Thomas Hardy

Hideous Continguities

In Thomas Hardy’s short stories, as in much of his work, there isn’t so much despair as contrived bleakness, a narrative mastery of misery which in another writer’s work might have led to farce. In Hardy’s, though, it suggests a dank realisation that life is a futile striving which will inevitably lead to human defeat and may take the form of disillusion, desolation or dissolution. There is of course a Schopenhauerian side to the English writer but what interests us chiefly is how this manifests itself in a particular form in the shorter works. In ‘A Mere Interlude’, young Baptista accepts marrying an older, wealthier merchant that her family thinks is an agreeable match. Days before doing so she meets once again on the mainland a man around her age, Charles, after missing the boat back to the small island where she lives and where she is due to marry. After Charles proposes, she impetuously marries him instead but after he goes for a swim a strong tide sweeps him away and Charles is washed up on the shore. There she is a widow already and yet she still hasn’t told the older Mr Heddegan she can’t marry him because she has married someone else. But now Charles is dead, she is a free woman and rather than complicate things by explaining what happened, she takes the path of least resistance and marries for the second time within a week. On their wedding night, Heddegan has found them an expensive, quiet hotel but there is a reason why it is all but empty. People are aware that a body is being kept there before its burial — none other than the body of Charles. There Baptista is, in one room with her new husband, while in the room next door is her dead one, in what Hardy describes as a “hideous contiguity.”

What are the chances that someone due to marry would meet another on the mainland, that he’d propose to her, that she would accept, that he would drown, and that he would find himself in the room next door on her wedding night with her second husband within a week? This suggests the mechanics of farce rather than the drama of tragedy, yet Hardy is a serious writer indeed, one for whom humour is often absent. As G. D. Klingopulos says, his work has “little of the comic abundance and vitality of Dickens…”   (‘Hardy’s Tales Ancient and Modern’). We can note too that T. S. Eliot (quoted by Klingopulos) said, of ‘Barbara of the House of Grebe’, “we are introduced into a world of pure Evil. The tale would seem to have been written solely to provide a satisfaction for some morbid emotion.” (‘Personality and Demonic Possession') Let us put aside Eliot’s musing into Hardy’s soul and see that the morbidity offers a resonance that a comedic story would be unlikely to possess. In a comedic tale the coincidences can seem canny, knowing and dexterous, while in a pessimistic piece they can instead be uncanny in the Freudian sense. Freud notes, “the German word unheimlich is obviously the opposite of heimlich, heimisch, meaning “familiar,” “native,” “belonging to the home”; and we are tempted to conclude that what is “uncanny” is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar.” (‘The Uncanny’) The comedic coincidence can seem all the more reassuring as the reader finds themselves at home in the comic but Hardy’s tragic coincidences demand a type of homelessness that Eliot sees as morbid. Hardy doesn’t propose Charles dies because Baptista is wrong to marry him (that would be for a moral tale,) but Hardy does allow her to wonder about such things when, after she settles into marriage with Heddegan, she finds herself blackmailed by a man who had witnessed her earlier wedding. After initially paying him off, she observes that “the system into which she had been led of purchasing silence thus was one fatal to her peace of mind…” She eventually tells Heddegan all and he announces that he has secrets too: that he has four children from a previous marriage but, as with Baptista’s husband, his wife is dead as well. She is soon obliged to adopt them and, in less than two months, she has moved from being a single woman, to one twice married and responsible for bringing up four kids. Again, comedy seems to beckon but Hardy resists it as instead of being lumbered with “hipless, shoulderless” step-daughters who are a burden, she discovers that her “unwelcomed daughters had natures that were close to sublimity.” From hideous contiguities to the unselfishly sublime, the story consistently resists its comedic throughline all the better to register an acceptance. The story ends with Baptista happily married toHeddegan and growing to love the girls. The narrator concludes that between Heddegan and Baptista grew a “sterling friendship at least, between a pair in whose existence there had threatened to be neither friendship nor love.” 

Frequently in Hardy’s short stories characters accept their lot but they also accept a lot, hence the melodramatic narratives that lead to the acceptance we have invoked. In ‘The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion’, the narrator as a boy hears a story from a woman who once lived with her father in an isolation that pleases the father, but does nothing for the daughter: “He enjoyed his darkness, while her twilight oppressed her. Nevertheless a suitor appears and Phyllis is ready to marry this “personage neither young nor old; neither good-looking nor positively plain.” Yet after the engagement, he takes off to Bath, initially only for a few weeks. But the time keeps expanding, while the letters he sends are formal as Phyllis becomes increasingly unsure of the arrangement. In time, she befriends the melancholy Hussar of the title but is wary of crossing a line: she still assumes she will marry Humphrey Gould. Soon, though, she hears rumours suggesting that the engagement is less than secure and allows her feelings to develop for Matthaus. He proposes that they run away together and on the very night that she is about to do so, who passes behind the wall where she waits but Gould, arriving with luggage and speaking to a friend. Phyllis captures a little of the conversation, hears that he has brought her a gift and admits that he has treated her rather badly. “Conscious-stricken”, what is Phyllis to do? She tells Matthaus that she can’t go, only for Gould then to tell her that he has a terrible secret to confide: he has married someone else. By now it is too late to catch up with the deserting Matthaus, who will go off to France After Matthaus and the others think they have escaped England, they find themselves having only moored at Jersey. Perceived as deserters, they are handed over to the authorities and, in turn, Matthaus is executed back on the mainland. The old woman who told the narrator the tale is now long since dead, and lies not far from the man who she almost ran away with. The story shows that they are at last united in death as they couldn’t be in life and Hardy ends on a note of resignation that contains within it an optimism if we assume that life ought always to be about more than the living. If Phyllis had found herself buried near Gould it would have been ironic; that she is buried near Matthaus gives the story a happy ending, Hardy style.  From one point of view, we have desolation as Phyllis loses the man she loves to the hangman’s noose, but we also have consolation as she is joined in death as she cannot be joined in marriage as they share a graveyard if not a home. 

Once more we have a Hardy story ripe with coincidence, hinging on a reverse confession and relying too, this time, on eavesdropping. It is mighty coincidental that the very night Phyllis is about to leave with the German Hussar, Gould returns after many months away. As in ‘A Mere Interlude’, both characters have something to reveal: that she has fallen for another man and that he has married someone else. Yet this time, the confession becomes lopsided as Gould has already married and Phyllis has let Matthaus go that very evening, assuming she must be loyal to Gould. Finally, there is how Phyllis initially hears about Gould’s return, by overhearing his presence when he is with a friend. “You know about eavesdropping” Nabokov says, “if it is not brought in as parody it is almost philistine. It is the mark of the amateur in literature.” (American Vogue) Of course, Hardy needs Phyllis to overhear Gould so that she can misconstrue his intentions and make a hasty decision in the interim, yet if Matthaus had been more insistent perhaps she would have gone with him anyway. “Unscrupulous pressure on his part, seeing how romantically she had become attached to him, would no doubt have turned the balance in his favour. But he did nothing to tempt her unduly or unfairly.” He no doubt becomes all the more virtuous for that and his death leaves him as a figure idealised as a consequence. While Gould is the pragmatic man who keeps her dangling while he finds a more suitable match, Matthaus is the one who dies trying to be a free man. He is a man so honourable that he, and another at the trial who organised the escape, admit they were the ringleaders, as the other two get away with flogging while Matthaus and his friend are executed. 

What makes Hardy a great writer isn’t the techniques he adopts but the means they serve. Nabokov may see certain technical procedures as weak; Eliot may see evidence in Hardy of the morbid. But let us suppose that what some might see as failed technique, and others view as an impoverished spirit, is in Hardy’s work the pursuance of a sensibility, of a value system that is properly transcendent if we regard it as a system that must incorporate the living and the dead. It isn’t just that graveyards and funerals are frequently evident in Hardy’s work, it is that life is only as good as the death which contains it. One might see this as morbid indeed but is it macabre to end a story on two people who loved each other but could never be together in life to lie close in death; or does it show a purity of feeling that the living usually sully for pragmatic ends? Both Phyllis and Matthaus act with the best of motives and a cynic might say look where it gets them. But Hardy offers instead an idealism that indicates what it gets them is a burial place near each other. To think about death is of course ostensibly a morbid activity but it can also be one of the most upstanding ways to comprehend the human condition. A writer such as Edgar Allan Poe is morbid (and brilliantly so) and there is in his work a constant fear of death. In Hardy, the fear is relatively absent, even if death is a constant presence. It gives to his work a broad temporality, as though life itself is too narrow. As D.H. Lawrence says, “Hardy shares with the great writers, Shakespeare or Sophocles or Tolstoy, this setting behind the small action of his protagonists the terrific action of unfathomed nature; setting a smaller system of morality, the one grasped and formulated by the human consciousness with the vast, uncomprehended and incomprehensible morality of nature or of life itself, surpassing human consciousness.” (A Study of Thomas Hardy)

In his essay attacking Hardy, Eliot attacks Lawrence too, seeing in them both a lack of education and a fascination for the unsavoury. Of Hardy, Eliot says: “he seems to me to have written as nearly for the sake of ’self-expression’ as a man well can; and the self which he had to express does not strike me as a particularly wholesome or edifying communication.” On Lawrence, the poet believes the novelist lacks “the critical faculties which education should give, and an incapacity for what we ordinarily call thinking.” (‘Personality and Demonic Possession’) Eliot wouldn’t be one to credit nature over civilisation, later saying in the essay that  “most people are only very little alive; and to awaken them to the spiritual is a very great responsibility: it is only when they are so awakened that they are capable of real Good, but at the same time they become first capable of Evil.” Writers such as Lawrence and Hardy lack both the education and the religious background to make the most of out of the spiritual; hence what Eliot sees as Hardy’s morbidness. However, taking into account Lawrence’s remarks, Eliot seems to be seeking “a smaller system of morality”, one that can be contained by the societal and the theological, while Hardy and Lawrence are in this sense primitive and pagan, interested far more in going beyond the limits of formal expectation and moral belief.  

Rather than seeing Hardy as a writer who fails the standards Eliot demands, better to see him as one of the few English novelists to have resisted the limitations placed on people and subjects. As Gilles Deleuze says of Hardy’s characters, “they are collections of intensive sensations, each is such a collection, a packet, a bloc of variable sensations.” Yet there is also a “strange respect for the individual, an extraordinary respect: not because he would seize upon himself as a person and be recognized as a person…but on the contrary because he saw himself and saw others as so many ‘unique chances…” (‘On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature’) Deleuze gives no examples from Hardy’s work and it would make for a very fat essay if we spent too much time attending to Hardy’s great novels like Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Far From the Madding Crowd and Jude. But what we can extract from Deleuze’s claim in the context of the short stories is this: seeing Hardy’s ‘suspect’ techniques within the context of variable sensation: to see coincidence for example as a means by which to escape causation, as though causality is merely a literary method of arrangement that leads to a narrowing of being, one which appeals only to the demands of the logical faculties. 

       Hardy is instead interested in what defies logic, which contextualises it within the broadest possible worldview. Hardy may have been younger than George Eliot and Dickens, but his work can seem from an earlier period partly because he attends so little to the advances of industrialisation, while incorporating into his work so much superstition, folk belief and custom. It is a point made by Chen Zhen, when saying Hardy's work “unfolds the real spiritual world of Wessex folk in Hardy’s time and generalises the cultural significance.” (‘Folk Belief And Textual Construction in Hardy’s Novels’) If Hardy relied on coincidence and melodrama, utilised eavesdropping and drew so often on oppressive figures to retard a story, there was behind such devices an interest in a vista much greater than the limitations of the device itself. If for example a writer uses the convenient death of a woman’s husband all the better so that she can marry the man she really loves, the reader might understandably wonder if the husband didn’t die a hundred pages earlier only so the novelist needed to retard the story for long enough to produce the happy ending. If however the same writer does so all the better to indicate an irony that shows the husband haunts the wife’s newfound happiness as she cannot forget that she wished him dead, and feels as though she has brought it into being, then those hundred or so pages makes us muse over just how guilty she should feel about his demise and how happy she ought to be with her great love. The simple happy ending would ask us to forget all that has gone before: it was a precursor to love and a narrative retardation. In the complicated ending where the woman doesn’t quite know who she loves as she finds herself increasingly thinking of her unhappy late husband, and less and less about her beau, then we can see more than a device at work even if narratively the same delays have taken place. 

Of course, pretty much all fiction insists on holding in abeyance narrative outcome. It is the rare story that is so brief that no such device will be used. One may think of Hemingway’s six-word ‘For Sale: Baby’s Shoes, Never Worn’, and other examples of what is now called flash fiction. Yet most short stories keep the reader in an anticipatory state. But it isn’t only the techniques utilised that matter but what ends they serve. In ‘The Withered Arm’, a young woman, Gertrude, marries a man, Mr Lodge, who is around forty and comes to stay in the village where the husband is from. The comely wife with a face like “a live doll’s” develops the withered arm of the title and doctors can find no explanation for this, though some people associate it with a curse and we know too that Lodge has deserted a milkmaid who is jealous of Gertrude and who has a son by the wealthy husband. Over six years, the arm gets worse and Gertrude visits for a second time a healer who tells her, “this is of the nature of a blight, not of the nature of a wound; and if you do throw it off, it will be all at once." It seems that the way to do so is to touch the neck of someone freshly hanged. Gertrude keeps this possible solution from her husband and finds a way to attend a young man’s execution. When the body passes through the street in a rough coffin, she manages to touch the man’s face with her withered arm and at that moment her limb returns to health. Almost simultaneously she hears a shriek and who does she see but Rhoda Brook, the milkmaid, and also Lodge. It transpires that the man hanged has been none other than the twelve-year-old boy from the start of the story, Rhoda and Lodge’s son. The coincidence is as enormous as the symmetry is apt, with Gertrude trying to cure her misfortune on the neck of another: only for this neck to belong to the boy whose mother has already been wronged by Gertrude’s husband marrying her over Rhoda. Gertrude dies as if in shock three days afterwards and her husband disappears from public life. He sells all his worldly goods and goes to live alone in an isolated part of the country (before dying two years later). Rhoda lives much longer but refuses any help or provision as people wonder what might be going through her mind. We have the desolate Mr Lodge who loses his spouse and child and then passes away, and the disillusioned Rhoda who has lost her son.

Here we see the narrative delay has an important function. Gertrude’s condition gets all the worse and years must pass so that the boy is old enough to become the hanged man whom Gertrude will touch, and that will cost Gertrude her life at the very moment she wants to return it to its former glory. Hardy to some degree opens and then closes the story on Rhoda, but much of it is viewed from Gertrude’s perspective and that is the position we have adopted when narrating the events. As Romey T. Keys notes, (in ‘Hardy's Uncanny Narrative: A Reading of "The Withered Arm”’) the story offers what Gerard Genette calls internal, variable narration, as it moves between the characters’ thoughts" but, if we believe it is more important that the story gives us Gertrude’s perceptions over Rhoda’s, it rests on the uncanny that Keys acknowledges but doesn’t link so specifically to Freud’s claim in his essay on the subject. Freud believes there are many stories which have elements that are uncanny but where the same elements in another story are not. He says, differentiating two tales, that “we have already asked why it is that the severed hand in the story of the treasure of Rhainpsenitus has no uncanny effect in the way that Hauff’s story of the severed hand has.” (‘The Uncanny’) It depends on where the focal point will be. If Hardy narrates chiefly from Rhoda’s point of view there will be little that is uncanny in the telling since Rhoda is part of the old world of superstition and is responsible for the deed, while Gertrude is from the modern world and its victim. Freud sees that the two vital dimensions to the uncanny rest loosely on the primitive and the neurotic: “We—or our primitive forefathers—once believed in the possibility of these things and were convinced that they really happened. Nowadays we no longer believe in them, we have surmounted such ways of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new set of beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation.”  The more susceptible someone may be to such beliefs, while at the same time not being responsible for the action, the more uncanny the story is likely to be. If Lodge refuses to believe in such nonsense and Rhoda is capable of activating the curse, it is Gertrud who is the victim of it and wishes to accept there may be a cure in superstitiously touching a dead man’s neck. Gertrude keeps from her husband that she will go off and find a hanged man’s neck to touch, aware that he will be inclined to tell her she is following idiot superstition, even if he may have his own reasons for believing that such a curse would be possible since he has wronged Rhoda. Gertrude will tell him after she touches the man’s neck and he will see her cured. 

Someone focusing on the story technically may see the formally predictable — noticing the ease with which Hardy turns a twelve-year-old boy into an eighteen-year-old murderer as the story hinges on the mightiest of coincidences. However, if we look at the tale as a thematically entangled account of Hardy’s fascination with the old and the new, with how the uncanny can become vital to a story if one allows for a necessary passage of time that doesn’t just retard the story but allows its completion, and the careful focalisation that makes it clear that for the uncanny affect to be achieved it needs to be seen at least partly from Gertrude’s perspective, then we note not so much Hardy’s originality as his muscularity. This might seem like an odd word to describe an artistic project but if we are determined to see in Hardy’s stories a quality so much greater than the ostensible technical attributes, it rests on what we are calling their thematic entanglements: the texture he manages to find in the stories he tells. Someone overly focused on the apparent weaknesses of the form may miss out on the excavatory interest the writer has in opening us up to the maximum amount of life that paradoxically must also account for the dead. Such a position rests on Hardy’s ambivalent relationship with the primitive, which he refuses to sacrifice completely to the modern. When Freud says “it would seem as though each one of us has been through a phase of individual development corresponding to that animistic stage in primitive men, that none of us has traversed it without preserving certain traces of it which can be reactivated…”, Hardy has perhaps preserved it more than any other writer of his time. If the dead are potentially alive, if they can haunt us from their graves, this is only part of a bigger animistic world that Hardy is willing to acknowledge. 

      In Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Tess thinks: “at times her whimsical fancy would intensify natural processes around her till they seemed a part of her own story. Rather they became a part of it; for the world is only a psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed, they were.” She adds: “the midnight airs and gusts, moaning amongst the tightly wrapped buds and bark of the winter twigs, were formulae of bitter reproach. A wet day was the expression of irremediable grief at her weakness in the mind of some vague ethical being whom she could not class definitely as the God of her childhood, and could not comprehend as any other.” In The Return of the Native, the narrator says of one character: “the silent being who thus occupied himself seemed to be of no more account in life than an insect. He appeared as a mere parasite of the heath, fretting its surface in his daily labour as a moth frets a garment, entirely engrossed with its products, having no knowledge of anything in the world but fern, furze, heath, lichens, and moss.” Whether the mind thinks it can be the world or the person can disappear into the world, Hardy’s perspective indicates a collective enterprise that cannot be individuated. Though Lawrence has problems with Hardy’s metaphysical claims, he finds justification for the writer’s view of the world in his description of things. “This is a constant revelation in Hardy’s novels: that there exists a great background, vital and vivid, which matters more than the people who move upon it.” Tess is never more herself than when natural processes intensify around her or when a figure in The Return of the Native is entirely engrossed in the natural world. 

Yet Hardy is also very interested in suggesting separation, and this is again where the temporal isn’t merely a delaying device but gives to the work its proper import. In ‘On the Western Circuit’, Hardy keeps a couple apart not so that they can be soon conjoined but to show how hopeless is the pairing when the physical attraction isn’t at all matched by intellectual stimulation. In the story, a lawyer who passes through Wessex two or three times a year is attracted to a pretty young woman who he assumes will be but a passing fancy as he spends some days with her. How could Raye devote himself to one so “inexperienced” and “artless”. Yet when Anna writes to him he is surprised to see that she writes well and with sensitivity, and over time he develops feelings for this woman who has the mind to match the beauty to which he was instantly drawn. He becomes involved in a passionate epistolary relationship that leads him to announce he will marry the young woman only to discover that the letters haven’t been written by his beloved but by her mistress, Mrs Harnham, a lonely married woman who wrote them partly to help the young girl — but also to develop a correspondence with a man she had seen in the Wessex town and to whom she was instantly attracted. The lawyer ends up marrying the young woman but is now aware that she cannot even read or write, and aware too that it was Mrs Harnham with whom he had been developing a love affair over the last few months. He may have had sexual relations with Anna, but it was the many weeks of letter writing that allowed feelings to grow, that led him to feel in love and thus to propose. 

Again we have narrated the story from one point of view even though it cuts back and forth between the lawyer and Mrs Harnham, Harnham knows that she is increasingly deceiving Raye but can’t resist continuing the exchange even as it leads Raye to a ruinous marriage with a woman well below his social station. Not only has Hardy given a purpose to the delay, he also denies the potential suspense in the tale. Discovering that Anna cannot read or write is a great surprise to Raye but it isn’t a twist because Hardy has told us of this fact much earlier in the story: when she receives an initial letter from Raye, Anna immediately tells Mrs Harnham that she can’t read it. Why does Hardy deny the surprise, why doesn’t he stay focalised on Raye and leave the revelation until the conclusion? One reason may be that Hardy wants to emphasise the potential uncanniness in the gap of the two women, and by moving between Raye’s feelings and Mrs Harnham’s, by turning Anna into an image in his mind and Mrs Harnham’s words into a manifestation of her in intellectual form, he can suggest instead of the double, so often central to the uncanny, its inversion:  the split subject — two women becoming together ‘whole’. Before the end of the story, Raye knows he will be marrying the wrong woman but does this mean that Mrs Harnham is the right one? She can feed his imagination with words but can’t make an impression on him when he first sees her in the flesh. He is in love with two women, we could say, but that seems both an exaggeration and an error. He was never in love with Anna and only fell in love with her when he assumed her mind was as engaging as her face was comely. Anna does not have that mind and Mrs Harnham does not have that face even if Raye admits, when they meet again, after the letter-writing and before the wedding, that he “discovered a strange and secret gravitation between himself and Anna’s friend.” 

This brings us to a couple of common ideas in Hardy’s work. One is the echo of a person in another that creates an uncanny sensation, and the second is what allows for a useful plot device when one person is deemed inadequate to marry another. ‘On the Western Circuit’ is an extreme manifestation of this but we see variations of it in both ‘Barbara and the House of Grebe’ and ‘The Waiting Supper’. In the former tale, Barbara finds herself attracted to a handsome man who is far below her socially. Nevertheless, they run away and marry and in return Barbara’s father, who accepts the union, also reckons the husband must go to Europe without her and with a tutor to receive a proper education. Barbara agrees, but while in Venice a fire in a theatre breaks out and the courageous Willowes re-enters the building five times to save the lives of others. In the process, he becomes horribly disfigured. When he returns, she can no longer love the man whose face is now so scarred however much she wishes she could and he leaves again, promising to return a year later to see if anything has changed. He doesn’t come back, Barbara assumes he is dead, and marries a man who had always wished her to be his wife, a man who is a friend of the family and very wealthy. What matters though is that during their marriage, someone who made a full sculpture of the young Willowes before his misfortune in Italy, ships it back to England and there Willowes is, “in all his original beauty.” Barbara becomes increasingly devoted to this image of her great love and in time her second husband becomes so jealous and vindictive that he hires another sculptor to disfigure the face of the sculpture, leaving Willowes as scarred in art as he was in life. Barbara reacts as though the deformation has been to Willowes’s very person. After all, she is in love with the sculpture as she had been with the man himself but the replication would seem as solid as her poor husband was fragile. But no, her despicable husband gets revenge and Barbara must grieve yet again for Willowes. One can see why Eliot sees the morbid: here we have a young woman who must hear of her husband’s terrible injury, wait for his return to discover just how appalling the injuries are, acknowledge that he must have died since he doesn’t return, and then accepts the loss all over again when the statue is defaced. 

Hardy’s fiction is morbid, just as his work from a certain perspective is technically obvious, with Lawrence going so far as to say “his form is execrable in the extreme.”  (Study of Thomas Hardy) Yet the morbid and the formal come together all the better to reveal Hardy’s interest in the uncanny nature of event. It is morbid that the very young man in 'The Withered Arm' who heals Gertrude is also the son of her husband, and it can also be seen as too easy a coincidence that it happens to be this man. In another writer’s work, the clumsiness would be all the more pronounced because it would be empty technique, a way of surprising the reader with a twist, just as Hardy also retards the narrative with time passing. But there is also and more especially in Hardy that “strange respect for the individual” Deleuze invokes, and we might be reminded of Schopenhauer’s claim that “poetry and the plastic arts always take an individual for their theme and present it with the most careful exactitude in all its uniqueness.” (Essays and Aphorisms) In contrast, he sees that science “operates by means of concepts each of which represents countless individuals by once and for all defining and designating what is peculiar to them as a species.” If science proposes the general, art offers the specific but subsequently achieves the Idea. “…So that a scene from human life depicted correctly and completely, that is to say with an exact delineation of the individuals involved in it, leads to a clear and profound knowledge of the Idea of humanity itself.” Here we have the opposite of a statistical account of humanity and instead the exemplary. Yet each writer must find their own version out of its myriad possibilities. They must find an Idea of the human that is strong enough to become a mode of the human in the world. If one talks of Hardy’s sinuousness, we do so to indicate a quality in the work that is far more important than its dark theme or its poor technique. A mediocre writer may also be preoccupied with bleak subject matter and might also use coincidence, retardation and mismatched lovers to tell their stories, but if we see nothing behind the theme and nothing behind the manipulation, then no Idea, in the Schopenhaueurian sense, comes through. 

To understand this Idea of Hardy’s, let us digress briefly from the stories and say a few words about the novel, The Well-Beloved. Here central character Jocelyn Pierston describes to his friend his idea of the Beloved, which is that “the Beloved One of any man always, or even usually, cares to remain in one corporal nook or shell for any great length of time, however much he may wish her to do so.” Through the course of the novel, Jocelyn spurns a young woman, Avice for another, Miss Bencomb, who after a brief alliance, disappears off to Europe with her father. Twenty years later, Jocelyn hears of Avice’s death and also realises how he let her down and feels a love towards her retrospectively that he then finds in embodied form in her daughter. Though the younger Avice lacks her mother’s warmth; she possesses at least as much of her beauty. She is not interested in Jocelyn as her mother was, and Jocelyn eventually helps her establish herself and returns her to her estranged husband. Another twenty years pass and he receives a letter from the second Avice asking him to come and visit, and who does he see but her daughter, who is also called Avice, and who combines the best qualities of her mother and grandmother. 

      Yet now Jocelyn is close to sixty and though very handsome for his age, could not appeal to a woman so young who already happens to be in love with another man. Nevertheless, her mother insists that Jocelyn is a good match and yet, just before he and Avice are due to marry, Avice runs off with this other man, who we discover is none other than the son of Miss Bencomb, the woman with whom, of course, Jocelyn spurned the original Avice over. Bencomb and Jocelyn become close again in old age as Hardy proposes Jocelyn has finally got over his obsession; that as an older and infirm man the desire to embody the ideal in the flesh has passed. In one scene Miss Bencomb, who, made up and in a certain light can pass for a much younger woman, reveals to Jocelyn how old and grey she happens to be. An old woman “pale and shrivelled”, Jocelyn says: “you are a brave woman. You have the courage of the great women of history. I can no longer love; but I admire you from my soul!” Put aside the sexual politics of a sixty-year-old lusting over a twenty-year-old (a politics Hardy is surprisingly attuned to as he makes much of Jocelyn’s seniority as agedness rather than status), what is interesting is once again Hardy’s fascination with the question of embodiment and the uncanniness of its coincidence. In other words rather than showing a technical concern over the coincidences so often found in Hardy’s work, better to think of the broader problem of coincidence as contiguity, which allows for a proper use of the uncanny if we accept that vital to it is often the nature of a split-subject: that a person can simultaneously be a beautiful man, a horribly deformed creature and a statue one can love (as in ‘Barbara of the House of Grebe’), both a young boy and a hanged man (‘The Withered Arm)’, and a person who can be the ideal woman but only if one joins together two people (‘On the Western Circuit’). In The Well-Beloved, when Jocelyn sees the second Avice as he grieves over the first it is an associative reincarnation, that he sees in front of his eyes the young woman whom he let down in the daughter that he can now make amends over. In his mind, he sees the first Avice but what the second Avice sees is a stranger as the affective gap between Jocelyn’s feelings for her and her feelings for him are enormous. This may be true in many a situation where one person is in love with the other, and where it isn’t reciprocated, but there wouldn’t be any uncanny dimension to this feeling. The uncanniness resides in the contiguity of Jocelyn’s feelings for another woman embodied in this new one who looks like the dead love and returns him to the past, emotionally, as it fixates him in the present, physically. Just as in ‘On the Western Circuit’, Raye is in love with the appearance of one woman and the mind of another, so Jocelyn mourns one and anticipates love for a second. If Deleuze is right to talk of “a bloc of variable sensations”, then we can see how Hardy brilliantly creates selves that are both figures of unity and separation, while also present and temporally and spatially divided. Someone may see no more than cheap techniques and bleak subject matter; however, Hardy’s purpose is to understand something of the human condition but as the more precarious condition of the human. 

Thus the human is provisional in various ways. They change through time and space, which is partly why Hardy even in his short stories is often fascinated by duration, in showing years pass, determined to maximise the transformations and dissolutions (as readily as disillusions) in his work. ‘The Waiting Supper’ covers many years in the two characters' lives. Falling in love while in their youth, the comfortable Christine Everard and the lowly Nicholas Long, end up together only in their later years even though they came so close to marriage when young — a little too young; Christine was not yet of age and the Reverend who they ask to marry them refuses as they turn up for the occasion. A nephew of a neighbour comes to the village from London and this man, Bellston, possesses all the worldliness that Nicholas lacks. Despite Nicholas’s more attractive appearance and superior dancing skills, there is no doubt Bellston is a better social match for Christine than Nicholas. Even though Mr Everard is reluctantly willing to allow his daughter to marry Nicholas, after rumours start spreading that they have already wed, he decides he would much prefer that she marry Bellston. Nicholas, envious of Bellston’s worldliness, fretful that Christine is already growing tired of him, and determined to do what he thinks is best for Christine, leaves the village and doesn’t return for fifteen years. In the interim, she ends up marrying Bellston but when Nicholas returns it seems that she is once again a single woman. She appears to be a widow but Nicholas can find no grave and it is merely assumed that Bellston is dead, perhaps murdered during one of his adventures. Yet there is no doubt her abusive husband has long since disappeared, having spent most of the family money, and it looks like Christine and Nicholas can at last be together. Yet who seems to return but Bellston, even though he never quite makes it to Christine’s door. Christine and Nicholas can’t marry because he is alive and thus she is still a married woman. However, seventeen years pass and he still doesn’t turn up. Eventually, a body is discovered and it transpires it is Bellston’s. “It was supposed that, on his way to call upon her, he had taken a short cut through the grounds, with which he was naturally very familiar, and coming to the fall under the trees had expected to find there the plank which, during his occupancy of the premises with Christine and her father, he had placed there for crossing into the meads on the other side instead of wading across as Nicholas had done.” The narrator adds, “before discovering its removal he had probably overbalanced himself, and was thus precipitated into the cascade, the piles beneath the descending current wedging him between them like the prongs of a pitchfork, and effectually preventing the rising of his body, over which the weeds grew. Such was the reasonable supposition concerning the discovery; but proof was never forthcoming.” 

During those seventeen years, Nicholas visits Christine and they sup together while waiting for Bellston’s possible appearance but it never comes because of course he is lying dead nearby, a horrible contiguity to match the one in ‘A Mere Interlude’. If in that story Baptiste marries twice within a week and finds her dead husband in the room next door as she spends her wedding night with the new one, in ‘The Waiting Supper’ the impatience of ‘A Mere Interlude’ becomes infinite patience. The couple who wish to get married at the beginning of the story are young and with their lives in front of them, but by the end of the story they have their lives behind them. If the Reverend says early on that they cannot quite know what they want since they are young, at the end of the story there is little future at all as they both decide that it seems pointless to marry when they have more or less become an old married couple anyway. The hideous contiguity here is twofold. First, they have been for many years waiting for Bellston’s return and he has been lying nearby dead in a ditch for almost two decades.  Secondly, are they the same people that they were when they first wished to get married, or merely contiguous with their former selves? Nicholas says after hearing of the discovered body that had lain there for many years: “You might have married me on the day we had fixed, and there would have been no impediment. You would now have been seventeen years my wife, and we might have had tall sons and daughters.” Instead, they are now beyond the age for children and what better reason to marry than to create a family? The young people with a future in front of them are quite distinct from the two people who now have their lives behind them and the disillusion they feel is met with a dissolution which suggests they are very much no longer their younger selves. 

      They are in some ways a desolate couple and yet with an odd Hardyesque optimism within the despair. Christina says, “the weight is gone from our lives; the shadow no longer divides us: then let us be joyful together as we are, dearest Nic, in the days of our vanity; and with mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.” They settle into what may pass for a contented old age. How horrible one finds the contiguity of the transformation from a younger to an older self depends on several things, and the degree of uncanniness will depend too on how rapid the change seems to be, or how absent it appears. If ‘The Waiting Supper’ finally suggests that the horrible contiguity is only in the awareness after many years that Bellston was dead and they could have married at any time, then the contiguousness between their selves young and old is far less uncanny. One doesn’t have a sense of a doubling or a split-subject. In ‘Barbara of the House of Greve’, the uncanniness rests on Barbara seeing that the statue brings both her husband back to life and returns him to his former handsomeness. In The Well-Beloved, it resides in Avice passing through time (from one generation to the next) but remaining physically the same age. In ‘The Withered Arm’, it is there as Gertrud discovers that the boy who is but a lad is now a man hanged for murder. How can that young boy and that grown-up youth be one and the same; and both the cure for the withered arm and vital to the curse since the boy’s mother has been spurned by his father, who is the husband of Gertrud? Even Miss Bencomb’s transformation in The Well-Beloved has an aspect of the uncanny about it: she still looks like a woman who could pass for many years younger until she presents herself to Jocelyn without “the beautifying artifices as any passée wife of the Faubourg St Germain.” Jocelyn sees quite suddenly forty years have passed: “to this the face he had once kissed had been brought by the raspings, chisellings, scourgings, bakings, freezings of forty invidious years…” What is uncanny is how in one go those forty years are laid bare to him. 

‘The Waiting Supper’ is thus in the context of ageing less contiguously uncanny and is probably closer to the ruefully ironic: during all those years waiting, they could have married at any time if only they had known Bellston was dead nearby. The uncanniness rests on the body that dead could allow for their marriage but in its absence could not. And yet there it was, so close. Now they know, so much time has passed that they have forgone children and can only live out their twilight years together. In ‘A Mere Interlude’ we have the morbidly uncanny rather than the ruefully ironic: the lack of knowledge in the former instance leaves the couple under the impression they can’t consummate their relationship; in the latter, it becomes for Baptista the difficulty in doing so as she knows the husband she married a few days earlier lies dead in the room next door. Frequently we see in Hardy’s work stories that can seem overly contrived, coincidentally convenient and morbidly manipulative, yet nevertheless containing within them a purpose far greater than the synopsis of the stories that we have offered in such detail. What Lawrence sees as poor technique and what Eliot insists is the “diabolical” result of a poor education, we see as an examination of disillusion, desolation and dissolution. The ostensible weakness of form and the apparently facile despair leads to a vision of the world that is the equal of Schopenhauer but in fictional form. As the German philosopher claimed: “However much the plays and the masks on the world’s stage may change it is always the same actors who appear. We sit together and talk and grow excited, and our eyes glitter and our voices grow shriller; just so did others sit and talk a thousand years ago: it was the same thing, and it was the same people: and it will be just a thousand years hence. The contrivance which prevents us seeing this is time.” (‘Essays and Aphorisms’) It is this contrivance that Hardy often seeks in his work, yet he does so to suggest that it is frequently the uncanny that makes us aware of how much and how little changes. 

© Tony McKibbin