Hardy's Poetry of Renunciation

Abstract

With his final novel, Obscure, Thomas Hardy made his escape from narrative form. That it was an escape can be felt by comparing novels to lyric poetry, particularly those poems written after 1897. Hardy wrote over nine hundred lyrics throughout his career, and it seems likely that poetry always provided a needed outlet, but turn of century can be taken as date of his ultimate escape from burden of Aristotelean plot. What had been luxury and freedom of nineteenth century novel, its sheer length, had become for Hardy a prison term, an interval to be filled. Even opening chapters ofJude Obscure suggest author's desire to short-circuit linearity of narrative sequence when he refers to his hero as the predestinate and writes: Jude was sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before fall of curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that all was well with him again.1 The bulk of narrative can at best postpone that tragic end as narrator is compelled to tell whole long story once again. It is a story Hardy has told many times before of men and women who unwittingly duplicate their own tragic failures and tragic failures of their predecessors. J. Hillis Miller has marked degree of parallelism of events and characters in Hardy's novels as well as distance which separates desire and aim.2 It is lack of rational causal links between past and present which determines that in Hardy's narratives, present cannot fulfill past, but merely repeat it. Insofar as parallel lines which become basic configuration of Hardy's plots do converge, such convergence is typically a fatal coincidence. Hardy's characters are rarely able to find a rational link to connect tragic errors of past with present action, and so any temporal distance between parallel situations rarely produces progress. Finally, as doublings of Hardy's plots prove increasingly fruitless, difference between beginning and end of a narrative becomes increasingly insignificant. begins as a quest hero, yet plot parodies linearity of quest as shuttles from Marygreen to Christminster to Marygreen to Christminster again. A story which begins with Jude's mar-