The Unreal Path to a Real Place: Six Strategies of Representation in the Novels of Thomas Hardy

Abstract

Hardy's style and its peculiarities have attracted critical attention. Discussions of Hardy's language, when concerned with his prose, have noted general character of its mythic contrasted with its simple directness; (1) fine-grained studies of Dorset dialect, including Dennis Taylor's Hardy's Literary Language and Victorian Philology, delineate distinctive features of his language primarily on level of word. (2) category of artificiality has long subsumed unique features of Hardy's literary form. Raymond Williams cites as a threat to Hardy's mature style (108-9); Vincent Newey says of Jude, The book does belong, broadly speaking, to tradition of nineteenth-century realism, committed to psychological and social verisimilitude, but at same time it its own to such an extent that we are never quite allowed a secure suspension of disbelief, freedom to talk about 'life' (214). tension between and verisimilitude is a persistent one in Hardy's novels, but that tension, far from undermining his project, discloses its fundamental aesthetic and even philosophical principles. If we rescale perspective of our analysis to sentence, and include as its object articulations of syntax, way in which Hardy's style declares its own artifice illuminates numerous strategies of representation. Counterfactual constructions and passive voice, which one critic has called Hardy's jargon (Heilman 317), need to be understood for what they contribute to Hardy's fiction. first is a technique of verisimilitude. second delivers a critique of naive perception, which in turn elucidates a persistent feature of Hardy's novels: his romantic dystopias. Hardy's use of seem, observed and dismissed as the locution by which amateur writers shirk commitment (loc. cit.), is one means by which he implies a spatial field. Examining Hardy's principal linguistic structures in a connected way is critical because one informs another; taken together and related back to abiding themes and patterns of his novels, they reveal central place and crucial significance of Hardy's distinctive techniques to his aesthetic project. HARDY'S PASSIVE VOICE: THE SYNTAX OF THE UNFOLDING PERCEPTUAL ACT passive voice is one of Hardy's most persistent techniques of representation; it appears on first page of his first published novel, Desperate Remedies (1871), throughout his novelistic oeuvre, and even decades beyond it. (3) Paragraphs into his second novel, Under Greenwood Tree (1872), it renders approach of some villagers as they become audible to a man walking alone at night: Shuffling, halting, irregular footsteps of various kinds were now heard coming up hill, and presently there emerged from shade severally five men of different ages and gaits, all of them working villagers of parish of Mellstock (4, emphasis mine, as are all others). This passage depicts a particular event: entry of an object into auditory field. In unfolding encounter with a novel object of perception, what is new is not just object but also sensation of perceiving it. experience of hearing is itself integral to this moment of newly focused attention. To render this experience, Hardy employs passive voice: its syntax elevates to prominence perceptual act--were now heard--and its unfamiliarity as a locution draws attention to act as well. passive voice provides a linguistic analogue for salient quality of this sensory experience. It is a structural mimesis of this perceptual act: prominence in experience is replicated through syntax. In this same opening scene, passive voice represents entry of a character into visual field, as he becomes visible against starlit sky: Having come more into open he could now he seen rising against sky, his profile appearing on light background like portrait of a gentleman in black cardboard (4). …