer book (not money because it was Sunday) she intended a joke; the abrupt shift from the two girls, bored on a dreary Sunday afternoon, to the intense contor-
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52 A Route to Modernism
tions of Boldwood's mind is a brilliant evocation of a web of crisscrossing and contradictory intentions and desires, similar, in its more complex way, to the network of 'diametrically opposed wishes' spreading over the gaming table in A Laodicean. Mrs Durbeyfield's use of The Compleat Fortune-Teller to predict the 'Fate' she wants for Tess, regardless of Tess's own desires, sets up a similar network. In these ways, Hardy demonstrates that it does not require an excessively pessimistic view of the universe to recognize that not only does it not adapt itself to the wishes or needs of the individual, but that it cannot do so. Chance occurrences in Hardy are devices for breaking into established patterns and jolting characters and readers into a recognition of the unforeseen and the unimagined. The arrival of Tess and Angel at Stonehenge, when the chances of actually bumping into it in the dark were minimal, is a powerful example of 'the marvellous' erupting in a novel; Stonehenge becomes, literally, a 'found object'. Hardy first evokes wonder and awe as Angel feels the strange forms and tries, in the darkness, to guess what he has encountered. Then Hardy shifts from the surprising and unforeseen to the patterned and formally structured: Tess on the sacrificial stone and the circle of dark shapes steadily converging. The effect is similar to a surrealist painting which is amazing and yet, in its detail, realistic - like Magritte's rock floating in the sky. Comparison of Hardy's work with surrealist practice in this matter of chance is illuminating. Nadeau describes how surrealists were 'trying to juggle chance and destiny, passive automatism and active revolution, optimistic faith in man's future and pessimistic doubt over the disasters of civilization. The experiment was keeping them all in the air not making a synthesis.' 9 These antitheses - chance and destiny, passive and active, faith and pessimism about the future - are central also to Hardy's work. Aragon in Paysan de Paris says 'Reality is the apparent absence of contradiction. The marvellous is the eruption of contradiction within the real.' Such eruptions in Hardy's partially realistic novels are startling, but, as he said, 'Nothing is too strange to have happened.' His aleatory procedures make strangeness happen. Strangeness and indeterminacy baffled his readers for many years. The understanding that indeterminacy, not fatalism, was central to Hardy's fiction only began to develop in the 1960s, mainly as a result of Roy Morrell's work. Thereafter, references to 'contrary imaginings' (Gregor), and 'radical disunity' (Bayley) began to replace
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Chance and Indeterminacy 53
previously universal views of Hardy as a novelist of doom and determinism. Obviously, any writer of importance is reinterpreted in each succeeding generation, but such a complete volte face must be particularly significant. The multiplicity, complexity and inconclusiveness of Hardy's art ran counter to the tendencies of his own time. The sense of heading in a particular and explicable direction is evident in, say, George Eliot (the full and fully explained closure in Middlemarch exemplifies this). By the 1890s other revolutionary artists besides Hardy were moving in another direction. In his lecture on 'The Modernity of Jude the Obscure',,]0 Robert Schweik showed how Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony ends (in a previously unheard of way) with the slow movement, which fades out gradually with a series of sinking cadences as the sound gets fainter and fainter, until it is impossible to tell at what moment it ceases altogether. (This was so contrary to the expectations of Tchaikovsky's contemporaries that conductors used to alter the order of the movements and play the second movement, with its more upbeat ending, as the final movement.) Schweik compared this inconclusive end with the end of Jude; this is apt, but I think there is contrast as well as similarity, with the noise of the brass band crashing out loudly across Jude's silent corpse. The contraries in the novel are sustained to the end. This kind of ending, also characteristic of some of Hardy's earlier novels, is not surprising since he repeatedly said such things as 'I am content with tentativeness from day to day' 11 and 'unadjusted impressions have their value' and so do 'diverse readings of [life's] phenomena as they are forced upon us by chance and change'. 12 The relationship between such statements and the structure of the novels is complex. Complicated plots and sometimes elaborate patterning were forced on Hardy by the publishers' rejection of The Poor Man and the Lady. He could, I suppose, have broken away from the complicated plot tradition by the time of the overtly challenging and experimental late novels. But, just as Joyce felt the need for a precise and clear structure to contain the fluidity of the streamof-consciousness and the diversity of other techniques in Ulysses, so, perhaps, Hardy retained the strong plot to contain the contraries, the unpredictability, the indeterminism of his fiction. He uses chance and coincidence as a way of structuring opposing impulses. It is usually the characters who bring in Fate or Providence in their need for some external power to blame for their misfortunes. Hardy emphasizes their misguidedness. He does not imply that Fate or
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chance predetermine people's lives, but that people find it easy to shrug their shoulders with Joan Durbeyfield and say 'twas to be', or, like Eustacia, to 'let things fall out as they would rather than struggle hard to direct them'. Even when, in The Mayor of Casterbridge, the narrator says 'Character is Fate', this is hedged round with qualifying comments. First, the statement is attributed to Novalis, then 'it might have been luck' which made Farfrae succeed and Henchard fail, then, 'probably luck had little to do with it'. Shortly after this, Henchard thinks 'some sinister intelligence is bent on punishing him', but says the narrator, 'events had developed naturally'. Frequently the characters blame some supernatural force, while the narrator offers 'natural' explanations. This pull in opposite directions creates an effect similar to that of oxymoron. The playing card ceiling in Tess, with its ace of hearts and/or dripping blood is a striking example of conflicting demands on readers' responses. This is similar in its effect to Lawrence's use of oxymoron. 13 Hardy confronts the quandary, which has become more insistent in the twentieth century, of the conflict between form and chaos. He insists that 'unadjusted impressions have their value', that 'diverse readings' of life's phenomena will be forced upon us 'by chance and change'; but a work of art necessarily has some kind of shaping, some kind of form, even if it is only a beginning and end. In rejecting consistency, coherence, realism ('Realism is not art')14 he forces readers to explore and to question. Of course, serious writers always try to make us do this. Howard Barker has attacked the kind of theatre which, in the 1980s, was praised for its clarity; his criticism was that this 'allows least ambiguity, the least contradiction, and the least room for evading the smothering sense that someone is giving you a meaning to take away with you'. He wanted it replaced by a 'braver' theatre which 'asks the audience to test the categories it believes it lives by'. 15 So, in the 1980s contemporary writers found it necessary to adopt similar strategies for similar purposes to those Hardy was employing in the 1880s and 1890s. Hardy was one of those 'braver writers' who challenged the imagination by his use of contrast, contradiction, inconsistency and his refusal 'to give you a meaning to take away with you'. Aware, like Elizabeth-Jane, of 'that chaos called consciousness', he needed, almost as urgently as Beckett, 'to find a form that accommodates the mess'. Hardy's attempts to find the appropriate form were, of course, far less extreme than Beckett's. Yet Life, for instance, is structured so that it recklessly jumbles together accounts
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of dinner parties, meditations on aesthetics and the doings of his cats; the form could hardly be more incoherent and disorganized; but it also has its rigidly chronological diary shape. The Dynasts' multiplicity of forms, styles, languages and angles of vision demonstrates the possibility of a form that only just manages to contain its disparate elements. Here, Hardy sets up a tension between the disintegrating force of these conflicting elements and the precarious holding together of the whole structure, and this, of course, corresponds to the chaotic nature of the subject matter. This kind of tension he saw as central to his art. In the Apology to Late Lyrics and Earlier, he defended 'the shocks that may be caused . . . by the juxtaposition of unrelated, even discordant effusions' and sarcastically sympathized with anyone whose train of thought might be 'thrown out of g e a r . . . by jarring tonics, without a semiquaver's rest between'. This was written in 1922. So, from his twenties in 1869 with The Poor Man and the Lady through to his eighties with Late Lyrics and Earlier, Hardy was creating forms whose 'discordant' and 'jarring' elements continued to be shocking, partly because they seemed to imply a correspondence to a chaotic universe. Hardy's idiosyncratic way of using narrators heightens this sense of uncertainty. None of them is omniscient. The implied narrators are observers, making deductions from what they see. The Henchard family at the beginning of The Mayor of Casterbridge have 'obviously' been on a long journey since their clothes are dusty. The way they walk reveals something about their personalities and relationship. Susan has two expressions, one was 'the work of Nature, the second probably of civilization'. This is a narrator with little knowledge of the minds of the characters or the course of events. The narration is guesswork, assumptions, suggestions. The use of 'probably' recurs frequently. This uncertainty underlies Hardy's whole conception of character, psychology and the nature of existence. We are in an uncertain world without a confident guide to point the way. The unconfident narrator sometimes even brings in another, hypothetical one, who, had he observed the scene, might have thought this or that. In The Return of the Native there is the 'emotional listener' who might have heard the wind in the heath bells and Eustacia's sigh and guessed its meaning. Another (or the same) observer might have asked why Diggory concealed his attractive person with reddle. Some of the poems also have disappearing authors. In 'The Fallow Deer at the Lonely House' the narrator is especially mysterious:
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One without looks in tonight Through the curtain chink From the sheet of glistening white; One without looks in tonight As we sit and think By the fender brink. We do not discern those eyes Watching in the snow; Lit by lamps of rosy dyes We do not discern those eyes Wondering, aglow, Fourfooted, tiptoe. 'We do not discern those eyes'. Who does? In spite of the clearly specified narrators sitting and thinking 'By the fender brink', the poem seems to come strangely out of inarticulate nature. The question of narrator is posed in an even more complex way in 'The Phantom Horsewoman'. The narrator, the T in the first line, seems to be the horsewoman herself. It is difficult to say how Hardy creates this impression. Perhaps it is the sense of intimacy suggested by the verb in second line; it is 'comes' (not 'goes') - so the 'man' comes to the speaker, on the sands. There is external evidence too, of course; this is one of the 1912-13 poems written after the death of Emma, and there is the parallel of 'The Haunter' where the ghost is explicitly Emma. But this narrator brings in the mysterious 'they', who say things and might say things that only the 'man' can know; they perhaps see into his brain. By the final stanza, the narrator (or is it still 'they'?) seems to be describing herself in the third person. The narrator remains enigmatic, we don't know what is 'real', everything seems phantasmagoric yet the poem makes the 'ghost girl rider' indisputably visible and audible as she 'draws rein and sings to the swing of the tide'. Simultaneously a 'ghost' and a 'girl', she represents Hardy's sense of the fluidity of existence, fluctuating like Tess, who is 'the visionary essence of woman' at dawn and an ordinary milkmaid at midday; and like Marty, who is a competent woodworker and becomes a representative of 'abstract humanism' in her elegy at Giles's grave. In poetry and fiction, Hardy intermingles 'the everyday quality of experience and an ultimate metaphysical vision'. 16 This statement was made, not about Hardy but about Lawrence by Michael Bell,
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who makes the point that 'indeterminacy is part of the fluidity of the process of living as Lawrence understood it and honoured it'. 17 For this reason 'the indeterminacy of the language is a form of precision'. 18 He uses the episode in Women in Love when the sisters watch Gerald swimming to show that Lawrence's fire imagery 'allows him to be concrete and detailed about the "tiny amber grains" [of the blackthorn flowers] while highlighting the indeterminacy of their "burning faintly in the white smoke of blossom". Lawrence describes the flickering life of the object rather than the "object" itself.19 Hardy makes a similar distinction between the 'real' and 'corporeal' Mr Melbury in The Woodlanders. Uncertainty may arise from the way a work is structured. Indeterminate endings in the fiction are a way of 'opening out' rather than reassuringly 'rounding off.20 I have mentioned Schweik's comparison of the dying echoes of Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony to the end of Jude. In his earlier work, Hardy also used the device of alternative endings, but in a much simpler way than in Jude. In The Return of the Native and 'The Distracted Preacher' he offers a choice between two possible events; these endings are similar to those of some Victorian novels, where the reader can choose one of two endings - as in Villette for instance. By the time of The Mayor of Casterbridge Hardy had developed a more complex approach to endings. It is, perhaps, the most complex of all his endings. It has confused many critics, who tend to quote the last phrase as if it embodied the meaning of the whole novel and from there it is only a step to apply it to the whole of Hardy's work. The complete sentence reads: 'And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquillity had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain'. 'Experience had seemed to teach her' one thing, but it had been wrong, for she is now experiencing the prospect of 'unbroken tranquillity'. But it is not surprising that such an involved and convoluted sentence should have caused problems. Perhaps it is meant to. 'The persistence of the unforeseen' serves as a sort of fulcrum; balanced on one side is 'unbroken tranquillity' and on the other side 'a general drama of pain'. The meaning of the sentence puts the weight on the tranquil side, the placing of the last phrase as the final words of the book puts the weight on the 'pain' side. Hardy deliberately leaves the reader in the lurch; no world
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order is affirmed here. The text seems to be swaying between two opposites. The characters, too, frequently find themselves poised between two opposing impulses. The phrase 'a feather would turn him' recurs in several novels; it is a feather which has, or might have, far-reaching consequences, like the butterfly's wing in chaos theory. In Desperate Remedies, Manston, about to disinter and rebury the wife he has accidentally killed, catches sight of his 'spectre-like' reflection in a mirror: 'The sight seemed to be the feather which turned the balance of indecision.' Angel, on the point of leaving for Brazil, 'was within a featherweight's turn of abandoning his road' and going to look for Tess. The feather image is used in this way by Woolf in the 'Time Passes' section of To the Lighthouse for the moment when the house is poised between succumbing to the forces of entropy and being saved by the human intervention of the charwoman. Both novelists reflect a modernist sense of instability. Even perfect balance is unstable - the 'oscillations' of Ethelberta's mind 'might arise from the perfection of its balance'. Neither in life nor in fiction is it possible to stay permanently in perfect poise. Nature takes its course, there is always a 'road not taken'; Hardy foregrounds the indeterminate nature of the text. The short story 'A Mere Interlude' actually goes down 'the passage we did not take' and then lurches back on to the original track. Baptista, a rather colourless young woman who is a teacher submits to family pressure to marry a middle-aged man as a way of escaping from teaching. She puts off returning to her native Scilly Isles for the wedding until almost the last moment and then misses the boat. It is four days' wait for the next boat, so that she will not get home until the eve of her wedding day. While waiting in Penzance for the boat, she bumps into a previous lover who had never got round to proposing to her. He is annoyed at the implication that she is jilting him and forcefully persuades her to marry him instead of her fiance. They do this, returning to Penzance in time to catch the boat she had previously planned to go on. They are a bit early, so they go for a walk, he goes swimming, disappears, turns out to be drowned. She catches the boat anyway, finds the prospective husband is on board, having come to meet her, so she marries him in accordance with the first plan. The couple return to Penzance for their honeymoon and stay at the hotel where the first husband's corpse is laid out in the next room; she spends the first night of the honeymoon between the live husband and
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the dead one. Apart from this episode, the story is not a very memorable one, but I have recounted it because it illustrates the point I want to dwell on - that indicated by the title, 'A Mere Interlude'. The plot hinges on the fact that Baptista does not just contemplate 'the passage we did not take' but actually goes down it. This husband, superficially more attractive, being her own age, a former fellowstudent, handsome, is also coercive, even bullying. His drowning accident is partly due to his pushy character, insisting on swimming when there isn't really time, then going out too far. With his tongue definitely in his cheek, Hardy puts his heroine in a position where 'a feather would turn her' and lets her experience both possibilities - and learn from them. He is playing with chance here, to make fun of conventional plots, even finishing it off with a moral lesson in true Victorian fashion. Of course, this is an unimportant story, but minor works often reveal, in a stark and simple way, qualities that exist in more complex forms in the major works. Here, the unpredictable, the unforeseen, the totally unexpected are foregrounded. By pushing it so far that two mutually exclusive choices (marriage to either one person or another) actually occur within a few days, within a few paragraphs of one another, Hardy is playfully suggesting the irrational, undetermined nature of things (and of plots) in a modern way, a bit like, for instance, Borges' Garden of Forking Paths. One can see why Hardy called himself 'not a rationalist but an irrationalist'. This applies to his characters as well. D.H. Lawrence expressed it vividly in his 'Study of Thomas Hardy': 'they do unreasonable t h i n g s . . . they are always going off quite unexpectedly . . . bursting suddenly out of bud and taking a wild flight into flower, always shooting suddenly out of a tight convention, a tight, hide-bound cabbage state into something quite madly personal'. 21 These images of bursting and shooting into flower out of the tight cabbage effectively evoke these contrary impulses in the novels. The utter unpredictability of the characters is in extreme contrast to Hardy's nineteenth-century predecessors. Henchard is about to murder Farfrae one moment, is cowering in a catatonic state the next; he 'tells mad lies like a child' to Newson, then is amazed at what he has done. Viviette in Two on a Tower, gentle, warm, loving, really basically conventional, ruthlessly foists the paternity of her illegitimate child on a Bishop. Angel, so rigidly moralistic about sex, suddenly invites Izz to be his mistress in Brazil and as abruptly withdraws the offer. Boldwood is one moment a puritanical celibate and the
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next consumed by passion. The throwing of the pig's pizzle switches Jude from ascetic scholar to excited lover. These changes are not inexplicable, for their chief interest lies in the psychological complexities which underlie such behaviour, but they are not easily explicable nor wholly explicable, and this is where Hardy is so innovative. Grace is 'a conjectural creature', Sue is 'puzzling and unstateable'. The use of 'unstateable' is particularly interesting; in the first edition it was 'unpredictable'. The change to 'unstateable' in the 1903 edition is an important moment for characterization in the English novel. This change signals the recognition of the unconscious as subject-matter for twentieth-century fiction, and, even more importantly, the need to find a technique for articulating it. The difficult art of encompassing a character in words was central to nineteenth-century fiction. George Eliot felt that if she were sensitive, sympathetic, imaginative and intelligent enough, she would get into words the total complexity of a character. Lawrence states - and shows - that this cannot be done. In Women in Love Ursula attacks Gudrun for adding up a character like a sum and drawing a line underneath - finished. Hardy is a bridge between George Eliot and D.H. Lawrence, moving from unpredictable Henchard in 1885 to 'unstateable' Sue in 1903. But even earlier than Henchard, Hardy had tended in this direction. The enigmatic qualities of Eustacia are created by observation and guesswork. She gazes at her grandfather's pistols. Her thoughts are not mentioned - the reader is left to guess, along with Charlie (used for the moment as one of Hardy's observers). Her death is likewise distanced; like Clym, we hear the splash, like him, we do not whether it is suicide or accident, though we are given clues to sway us first one way and then another. We follow the neurotic thoughts of Boldwood as he prepares for his party; we are distanced from his mind at the moment when he pulls the trigger to kill Troy. In A Pair of Blue Eyes we follow in detail Knight's thoughts as he hangs on the cliff until he begins to contemplate his own death; at that moment, Hardy ostentatiously withdraws from his mind: i n t o the shadowy depths of these speculations we will not follow him'. Thus, in the early works, the characters are deliberately kept mysterious, unstated at crucial moments; by the time of the revised version of Jude, in using the word 'unstateable', Hardy is making more explicit the problem of exploring the unconscious (while managing, at the same time, to create a sense of psychological depth which anticipates Lawrence and Freud).22 Our sense of the strangeness of these characters is
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Chance and Indeterminacy 61
heightened by setting them against more readily predictable and knowable characters: Henchard against Farfrae, Boldwood against Oak, Eustacia against Thomasin. In his vivid metaphorical language, Lawrence makes this point by contrasting those who flare up like the phoenix or the poppy with those who remain 'tight, hidebound cabbages'. A way of moving towards articulating the strangeness of characters is by the use of doubles. Freud emphasizes their disconcerting qualities in his essay on 'The Uncanny'. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, Lucetta can create her own double quite happily, spreading out the two costumes as if they were human figures, with gloves at the end of the sleeves and parasols to hand, and deciding whether to be 'this person or that person'. Yet, when she sees the skimmity ride, she shrieks, 'She's me - she's me - even to the parasol - my green parasol!' collapses and dies. Lucetta has been shown as having an insecure grasp of her identity; she has done a good deal of posturing, laying herself out - like the clothes - in a variety of affected poses, and at her death she feels she has no more identity than a parasol. This reaction is juxtaposed to Henchard's encounter with 'a human body lying stiff and stark upon the surface of the stream . . . then he perceived with a sense of horror that it was himself. Not a man somewhat resembling him, but one in all respects his counterpart, his actual double, was floating as if dead in Ten Hatches hole'. Feeling 'even I be in Somebody's hand', he abandons thoughts of suicide. These contrasting outcomes have the effect of intensifying the sense of uncertainty in the novel. The double is associated with horror and usually with a sense of loss. Both Tess and the first Avice feel themselves diminished by being 'one of a long, long line'. In 'Wessex Heights', Hardy looks back at his former self, 'my simple self that was/And is not now', 'my chrysalis' and he imagines this 'chrysalis' wondering at 'such a strange continuator as this' - that is, himself, now. The whole notion of doubles is fraught with strangeness and unease. The characters' selfhood is called into question. 23 Hardy might well have found Karl Popper's Indeterminism and Human Freedom congenial. Popper posits at one extreme, on the left, 'a very disturbed and disorderly cloud' as one image of a possible view of the nature of things. Alternatively, we may envisage at the other extreme, on the right, a very reliable clock, representing 'physical systems which are regular, orderly and highly predictable in their behaviour'. He argues that 'if determinism is true, then the
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63
whole world is a perfectly running, flawless clock, including all clouds, all organisms, all animals and all men'. If, on the other hand, some form of indeterminism is true (and even the best clock will wear out) 'then sheer chance plays a major role in our physical universe'. This raises the question of 'whether chance is more satisfactory than determinism'. Popper concludes that since 'such things as purposes, decisions, intentions play a part in bringing about changes in the physical world', we can take up a position which accepts neither total determinism nor total indeterminism, but 'our old arrangement with clouds on the left and clocks on the right and animals and men somewhere in between'. The situation Hardy sets up in The Mayor of Casterbridge in relation to Farfrae's new sower is similar to 'Of Clocks and Clouds'. On the one hand we have Henchard, unpredictable, acting on impulse and by guesswork (clearly a 'disturbed and disorderly cloud' type) and, on the other hand, Farfrae with his clockwork machine which will ensure that 'each grain will go straight to its intended place and nowhere else whatever'. (In his rage for order and efficiency, Farfrae is an embryonic predecessor of Gerald in Women in Love, with his 'organization' of the mines). Hardy sets up in opposition to Farfrae, Henchard, rejecting out of hand such mechanical exactitude, but he also highlights Elizabeth-Jane's response: 'Then the romance of the sower is gone for good.' So she joins Popper in a central position, neither aligning herself with disorderly clouds on the left, nor with mechanical clocks on the right, but 'somewhere in between'. As a novelist and poet, of course, Hardy is not concerned to offer an explanation, nor even to adopt such a free-floating position as Popper's. While Popper argues that it is human rationality which prevents sheer chance from governing the universe, Hardy adds other, non-rational human qualities as playing a part in how things turn out. When the impact of the pig's pizzle disrupts Jude's plans for a scholarly life, Hardy comments on how disruptive of intentions the instincts are. Though he may seem intermittently to set up certain philosophical positions on determinism and chance in the text, their 'provisional' nature is soon shown. Hardy's jokey treatment of changing philosophical theories in 'Drinking Song' with its refrain, Fill full your cups, feel no distress Tis only one great thought the less
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Chance and Indeterminacy
amusingly highlights the transitoriness of attempts to explain the nature of the universe. So even Popper's inbetween, indeterministic stance is too static, too finite for the creative artist. Hardy is not content to rest in the inbetween state - for this proposes some kind of answer. His reply to 'Nature's Questioning' is 'No answerer f, and this is central to his art. Nearly a century later, Ligeti translated these concepts into sounds, in his early work, 'Of Clocks and Clouds', in which he pays homage to Popper, while saying that 'the music has nothing to do with argument', but it does heighten the sense of irresolution and emphasizes the shifting, unstable world of Popper's concept. Ligeti describes his 'Of Clocks and Clouds' as 'an ambiguous, uneasy sound world' and suggests that 'it sits on the edge of chaos without a clear backbone'. It incorporates contradictions, the 'unnerving flutes' strangely suggesting 'ticking'; the ending, he adds, 'is indefinite, like Tchaikovsky's VI, only more extreme, like clouds disappearing'.24 He denies that he is in any way post-modernist; but he is modernist. Popper's characteristically modernist balancing position between determinism and indeterminism is preceded in fiction by Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf (who uses clouds to suggest iecklessness, a lack of symmetry and order') 25 and followed by Ligeti's 'Of Clocks and Clouds'. Hardy creates situations with clouds on the left and clocks on the right to exemplify the oscillating balance of chance and determinism. Popper again followed in Hardy's footsteps in his lecture to the 1988 World Congress of Philosophy: 'The world is no longer a causal machine - it can now be seen to be an unfolding process, realizing possibilities and unfolding new possibilities. This is very clear in physics, where we can see how new elements, new atomic nuclei are produced.... And with the new elements are created new possibilities which previously simply did not exist.' Hardy's persistent sense of the unknown beyond the known is, of course, conveyed differently. The exploration of 'the stellar universe' in Two on a Tower, with its 'peep into the maelstrom of fire, taking place where nobody had been or ever would be' forces the reader into 'unknown modes of being'. The mind of the reader, as well as that of Viviette is 'feeling its way through a heaven of total darkness'. The characters' awareness of 'a vastness they could not cope with even as an idea' points to the significant difference between philosophy and art and suggests that the process of exploring the unknown intellectually - 'as an idea' - is slightly easier to cope with than to
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encounter it as an imaginative experience, such as Hardy creates in novels and poetry. This may not enable us to 'cope with it' but it does make us conceive of it, imagine it, endure it. This is the point where Art and Indeterminacy come together, where the unknown and the unknowable are experienced through the senses and the imagination. In 1983 Richard Rorty told his fellow philosophers that what we want is 'acknowledgement of discontinuity and open-endedness and contingency'. He suggested that they might find it, not in philosophy, but in some contemporary works of literature. He could have sent them to earlier examples - to the artists, composers and writers of the modernist period and to an especially early example, Thomas Hardy.
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Chance and Indeterminacy 65
Discoveries of Dissonance: Hardy's Late Fiction
I had to write a narration; now narrative is something I find very tiresome (Flaubert, 1857) A crucial aspect of modernity appears with this disgust with narrative. Flaubert is the first to challenge . . . narrative function, hitherto regarded as essential to the novel (Genette, 1982)1 Hardy's late fiction continues his own and Flaubert's challenge to narrative and develops this 'crucial aspect of modernity'. Traditional narrative form, working towards conclusion, suggests a rounding off, a sense of order, and so provides reassurance. 'Merely to give order', says Kermode in The Sense of an Ending... 'is to provide consolation . . . we [in the twentieth century] want fiction . . . to make discoveries of the hard truth of here and n o w . . . discoveries of dissonance.' 2 Hardy's powerful explorations of dissonance as an aspect of 'hard truth' come to their peak in his late fiction. In these works we can see some of the seeds of the intellectual and artistic changes which were to be characteristic of modernism. I shall focus mainly on Hardy's last novel, Jude the Obscure but also investigate parallel and contrasting facets of The Well-Beloved, whose publication in serial form in 1892 and in revised, book form in 1897, sandwiches Jude. But first I want to go right back to the beginning of Hardy's novel-writing for traces of a challenge both in the themes and in the form of his fiction, and to look at - or, rather, conjecture about - his first (unpublished) novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, with its 66 10.1057/9780230599154 - A Route to Modernism, Rosemary Sumner
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5
subtitle: 'A story with no plot: containing some original verses'. This was 1868; 11 years after Flaubert expressed his disgust with narration. But Hardy actually wrote a novel without a plot, if his subtitle is to be believed. And, not content with such revolutionary opposition to conventions of Victorian fiction, he included 'verses'. He said himself that The Poor Man and the Lady was 'his most original work for its time that he'd ever written'. 3 That is all we know about The Poor Man and the Lady directly from Hardy himself. But he did include in the Life, the reports of the publishers' readers and some of their correspondence about the book, all of which reinforces our sense of it as a revolutionary and challenging work; it was not so much the form which startled the publishers, but the content. It 'meant mischief, with its satire on the upper classes. They saw that it would shock the fiction-reading public. While seeing Hardy's potential, they were unable to recognize fully his originality; that the absence of plot also frightened them is seen in their advice to 'write a story with a strong plot like Wilkie Collins'. Hardy wanted to be published, so he abandoned his first, rejected, novel, so subversive in attitude, so challenging in form, and wrote the desperately overplotted Desperate Remedies - which he described as 'a strictly conventional narrative', as indeed it is - no 'mischief about the class system, no daring challenge to established conventions of novel form. (The amazing lesbian scene seems to have gone unnoticed.) So, the problem remained - how to write original and experimental novels while conforming sufficiently to traditional modes so as to get published. Obviously, it was appalling for Hardy, who would have agreed with Lawrence that there's no point in writing novels which are copies of other novels, to be told to try to reproduce Wilkie Collins. His initial idea was to write novels as potboilers in order to earn enough money to live on and then concentrate on poetry. Yet the experimental and adventurous novelist was continually struggling to break out of the cage of convention which publishers imposed on him. He speaks of 'feeling his way to a method' in the Preface to Desperate Remedies but by the end of it the demand for 'a strong plot' has turned it into a mixture of detective story and 'ripping yarn'. He continued to make tentative attempts to free himself from the restrictions of these early publishers while fulfilling their expectations as far as plot was concerned. Unhampered, he might have been an even more exciting novelist, even further ahead of his time than he was. But, it is arguable that the tension
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Discoveries of Dissonance 67
between the traditional and the experimental may have been a source of his strength. He is a good storyteller, adept at making the reader want to know what happens next, sometimes to the extent of obscuring for some readers more complex and more interesting aspects of the novel. But by the time of his late fiction he was as experimental and controversial as he seems to have been at his first attempt. The mixture of styles and methods is as complex, the criticism of the social structure as fierce as it was when Macmillan saw that he 'meant mischief nearly 30 years earlier. Hardy's late fiction is experimental, modern in the way it precariously holds together disparate elements and conflicting impulses. It is essential that the holding together is precarious. This fiction is the beginning of that 'revolt against narrativity... in literature [which] is a revolt against the authority of the social system'. 4 This was one of the central themes of the 1988 Chicago conference on Narrative; 'a scandalous, incoherent, chaotic dimension to narrativity was a recurring topic at the conference.' 5 'Modernism is our art; it is the one art which responds to the scenario of our chaos'. In the 1890s the problem was to find a form of novel which would express dissonance and yet not fall into total incoherence. The patterned structure of Jude controls and shapes Hardy's sense of discord in society and in nature, i t is possible to discern [Modernism's] origins long before we see its fruition.' 6 In the dissonances of Jude these origins can be discerned. Dissonance and harmony are juxtaposed. As a boy, Jude has both 'a sense of harmony' and an awareness that 'events did not rhyme as he had thought'. The bird-scaring episode 'sickens' his sense of harmony further as he realizes that 'mercy to one set of creatures was cruelty towards another'. Hardy gives him 'dark harmonizing eyes' (that is harmonizing with his dark hair and skin) and in this way emphasizes the clash between his harmonious outward appearance and his inner conflicts. As he manages to teach himself Latin and Greek and starts imagining a career in the church he is also captivated by the poetry of the classical languages. It is after kneeling to the moon goddess while reciting a poem from Horace that he realizes that there is 'little harmony between pagan literature and Christianity'. Yet Hardy makes his yearning for harmony so powerful that Christminster has to be his 'heavenly Jerusalem' whatever the actuality of the place: 'when he passed objects out of h a r m o n y . . . he allowed his eyes to slip over them as if he did not see them'. He imagines that Sue is 'ensphered by the same harmo-
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68 A Route to Modernism
nies as those which floated into his ears'. This is followed immediately by her purchase of the pagan statues which she thrusts in among the Christian ornaments of her room. These emphatic contrasts form the basis of the novel; 'all is contrasts', Hardy says in the Preface. Such clashes and dissonance reverberate through the novel. Echoes of ideas, phrases, images from the first quarter of the book are repeated towards the end. This has the effect of creating an ironic harmony. Things that clash, by being repeated in a different context, are forced to echo - or one might say 'rhyme' perhaps - and thus give a coherent form to the novel, without diminishing the sense of dissonance. Jude's early recognition that 'mercy to one set of creatures was cruelty towards another' is echoed in Sue's question 'Why should Nature's law be mutual butchery?' when she releases her pet pigeons from the poulterer's basket. This repetition reinforces the sense of Jude and Sue as 'counterparts', 'one person split in two' while reiterating the discord in the nature of things. Arabella, in one of her early attempts to seduce Jude, flings herself down on the hillside, lying, rather strangely, 'as straight as an arrow'. Jude, dead, also lies 'straight as an arrow'. In this way, Hardy ironically juxtaposes lust and death. A similar contrast of pleasure and death is suggested by the invitation to Arabella to 'the boat-bumping', followed immediately by her realization, as she listens for Jude's heart, that 'the bumping of near thirty years had ceased'. By picking up the odd name 'bumps' for those college boat races at Oxford and using it in an even odder way for the beating of the heart, Hardy heightens the incongruity of these juxtaposed events and simultaneously makes them seem to 'rhyme'. Jude's fear, when he first hears of the existence of Little Father Time, is that he will say 'Let the day perish wherein I was born'. At the end of the book, on his own deathbed, Jude quotes that line from Job again. These echoes give shape and pattern to the novel while also highlighting the dissonance that underlies the formal harmony. In Jude the Obscure, Hardy has created a form which discovers dissonance, as Bartok, for instance, was to do in music. In this novel, Hardy was tentatively moving towards a new kind of fiction in which fragmentation of form allows room for multiple versions of reality. Little Father Time has often been criticized as a heavily symbolic figure, overburdened with the symbolic weight put upon him and utterly incongruous in an otherwise realistic novel. This is true. He does have a jarring effect in a novel pre-
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Discoveries of Dissonance 69
sented largely in terms of verisimilitude. This is part of his function. Little Father Time appears from nowhere, gazing with detachment at the world around him. He views humanity with the remote compassion of the Spirit of the Pities in The Dynasts. He is not explained; the doctor's remark about 'the coming universal will not to live' is probably Hardy's ironic comment on the scientific mind's 'irritable reaching after fact and reason'. Little Father Time is, like Sue, 'puzzling and unstateable'. Gregor and Irwin, in Thomas Hardy after Fifty Years have written of 'the immensity of feeling behind his creation'. They say that Jude without Little Father Time would be a lesser novel - a tragedy not about the universe but about unfulfilled ambitions and domestic strife. 'Father Time marks the outermost reach of Hardy's art; the extravagance is too great, the stylization fails; the formal and realistic modes collide... the violence of that collision is a measure of Hardy's creative energy, of his undiminished eagerness to accomplish something new'. 7 This is brilliantly perceptive, but in its judgement, mistaken. Having so movingly indicated the power of Little Father Time in the novel, having seen 'the creative energy' in the collision of modes, they retreat, as if alarmed by their own insight; the extravagance is 'too great', they say; 'it fails'. Yet the whole point, as Gregor and Irwin show so vividly, is the violence of the incongruity. The juxtaposition of the symbolic and the realistic heightens the unease which the grotesque death scene arouses. It threatens to fragment the novel. This is the risk and the challenge. A new form of novel is being created here. Precariously, it holds together. Writing more than 50 years later, Beckett said, 'The chaos is all around us. To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.' Jude the Obscure is an early step in that direction. Beckett's is, of course, a twentieth-century sense of chaos, but disorientation was probably just as acute when people were trying to adjust to the idea of evolution. The loss of belief in a beneficent power controlling the world, the exposure to a universe expanding limitlessly in time and space necessarily made an impact on the forms of art. Artists' control over their imagined worlds seems to break down if there is no corresponding power controlling the world itself. In 'The Science of Fiction', Hardy wrote: 'with our widened knowledge of the world and its forces, and man's position therein, narrative, to be artistically convincing, must adjust itself to the new alignment'. 8 The experience of the world has changed and Hardy offers 'diverse readings of its phenomena' without explana-
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tion. These are his 'discoveries of dissonance'. In the Preface to Jude, he describes the novel as 'an endeavour to give shape and coherence to a series of seemings, or personal impressions, the question of their consistency or their discordance, of their permanence or their transitoriness being regarded as not of the first moment'. The first part of this has been much quoted, but the whole sentence is still worth further examination. On the one hand there is the suggestion of 'shape and coherence', on the other it does not matter whether there is consistency or discordance; so the statement itself welds together contradictory, mutually exclusive concepts, coherence co-existing with discordance. This is a conception of form which makes possible such violent juxtapositions of styles and methods that the novel is on the edge of falling into fragments. As I have argued in relation to Little Father Time, the extremes of realism and symbolism form one such antithesis. The play with combination and permutation is a technique used in the modernist period because of a heightened sense of the randomness of the world. In The Poetics of Indeterminacy, Perloff says, indeterminacy is created by repetition and variation, sameness and difference, a rhetorical pattern of great intricacy'. One might think she was writing about Hardy's late fiction, but in fact she was referring to Gertrude Stein. It is remarkable how much affinity Hardy has with modernist writers as he moves further away from realistic assumptions and linear form in the late novels. In her essay, 'The Narrow Bridge of Art', Virginia Woolf imagines a new kind of novel which 'will resemble poetry in this, that it will give not only or mainly people's relations to each o t h e r . . . as the novel has hitherto done, but will give the relation of the mind to general ideas and its soliloquy in solitude. . . . It will give the relations of man to nature, to fate; his imagination, his dreams'. 9 It will also take in contrasting and incongruous things. There is something of this in Little Father Time, with his impersonal quality, the movement of a wave or a breeze, or a cloud', 'his view over some vast Atlantic of Time' and his concern with 'the generals of life', not the particulars. Even the language is very close to Woolf's, with her reference to 'the relation of the mind to general ideas...'. Yet Little Father Time has his place in a book partly concerned with topical issues such as the right to education and the iniquities of the marriage laws. The social criticism, subversive of an existing order, co-exists with and is endorsed by the subversion of the established novel form. The 'mixtures' which Gregor and Irwin found 'too extravagant'
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in the treatment of Little Father Time are conspicuous in many modernist works. 'Time Passes' is in an entirely different manner and style from the rest of To the Lighthouse. In Between the Acts the mixture is even more bizarre, occurring within a single sentence, as Isa's poems are interspersed with her order to the fishmonger. The Well-Beloved, too, is modernist in some of its innovations. Proust recognized that it anticipated his own experiments in the treatment of time, maintaining that it was 'a thousand times better than A La Recherche du Temps Perdu', which he was just beginning to write. He added, i t doesn't even lack that slight touch of the grotesque which is essential to all great works'. 10 This aptly highlights The Well-Beloved's distance from the realistic novel. The first version ends in a way that has more than a 'slight touch of the grotesque', with Marcia appearing as a kind of Death's head and the last words - or sounds - consisting of Pierston's macabre laughter. The irony of the contrast between this scene and Pierston's previous obsession with idealized beauty is savage; he has veiled the imperfections in his sitters just as Jude avoided acknowledging the imperfections in Christminster. The grotesque undercuts, opposes, shatters idealization. Hardy creates a form which can embody such dissonance. Pierston's idealized art appears to be just what the publishers, magazine editors, reviewers wanted from Hardy; it is the kind of art which he attacks in 'Candour in English Fiction'. He makes Pierston, in his pursuit of perfection, forget, like Angel 'that the defective can be more than the entire'. In the Life, Hardy quotes Turner's question: 'What pictorial drug can I dose a man with which shall affect his eyes, somewhat in the manner of this reality which I cannot carry to him?' He adds that Turner 'set to make such strange mixtures as he was tending towards in "Rain, Steam and Speed".'11 What Turner, Hardy and Pierston have in common is their pursuit of 'the unattainable'. But Hardy makes his fictional artist fail because he seeks a non-existent, permanent perfection of physical beauty. When Pierston loses interest in this external beauty, he is finished as an artist. But Turner and Hardy are concerned in their art with 'the deeper reality underlying the scenic, the expression of what are sometimes called "abstract imaginings".' Hardy went on, '"the simply natural" is interesting no longer. The much decried late Turner rendering is now necessary to create my interest. The exact truth as to material fact ceases to be of importance in art'. 12 Hardy wrote this as he was finishing The Woodlanders. It
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highlights qualities which were intermittently present in his earlier novels and points in the direction his later work was to take. In the 1912 Preface to The Well-Beloved, he said that it differed from his other books in that 'verisimilitude in the sequence of events was not aimed at'. The other late novels were also clearly breaking away from the traditional realistic novel form and veering towards the expression of 'abstract imaginings'. Giles Winterbourne is, for much of The Woodlanders, a traditionally presented, psychologically plausible character, but he is also an emblematic figure. The exceptionally skilled, sensitive woodland worker, capable of intelligent intercourse with nature' merges into 'Autumn's very brother, his face being sunburnt to wheat-colour, his eyes blue as cornflowers'. He is more like Keats's 'Autumn' than a conventionally conceived character in a novel. At the time of his death he is so much the proper and punctilious Victorian hero, nobly sacrificing himself for the sake of a woman's honour, that he becomes almost absurd; this figure gradually dissolves and becomes just a sound, a cough, heard by Grace - she thinks it might be a squirrel or a bird - then it becomes 'an endless monologue, like that we sometimes hear from inanimate nature in deep secret places where water flows, or where ivy flaps against stones'. Here, Giles is first part of the animal world, then intermingled with inanimate nature and finally, with the universe and the unknown, 'like a comet; erratic, inapprehensible, untraceable'. The 'strange mixture' which Hardy found in Turner's 'Rain, Steam and Speed' is here even stranger as the human makes this transition to modes of being which are further and further away from comprehension and, ultimately, 'untraceable'. This sense of the non-human aspects of the universe anticipates Lawrence's and Woolf's explorations of otherness. Lawrence suggests that 'Now we must learn to think in terms of difference and otherness'. 13 In Women in Love, Birkin thinks 'a world empty of people' would be desirable and Ursula thanks god that 'the universe is non-human'. Woolf seeks to create an art which can explore 'the thing which exists when we aren't there'. Hardy's development of such insights marks the move towards their fruition in the modernist novels of his successors. His poetic and abstract treatment of character gradually became bolder and more extreme. In The Woodlanders the realistic and the abstract clash, but not violently. This is because the characters merge naturally with their background. Marty appears as a great bird among the twigs and she is so attuned to life in the woods that when in
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her elegy over Giles's grave she takes on the quality of 'abstract humanism', there is no abrupt transition from one mode of writing to another, even though it is juxtaposed to Grace, in realistic fashion, departing with Fitzpiers to a hotel. The two kinds of narration are held in balance. Similarly, Tess can be 'the visionary essence of woman' in the mist at dawn and modulate into an ordinary milkmaid at midday. In this way, the movement away from 'the simply natural' is made without any sense of disruption. The last two novels are different. They implement the break away from traditional modes in an even more extreme, more challenging way. Perhaps because he was offering The Well-Beloved to the publishers as something 'short and slight', Hardy felt able to play freely with his notion of 'abstract imaginings'. His response to critics who were shocked by his treatment of sex was that there was 'more fleshliness in The Lovers of the Triangles' than in The Well-Beloved. This catches just the right note of oddity and abstractness. He repeatedly stresses Pierston's lack of 'animalism'. Pierston loves especially intensely when the woman is dead: 'The flesh was absent altogether; it was love rarefied and refined to its highest attar.' The living women, too, seen through Pierston's idealizing eyes are abstract embodiments of his desires. The second Avice is 'an irradiated being, the epitome of the whole sex'. And so were the other Avices and other Beloveds. In discussing the novel, Hardy later quoted Proust on the 'purely subjective nature of the phenomenon of love'. The Well-Beloved raises many questions about the nature of the relationship between sexual love and art. It is not the individual characters which are haunting in The Well-Beloved, but the possibility it raises that even the most intense experiences, whether of love or of art, are infinitely repeatable and so perhaps meaningless. Where the abstract is more vivid than the concrete, the disembodied more reliable than the actual, the identity of individuals becomes uncertain. The recurrence of doubles (and even triples) in The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Well-Beloved and Jude the Obscure contributes to the uncertainty, as I showed in Chapter 4. Karl Miller, in his book, Doubles says, 'the double stands at the start of that cultivation of uncertainty by which the literature of the modern world has come to be distinguished'. 14 Pierston's sight of the moon makes him feel 'as if his wraith in a changed sex had looked over the horizon at him'. Hardy sums up the ambiguity of Pierston's sense of himself in two phrases: 'The curse of his qualities (if it were not a blessing)....' The clashing opposition of curse and blessing
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is dramatized a few pages later when Pierston, waking at dawn, catches sight of 'something ghostly'; with a shock, he realizes it is himself in the looking-glass, but terribly aged, i n advance of the person he felt himself to be'. The dissonance of 'the person he felt himself to be' and the 'withering carcass' in the mirror undermines his sense of his own reality. He wants to reject his body and 'shift it off for another'. The notion of doubles - or triples or multiples - is likewise disquieting to the three Avices. They do not like seeing themselves as 'only one - in a long, long row'. The third one, on learning that Pierston had loved her mother and grandmother asks, bringing in again 'that slight touch of the grotesque', 'Did you love my greatgrandmother too?' Tess had the same feeling about being one of a long line of d'Urbervilles. It diminishes the individual and seems to shrink the space in time she occupies. The feeling of a proliferation of selves suggests also a fragmentation of the self. Yet the double is even more ambiguous than this, for it can fulfil the opposite function of giving reassurance, in a form that offers supreme happiness - the identification of lovers. 'What counterparts they were!' thinks Jude, and Sue in his best clothes looks like 'himself on a Sunday'; the manuscript continues, 'he saw in her as it were the rough material called himself done into another sex idealized, softened and purified'. Children, too, as counterparts of their parents, create delusions of continuity. Jude deludes himself that Little Father Time will fulfil his ambitions by going to the University. 'I'd rather not', is his response - he'd taken the colleges for gaols. The clash, not only of father and son, but also of colleges and gaols, with the possibility of 'mind-forged manacles' just beneath the surface, widens the implications of the exchange to encompass society. Hardy emphasizes that Little Father Time is a wan double of Jude. Jude as a child was 'an ancient man in some phases of his thought, much younger than his years in others'. He was brought from the railway station by carrier's cart to his unknown relative at Marygreen. Little Father Time, too, arrives alone by train, but, even more desolate, has to take 'this plunge alone' and find his own way from the station to the unknown relatives. Jude's concern for the worms and birds parallels Little Father Time's feeling for flowers; but Jude tries to preserve their lives, Little Father Time simply mourns their inevitable deaths. Jude is 'the sort of man born to ache a good deal'; his child never ceases to ache. Young Jude meditates on the
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Discoveries of Dissonance 75
'horrid' nature of existence, 'then, like a natural boy, sprang up'. Little Father Time never springs up. Jude attempts suicide, Little Father Time succeeds. He epitomizes all the sorrows of his parents; 'He was their nodal point, their focus, their expression in a single term.' With his death, Jude's imagined future is gone, and when Sue rejects him, all his defences against the dissolution of his individual consciousness have gone. Yet the relationship with Sue had been a wonderful, intense experience; it had given glimpses of perfect harmony - fleeting, yet actually momentarily attained. This is why Jude the Obscure is so poignant compared with The Well-Beloved, heightening the anguish in a way Pierston's relatively abstract pursuit of the unattainable never does. The combination in Jude of 'abstract imaginings' with a sense of characters as experiencing, suffering human beings makes a powerful impact. These 'strange mixtures' haunt the imagination. The dual implications of the double - either threatening or confirming one's existence - is mentioned by Freud in his essay on 'The Uncanny', where he suggests that the double was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, a denial of the power of death. But he says that the ego also projects pathological mental processes outwards, as something alien to itself, so these form an inimical kind of double. Freud describes an episode almost identical with Pierston's sight of himself in the looking-glass, when he saw a rather unpleasant and very old man, and then realized that he was looking at himself in a mirror. He accounts for the dislike he felt by relating the double to the uncanny; it embodies the things in ourselves which we want to reject as alien. He does not comment on the agedness of the mirror image, and yet his account emphasizes this, as does Hardy's description. The novel suggests that Pierston, 'a young man of sixty' rejects the idea of aging, and, by implication, death. The same would seem to apply to Freud; Hardy's interpretation of the experience is perhaps the more searching one. Foucault sees the double as 'the unthoughf, 'the Other', 'the blurred projection of what man is in his truth'. He says, 'The whole of modern thought is imbued with the necessity of thinking the u n t h o u g h t . . . of ending man's alienation by reconciling him with his own essence'.15 The Well-Beloved explores some aspects of this problem but offers no reconciliation, not even in the second version. Jude and Sue seem almost to have a glimpse of such a reconciliation, only to have it shattered. The harmonious coming
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together of the self with 'the Other' is so tentative that the novel can hardly incorporate it; it can only happen 'off-stage' and in retrospect. If Foucault is right about the central concerns of modern thought, then Hardy's claim, in his notes for his publisher, that The Well-Beloved is 'entirely modern' is perhaps justified, not only in its own time but as a forerunner of modernism. In the late novels the linear shape diminishes in significance and a different kind of pattern takes its place. In some senses this is quite rigid. The crucial moments of Pierston's life come round at regular 20 year intervals; Jude i s all contrasts', Hardy says and lists a grid of criss-crossing ideas: 'Christminster academical, Christminster in the slums, Jude the saint, Jude the sinner' and so on. Looked at as a pattern, the novels are tightly constructed, The Well-Beloved forming a spiral, Jude the Obscure a grid. Proust calls the way each block of The Well-Beloved is piled on the other 'stonemason's geometry' and compares it to the way the houses on the island are arranged one above the other. But Proust's account omits the gaps in the structure. The intervening spells of 20 years in The WellBeloved and the more irregular gaps in Jude the Obscure destabilize the geometrical pattern. This is sometimes done with telling effect; the narrator states that somebody could easily have come and taught Jude Latin and Greek, 'but nobody came because nobody does'. Though his achievement is explained retrospectively, the clash of the pessimistic 'nobody came because nobody does' against the triumph of Jude's persistence and intelligence is sharply defined. The production of two children occurs in another gap in the narrative. As Woolf said in 'Modern Fiction', 'life is not a series of gig-lamps' and the novelist does not have to provide the accepted focal points. Jude's children are born as inconspicuously as Susan's and Bernard's in Woolf's The Waves. In his Essay on Hardy, John Bayley attacks the construction of Jude as 'too mechanical'. I don't agree, although it is certainly true that in both The Well-Beloved and Jude Hardy makes the framework very conspicuous, perhaps unnecessarily so. But, at the same time, he was doing something revolutionary - breaking away from the linear emphasis of the novel, dwelling on the indeterminate, the uncertain, the fragmented. It is illuminating to compare his structures with experimental novels of some 20 to 30 years later. Mrs Dalloway is tightly constructed, held within a single day, with Big Ben marking the passage of time - a pattern just as tight as the 20year recurrence in The Well-Beloved. Ulysses is almost obsessionally
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structured as a way of giving 'shape and coherence' to the multiplicity of styles (and of everything else in it). These novelists, conscious of breaking down conventional forms, naturally felt strongly the need for some alternative shaping. I think we can see now that they need not have been quite so afraid of chaos and could have let a little more of it into their art. It is not surprising that Hardy, writing earlier, felt that 'shape and coherence' must balance, if not control, 'discordance'. Nevertheless, the endings of the late novels are designed to challenge the notion that there is some kind of world order that art should attempt to replicate; Kermode writes of modern form as 'the place where we accept the knowledge that our inherited ways of echoing the structure of the world have no concord with it'. 16 If we look at the end of Jude the Obscure and the two versions of The Well-Beloved in the order in which they were written, we see Hardy trying a variety of ways of undermining the convention of an affirmative ending, with its suggestions of consolation and reassurance. In the earlier novels, though the main character may be dead, there is a sense of life going on - even going on serenely. At the end of The Mayor of Casterbridge Elizabeth-Jane is experiencing 'unbroken tranquillity'; in Tess, Angel and Lisa-Lu are going on, hand in hand. This kind of ending is abruptly and savagely rejected in the first version of The Well-Beloved. The reappearance of Marcia as a 'parchment-covered skull' and Pierston's concluding ironical laughter drop the reader into a void. Beckett's The Unnamable has been described as ending in 'a gurgle of icy laughter'. 17 I am not sure how much laughter there is at the end of The Unnamable but the phrase applies most aptly to this version of The Well-Beloved and the parallel underlines its status as an early modernist text. As if shocked by his own temerity, Hardy modified the abruptness of his last two endings while retaining the discordance and the refusal of consoling closure. The conflicts which run throughout Jude the Obscure are compressed and intensified in the final pages. The pig-killing is recalled near the end and used to heighten the conflict between Arabella and Jude, which actually becomes physical; his failure to throttle her is parallelled to his failure with the pig. The last meeting between Jude and Sue expresses in concentrated form the tortured love which has been the basis of their whole relationship. Sue's i give you back your kisses, I do, I d o . . . . And now I'll hate myself for ever for my sin' crystallizes in a sentence her inner discord.
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The dissonance with which Jude ends is registered repeatedly in terms of noise. As Jude is dying, first there is the sound of a distant concert 'faint as a bee's hum', then the shouts from the boat races drown 'the faint organ notes' and clash against Jude's murmured lines from Job. As he lies dead, outside there is not only the brass band, the bells, the shouts, but also an explosion of colour, 'gay red and buff bunting', 'bright plants in full bloom', the band's red uniform and 'gorgeous nosegays of feminine beauty arrayed in green, pink, blue and white'. Arabella feels Vilbert's arm round her waist, participates in the horseplay on the riverbank and at the same time is conscious of 'the imprint on her mind's eye of a pale, statuesque countenance'. Later, as Jude lies 'covered with a sheet, straight as an arrow', through the window, 'the joyous throb of a waltz' comes from a college ballroom. When he is in his coffin, speeches from the degree ceremony float in, followed by joyous bells which reverberate round the room. The vision expressed in the last pages is echoed in i n Tenebris If (written just after Jude) where 'the shouts of the many and strong' crush all that is iowvoiced', 'delicate' yet unafraid of 'a full look at the worst'. Arabella, a survivor, a 'stout upstander' has the last words. The juxtaposition of her brash vitality, Jude's death and Sue's living death creates no order, offers no consolation and ends the novel on a final note of dissonance. Eagleton seems to me correct in describing 'the formal dissonances' of The Return of the Native and The Mayor of Casterbridge as' leading to the 'exploding' in Jude of 'novel forms in their received shape', but wrong in suggesting that this left 'nowhere for Hardy to go'. 18 As he points out later in Criticism and Ideology Lawrence's 'Assuring of organic forms' is something 'already put into profound question by Jude the Obscure'.19 This suggests that there was a direction for Hardy to go in - the direction taken by Lawrence in Women in Love - had he not chosen instead to concentrate on poetry. Yet, after Jude, in the second version of The Well-Beloved Hardy may at first sight seem to have succumbed to convention. Indeed, he has - with deliberate irony, just as Pierston succumbed to his neighbours' desires 'to round off other people's histories in the best machine-made conventional manner'. The decision to marry is attributed to smoking chimneys and 'the wishes of the neighbours to give a geometrical shape to their story'. By combining this with the grotesque wedding in a wheelchair and the closing of 'the old natural fountains' both literally and metaphorically, Hardy wryly
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echoes the laughter of the first Pierston and by mockery more subtly undercuts the expectation of 'the best machine made conventional ending'. These late novels illustrate the comments on modern form in Kermode's The Sense of an Ending: 'Merely to give order... is to provide consolation... we want fiction not only to console but to make discoveries of the hard truth of here and n o w . . . discoveries of dissonance'. 20
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The Well-Beloved: a Modernist Experiment?
The Well-Beloved is an extraordinary novel. Proust's praise of its 'slight touch of the grotesque' both crystallizes its oddity and leads to the oscillation of my thinking about it. Sometimes I agree with Hardy that it is 'something slight', 'fanciful'; or is it, perhaps, more like The Importance of Being Ernest, whose subtitle is A trivial comedy for serious people? Sometimes it seems absolutely fascinating technically, hence the title of this chapter - and hence, too, its question-mark. Modernist fiction challenges us to reconsider the nature of fiction and fiction's relation to reality. One of the questions I am asking is, 'Does The Well-Beloved do this?' Hardy's claim that 'there is more fleshliness in The Loves of the Triangles than in this story' 1 is absolutely apt, and is one of the reasons for its slightness. The Well-Beloved is, Hardy said, 'a fanciful little tale', which might i n its better parts have some faint claim to imaginative feeling.' 2 Even allowing for Hardy's usual, selfdeprecating stance, these remarks place The Well-Beloved appropriately in its relation to his other late fiction. The greatness of Tess and Jude lies in the fact that reading them is a searing emotional experience as well as an aesthetic and intellectual one. Hardy's reference to The Loves of the Triangles is extraordinarily apposite in other ways too. The Well-Beloved is a mathematical, or more specifically a geometrical novel. This is an aspect of its experimental quality. Its form raises questions about the art of fiction. It does this partly by juxtaposing the mathematical and the artistic. The shaping of the novel with its 20-year gaps is mathematical. Its terminology is frequently mathematical. A road is 'rigidly 81
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mathematical', it is checked by a 'vertical escarpment' and turns at 'a sharp angle'. Marcia is 'squarer' than the Avices. Pierston is 'conscious of being at the end of a radius whose pivot is the grave of Avice'. A road 'tapering to a point' is 'like a lesson in perspective'. And of course there is Proust's famous praise of the geometry of the The Well-Beloved as well as the 'geometrical' ending. In the first version, the characters are even referred to numerically, instead of using their names - 'the man of nine and fifty' questions 'sweet and twenty'. There is a 'fraction of a face', 'quarter of a kiss'. This making the characters mathematical, abstract, is similar to developments in visual art early in the twentieth century. Consider, for instance, the abstract and mathematical nature of Cubism, or Duchamp's Nude descending a staircase, which has been described as 'a frantic geometry in motion', or perhaps Picasso's Demoiselles dAvignon, where the faces are rectangles or cubes. Alongside these mathematical terms runs a series of literary metaphors, suggesting that the art of writing (rather than the art of sculpture) is being juxtaposed to the science of mathematics. In this way, Hardy foregrounds his use of technique - something more characteristic of twentieth-century than of Victorian fiction. Pierston sees in his own face 'history - distinct chapters of it; his brow was not that blank page it once had been'. Mrs Pine-Avon becomes 'a person of lines and surfaces'; she was 'a language in living cipher no more'. Pierston's feeling for Avice I after her death is that 'to convey it in words would have been as hard as to cage a perfume'. These literary metaphors seem almost to imply that Pierston is writing himself and his Beloveds as well as creating them as works of sculpture. They suggest that the art Hardy is really concerned with in this novel is the art of fiction. So, two kinds of form are juxtaposed - the literary and the geometrical. In fact, the central organizing principle of The WellBeloved is antithesis. One chapter is even called 'Juxtapositions'. One example, overarching the whole novel, and fundamental to its structuring is the stress on the antiquity of almost everything on the Isle - the rock, the religions, the buildings - set against London with its new-fangled thing, a 'flat'. Sylvania Castle, in its newness, brings the same contrast within the bounds of the island. It 'formed a complete antithesis to the rest of Portland'. It has trees; there are none anywhere else on the island. Then, with a complete volte face, which emphasizes sameness as well as difference, Hardy records 'the forest of conifers which lay as petrifactions, their
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heads all one way, as blown down by the gale in the secondary geological epoch'. The father mines the ancient rock (with 'eternal' saws), the son uses it to turn his 'ephemeral fancies' into 'perennial shapes'. Nothing in Pierston's Well-Beloveds was permanent but change. This changeableness is embedded in the structure and language. Dubiety and indeterminacy permeate the text. Everything is equivocal or dubious. Hardy writes 'the curse of his qualities (if it were not a blessing)'. Avice II 'enraptured his soul' and 'shocked his intellect'. Equivocalness infests the imagery: the noise of the waves 'could be translated equally well as shocks of battle or shouts of Thanksgiving.' Sounds of winds and waves from the whole bay suggest that they are caused by the multitudes who have been drowned there; their interests in life had been 'as wide asunder as the poles but they had rolled each other to oneness on that restless sea-bed'. They now form 'a huge composite ghost as it ran a shapeless figure over the isle, shrieking for some good god who would disunite it again'. This surrealistic image foreshadows some of Max Ernst's strange 'zoomorphic' figures and suggests an agony in fusing together what is antithetical. The birth of Avice III evokes a similar, yet contrasting reaction. Two lights - one from the lightship and one from the bedroom window - 'brought tamelessness and domesticity into due position as balanced opposites. The sea m o a n e d . . . . accompanied by an equally periodic moan from the interior of the cottage . . . the articulate heave of water and the articulate heave of life seemed but differing utterances of the selfsame terrestrial Being - which in one sense they were', although in the previous sentence they were 'opposites'. Antithesis, uncertainty, indeterminacy, multiple perspectives became characteristics of thought and writing after the publication in 1905 of Einstein's relativity theory. But Hardy was already dealing with it in the previous decade. His method is tentative and unemphatic. Some 25 to 30 years later, Woolf explicitly states that 'Mrs Dalloway would never say of anyone that they were this or were that'. Lily, the artist in To the Lighthouse, tries to achieve 'that razor edge of balance between two opposite forces'. (Balancing on a razor's edge is a superb image for indeterminacy; it highlights the riskiness.) Hardy, I suppose, was able, experimentally, to touch on this, probably because the idea was already in the air, as Lawrence suggested: 'Everybody catches fire at the word Relativity. There must have been something in the mere suggestion that we had been waiting for.'3 And Hardy had glimpsed that 'something'.
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The situation was similar with new ideas about Time. As early as 1875, Hardy was discussing 'the unreality of Time' 4 with Leslie Stephen. In 1889 Bergson's Time and Free Will was published, in the same year that Hardy had the idea, described in the Life, of 'a story or face which goes through three generations or more; this would make a fine novel or poem on the passage of time. The differences of personality to be ignored. [This idea carried out to some extent in The Well-Beloved.]'5 This idea of Hardy's and of Bergson's book are both examples of the increased consciousness of the complexities of Time in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. There were a variety of causes for this development which reinforced one another. Darwin had stretched conceptions of time to lengths previously unimaginable. Time was being measured more by the clock and less by natural forces because of the development of mechanization and factory work. So time was both stretched and chopped up in unfamiliar ways. As a result, clocks in modernist art tend to behave in strange and threatening ways. The unsynchronized ticking of clocks as Elizabeth-Jane in The Mayor of Casterbridge sits by her mother's sick-bed, suggests 'that chaos called consciousness'. Hardy uses clocks to imply psychological and social disruption: in Desperate Remedies a clock 'ticked wildly . . . its entrails hanging down like the faeces of a Harpy'; Troy's goodness is 'like the thirteenth stroke of a crazy clock'; as the homeless Durbeyfields travel towards Kingsbere, the disembodied head of their grandfather clock 'strikes one and one and a half in hurt tones'. Clocks become even more disturbing in the next century. Salvador Dali makes them melt. In Women in Love Gudrun's relation with clocks is nightmarish. A clock seems to sneer at her and at the same time she is afraid to look in the mirror in case her face has turned into a clock dial. Everything in life seems to have become 'tick, tick, tick'. In 'The Industrial Magnate' chapter of Women in Love the reorganized mines are 'a great and perfect system that subject life to pure mathematical principles'. Such mechanical conceptions provoked investigations into the ways in which we experience time. Bergson, in Time and Free Will developed the notion of i a duree', (usually roughly translated as 'duration') - the experience rather than the measuring of time. The next year, in 1890, William James coined the term 'stream of consciousness'. 6 His first idea had been a 'train' of consciousness (presumably to echo 'train of thought') but he dismissed that and 'chain' of consciousness because they both suggested something with
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joins. 'Stream' was a better metaphor, he thought, because it is not jointed and wherever you choose to step into it it brings all the material that has entered it higher up, or, in the case of consciousness, earlier, i n the evolving flow of conscious states, past-ones do not disappear, but co-exist with and interpenetrate present ones.' 7 In The Well-Beloved the things William James wanted to avoid suggesting (the measurement of time and the jointedness of the 20-year gaps) are combined with something resembling, in a rudimentary way, his idea of a stream of consciousness. This is the occasion when Pierston, at a dinner party, surreptitiously reads the letter about the death of Avice I: By imperceptible and slow degrees the scene at the dinner-table receded into the background, behind the vivid presentment of Avice Caro, and the old, old scenes on Isle Vindilia which were inseparable from her personality. The dining-room was real no more, dissolving under the bold stony promontory and incoming West Sea.. .. The ivy trailing about the table-cloth, the lights in the tall candlesticks, and the bunches of flowers, were transmuted into the ivies of the cliff-built Castle, the ocean killed the smell of the viands, and instead of the clatter of voices came the monologue of the tide off the Beal. Here the senses are engaged - sight, hearing, smell, even a hint of taste. Bergson called for 'some bold novelist' to explore 'the infinite permeations of a thousand different impressions'. 8 Such extreme multiplicity became characteristic of the later developments of stream of consciousness technique; Hardy's interweaving of past and present is relatively uncomplicated, but it is a pointer towards later complexities. In these ways, The Well-Beloved touches on various aspects of time: Bergson's idea of different states of consciousness permeating one another, the Darwinian conception of time receding infinitely into the past, or, at least, as far back as the time when the fossilized crustaceans which form the rock of Portland were alive, and clock time - or perhaps I should call it calendar time - the regular 20year pattern (though on one occasion Pierston insists on the mathematical exactitude of 'nineteen and three-quarters'). The WellBeloved deals with the ambiguous nature of time by challenging the traditional linear verisimilitude of the novel, designed to create an illusion of real life. Woolf described this as 'the appalling narrative business of the realist, getting on from lunch to d i n n e r . . . it is
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false, unreal, merely conventional'. 9 That kind of realism restricts the novel to the time and space of the individual human being something Hardy very rarely does, even in his early fiction. In A Pair of Blue Eyes, 'time closed up like a fan' when Knight, hanging on the cliff, found himself face to face with a fossilized trilobite. In The Well-Beloved, the setting of Portland perpetually 'closes time up like a fan'. The 20-year gaps (mathematical in their regularity) create fragmentation and discontinuity. The present moment is seen in relation to points of time itself; such tensions and antitheses became central to modernist art. The Well-Beloved is an early example, with on the one hand, the mathematically exact and measured gaps, and on the other the less exact, less measured processes of memory and intuition. Woolf argued in her essay 'Modern Fiction' (1919) that 'life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged' and the modernistic urge is towards multiple perspectives - both fragment and flow, both divisions of clock and continuity of consciousness. As far as time is concerned, The Well-Beloved is a modest version of Woolf's Orlando. They are both versions of Hardy's 1889 idea of 'a story or face which goes through three generations or more'. Orlando, Woolf hoped, 'comes with the leaps of the chamois across the years' from Elizabethan times to the present (which was then 1928). In those 300 plus years Orlando advances to the age of 32 and changes from a man into a woman. Time changes according to subjective states. Orlando 'did the work of his vast estates in a moment', and his brief affair with Sasha during the Great Frost is measured by its intensity. Similarly, Pierston can be 'a young man' of 20, 40, 60. However The Well-Beloved is much narrower in conception than Orlando, partly because of its short timespan. Orlando creates a sense of historical and literary changes over its 300 years. It is, among other things, a brilliant pastiche of the literary styles of the periods it focuses on. Orlando unravels accustomed patterns (history, gender, aging) and suggests other orders of possibility. Gillian Beer says i t reminds us of the power of what it frees us, momentarily, from believing'. Because The Well-Beloved is so focused on the subjective nature of Pierston's experiences, it merely hints at these possibilities; it does not attempt to explore them. A less well-known short story of Woolf's, 'The Searchlight'10 deals with the interplay between past and present in human consciousness in a way which is relevant to The Well-Beloved. (Until I read 'The Searchlight', I had always taken Avice Ill's question, 'Did you love
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87
my great-grandmother too?' as a rather patronizing joke about her naivety. Woolf's story made me think again.) It is set in the summer of 1939; it is just before the war. The searchlights are practising. The place is London, a hotel balcony overlooking a park, where a group of people are chatting after dinner. The searchlights occasionally swoop earthwards, lighting up a bit of the park. An elderly woman says 'You'll never guess what that made me see' and everyone begs to be told. It's her great-grandfather's story. As a boy, at the beginning of the previous century, he had a telescope for stargazing, but what did the earth look like through a telescope? The woman made movements as if twirling something. He focused it upon the earth . . . on a dark mass of wood on the horizon . . . he focused it so he could see each tree. . . and birds. . . and smoke . . . (she lowered her e y e s ) . . . a house . . . every brick showed . . . a woman came out, wearing something blue. . . . And then . . . l o o k . . . . A man came. He came round the corner. . . . He seized her in his arms. .. they kissed. It was the first time he'd seen a man kiss a woman in his telescope miles and miles away across the moors. She thrust something from her - the telescope presumably. So he ran downstairs, through fields, lanes, woods. He ran for miles and miles, and just when the stars were showing above the trees, he reached the house . . . covered with dust, streaming with sweat. She stopped, as if she saw him. 'And then? . . . and then? . . . what did he do then? and the girl?', they pressed her. A shaft of light fell on her as if someone had focused the lens of a telescope upon her. (It was the searchlight.) She had risen. She had something blue on her head. She had raised her hand as if she stood in a doorway, amazed. 'Oh, the g i r l . . . She was my -' She hesitated as if she were about to say 'myself. But she remembered and corrected herself. She was my greatgrandmother, she said. She turned and looked for her cloak. 'But what about the other man - the man who came round the corner?' 'That man? Oh he, I suppose, vanished'. The light, she added, gathering up her things, only falls here and there. That is, of course, a travesty of Woolf's short story. I've told it because of its focus on two 'spots of time', with the interplay between past and present in human consciousness which that highlights, in
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'The Well-Beloved'
this way paralleling the three spots of time in The Well-Beloved. The concentration in both is on similar things: on how past and present interrelate in human consciousness; on how memory functions; on how to focus on these in a novel. In the Woolf there is a little audience, demanding 'and then? and then? And what happened next?' epitomizing the conventional demand for story, that 'low atavistic form', as Forster calls it. Woolf makes no concessions to this. She selects as the telescope selects, creating a close relationship between present and past by mentioning the woman's past; she gives us the great-grandfather's view through his telescope; and that focusses on detail 'making every brick show'. The use of the telescope adds a hint of impersonality; it makes seeing 'every brick' possible; it unites great-grandfather and great granddaughter; it, indeed, shapes the story, bringing together the disparate elements far apart in time, in place, in experience. So for the reader, unlike the audience, it is not what happened next which is absorbing, but the aesthetic shaping of the work. The blue motif is like the matching, repeated tooth of the Avices - a small thing in itself, but vital to the total patterning of the novel. The emphasis in 'The Searchlight' is on the way the story is told by the narrator and by the author; it is not on what happens to the great-grandfather. It is this kind of interest which shapes The Well-Beloved. Woolf's little audience on the hotel balcony demanding to know what happened next is parallelled in The Well-Beloved by the neighbours who wanted 'to round off other people's histories in the best, machine-made, conventional manner'. They are treated even more ironically than Woolf's audience. Pierston, having lost all sense of art, allows these hitherto unheard of neighbours to direct his life and, in the process, they take over the novel and construct the ending as if they were old-fashioned, omniscient novelists gratifying readers' desires for happy and finite endings. It is ironical that these neighbours feel the need for a 'geometric shape' to the story. We are back to antithesis. These neighbours seem to endorse the experimental, geometrical structuring of the novel AND to insist on their conventional expectations of the linear novel being fulfilled. Hardy piles on the irony, making the decision to marry hinge on Marcia's smoking chimney and on these neighbourly expectations. So The Well-Beloved actually ends with wedding bells - this is conventional ending as farce - bride in wheelchair, groom hobbling along well-wrapped up, neither of them particularly keen. Hardy here subverts conventions of novel structure by parody. The 1892
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ending is subversive in a more experimental way. Trickling away in a gurgle of macabre and icy laughter, it anticipates modernist open endings, perhaps in particular the dissolving ungraspable ending of Beckett's The Unnamable. I have so far refrained from mentioning J. Hillis Miller's claim that the novel offers the reader alternative endings - a choice of endings. If it were so, it would be excellent support for my argument that The Well-Beloved is an experimental innovatory novel. Sadly, I have to reject this support. Yes, of course, there are two versions, but this is true of all Hardy's novels: the serial version differs from, is usually a bowdlerized version of the book form. The Return of the Native really does have an alternative ending, not quite embedded in the text, but one does read the footnote about Diggory Venn at the same time as one reads the main text. With The Well-Beloved one reads either the 1892 or the 1897 text, or both, but not simultaneously. Hillis Miller says 'the two endings compel the reader to think of the three episodes of the novel not as leading to some necessary o r d e r . . . there is no necessary momentum towards a single conclusion . . . it foreshadows Fowles and Berger.'11 Following in Miller's footsteps, Patricia Ingham makes the argument about modernism even more forcefully: 'this syntactically co-ordinated branching is completely innovatory." 2 Reluctantly, I have to forego these arguments. The Well-Beloved is not like Borges' 'Garden of Forking Paths' which offers alternative routes within the text. But, I do maintain that both endings, separately, and in their totally different ways, are modernist in their attitudes to closure and finality. Victorian novels tend to have, as Gillian Beer says, 'the authoritarian inevitability of sequence implied by plot'. 13 Modernist endings (Women in Love in the middle of an argument, Between the Acts with the words, 'The curtain rose. They spoke', then - nothing - the end) tend to suggest uncertainty, possibility, 'books left open, no conclusion come to' (something hated by Giles in Between the Acts - a very conventional character). Pierston's closing of the natural, ancient springs in the 1897 version is significant here. It draws attention to the deadly effect on art of convention which excludes anything which rises subversively or uncontrolled from the depth of the unconscious. Woolf reports a conversation she had with Hardy in 1926 in which he said, '"They've changed everything now. We used to think that there was a beginning and a middle and an end. We believed in the Aristotelian theory. Now one of those stories came to an end
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with a woman going out of a room." He chuckled.' 14 I have seen that described as Hardy's horror at the shapeless nature of the modern novel. I doubt it. He was already doing it himself. That chuckle, I reckon, was benign. So Hillis Miller was right about the open-endedness of The WellBeloved, but for the wrong reasons. (I should perhaps say here in parenthesis that his essays on The Well-Beloved (especially the longer version in Fiction and Repetition) are much more complex, ambiguous, ironical and illuminating than my selective quotations suggest.) 'The Well-Beloved', he says, i s one of the important nineteenth century novels about art'. 15 In the sense that, as he says, 'a central theme of Hardy's writing is literature itself this is true. In the sense that The Well-Beloved is about an artist centrally concerned with his art (a common feature of modernist writing) it is surprisingly untrue. Hardy called it 'A sketch of a temperament' not 'A sketch of a sculptor'. The fact that Pierston is a sculptor seems to be almost accidental. Unlike Lily in To the Lighthouse, Paul in Sons and Lovers, or the characters in Women in Love, he does not discuss the nature or technique of his art. Even the point that he is a carver of the ancient stone of Portland, so central to the treatment of time and place in the novel, is fudged, in fact, almost lost at some points in the novel. 'These dreams he translated into plaster.' Plaster? Not stone? Is this a plaster maquette which will be translated into a stone carving? Hardy doesn't mention this; perhaps he assumes that we will understand the technique. 'He had laboured to express the character of that face in clay.' A clay version is usually the basis for a cast in some more permanent material - bronze perhaps, or, more cheaply, in plaster. No use for stone here. Avice IPs voice i s as artistic as any line of beauty struck by his pencil.' It is strange that Hardy made Pierston so versatile in his use of materials, when the essence of his art is that he is 'a one part man'; he creates nothing but Well-Beloveds; all we know about them is that they are attempts to reproduce his ideal of beauty in stone (or plaster, or clay, or in pencil-sketches). Modernist novelists often have characters who are artists in order to incorporate obliquely discussion on the nature of their own art of fiction. These characters usually have an intense interest in the significance and technique of their own art. Paul in Sons and Lovers is passionately concerned to explain his attempt to capture in paint the shimmer of new leaves; the artists in Women in Love (as well as the other characters) enter into detailed discussion of the form and
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meaning of the African statuettes, of Gudrun's miniature pieces, of Loerke's factory freeze and girl on horse. These are serious matters in themselves as well as in their relation to the characters and in the way they impinge on the central issues of the novel. Lily's theory and practice in painting are central to To the Lighthouse. In contrast, Hardy's concern with Pierston's art is peripheral. Pierston is 'a one part man', repeating again and again his idealizing conception of woman. His search for his ideal entails 'veiling' of 'blemishes'; 'Beauty was his only joy', 'all sordid details were disregarded.' A contrast with Woolf's painter in To the Lighthouse is illuminating here. It is a beautifully, tightly structured novel, but contains within it, a questioning of its own neatness. Lily, the abstract modernist painter, rendering mother and child as a purple triangle, thinks of the beauty of Mrs Ramsay as she paints; she thinks, 'Beauty had this penalty - it came too readily, too completely. It stilled life - froze it. . . agitations... distortions.... It was simple to smooth them out under the cover of beauty.' Pierston is not even aware of such a conflict. If we compare his 'veiling sordid details' with Hardy's practice as a novelist and with his comments on art in the Life and in essays, it becomes clear that it is not Pierston's art which interests him. In the Life, he says 'To find beauty in ugliness is the province of the poet'; 'high art may choose to depict evil as well as good'. And 'Candour in English Fiction' is an attack on idealizing. Pierston's art is wholly self-regarding, concerned only with 'the purely subjective phenomenon of love' (Proust). This is the subject of the novel, The Well-Beloved. Pierston is not a great 'mad late Turner' of sculpture, nor a great subversive artist creating challenging complexities such as Jude the Obscure. Pierston would not dream of wanting to 'express ideas and emotions that run counter to inert crystallized opinion' (though he is prepared to flout laws about bigamy for his own convenience). I seem to be leading towards suggesting that Pierston is totally negligible as an artist. Not so. Hardy has taken precautions against this. The function of Somers in the novel is to place Pierston as an artist, not at the lowest level of providing 'furnishing' for home buyers, but as a middling sort of artist who sees the relationship between the erotic and art, but does not know how to make art out of that relationship. It is interesting that Somers has a parallel in To the Lighthouse - a Mr Paunceforte, who comes to paint in the summer season and one year started a fashion for views in a nondescript shade of yellow. His function is similar to that of Somers
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- to emphasize the value of Lily's art, even though her picture will end rolled up under a sofa or mouldering in an attic. Both these novels are partly about art, but their scope is greater than that of the artists within them. Hardy chose as the epigraph of The Well-Beloved a phrase of Shelley's 'One shape of many names'. In 'The Revolt of Islam', this refers to the spirit of evil. This shape is thus the antithesis of Pierston's ideal beauty. Had the juxtaposition of these two extremes - evil and beauty - been made central to The Well-Beloved, it would have been a more powerful book. The second version was, of course, we now know, a dead-end for Hardy as far as fiction was concerned. By spurning the nineteenth-century tradition of endings, he might seem to be pointing in a new direction, but parody merely makes mockery of the familiar, it does not 'make it new'. Terry Eagleton says 'Modernism... is parasitic on what it sets out to deconstruct.' I do not agree. I think that modernism goes far beyond 'what it sets out to deconstruct', but when it is in the form of parody, it is necessarily parasitic; parody cannot exist without the thing it parodies. In contrast, the ending of the first 1892 version of The Weil-Beloved does look forward to Women in Love, stopping in the middle of an argument, to the blank page after 'They spoke' in Between the Acts, to the final icy gurgle of The Unnamable. The first version of The Well-Beloved, ending with Pierston's hollow laughter points forward to these subsequent developments.
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The Adventure to the Unknown: Hardy, Lawrence and Developments in the Novel
'Human character changed in 1910', said Virginia Woolf.1 The precision of her dating was joky and provocative but it was prompted by the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition in London which took place that year, and which showed, she felt, that ways of perceiving had irrevocably changed. Of course, she knew perfectly well that it was not as abrupt as this, and, indeed, one may hesitate to describe a change in perception as a change in character. But changes certainly were going on. As early as 1887 Hardy's comments on Turner suggested different ways of looking: i want to see the deeper reality underlying the scenic, the expression of what are sometimes called "abstract imaginings".' 2 Lawrence, too, thought artists were introducing innovative ways of seeing; on Cezanne he wrote: 'the eye sees only fronts, and the mind, on the whole, is satisfied with fronts. But intuition needs all-aroundness and instinct needs insideness. The true imagination is for ever curving round to the other side, to the back of the presented appearance.' 3 I think one could trace the beginnings of the change, as it affected the novel, some 40 years earlier than Woolf's proposed date, in Hardy's quite early novels. This chapter will explore how these tendencies developed in Hardy's work and - one might say - exploded in Lawrence's central novels, The Rainbow and Women in Love. I am going to focus on the fiction of both writers. Lawrence's 'Study of Thomas Hardy' is obviously central to the relationship between them and it will be implicit in what I say, but I am not planning to 93 10.1057/9780230599154 - A Route to Modernism, Rosemary Sumner
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approach it directly, partly because it has already been discussed by a number of critics,4 and partly because I am more concerned with discerning a tendency than showing an influence. This tendency, developing in Hardy, leads to the kind of modern novel Lawrence wrote (in contrast to the Joycean kind of modernism) and continues in the works of Woolf and Beckett. Fundamental to the change in modes of perceiving was the recognition of, or even confrontation with the unknown and unknowable. After the mid-nineteenth-century scientific discoveries which enlarged conceptions of time and space almost beyond comprehension, 'the relationship between man and his circumambient universe' (the phrase comes from Lawrence's 'Morality and the Novel')5 necessarily becomes a focus of attention in literature and art (Lawrence said it was 'the business of art'). Of course, from the days of myth literature has been concerned with humanity's place in the cosmos, but the novel in its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century form had been primarily concerned with personal and social relationships, rather than with cosmic ones. When the boundaries of the universe recede into the unknown, the artist's subjects and forms must become more indeterminate. Hardy said, i am utterly bewildered to understand how the doctrine that beyond the knowable there must always be an unknown, can be displaced'. 6 Both novelists are making 'the adventure to the unknown.' This takes several forms. First there is their exploration of the characters' place in the expanding universe; then there is the world within, also expanding as awareness of subconscious and unconscious areas increases. As a result of this, novelists begin to create characters which cannot be wholly understood, even by their authors and, of course, each character becomes an 'unknown mode of being' to the other characters. All this entails a feeling of uncertainty and danger which is heightened as late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury writing inevitably veers towards the taboo areas of the instincts, of sexuality, of the relationship between mind and body. Clearly, new forms, new ways of using language were needed if the novel were, even tentatively, to explore these aspects of life. And this is what Hardy did, tentatively feeling his way towards writing about the instincts and the unconscious, challenging the taboos, seeking a form which was indeterminate, inconclusive, preparing a way for Lawrence's reckless leap into the unknown. As a result, Jude was in danger of being banned, and of course The Rainbow was banned.
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It is illuminating to take a detailed look at two opening chapters - of The Return of the Native (1878) and of The Rainbow (1915). There are no characters in the ordinary sense in either chapter. In The Return of the Native there is a hypothetical furzecutter who is aware of the light in the sky and the darkness of the heath and there is a 'mind' 'harassed by the irrepressible New' to which the heath is said to 'give ballast'. The first chapter of The Rainbow is similarly abstract, though more thickly populated with unnamed generations of Brangwens, stretching back into the past - the ancestors of the characters of the novel. Hardy's timespan is longer than Lawrence's, for he goes back before humanity to 'the finger touches of the last geological change'. Yet, as with this image of 'finger touches' (instead of just saying 'marks'), he continually aligns this ancient, mysterious region (the word 'obscure' echoes through the chapter) with humanity. The heath is 'like man, colossal and enduring'. Most significantly, it connects with our unconscious: i t was found to be the hitherto unrecognized original of those wild regions of obscurity which are vaguely felt to be compassing us about in midnight dreams of flight and disaster, and are never thought of after the dream till revived by scenes like this.' The stress is on the heath's correspondence to the most obscure and frightening levels of the unconscious, yet, paradoxically, it 'gives ballast' to the conscious mind. This recognition that when the conscious mind is in touch with unconscious impulses there is a stabilizing effect is a mark of Hardy's psychological insight. 7 As the novel develops, he shows the dislocation caused by Eustacia's conscious hatred of the heath and her unconscious affinity with it. Yet, eventually, on her way to her death, she achieves an ironic kind of balance: 'Never was harmony more perfect than that between the chaos of her mind and the chaos of the world without.' Lawrence, too, is concerned with how consciousness and the unconscious relate to the cosmos and to time. The long generations of Brangwens look 'as if they were expecting something unknown'. Though they participate in the cycle of the seasons: 'They felt the rush of sap in spring, they knew the wave that cannot halt, but every year throws forward the seed to begetting' and they know the closeness of their relationship to the earth ('they felt the pulse and body of the soil'), Lawrence also says that they are 'staring into the sun'. Attention is usually drawn to the men turned towards the earth and the women looking to the horizon a limited, social horizon. But it is important that the Marsh folk
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combine their earth-bound vision with a cosmic one, in this way indicating the potential for development in The Rainbow and Women in Love. Their position in relation to the universe is similar to that of Hardy's hypothetical observer on the heath. Both are attuned to the continuing cycle of nature and open to the shock of the unknown beyond the earth or in the psyche. Hardy described the setting of his novels as 'partly real, partly dream-country'. Egdon Heath is 'real' in the sense that it is 'made vividly visible'; it is 'dream-country' in that it represents the movements of the mind, both of the conscious mind and of the obscure and inapprehensible unconscious. Lawrence, in The Rainbow, gives a swift and vivid impression of the year's work on the farm and simultaneously conveys the inner life of the men who 'lived full and surcharged, their sense full-fed... impregnated with the day, cattle and earth and vegetation and the sky'. In these two chapters we see the move away from the novel's traditional sphere of human relationships to a new direction evoked by Virginia Woolf in her essay 'The Narrow Bridge of Art'; she says the new novel 'will give the relation of the mind to general ideas and its soliloquy in solitude... for an important part of life consists in our emotions towards such things as roses and nightingales, the dawn, the sunset, life, death and fate'.8 She felt that this new thing probably could not be called a novel. She need not have been so tentative. Hardy and Lawrence had got there before her. And she admitted that the novel can 'take in contrasting and incongruous things'. Her 'new novel' would resemble poetry, she said. Thirty years earlier, in 1897, Hardy said he had 'aimed at keeping his narratives... as near to poetry in their subject as conditions would allow'.9 These opening chapters of The Return of the Native and The Rainbow are written in markedly rhythmic prose. Both novelists are moving away from the tradition of realism in nineteenth-century fiction, with i t s marvellous fact-recording power' (Woolf again) towards a mode which does indeed resemble poetry: 'the sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages and the people changed, yet Egdon remained'. The suggestion of incantation is even more marked in The Rainbow: 'They took the udders of the cows, the cows yielded milk and pulse against the hands of the men, the pulse of the blood of the teats of the cows beat into the pulse of the hands of the men.' This emphatically onomatopoeic rhythm, which would be conventional in a poem, illustrates Woolf's point that there need be no clear-cut distinction between fiction and poetry.
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But neither of them is writing quite the kind of novel Woolf envisaged. The second chapter of both novels makes an abrupt switch to traditional modes of story-telling. Hardy's chapter 2 starts: 'Along the road walked an old man'; Lawrence's second section: 'About 1840 a canal was constructed across the meadows'. The precision and limitation of place and time indicate that (for the moment at least) we have moved to a more manageable, more easily apprehensible world. These transitions from one mode of perceiving and writing to another are characteristic of both of them. In the Preface to Two on a Tower, Hardy writes of setting 'the emotional history of two infinitesimal lives against the stupendous background of the stellar universe' and he suggests that to readers 'the smaller might be the greater to them as men'. Lawrence said the opposite; he found in Hardy 'a great background, vital and vivid, which matters more than the people who move upon it'. However, trusting the tale rather than the teller (or the critic) I would say that the interest lies in the way the background and the human lives are related. In Two on a Tower the characters find themselves 'plunging' among the stars by means of Swithin's telescope, the 'mind feeling its way through a heaven of total darkness, occasionally striking against the black invisible cinders of stars'. By juxtaposing these terrifying experiences of infinite space to the tender emotions of the lovers, Hardy heightens both our sense of human littleness and vulnerability and our fear of contemplating an endless void. Yet this sense of the precariousness of life makes it all the more powerful and precious in the face of annihilation. In Tess, Hardy briefly makes a similar juxtaposition when he brings into the field at Flintcomb Ash the 'strange birds from behind the North Pole' which have 'witnessed scenes of cataclysmal horror in inaccessible polar regions'. 10 As in Two on a Tower, he exposes the reader to a place beyond human conception. Using appropriately polysyllabic language to suggest an overwhelming vastness, he sets this against the 'homely upland', the girls hacking swedes and the birds which are now merely looking for food. A sense of the inapprehensible is brought sharply into the context of the everyday life of farmworkers. The reader's response to both the inconceivable and the ordinary is vivified by the juxtaposition. Lawrence often works in the same way. In Sons and Lovers he jumps from a quarrel (an everyday event in the Morel family) to the strangeness of the night-time garden as Mrs Morel, locked out,
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becomes aware first of the 'glistening great rhubarb leaves' (weird, almost menacing in the darkness), then of 'the immense gulf of white light' and 'the tall white lilies reeling in the moonlight'. When Walter at last unlocks the door, 'there stood the silver-grey night, fearful to him' 11 but Mrs Morel is back at once into daily routine, putting his pit clothes ready and so on. These non-human modes of being are all the more powerful because they co-exist with the realistically portrayed everyday life of the Morels. Both writers make us stare into space, contemplate nothingness and meaninglessness. Hardy said, 'Courage has been idealized; why not fear? - which is a higher consciousness and based on a deeper insight.' 12 This 'higher consciousness' and 'deeper insight' is evident in the way they both confront death. In The Woodlander Giles is dying, delirious, alone in the wood. Grace, in the hut, hears something she thinks might be a squirrel or a bird; then it becomes 'an endless monologue, like that we sometimes hear from inanimate nature in deep secret places where water flows or where ivy flaps against stones'. So, in his process towards death, Giles becomes first part of the animal world, then of the inanimate world of water, wind and stone. Personality has gone now. 'Autumn's very brother', who was both an abstraction and a warm, living human being, has become simply an element in a lonely elemental place. But the process of dying is not completed. Hardy goes further into non-human, unknown regions. The delirious murmur becomes 'like a comet, erratic, inapprehensible, untraceable.' It is strange to see a man as a comet, and the adjectives - erratic (and so unpredictable), inapprehensible, untraceable - are negative and abstract. With this imaginative leap into outer space, with these negatives and abstractions, Giles leaves this world and makes his transition to what Lawrence called 'the pure inhuman otherness of death'. But, oddly, Giles is not yet dead. Hardy does a strange thing here. After this flight into death, he gives another 'realistic', traditional death scene in the hut, registered in terms of the consciousness of Grace and Fitzpiers (whereas the 'comet' episode, ostensibly emanating from Grace's consciousness, seems to move away from her and become impersonal). This traditional treatment of death is quiet and not very disturbing. Fitzpiers says Giles's extremities are already dead and that his previous illness was likely to be followed by a relapse anyway, thus making the death seem normal and expected and therefore less disquieting. The 'comet' image gives an utterly differ-
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ent view of death. These two scenes illustrate Hardy's capacity to be a nineteenth- and a twentieth-century writer simultaneously. The gap between the two modes of perceiving is enormous. In these gaps the imagination is suddenly thrust out of its normal tracks to contemplate non-human modes of being; here we encounter 'the intenser stare of the mind'. 13 There are similar shifts in Lawrence. In Sons and Lovers, Mrs Morel's death is presented first in precise, exact and agonizing detail as Paul experiences its slow advance. Apart from the horror of the clinical detail, it is in the tradition of nineteenth-century deathbeds. At the end of the novel, Paul experiences it again. This time it is not the process, but the fact of death. He faces 'everywhere the vastness and terror of the n i g h t . . . There was no Time, only Space . .. the immense dark silence seemed pressing him into extinction . . . she was gone, intermingled herself. 14 As in Hardy, the domestic, factual, traditional scene is contrasted with vastness and space and extinction. But, here, the reader is aware all the time of observing Paul's consciousness - this is the centre of interest. In The Woodlanders, when Giles becomes 'inapprehensible, untraceable', Grace's consciousness is no longer our concern - the focus is on the voyage into space. In both novels the 'abstract imaginings' occur in contexts which are mainly traditional and realistic. Thus, at the end of The Woodlanders, when Marty is mourning over Giles's grave, Hardy attributes to her the 'quality of abstract humanism'. Yet that final elegy, celebrating Giles's life, also outlines Marty's future: 'Whenever I plant the young larches, I'll think that none can plant as you planted . . .'1S In Marty's dirge the abstraction of universal mourning coexists with a move back from outer space and the unknown to the everyday and the known. Lawrence makes a similar movements as Paul rejects 'the drift towards death': 'But no, he would not give in . . . he walked towards the faintly humming, glowing town, quickly.'16 These tentative moves back from the unknown to somewhat more manageable and reassuring aspects of existence are rejected in the later books of both authors. Round Jude's death Hardy creates a gap, a silence juxtaposed to explosions of colour and noise. Jude seems to efface himself, to create a state of not being. His own last words are, 'And I here. And Sue defiled.' The elliptical 'And I here', the absence of any verb 'to be' preempts the actual moment of death. Like Tess, he would 'have his life unbe'. This is followed by the murmured quotation from Job in which Jude's own first person
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T is subsumed under that of Job. The yells from the races cut across the Biblical words. These abrupt interruptions from 'the many and strong' are reinforced by the bigger narrative gap as Hardy switches with equal abruptness to Arabella looking for amusement in town. The jerky cross-cutting from death to a particularly brash and callous form of life continues. The moment of death is left as a gap - unstated. Arabella returns to find Jude's body still warm: 'She listened at his chest. All was still within. The bumping of near thirty years had ceased.' Immediately there is the sound of a brass band and Arabella's exclamations of annoyance at this interruption to her day's pleasure. Hardy's language creates an explosion of noise and colour: 'The gay barges burst on the view, the oars smacking with a loud kiss on the face of the stream' - even the oars join in the rowdiness with their vulgar loud-mouthed, 'smacking kiss'. As Jude lies in his coffin, there are cheers from the degree ceremony and bells 'struck out joyously and travelled round the bedroom'. 17 In this cutting from the noise of life to the silence of death, Hardy is creating, in a way quite different from that of The Woodlanders, a sense of 'the pure inhuman otherness of death'. Jude the Obscure, like Lawrence's poetry, is inconclusive'. The unstated death, the indefinite future for Sue prevent a positive conclusion. Even Arabella's apparently confident comment on Sue is oddly circumlocutory, looking into the future and then turning back on itself, 'till she's as he is now'. Gerald's 'snow-abstract annihilation' at the end of Women in Love is a further exploration of the 'otherness' of death. The gleaming ice imagery which has been associated with Gerald all through the book reaches its culmination here; his estrangement from life is embodied in the landscape of white snow slopes and black rock, the immense height, remote from all living things, the soundlessness. 'How frail the thread of his being was stretched' suggests a state similar to the elliptical 'And I here' in Jude. And, as in Jude, the exact moment of death goes unstated: 'He slipped and fell down and as he fell, something broke in his soul and he immediately went to sleep.'18 A few lines later, in the next chapter, on the next morning, Gudrun is told that he died 'hours ago'. His transition from being scarcely conscious to being 'so inert, so coldly dead, a carcass' happens in the space between chapters 30 and 31, just as Jude's death occurs between the last words quoted from Job and Arabella's return. Gerald had willed the finality of death, he had 'wanted to go on,
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100 A Route to Modernism
to the end. Never again to stay, till he came to the end' and the 'coldly dead' carcass seems utterly final. But Lawrence does not use this death to make a Victorian ending, rounding things off; he makes it indeterminate. Birkin, meditating on it, thinks of impermanence, of how humanity could die out and be replaced by 'a finer created being'. And even Gerald, now 'an inert mass' could have responded to Birkin's offered love; then he could have 'lived still in the beloved', an idea Birkin tentatively offers to Ursula as possible for the two of them. 19 The novel evades finality. It ends - breaks off - in the middle of a conversation. It is as inconclusive as a novel could be'. As Lawrence said of his poetry, inconclusiveness, immediacy, the quality of life itself, without denouement or close . . . none of that finality which we find so satisfying because we are so frightened'. 20 These two novelists confront this fear, refuse to evade it. They do not console. Inconclusiveness, indeterminacy, the unknown, the abstract are features of twentieth-century arts - one thinks of the moves towards abstraction in painting or in electronic music, of Stockhausen, for instance, who said that when he was incorporating sounds from the air waves in his music, he felt as if he were in communication with the cosmos. Perhaps these qualities would not seem to fuse happily with the aspects of nineteenth-century realism which Hardy and Lawrence retained. Little Father Time is a challenging example. He is incongruous in a novel largely presented in terms of verisimilitude. But Hardy was developing another kind of fiction which, like Lawrence's, questioned conventional form. Little Father Time, appearing from nowhere, gazing with unearthly vision at the world around is similar to Golding's Matty in Darkness Visible, appearing out of the fire and carrying with him a strange burden of insight. Hardy's experiment in character here pushes out the boundaries of the novel so far as to become, as I have suggested, too extreme for some readers. It is a daring exploration of strange modes of being, a risky challenge to notions of congruity and realism. Possibly we may catch a glimpse in Little Father Time of an embryonic form of the kind of imagination which was to create, say, Count Dionys in 'The Ladybird', singing his strange 'utterly inhuman' songs in the night. But the strangeness of Little Father Time is only an extreme form of Hardy's sense of the inexplicable nature of human beings. As early as Far from the Madding Crowd he suggests the importance of unconscious drives in Boldwood's repression of earlier traumatic experiences, which, nonetheless, have left 'high water marks'. He
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calls Grace 'a conjectural creature'. And it is in Jude the Obscure that he confronts most explicitly the problem of conveying in words what is unknown to the conscious mind and therefore unarticulated. Sue has 'untranslateable eyes',21 she is 'one lovely conundrum', 22 she is 'puzzling and unstateable'. 23 This word 'unstateable' is particularly significant. In the first edition it was 'unpredictable', which, while being accurate about Sue, did not touch on the problem facing the novelist. Hardy was well aware that the new novel required a new language. Language inevitably tends to run the risk of explaining the inexplicable, stating the unstateable. Hardy avoids this by creating a changing, inconsistent, contradictory, precariously balanced character, whom he then exposes to the traumatic experience of the deaths of the children. In her apparent volte face from sceptical rationalism to religious fanaticism Hardy is exploring further the areas of masochism and sexuality which he had indicated as problematic for her earlier in the novel. Lawrence (in his 'Study of Thomas Hardy') saw her as like Cassandra, asexual; he accepted Jude's mometary feeling that she was a specialized type and should not have been violated. The novel does not seem to me to endorse this; Hardy repeatedly seems to suggest that she has strong sexual feelings which she is afraid of and represses, perhaps just because they are so strong. Her use of imagery is suggestive; while arguing that Phillotson is her real husband, she says, i want to prick myself all over with pins to let out all the badness that is in me'. 24 These images of penetration, associated with pain and sin may perhaps be seen as implying a masochistic sexuality. On Jude's last visit, she kisses him, saying, i give you back your kisses - I do, I do and now I'll hate myself for ever for my sin'. 25 This certainly does not seem to suggest an absence of sexual feeling. Nor does her insistence on returning to Phillotson's bed with 'a look of aversion . . . but clenching her teeth she uttered no cry';26 rather it supports the idea of a terrifying sex-drive. Her relationships with men - the undergraduate, Phillotson, Jude, Phillotson again, parallel closely Arabella's sexual relationships - with Jude, Mr Cartlett, Jude again, Vilbert. The apparently sexless Sue is as good as sexy Arabella at getting herself into a position where a sexual relationship is at least possible. Hardy's tentative suggestions of these unconscious contradictions indicate that Jude the Obscure is taking fiction in new directions, into the uncertain, unknown world of the unconscious and the then taboo world of sexuality, while seeking a language and a form to express them. 27
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The unconscious fear, even horror, of the self, which Hardy suggests in Sue, is something which Lawrence, too, explores, while going much further than Hardy in suggesting that violent and destructive impulses exist in all of us and do not need such traumatic experiences as the murder and suicide of children to account for them. Writing 20 years later than Hardy, Lawrence is able to recognize more fully the existence of the unconscious and to explore it more directly. Hardy uses dialogue, Sue's partially accurate self-analysis, Jude's bewilderment and incredulity, to hint at what is going on beneath the surface. Even the narrator has no direct access to Sue's unconscious; her behaviour is described (her look of aversion and clenched teeth, for instance) and the reader draws conclusions from that. Hardy makes his point by leaving her as puzzling to readers as to herself and to the other characters. Lawrence uses different methods for similar purposes. Like Hardy he is moving away from the notion that characters in novels should be fully known, fully explained. Even as late as 1927 in Aspects of the Novel, Forster suggested that 'a character is real when the novelist knows everything about i t . . . he may not choose to tell us all he k n o w s . . . but he will give us the feeling that though the character has not been explained, it is explicable.' He even claimed that the virtue of novels is that 'they suggest a more comprehensible and manageable human race' and 'solace us' by giving us 'the illusion of perspicacity and power'. 28 (In justice to Forster, I must say in parenthesis that most of Aspects of the Novel and his fiction are far more complex than this.) Yet, that somebody of the stature and power of Forster as a novelist was able, so late in the day, to assume that it was the function of fiction to offer readers the explicable and illusions and solace serves to show how strongly Hardy and Lawrence had gone against the current of their time. Hardy leaves the reader guessing about Sue. Lawrence in The Rainbow seems to do the opposite by giving the narrator direct access to the unconscious of the characters. But he always makes it clear that he is able to throw light on only a limited area. A vivid and explicit example of Lawrence's methods is Ursula's terrifying experience during the dance by the stacks in The Rainbow.29 He conveys the strangeness by starting with the universe: 'the great slow surging of the whole n i g h t . . . one great flood heaving slowly backwards to the verge of oblivion, slowly forward to the other verge'; then, with 'the heart sweeping along each time' the human element becomes part of the universal process. 'The whole night' and the heart
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become identified in their movement. This leads the way to Ursula's strange relationship with the moon: 'She was as bright as a piece of moonlight, bright as a steel blade, he seemed to be grasping a blade that hurt him.' The imagery becomes more and more surrealistic. Like Sue, 'she was afraid of what she was'. After four pages of exploring Ursula's unconscious in strange imagery and hypnotic rhythms, he brings her back to what he calls 'daytime consciousness'. Like the reader, she is horrified. She is 'filled with overpowering fear of herself, overpowering desire that it should not be, that other burning, corrosive self.. . . She denied it with all her might.. .. She was good, she was loving.... "Isn't it lovely?" she said softly, coaxingly, caressingly.' The shock of this transition heightens the disturbing strangeness of Lawrence's venture into the unconscious. In passing, we might compare this with Hardy's use of dancing as a way of suggesting unconscious impulses. Eustacia dancing secretly with Wildeve on the outskirts of the heath feels she is 'riding the whirlwind'. In 'The Fiddler of the Reels' Carline's strange, hypnotized dancing to exhaustion implies a total loss of conscious volition; in this, it is similar to the disjunction experienced by Ursula in The Rainbow. This contrasting of the unconscious with 'daytime consciousness' is an extreme form of the contrasts between the unknown and the known which I have been commenting on in the works of Hardy and Lawrence. After these strange and exciting experiments in The Rainbow, Lawrence developed further such contrasting methods in Women in Love. 'A truly perfect relationship is one in which each party leaves great tracts unknown in the other party', he said in Studies in Classical American Literature.30 Birkin tells Ursula, 'We are two stark unknown beings' and she sees 'the dark subtle reality of him, never to be translated'. 31 When they make love in Sherwood Forest, Lawrence wants to convey 'the sensual reality of that which can never be transmuted into mind content'. 32 H.M. Daleski (in Lawrence and the Modern World) objects to this on the grounds that if the experience were 'untranslateable' then 'the attempt to render it in words was probably misguided anyway'. 33 I profoundly disagree with this, and so would have Hardy and Lawrence. Hardy said, 'when a man not contented with the grounds of his success goes on and on and tries to do the impossible, then he gets profoundly interesting to me.' 34 Lawrence wrote, in the Foreword to Women in Love, 'Any man of real individuality tries to know and understand what is happening, even in himself, as he goes along.
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This struggle for verbal consciousness should not be left out in art. It is a very great part of life.'35 The struggle is very evident in Women in Love with its frequent discussions about the difficulty and inadequacy of words to convey profound emotional experiences. Lawrence and Hardy were grappling with the same problem of articulating what is not experienced at a cognitive level. 'Never to be translated' in Women in Love links it directly to Jude the Obscure with Sue's 'untranslateable eyes' and 'unstateable' nature. Sue struggles to analyze herself, just as the characters in Women in Love seek for words to convey their inner experiences. The 'struggle for verbal consciousness' is central to both novels, while at the same time both novelists insist that there will always remain 'the unknowable beyond the known'. Women in Love is full of unanswered questions, abstractions, negatives. While there may, perhaps, be some slight justification for saying (as one critic has) that the 'procedures of The Rainbow don't offer enough for the cognitive imagination', 36 it is certainly not applicable to Women in Love, which combines the compelling emotional power of The Rainbow with this appeal to the 'cognitive imagination'. This combination connects with Lawrence's view that 'life is only bearable when mind and body are in harmony and each has a proper respect for the other'. 37 Hardy thought so too, but, being a Victorian novelist, he was unable to express it so unequivocally. In Tess and Jude mind and body are split between two characters, Angel and Sue representing mind, Alec and Arabella representing body. Modern Hardy says of Angel: 'with more animalism he would have been a nobler man. We do not say if,38 Victorian Hardy hastily adds. Similarly, if Sue's intellect could have been combined with Arabella's sexuality in one person, then a happy relationship with Jude would have been possible, but to this kind of thing 'English society opposes a well-nigh insuperable bar', Hardy said in 'Candour in English Fiction'.39 Though Tess and possibly Jude may have mind and body in harmony, they cannot be allowed a partner who is similarly balanced. Sexual happiness can only be momentary and doomed - as in the brief honeymoon in the house in the woods before Tess's capture at Stonehenge. Writing 20 years later, Lawrence can show Ursula progressing towards a state where mind and body are in harmony and she and Birkin can achieve, at least intermittently, a fulfilling relationship. If character was indeed changing during the writing lives of Hardy and Lawrence (and certainly, if nothing else, attitudes to sex were
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changing) then their own writing made some contribution to that change and, of course, to the consequent changes in the novel form. In 1886, Hardy wrote, 'novel-writing as an art cannot go backwards. Having reached the analytic stage, it must transcend it by going further in the same direction. Why not by rendering as visible essences . . . the abstract thoughts of the analytic school?' 40 This move towards abstraction is a high risk strategy; like abstract art and experimental electronic music it may at first seem incomprehensible or pretentious. But Hardy and Lawrence refused to be confined by convention. Lawrence said, 'As a novelist, I feel it is the change inside the individual which is my concern.. . . My field is to know the feelings inside a man and to make new feelings conscious.'41 By their continual adventuring to the unknown, Hardy and Lawrence opened up new possibilities both for the novel and for human experience.
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A Language of the Unconscious: The Rainbow
8.1
'Anna Victrix'
'Writing in a foreign language I don't know very well' is how Lawrence described his experience of writing the first version of The Rainbow. This language, in its developed final form, is able to suggest modes of being which are 'unknown' because of its powerful rhythms and strange imagery. Because the prose is close to poetry and the nonverbal arts of music and painting, the reader is warned against seeking a wholly cognitive response to the text. Awareness of the rhythm of the sentence, the paragraph, the episode leads on to a sense of the rhythm of the structure of the whole book. The variations on the theme of the experiences of the three generations of Brangwens create a broad rhythm, encompassing the book. Visual definition is given by the reiteration of images of arches, doorways, rainbows, seeds, husks which span the novel. The smaller rhythm of paragraph or passage works in a similar way, through repetition: Suddenly, like a chestnut falling out of a burr, he was shed naked and glistening on to a soft, fecund earth, leaving behind him the hard rind of worldly knowledge and experience. . . . He heard it in the hucksters' cries, the noise of carts, the calling of children. And it was like the hard, shed rind, discarded .. . Inside the room was a great steadiness, a core of living eternity. Only far outside, at the rim, went on the noise and the distraction. Here at the centre the great wheel was motionless, centred upon itself. Here was the poised, unflawed stillness. ..
107
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8
108 A Route to Modernism
Here the pattern of contrasts between the noise and movement and distraction 'at the rim' and the stillness 'at the centre' is created partly by the repetition of 'rim', 'rind', 'outside', 'inside', 'centre', so that there is a recurring movement inwards and outwards: . .. inside the room . . . far outside at the r i m . . . . Here at the centre . . . here was a poised stillness... far off, forever far off.... This patterned sentence-structure creates a sensuous experience of being 'at the still point of the turning world'. The repetition of images has a similar effect. The 'rind' and 'rim' are associated with noise and movement, contrasting with the 'centre', 'steady', 'poised', 'motionless', 'eternal'. With the introduction of eternity, the sensuous experience hovers on the brink of becoming abstract, but eternity brings in time, not here as an abstract concept but present to the senses: 'time roared far off, for ever far off, towards the rim'. This repetition of words, images, sentence-structure sets up a steady, throbbing rhythm, 'the steady core of all movement'. The movement to and fro from the 'centre' to the 'rim' is a rhythm which Lawrence uses throughout the book, an oscillation between the unconscious world or inner reality' and the 'ordinary' world presented in realistic terms. Gradually for Anna and Will, 'the noises outside become more real' and they start returning to the daytime world of lighting fires, cooking breakfast, eating. Passages exploring the unconscious impulses of the characters are intercut by scenes of housework, sewing, preparation for teaparties. Such shifts of subject, tone and intensity are essential. The alternating heightening and relaxation of tension correspond to the shifting, changing, contradictory states of the characters. Such contradictions are central to Lawrence's innovatory treatment of character, but they were not quite so new as he suggests in the letter to Garnett in which he rejects the 'old-fashioned' method which 'causes one to conceive a character in a certain moral scheme and make him consistent'. 2 Hardy's rejection of the assumption that characters must be consistent was particularly sharply made with Sue Bridehead's abrupt emotional transitions. 3 Further, Jude the Obscure holds in tension
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... they were at the very centre of all the slow wheeling of s p a c e . . . at the centre where there is utter radiance, and eternal b e i n g . . . they were at the heart of eternity, whilst time roared far off, forever far off, towards the rim.1
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multiple contradictions; as Hardy said, i t is all contrasts'. For both novelists, the capacity of their books to allow contradictions to coexist is central, and marks their divergence from their predecessors. Lawrence develops and dramatizes this, going beyond Jude in seeking a language which can convey experiences which the conscious mind cannot fully analyze or investigate. In 'Anna Victrix' he traces the pendulum swings of emotion, at first by relatively simple statement: It was always the unknown, always the unknown, and she clung fiercely to her known self. But the rising flood carried her away... . So it went on continually, the recurrence of love and conflict between them. One day it seemed as if everything was shattered, all life spoiled, ruined, desolated and laid waste. The next day it was all marvellous again. This is vivid enough and at a cognitive level the reader understands the nature and the violence of the fluctuating emotions. But it does not suffice for Lawrence's purposes. To explore those reactions which are not conscious he needs a language which does not conceptualize or even state what is going on inside the characters but leads the reader to an intuitive entering into their unconscious mode of being. One way of doing this is by the rhythm of his prose. By creating a prose that is close to poetry and music ('the deepest of the arts' according to Forster) he evokes a response which is intuitive rather than cerebral. The long, flowing sentences in which he describes Anna's delighted reaction to her pregnancy suggests a serenely running stream of consciousness: How happy she was, how gorgeous it was to live: to have known herself, her husband, the passion of love and begetting; and to know all this lived and waited and burned on around her; a terrible purifying fire, through which she had passed for once to come to this peace of golden radiance, when she was with child, and innocent, and in love with her husband and with all the many angels hand in hand. The undercurrent of violence, the jarring of the serenity suggested by the long, smoothly flowing sentence is hinted at in 'the terrible purifying fire'. This hint is then foregrounded in shorter, almost monosyllabic sentences: 'But there ran through her the thrill, crisp
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'The Rainbow'
as pain, for she felt the darkness and other world still in his soft sheathed hands.' The assonance ('thrill', 'crisp') and alliteration ('still', 'soft', 'sheathed') are ways of ensuring that our experience is sensuous and imaginative. The sentences become shorter and sharper as the conflict between them intensifies: 'She shrank.' 'To him also it was agony.' 'He was unsatisfied.' 'He was cruel to her.' 'And he could not. And she would not heed him.' The stabbing effect of this abruptness is very potent in suggesting the fierceness of their interaction. Repeated negatives reinforce this and also point to their bewilderment in the grip of these feelings they do not understand: 'He did not want it. Not this - not t h i s . . . . He was unsatisfied . . . unsatisfied, unfulfilled . . . wanting, wanting.' A long series of questions, some voiced by Anna, most, unarticulated, coming from the depths of Will's unconsciousness, indicate that the author, the characters, the readers are exploring unknown regions of the psyche where there are no answers or explanations. The reverberating rhythms of the prose take on the quality of a ritualistic chant as Anna begins her 'dance before the Unknown': 'she danced in secret and her soul rose in bliss. She danced in secret before the Creator, she took off her clothes and danced in the pride of her bigness.' Lawrence's twentieth-century experimental language has rhythms which make it capable of blending without hiatus into the seventeenth-century English of the Authorized Version. The ancient, mysterious Old Testament ritual is linked by the resonant language to the similarly mysterious and primitive unconsciousness of the twentieth-century characters. In Will's terror, Lawrence suggests the profound level at which such an ancient rite impinges on the psyche: It hurt him as he watched it as if he were at the stake. He felt he was being burnt alive. The strangeness, the power of her in her dancing consumed him, he was burned, he could not grasp, he could not understand. He waited obliterated. The use of rhythm, the insistent repetition, the unanswered questions are all ways of avoiding rationalization, explanation, conclusion, and of giving a direct and intuitive apprehension of the unconscious. It is an experiment in articulating what is not verbal. Even more powerful in this process is his use of imagery. By comparing the characters to animals and birds, to inanimate, elemental and mythical things he emphasizes the strangeness of their mode
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of being. It is difficult to imagine what it is like to be a hawk or a mole; almost impossible to conceive of a person as a cloud, a stream, a pebble. 4 Yet, at the same time, the vivid visual image has an immediate impact on the mind's eye. These contrary effects are central to Lawrence's art; they enable him to stimulate the imagination so that the mode of being of the characters is both immediately apprehensible and strange; it remains beyond the grasp of the cognitive sense. Yet even visually there are contradictions, making it impossible to impose a fixed pattern or 'to nail anything down in the novel'. Anna is usually associated with images of light, Will with darkness. Anna's first impression of Will is of 'some mysterious animal that lived in the darkness under the leaves and never came out, but which lived vividly, swift and intense.' (chap. IV) The image recurs when she is pregnant, but this time the perception is his: 'Within himself his will was coiled like a beast, hidden under the darkness, but always potent, working.' He is 'blind as a subterranean thing', like a mole, 'like a darkness covering and smothering' Anna. She begins to feel he is alien: 'she had thought him just the bright reflex of herself. . . she realised that he was a dark opposite.' But her contrasting brightness is itself contradictory: she may seem 'to have sunlight inside her', to be 'a beam of sunshine', 'a warm, glowing cloud', but she is also 'as cold and hard as a jewel'. The opposed images of light and dark seem to concur with Anna's view of the contrast between them. But the complex explorations of The Rainbow cannot be contained within such a simple pattern. So dark Will is also 'a gleaming bright pebble' with 'hateful, hard, bright eyes, hard and unchanging as a bird of prey'. This changing of the pattern is not a consistent or continuous development. Early in the relationship both could be both dark and light: 'Her eyes were dark and flowing with fire. His eyes were hard and bright. .. like a hawk's. She felt him flying into the dark spaces of her flames, like a brand, like a gleaming hawk.' (chap. IV) The basic pattern which equates Anna with light and rationality (in her arguments about miracles, lambs, cathedrals) and Will with darkness and non-rational modes of being (his inarticulacy, his religious ecstasy, his love of books in German which he cannot read) never becomes fixed. The sense of human beings in a continual process of change, never completely understood nor understanding themselves is thus expressed through the imagery, more than by the traditional means of dialogue and narration.
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The Rainbow'
The images of animals and birds contribute to our awareness of the unconscious and unknowable aspects of human beings. Tom sees Will's 'eyes always shining like a bird's, utterly without depth. There's no getting hold of the fellow, Brangwen irritably thought.' (chap. IV) Tom here recognizes in Will that 'unstateable' quality which Hardy attributes to Sue. Later bird imagery endorses and complicates Tom's notion. Will has 'swift, bright, mistrustful eyes like a caged hawk' (chap. IV) and they are intent, and far, and proud, like a hawk's, naive and inhuman as a hawk's'. He 'just ignored the human mind' when, mole-like, 'he followed his own tunnelling nose'. This inhuman quality is not solely negative. The cat imagery is used at first to suggest his total detachment from humanity; like a cat 'he could lie perfectly peacefully on the hearthrug whilst its master or mistress writhed in agony a yard away', (chap. IV) But the cumulative effect of the images is to create a sense of discovering a deep force, inexplicable and remote, in the human psyche: 'he had the quality of a young black cat, intent, unnoticeable, and yet his presence gradually made itself felt, stealthily and powerfully took hold of her. He called not to her, but to something in her, which responded subtly, out of her unconscious darkness.' (chap. VIII) The cat as an image of a form of life totally other than the human makes Will's inner life visible but inscrutable. Anna's response 'from her unconscious darkness' confirms that Lawrence is both evoking Will's uniqueness and discovering ways of making that universal 'unconscious darkness' visible to the eye of the imagination while evading the mind's analytical reactions. The mythical and religious imagery makes even more demands on the reader's imagination. Will as 'an angel or fabulous beast' is given a human context by Anna's initial irritation with him in this role. As the angelic imagery is developed, it becomes more abstract. Will feels 'as if his soul had six wings of bliss' and 'he stood upright in the flame of praise, transmitting the pulse of Creation . . . he seemed like an Annunciation to her. . . she was subject to him as to the Angel of the Presence'. This imagery heightens the sense of exploring the unknown. Such passages are selected for adverse criticism by John Worthen while he praises Lawrence's innovative, experimental and deliberative' writing. 5 He argues that the vocabulary of 'transfiguration' and 'glorification' is abstract, 'detached from the experience of living' and impossible to use successfully in the dynamic relations of the novel'. He contrasts such passages of 'repetitive, ritualistic language' with the episode of Tom and Anna
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in the cowshed, which, he suggests, is wholly successful because 'the cows are real cows, the rain real rain'. Nobody, I imagine, would want to dispute the success of this superb passage, but the notion of the 'real' cows and rain raises questions not only about the meaning of 'real' in this context, but also about the nature and variety of Lawrence's experiments in language in The Rainbow. While agreeing that this is one of the most sensitively imagined passages in the novel, I would argue that its power lies not so much in the reality of the cows, but in their 'otherness'. Little Anna is shocked out of her self-absorbed misery by the rain on her face and by the strange, non-human life of the cows. Yet, at the same time, she senses an affinity with them; tired as she is after her wild weeping, she drowsily asks, 'Will they go to sleep now?'. If the cowshed scene were simply an especially vivid and powerful example of the realistic tradition, it would hardly have the impact it does. By suggesting that the familiar 'real' cows have a being of their own, not immediately accessible to our understanding, Lawrence extends the imaginative reach of the novel. The experiments where the language is either abstract or religious or both is an extension of this. They are ways of going beyond the boundaries of verisimilitude to explore those areas of existence which are not experienced in realistic terms. Though in 'Surgery for the Novel - or a Bomb', Lawrence writes of the need for the novel 'to tackle new propositions without using abstractions', 6 yet frequently in his fiction concrete and figurative language is combined with abstractions. He uses the word 'abstract' to convey Will's essential quality: 'his soul ran free, like some strange underground thing, abstract'. The enormous number of negatives move the prose away from the specific towards the indefinable and abstract: 'he loved the undiscovered and undiscoverable'; 'they fought an unknown battle, unconsciously'; 'her husband was to her the unknown'; if he relaxed his will he would fall, fall through endless space, into the bottomless pit, always falling, will-less, helpless, non-existent, complete nothing.' Here, 'endless', 'bottomless', 'will-less' (with its pun), 'helpless' serve to erase the character, even before we reach 'non-existent'. His 'extinction', his state of 'complete nothing', for the moment, turns him into a total abstraction - the concept of nothingness. Will had always hovered on the edge of non-being; earlier, Anna had felt he was 'like something negative ensconced opposite her'. This is characteristic of Lawrence's way of dealing with abstractions; something negative becomes embodied. It is
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'The Rainbow'
reminiscent of Mr Melbury in The Woodlanders: 'Could the real have been beheld instead of the corporeal merely, the corner of the room in which he sat would have been filled with a form typical of anxious suspense, large-eyed, tight-lipped, awaiting the issue'.7 Both novelists are grappling with the problem of finding a language which will make the unconscious, the indefinable and abstract just as 'real' as (or even more real than) the external and the visible. Hardy is here pursuing his suggestion (made about the same time as The Woodlanders) that the novel 'having reached the analytic stage must transcend it by going still further in the same direction. Why not by rendering as visible essences, spectres etc. the abstract thoughts of the analytic school?' 8 While doing precisely this in this passage of The Woodlanders, Hardy is also calling into question the relative unimportance of conveying in words 'the corporeal merely' in comparison with his conception of 'the real'. This is developed in Jude the Obscure, where it becomes, says Terry Eagleton, 'a defiant flouting of "verisimilitude",... a driving back of the bounds of realism'.9 The variety of techniques used by both Hardy and Lawrence is essential to their opening up of the novel to unexplored modes of thought and feeling and being. The intense and demanding concentration on the unconscious in 'Anna Victrix' is juxtaposed to the conscious conflict and partially articulated thought of the retrospective 'Cathedral' chapter. There follows a period of stasis in the relationship, while Anna, primarily involved in having children, abandons 'the journey into the unknown' and Will focusses his violent feelings almost sadistically on Ursula. Their coming together again after the encounter with the girl in Nottingham seems to invite the use of techniques similar to those of 'Anna Victrix'. Certainly, there are resemblances; in the use of repetition and, through this, the creation of strongly marked rhythms, it echoes 'Anna Victrix'. The most frequently repeated words are 'strange' and 'stranger' which also occur occasionally in the earlier chapter, and, along with the rhythmic effects, seem to create a continuity. But the differences are significant. The changes in the state of being of the characters and in their relationship are emphasized by the marked changes in the language. The later passage is lacking almost entirely in imagery. In 'Anna Victrix' there was no need for such frequent repetition of 'strange'; the animal, plant, elemental and mythological imagery evoked a sense of encountering an unfamiliar world. Here, in this later passage, the absence of imagery denies such openings into the unknown. What few images
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there are have a limiting rather than an expanding effect: 'a store of delights' (repeated several times) suggests stocktaking rather than exploring imagined worlds or the unconscious; a 'feast' gives purely sensual pleasure. The image of the 'marauder', though he is said to be infinitely unknown', does not have much resonance. The cat imagery is picked up from 'Anna Victrix'. Here it is just sensual: 'He wished he were a cat, to lick her with a rough, grating, lascivious tongue'. The effect of this is wholly physical, unlike the earlier cat imagery, which emphasized the non-human qualities of the cat - and of Will. By restricting the images to those that have only finite implications, Lawrence suggests that all the excitement leads only to a dead-end. 10 The exclusively physical nature of Will's delight, shown in his attention to the body, not as a whole but in separate parts - ankles, toes - also signals limitations; a toe is a toe is a toe. But for Will, these separate items represent 'Absolute Beauty'. These words, often capitalized, recur all through the passage: 'beauty consummate, absolute through touch', 'a store of absolute beauties', 'he had a secret dread of Absolute Beauty, it was immoral and against mankind'. Even with the girl in Nottingham, 'he seemed to be touching absolute beauty' - a sure sign that it is the sense of touch merely that is involved. The insistent reiteration is significant, for it echoes the same words from the 'Cathedral' chapter. Will had found 'absolute beauty' in the cathedral until Anna and the gargoyles destroyed 'that which had been his absolute'. Anything that is absolute is at its maximum. In desperately seeking absolute beauty somewhere, whether in a cathedral, in casual sex or with his wife, Will is anticipating the adolescent Ursula with Skrebensky, 'each seeking his or her own maximum self. . . wherein was something finite and sad because the human soul at its maximum wants a sense of the infinite', (chap. XI) Similarly, this final relationship of Will and Anna is 'sad' rather than bad. It is Will, not Lawrence, who feels his sensual search for Absolute Beauty is immoral and against mankind'. Some critics see Lawrence as condemning this 'sensual gratification without tenderness or love'. I don't think this is his position. Colin Clarke suggests that 'what is being deviously suggested is that the potency can't be had without the degradation' and he goes on to assert that in doing this 'Lawrence was breaking new ground, even if he was doing it at a purely discursive level'.11 But this ground is not entirely new. Long before, Blake had implied something similar when he said, 'Attraction and Repulsion,
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Reason and Energy, Love and Hate are necessary to Human existence'. Lawrence does break some new ground by embodying these abstractions in human feeling and behaviour; but this is something that his study of Thomas Hardy helped him to develop. The idea in Tess of the d'Urbervilles that 'with more animalism Angel might have been a nobler man' is a step in this direction. In Jude the Obscure Hardy raises the possibility that for her fulfilment a woman needs both the 'etherial' qualities of Sue and the 'grossness' (Sue's word) of Arabella. Colin Clarke says that in The Rainbow the point that 'the creative and the reductive coexist' is made 'at a purely discursive level.'12 I think not. The 'new ground' lies in the way language is used. The language of this episode does not exist in isolation but, as I have shown with the echoing of 'Absolute Beauty', depends for some of its effects on what has gone before. Apart from this phrase, it is all contrasts. In 'Anna Victrix', the strange imagery opened 'doors into the unknown'; in the later episode, what sparse imagery there is suggests the 'finite and sad' nature of the experience. The 'journey to the unknown' has reached a dead-end. For further exploration of how language can be used to explore the 'unanalysable, undefinable, inconceivable' 13 unconscious, Lawrence must move to new characters. 8.2
The dance by the stacks
One of Lawrence's most audacious and experimental pieces of writing is the account of the dance by the corn stacks. He leads up to these few pages by passages in a variety of contrasting styles. The argument between Ursula and Skrebensky about war, soldiers, society and the individual is a dialogue in which each character states an attitude to life in a fairly rational way; beneath the overt, intellectual disagreement, there is an undercurrent of hostility of a more extreme kind, crystallized in Ursula's 'Are you anybody? You seem like nothing to me.' But this conflict is presented as relatively superficial. This cold exchange is followed by the contrasting episode with the bargee, with its vivid visualization and sensitive evocation of the rapport between Ursula and the bargee, the baby and the mother. The girl in the white dress, the black coal-dust of the bargee, the girl hesitating, the bargee shouting playfully at his baby, the fragile, shining necklace in his hard, black palm are visual contrasts
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which enhance the delicate play of feeling between the four people on the barge. Skrebensky is apart, on the bank. He can only see something to sneer at, 'the woman had been a servant'. Ursula moves from 'the pleasant warm feeling' of the bargee to 'the sterility as if the world were ashes' of Skrebensky. In these ways, sometimes conceptually, sometimes visually, the relationship between Ursula and Skrebensky, containing its seeds of disintegration, is shown at varying levels of the characters' consciousness, before Lawrence exposes those elements which the characters cannot articulate and are not even conscious of. The two scenes foreshadow the stacks episode; in them, the conflict is on the surface; in the dance, the characters' reactions to one another are revealed in all their unconscious violence. Lawrence had experimented with using dance as a way of escaping from superficial levels of feeling in his short story 'The White Stocking' (probably written in 1912). He had been anticipated by Hardy in 'The Fiddler of the Reels' as well as in the dance episode in The Return of the Native. The two short stories deal with the psychological effects of music and dancing in a relatively simple way. 'The Fiddler of the Reels' focusses on a kind of musical hypnotism which is overtly sensual. When Cariine (already engaged to a pleasantly ordinary young man) hears the fiddler's 'heart-stealing melodies', 'the aching of her heart seized her simultaneously with a wild desire to glide airily in the mazes of an infinite dance'. Her infatuation' makes her so hypersensitive to the sound of his tread that on hearing him on his way to visit another woman she leaps towards the ceiling and bursts into tears. She rejects her fiance because he cannot 'play the fiddle so as to draw the soul out of your body like a spider's thread'. Hardy does not mention any development of a relationship between Cariine and the fiddler. Nor, writing in 1893, does he mention the conception and birth of her child by the fiddler, but simply has the little girl suddenly appear in the narrative at the age of three. But this Victorian reticence is counteracted by the detailed description of Cariine's final compulsive and convulsive dancing. She dances 'despairingly'; 'the wild and agonising sweetness' of the music 'projecting through her nerves excruciating spasms, a sort of blissful torture'. The orgasmic suggestiveness is combined with the involuntary nature of her performance, as she dances 'defiantly, she thought, but in truth slavishly and abjectly, subject to every wave of the melody' until she collapses.
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In this slightly oblique way Hardy's treatment of compulsive sexuality is, in spite of its indirection, as powerful and almost as explicit as Lawrence's in 'The White Stocking'. Cariine's behaviour is as involuntary as Jude's; sexually attracted for the first time, he feels as if 'a compelling arm of extraordinary muscular power seized hold of him.. . . This seemed to care little for his reason and his will, nothing for his so-called elevated intentions, and moved him along, as a violent schoolmaster a schoolboy he has seized by the collar.' In 'The Fiddler of the Reels', Hardy offers two interpretations of this compelling power. By emphasizing the mysterious and enigmatic character of Mop, the fiddler, Hardy gives this power a supernatural quality. At the same time, he suggests it is of psychological origin, something which 'would require a neurologist fully to explain'. This story presents sex in a naked way, quite extraordinary for the period. It is physical, it is compulsive, it is loveless. By hinting at the supernatural and the psychologically abnormal, Hardy highlights the differences between this state and 'daytime consciousness'. This story resembles 'The White Stocking' in several ways. Both heroines are engaged to pleasantly ordinary, and, at first, fairly imperturbable young men; both find themselves compelled by the magnetic power of another man, through his music in the Hardy story, through overt sexuality while dancing in the Lawrence. The women's characters are different; Hardy's Cariine is 'a pretty, invocating, weak-mouthed girl', easily overwhelmed by the fiddler's music, but otherwise quite colourless; Lawrence's Elsie is lively and flirtatious and so, perhaps, particularly open to the power and attraction of the other man, who is her boss. Like Cariine, Elsie's response mingles reluctance with submission. Lawrence makes this conflict more conscious than Hardy does, but, like Hardy, suggests that the instinctive sexual drive tends to oust more conscious ones. In the first dance 'she becomes all soft and pliant to him, flowing to his f o r m . . . his strong form moving against her, rhythmically, deliriously'. Yet, 'the look in his eye left her partly cold. She was not carried away.' The next dance with him was an intoxication to h e r . . . she felt herself slipping away from herself. She almost knew she was going, she did not want to g o . . . . His fingers seemed to search her flesh . . . she felt she would give way utterly and sink molten: the fusion point was coming when she would fuse down into perfect unconscious-
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'The Rainbow'
119
The intricate relationship between thought, feeling and physical sensation is subtly created as one continuous flow where contradictions dissolve into one another. Undersea imagery is used to suggest the inevitability of going with the flow and the intoxicated excitement of doing so, while Elsie's established connection with her non-dancing fiance is pointed up by her contacts with him in the intervals between the dances. Superficially, it is her teasing, playful persona which reacts to him, but she is also aware of 'his slim, young man's figure, real and enduring before her. That was he.' In these ways, the sense of a mental and physical and emotional ebb and flow of contradictory conscious and unconscious impulses and uncertainties is created. Both stories explore the extraordinary power and sexual reverberations of music and dance and physical contact - except that Car'line and the fiddler appear never to touch; in 1893 sexual contact preferably happened off-stage. Fifteen years earlier than 'The Fiddler of the Reels', in The Return of the Native, Hardy used dancing as a way of dramatizing his characters' abandonment of social restrictions and of simultaneously suggesting a loss of conscious control of feelings and behaviour. As in the dance by the stacks in The Rainbow, dancing out of doors has an especially powerful effect: The pale ray of evening lent a fascination to the experience. There is a certain degree and tone of light which tends to disturb the equilibrium of the senses and to promote dangerously the tenderer moods; added to movement, it drives the emotions to rankness, the reason becoming sleepy and unperceiving in inverse proportion; and this light now fell on these two from the disc of the moon. 14 Hardy spells out in abstract terms the effects of dancing and moonlight on the consciousness; his account of the disturbance of the senses, the dangerously heightened feeling, the 'rawness' of emotions and the sleep of reason is almost a summary of many aspects of the dance passage in The Rainbow. Awareness of physical sensation is as important in Hardy as in Lawrence: 'She could feel his breathing and of course he could feel hers.' The second half of the sentence adds a feeling of vulnerability to the sensuousness of the first half.
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ness at his feet and k n e e s . . . she would be as liquid to him, as an intoxication only.
Hardy's use of imagery, though sparse compared with The Rainbow passage, suggests some similarities in the nature of the experiences being described. The separation between ordinary modes of being and those of the dance is emphatic in both. Eustacia feels 'a clear line of difference divided like a tangible fence her experience within this maze of motion from her experience without i t . . . . Her previous 'erotic frigidity' turns into 'tropical sensations'. They are 'riding upon the whirlwind'. Added to the emotional, sensual and physical sensations of the dance is their sense that it 'had come like an irresistible attack on whatever sense of social order there was in their minds'. Hardy perceives what Freud was later to say: 'Society forces its members into an . . . estrangement from their instinctual dispositions.' In its restrained and simpler way, Hardy's evocation of the sensual and psychological effects of dancing by moonlight is similar to the release of unconscious energies in The Rainbow dance. Hardy's insights of this kind are glimpses of what was to become central to Lawrence's fiction. The dance at the stacks is a violent and extreme development of such perceptions. While Hardy comments on and explains the nature of the dancers' experiences, Lawrence seeks a language which will give the reader something akin to the sensations of the experience itself. Hardy's abstract comment on the loss of 'a sense of social order' becomes in Lawrence a probing of violent unconscious impulses; Hardy hints at, Lawrence explores taboo areas of the psyche. In spite of his rejection of Freud, what Lawrence is investigating is very similar to the Freudian concept of the id, with its powerful impulses unacknowledged by the ego and superego. This entails a leap, like Ursula's, 'from the known to the unknown'. But, of course, Lawrence's methods are not analytical. The rhythm of the dance and the music, the rhythm of the sentences, the rhythm of recurring images of light and darkness are ways of making that leap a sensuous experience, leaving the mind in abeyance, 'sleepy and unperceiving'. Hardy remarks on the dangerous and disturbing effects of dancing out of doors in the moonlight. Lawrence makes the night a mysterious force, exerting enormous power over Ursula, but also existing as an independent mode of being: 'the darkness seemed to breathe like the sides of some great beasf. Images of 'deep fluid underwater energy' and 'the depths of the underworld under the great flood' reinforce the sense of entering into unconscious modes of being, while simultaneously suggesting the presence of something impersonal, non-human. The universe itself is creating a rhythm:
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'there was a wonderful rocking of the darkness, slowly, a great slow swinging of the whole night', while the human music was 'playing lightly on the surface'. Then, in a sentence which continues this slow, heavy rhythm and combines it with an image suggestive of tidal ebb and flow, he brings the human rhythms into touch with the cosmic ones: 'underneath, only the great flood heaving slowly backwards to the edge of oblivion, slowly forwards to the other verge, the heart sweeping along each time'. This sentence puts in sensuous terms what he says more baldly in Apocalypse: 'We and the cosmos are one. The cosmos is a vast living body of which we are still parts.' 15 The vividness of the version in The Rainbow is due to the rhythm created by the repetition, 'slowly backwards... slowly forwards' which echoes 'slowly, a great slow swinging', with its alliteration and assonance earlier in the sentence; and it suggests the systole and diastole of the heart. This relationship between humanity and the forces of nature, of course, affects the way Lawrence uses imagery in most of his writing. In this episode of the dance at the stacks, the strangeness of a human relationship with the moon is made particularly intense. Before she sees it, Ursula is aware that 'some powerful glowing sight was looking right into her'. The contrast between her perceptions and Skrebensky's is pointed up by his mundane statement, 'The moon has risen.' Immediately, 'she was cleaved like a transparent jewel to its light'. He eclipses her with the dark cloak. This starts the pattern of light and dark, associating Ursula with the moon and Skrebensky with darkness: 'She felt like bright metal weighted down by dark, impure magnetism.' She feels she will achieve 'her pure being' in the moonlight. It is an unusual procedure to present a character's unconsciousness in terms of brilliant light; it succeeds because the light is strange, remote, inhuman: 'She was cold and hard and compact of brilliance as the moon itself, and beyond him as the moon was beyond him, never to be grasped or known.' This level of strangeness can be sustained in the novel for so long because of the way Lawrence structures the scene. Brief moments of ordinariness ('So they danced four or five dances') provide both a temporary respite from the transcendental experiences of the characters and, in the plainness of the sentence, from the intensity and complexity of the figurative language. The intricacy of contrasting patterns is essential to this passage of The Rainbow. Underlying Ursula's compulsive drive towards Skrebensky's destruction are changing rhythms and patterns of
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imagery which heighten the struggle and conflict, representing on a smaller scale the similar rhythms and patterns of the relationship as it develops through the rest of the book. The swaying, tidal rhythms at the beginning of the dance are replaced by an insistent rhythm arising from repeated, emphatic assonance: 'Skrebensky like a loadstone weighed on her, the w e i g h t . . . detained h e r . . . the burden . . . the persistent inert burden. He was inert and he weighed upon her.' This heaviness obstructs the flight towards the moon. As the conflict approaches its climax, Lawrence develops a new kind of imagery. Ursula seems to Skrebensky like a steel blade, 'yet he would clasp her, if it killed him'. A moment later she is gossamer. The stacks are 'like cold fires... a burning of cold, glimmering, whitish-steely fires'. The oxymoron is an intensification of the lightdark clash earlier in the passage. The cold-burning is transferred to Ursula herself, to her 'brilliant, cold, salt-burning body. . . cold as the moon and burning as fierce salt'. As her gleaming power increases, the references to darkness diminish. The light-dark, Ursula-Skrebensky contrast is replaced by the cold burning of Ursula alone. Oxymoron compresses contradictions and holds them together in an impossible unity; it creates a sense of enormous energy about to burst apart. In such tension there is no stability, no fixity. She is as dangerous to herself as to him: 'She seemed a beam of gleaming power. She was afraid of what she was'. By giving her this momentary, horrified glimpse of self-awareness, Lawrence reinforces the sense of the whole passage as a venture beyond the subconscious into the depths of the unconscious; and he implies both the power and the non-rational nature of the unconscious by following this with her increased rage for destroying Skrebensky. The imagery becomes even more concentrated; Ursula is 'burning and brilliant and as hard as salt and deadly'. The reiteration of 'fierce', 'burning', 'corrosive' becomes more and more insistent until, 'She had triumphed: he was not any more.' The evocation of an alarming, transcendental world of the unconscious has been criticized as not allowing enough scope for 'the cognitive imagination'. That the cognitive faculties should be in abeyance for a short passage is wholly appropriate. This is a prose which demands a response through the senses, through a sensitivity to rhythms, through an engagement with the extremities of the characters' experience. Lawrence is experimenting with ways of writing that will take him further and deeper than thought or surface consciousness can. In 'Daughters of the Vicar' he writes,
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i t had nothing to do with his thoughts. Almost it had nothing to do with him . . . the whole tide of his s o u l . . . the heave passing on towards its breaking, taking him further than he had ever been.' In the scene at the stacks, Lawrence postpones such explanatory comments until after he has given the reader the opportunity to enter into the experience in an intuitive way. Though he uses the conventional method of the narrator articulating the processes going on within the characters, what he tells us about them and the language he uses to do it are innovatory. He has devised a language for the immediate, uncomprehended sensation which leads into an awareness of a mode of being different from that of normal perceptions. In a letter, he wrote, 'We want to realize the tremendous non-human quality of life - it is wonderful. It is not the emotions, nor the personal feelings and attachments that matter.... Behind in all are the tremendous unknown forces of life, coming unseen and unperceived as out of the desert to the Egyptians." 6 This is why, at the beginning of this episode of the dance at the stacks, Lawrence makes no attempt to relate the 'tremendous unknown forces' to 'daytime consciousness'. It is only after the reader has experienced the impact of these forces sensuously, visually, imaginatively, that he puts them in the context of 'ordinary' life. Ursula's gradual realization that 'the night was common and ordinary, that the great, blistering transcendental night did not really exist' shifts the angle of vision abruptly. Her denial of 'that other burning, corrosive self only reinforces our sense of that other self because we have experienced it with such intensity. Her attempt to regain 'her ordinary warm self and rekindle the relationship with Skrebensky is an attempt to deny one aspect of her being. In the manuscript, Lawrence spelt this out: 'She recognised her own little self. But what of the big, fierce self of the moonlight?" 7 In the published text the point is made more obliquely but with greater imaginative force. The raging madness and cruelty are not to be denied. The falsity of her attempt to become Skrebensky's 'servant, his adoring slave' is juxtaposed to the assertion of the significance of her experience: 'she saw the delicate glint of oats dangling from the side of the stack, in the moonlight, something proud and royal and quite impersonal. She had been proud with them, where they were, she had been also.' Thus her relationship with the natural world and her own consciousness is reaffirmed. It is a characteristically more extreme treatment of an affinity which Hardy constantly registers. In The Return of the Native, after the description of the sounds of
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'The Rainbow' 123
the wind in the heath-bells, Hardy says Eustacia's sigh is 'another phrase in the same discourse as theirs.' 18 Her human feelings become one with the impersonal sounds of nature. This transforms her adolescent romanticizing about a 'great' lover into something elemental, just as Ursula's seemingly neurotic rage for destruction becomes something 'big' and 'fierce' and impersonal' when placed in relation to the 'proud', 'royal' and 'quite impersonal' oats. Later in The Rainbow (chap. XV) the image of a circle of light surrounded by threatening darkness is another experiment in describing the conflicts between conscious and unconscious impulses. These four paragraphs have come in for some adverse criticism. They are certainly odd, especially the one beginning 'Yea . . . ' . But they are also striking. The images are both visually vivid and highly theoretical. 'Daytime consciousness' and 'dark and unrevealed' states of being are juxtaposed, in a way that almost summarizes the earlier, more extended treatment. Within the circle of light, 'lit up by man's completest consciousness', the daily, mechanical round goes on, while outside, corresponding to Ursula's 'dark and unrevealed' inner being, is the darkness with 'points of light like the eyes of wild beasts, gleaming, penetrating, vanishing'. Among the creatures 'forced out' by the light are angels 'flashing at the door. . . like the flash of fangs'. Angels flashing like fangs suggest a fusion of goodness and terror; they are reminders of that fierce, unconscious being that was revealed at the dance by the stacks. In the midst of these images of darkness and light, wild animals and angels, a preacher suddenly declaims against the folly of living only in the light: 'Yea, and no man dared even throw a firebrand into the darkness.' The people in the light respond in biblical language: 'We move and live and have our being within the light and unto us is given the eternal light of knowledge.' John Worthen calls this passage 'strident' and says Lawrence 'makes the point superficial by vulgarising it and he quite forgets poor Ursula',19 but perhaps the admittedly incongruous paragraphs can be seen as more complex than this. By their biblical language the speakers lay claim to a religion of consciousness and knowledge, denying the significance of the unconscious and the unknown, frightened to acknowledge that in human beings angels and fangs coexist. The rhetorical style and the assertion of the author's view are incongruous, but it is an appropriate incongruity. It picks up the threads of social comment which are intermittently foregrounded throughout the book and connects them with the inner life of the individual. All four paragraphs form a
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contrasting set-piece, an extended metaphor inserted in the narrative. It would be more conventional and less startling to have these implications subsumed within the narrative or in Ursula's consciousness. Lawrence does the opposite, insisting with his 'Yea . . . ' paragraph on another kind of reading. This theoretical interchange between the unnamed speakers is all the more peculiar because of the imagery of the creature-haunted darkness of the surrounding paragraphs. Such mixtures of techniques, used by both Hardy and Lawrence, are essential to their opening up of the novel to unexplored modes of thought and feeling and being. Lawrence's shifts to and fro from narrative to figurative to abstract language reflect the competing and contradictory forces within the psyche, its fluidity, its complexity, its instability. By his bold Assuring of conventional form and language he has abandoned 'the old stable ego of character'. In Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious he said, 'We know the unconscious by direct experience.' The Rainbow gives its readers that 'direct experience'.
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9
9.1
Towards harmony?
In The Rainbow Lawrence probably went further than anybody had gone before in creating a sense of experiencing the nature of unconsciousness. In Women in Love he brings that experience more fully into relation with consciousness. Form and language become more complex as he endeavours to encompass 'the whole man alive' - mind and body, intellect and instincts, consciousness and unconsciousness. This investigation is paralleled in his non-fictional writings, where his changing and often contradictory views and attitudes are explicit. His letter of 1913 in which he writes of his 'belief in the blood as being wiser than the intellect" seems to me to have been given excessive weight in much Lawrence criticism. It is often treated as if it were the key to the whole of Lawrence's work. If it were so, his novels would have the 'fatal halfness' he exposes in some of the characters in Women in Love. It is inconclusiveness and wholeness which are central to his work. For this reason, he often regarded the abstract as fatal to art because it 'abstracts' part from the whole. In his discussion of Turner's late paintings in his 'Study of Thomas Hardy', he sees them as 'magic' and 'perfect', 'But I cannot look at a later Turner picture without abstracting myself, without denying that I have limbs, knees and thighs and b r e a s t . . . whenever art or any expression becomes perfect, it becomes a lie. For it is only perfect by reason of abstraction from that context by which and in which it exists as truth.' 2 This might seem almost an endorsement of the 'belief in the blood', but the position has shifted; the emphasis is on wholeness; thighs and knees are not more important or 'wiser' than other parts of the human being, but they are essential parts. The point is expanded 126 10.1057/9780230599154 - A Route to Modernism, Rosemary Sumner
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in introduction to these Paintings': 'Any creative act occupies the whole consciousness... instinct, intuition, mind, intellect all fused into one complete consciousness'. 3 Here, the necessity for wholeness is spelled out with emphatic clarity. Mind and intellect, which deal with abstractions, are given equal weight with instinct and intuition. Sometimes he goes even further; in a letter of 1917, he says, 'Sculpture never quite satisfies me. It is not sufficiently abstracted.' 4 Later in the same letter he says, 'The pure abstract thought interests me now at this juncture more than art. I am tired of emotions and squirmings and sensations. Let us have a little pure thought, a little perfect and detached understanding.' This is a complete volte face from the 'religion of the blood', but it is significant that 'pure abstract thought' is differentiated from art, where 'wholeness' is nearly always seen as essential. In 'A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover' he says, 'Life is only bearable when the mind and the body are in harmony, and there is a natural balance between them, and each has a natural respect for the other.' 5 This late (1929) statement seems to me to represent Lawrence's position as early as Women in Love. Certainly, he sometimes (as in the 'religion of the blood' letter) veers away from this idea of perfect balance, but this is because he felt that his age lacked that 'natural respect' for the body, which he hoped by his art to create. 'Mankind has never been able to trust the intuitive consciousness, and the decision to accept the trust marks a very great revolution in the course of human development', he says as he praises Cezanne as 'a pure revolutionary' in introduction to his Paintings'. 6 This revolution is the basis of modernism. 'Cezanne's apple hurts. It made people shout with pain.' 7 Jude the Obscure evoked even louder shouts, because of its treatment of a subject 'hitherto banished from their thoughts'. 8 It was precisely this that drove Lawrence's revolution. A short story of 1912, 'New Eve and Old Adam' exposes in relatively simple terms the problems of embodying in a work of art the revolution Lawrence saw in Cezanne. It juxtaposes the opposite poles of 'blood' and intellect', concrete and abstract in a particularly stark way. Lawrence seems to be trying out opposing methods of conveying thought and feeling, consciousness and unconsciousness simultaneously in this short story. In describing the battle between the married couple, he says the man 'felt the physical sickness rising in him. Somewhere down in his belly the big feverish pulse began to beat, where was the inflamed place caused by the conflict between them.' By describing the psychological effects
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of the conflict in terms of illness, Lawrence emphasizes its physicality and suggests that it is not something within the control of the consciousness. The use of the word 'somewhere' reinforces our sense of the man's ignorance about his emotional state. The violence of his feelings is repeatedly conveyed in purely physical terms: 'The rage went through his veins like flame'; 'His heart was a flame that prevented his breathing'. Interspersed among these accounts of intensely physical sensations are purely abstract ones: 'They were both rendered elemental, like impersonal forces by the battle and the suffering.' Lawrence's impersonal forces' are akin to Hardy's Mr Melbury when he becomes the abstraction 'anxious suspense', which, nevertheless, Hardy says, is more 'real' than his bodily form. Lawrence is in the process of discovering how to take this abstraction much further. His elemental forces are on a bigger scale and more mysterious than Hardy's 'anxious suspense'. Much later, Lawrence was to say, 'Shadow you are . . . and by shadow I mean idea, concept, the abstracted reality, the ego.' 9 Both novelists were working towards a quality which can sometimes be created by quite other means in the theatre. When exploring the possibilities of the use of masks, Peter Brook found that 'the naturalistic mask expresses essential human types and the non-naturalistic mask embodies forces'.10 In 'New Eve and Old Adam' Lawrence has not yet found how to embody his abstract forces in non-naturalistic symbolic forms; he is still tied to the naturalistic mode. The unconscious, elemental experiences are presented either in terms of physical sensations or in largely theoretical abstractions, sometimes shifting abruptly from one to the other. In the description of Peter having a bath, the 'voluptuous warm water' seems to signal that the account will be primarily concerned with physical sensations, but 'his body had gone meaningless to him, almost as if it were not t h e r e . . . . All the life was accumulating in his mental consciousness and his body felt like a piece of waste. He was not aware of this.' This simple, crude outline of the discontinuity between unconscious and conscious processes states a theory without giving it any imaginative force. In a later paragraph, Lawrence comes nearer to suggesting the dislocation of mind and body in imaginative terms: the dark unknown being which lived below all his consciousness . . . heaved and raged . . . this tremendous swaying of the most elemental part of him continued through the hours, accomplishing his being, while superficially he thought of the
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Again, the overt, abstract explanations diminish the power of the evocation of elemental, inexplicable forces. Nevertheless, this story is an important stage in the process towards one of Lawrence's major contributions to the development of the novel - his exploration of 'the dark presence of the otherness that lies beyond the boundaries of man's conscious mind'. 11 But while this is Lawrence's most important area of innovation, it does not occur in isolation. 'New Eve and Old Adam' is an early step in the search for that harmony of mind and body he writes of in 'A Propos of Lady Chatterly's Lover'. At this stage he has not found the form and language in which to unite them. It is a problem Hardy had confronted in his later fiction. His division of characters into the sensual and the spiritual (Alec and Angel, Arabella and Sue) seems to be going in the opposite direction to Lawrence's movement towards unity; but in proposing to an outraged readership ('Tess - she is vile' wrote Henry James) that Tess's sexuality is compatible with purity, Hardy was opening up the way for Lawrence's much fuller explorations of sensuality in The Rainbow some 20 years later. The rejection and disapproval of sensuality was even greater in Hardy's time than in Lawrence's, yet in spite of Hardy's less extreme treatment of the subject, he indicates that he, too, sees the necessity for mind and body to be in harmony when he says that 'with more animalism Angel might have been a nobler man'. If Tess is a forerunner of The Rainbow, Jude leads straight to Women in Love. In its articulate characters, in their discussions of religion and philosophy and in their problems in reconciling their physical natures with their intellects, Hardy's novel opens up many of the areas which are crucial in Women in Love. Jude the Obscure is simpler in its division of intellect and sensuality neatly between Sue and Arabella. Sue is so etherial that she becomes like Lawrence in front of Turner's Sunrise at Norham Castle, 'without limbs, knees, thighs or breast' (though she does have 'apple-like convexities'). By making Sue intellectual and Arabella wholly sensual, Hardy externalizes the problem; but he also makes it an inner conflict for Jude, with each woman appealing to a different half of himself. The novel illustrates what Lawrence wrote in 1925; 'We are creatures of two halves, spiritual and sensual - and each half - say the delicate, spiritual half alone - inevitably brings revulsion and
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journey.... Without knowing it, he suffered.... But it was all below his consciousness.
betrayal.' 12 Jude the Obscure initiates an investigation into this 'fatal halfness' in its treatment of the psychological complexity of Sue Bridehead; more tentatively it hints at the possibility of 'wholeness' for Jude, but that cannot be achieved in that society nor in the novel of the time. 13 In Women in Love Lawrence pursues this elusive harmony of mind and body and even suggests that it might be momentarily attainable. The difficulty of achieving it is expressed theoretically in the thinking of the characters and in their discussions, formally in the structuring of their relationships and of the novel, and imaginatively in the language, especially in the use of imagery. The route to harmony is difficult and tortuous. Given the changing and contradictory attitudes towards body and mind, the physical and the abstract, expressed in the non-fiction, it is not surprising that in the novel, the word 'abstract' is used in a multiplicity of ways. Its most complex usage is in connection with the West Pacific and African statuettes in 'Totem' (or 'Fetish') and 'Moony'. The figure of the woman in 'Totem' is 'abstracted in utter physical stress. It was a terrible f a c e . . . abstracted almost into meaninglessness by the weight of sensation beneath.' This curious conjunction of something 'abstracted' with 'sensation' is given a partial explanation by Birkin. He describes this art as 'Pure culture in sensation, culture in the physical consciousness, really ultimate physical consciousness, mindless, utterly sensual.' But the stress on 'physical' contradicts 'abstracted', till Birkin's, 'Oh, I know this isn't everything' brings the two apparent opposites together. It is characteristic of the technique of Women in Love that these ideas are left floating until Birkin's reflections on the statuettes are recalled in 'Moony'. Here the connection of the 'purely sensual' with the abstract is developed and clarified. Initially, Birkin's memory focusses on the physical appearance of an African statue i n dark wood, glossy and suave', on the 'long and elegant body', 'diminished beetle face' and 'protuberant buttocks'. From these recollections of the physical detail of the sculpture, he moves to its implications, so that in the same paragraph, Lawrence juxtaposes the vividly created visual impression of the figure and abstract theorizing about its significance. What Birkin sees in it is 'purely sensual, purely unspiritual knowledge... mindless progressive knowledge through the senses, knowledge arrested and ending in the senses.' Birkin applies abstract thought to the work of art; he also theorizes about 'knowledge in one sort.. . knowledge arrested and ending in the senses'. As he said in 'Totem',
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i know this isn't everything.' This African art has abstracted one aspect of the human being, the sensual, so that 'the relation between the senses and the outspoken mind had broken'. This is 'the burning death-abstraction of the Sahara', which is both the opposite of and the same as the 'snow-abstract annihilation' of the Northern races. The words 'abstract', 'abstraction' toll through this passage, along with 'dissolution' and 'annihilation'. The 'one process of frost-knowledge' is ultimately the same as and as doomed as 'knowledge in one s o r t . . . through the senses'; the opposites are identical in their halfness. These ideas and images are at the core of Women in Love. In this short passage of concentrated abstract thought combined with vivid symbolism, Lawrence crystallizes one of the central issues of the novel - the need for instinct, intuition, mind, intellect all fused into one complete consciousness'. The passage acts as a signal perhaps an unnecessarily clear signal - to the reader of an underlying, central theme linking the divergent aspects of the novel. There are risks in this clarity. It may seem to disregard Lawrence's warning against trying to nail down anything in the novel. The African/Arctic symbolism is not wholly abstract because it is preceded by the human complexities of the characters who embody it. The initial discussion of the statues in 'Totem' provides a theoretical introduction to the subject. More importantly, because Gerald's talk, behaviour, appearance, consciousness, and something of his unconsciousness have been established before 'Moony', he is recognizable in the terms of Birkin's meditation on Arctic abstraction - surprising, but recognizable. His demonic qualities have shown themselves in relations with Minette and Gudrun, with his father and the miners, with his mare, and, especially, in the preceding chapter 'Rabbit'. But Lawrence makes Gerald far more complex than this. Qualities which are less explicit are suggested by the attraction Birkin feels towards him. So it is appropriate that the analysis is tentative and interrogative: 'And was he fated to pass away in . . . this one process of frost-knowledge, death by perfect cold? Was he . . . an omen of the universal dissolution into whiteness and snow?' The questions are crucial. By putting in interrogative form Birkin's struggle towards an understanding of himself and of others, and of the nature of the universe, Lawrence avoids making Gerald merely an illustration of Birkin's theories, even though the fulfilment of the prophecy of 'death by perfect cold' seems to indicate a rigid
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pattern. And, indeed, much of the description and analysis of Gerald does reinforce Birkin's notion of his 'fatal halfness'. He is depicted as terrified of the unconscious part of himself, acknowledging it might reveal 'a meaningless babble lapping round a darkness'. By conscious effort - exerting his will, being constantly active, going to Birkin who 'kept the fear definitely off him', using women to fill the void he feels in himself, he tries to live as a half-man, while seeking an illusory 'wholeness'. With Gudrun he is 'blind to her, thinking only of himself. . . into her he poured all his pent-up darkness and corrosive death', so that he becomes 'whole'. The momentary attainment of completeness (at the expense of Gudrun) is juxtaposed to Gerald's almost continuous sense of a 'void' - both within himself ('the great, dark void which circled at the centre of his soul') and as an external, 'bottomless pit of nothingness' where he hangs writhing. The internal nothingness is both contradicted by the violence of the language with which his feelings are described ('the great red-hot stroke of horrified fear through his bowels', 'his heart rang like a bell clanging inside him') and endorsed by the repeated 'gaps in his consciousness', his capacity to behave 'automatically without thought or sensation'. The tensions generated by these opposites ultimately take the form of a macabre kind of harmony: 'His consciousness had gone into his wrists.... He was one blind incontinent desire to kill her. His wrists were bursting, there would be no satisfaction till his hands closed on her.' Powerfully, Lawrence evokes a sense of mind and body momentarily in harmony; but that harmony becomes its opposite, chaos. The symbolic, doomed figure of Birkin's imagination in 'Moony' is here wrenched into a new, more complex dimension. The narrative encourages recognition of the strangeness and inexplicability of human beings by showing the inadequacy of Birkin's attempts to understand and explain people. In doing this, Lawrence characteristically both endorses and rejects modern developments in psychology. By articulating normally unacknowledged impulses (or, in Freudian terms, the id) Lawrence's fiction is part of the modernist development in the arts to encompass extremes of psychological complexity. But, insofar as the function of psychoanalysis is to make people intelligible to themselves, then Lawrence points the opposite way, in his fiction, insisting on unintelligibility and strangeness. The structuring of the novel points up the affinities and differences of Gerald and Gudrun, thus intensifying the sense of human complexity. Gerald 'translates the mystic word harmony into the
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practical word organization' and creates 'a new order, strict, terrible, inhuman, but satisfying in its very destructiveness'. Gudrun's creativity takes the form of sculpture - tiny pieces which can be held in the hand, under control. Both are control freaks, half-people, clinging to consciousness, repressing the unconscious. Gudrun is included with the people of Beldover who 'have a sense . . . of fatal half-heartedness'. Her suppression of unconscious impulses is more deliberate and aware than Gerald's. The dying Mr Crich is 'to her fancy... just an ordinary man. Only his rather terrible appearance was photographed on her soul, away beneath consciousness.... She was glad the everyday world held good, and she need not recognise anything beyond'. If her unconscious seems to threaten eruption, she can 'regain her will with a click'. This 'new Daphne turning not into a tree but a machine' would fit well into Gerald's reorganized mine with its 'subordination of every organic unit to the great mechanical purpose'. But Lawrence makes subtle differences between these two characters. In them he explores the region between consciousness and unconsciousness which Jung called a 'threshold', 'no man's land'. In the chapter called 'Threshold', 'they both felt the subterranean desire to let go. .. and lapse into sheer unrestraint, licentious and brutal'. This experience is expressed entirely through Gudrun's perception of it; 'She knew she wanted this.. . . Ah, if that which was unknown and suppressed in her were once let loose, what an orgiastic and satisfying event that would be . . . the clear perception of this preoccupied her, distinct and perfect in its final reality. Then she shut it off, completely.' Throughout the novel, her capacity for 'knowing' is stressed, in contrast to Gerald, lost after all his 'go' has gone into the mine. Her 'clear perception' contrasts with his confusion. He wanders, bewildered, into death ('he fell asleep'); she wanted 'willed finality', but remains enigmatic, her future unresolved. This oscillation between sameness and difference is of vital significance for the whole shaping of the novel. 'All emotions, including love and hate, and rage and tenderness, go to the adjusting of the oscillating, unestablished balance between people', Lawrence argues in 'Morality and the Novel'.14 In 'Rabbit' these two characters' insight into their 'mutual hellish recognition' takes the novel into dangerous areas, but not for the sake of analysis. By putting the physical ('the long red rent of her forearm, so silken and s o f t . . . the long, shallow red rip seemed torn across his brain') alongside the abstract ('the forever unconscious, unthinkable red ether of the beyond,
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the obscene beyond') the novel seems to provide a glimpse, directly into the unconscious. 'Modern art relinquishes the notion of art as a bulwark against chaos and barbarism." 5 Indeed, a central function is to foreground what was hitherto feared and excluded. 'Everything is the proper stuff of fiction. No perception comes amiss.'16 In defiance of traditional conceptions of structure, the other pair of characters in Women in Love offers no stability to balance the oscillations of Gerald and Gudrun. The treatment of Birkin is even more uncertain, shifting and complex. The criticism that Lawrence uses him, to express a dogmatic authorial view is not justified. Certainly, Birkin expresses dogmatic views dogmatically, but he is also open to criticism and contradiction by other characters and he contradicts and questions himself. Early in the novel he is described as 'somehow evanescent' and 'indefinite, not to be assigned'. Lawrence's use of Birkin to voice notions of wholeness is given a sharp edge by making him also aware of his own duality. This is not like Gerald's 'halfness', but rather, an alarming kind of contradictory wholeness. In the discarded Prologue to Women in Love 'he would not sacrifice one half to the other. . . the spiritual to the sensual'. 17 In Women in Love, we see how Hardy's nineteenth century problems of articulating the experience of sensuality and spirituality are explored and overcome. Their allocation to separate characters - Alec and Angel, Arabella and Sue - was a moderately acceptable solution in the 1890s, but to combine them in Jude was a daring challenge to the attitudes of the time. After discussing this aspect of Hardy's fiction in 'A Study of Thomas Hardy', Lawrence took the subject much further in Women in Love, exploring and intensifying the effects of their coexistence in a single character. This subject is at the heart of the relationship between these two novelists. For both, it was not only a matter of great importance in the two particular novels, but also of intense universal significance. Birkin's mixture of selfknowledge and uncertainty, spirituality and sensuality are fundamental, not only to this character, but, the novel suggests, to the human race. After his attempt to explain to Ursula his idea of love, Birkin asks himself, 'Was it really only an idea or the interpretation of a profound yearning? If the latter, how was it that he was always talking about sensual fulfilment? The two did not agree very well.' The suggestion that the two might be irreconcilable is left tentative but it leads straight into Birkin's searching exploration of 'halfness' as he meditates on the African statuette and on Gerald. The complexity of this juxtaposition is heightened by Birkin's
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disturbed awareness of the extremes of the spiritual and the sensual coexisting within himself: 'He knew he was perverse, so spiritual on the one hand, and in some strange way, degraded on the other.. .. He knew his spirituality was concomitant of a process of depravity, a sort of pleasure in self-destruction.' Lawrence conveys both Birkin's anxiety about these discordant elements in himself and his need to recognize that both his contradictory halves have their value. Instead of Gerald's sense of a 'void' within him, Birkin 'knew what it was to be aware and potent in that other basic mind, the deepest physical mind'. In this he is 'like an Egyptian Pharaoh'. This image has been treated with a good deal of scorn, partly because he is 'like an Egyptian Pharaoh driving the car'. But Lawrence was writing when cars were still strange and unusual, and visually quite unlike slick, modern models, so the analogy is not ridiculous. The strange, magical, inscrutable quality of the Egyptians, their mysterious power coming to them 'out of the desert' was always for Lawrence an image of unknown forces. Here, Birkin realizes that the 'unthinkable knowledge and unthinkable force' is compatible with 'the free intelligence to direct his own ends'. It is both Greek and Egyptian: 'A lambent intelligence played secondarily above his pure Egyptian concentration in darkness.' The complete fusion of the two kinds of intelligence is emphasized by making the Greek element physical: 'His arms and his breast and his head were rounded and living like those of the Greek, he had not the unawakened straight arms of the Egyptian, nor the sealed, slumbering head.' This fusion marks an important stage in Birkin's development and makes possible the experience shared with Ursula of perfect harmony at the end of 'Excurse'. Previously, in 'Gladiatorial', after the fight, 'He was divided entirely between his spirit which stood outside and knew and his body, that was a plunging, unconscious stroke of blood.' The clear movement towards 'mind and body in harmony' in 'Excurse' does not imply a final achievement there. The essence of this novel is its indeterminacy and openness. One of Birkin's strengths is that he is 'a changer'. He is 'not a man, a chameleon' in his dancing at Breadalby and even more strange in his grotesque dance in 'Water-Party', where his face is 'a constant thing, w h i l s t . . . his body seemed to hang all loose and quaking, in between, like a shadow'. To Ursula this is malevolent and mad, but Birkin responds, 'Pity we aren't madder.' His body, 'loose', 'vibrating', 'perfectly abandoned to its own dropping and swinging' is indicative of his ability
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to let go of control, to behave instinctively and spontaneously. Such a capacity, Lawrence suggests, is unusual and alarming in a society which is geared to a mechanical order; so Ursula is frightened by it and Gerald tells Birkin 'there is always an element of uncertainty about y o u . . . . You can go away and change as if you had no soul.' Birkin is amazed not by the changing but because 'he thought he had all the soul in the world'; but Gerald expects consistency and thinks there is an incompatibility, or even hypocrisy in Birkin's combination of 'young, animal-like spontaneity of detachment' and his tendency to 'talk so deeply and importantly'. This demand for consistency is put into a different perspective immediately afterwards by Birkin's view of Gerald as 'limited to one form of existence, one knowledge, one activity'. Thus, in Women in Love, the characters themselves are involved in discussing the nature of character; inconsistency, complexity, limitations, wholeness are analyzed and debated and dramatized. Their disagreements and uncertainties provide some of the vital cross-currents and contraries which create the complex structure of this novel. It contains argument, even dogma, but it does not 'nail anything down'. 18 The deaths, the mechanization, the fraught personal relationships repeatedly shatter the world of the characters and in this way, reflect the world at war while Lawrence was writing; in this context, the search for and struggle towards harmony is agonizingly difficult. So the process takes the form of arguments, disagreements, quarrels, even physical attacks, as well as analyses of the self and others. Birkin, the searcher for harmony, is the centre of these discussions. He is presented much of the time in terms of his conscious thoughts and theories. His arguments about 'polarity', 'free proud singleness', his attempts to convey the nature of 'ultimate marriage' are presented in cerebral, abstract terms, sometimes at considerable length, as in 'Man to Man', but more often interrupted by the questions and disagreements of the other characters. His ideas are made explicit. In contrast, there are few direct statements about his unconscious in the novel itself. The discarded Prologue is different. There, the narrator says, i t was in the other world of the unconscious that the interplay took place" 9 between Birkin and Gerald. It was perhaps because the Prologue used such wholly abstract terms (the statement is almost as simple as those in 'New Eve and Old Adam') that it was abandoned (though, no doubt, the likely consequence of expressing overtly homosexual feelings was also a deterrent). In the novel itself such abstract theorizing is restricted to Birkin's
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conscious mental processes. The subconscious element is suggested in more indirect ways. Somewhat bizarre behaviour is used to reveal what he scarcely knows about himself. After Hermione's blow on the head, his lying naked in the primroses and brushing through the young pine-trees (which a contemporary reviewer thought were unequivocal signs of madness) suggest not only his sensuousness but also his sensitivity to other forms of life and modes of being. People see him as 'a strange creature from another world'. The struggle to explain or 'translate' him is seen to be impossible. But Lawrence finds ways of conveying without 'translating' what lurks beneath consciousness. His violent stoning of the moon is left open, enigmatic. Though he utters curses while he is doing it, his reply to Ursula's question is, 'Was it hate?' In the scene at the inn in 'Excurse', his uncertainty about his own psychological processes is vividly and succinctly revealed. As Ursula kneels on the hearthrug looking up at him 'like a Paradisal flower', he feels, 'He did not like this crouching, this radiance - not altogether.' The last two words show how the theorizing about 'free proud singleness' and 'polarity' are ideas which he is struggling towards intellectually while his instincts and his male conditioning make it almost impossible for him not to enjoy - at least a little - having a woman kneeling adoringly at his feet. This illustrates Lawrence's recognition of how difficult the struggle is, both for harmony between mind and instinct and between man and woman. But, at the end of 'Excurse', there is that momentary total harmony and equilibrium in which the lovers experience both 'a palpable revelation of living otherness', and an absolutely equal and shared experience 'that can never be transmuted into mind content': 'She had her desire fulfilled. He had his desire fulfilled. For she was to him what he was to her. . . . ' The matching, balanced sentences enact the matching, mutual experience. They have here, briefly, achieved what Birkin has been seeking throughout the novel - mind and body, man and woman in harmony. It is a transitory moment, not an endpoint, achieved and final. Birkin said, near the beginning of the novel that he wanted 'the finality of love'. Lawrence does not suggest that this is possible. In 'Continental', crossing the channel is for both Ursula and Birkin a transcendental experience in which 'they seemed to fall like one closed seed of life, falling through dark, fathomless space', yet Lawrence stresses that they do not experience the same thing. This is not the absolutely equal sharing of 'Excurse', but it is 'bliss' and 'peace'.
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'Women in Love'
The end of the novel reinforces what has been implied all along, that there can be no 'finality of love'. Ending in the middle of a conversation on a note of disagreement, it shows uncertainty persisting. A perfectly harmonious relationship may be a possibility for perfectly balanced individuals, but, even for them, it is unlikely to be more than an intermittent experience. The modern novel apparently unfinished - reflects this. Similarly, a completely whole person, with 'mind and body in harmony' is an unlikely phenomenon. Writing 'On the Nature of the Psyche', Jung said, 'psychic wholeness comprehended in the unity of consciousness, is an ideal goal which has never yet been reached'. 20 Women in Love suggests that Lawrence would have agreed with this. In Birkin, he creates a character who, in great turmoil and uncertainty, aims at that goal. As he said in the Foreword to Women in Love, 'any man of real individuality tries to know and to understand what is happening, even in himself, as he goes along'. 21 Birkin is Lawrence's exploration of that kind of man - hence the self-searching, the analyzing, the debates. But Lawrence does not propose that Birkin's strenuous efforts towards self-understanding would reach a conclusion or discover the truth. Here, again, the parallel with Jung is striking: 'the necessary insight is made exceedingly difficult' because political, social and religious leaders want 'the identification of the individual with a necessarily onesided "truth". Even if it were a question of some great truth, identification with it would still be a catastrophe, as it arrests all further spiritual development.' 22 The development of 'the whole man' is seen by both Lawrence and Jung as vital for the individual and for humanity. Jung discusses the difficulties of achieving wholeness: 'the much needed broadening of the mind by science has only replaced mediaeval one-sidedness - namely that age-old unconscious which once predominated and has gradually become defunctive - by a new one-sidedness, the overvaluation of "scientifically" attested views'.23 The closeness of this passage to Birkin's meditation on the African statuette and on the ice-destructive knowledge' of the Northern races is interesting; it usefully puts their common argument into more abstract terms than the novel. It is especially illuminating as Jung goes on to state that 'nowadays the backwardness in psychic development. . . has become one of the most pressing of contemporary problems' 24 - or as Lawrence more graphically put it, was Gerald 'an omen of the universal dissolution into whiteness and
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snow?' Lawrence, writing during World War I, and Jung, writing after Hiroshima, both perceive the desperate need for a change of consciousness and meditate on the possibility of 'another deluge that will finally exterminate the existing race of men'. 25 Women in Love treats this theme of the end of the world in much more complex ways, making Jung's approach to it seem relatively 'one-sided'. Birkin's vision of Gerald as a symbol of 'universal dissolution' is fulfilled in his death in the snow. There is an echo of this in Loerke's 'dream of fear', which reads like a description of a nuclear winter, turned into a macabre game, in which he and Gudrun imagine the world blown apart by a bomb. Running counter to these perverse fantasies of the end of the world are Birkin's positive and welcoming ideas of 'a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass and a hare sitting up'. Gerald's death leads him to question further the value of the human race and to imagine it superseded by 'new forms of consciousness, new forms of body, new units of being'. Much of the power and originality of Women in Love lies in the ways in which it invites readers into 'the thick of the scrimmage' among the multiplicity of voices, attitudes, feelings, thoughts, disagreements, quarrels which it dramatizes, while simultaneously directing them away from this 'so merely human' area. Birkin bridges the two worlds. His expressed willingness to face personal extinction in favour of something non-human and superior is foreshadowed in his contact with plants, animals, heavenly bodies. This is sometimes presented in terms of imagery: in 'Gladiatorial' he becomes 'like a hard wind', in 'Continental', he is 'like a meteorite plunging across the chasm between the worlds . . . plunging like an unlit star through the ineffable riff. The audacity of this image (reminiscent of Giles Winterbourne as a comet in The Woodlanders) thrusts Birkin out of the human world into outer space. Even the more earthly associations have a strangeness and an intimacy which articulate his 'untranslatableness' without attempting a translation. After Hermione's attack with the lapis lazuli he 'saturates' himself with the primroses, explores the tactile effects of fir trees and thistles, silver birch and hazel and enjoys 'the coolness and subtlety of vegetation travelling into one's blood'. This relationship is entirely physical. With their sap in his veins, he almost becomes a plant or a tree. The living sap becomes inanimate ice as he feels 'his blood was turning to ice-water' in the presence of Gerald's frozen corpse. In this almost non-human, elemental state, he goes 'over the snow
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'Women in Love' 139
slopes to see where the death had been'. Here he has his 'consoling' thoughts about the extinction of humanity: 'To have one's pulse beating direct from the mystery was perfection. Human or inhuman mattered nothing.' The blood, formerly seen as 'wiser than the intellect' is here fused with it, as Birkin's thinking about 'the mystery of creation' is expressed both abstractly and in images of the blood pulsing round the body. Mind and body are briefly in harmony. For a moment, too, the little human being seems to be at one with the universe. This is similar to the moment in The Waves when Bernard, having imagined 'a world without a self rides towards his death, saying, i n me too the wave rises.' This moment springs straight out of a scene in a restaurant, so that 'this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves' are juxtaposed to death, the unknown. Lawrence's juxtaposition is even more extreme. Birkin's vision of indescribable being, miraculous unknown species' is set against the 'so merely human' discussion about human relationships with which the book ends. This inconclusive argument reflects in dramatic form and casual language the indeterminacy of the novel which goes on reverberating beyond its conclusion. The elusiveness of harmony in life is echoed in the form of the novel. 9.2
A language for 'the w h o l e m a n alive'
'We have no language for the feelings' said Lawrence, and proceeded to create one in The Rainbow. With the emphasis in Women in Love on 'the whole man alive', 'the mind and body in harmony', the search for a language for the unconscious needs to be accompanied by a language for conscious, even for abstract thought. It is surprising, in view of Lawrence's many attacks on abstraction, (on late Turner for instance, for depriving him of his knees) how frequently the words 'abstract' and 'abstraction' are used in Women in Love (and by no means always in a pejorative sense). Negatives and interrogatives with which Women in Love teems, lead towards abstraction: unknown, unconscious, undiscovered, unrealized, unmitigated, intangible, uncertain, unseen - the list is endless. They are all words used repeatedly in Women in Love - and they are all abstract concepts. The mode of being of the characters is no longer conveyed by methods that evoke a response mainly through the senses - the sense of rhythm, the visual imagination, as in The Rainbow - but by language which demands a combined sensuous and cerebral response. In 'Excurse' Birkin is seen as both
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Greek (and therefore primarily intellectual) and Egyptian (and so intuitive and spiritual). This comparison is a theoretical statement of a point which is made in a variety of ways throughout the novel. In 'Gladiatorial', Birkin is 'so abstract as to be intangible' but at the same time he has 'uncanny force'. Here the two negatives, i n tangible' and 'uncanny' pull in opposite directions, suggesting extremes of frailty and power. After winning the wrestling match, 'He was divided entirely between his spirit which stood outside and knew, and his body that was a plunging unconscious stroke of blood'. In Birkin, unlike Gerald, there exists both the 'abstract', intangible', 'spirit' half and the unconscious 'blood' half. The novel is partly about the difficulty of bringing these two negative - intangible spirit and unconscious blood - together into a positive harmony of mind and body. In the discarded Prologue, Birkin 'would not sacrifice the sensual to the spiritual half of himself and he could not sacrifice the spiritual to the sensual half. 26 Even as late as 'Excurse' he sees himself as 'so spiritual on the one hand . . . and degraded on the other'. In 'Moony' he felt, 'The two do not agree very well.' The negatives highlight the extreme difficulty of becoming 'whole integral beings in which two streams can be harmonized and reconciled'. 27 Lawrence clarifies these ideas by contrasting Birkin's struggle towards harmony with Gerald's 'halfness' which rules out such a possibility; Birkin's oscillation between the spiritual and sensual extremes gives the negatives used about him a tentative uncertain quality. With Gerald there is fixity. Once he has got the mines running efficiently, he is i n terror not knowing what he was'. He looks in the mirror and is afraid but 'he knew not what of. His face seems 'not real'. His eyes look the same as usual, but 'he was not sure that they were not blue false bubbles'. This double negative doesn't make a positive but intensifies the negativity. He is afraid of becoming 'a purely meaningless babble'. None of these negatives 'lead to the unknown'. Lawrence calls his fear 'sterile', but even before he uses this word, the purely negative nature of the experience is clear (and the words 'pure' and 'purely' emphasize Gerald's resemblance to the African statuette with its experience 'all in one sort'). With his father's death, he feels he is 'suspended over the bottomless pit of nothingness'; 'he could not bear it' is repeated three times. His solution is a regressive one - with Gudrun he becomes 'like an infant at its mother's breast'. His failure to learn from his experience of love and death is suggested in 'the
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insensitiveness of that firm tread' as he strides away from the Brangwen house. Gerald's not knowing ends in a cul-de-sac - both a mental one (he wants finality, seeks 'the end') and the physical one in the snow (which Birkin, significantly, finds a way out of). Gerald's negatives close up, but others open out. Ursula, crossing the Channel, 'without knowing, without seeing' has 'a sense of the unrealized world ahead . . . paradise unknown and unrealized . . . the unknown paradise towards which she was g o i n g . . . a delight in living quite unknown'. These negatives imply something positive; Ursula is taking up 'the adventure to the unknown' which her mother abandoned in The Rainbow. Similarly, the discussion of ideas which is such an important feature of Women in Love has a tentativeness, an openendedness which arises from its expression often in negative or interrogative form. For this reason, I reject the notion that in this novel Lawrence is an anachronistically omniscient author (as Scholes and Kellogg claimed in The Nature of Narrative),2* or a preacher (though, of course, Birkin often preaches). In fact, much of the book is concerned with the impossibility of omniscience. 'Not knowing' is a recurrent theme. To Ursula, Birkin is indiscoverable . . . the being never to be revealed.... This dark, subtle reality of him never to be translated.' A reality which is undiscoverable, unrevealed, untranslatable acquires a strange power, made a little more explicit when Ursula thinks he is 'not a man, something other, something more'. Here again, a negative turns out to have strongly positive implications, suggesting h u m a n potential beyond ordinary recognition. This applies to the whole treatment of love in the novel. Birkin is unwilling to use the word because of its stereotyped and limited meanings. His theories about love are almost all negative (or expressed in the negative). In trying to persuade Ursula of a love which is 'something more' than the conventional notion of love, he argues for 'something much more impersonal'. When pressed by Ursula, he says, 'ultimately there is no love'. It is in 'a voice of pure abstraction' that he tries to explain that he wants to meet her on a plane where 'there could be no obligation... no standard for a c t i o n . . . . It is quite inhuman . . . nothing known applies'; they would be 'responsible for nothing, asking for nothing, giving nothing, only each taking according to primal desire'. This string of negatives offers plenty for 'the cognitive imagination' to work on (in contrast to The Rainbow which has been criticized as not offering
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enough to 'the cognitive imagination'). This prose is dealing with theories which are complex, difficult, worth thinking about. At the same time it creates a sense of Birkin's personality, of his mind at work, of his hectoring manner, his risk-taking, so that Ursula thinks 'he's so absurd' - and, indeed, he does say silly (or partly silly) things, like i want a woman I don't see.' (A woman without iimbs, knees or thighs'? Perhaps he'd prefer Ursula to be in a late Turner picture.) After all these convoluted negatives, the moment when harmony is achieved, when mind and body are in harmony, when Birkin and Ursula are in harmony together is expressed in short, simple, balanced, positive sentences: 'She had her desire fulfilled. He had his desire fulfilled. . . . ' But the negatives are still appropriate, for it is 'the reality of that which can never be known, vital, sensual reality that can never be transmuted into mind content'. H.M. Daleski maintains that if this cannot be translated, Lawrence should not have tried to do it. I disagree totally. Thomas Hardy said, 'When a man not contented with the grounds of his success goes on and on and tries to achieve the impossible, then he gets profoundly interesting to me.' 29 And in Sue Bridehead Hardy did just what Daleski objects to in Lawrence - created a character who is 'unstateable' and has 'untranslatable eyes'. In Women in Love, Lawrence's efforts to create a language which will articulate (without 'stating') 'the whole man alive' - the unconscious, instinctive, sensual, spiritual, emotional, and intellectual fused into wholeness - were perhaps attempts at the impossible - and 'profoundly interesting'. From the impossibility arises the discussion of language in the novel, of its difficulty and inadequacy. So the novel must be tentative and open-ended, negative and interrogative. The challenging indeterminacy of Women in Love is expressed in concentrated form in the last few lines. It would not be possible for a novel to be more open-ended, breaking off as it does in the middle of an argument, of which the last words consist almost exclusively of negative statements: i don't believe it', 'You can't have two kinds of love', i t seems as if I can't', 'You can't have if, i don't believe that'. Ursula's own uncertainty manifests itself in the large number of questions she asks - most of them unanswered. The questions capable of being answered - questions to Birkin about his relationship with Hermione, about his attitude to himself, about his love - tend to merge into larger questions which are fundamental to the book as a whole. When she sees Birkin by the pond, she asks herself,
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'Supposing he did something he would not wish to be seen doing . . .?' which leads on to questions about the nature of being: 'How could it matter what he did? How can there be any secrecy, when everything is known to all of us?' The uncertainty implied by the interrogative form is characteristic of this novel as well as of Ursula's uncertainties about the world and herself. Her questions about the floating daisies - or, rather, about herself - 'Why did they move her so strongly and mystically? . . . Why are they so lovely? . . . Why do I think them so lovely?' - raise problems of philosophy, psychology and perhaps art, as well as emphasizing that she is never very sure of anything. These questions, and those asked by other characters, are one of the ways in which the novel's tentativeness is expressed. The very large number of negatives have a similar effect, preventing any tendency to 'nail anything down' in the novel. Ursula's negatives have mainly positive implications. In 'Excurse', in the new, enhanced relationship with Birkin, she sees him as indiscoverable, never to be translated'. The sense of the inadequacy of language which runs through the novel is focused here by the negatives: 'To speak, to see was nothing. . . . She must lightly, mindlessly connect with him, have the knowledge which is the death of knowledge, the reality of surety in not-knowing.' These negative, abstract sentences, the trembling of the balance between positive and negative (knowledge/death of knowledge; reality of surety/not-knowing) are ways of suggesting the non-verbal, mysterious nature of the experience as they drive towards their moment of sexual harmony in Sherwood Forest. I am not suggesting that such convoluted language is a marvellous example of Lawrence's prose, but its awkwardness has a useful function in emphasizing the struggle to articulate what is not known. It is also a feature of the tentativeness of the whole novel that one of its supreme moments of harmony and fulfilment is introduced by a series of negatives. Lawrence uses negatives as ways of conveying the irrational and extraordinary nature of intense experience. Early in her relationship with Birkin, Ursula feels 'Something in him, inhuman and unmitigated disturbed her and shook her out of her ordinary self.' She finds herself equally incomprehensible and irrational' when she is possessed by hatred of him as 'a strange, gem-like being whose existence defined her own nonexistence'. Yet, in 'the ecstasy of bliss' while crossing the channel, it is again the negatives which dominate, in her sense of 'the unrealized world a h e a d . . . of a paradise unknown and unrealized .. . a delight of living quite unknown'.
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Lawrence uses these negatives and interrogatives to distinguish extreme states of being, whether of love or hate or of intense perception, from the 'ordinary self. This enables him to avoid an appearance of dogmatic certainty about the nature and processes of the unconscious; he can be both vivid and uncertain simultaneously, and he can create the impression both of having access to the unconscious and of keeping it 'unknown'. One of the other central themes in Women in Love (and a tentative title was 'Dies Irae') is death. The Crich deaths and killings are interwoven with the destructive effects of mechanization on society. But their affinity with death, treated in a predominantly realistic way, is set against another stream of references to death, which offers opposing ways of seeing it; these are frequently expressed in negatives which are, nevertheless, positive in their implications. In chapter XV ('Sunday Evening') Ursula, after her encounter the previous day with death and love and then the long, fruitless wait for Birkin, feels 'on the brink, where there was no beyond, from which one had to leap like Sappho to the unknown'. She begins, i n a kind of spiritual trance', to look forward to death, where one would go, 'unknown, unquestioned, unabased . . . let us ask no question of it, what it is or is not. To know is human and in death we do not know, we are not human.' Her meditation becomes a celebration of 'the pure inhuman otherness of death'. A sense of 'otherness' is central to Lawrence's experiments in the novel. The otherness of death, like the otherness of non-human modes of being (animals, birds, plants, mountains) demands a language which is tentative, imaginative, uncertain, non-finite. Finite, verifiable things can be expressed in positive statements. What is unknown has to be negative or interrogative. It is the sight of yellowhammers, 'so uncanny and inhuman, like flaming yellow barbs shooting through the air on some weird living errand' which prompts Ursula to reject Gudrun's way of adding up people and drawing a line underneath, like a sum. The yellow-hammers make her think, 'The Universe is non-human, thank God!' This echoes Birkin's imagining the end of humanity, 'a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass and a hare sitting up . . . a new start, non-human'. Even when he is confronted with Gerald's 'carcass', he thinks again that the universe is 'a non-human mystery, it has its own ends, man is not the criterion'. 'The mystery of creation' can only be expressed in negative terms - 'fathomless, infallible, inexhaustible', incorruptible and unsearchable. It had no limits.' He imagines
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with satisfaction 'miraculous unborn species' replacing humanity. In envisaging a non-human mode of being in some unimaginably far future, Lawrence is suggesting an unlimited scope for the novel, moving it far from traditions of nineteenth-century realism. Virginia Woolf does something similar in the 'Time Passes' section of To the Lighthouse. She suggests a horror of 'a world without people - chaos, winds and waves like leviathans lunged and p l u n g e d . . . in brutal confusion'. There are 'flowers looking before them, looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless, and thus terrible'. She described 'Time Passes' as 'the most difficult abstract piece of w r i t i n g . . . all eyeless and featureless'. The negatives used by all three writers enable them to write about the unknown and the unstateable without reducing it to the known and manageable. Lawrence treats the notion of a non-human world in a more shifting and complex way than Hardy and Woolf. Ursula both questions Birkin sharply about it and is intermittently persuaded by him. Gudrun and Loerke, too, contemplate a remote future, but they turn it into a macabre game. There are no negatives in their mocking fantasies, but there is a chilling recognizableness about them now: they imagine 'a ridiculous catrastrophe' - the invention of 'such a perfect explosive it blew the world in two'; Loerke has 'a dream of fear' which sounds like a dream of a nuclear winter. Gudrun's and Loerke's positives close down the future: Birkin's negatives keep it open. Birkin finds his great vision of the extinction of humanity and its replacement by something superior 'consoling'. It is a superbly impersonal consolation. In contrast, the death of Gerald is positive, definite, finite: i n the short blond moustache the life-breath was frozen into a block of ice, beneath the silent nostrils. And this was Gerald.' Confronted by such finiteness, Birkin breaks down, crying, i didn't want it to be like this.' The 'cold, mute matter' of Gerald's corpse is inert', 'repugnant'. There is no consolation here. But Lawrence brings the two great themes of the book, love and death together in Birkin's suggestion that 'Those who die and dying still can love, still believe, do not die. They live still in the beloved.' That 'do not die' is an extreme example of the positive possibilities of a negative. This consolation is immediate, 'little and personal' compared with his remote, impersonal consolation. But Lawrence's art is not to console but to explore. Varieties of ways of living and loving and dying, alternative visions of the end of humanity come and go in the novel. 'There must be . . . inconclusiveness, immediacy, the quality
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of life itself, without denouement or close'30 he wrote of his poetry. Ending Women in Love with negative statements ensures that it, too, has 'none of that finality which we find so satisfying because we are so frightened'. 31 The imagery of Women in Love is an integral element in its inconclusive structure; its very changeableness and inconsistency contributes to the shaping of the novel. The apparent flow of one pair of characters towards destruction and the other towards harmony is suggested by images of ice, metal, machinery on the one hand, and on the other by images of plants, growing things, light. But the flow in one direction is constantly interrupted by shifting image patterns. The form of the novel corresponds to (or mirrors) the mode of being of the characters; both form and characters are more fluctuating, more disorderly, less subject to rational control than in most earlier fiction. In 'The Science of Fiction', Hardy wrote of 'the desirability, the impossibility of reproducing in its entirety the phantasmagoria of experience'. 32 Women in Love explores that impossibility. The shifts and contradictions embodied in the imagery express the changed conception of characters in the modernist period. Birkin asks, 'How could he say "I" when he was something new and unknown, not himself at all?' The instability of character is manifest in the instability of the imagery. This is particularly vivid in the treatment of Gudrun. Much of the imagery related to her suggests she is part of the mechanical world of mines, machines, clocks. She is terrified by 'the mechanical succession of day following day . . . the terrible clock with its eternal tick-tack'. The onomatopoeic repetition of 'tick-tack' infects everything, so that she feels she can hear Gerald's kisses and embraces as 'tick-tack'. 'The clockface of life' seems to be watching her as she watches it, becoming a clock herself and afraid to look in the mirror for fear of her face looking like a clock dial. Imagery of natural forces is, paradoxically, used to heighten rather than to modify her mechanistic tendencies: her 'electric life' surcharges Gerald's 'soft iron'; she is 'lightning sleeping in pure soft stone'; he and she are 'opposite poles of one fierce energy'. In its contrast to Birkin's idea of 'polarity', in which stars harmoniously balance each other, the 'fierce energy' suggests destructive potential. Yet natural imagery is also used to create a vivid sense of alternative modes of being for Gudrun: 'she was like a flower just opened to the rain, the heart of the blossom just newly visible, seeming to emit a warmth of retained sunshine . . . so beautiful
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'Women in Love' 147
and unknown'. These images of growth and warmth contradict utterly the clock imagery. Through imagery, Lawrence articulates the modernist awareness of the fragmented and conflicting nature of the psyche, without analysis or explanation. This method does not always work. Gerald, the ice man, the mechanical industrial magnate as a flower is an interestingly challenging idea. Unfortunately it remains an idea. The flower refuses to be flowery. It is simply functional, demonstrating that Gerald is incomplete, limited, unfinished, like an open flower under the sky'. This is exceptional. Nowhere else in Women in Love does the idea dominate at the expense of the image. Sensuous image and theoretical implication normally reinforce one another. Images of light associated with Ursula do this. She is 'new and frail like a flower, just unfolded .. . made perfect by inner light'; her face 'was now a dazzle of released golden l i g h t . . . a flower of harmoniousness'. But her claim that she is simpler than her sister is contradicted by the imagery. Images of light used to evoke her warmth and tenderness are also used to express states of repudiation and hatred. She had 'a faculty of assuming a light of her own which excluded the reality, and within which she looked radiant, as if in sunshine'; 'she became hard and self-completed like a jewel. . . bright and invulnerable . . . r a d i a n t . . . in her possession of perfect hostility; she was transfigured in a white flame of essential hate'. These last images, by replacing the golden luminescence with a white flame, undercut the unifying effect of the light imagery. By these means the character becomes a complex unity, hovering on the brink of fragmentation. This is a language which has to be apprehended intuitively. Jung maintained that symbols are 'the best possible expression for something unknown - bridges thrown out towards an unseen shore'. 33 The symbolic and real rabbit in 'Rabbit' is a bridge to dangerous areas of being. The 'mutual hellish recognition' of Gerald and Gudrun implies both evil and an underworld of 'abhorrent mysteries'. The physical is stressed: the 'deep red score down the silken white flesh' is visually vivid and so is 'the long, shallow red r i p . . . torn across his brain'. Man and woman, mind and body are in a kind of harmony, disturbing, terrifying. The emphatic physicalness of ripped arm and ripped brain is made even more immediate by Gerald's fear of touching, of perhaps forcing himself to touch the wound. Lawrence makes the physical and metaphysical gashes into openings into the unconscious. The language seems to give immediate access to the unconscious as if it were something tangible and at the same time,
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by the repetition of 'beyond', it seems to reverberate away, like an echo, into infinity. Jung in 'Psychology and Literature' wrote that there is i n the hinterland of man's mind . . . a disturbing vision of monstrous and meaningless happenings that in every way exceed the grasp of human feeling and comprehension'. 34 In this experiment in language Lawrence succeeds in bringing such monstrous happenings within 'the grasp of human feeling', though not, perhaps, of comprehension. Structurally this episode is a macabre parallel to the night of perfect harmony in Sherwood Forest. Birkin and Ursula discover one another's 'otherness'. For Gudrun and Gerald, the mutual experience is 'hellish' and 'obscene'. There is nothing to make life bearable here.
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Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence
10.1
Harmony and dissonance
i n the midst of chaos there was shape', thinks Lily in To the Lighthouse as she struggles with the form of her painting. Woolf's search for harmony is as central as Lawrence's. In her work, too, harmony within the characters, between the characters, between the characters and 'their circumambient universe', 1 and, above all, for her, in the form of the novel, is sought, explored, achieved, questioned, disrupted. She concentrates more overtly than Lawrence on the shape of the novel; she is somewhat wary of letting in too much chaos. The tight time-structure of the single day in Mrs Dalloway and the repeated motifs (Big Ben, 'fear no more the heat o' the sun') are designed to give a clear shape to the amorphous and disruptive material of the consciousness of the characters. Violent emotions are often suppressed in this novel. Clarissa's response to the 'brutal monster grubbing at the roots' is to cry 'Nonsense, nonsense' as she represses her hatred of Miss Kilman in favour of buying flowers for her party. This moment of horror at the contents of her own subconscious is done so swiftly and so early in the novel that its significance can be overlooked as her character is developed. Threats to her sensitivity - Peter's too demanding love, jealousy of Richard's lunch-engagement, her hatred of Miss Kilman - are easily suppressed and controlled. Woolf was anxious that she might have made her 'too tinsely'. The ease with which Clarissa represses disturbing elements in her psychological make-up seems to endorse this. In her surprisingly imaginative vicarious experiencing of the death of Septimus, harmony is seriously threatened, but even here, the moment 150
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10
passes, and she is able to return serenely to her role as hostess, celebrated in the final line of the book: 'For there she was.' The book is structured so as to hint at the fragility of the serene surface, not only of Clarissa but of her society. Memories and consequences of the war in Septimus's anguished mental torture run parallel to the calm world of West-end dinner parties. The Doctors, embodiments of ruthless power, are required to protect this society from any trace of disturbance or disruption, yet are themselves a threat to the vulnerable. It is a rare moment for Septimus of calm and harmony ('he would wait in this warm place, in this pocket of still air, which one comes on at the edge of a wood sometimes in the evening when . . . warmth lingers, and the air buffets the cheek like the wing of a bird') which is shattered by 'human nature' in the form of Dr Holmes which drives him to his plunge from the window to his death on the spikes of the railings below. The chaos beneath the formal pattern of the novel is allowed to erupt violently here, and again, at second-hand, at the party. The effect of the ending is to seem to superimpose a harmony, to suggest a resolution, more as a gesture towards the conventions of endings than as something actually achieved (or sought) in the novel. Virginia Woolf is perhaps ironical in elevating Peter's romanticized view of Clarissa here, a view not endorsed by the rest of the novel. This ending, with 'tinsely' Mrs Dalloway achieving a kind of apotheosis, both as 'the perfect hostess' and as a vicarious participant in the death of Septimus is typical of the modernist movement towards new and disconcerting endings. The savage juxtaposition of death and carnival at the end of Jude, the ironical use of Ursula's youthful vision of a new world at the end of The Rainbow and Mrs Dalloway's questionable triumph all emphasize contradiction and uncertainty. In the next book, To the Lighthouse, she faces the challenge of 'Time Passes'; she disrupts the pattern; she creates the flight of time; she makes entropy 'vividly visible' by speeding it up as in time photography. Human events (mainly deaths) are almost wholly restricted to bald statements in square brackets. In the midst of descriptions of winds, storms, destruction, decay, some unidentified voice 'seemed to declare . . . that good t r i u m p h s . . . order rules'. Such tentative voices come to the surface, only to sink away again in the face of 'gigantic chaos'. There is no form: 'night, day, month, year ran shapelessly together'. In this section, Woolf creates a great imaginative experience of chaos and then throws in notions of
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harmony tentatively, tantalizingly, seeming to posit the possibility of escape from the 'brute confusion' she has created, only to withdraw it: 'that half-heard melody . . . always on the verge of harmonizing . . . never fully harmonized . . . at l a s t . . . the harmony falters, and silence falls'. The ten years of 'Time Passes' encapsulate World War I, death in the trenches, death at sea and other sudden deaths; any hint of harmony here has to be hesitant. To the Lighthouse raises questions about the nature of harmony. If it is absent from the universe, can human beings find some minimal way (when they are not fighting wars or cutting bait from the living body of fish) in which to create moments of harmony? Lily's meditation as she paints provides a central thread for this theme through the novel. She looks at the view. It changes as she looks. 'The disproportion there seemed to upset some harmony in her own mind . . . she could not achieve that razor edge of balance between two opposite forces.' Yet she does eventually draw the line in the centre of her picture which holds the opposing forces together. It is not only art that achieves this. Mrs Ramsay, too, is 'like a work of art'. Lily sees her as saying '"Life stand still here" .. . making of the moment something permanent' (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent). And it is not only in Lily's memory that she functions in this way. In the first section, at dinner, Mrs Ramsay recognizes the significance of such moments: i t partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr Bankes to an especially tender piece, of eternity.' Certainly 'We do not always think of eternity while serving potatoes', 2 but in this moment of harmony round the dinner table, Mrs Ramsay has created something 'like a work of art'. The artistry of the dish of fruit, arranged by Rose, also induces serenity, until a hand reaches out and takes a pear and ruins the design. The corresponding pattern of harmony momentarily achieved in the first and last sections of To the Lighthouse is bizarrely echoed in the central section by Mrs McNab, who also says 'Time stand still here.' She is 'witless', 'not highly conscious', yet plays her part in halting the processes of entropy. Thus the function of these three utterly different women is to achieve the same thing. Each is confronted by chaos. Each creates order, form, shape - for a moment. The question remains - does Virginia Woolf achieve 'that razor edge of balance' that Lily sought? The correspondence of the three women characters is interesting and surprising, but perhaps a little too neat. Though Lily 'steps off the strip of board into the waters
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of annihilation', it is for such a brief moment that she might almost be joining Mrs Dalloway in saying 'Nonsense' to such perceptions. Lily's final line drawn in the centre of her picture at the moment of the arrival at the lighthouse makes both it and the novel cohere; combined with her final statement, i have had my vision', it suggests a point of rest, a resolution, rather than 'that razor edge of balance between two opposite forces'. The chaos, tumult, violence and fear, admitted especially into the central section of the novel, seem now too easily controlled, as if the novelist is endorsing William Bankes's 'barbarity was tamed, the reign of chaos subdued'. Similarly, when she had just finished The Waves, Woolf wrote in her diary, 'finished, rounded off, completed'. A few years earlier, in Aspects of the Novel, Forster had suggested that 'Not rounding off. Opening out.' was probably the more interesting way of ending a novel. But The Waves is not as 'rounded off as her comments in her diary, written in the exhilaration of completing the book, suggest. Though it has a clear, coherent and controlled structure, there is no sense here that a resolution has been superimposed to create a reassuring ending. A novel ending with death may be regarded as the most closed or most open of endings. But The Waves does not end with death. Bernard is still riding towards it in the penultimate sentence. The waves continue to break on the shore. Apart from Rhoda's suicide, the other characters lives do not end; instead their monologues simply cease, while they themselves continue as part of Bernard's consciousness and existence. The Waves does not flinch from 'that razor edge of balance between two opposite forces'. The shaping is strong, with the Interludes enclosing in their single day the whole lives of the six characters. Percival as a focal point for the six is like the lighthouse or Lily's line down the centre of her painting, used to give coherence to what might otherwise be shapeless. But this structure does not imply rigidity or the dominance of control. The amorphousness of consciousness, the violence of sensations and emotions, hate and love and fear, the horror of aging and death are shattering and discordant. Cruelty, disharmony, disgust exist both in the experience of the six characters' consciousness and in the Interludes where the birds savagely attack other forms of life and leave them to fester, and warriors with poisoned assegais thunder on the shore. The last Interlude, with its single, monosyllabic sentence, 'The waves broke on the shore' is not a 'rounding off; it puts Bernard's excited defiance of death into the perspective of the perpetual continuity of non-human forces.
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Between the Acts brilliantly articulates discord and fragmentation. It is a novel about chaos and harmony. Sentences, even words, crack up, fall apart, are blown away by the wind. Discord, cacophony interrupt speech. Fragments of mirrors visually echo the jagged, broken music and dialogue. Chance is allowed a significant impact. Instead of the tight, time-based structures of Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves, this novel is patterned more loosely by a series of repetitions. The functions of these repetitions (even when they are repetitions of discordance) is to reverberate through the novel and by their echoes to create connecting threads which tie the whole together. The clash between harmony and discord is more extreme here than in any of Woolf's other novels. Yet she has given shape to this material without diminishing the force of the fragmentation. The boldness of the form is exemplified in the ending, which could hardly be more open, even though it occurs three times, twice in Miss La Trobe's imagination and again as Isa and Giles enact her scene from the Stone Age; even a fourth version, her unwritten play (now written?) is proposed in the penultimate sentence, 'the curtain rose'. The final words, 'They spoke' leave the ending open to infinite possibilities. J. Hillis Miller maintains that Woolf is 'caught between two irreconcilable necessities' and he allows Between the Acts to be merely 'an admirable articulation of her predicament'. 3 I shall argue that it offers not a predicament but a solution - a work of art which contains and expresses both discord and harmony. Set in June 1939, the novel is necessarily pervaded by threats and fears of war. Giles's horror of its imminence is heightened by the contrast of 'coffee and cream' on the terrace and 'Europe bristling'. Aeroplanes disrupt rural quiet, The Times reports rape by guardsmen, and this keeps recurring in Isa's thoughts. The disharmony in public affairs is repeated in the relationships of the characters. Isa aches for the gentleman farmer, Giles flirts with Mrs Manresa; both feel iove; and hate'. Giles's white tennis shoes, bloody from stamping on the snake and toad entwined in mutual destruction, is a potent symbol of discord, which keeps recurring as different characters notice the blood. Even the question of piped water or cesspool is involved in the conflict. The book opens with Mrs Haines's exclamation - to be repeated a few lines later - 'What a subject to talk about on a night like this!', suggesting discord where none exists. Her inanity is mocked, but so is Mrs Swithin's opposite view, finding harmony everywhere: 'the agony of the particular sheep,
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cow or human being is necessary; and so . . . beaming seraphically.. . we reach the conclusion that all is harmony, could we hear it. . . . Well, if the thought gave her comfort... let her think it.' Given that such clashes, such public and personal discord are of the nature of existence, Woolf raises the problem in Between the Acts of how art can both express this chaos and achieve the harmony of form conventionally considered to be essential to art. The starlings attacking the tree seem to model life: They pelted it like so many winged stones. The whole tree hummed with the whizz they made, as if each bird plucked a wire. A whizz, a buzz rose from the bird-buzzing, bird-vibrant, bird-blackened tree. The tree became a rhapsody, a quivering cacophony, a whizz and vibrant rapture, branches, leaves, birds syllabling discordantly life, life, life, without measure, without stop devouring the tree. In Chaos Bound, N.K. Hayles relates Chaos Theory to deconstruction. She says, 'Both discourses invert traditional priorities; chaos is deemed to be more fecund than order, uncertainty is privileged above predictability, and fragmentation is seen as the reality that arbitrary definitions of closure would deny.' 4 This digression from scientific to literary theory is oddly apposite to this episode in Between the Acts; the chaos of the tree and starlings is a source of fecundity, 'life without measure', which inspires Miss La Trobe's new play. In Chaos, James Gleick says, 'Pattern born of formlessless: that is biology's basic beauty and its basic mystery. Life sucks order from a sea of disorder.' 5 Woolf's conception of Miss La Trobe's creative processes corresponds to these biological processes. The tree chaotically pelted with starlings causes words to rise from the depths of Miss La Trobe's mind as from the mud of the fish pond. Out of the chaotic tree and the formless mud, she creates a scene and characters: 'pattern born of formlessness'. As so often, this imagination of a concept by a writer or artist precedes the scientific exposition of that concept or of something closely akin to it. But Between the Acts 'affirms now one possibility, now another'; unlike scientific discourse, there can be 'oscillation in the text'. 6 In Between the Acts Woolf has created a violently oscillating form. In one sense it is a linear novel, with a tenuous narrative moving (with unexplained gaps) from the evening of one day to midnight on the next. But other time-schemes weave in and out of this. The
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village pageant is one of a series extending back over the last seven years. The kitchen has a priest's hole. The barn is mediaeval and looks like a Greek temple. For Mrs Swithin, deep in H.G. Wells's Outline of History, the maid is scarcely distinguishable from a dinosaur and one of the audience is so ancient as to look almost extinct. Audience and villagers have names in the 'Domesday Book'. Barfs rapid resume of the marks on the land left by Britons, Romans, Elizabethans, the Napoleonic wars is a compressed version of Miss La Trobe's pageant going 'with leaps of the chamois across the centuries' 7 from the Middle Ages to 'Here and Now', like a more caustic and satirical Orlando. The other time-schemes are dovetailed into the linear 'story', but the pageant constantly intersects it. Thus the play within the novel fragments the novel and the novel fragments the play. The reader of the novel has to adjust to the shifts in time, just as the audience at the play do. And beyond this vast span from prehistoric times to the present, the future threatens with war and possible sudden death: 'The future shadowed their present, like the sun coming through the many-veined transparent vine leaf; a criss-cross of lines making a pattern.' In Miss La Trobe, Woolf has created an experimental plawright. Her undermining of the audience's expectations is a typically modernist ploy to make them widen their horizons and see something new. While complaining bitterly of the gash made in her play by the interval, she herself deliberately gashes it with a passage of nothingness; her script says, '"try ten minutes of present time. Swallows, cows etc." She wanted to expose them, as it were, to douche them, with present time reality.' This is an anticipation by several years of John Cage's 4'33", in which the pianist opens the piano and sits motionless beside it for that amount of time. One of the things Cage said about it was that '4'33" leads out of the world of art into the whole of life.'8 This is precisely what Woolf has set Miss La Trobe to do, only more dangerously with ten whole minutes of 'empty' stage. It is no wonder that she feels 'Reality too strong'. Yet she wishes she had been able to make the experiment even more extreme, with 'a backcloth to hang between the trees to shut out cows, swallows, present time'. Cage's experiment was meant to 'lead into the whole of life.' Woolf's playwright seems to want to go from 'present time reality' to something else, shutting out 'present time'. This 'scene' is a preliminary to the final one, 'Ourselves'; ourselves is what she wants the audience to confront. Yet, in a panic, as her experiment seems to be disintegrating, she
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feels i t is death . . . when illusion fails'. She had experimented with cutting out illusion and discovered that
There is an early treatment of this theme in Miss La Trobe's pageant, when the wind blows away the words and the audience is left 'staring at the villagers whose mouths opened, but no sound came'. She thinks, illusion had failed. "This is death," she murmured'. The situation is saved by the bellowing of the cows - 'the primeval voice sounding loud in the ear of the present moment'. As with the shower ending the later experiment, 'Nature . . . had taken her part.' This corresponds to Cage's idea of leading 'out of the world of art into the whole of life', but it is more complex than either Cage or Miss La Trobe suggest. By having the pianist sit on the stage on which the rest of the concert programme is being given, Cage creates a framework round this silent 'performance'; the random noises coming from the audience and coming through the windows are framed, so that they are observed with the same intensity that we give to a work of art. Miss la Trobe's stage works in the same way, except that her outdoor 'stage' is a natural feature of the land, thus adding another layer of complexity to the life/art debate: It was a place where swallows darting seemed, by the regularity of the trees, to make a pattern, dancing. . . but to the unheard rhythm of their own wild hearts. Regularity of trees, wild rhythms of swallows, cows in their bellowing, plunging vein - all contribute to the work of art: The cows annihilated the gap; bridged the distance; filled the emptiness and continued the emotion. The human beings are more recalcitrant. Their chatter is random, their restlessness and irritation at being confronted by an empty stage makes them feel 'suspended without being, in limbo', until the cows save them, and they respond by browsing, not in a field, but in their programmes. In Madness and Civilisation Foucault wrote: '. . . by the madness that interrupts it, a work of art opens a void, a moment of silence, a question without answer, provokes a
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human kind Cannot bear very much reality.9
breach without reconciliation where the world is forced to question itself. . .."° Woolf does not (at this point)" use madness to interrupt her work of art but makes interruption itself suggest the unconscious, the instinctive, the animal. This 'opens a void', creates questions, supplies no answers. The voids in this last work are part of its disconcerting oscillation between randomness and order, chaos and harmony. It is in some ways a fulfilment of an idea Woolf had long before she had written any novels. She thought writers tended to see art as 'sealed as it were', whereas she wanted to 'achieve a different kind of beauty, achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords... some kind of whole made of shimmering fragments'.12 As she approaches the end of her writing, discord and fragments proliferate. The music of the pageant: snapped; broke; jagged. Fox-trot was it? Jazz? Anyhow the rhythm ticked, reared, snapped short. What a jangle and a jingle!. . . What a cackle, a cacophony. Nothing ended. So abrupt. And corrupt. .. and not plain. Very up to date all the same. What is her game? To disrupt? . . . The monosyllables, rhymes, assonance, alliteration of harsh consonants, short, verbless sentences, create a vividly onomatopoeic effect of the music, said to be 'of the young who can't make, but only break; shiver into splinters the old vision; smash to atoms what was whole'. This is the introduction to the leaping, cracked and broken mirrors, reflecting, 'Here a nose . . . there a skirt. . . . Now perhaps a face. . . . Ourselves?. . .. And only in parts . . . that's what's so distorting and upsetting....' These exhilarating word games not only make the performance dramatically vivid for the reader, but also incorporate and satirize audience reaction, conventionally antagonistic to anything new. Woolf here explores the phenomenon of 'the shock of the new' and the violent response it often evokes. She suggests, when the mirrors finally come to rest, that it is the challenge to their own identities which frightens the audience. Only Mrs Manresa, with the brashness of 'the jolly human heart' magnificently refuses to be cowed; no void opens for her; impervious to art, she will not be forced to question herself. The broken mirrors, like the broken sentences, disconcert all but the totally imperceptive. They work like the sentences of Mary Carmichael, Woolf's imaginary young writer in A Room of One's Own:
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. .. she had broken up Jane Austen's sentence. . . she had gone further and broken the sequence .. . the expected order. .. whenever I was about to feel the usual things in the usual places. . . the amazing creature twitched me away. . . . She made me feel. .. that instead of being serious and profound . .. one might be merely lazy-minded and conventional. 13 In Between the Acts Woolf goes much further than she envisaged 'Mary Carmichael' going. The responses to the fragmented work of art, Miss La Trobe's play, are themselves fragmentary and contradictory: i thought it brilliantly clever. . . . O my dear, I thought it utter bosh.' The voice of propriety, the Vicar, trying hard to be coherent, has his words split in two by the aeroplane: 'each of us has still an opp .. .' The word was cut in two. A zoom severed i t . . . '.. . portunity', Mr Streatfield continued. The church, here the victim of chaotic disruption, becomes the cause of it when the persistent 'ding dong' of the church bell interrupts conversation and shatters sentences: 'Are machines the devil or do they introduce a discord. . . . Ding dong d i n g . . . by means of which we reach the final.... Ding dong' [ellipses are Woolf's]. In this part of Between the Acts the delight in making linguistic experiments is combined with an intention to startle readers out of conventional expectations and the complacency that these may entail. She is well aware that she is not doing something wholly new. Sterne, as always, is a precursor. She praised the way he 'dared to take such liberties with grammar and syntax and sense and propriety and long-standing tradition of how a novel should be written'.' 4 It is clear from her reference to 'sense and propriety' that she sees an intimate relationship between a challenge to conventions of the novel and to conventions of thought and of society. A similar purpose is obliquely served by Hardy's use of the raucous shouts of the holiday crowds to intersect Jude's dying recitation from Job. The expected biblical order, the disorderly crowd, death and life are violently juxtaposed. Woolf challenges her own practice. A 'megaphontic' voice, attacking the audience, society, civilization is followed by jumbled, chaotic music, and then, 'The tune began . . . the first note meant a second; the second a third . . . from chaos and cacophony measure . . . recalled from the edge of appalling crevasses; they crashed; solved;
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united.' This opposition of discord and harmony runs right through to the end of the book, with the characters, simultaneously Stone Age and twentieth century, both fighting and making love. Between the Acts, Jude the Obscure, Women in Love are all 'books open; no conclusions come to'. But this does not mean that Woolf (and Hardy and Lawrence) are caught between 'irreconcilable necessities'.15 Between the Acts does not disintegrate into discordant elements. The timespan of somewhat more than twenty-four hours also encompasses time from the dinosaurs to World War II. The disparate elements of the day are woven together by the pattern of motifs and recollections: the rape by the troopers, the blood on the shoe, Bart remembering in the evening that he frightened the little boy in the morning, Mrs Swithin hurrying to finish The Outline of History. The empty, white, silent room and the deep, dark, silent pond, in their multiple implications, draw together the opposing extremes which the novel embodies, and both 'open a void, a moment of silence, a question without answer'. 10.2
'The t h i n g that exists w h e n we aren't there' 1 6
Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf were all intent on expanding the frame of the novel. Hardy's knowledge that 'beyond the knowable, there must always be an unknown" 7 is central to Lawrence and Woolf too. Lawrence sees 'man's relation to his circumambient universe' 18 as the 'business' of the novel and Woolf claims that the traditional subjects of fiction are exhausted and that 'an important part of life consists in our emotions towards such things as roses and nightingales, the dawn, the sunset, life, death, and fate'.19 All three try at times to do the impossible, and write about 'the thing that exists when we aren't there'. They try to encompass modes of being which are not human. Hardy reduces the human element by having often only a hypothetical observer to record the natural world; the unnamed furzecutter in the first chapter of The Return of the Native is a hypothesis, not an actual (or even fictional) working man; the listener to the sounds of the wind in the heathbells is reduced to an ear though a wonderfully sensitive ear. The birds from behind the North Pole in Tess have observed sights beyond human capability. Hardy insists that no human has ever seen what those birds have seen. Such a method cannot be continued for long; usually there is some unnamed watcher noting the forces of nature. Two on a Tower is perhaps Hardy's most sustained attempt to create a sense of a non-
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human realm, 'an endeavour to bring down the immeasurable to human comprehension' 20 while acknowledging that i t is impossible to think adequately of the sky'.21 He cannot wholly 'retreat from the human' but the universe his characters explore through the telescope is utterly alien to humanity: i t was a peep into a maelstrom of fire, taking place where nobody had ever been or ever would be.' 22 In a totally different way, the strange, unearthly qualities of Little Father Time provide a similar perspective in Jude; he alone in that novel has a view 'over some vast Atlantic of Time'; his is 'a spacious vision' which is 'far above' 23 the normal human range. Hardy tries simultaneously to create a world unknown to human beings while acknowledging the impossibility of doing it 'adequately'. Lawrence's method is to give his characters access to elemental and cosmic forces so that their human consciousness seems transformed into moonlight or steel or salt. The characters in Women in Love are simultaneously having a winter sports holiday in the Alps and 'moving in an intensity of speed and white light that surpassed life itself, and carried the souls of the human beings beyond into an inhuman abstraction of velocity and weight and eternal frozen snow'. 24 The physical, human action of tobogganing becomes abstract, detached from time and place and the body. Gudrun is similarly deprived of human attributes: 'she seemed to pass altogether into the whiteness of snow, she became a pure, thoughtless crystal'. 25 In these examples, Lawrence makes the characters seem to turn into something other, something not human. But the processes of Ursula's sensibility and imagination are foregrounded as she experiences the Alpine night: 'an intoxication, a silence of dim, unrealized snow, of the invisible intervening between her and the visible, between her and the flashing stars.. .. She imagined she could hear the stars . . . could hear the celestial musical motion of the stars, quite near at hand. She seemed like a bird flying amongst the harmonious motion.' 26 By using words such as intoxication', and negatives such as 'unrealised', invisible', Lawrence suggests a reduction in usual cognitive awareness; the stars 'near at hand' and 'amongst the harmonious motion' imply a transference from earth to cosmos. Yet imagined' and the simile of the bird have the opposite effect of placing the experience in Ursula's consciousness. In this way, the narrative seems to oscillate between i n h u m a n abstraction' and the subjectivity of the characters. Finally, the subject is anchored in human experience by becoming part of Birkin's meditation on man and the universe, in which he concludes that
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i t is an inhuman mystery, it has its own great ends, man is not the criterion'. 27 In this way, Lawrence both returns the narrative to a human perspective and invites contemplation of a world devoid of humanity, but perhaps inhabited by 'some other being, finer, more wonderful, some new, more lovely race to carry on the embodiment of creation'. 28 Woolf wrote, i t is not oneself but something in the universe that one's left with', 29 and added, a month later, as she contemplated writing The Waves, i t is to be an endeavour at something mystic, spiritual, the thing that exists when we aren't there to see it.' 30 The 'Time Passes' section of To the Lighthouse and the Interludes in The Waves are in conception close to Lawrence's i n h u m a n mystery' while exploring utterly different ways of creating it. Her methods have been described as 'an almost Hardyesque retreat from human perspective'. 31 I think it is, rather, the other way round; his is 'an almost Woolfian retreat from human perspective'. Her retreat is more sustained in 'Time Passes' and the Interludes and more insistent in Between the Acts. Hardy's hypothetical human observer is usually hovering at the edge of the narrative, available for use. Woolf's experiments occur intermittently in all the novels and are central to the whole conception of 'Time Passes' and the Interludes in The Waves, where she writes of non-human processes as they occur when there is no human eye to see them or mind to record. The ten years which are compressed into 'Time Passes' are treated in such a way as to give an effect similar to speeded up photography, enabling the reader to see entropy in process, invisible to the human eye. In an essay, she quotes Tristram Shandy: Time wastes too fast: . . . everything presses on - whilst thou art twisting that lock - see! it grows grey.32 'Time Passes' does not so much ask us to use our visual imagination so as to see what we know as the facts of entropy, but, rather, shows these processes in the act of occurring. Instead of Sterne's human image, she chooses a house, thus combining the non-human with the manmade, and its human associations. This makes possible continuous moving from the impersonal to human connections and back again; 'there was scarcely anything left of body or mind . .. sometimes a hand was raised as if to clutch something . . . or somebody laughed aloud, as if sharing a joke with nothingness'. Such slightly macabre hints of a remaining tenuous human presence in
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communication with nothingness is a way of intensifying the sense of human absence. The abandoned clothes which 'alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated . . . how once the looking-glass had held a face .. .'; recording the one-time presence makes the absence of humanity all the more extreme. The non-human world appears to have displaced human beings. She points this up with phrases such as, 'Listening (had there been anyone to listen)'. This hypothetical listener is made to seem even more absent than those of Hardy. His listeners might be there; hers is definitely not there. Even human artefacts begin to take on the qualities of natural forces. The slipping of the shawl, with its intimate associations with Mrs Ramsay and Cam and James, is equated with the slow processes of nature: 'as after centuries of quiescence a rock rends itself from the mountain and hurtles crashing into the valley, one fold of the shawl loosened and swung to and fro'. Notions of time are disrupted, 'for night and day, month and year ran aimlessly together'. Human methods of registering time have no function here. It is partly by continually noting their absence that Woolf almost seems to have created a world free from human perceptions. The flowers that 'are looking before them, looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless and thus terrible' derive their macabre power from so nearly having human qualities. In 'Time Passes' Woolf searches for ways of suggesting a world unseen and unknown. Shut off, in square brackets, the characters of the novel are excluded with dramatic emphasis. Yet she creates a mysterious, disembodied, abstract character for this section. It is an unnamed sleeper who is sleepless, who walks upon the beach asking unanswered and useless questions 'as to what and why and wherefore'. These pacers on the beach (sometimes there are more than one) are treated ironically, accused of finding the scene 'calculated . . . to lead to the most comfortable conclusions' until they are confronted with something 'that had boiled and bled invisibly' beneath the surface of the sea. This leads to an abstract, ironical passage on Nature's acquiescence in torture. The style here is wholly at odds with the rest of 'Time Passes'. The language is ironical, detached, formal. Its incongruity with the language and tone of the rest of 'Time Passes' draws attention to the mixture of techniques; this discordance mirrors (to use Woolf's word) the content. It denies, as Birkin does in Women in Love, any kind of privileged status for human beings.
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In the Interludes in The Waves, Woolf takes the basic ideas of 'Time Passes', expands them and makes them reverberate throughout the book. The characters of the novel are excluded from these passages, though snatches from their monologues are used in the Interludes, partly to make a pattern of motifs run throughout the book, and partly to connect the speakers to the whole world and time and space. But the Interludes are about what the characters do not see or understand. In them, Woolf is exploring the possibility of creating a narrator which is non-specific. She asks herself, 'Who thinks it? And am I outside the thinker?' 33 Sometimes the viewpoint becomes that of things, either animate or inanimate. It is almost possible, the narrator seems to suggest, to see with the eyes of birds: their bright eyes glancing... intensely conscious of one t h i n g . . . . Perhaps it was a snail shell, rising in the grass like a grey cathedral. . . . Or they fixed their gaze on the small bright apple leaves. . . . Or they saw the raindrops on the h e d g e . . . or, gazing straight at the sun, their eyes became gold beads. This passage mixes bird's-eye view and narrator's view. The birds are intensely conscious', they 'see raindrops'; this is their viewpoint. They 'gaze' at leaves, at the sun; here, perhaps, an observer notes their gaze. The snail shell 'like a cathedral' indicates a human attempt to imagine seeing like a bird; eyes 'like gold beads' are looked at, not through. 'The defenceless worm', 'spiked' and 'left to fester' insists that here a human sensibility is reacting to the events. This oscillation between a human and a non-human perception is essential to the function of the Interludes. It is possible, the narrator suggests, to imagine what it is like to see with the eyes of a bird. To see with an inanimate eye is stranger. Woolf makes the sun 'uncompromising, undeniable'; she uses strong verbs to suggest it has a purpose; it 'struck', it 'searched', it 'beat'; things are 'caught in the level glare of the sun'. Natural forces - the sun, waves, winds - seem to hover between animate and inanimate. Motionless, inanimate objects and human artefacts fall into a different category, a different relationship to the world. Yet even these things are observers: 'the looking-glass held the scene immobile as if everlasting in its eye'. The disturbing mysteriousness of seeing reflections in looking-glasses is recognized in Hardy and Lawrence, and in Freud's essay on 'The Uncanny', but here it is even more uncanny, for it is
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the mirror itself which has an eye and watches. Human perception diminishes in significance in this context. 'The thing that exists when we aren't there' is 'held' in the mirror's eye. Woolf makes the human absent, or passive, subject to things. The immense power of things is conveyed with excruciating vividness in the account of a jar, 'so green that the eye seemed sucked up through a funnel by its intensity and stuck to it like a limpet'. Human beings exist in the Interludes, but they are unindividualized, nameless figures washing clothes in remote rivers or warriors, used as an image for waves, pounding on the shore. The Interludes foreground insensitive Nature', Time, Space, inanimate objects, abstractions. As she was approaching the final stages of writing The Waves, Woolf wrote in her diary, 'What I like is the flash and dash from side to side, goaded on by what I call reality.'34 Possibly this 'flash and dash from side to side' includes the movement to and fro between the human and the non-human, the seen and the unseen in the Interludes. Later in the same passage she says, if I could catch the feeling, I would: the feeling of the singing of the real world, as one is driven by loneliness and silence from the habitable world'. That 'real world' which sings and is other than 'the habitable world' is caught from time to time in the Interludes. These two worlds are indivisible. Perhaps this is why the recurring image of the girl with the lamp is used at the beginning of several Interludes so as to fuse the elemental and the human. In the first Interlude, the image of a woman raising a lamp is unemphatic; it is the description of the dawn light on the sea which is striking for its vividness and exactness: 'an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon'. By the fourth Interlude, the imagery associated with the girl has become far more elaborate, the sun is 'no longer half seen . . . as if a girl couched on her sea-green mattress tired her brows with water-globed jewels that sent lances of opaltinted light falling and flashing in the uncertain air'. This is all in the past tense. The girl is 'no longer' on a mattress (a comically incongruous image for the sea, used also in the previous Interlude). None of the earlier Interludes are quite so ornate as this one. The fanciful imagery, the use of the past tense, the archaic 'tired her brows' have a distancing effect. We seem to be concerned not with nature, but with artifice. It trivializes the human by contrasting it with the 'uncompromising, undeniable' burning of the sun. Sun and sea as powerful elemental forces transcending anything human are dominant in the opening lines of each Interlude. Yet the images
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for the waves themselves are utterly different; the turbaned warriors with poisoned assegais menacingly come from a different time, a different culture from the girl with the lamp. These mixtures create the 'uncertainty and ambiguity' which come to dominate the final Interludes. In these passages, the organic and the inorganic, the earthly and the unearthly, the natural and the artificial, the abstract and the concrete, the human and the non-human are juxtaposed and combined. They create the sense Woolf sought of the waves sounding throughout the book - an image of both permanence and transience. The final Interlude, in its monosyllabic bareness - 'The waves broke on the shore' - makes a simple statement of continuity, set against the ephemeral lives of individuals. Between the Acts takes the exploration of 'the thing that exists when we aren't there' in some different directions. The sky's inhuman otherness is felt in 'a fecklessness, a lack of symmetry and order in the clouds. Was it their own law, or no law, they obeyed?' But the clouds are perceived and questioned by a human intelligence, so Woolf goes further, beyond the reach of human questioning: 'Beyond that was blue, pure blue, black blue; blue that had never filtered down; that had escaped registration.' But even as she writes, she is registering that lack of registration. Trying to counter the anthropocentric nature of language, she turns round the idea of outer space, unseen by humanity, and envisages the unregistered blue as reciprocally unaware of the earth: i t never fell as sun, shadow or rain upon the world, but disregarded the little coloured ball of the earth entirely. No flower felt it; no field; no garden.' Only by negatives can the unknown be expressed. The empty room, the apparently empty barn, the lily pond, are only slightly less elusive; the imagination of this emptiness has its source in the memory of when 'we' are there, but the familiar thing also 'escapes registration' 'when we aren't there'. A room can be as expansive and as elusive as the cosmos: Empty, empty, empty, silent, silent, silent. The room was a shell, singing of what was before time was; a vase stood in the heart of the house, alabaster, smooth, cold, holding the still, distilled essence of emptiness, silence. This alliterative, rhyming prose poem evokes something outside human experience, 'before time was'. The metaphor of the alabaster vase suggests an eternal stillness, like Keats's urn:
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The room, like the little town on the urn is 'emptied of its folk'; the room is unseen, the melodies unheard. But Keats, nevertheless, centres the experience on human sensibilities: the 'unheard melodies are sweeter'. The singing of Woolf's room is silent; she evokes absence. The difficulty of doing this is shown in an early typescript of Between the Acts: But who observed the dining room? Who noted the silence, the emptiness? This presence certainly requires a name, for without a name, what can exist? And how can silence and emptiness be noted by that which has no existence? Yet by what name can that be called which enters rooms when the company is still in the kitchen or the nursery or the library; which notes the pictures, the flowers, and observes, though there itself, the room is empty. The great dictionary which records the names of infinitely small insects, has a name for grains of different sand one is shell, the other rock - has ignored this presence, refusing to attempt to name it. Certainly, it is difficult to find a name for that which is in a room, yet the room is e m p t y ; . . . Nameless it is, yet partakes of all things named; is rhyme and rhythm. . . . This nameless spirit then, who is not 'we' nor T . . . ,3S In her search for a nameless name Woolf seems to need a language that is not language, a languageless language to write about emptiness. Her 'nameless spirit' is akin to Wallace Stevens' listener who nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is36 The white, silent, empty room has its counterpart in the black, silent, deep mud of the lily pond, i n that deep centre, in that black heart' the fish, patently other, utterly non-human, rarely seen on the surface, elude Mrs Swithin's attempts to anthropomorphize them as 'ourselves' or to turn them into pets fed with biscuit crumbs. Woolf articulates a trajectory by way of fish, petal and grain spiralling from the visible surface down into the unseen depths of the 'black cushion of mud'. Words sink down into the mud of Miss La Trobe's unconscious where they accumulate the material for her new play. This transition from the unknown and unknowable physical
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Thou silent form dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity.
world 'when we're not there' shifts the narrative back towards a human-centred stance, to 'the mind in its darkness'. Even the barn, in its simpler way represents the decentring of humanity; it is empty of people but busy with insect and animal life. The cook, hurrying in, unaware of this population, highlights assumptions of human centrality; for her, the barn was empty till she arrived. In her exploration of 'unknown modes of being', Woolf is trying to do the impossible, at least according to some scientists: We may think we are making sense when we talk about what the world is doing whether we observe it or not. It seems perfectly reasonable, for example, to say there is sound in the forest when a tree falls, whether or not there is anyone around to hear it. Quantum mechanics gives no support to this notion. The world on the atomic scale, at least, does not seem to be some particular way, whether physicists observe it or not. The atomic world appears to have particular qualities only as a result of measurements physicists m a k e . . . . We firmly believe that we relate to a world with 'objective' characteristics that somehow exist independently of what we observe. . . .37 Gregory asserts that to believe this is to go down a blind alley. J. Hillis Miller, in his brilliantly ambiguous and contradictory analysis of Between the Acts seems to endorse this view in his sharp differentiation between the scientific and the poetic. He says that in moving from the known to the unknown, one assumes that 'whatever one reaches will be somehow like what one has already reached. This hypothesis can never be verified. It remains figurative not literal, poetic not scientific.'38 He adds that Woolf's adventures of this kind 'can be named and known only figuratively'.39 This distancing of the figurative or poetic from the scientific, seems rather reductive, as if poetry aspires to the verifiability of science but fails to achieve it. This view disregards the startling impact of ideas about relativity and quantum physics on art, music and literature in the early twentieth century. The great modernist changes in the focus of art both coincided with and resulted from developments in physics: 'For poets quantum physics supports a belief that the universe cannot be reduced by reason and measurement to a completely knowable reality.'40 Woolf's search for a mode of expression for 'the thing that exists when we're not there', and Lawrence's demand for
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inconclusiveness in poetry are not at odds with contemporary science. Even Hardy, in extreme old age, seems to have been delighted (or at least amused) by the formal changes. According to Woolf, he said, '"They've changed everything now. We used to think there was a beginning and a middle and end.. . . Now one of those stories came to an end with a woman going out of a room." He chuckled.'41 'The leading interpretation of quantum theory requires indeterminacy - an irreducible uncertainty - in the best available description of the physical world.'42 The essence of the fiction of Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf lies in such irreducible uncertainty'.
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Hardy to Woolf: a Route to Modernism
I see Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf as writers who certainly wanted to create new form, not solely for its own intrinsic interest but because of their need to express new ways of thinking and feeling and being. Hardy's very first (unpublished) novel had been a challenging attempt to do this - his subtitle being 'A Story with no Plot, containing some original Verses'. He was told instead to try to be more like other people, in particular, like Wilkie Collins, and he did try to conform, with his desperate overplotting of Desperate Remedies. Lawrence, advised in much the same way, reacted by saying that traditional novelists like Arnold Bennett were 'old copiers' and that there was no point in writing novels that were copies of other novels. He was happiest when writing what he felt was 'a novel in a foreign language I don't know very well'. By the time of Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out (1915) it was becoming easier to write novels in a novel way, though not always easier to publish them. She was excited by the challenge of experimenting. Each novel she wrote was exploring something new; she commented especially on the daring of the 'Time Passes' section of To the Lighthouse and on the strangeness of The Waves. These three writers wanted to escape from the traditional concept of realism. Hardy said 'Realism is not art', and Woolf deplored, 'this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner; it is false, unreal, merely conventional'. 1 In order to compare how these two met this challenge, I have chosen as my starting point two passages, one from A Pair of Blue Eyes and one from To the Lighthouse. The Hardy passage, Knight's 170
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accident on the cliff (chaps XXI and XXII) is not without difficulties as an illustration, since it is a very early novel and Hardy is still trying hard to conform to publishers' requirements. But the originality of his methods is very evident, in spite of the pressure for strong plots and even cliffhangers. One of the most striking aspects of the passage is the imaginative recreation of the processes of evolution. It was written only 14 years after the publication of The Origin of the Species. Most people were still outraged and making jokes about Darwin's grandmother being an ape. But this awareness of an extremely remote past became more and more important to writers since it gave focus to a sense of something 'other', something unknown, hidden, primitive in human beings. By the twentieth century it was linked with the Freudian stress on the importance of the unconscious, similarly unknown and primitive. The conjunction of these new notions of history and of the human mind was vital to experimental writers of the early twentieth century, giving the possibility of access to hitherto unknown areas. By the time of Virginia Woolf, of course, these notions of evolution had become familiar, as theory, while still being both disturbing and inviting to the imagination; whereas, in 1873, when A Pair of Blue Eyes was published, they were utterly strange and shocking to most people. In this cliffhanging passage, Hardy gives a brilliant, rapid survey of all the stages of evolution, starting with early man and picturing the 'huge elephantine forms', 'swinish creatures as large as horses', and before them, 'uncouth shapes', 'flying reptiles', right back to the trilobite, with 'eyes dead and turned to stone' now staring Knight in the face. It is interesting that Hardy's rapid sweep backwards through evolutionary time is parallelled by a short paragraph in Woolf's last novel, Between the Acts, in which she traces the same process forwards. From an aeroplane, says one of the characters, you can see the marks made by the Ancient Britons, the Romans, the Napoleonic Wars; similarly, Miss La Trobe's play makes a survey of the years from the Middle Ages to the present. At the same time, the present continually merges with the far past, as Mrs Swithin, immersed in H.G. Wells's Outline of History, dreams of mammoths and megalosauruses in Piccadilly. The book ends with the central characters becoming Stone Age cave dwellers. We have come a long way from Knight's set-piece, imaginative though it was, on evolution. There, it was the 'fair geologist' who could make such a mental excursion. The significance hardly spreads to other parts of the book.
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Hardy to Woolf
But in 1940 the theory of evolution was so much a part of the general consciousness that it could be a recurring element in the book, treated sometimes amusingly, sometimes profoundly, linking the characters' elemental emotions of love, hate, jealousy to those of their remote ancestors and suggesting the more disturbing and uncontrollable aspects of human nature. Here, the prehistoric is felt as part of the present moment throughout the book; in A Pair of Blue Eyes, Knight, momentarily confronted by a trilobite, has a fleeting glimpse of his connection with the ancient world - a connection which he attempts to deny when he thinks of the waste of his exceptionally good brain if he should die, and which Hardy, too, veers away from in refusing to follow Knight's thoughts i n t o the shadowy depths [of death) and the unknown future beyond'. The 'Time Passes' section of To the Lighthouse in its oblique way explores some of the same areas as the cliff episode in A Pair of Blue Eyes. It does not deal directly with evolution but it does suggest the effects of vast passages of time. Literally, it covers a period of ten years, but imaginatively it is millennia. The decay and disintegration of the house correspond to the process towards extinction of the prehistoric species in Knight's meditation as he hangs on the cliff. The literal ten years turn into centuries; the slipping of a shawl becomes an avalanche: Once in the middle of the night with a roar, with a rupture, as after centuries of quiescence a rock rends itself from the mountain and hurtles crashing into the valley, one fold of the shawl loosened and swung to and fro.2 If we compare that with Knight's reaction to finding himself face to face with a trilobite, we notice something of the same effect by a completely different method: Time closed up like a fan before him. He saw himself at one extremity of the years, face to face with the beginning, and all the intermediate centuries simultaneously. 3 Hardy, writing long before The Origin of Species had been fully assimilated, adopts an explanatory manner, before he moves on to his imaginative realization of those intermediate centuries'. Woolf does not need to explain. She can render time closing up like a fan in purely sensuous terms - we hear the avalanche, we
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see the shawl slipping - it is an immediate imaginative experience. Both writers shifted the human being from a position of centrality. Knight is, of course, the focus of our attention, but even so, 'the lifetime scenes of the fossil confronting him were a present and modern condition of things. . . . He was to be with the small in his death', and he, too, is small contrasted with the 'cosmic agency, active, lashing, eager for conquest' which appears to be about to destroy him. To the Lighthouse is even more extreme; in 'Time Passes' Woolf is experimenting with rendering the effects of entropy when there is no one there to observe them. Human beings appear peripherally in square brackets; the great moments of life and death pass in a flash as we read. Occasionally, a nameless observer is brought in: should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul.4 Both novelists take an ironic stance towards any conceivable beneficent power. Hardy's 'weather-beaten West-country folk' see Nature's 'lawless caprice' and 'feline fun in swallowing the victim' - an attitude Knight now adopts. Woolf calls this power with even heavier irony 'divine goodness', which 'breaks his treasures' so that it is impossible that their calm should ever return or that we should ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole'. It is 'useless. . . to ask what and why and wherefore'. 5 At this moment the first death abruptly breaks in with a bare factual announcement. This is extraordinarily powerful. The stark statement shocks like the experience of a sudden death. At the same time, parenthesized as it is, it becomes a tiny part of the breaking, fragmentation and confusion in the house, in the garden, at sea, in the universe. For Knight, too, the world is turned upside down: i t rained upwards instead of down.' Each raindrop becomes 'a shaft. .. and pierced him to his skin'. Even the sun behaves abnormally, like 'a splotch of vermilion red upon a leaden ground - a red face looking on with a drunken leer'. Hardy's irony has become as savage as Woolf's. At this point, Knight gives up hope of life, and then Hardy immediately brings in Elfride, a romantic Mrs MacNab, to halt the rush towards
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Hardy to Woolf
disintegration. In To the Lighthouse our confrontation with entropy is more prolonged. More parenthesized deaths are to come - Prue's death, 'twenty or thirty young m e n . . . blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay'6 - thus a world war is encapsulated in a sentence. A ship is sunk in the bay, leaving a stain on the sea 'as if something had boiled and bled invisibly beneath'. The destructiveness of human beings parallels nature's: What power could now prevent the fertility, the insensibility of nature? . . . Let the swallow build in the drawing room and the thistle thrust aside the tiles.. .'7 But, just as Hardy often suggests that human beings do not necessarily have to succumb to powerful forces, human or cosmic, which seem to be intent on destroying them, so Woolf, too, suggests that in spite of despair ('to pace the beach was impossible; contemplation was unendurable') the move towards chaos can sometimes be halted. Mrs MacNab fulfils the same function with her buckets and mops as Elfride with her rope of underclothes; she rescued from the pool of Time that was fast closing over them now a basin, now a cupboard; fetched up from oblivion all the Waverley novels.. . 8 This is their only link. Elfride has much else to do in her novel. Mrs MacNab is simply a part of the pattern. Her function is to parallel Mrs Ramsay and Lily, in a book which is focused, more overtly than A Pair of Blue Eyes, on notions of permanence and survival, evanescence and decay, ideas which are repeated in Mr Ramsay's anxiety about whether his books will last. In the last section, 'The Lighthouse', Lily looks back at the dinner party in the first section and thinks, 'Mrs Ramsay said "Time stand still here".' Lily, too, with her painting, is saying 'Time stand still here.' And in this elevated company, Mrs MacNab triumphantly takes her place. Of the repaired house, of the completed painting, the same thing is said: i t was finished'. At the same moment as Lily's final brushstroke, Mr Ramsay steps on to the rocks at the lighthouse. Woolf brings all the threads together; though she is not writing a symphony, so she cannot strike several notes simultaneously, yet she creates the effect of doing so. Lily says, 'He has landed' . . . i t is finished', then paints her final central brushstroke and, changing
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tense, Woolf says, i t was finished'. The arrival at the lighthouse and the completion of the painting seem to be simultaneous events. While both authors are dealing with abstract, theoretical matters - evolution, time, entropy - they are also both concerned with the individual consciousness, Hardy in the cliffhanging passage, Woolf in the other sections of To the Lighthouse. Hardy is, of course, writing long before the notion of a stream of consciousness had been developed. Knight's thoughts are presented in the third person by a semi-omniscient narrator - a device also characteristic of some of Woolf's idiosyncratic techniques for the stream of consciousness. But Hardy's narrator, since he is not using stream of consciousness technique, shifts the focus of his attention constantly, moving in and out of Knight's thought-stream. Thus, while Knight is devising a plan for getting Elfride safely back on to the cliff-top, the narrator, in guide-book style, indulges in a statement on the exact height of the cliff, a comparison of the relative heights of other cliffs in England and Wales - none of which is likely to be in the forefront of Knight's mind (or in his subconscious) at this moment. From this tour of the British coast, we move back to this particular cliff and, since it is what Knight can see, possibly into his consciousness. But Hardy is, at this moment, writing an action-packed cliffhanger, not a psychological novel, and so he is using all the conventional devices of action and dialogue, leaving his character hanging over the void when the chapter - and the instalment in the serial version - ends. With the start of the new chapter, the focus is almost wholly on Knight's mental processes, so it is appropriate to embark on a comparison with a passage from one of the other sections of To the Lighthouse. The one I have chosen (The Window', Section 5) has been fully analyzed by Erich Auerbach in his chapter called 'The Brown Stocking' in Mimesis. I have chosen it partly because Auerbach focusses on the ways in which Woolf differs from her predecessors. While I agree with much of his analysis, I want to highlight the ways in which Hardy (ahead of most other nineteenth-century novelists) was gradually moving towards Modernist techniques. A bird's-eye view of the two passages may help to clarify this. I will omit the part of the episode which occurs in chapter XXI of A Pair of Blue Eyes since it deals almost exclusively with the external events of the accident, and begin at chapter XXII. It starts with a description of the cliffs, possibly as seen by Knight, his position, his determination to survive. By this point there is no longer any
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Hardy to Woolf
ambiguity; it is Knight's thoughts we are reading. They switch to the remote past, back to Elfride and the chances of rescue, his attitude to death, his position on the cliff-face, the trilobite, evolution, time, and back to death or rescue. All this takes place in Knight's consciousness. Then, abruptly, the opinions of West-country folk become the subject, apparently described by the narrator. But the next paragraph begins, 'Such a way of thinking had been absurd to Knight', thus seeming to imply that it was his thoughts about Westcountry ideas in the previous paragraph. Next, his physical sensations in the rain lead to his sense of cosmic hostility and to renewed thoughts of rescue. The narrator's role in reporting Knight's thoughts now becomes prominent, with its corrections of the mistakes about the time, the weather, the colour of the sea. We return to Knight's consciousness as he experiences the world upside-down, hears the voices of the wind and the ocean. At this point, somebody questions his trust in Elfride and speculates on the nature of love. Next, 'nobody' is suddenly introduced, along with the sun, 'a red face with a drunken leer'. Knight might well have felt that the sun was leering drunkenly at him, but clinging with his face to the cliff, he wouldn't see it. The uncertainty continues with the meditation on brains in general and Knight's in particular; such generalizations are consistent with his mode of thinking and they merge in the course of the paragraph with thoughts which are explicitly his. The next paragraph expresses a favourite idea of Hardy's about intention and chance. Momentarily we return to Knight's consciousness as he abandons hope and contemplates death; the narrator's role is at its most ostentatious here, in the refusal to enter 'these shadowy depths'. It is usually said that the main difference between the Modernist rendering of consciousness and earlier methods is that earlier writers treated it as rational, coherent and closely integrated with whatever external event prompted it. Yet here, in this very early Hardy novel, the thoughts are presented as erratic and random, circling round the central event rather than focussing on it. I am not suggesting that this is wholly intentional on Hardy's part. It is at least partly the result of his uncertainty about an appropriate technique. A similar lightning survey of the 'brown stocking' passage in To the Lighthouse will highlight some similarities and differences. Mrs Ramsay notices William Bankes and Lily passing, says to James, 'Stand up and let me measure your leg', thinks Mr Bankes and Lily should marry, says 'stand still', looks up at James, remembers Andrew's
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remark about the chairs, considers the cheapness and advantages of the house, visitors, old furniture from London, books, poets, Croome on Mind, Polynesia, the lighthouse, shabbiness, mess made by the children (but they're gifted), the stocking, the shawl, doors, windows, maids, the Swiss girl, 'the mountains are so beautiful', her father is dying; there is a sudden quiet and she says, 'Stand still.' Her thoughts cease abruptly here. Instead, '"Never did anyone look so sad" . . . people said'. There follows a series of questions, and Mr Bankes's memories of her, including a flashback to a telephone call about a train journey and the building work going on outside his window at the time. The paragraph ends with Mrs Ramsay framed - 'absurdly' - suggesting a portrait of a lady. Obviously there are many differences between the Hardy and Woolf passages, but they also have things in common. The passage from To the Lighthouse is more random; Mrs Ramsay looks up to tell James to stand still, the room with its shabby furniture catches her eye and from here we go to the children, Polynesia, the Swiss mountains and back to Mrs Ramsay - though we have never left her. In the Hardy passage, the event which prompts the stream of thought is on a grander scale and so, inevitably, dominates the thoughtprocesses more; in spite of this, it is arguable that the survey of evolution takes us even farther from the starting point than the Swiss mountains take Mrs Ramsay. The difference between mindtime and clock-time is prominent in both passages. In the Hardy, it is explicit, with the narrator explaining the difference: Knight thinks, 'She has been gone ten minutes'; the narrator says 'the mistake arose from the unusual compression of his experience just now: she had really been gone but three.' In To the Lighthouse this difference is implicit; the reader is surprised that she is still measuring the stocking when Mrs Ramsay says, 'Stand still. Don't be tiresome.' The time taken to read her thoughts is shown to be far longer than the time taken to think them. For us as readers at that moment in a small way 'time-closed up like a fan'. Auerbach maintains that this was a startling innovation in To the Lighthouse. He says in Mimesis, i n a surprising fashion unknown to earlier periods, a sharp contrast results between the brief span of time occupied by the exterior event and the dreamlike wealth of a process of consciousness which traverses a whole subjective universe'. In his summing up of the three 'characteristic and distinctively new features of the technique' used by Woolf, he lists 'the elaboration of the contrast between "exterior" time and "interior" time' as
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one of them. 9 In 1873 Hardy was, however clumsily, groping his way towards this technique - a technique which had been accepted as 'distinctively new' in 1927.10 The ambiguity of To the Lighthouse is also tentatively present in A Pair of Blue Eyes. Hardy's narrator is very prominent, understanding and explaining Knight's thoughts and generalizing about them ('the inanimate world baits the mind of man') but also withdrawing, keeping an area unknown, when he refuses to pursue the thoughts about death. In To the Lighthouse this is much stronger. 'Never did anybody look so sad.. . . But was it nothing but looks? people said', and a whole series of questions follows. We don't know who these people are, except Mr Bankes whose thoughts about her end, 'He did not know.' Hardy, too, brings in unnamed people the West-country folk who are aware of nature's capriciousness, also 'most men who have brains' and 'some people' who see circumstances defeating intellect. Unlike Woolf's people, their thoughts are not focussed on the central character but are concerned with general ideas. In this way, her passage, entirely centred on Mrs Ramsay, is more tightly structured than Hardy's. Yet the Hardy passage does not render the mental processes so immediately as Woolf does. The accompanying, explaining narrator gives the impression that Knight could be wholly explained, and perhaps that it is only a sensitive tactfulness which prevents the narrator from pursuing him into 'those shadowy depths'. We can see there in this early novel Hardy 'feeling his way to a method' - a method which shares, in embryonic form, some of the characteristics of the highly developed modernist techniques of To the Lighthouse. In his later novels, the method is much more complex and subtle; Elizabeth-Jane sits by her mother's bedside, hearing the evening noises of Casterbridge fading into silence, leaving only the intensified ticking of two clocks. She is asking herself questions - why she was born, why sitting in a room, why things around her had taken the shape they had and what 'that chaos called consciousness .. . tended to and began in'." It is a characteristic of Modernism to question both the nature of the self and how that 'self might be expressed. Here, the indeterminacy which we saw in the unanswered questions about Mrs Ramsay is a feature of the character's own consciousness. She is asking herself not what she feels but what she is. Tess in the garden, listening to Angel's harp is particularly interesting because Hardy emphasizes that it is something other than consciousness that he is describing: 'She was conscious of neither
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time nor space'; 'exaltation . . . came now without any determination of hers; she undulated upon the thin notes of the second-hand harp and their harmonies passed like breezes through her.' Hardy has found a way of conveying a mode of experiencing to which the terms conscious, subconscious or unconscious do not seem quite applicable. It comes closer to some of Lawrence's ways of rendering states of being or to the unarticulated sensations of the children at the beginning of The Waves. The exploration of such modes of being as these is part of the central question of the nature of reality which these novels pose. Mr Ramsay's books are about 'subject and object and the nature of reality' but To the Lighthouse repeatedly shows how uncertain 'the nature of reality' is. As they approach close to the lighthouse, James remembers, when he was little, his father saying, 'You won't be able to go to the lighthouse'. The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye. . . . Now - James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the whitewashed rocks; the tower, stark and straight; he could see that it was barred with black and white. . . . So that was the Lighthouse, was it? No, the other was also the Lighthouse. 12 Knight's experience as he looks down past his toes to the distant ocean beneath is similar; he sees 'a white border to a black sea his funeral pall and its edging'. But Hardy does not say that it was 'really' blue; he says, 'the sea would have been a deep neutral blue had happier auspices attended the gazer'. They are both, perhaps, excessively explanatory; but Woolf contains the explanation in James's thoughts, 'For no thing was simply one thing.' Hardy's narrator interjects, 'We colour according to our moods the objects we survey.' Both novelists, aware of the subjective nature of perception, feel the need to incorporate this in their art. Woolf does it more subtly by keeping it within the character's consciousness. She also explores the corollary of it in 'Time Passes' - how to describe the house when there is nobody there to see it. This is something she develops in The Waves. 'How describe the world seen without a self?' asks Bernard. The Interludes (the italicized passages) are her answer. Just as some impersonal, abstract consciousness observes the processes and defiance of entropy in 'Time Passes', so an impersonal narrator in The Waves observes the
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Hardy to Woolf
elements, the seasons, the happenings across the world, the cosmos. In this way, the concerns of the first chapter of The Return of the Native are taken much further by Woolf. Hardy finds it necessary to explain what he is doing by bringing in an unnamed observer, a furzecutter and a 'mind', who are imagined responding to the scene; by the time of Woolf, it is possible to use a more oblique method, allowing the world to exist, bare and unlooked at ('unregistered' in Between the Acts). The parallels between the Interludes and the human lives in the other parts of the book are implicit, unstated. The italicized passages set up a rhythm that makes the waves resound all through the book, as she intended: i hope to have kept the sound of the sea and the birds subconsciously present, doing their work underground." 3 Similarly, in The Return of the Native, the heath keeps the non-human element continuously present throughout the novel. After the impersonal opening chapter, in which none of the characters of the novel make an appearance, the heath functions mainly through its impact on the characters, giving Clym 'ballast', seeming hostile to Eustacia and 'prosy' to Thomasin; and yet it retains its abstract, impersonal, ageless power that Hardy created in the first chapter. In The Waves, the extreme structural experiment of the recurring interludes is an innovation that would have been inconceivable in 1878. But Hardy creates a rather similar effect by occasional impersonal passages. In the description of the wind in the different kinds of heathbells, the acuteness of the sensuous awareness parallels that of the Interludes. In The Waves, the structural device which sharply differentiates the main body of the novel from the Interludes makes a very strong pattern; the birds becoming more and more predatory and savage in their fight for life parallels the development of the characters. The setting of the six human lives alongside and intermingled with the incessant rise and fall of the waves highlights the ephemeral nature of individual existence, seeming to echo the opening line of Shakespeare's sonnet: Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end. My emphasis on the abstract and impersonal seems to be endorsed by Virginia Woolf herself. Commenting on reviews of The Waves, she said, 'Odd they should praise my characters when I meant to have none'. In spite of what I have said earlier, I think this is
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rather an extreme statement of her position. Certainly she has no characters in the traditional sense; sometimes they seem to be clusters of images, or rhythms, or memories, but they are also individuals, having relationships with one another, though their relationship with the collective unconscious, the elements, the cosmos is probably stronger. At the end, Bernard almost becomes a wave: 'And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back.' 14 He also becomes almost identified with the impersonal narrator of the Interludes, referring back to the early descriptions of the dawn, to the girl with jewelled hair who raises the lamp. Thus, a character named Bernard who is the little boy who experienced with such intensity the water being splashed over him in the bath, and who is the old man talking in a restaurant, also becomes, at least momentarily, the impersonal, abstract entity, the narrator. Woolf called The Waves 'an abstract, eyeless book'. In his late novels, Hardy moves tentatively in this direction. Marty, at Giles's graveside has 'the quality of abstract humanism'. Tess and Angel, out in the early dawn, are Adam and Eve - representative human beings - and Tess is 'the visionary essence of woman'. These are brief moments when Hardy shifts into a different mode of characterization. With Little Father Time he goes much further, creating a character with an 'impersonal quality, the movement of a wave or a breeze or a cloud'. This strange child with his 'view over some great Atlantic of Time' is concerned with 'the generals of life', not the particulars. 15 The effect of this, in a novel concerned in part with topical issues such as the right to education and the reform of the marriage laws was a startling challenge to conceptions of characterization at the end of the nineteenth century. Lawrence explores much the same area in his famous 'carbon' letter, in which he says he is not so much interested in 'what the woman feels' (he was creating Ursula in The Rainbow at the time) 'but in what she is'. In The Waves the modes of being of the six characters are presented in such a way as to suggest not only what it is like to be Jinny or Neville, but also what it is like to be a baby, a small child, an elderly man and so on. It conveys a sense of their relationship with themselves, with one another (but not with their families, other friends, colleagues) and with Nature and Time and Space, and it explores and discusses how to articulate this in a novel.
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Hardy to Woolf
Bernard, the character who is a writer, struggles constantly with the inadequacy of language. He sometimes longs for words of one syllable which a child uses, or 'a little language such as lovers use'; at other times only a howl will suffice: 'what is the use', he asks, 'of elaborating these consecutive sentences when what one needs is nothing consecutive but a bark, a groan'. He wonders how he can make a shape out of the complexities of life which include 'the old brute, the savage, the hairy man . . . whose speech is gutteral, visceral.... He squats in me.' 16 The Waves raises the question of how this primitive unconscious can be conveyed in organized, modern syntax - and to some extent, answers it. Problems of this kind are explored even more intensively in Between the Acts. Miss La Trobe's village pageant is a modernist, experimental piece of writing. She tries holding up the action so as to 'douche them with present time reality' like John Cage in his 4'33"; this 'silent' piece is different every time it is played, depending on circumstances and chance. In Miss La Trobe's gap in the action, the cows perform; their bellowing is 'the primeval voice sounding loud in the ear of the present'. She has gone back in time even earlier than Bernard's 'hairy man'. She takes on, too, Bernard's question about the use of 'elaborating these consecutive sentences'. She ends her pageant, not with the reassuring tableau round the Union Jack which some of her audience had hoped for, but by confronting them with mirrors, tin cans, a cheval glass, 'anything bright enough to reflect, presumably, ourselves. . .. Here a nose... . There a skirt.... Now perhaps a face. . . . Ourselves? But that's cruel. . . that's what's so distorting and upsetting." 7 Like the audience, the language becomes fragmented; the cast of the pageant utter snippets from their parts, the audience exchange broken phrases, even words are broken by planes and the 'ding dong' of the church bell. Finally, the gramophone begins to state 'dispersed are we' amidst the 'broken goodbyes'; 'The gramophone gurgled Unity - Dispersity . . . Un ... dis ... and ceased.' This breaking of coherence and syntax and word runs through the novel; Isa's murmuring of poetry is cut across by her telephone orders for the fish. A similar though less extreme effect occurs at the end of Jude the Obscure where shouts and cries from the boat races crash across Jude's dying murmurs from the Book of Job. Earlier novelists usually required some explanation, such as a character's delirium (Richardson's Clarissa is an example) to excuse such a breakdown of order in language (Tristram Shandy is, as always, an
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exception). The form of the novel reflects the modernist awareness that things are not wholly ordered and controllable. In conjunction with this disruption of syntax, there are new developments in the treatment of endings. In the last 20 or 30 years it has become something of a cliche to write novels about writing novels. Bernard in The Waves was well ahead of his time in discussing how to make an ending; 'Should this be the end of the story? a kind of sigh? a last ripple of the wave? A trickle of water in some gutter where, burbling, it dies away?" 8 He decides that what he needs is 'a howl, a c r y . . . nothing neat. Nothing that comes down with all its feet on the floor."9 It is surprising that Woolf should write with satisfaction in her diary after completing the final pages of the final version of The Waves: i t is not only finished, but rounded off, completed'. I would have expected her to have preferred Forster's notion of the best way of ending a novel: 'Not rounding off. Opening out.' And this is what she did in Between the Acts. The pageant ends with the fragmentary reflections in the mirror and the fragmentary words on the gramophone. Miss La Trobe feels her work has been a failure, but on her way home she has a vision of the beginning of a new play: i t would be midnight; there would be two figures half-concealed by a rock. The curtain would rise. What would the first words be? The words escaped her'. 20 Between the Acts ends with dusk in the big room, Mrs Swithin finishing a chapter of The Outline of History: 'Prehistoric man, half-human, halfape, roused himself from his semi-crouching position.' It grows darker. Isa and Giles 'must fight; after they had fought they would embrace. . . . It was night before roads were made, or houses. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among the rocks. The curtain rose. They spoke.' It would hardly be possible to make a novel more open-ended than that. There is the added ambiguity of its echo of Miss La Trobe's new play; but this repetition also creates a sense of pattern. I have suggested that Bernard's discussion in The Waves about how to end a novel is a typically twentieth-century technique - in fact, even more characteristic of the fiction of the 1970s and 1980s than of the 1920s and 1930s. Yet there is a parallel in Hardy. In the 1897 version of The Well-Beloved there is talk of the neighbours wanting to 'round off other people's histories in the best machinemade conventional manner'. In spite of Jocelin's and Marcia's hesitation, even reluctance, these wishes 'to give a geometrical shape to their story' are fulfilled. In the grotesque wheelchair wedding
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which follows, Hardy's mockery of the demand for conventional endings is explicit. The open ending of Between the Acts takes place simultaneously at Pointz Hall in June 1939 and in the Stone Age. This telescoping of time runs through the whole book. The oping conversation about the county council's failure to bring water to the village to replace the cesspool is juxtaposed to a brief history of England from the Ancient Britons to the Napoleonic Wars. The pageant repeats this in an extended form. Mrs Swithin, immersed in H.G. Wells cannot distinguish the maid from a mammoth. In the 68 years between Knight hanging on the cliff staring into the stone eyes of a trilobite and Between the Acts, the knowledge of evolutionary processes had been assimilated so that it could permeate a whole novel and be assumed to have been absorbed into the consciousness and subconscious of the characters. Hardy made a start in the novel with an imaginative set-piece on evolution in which 'time closed up like a fan' and in which the present and the remote past were made to coexist. In Between the Acts this has developed into an evocation of layer upon layer of time as it exists in the characters' consciousness and as it impinges especially on the mind of the creative artist.
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'Books open: no conclusion come to' 1
Modernism is not a fixed destination. Any arrival will be an enigma. Woolf said in 'Modern Fiction', 'Life presents question after question which must be left to sound on and on after the story is over in hopeless interrogation.' Or, in Barthes' terms, its aim is to 'multiply signifiers, not to attain some ultimate signified'.2 This book, which attempts to follow novelists on their 'adventure to the unknown', cannot reach a conclusion. The journey started on board Woolf's imaginary train with other modernists flashing past on different tracks. This image vividly indicated her sense of her difference from some other modernists, but its usefulness is restricted, as her later rejection of 'the formal railway line of the sentence' suggests. The hypothetical train of Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf does not follow an existing track but tunnels deep beneath surfaces, follows routes which are 'spasmodic, fragmentary', 3 open to infinite possibilities, and sometimes takes off like a rocket into the cosmos. As she started Between the Acts, Woolf implored herself 'not to call in all the cosmic intensities again'. Instead, she wanted 'perpetual variety and change from intensity to prose and facts'.4 'Prose and facts' are what she had spurned. The escape from these restrictions was modernism and it is this escape route that I have been concerned to map. So the intensities' have been the focus of my attention, while the traditional 'prose and facts' have taken a subordinate (though significant) position. The strange vision of the 'birds from behind the North Pole' in Tess is intensified by being placed alongside women digging up swedes in the mud. Lawrence 185
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places 'daytime consciousness' beside psychological intensities of an extreme kind in the dance by the stacks in The Rainbow. Woolf clashes the two extremes together in the mind of Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse: i t partook, she thought, helping Mr Bankes to an especially tender piece, of eternity'; similarly, Lily felt, 'one wanted to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply, that's a c h a i r . . . yet at the same time, it's a miracle'. In 'Myth and Modern Literature', 5 Christopher Nash suggests that there are motifs 'not viable in standard realism' which can be used to create 'a fluent intercourse between human, chthonic and celestial forces'. In less grandiose and more imaginative terms, these three novelists place such intercourse 'on a level with ordinary experience'. In Modernism, Bradbury and MacFarlane maintain that the modernist novel is 'poised between the artifice of eternity and the conviction that this artifice is no more than a consoling fiction'.6 Gillian Beer suggests that Woolf would like to 'produce the consolation of containment'. 7 But Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf did not throw away the reassurance of traditional plot in order to find consolation elsewhere. Their forms are daring, disruptive, subversive. 'Hardy's texts refuse to stay still within their frames'; the work is 'always on the point of breaking through its own containing forms'. 8 Any consolation in Lawrence is put into a context which undercuts it: Ursula's rainbow at the end of the novel is probably hers alone; Birkin's new superior species is juxtaposed to the world blown apart like a bomb and to the 'mute dead matter' of Gerald's body. Sources of consolation are ironically cheek by jowl with the mundane in Between the Acts - religion and crepe soles might be equally comforting. Challenging changes in form developed alongside challenging changes in ideas. In 1895, in Jude, Hardy said he was dealing with impressions, the question of their consistency or their discordance... being regarded as not of the first moment.' 9 This is his confirmation of the move away from traditional chronological structure leading to climax and resolution; such 'patterns belong with Euclidean geometry, with classical cause and effect determinism . . . such linear patterns are closed f o r m s . . . they reflect a hierarchically ordered world in which every element contributes to some end'. 10 Once such certainties are called into question, fragmented modernist work 'denies us the comfort of finding a centre, a single meaning, either in works of art or in the world'.11 Such close interrelationships between scientific and social ideas and structure and style pervade all the modernist arts. Adorno, in
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The Philosophy of the New Music, says 'The listener.. . feels no particular urgency for a "resolution" of alleged dissonances, but rather spontaneously resists resolution as a retrogression into less sophisticated modes of listening.' 12 Ligeti exuberantly endorses this view: i tend towards something irregular, freakish; music should not be well-bred, with its tie in the right place'. Woolf makes Bernard in The Waves express similar views, in his objections to phrases which safely 'come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground' and to sentences like Roman roads. Lawrence is even more emphatic and direct: 'We need more looseness. We need an apparent formlessness. .. definite form is too mechanical.' 13 Such ideas on the nature of form raised questions about the role of beauty in art. Hardy said he was no longer interested in surface beauty but sought the 'deeper beauty underlying the scenic'. 14 Lawrence said, 'Pound's god is beauty, mine life." 5 He disliked the kind of art you can walk round and contemplate with detachment. Lily in To the Lighthouse complained that beauty 'froze life'. Woolf claimed to be an ugly writer. What is at issue here is the concept of beauty. One kind is 'a precious possession to be taken out occasionally and contemplated . . . the second, which has truth as its condition, strives to enter the otherness of the object while knowing that it can never fully do so'. 16 This is the essence of the modernism of Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf, the 'recognition of some existence other than ours'. 17 Their fiction leads into the 'unknown modes of being' of the unconscious, of animals, of plants, of inanimate objects, even of the cosmos. They write of a world which has 'escaped registration' and 'exists when we're not there to see it'. These three novelists acknowledge the impossibility of 'thinking adequately of the sky' by stressing the way it recedes beyond perception, beyond language into the unknown; this marks one of the differences between their route to modernism and that of Joyce. In the ithaca' section of Ulysses the exact, measuring, scientific account of the sky ironically pretends to define it and to make it accessible to the human mind. Ultimately, Joyce may be implying the same thing as Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf, but irony and parody give his work a totally different tone. Only by implication - and perhaps not even then - is there anything in Ulysses which seems to point beyond human comprehension. Hardy thought trying to do the impossible was the most interesting thing to do. This is the direction in which this branch of modernist fiction points. From 'unstateable' Sue Bridehead through Lawrence and Woolf it leads
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to Beckett, who said, 'I'm working with impotence, ignorance. . . . My little exploration is that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unuseable.... I think anyone nowadays who pays the slightest attention to his own experience finds it the experience of a non-knower, a non-can-er (somebody who cannot)." 8
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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35
Introduction Woolf: Letter to Ethel Smythe 1931. Woolf: Diary 6.9.22. R. Scholes: Structuralism in Literature (Yale University Press, 1974) p. 185. J. Sutherland: Can Jane Eyre be Happy? (Oxford University Press 1997). Herbert Read: A Coat of Many Colours (Routledge & Kegan Paul 1945). Genette: Figures III. S. Beckett: Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (Faber 1972) p . 14. Quoted by Hardy from t h e publishers' report in The Life of Thomas Hardy (Macmillan) p. 5 8 - 6 4 . Ibid. p. 62. In its t r e a t m e n t of sexual relationships it may, possibly, in some ways, have anticipated Lady Chatterley's Lover; in its form, it may have been even more experimental (though probably not in its language). Only guesses are possible; Hardy, unfortunately, submitted t o t h e publishers' judgement and destroyed t h e manuscript. E.T. (Jessie Chambers): D.H. Lawrence: A Personal Record (Frank Cass & Co. 1935) p. 103. Lawrence: Letter to Garnett 24.1.14. Life p. 108. Woolf: Essays II (ed. Leonard Woolf) p. 106. Ibid. p. 3 3 1 . Woolf: Diary 28.11.28. Woolf: The Waves (Hogarth) p. 169. Woolf: Between the Acts (Hogarth) p. 109. Woolf: Diary 2.9.30. Life p. 284. Ibid. p. 64. W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.): On Narrative (Chicago University Press 1981) p. viii. Harold Orel (ed.): Hardy's Personal Writings (Macmillan 1967) pp. 125-33. Barthes: The Pleasure of the Text (New York 1975) p. 14. Life p. 2 9 1 . Fiona Beckett: D.H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet (Macmillan 1997) p. 192. Lawrence: Letter to Garnett 5.6.14. Roger Fowler: Linguistics and the Novel (Methuen 1977) p. 67. Woolf: Collected Essays I (ed. Leonard Woolf) p. 263. Derrida 'The Law of Genre' in Mitchell: On Narrative p. 60. Woolf: Collected Essays I p. 337. Ibid. II p. 228. Bridget Riley at t h e Tate, St Ives 25.10.97. TD c h a p . 36. Lawrence: 'A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover1 (Penguin 1961) p. 92. 189
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Notes
36 Beckett: 'Interview with Tom Driver' Fonim 4 (Columbia University) summer 1961. 37 Orel: Hardy's Personal Writings p. 128. 38 TD c h a p . 58. 39 Heidegger: On the Way to Language (Harper and Rowe 1971) p. 98. 40 Lawrence: Introduction to New Poems, Collected Poems p. 183. 41 The Mayor of Casterbridge chap. 18. 42 RN V.7. 43 TD chap. 19. 44 The Waves p. 79. 45 TonT chap. 8. 46 WB c h a p . 8. 47 Jakob Lothe in Narrative H a w t h o r n (ed.) (Arnold 1985) p. 124. 48 Eagleton: Criticism and Ideology (Verso 1976) p. 161. 49 Ibid. p. 132. 50 Ibid. p. 160. 51 J o h n M e p h a m : Virginia Woolf (Macmillan 1991). 52 'Woolf: Diary 1908' (M.A. Leaska (ed.): A Passionate Apprentice (Hogarth 1990)) p. 3 9 3 . 53 Lawrence: Collected Poems I p. 184. 54 Woolf: Letters Vol. IV p. 15. 55 Between the Acts p. 245. 56 G. Josipovici: The Lessons of Modernism (Macmillan 1987) p. 123. 57 Hardy: 'Midnight o n t h e Great Western' Collected Poems p. 514. 58 Sumner: Thomas Hardy: Psychological Novelist, chap. 9 is a detailed analysis of t h e t r e a t m e n t of Sue. 59 WinL chap. 19. 60 The Waves p. 66. 61 Ibid. p. 114. 62 Lodge: 'The Language of Modernist Fiction' in Bradbury a n d McFarlane: Modernism (Penguin 1976) p. 495. 63 WinL c h a p . 19. 64 To the Lighthouse III.6. 65 Hardy: Collected Poems p. 514. 66 Lawrence: Phoenix p. 419. 67 Woolf: Diary 30.9.26. 68 Ibid. 3.10.26. 69 Woolf: The Haunted House p. 48. 70 Lawrence t o Garnett 5.6.14. 71 Langbaum 'Hardy and Lawrence' in Thomas Hardy Annual n o . 3 N o r m a n Page (ed.) p. 2 3 . 72 Woolf: The Haunted House p. 85. 73 The Waves p. 204. 74 Hardy: Collected Poems p. 598. 75 Between the Acts p. 47. 76 Kangaroo chap. 17. 77 Between the Acts p. 30. 78 WinL c h a p . 13. 79 Ibid. c h a p . 14.
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191
80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94
Ibid. c h a p . 19. Kangaroo c h a p . 17. Woolf: Collected Essays IV:200. McFarlane in Bradbury and McFarlane; Modernism p. 72. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poems (Faber 1954) p. 10. Lite p. 218. Hardy: Collected Poems p. 127. WinL c h a p . 5. Ibid. c h a p . 22. Ibid. Between the Acts p. 181. Ibid. p. 2 5 3 . Woolf: Letters III.65. G. Beer: 'Elegy in To the Lighthouse' Essays in Criticism January 1984, p. 50. M. Bell: D.H. Lawrence: Language and Being (Cambridge University Press 1992) p. 6 1 . 95 G. Josipovici: op. cit. p. 115. 96 P. Ricoeur: Time and Narrative (Chicago University Press 1985) p. 104. 97 TonT c h a p . 8. 2
T h e E x p e r i m e n t a l a n d t h e A b s u r d i n Two
on a
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25
Tower
H. Orel (ed.): Hardy's Personal Writings (Macmillan 1966) p. 135. Lawrence: Phoenix ( H e i n e m a n n 1936) p. 419. Ibid. p. 527. RN 1.1. RN 5.7. RN 3.4. RN 5.2. TonT c h a p . 34. TonT c h a p . 1. TonT c h a p . 4. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. TD 4.3. Conrad: Nostromo 3.10. Ibid. TonT chap. 8. Nostromo 3.8. TonT c h a p . 4. Forster: A Passage to India c h a p . 12. Ibid. TonT c h a p . 8. Life p. 370. Ibid. p. 284. Letter to Mrs Henniker in One Rare Fair Woman Evelyn Hardy and F.B. Pinion (eds) (Macmillan 1972) p. 26. 26 Martin Esslin: Absurd Drama (Penguin 1965) p. 23. 27 L.St.J. Butler: Thomas Hardy after Fifty Years (Macmillan 1977) p. 119.
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Notes
28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
TonT chap. 4. TonT chap. 9. TonT chap. 41. TonT chap. 8. TonT chap. 4. 7bnT chap. 29. JO V.3. Donald Davidson: 'The Traditional Basis of Hardy's Fiction', Southern Review VI (1940). Letter to Gosse, quoted in Purdy: Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study (Oxford University Press 1954) p. 44. TonT chap. 9. TonT chap. 15. Preface to JO. TonT chap. 15. TonT chap. 8. TonT chap. 15. TonT chap. 25. Roy Morrell: Thomas Hardy: the Will and the Way (University of Malaya 1965). TonT chap. 41. Lawrence: Lady Chatterley's Lover chap. 9. TonT chap. 40. Gillian Beer: Darwin's Plots (Routledge & Kegan Paul 1983) p. 254. Some Surrealist Elements in Hardy's Prose and Verse TD chap. 56. TW chap. 41. RN IV.2. WB II.3. Tom Paulin: The Poetry of Perception (Macmillan 1976) p. 24. Quoted by R.H. Wilenski: Modern French Painters (Faber & Faber 1945) p. 274. TW chaps 7, 40. Ibid. chap. 40. Joan Grundy: Hardy and the Sister Arts (Macmillan 1979) p. 57. FMC chap. 46. Life p. 230. In Max Ernst: Beyond Painting and other Writings by the Artist and his Friends (Wittenborn Schultz 1948) p. 193. FMC chap. 46. Life p. 209. Under the Greenwood Tree 1.9. 'The Science of Fiction' in Thomas Hardy's Personal Writings Harold Orel (ed.) (Macmillan 1967). Life p. 177. Ibid. p. 185. TW chap. 23. Life p. 329.
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192 Notes
193
21 Andre Breton: 'First Surrealist Manifesto' in Manifestoes of Sunealism trans. Seaver and Lane (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan 1972). 22 Ernst o p . cit. p. 20. 23 F. Beckett: D.H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet (Macmillan 1997) p. 182. 24 Ibid. p. 189. 25 M. Bell: Literature Modernism and Myth (Cambridge University Press 1997) p. 108. 26 Ibid. 27 Woolf: The Waves p. 79. 28 L.A. Sass: Madness and Modernism (Harvard 1994) p. 137. 29 F. Beckett: op. cit. p. 182. 30 Q u o t e d by Herbert Read in The Philosophy of Modern Art (Faber & Faber 1964) p. 147. 31 F. Beckett: o p . cit. p. 182. 32 Woolf: Diary 10 September 1928. 33 R. Barthes Image Music Text trans. S. Heath (Fontana 1997) p p . 123-4. 34 Quoted in P. Waldberg: Surrealism, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Skira 1962). 35 Life p. 216. 36 Ibid. p. 124. 37 Barthes op. cit. p. 144. 38 Calvin Tomkins: Duchamp: A Biography (Chatto 1997). 39 M. W o o d : r e v i e w of T o m k i n s : Duchamp i n London Review of Books 13 November 1997. 40 Memoir by Edith Mary Fawkes, National Gallery, L o n d o n . 41 Millgate: Thomas Hardy: A Biography (Oxford University Press 1982). 42 Herbert Read: The Philosophy of Modern Art (Faber & Faber 1964) p. 137. 43 Life p. 309. 44 Breton: ' O n Surrealism in its Living Works' op. cit. p. 304. 45 Life p. 285. 46 Ernst o p . cit. p. 1 9 1 . 47 Life p. 111. 48 N o r m a n Page: Thomas Hardy (Routledge & Kegan Paul 1977) p. 64. 49 Hardy: Preface to Poems of the Past and of the Present. 50 G r u n d y o p . cit. p. 49. 51 Life p. 284. 52 'The Profitable Reading of Fiction' in Orel op. cit. p. 122. 4
C h a n c e a n d I n d e t e r m i n a c y in Hardy's N o v e l s a n d Poetry 1 J o h n Cage: Silence (Calder a n d Boyars 1988). 2 See Chapter 10 for a d e v e l o p m e n t of this parallel between 4"33' a n d Between the Acts. 3 David Sylvester: Interviews with Francis Bacon (Thames and Hudson 1975) p. 53. 4 Hardy's Collected Letters Purdy a n d Millgate (ed.) 1.117. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 2.215. 7 Ibid. 3.5. 8 A Laodicean Book IV.IV.
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Notes
9 Nadeau: A History of Surrealism (New York 1965) p. 22. 10 In his 1988 Hardy Society Birthday Lecture, '"No Answerer I": Hardy's Art of Embracing Contraries' Professor Schweik developed these points further, with reference to the multiple, contrasting and unresolved ethics of the characters in The Woodlanders. 11 Life p. 155. 12 Hardy: Preface to Poems of the Past and the Present (The Complete Poems p. 84) James Gibson (ed.) (Macmillan 1976). 13 Fiona Beckett: D.H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet (Macmillan 1997) which explores (passim) Lawrence's use of oxymoron. 14 Life p. 229. 15 The Guardian 22 August 1988. 16 M. Bell, D.H. Lawrence: Language and Being (Cambridge University Press 1992) p. 61. 17 Ibid. p. 91. 18 Ibid. p. 64. 19 Ibid. p. 110. 20 Forster: Aspects of the Novel (Arnold 1927) chap. 5. 21 D.H. Lawrence: Phoenix p. 410. 22 These aspects of Jude the Obscure are examined in Sumner: Thomas Hardy: Psychological Novelist, chap. 9. 23 Further implications of the use of doubles are considered in Chapter 5. 24 Radio 3 (Concert from Royal Festival Hall) 17 November 1997. 25 Woolf: Between the Acts (Hogarth) p. 25. 5 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
Discoveries of Dissonance: Hardy's Late Fiction G. Genette: Figures of Literary Discourse (Blackwell 1982) p. 202. F. Kermode: The Sense of an Ending (Oxford University Press 1966) p. 179. Purdy and Millgate (ed.) Hardy: Collected Letters 1.10. W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.): On Narrative (Chicago University Press 1980) p. viii. Ibid. p. ix. Bradbury and MacFarlane (eds): Modernism (Penguin 1976) p. 30. Gregor and Irwin: 'Either side of Wessex' in L.St J. Butler (ed.) Thomas Hardy after Fifty Years (Macmillan 1977) p. 155. Hardy: 'The Science of Fiction' in H. Orel (ed.) Hardy's Personal Writings (Macmillan 1967) pp. 134-8. Woolf: Collected Essays II (Chatto 1966) p. 225. Proust: Letters Curtis (ed.) (Chatto & Windus 1950). Life p. 216. Ibid. p. 185. D.H. Lawrence: The Symbolic Meaning (Centaur Press 1962) p. 17. Karl Miller: Doubles (Oxford University Press 1985) p. vi. M. Foucault: The Order of Things (Tavistock 1971) chap. 9. F. Kermode op. cit. p. 173. G. Josipovici: The Modern English Novel (Open Books 1976) p. 173. T. Eagleton: Criticism and Ideology (Verso 1978) p. 132. Ibid. p. 161. F. Kermode: op. cit. p. 179.
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194 Notes
6 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27
195
The Well-Beloved Life p. 286. Ibid. p. 287. Lawrence: 'Fantasia of the Unconscious' (Penguin 1971) p. 177. Life p. 105. Ibid. p. 217. William James: Principes of Psychology Vol. 1 (Routledge & Kegan Paul 1953-71) p. 239. Bergson: Time and Free Will (1889) (Allen & Unwin 1971) p. 98. Ibid. p. 133. Woolf: Diary 28.11.28. Woolf: A Haunted House (Hogarth 1944) pp. 120-1. J. Hillis Miller: Fiction and Repetition (Blackwell 1982) p. 154. Patricia Ingham: Thomas Hardy (Harvester Wheatsheaf 1989) p. 97. Gillian Beer: Darwin's Plots (Routledge 1985) chap. 8. Woolf: Diary, July 1926. J. Hillis Miller: Introduction to The Well-Beloved (Macmillan 1975) p. 12. The Adventure to the U n k n o w n V Woolf: 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown' in Collected Essays 1.320. F.E. Hardy: Life of Thomas Hardy p. 187. D.H. Lawrence: Phoenix p. 579. See Mark Kinkead-Weekes 'Lawrence on Hardy' in Thomas Hardy after Fifty Years L.StJ. Butler (ed.) (Macmillan 1977) for a useful example. D.H. Lawrence: Phoenix p. 527. Life p. 370. R. Sumner: Thomas Hardy: Psychological Novelist chap. 7. Woolf: 'The Narrow Bridge of Art', Collected Essays 11.225. Life p. 291. TD chap. 43. Sons and Lovers chap. 1. Life p. 253. 'In Front of the Landscape', Hardy, Complete Poems (ed. Gibson) p. 303. Sons and Lovers chap. 15. W chap. 48. Sons and Lovers chap. 15. JO Part XL WinL chap. 30. Ibid. chap. 31. 'Poetry of the present', Complete Poems Vol. I pp. 183-4. JO Part Second, II. Ibid. Part Third, I. Ibid. Part Fourth, III. Ibid. Part Sixth, III. Ibid. Part Sixth, VIII. Ibid. Part Sixth, IX. These aspects of Boldwood and Sue are explored more fully in my Thomas Hardy: Psychological Novelist (Macmillan 1981).
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Notes
28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41
Aspects of the Novel chap. 3. R chap. 11. Studies in Classic American Literature (Penguin 1971) chap. 10. WinL chap. 13. Ibid. chap. 23. Preston and Hoare (eds) Lawrence and the Modern World p. 94. Life p. 329. Phoenix II pp. 275-6 (Heinemann 1968). Jacques Berthoud in D.H. Lawrence A.H. Gomme (ed.) (Harvester 1978). 'A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover' (Penguin 1961) p. 92. TD chap. 36. Orel (ed.) Hardy's Personal Writings p. 128. Life p. 177. Phoenix II p. 567.
8 A Language of the Unconscious 1 R chap. VI. All quotations from The Rainbow in this section are from Chapter VI unless otherwise stated. 2 Letter to Edward Garnett, 5 June 1914. 3 The relationship between these changes and unconscious impulses is discussed in my Thomas Hardy: Psychological Novelist chap. 9. 4 But Aldous Huxley claimed that Lawrence 'seemed to know by personal experience, what it was like to be a tree or a daisy or a breaking wave or even the mysterious moon itself. (Introduction to A. Huxley (ed.) The Letters of D.H. Lawrence's (Heinemann 1932).) 5 John Worthen: D.H. Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel (Macmillan 1979) p. 68. 6 Phoenix p. 520. 7 W chap. XXIII. 8 Life (Macmillan 1962) p. 77. 9 Terry Eagleton: Criticism and Ideology (Verso 1976) p. 131. 10 Colin Clarke: The River of Dissolution (Routledge Kegan Paul 1969) p. 49. This seems to me a valid view of this episode, but in his volume of the Cambridge biography D.H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile (Cambridge University Press 1996) p. 222, Mark Kinkead-Weekes argues that this 'dark relation . .. can still bring about a kind of rebirth'. He points to Will's achievement of 'a role in society' as evidence. Neither that, nor the parts played by Will and Anna in the rest of the novel support such a positive way of seeing this episode. 11 Clarke op. cit. p. 53. 12 Ibid. 13 Lawrence: Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (Penguin 1971) p. 213. 14 RN IV.III. 15 Lawrence: Apocalypse (Penguin 1974) chap. 5. 16 Lawrence: Letter 21.9.14. 17 R.M. Kinkead-Weekes (ed.) p. 627 (Cambridge University Press 1989). 18 RN I.VI. 19 Worthen op. cit. p. 81.
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196 Notes
Notes Women
in
Love
1 Letter to Ernest Collings 17.1.13. 2 Phoenix p. 475. 3 Ibid. p. 573. 4 Letter to Gertler 1.4.17. 5 'A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover' (Penguin 1961) p. 92. 6 Phoenix p. 578. 7 Ibid. p. 570. 8 Mrs Oliphant: Review of Jude the Obscure (Blackwood's Magazine, January 1896). 9 Phoenix p. 570. 10 Peter Brook: The Shifting Point p . 227. 11 A. Huxley: Introduction to The Letters of D.H. Lawrence. 12 Letter to Brett, January 1925. 13 R. Sumner: Thomas Hardy: Psychological Novelist (Macmillan 1981) (chap. 9) develops this p o i n t . 14 Phoenix p. 529. 15 G. Josipovici: The Lessons of Modernism (Macmillan 1977) p. 123. 16 Virginia Woolf: 'Phases of Fiction' in CE II Leonard Woolf (ed.) p. 110. 17 Phoenix II. p. 102. 18 Phoenix p. 528. 19 Phoenix II p. 96. 20 Jung: Collected Works (RKP) Vol. 8. p. 175. 21 Phoenix II p. 276. 22 Jung: o p . cit. p. 219. 23 Ibid. p. 220. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. p. 222. 26 Phoenix II p. 102. 27 Apocalypse (Penguin 1974) p. 192. 28 Scholes and Kellog: The Nature of Narrative (Oxford University Press 1966) p. 279. 29 Life p. 329. 30 Phoenix p. 220. 31 Ibid. 32 Orel (ed.): Hardy's Personal Writings p. 135. 33 Jung: Collected Works Vol. 15 p. 75. 34 Ibid. p. 180. 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Virginia Woolf a n d D.H.
Lawrence
D.H. Lawrence: 'Morality and t h e Novel' in Phoenix p. 527. David Lodge: Language of Fiction (Routledge 1966) p. 86. J. Hillis Miller: Fiction and Repetition (Blackwell 1988) c h a p . 8. N.K. Hayles: Chaos Bound p. 176. James Gleick: Chaos p. 299. J. Hillis Miller op. cit. p. 230. Diary 2.11.32. J o h n Cage: Silence.
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9
197
Notes
9 T.S. Eliot: 'Burnt N o r t o n ' in Collected Poems (Faber and Faber 1963). 10 Foucault: Madness and Civilisation p. 288. 11 Her use, in other parts of t h e novel, of t h e village idiot to bring in t h e alarmingly unpredictable a n d irrational serves a similar purpose to t h a t proposed by Foucault. 12 Diary, Italy 1908. (Leaska (ed.): A Passionate Apprentice). 13 A Room of One's Own chap. V. 14 CE 1.95. 15 Miller op. cit. p. 230. 16 Diary 30.10.26. 17 Life p. 370. 18 Phoenix p. 527. 19 Woolf: CE 11.225. 20 TonT c h a p . 4. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. chap. 8. 23 'Midnight o n t h e Great Western' CP. p. 514. 24 WinL p. 3 5 3 . 25 Ibid. c h a p . 29. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. c h a p . 3 1 . 28 Ibid. 29 Woolf: Diary 30.9.26. 30 Woolf: Diary 30.10.26. 31 Patricia Clements 'As in t h e rough stream of a glacier' in Virginia Woolf: New Critical Essays Clements and Grundy (eds) (Vision Press 1983) p. 22. 32 Woolf: CE 11.227. 33 Woolf: Diary 25.9.29. 34 Woolf: Diary 11.10.29. 35 Early ts. p. 57, q u o t e d by M. Leaska: Poyntz Hall (New York University Press 1983) p. 6 1 . 36 Wallace Stevens Collected Poems (Faber & Faber 1984) p. 9. 37 Bruce Gregory: Inventing Reality: Physics as Language (Wiley Science Editions 1958) p. 98. 38 Miller op. cit. p. 216. 39 Ibid. p. 217. 40 A.J. Freedman a n d G.C. Donley: Einstein as Myth and Muse (Cambridge University Press 1985) p. 134. 41 Diary 25.7.26. 42 Freedman and Donley op. cit. p. 111. 11
Hardy to Woolf
The page references to The Waves and Between the Acts are to t h e Hogarth Press editions. 1 Diary 28.11.28. 2 TTL III.4. 3 A Pair of Blue Eyes, chap. XXII. 4 TTL III.3.
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198
5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
Ibid. TTL II.6. TTL II.9. TTL II.9 E. Auerbach Mimesis (Princeton 1968) p. 538 (first published 1946). A more recent critic has gone to the opposite extreme and suggested that 'each new work in one way of another is a repetition of a long row of previous ones' (]. Hillis Miller: Fiction and Repetition p. 231). A position somewhere between the two would seem a more accurate one. MofC chap. 18. TTL III.9. Diary 1.2.31. TW p. 211. JO VIII. TW p. 205. BTA p. 214. TW p. 189. Ibid. p. 209. BTA p. 189. 'Books open: n o c o n c l u s i o n c o m e to' BTA (Hogarth) p. 74. Barthes: S/Z (1970) p. 171. Woolf: 'An Unwritten Novel' in A Haunted House p. 14-27. Diary 26.4.38. Nash C : 'Myth and modern literature' in M. Bell (ed.) The Context of English Literature 1900-1930 (Methuen 1980) p. 181. Bradbury and McFarlane (eds) Modernism (Penguin 1976) p. 412. G. Beer: Virginia Woolf p. 119. T. Eagleton: Preface to John Goode: Thomas Hardy p. vii. Hardy: Preface to JO. Friedman and Donley: Einstein as Myth and Muse (Cambridge University Press 1985) pp. 134-5. Josipovici, G.: The Lessons of Modernism (Macmillan 1977) p. 138. Adorno: The Philosophy of the New Music (Sheed and Ward 1973). Phoenix pp. 249-50. Life p. 185. Lawrence: letter, November 1909. Josipovici, G.: op. cit. pp. 103-4. Woolf: A Haunted House (Hogarth 1944 and Granada 1982) p. 45. Fletcher and Spurling: Beckett (Methuen 1972) p. 41.
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Notes 199
Main Works Discussed Thomas Hardy Desperate Remedies A Pair of Blue Eyes The Return of the Native Two on a Tower The Mayor of Casterbridge The Woodlanders Tess of the D'Urbervilles Jude the Obscure The Well-Beloved 'The Fiddler of the Reels' (in Life's Ironies) Collected Poems (ed. James Gibson) Hardy's Personal Writings (ed. Harold Orel) The Life of Thomas Hardy (by F.E. Hardy)
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Bibliography
D.H. Lawrence Sons and Lovers The Rainbow Women in Love Kangaroo The Complete Poems (eds de Sola Pinto and Roberts) (Heinemann 1964) The Symbolic Meaning (Centaur Press 1962) Studies in Classical American Literature (Penguin 1971) Phoenix (Heinemann 1934) Phoenix II (Heinemann 1968) Apocalypse (Penguin 1974) A Propos of'Lady Chatterley's Lover' (Penguin 1961) Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (Penguin 1971) 'Study of Thomas Hardy' Phoenix (Heinemann 1936) Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway To the Lighthouse The Waves Between the Acts A Haunted House (Hogarth 1944) A Room of One's Own (1929) (Penguin 1945) Collected Essays (ed. Leonard Woolf) (Chatto & Windus 1966) Diaries (Penguin 1979-84) Letters (Hogarth 1977) 200
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Adorno T. The Philosophy of the New Music, Sheed and Ward 1973 Auerbach E. Mimesis, Princeton 1968 Barker H. Essay in The Guardian 22 August 1988 Barthes R. Image, Music, Text, Fontana 1977 The Pleasure of the Text, New York Hill and Wang 1975 S/Z (1970), Cape 1975 Bayley J. An Essay on Hardy (Cambridge University Press 1978) Beckett F. D.H. Lawrence: The Thinker as Poet, Macmillan 1997 Beckett, S. Our Exagmination round his Factiflcation for Incamination of Work in Progress, 1929; Faber and Faber 1972 Beer G. Virginia Woolf, Edinburgh University Press 1996 Arguing with the Past, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1989 'Elegy in To the Lighthouse', Essays in Criticism, January 1984 Darwin's Plots, Routledge Kegan Paul 1983 Bell M. Literary Modernism and Myth, Cambridge University Press 1997 D.H. Lawrence: Language and Being, Cambridge University Press 1992 (ed.) The Context of English Literature 1900-1930, Methuen 1980 Bergson H. Time and Free Will (1889), Allen and Unwin 1911 Berthoud J. in D.H. Lawrence A.H. Gomme (ed.) Harvester 1978 Bowlby R. Virginia Woolf, Blackwell 1988 Bradbury M. and J. McFarlane (eds) Modernism, Penguin 1976 Breton A. Manifestoes of Surrealism, Ann Arbor, US State 1972 Brook P. The Shifting Point, Methuen 1989 Brown D. The Modernist Self in Twentieth Century English Literature, Macmillan 1989 Butler C. Modernism, OUP 1994 Butler L.StJ. (ed.) Thomas Hardy after Fifty Years, Macmillan 1977 Cage J. Silence, Calder and Boyars 1988 Camus The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. J. O'Brien, Penguin 1975 Clarke C. The River of Dissolution Routledge & Kegan Paul 1969 Clements P. and I. Grundy (eds) Virginia Woolf: New Critical Essays, Vision 1983 Cohn D. Transparent Minds, Princeton University Press 1978 Conrad J. Nostromo, Dent 1904 Daleski H. M. in D. H. Lawrence and the Modern World (eds) Preston and Hoare Darwin C. On the Origin of the Species, London 1859 Davidson D. 'The Traditional Basis of Hardy's Fiction' in Southern Review VI 1940 Derrida J. 'The Law of Genre' in Mitchell (ed.) On Narrative, Chicago 1981 Donoghue D. The Sovereign Ghost, Faber and Faber 1978 Eagleton T. Preface to J. Goode: Thomas Hardy, Blackwell 1988 Criticism and Ideology, Verso 1978 Eliot T.S. Collected Poems, Faber and Faber 1964 Ernst, Max Beyond Painting, Wittenborn Schultz 1948 Esslin M. Absurd Drama, Penguin 1965 E.T. (Jessie Chambers) D.H. Lawrence: A Personal Record Frank Cass & Co. 1935 Fawkes E.M. Memoir of Turner, National Gallery, London
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Critical and General Works
Fish S. Is there a text in this class? Harvard 1980 Fleishman A. Virginia Woolf, Johns Hopkins 1975 Fletcher J. and J. Spurling Beckett Methuen 1972 Foucault M. The Order of Things, Tavistock 1971 Madness and Civilisation, 1965 Fowler R. Linguistics and the Novel, Methuen 1977 Freedman R. Virginia Woolf: Revaluation and Continuity, California University Press 1980 Freedman A.J. and C.C. Donley Einstein as Myth and Muse, Cambridge University Press 1985 Genette G. Figures of Literary Discourse, Blackwell 1982 Gleick J. Chaos, Cardinal 1987 Gomme A.H. (ed.) D.H. Lawrence, Harvester 1978 Goode J. Thomas Hardy, Blackwell 1988 Gregor I. (with M. Irwin) 'Either Side of Wessex' in L.StJ. Butler (ed.): Thomas Hardy after Fifty Years, Macmillan 1977 Gregory B. Inventing Reality, Wiley Science Edition 1958 Grundy J. Hardy and the Sister Arts, Macmillan 1972 Hardy E. and F.B. Pinion (eds) One Rare Fair Woman, Macmillan 1972 Hayles N.K. Chaos Bound, Cornell University Press 1990 The Cosmic Web, Cornell University Press 1984 Heidegger M. On the Way to Language, Harper & Rowe 1971 Huxley A. (ed.) The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Heinemann 1932 Ingham P. Thomas Hardy, Harvester 1989 Ingram A. The Language of D.H. Lawrence, Macmillan 1990 Irwin M. (with I. Gregor) 'Either Side of Wessex' in L.StJ. Butler (ed.) Thomas Hardy after Fifty Years, Macmillan 1977 Jacobus M. Women Writing and Writing about Women, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1983 James W. Principles of Psychology, Macmillan 1890 Josipovici G. The Lessons of Modernism, Macmillan 1977 The Modern English Novel, Open Books 1976 Joyce J. Ulysses, Bodley Head 1937 Jung C. Collected Works, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1953-71 Essays in Fiction, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1983 Kermode F. Continuities Routledge & Kegan Paul 1968 The Sense of an Ending, Oxford University Press 1966 Kiely R. (ed.) Modernism Reconsidered, Harvard University Press 1983 Kinkead-Weekes M. D.H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile, Cambridge University Press 1996 'Lawrence on Hardy' in Butler L.StJ. (ed.) Thomas Hardy after Fifty Years', Macmillan 1977 Langbaum R. 'Hardy and Lawrence' in Thomas Hardy Annual no. 3 N. Page (ed.) Macmillan 1985 Leaska M.A. (ed.) A Passionate Apprentice, Hogarth 1990 Lee H. Virginia Woolf, Chatto & Windus 1996 Lodge D. Modes of Modern Writing, Edward Arnold 1977 'The Language of Modernist Fiction' in Bradbury and McFarlane (eds) Modernism, Penguin 1976
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The Language of Fiction, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1966 McLaurin A. Virginia Woolf: The Echoes Enslaved, Cambridge University Press 1973 Meisel P. The Myth of the Modern, Yale University Press 1987 Mepham J. Virginia Woolf, Macmillan 1991 Miller J. Hillis Fiction and Repetition, Blackwell 1982 Miller K. Doubles, Oxford University Press 1985 Millgate M. Thomas Hardy: a Biography, Oxford University Press 1982 Mitchell WJ.T. (ed.) On Narrative, Chicago University Press 1981 Morrell R. Thomas Hardy: The Will and the Way, University of Malaya University Press 1965 Nadeau M. A History of Surrealism, New York 1965 Naremore J. The World without a Self, Yale University Press 1973 Nash C. 'Myth and Modern Literature' in M. Bell (ed.) The Context of English Literature 1900-1930, Methuen 1980 Nicholls P. Modernism, Macmillan 1995 Oliphant (Mrs) Review of Jude the Obscure in Blackwood's Magazine January 1896 Orel H. (ed.) Hardy's Personal Writings, Macmillan 1966 Page N. (ed.) Thomas Hardy Annual nos 1 and 3, Macmillan 1983 and 1985 Thomas Hardy, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1977 Paulin T. The Poetry of Perception, Macmillan 1976 Perloff M. The Poetics of Indeterminacy, Princeton 1981 Pinion F.B. and E. Hardy (eds) One Rare Fair Woman, Macmillan 1972 Popper K. Indeterminism and Human Freedom (Routledge & Kegan Paul 1982) Preston and Hoare (eds) D.H. Lawrence and the Modern World, Macmillan 1989 Proust M. Letters Curtis, (ed.), Chatto and Windus 1950 Purdy R.L. Thomas Hardy: a Bibliographical Study, Oxford University Press 1954 Quinones R. Mapping Literary Modernism, Princeton University Press 1985 Rabbetts J. Hardy to Faulkner, Macmillan 1989 Ragussis M. The Subterfuge of Art, Johns Hopkins University Press 1978 Read H. The Philosophy of Modern Art, Faber and Faber 1964 A Coat of Many Colours, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1945 Ricoeur P. Time and Narrative, Chicago University Press 1985 Salgado G. A Preface to Lawrence, Longman 1982 Sass L.A. Madness and Modernism, Oxford University Press 1966 Scholes R. Structuralism in Literature, Yale 1974 Scholes R. and R. Kellog The Nature of Narrative, Oxford University Press 1966 Schweik R. 'No Answerer I' in Hardy Journal 1988 Shklovsky V 'Art as Technique' in Modern Criticism and Theory D. Lodge (ed.) Longmans 1988 Stevens W. Collected Poems, Faber and Faber 1984 Stevenson R. Modernist Fiction, Harvester 1992 Sumner R. Thomas Hardy: Psychological Novelist, Macmillan 1981 Sutherland J. Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?, OUP 1997 Sylvester D. Interviews with Francis Bacon, Thames & Hudson 1975 Tomkins C. Duchamp, Chatto 1997
10.1057/9780230599154 - A Route to Modernism, Rosemary Sumner
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Trotter D. The English Novel in History 1895-1920, Routledge & Kegan Paul 1993 Waldberg F. Surrealism trans. Stuart Gilbert, Skira 1962 Wilenski R.H. Modern French Painters, Faber and Faber 1945 Wood M. Review of Tomkins: Duchamp in London Review of Books 13 November 1997 Worthen J. D.H. Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel, Macmillan 1979 Zwerdling A. Virginia Woolf and the Real World, Berkeley 1985
10.1057/9780230599154 - A Route to Modernism, Rosemary Sumner
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204 Bibliography
abstraction 17, 39, 57, 73, 74, 76, 95, 113-14, 119, 128, 129, 130, 131, 136, 138, 140, 142, 144, 146, 163, 165, 167, 175, 180, 181 absurd, t h e 26-9 Adorno, T. 186-7 Andre, C. 45 Aragon, L 53 art 34, 65, 73, 9 0 - 1 , 130, 152, 157, 158, 188 Auerbach, E. 175, 177 Bacon, F. 50 Barker, H. 55 Barthes, R. 43, 44, 49 Bayley, J. 53, 77 beauty 9 1 , 92, 115, 158 Beckett, F. 5, 43, 194n Beckett, S. 26, 27, 30, 5 1 , 55, 70, 78, 92, 188 Beer, G. 20, 43, 186 Bell, M. 20, 42, 57, 199n Bennett, A. 170 Berger, J. 89 Bergson, H. 84 Berthoud, J. 196n Blake, W. 115 Borges, J. 60, 89 Bradbury, M. 186 Breton, A. 43 Bronte, C. 58 Brook, P. 128 Bunuel, L. 40 Burroughs, W. 50 Butler, L.StJ. 26 Cage, J. 49, 50, 156-7 Calas, N. 39 Clarke, C. 115-16 Camus, A. 28 Cezanne, P. 93, 127 C h a m b e r s , J. (E.T.) 3
c h a n c e see i n d e t e r m i n a c y chaos 7, 8, 12, 13, 23, 30, 4 9 - 6 5 , 90, 95, 134, 150-9, 174, 178 Clodd, E. 39 closure see endings Collins, W. 170 consciousness 5, 8, 8 4 - 7 , 9 5 - 6 , 102, 104-5, 109, 117-19, 122-4, 127-8, 133, 139, 161, 175-6, 178-9, 184 contradiction 6, 11, 35, 37, 53, 108-9, 126-7, 132, 151 contraries 18, 5 1 , 53, 55, 60 Dada 46 Daleski, H.M. 104, 143 Dali, S. 47, 49, 84 dancing 117-83 Darwin, C. 25, 84, 171, 172 death, t r e a t m e n t of 73, 79, 98, 1 0 0 - 1 , 145-6, 150 De Chirico, G. 37 Derrida, J. 5 determinism 62-3 discord 56, 71, 78, 135, 154, 160, 163, 186 disproportion 35, 36, 38 dissonance 6 6 - 8 0 , 187 doubles 74-6 Eagleton, T. 79, 92, 114, 199n Einstein, A. 83 Eliot, G. 54, 61 Eliot, T.S. 19 Ellis, H. 50 Eluard, P. 17 endings 11, 58, 78-80, 88-90, 92, 151, 160, 169, 183, 184 e n t r o p y 152, 174, 179 Ernst, M. 35, 38, 39, 45, 46, 83 Esslin, M. 26 evolution 18, 20, 171-2, 183-4 205
10.1057/9780230599154 - A Route to Modernism, Rosemary Sumner
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Index
Index
Fawcett Society 29 Fawkes, E.M. 46 Fish, S. xiii, 80 Flaubert, G. 66, 67 form 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 11, 12, 28, 55, 69, 71, 77-9, 82, 88, 94, 108, 111, 121, 1 2 5 - 3 3 , 151-5, 169, 170, 174, 180, 184-7 Forster, E.M. 25, 103, 153 Foucault, M. 6, 77, 156 Fowler, R. 5 Fowles, J. 89 fragmentation 6, 11, 12, 5 1 , 77, 86, 148, 154, 156, 158, 173, 182, 183, 186 Freud, S. 6 1 , 62, 164 Garnett, E. 5, 6 Genette, G. 66 Gleick, J. 155 Golding, W. 101 Gosse, E. 29 Gregor, I. 53, 70-1 Gregory, B. 168 Grundy, J. 38, 40, 48 Hardy, T. ' C a n d o u r in English Fiction' 7, 30, 72, 9 1 , 105 Desperate Remedies 2, 27, 35, 59, 67, 84, 170 Dynasts, The 70 'Distracted Preacher, The' 59 Far From the Madding Crowd 24, 3 8 - 4 1 , 52, 101 'Fiddler of t h e Reels, The' 43, 117-19 Jude the Obscure 6, 11, 13, 26, 29, 3 1 , 40, 58, 6 1 , 63, 66, 68-79, 9 1 - 1 0 5 , 109, 114, 127, 129, 143, 151, 159, 160 Laodicean, A. 27, 5 2 - 3 Life of Thomas Hardy 25, 34, 39, 4 1 , 48, 55, 67, 72, 91 Mayor of Casterbridge, The 13, 18, 24, 40, 5 5 - 6 3 , 74, 78, 79, 178 'Mere Interlude, A' 59
Our Exploits at West Poley 5 1 - 2 Pair of Blue Eyes, A 3, 40, 48, 61, 86, 170-9 Poems: 'Abbey Mason, T h e ' 45-6, 'Drinking Song' 63, 'During Wind and Rain' 37, 'Fallow Deer, T h e ' 16, 'Haunter, The' 57, 'Midnight o n t h e Great Western' 14-15, ' P h a n t o m Horsewoman, T h e ' 57, 'Thoughts at M i d n i g h t ' 31, 'To an U n b o r n Pauper Child' 14, 16, 'Wessex Heights' 62 Poor Man and the Lady, The 23, 54, 56, 6 6 - 7 , 170 Return of the Native, The 9, 10, 2 2 - 3 , 34, 36, 40, 48, 52, 56, 58, 79, 89, 9 5 - 6 , 117, 120, 123-4, 160, 180 'Science of Fiction, T h e ' 22, 70 Tess of the D'Urbervilles 8, 14, 18, 3 1 , 35, 40, 44, 55, 57, 59, 60, 75, 116, 129, 160, 178, 185 Two on a Tower 10, 2 1 - 3 3 , 60, 64, 97, 160 Well-Beloved, The 66, 72-9, 8 1 - 9 2 , 183 Woodlanders, The 35, 38, 4 0 - 3 , 5 7 - 8 , 6 1 , 7 2 - 3 , 9 8 - 1 0 0 , 114, 128, 139 h a r m o n y 7-13, 23, 6 8 - 9 , 95, 105, 126-55, 158, 160 Hayles, N.K. 155 Heidegger, M. 8 Huxley, A. 196n imagery 83, 104, 110-12, 114-15, 120, 125, 139, 147-8, 165-6, 181 impersonality 7 1 , 124, 128, 142, 146, 179, 180 inconclusiveness 8, 54, 185-8 incongruity 29, 69, 70 indeterminacy 4 4 - 5 , 4 9 - 6 5 , 8 1 , 83, 100-2, 116, 136, 143, 176, 182 Ingham, P. 89
10.1057/9780230599154 - A Route to Modernism, Rosemary Sumner
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207
i n n o v a t i o n 1, 3, 4, 10, 14, 48, 67, 68, 83, 89, 9 3 , 94, 96, 106, 112-16, 1 2 2 - 3 , 129, 145, 170, 177-8, 181 interrogatives 131, 144, 145, 185 irony 29, 69, 70, 78, 79, 88, 151, 173, 187 Irwin, M. 71
Women in Love 10, 14, 17, 18, 20, 50, 58, 6 1 , 63, 73, 79, 84, 8 9 - 9 3 , 101, 104-5, 126-49, 160-3 Leaska, M.A. 198n Leavis, F.R. 9 Ligeti, G. 64, 187 linearity 4, 77, 85, 155, 170
James, H. 31 James, W. 84-5 Job, Book of 69, 79, 100, 159 J o h n s o n , B.S. 50 Joyce, J. 1, 2, 5, 54, 77, 187 Josipovici, G. 13, 20, 186, 194n, 199n Jung, C. 133, 138-9, 148-9
Magritte, R. 34, 35, 40, 4 1 , 43, 53 McFarlane 191 n Miller, J. Hillis 8 9 - 9 0 Miller, K. 74 Millgate, M. 46 Mitchell, W.J.T. 189n Mondrian, P. 6 Morrell, R. 32, 44, 5 1 , 53 music 54, 109, 117-18, 156, 158-9, 168, 174, 187
Keats, J. 167 Kermode, F. 66, 78, 80 Kinkead-Weekes, M. 123 Langbaumn, R. 15 language 107, 109-10, 121, 124, 125, 128, 132, 140, 143-4, 148-9, 158-9, 163, 166-7, 182 Lawrence, D.H. 9 3 - 1 6 9 Apocalypse 121 'A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover' 7, 129 'Daughters of t h e Vicar' 122-3 Kangaroo 17, 28 'The Ladybird' 100 Lady Chatterley's Lover 32 'Morality a n d t h e Novel' 94, 133 'New Eve a n d Old Adam' 8, 127-9, 136 'Prologue to Women in Love' 134, 136 Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious 125 The Rainbow 13, 20, 27, 9 3 - 6 , 103, 107-25, 129, 140, 142, 181, 186 Sons and Lovers 90, 97-9 Studies in Classical American Literature 104 'Study of T h o m a s Hardy' 15, 22, 43, 60, 93, 126, 134 'The W h i t e Stocking' 117-19
Nadeau, M. 53 narration 4, 57, 66, 68, 170 narrator 123, 178-9, 181 Nash, C. 186 negation, negatives 16, 140-7 Noyes, A. 51 Orel, H. 191n o x y m o r o n 122 Page, N. 48 pattern see form Paulin, T. 36-7 Perloff, M. 71 Picasso, P. 39, 82 plot 2-5, 44, 54, 60, 67, 88, 170, 186 poetry 5, 6, 8, 12, 16, 25, 96, 166, 168 Popper, K. 6 2 - 3 Pound, E. 187 Preston, P. 196n Proust, M. 72, 77, 8 1 , 91 psychology 4, 13, 26, 3 0 - 1 , 6 1 , 95, 127, 130, 132, 137-8, 150, 175, 186 Read, H. 2, 4 1 , 47 realism 5, 34, 50, 69, 73, 8 5 - 6 , 9 8 - 9 , 101, 114, 186
10.1057/9780230599154 - A Route to Modernism, Rosemary Sumner
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Index
Index
reality 27, 34, 36, 4 1 - 3 , 8 1 , 157, 179 repetition 13, 121-2, 149 r h y t h m 3, 5, 8, 13, 107, 109-10, 114, 120-2, 157, 180-1 Richardson S. 182 Ricoeur, P. 20 Riley, B. 6, 11 Rorty, R. 65 Scholes, R. 142 Schopenhauer, A. 37 Schweik, R. 54 Schwitters, K. 46, 50 sexuality 3 1 , 105-42 Shklovsky, V. 50 Smythe, E. 12 space 2 2 - 3 3 , 94, 9 7 - 9 , 164-5, 181 Stein, G. 1, 71 Stephen, L. 84 Sterne, L. 162, 182 Stevens, W. 17, 167 Stockhausen, K. 101 Strangeness 14, 35, 43, 53, 62, 110, 112, 132, 137, 139, 142, 161-2, 164, 166 structure see form Surrealism 3 4 - 4 8 Sutherland, J. 2 symmetry 11-12, 39 Tate Gallery 45 Tchaikovsky, P.I. 54, 64 time 2, 14, 8 4 - 7 , 94-9, 155, 162-5, 172-4, 177, 181, 184
Turner, W.MJ. 93, 129
4 1 , 43, 46, 50, 72,
unconsciousness 5, 8, 13, 17, 34, 42, 89, 9 5 - 6 , 101-4, 109, 112, 114, 116, 119-25, 127, 133, 167, 179, 187 u n k n o w n , t h e 2, 15, 2 0 - 3 3 , 9 3 - 1 0 6 , 114, 116, 123, 140, 145, 160, 167-8, 187 verisimilitude
see realism
Wagner, R. 41 Wells, H.G. 20, 156, 160, 171, 184 Woolf, V. Between the Acts 3, 10, 12, 13, 16, 17, 19, 20, 28, 49, 72, 92, 154-5, 159-62, 166-8, 171, 180, 182-6 ' M o d e r n Fiction' 3, 77, 185 Moths, The 19 Mrs Dalloway 1, 2, 14, 17, 2 1 , 77, 1 5 0 - 1 , 153-4 'Narrow Bridge of Art, The' 71, 96 Orlando 80, 156 Room of One's Own, A 158 'Searchlight, T h e ' 8 6 - 8 To the Lighthouse 20, 27, 59, 72, 83, 9 0 - 1 , 146, 150-4, 163, 170-9, 187 Waves, The 77, 153, 162, 164-5, 170, 179-83 Voyage Out, The 170 Worthen, J.
112, 124
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