discarded because i was reading it on-line at work, and now i don't work there anymore.
so is hardy a satirist or a tragedician or what? i can't get a fix on him, and that's quite the pleasure. critics call him dark and gloomy, but i just can't take him wholly serious. mebbe that's just cuz i've only read the first chapter yet. i dunno, mebbe he's settin' it up like a shakespeare plot, with the clown at the first and the drama to come. kinda like his tone of voice, even tho you don't know what he's got at stake in telling this story. just like, 'oh, here it is, you ready or not, here comes a story.' but he's concise, isn't he, tight and exact, no room for frivolries, even when he's jumping all over the place, know what i mean? besides, he's got this thing for taking on the vernacular, for a mix in the voices that just doesn't quite read out on the page. like, he doesn't spell it all out for us. that's the cypher of it.
now here's the trick: will he or won't he? we ca...more
discarded because i was reading it on-line at work, and now i don't work there anymore.
so is hardy a satirist or a tragedician or what? i can't get a fix on him, and that's quite the pleasure. critics call him dark and gloomy, but i just can't take him wholly serious. mebbe that's just cuz i've only read the first chapter yet. i dunno, mebbe he's settin' it up like a shakespeare plot, with the clown at the first and the drama to come. kinda like his tone of voice, even tho you don't know what he's got at stake in telling this story. just like, 'oh, here it is, you ready or not, here comes a story.' but he's concise, isn't he, tight and exact, no room for frivolries, even when he's jumping all over the place, know what i mean? besides, he's got this thing for taking on the vernacular, for a mix in the voices that just doesn't quite read out on the page. like, he doesn't spell it all out for us. that's the cypher of it.
now here's the trick: will he or won't he? we can all know what happens in the plot - it's practically blared from the headlines. so why read it, then, if not to find out what happens? that's the question. hardy doesn't let us off easy, either - it's almost as if he's asking it of himself, too, like "why tell this when you all know what's coming next?" it's that acknowledgement of that, that nod towards the unknown, that fills in the sentences and draws one from the next.
maybe i'm reading too much into this, but it's like those car crash commercials, you know, the ones with the seat belts: "You can learn a lot from a dummy." so if the bait-and-switch here is with degrees of attention, and not subplot and characters (as it was with Annie Dillard and Jonathan Franzen), then, well, i don't have a corrolary to that analogy. that's the joy of it, i guess, the set up of expectations and then the switch of codes that allowed expectations to emerge in the first place.
much different than Henry James, his contemporary. Hardy reads like Gustav Mahler sounds, Mahler with his symphonies that started with simple motifs of rustic pastoralism before sprawling out into agonizing ecstasies and precisely determined furor, while James resembles more the intricate veneers of smooth-talking seductions and layered facades of intrigue that Richard Strauss suggests in his chamber orchestras and buffonery operas. James reportedly called Hardy "Our good little Thomas," according to a recent Harper's review of a couple Hardy bios. So this of course brings up the issue of class in fin-de-siecle fiction.
We've already started to discuss depictions of servants in what's his name, Proust, and, although there's a lot more that remains to be said/questioned/expunged, a comparison here could set terms. While James doesn't even deign to grant individual characteristics to the servants in "Portrait of a Lady," and Proust relegates them to the role of worshipful attention and benevolent ignorance in superficial dialogue and habitual gestures, Hardy seems invested in demonstrating the risks and rewards of representing a class of people who hadn't yet thought of conceptualizing themselves as a class/group/political body, and now are beginning to struggle to find a template with which to model their interactions with history, their contemporaries, and consequential conditions. This much is evident from the first chapter of "Tess," as playing the role of the country squire don't mean squat when you're drunk and broke. Sorry to bring the 'you' into it, but you know, the paucity of our English language has yet to be permeated. A project of cross-cultural transmissions may depend on recognizing one's limits, and Hardy, at his time, was out there on the edge, tracing the borders of knowable knowledge, and pushing through it to say what 'polite society' couldn't pretend to hear....less
Tess of the D'Urbervilles 
