Object-loss and Object-bondage: Economies of Representation in Hardy's Poetry

Abstract

I. For the past five years, I have been trying to read Thomas Hardy's poetry. For the same five years, I have been trying my hardest not to read it. Wanting to read means wanting to organize the poetry as a field of social and psychic intentions, the two orders dynamically intertwined. I will unpack that definition when I get to the subject of style in Hardy's poetry, for that is where the social and psychic most clearly betray their kinship (often, through the vehemence with which they deny it). First, though, let me explain that ambivalence I announced a few sentences back. I claim it not so as to display its overcoming; quite the contrary, the line of thought I pursue is nothing but the experimental staging of that ambivalence. Let me be clear that self-exploration (by contriving a crisis of subjectivity) is not the goal of this method. Rather, I work from the premise that my critical object, Hardy's poetry, and my interest in that poetry are one integral phenomenon, and that is what I plan to read. Of course, to say that I am drawn to this poetry by its withdrawal from me is the sort of thing one could say about almost any text, and certainly any modernist text. However, Hardy's difficulty and the history of responses to it are a special case, and not just to me. Here for example is Donald Davie's light but edgy, perhaps even defensive, account of the matter: [O]ne honest critic after another has, by his own confession, retired, baffled and defeated [by Hardy's poetry]. It is nothing short of comical that a criticism which can make shift to come to terms with Ezra Pound or Apollinaire, Charles Olson or René Char, should have to confess itself unable to appraise a body of verse writing like Hardy's, which at first glance offers so much less of a challenge to tested assumptions and time-honored procedures.1 John Bayley confronts the critical embarrassment head-on. He observes Hardy's "lukewarmness," as he puts it—his "lack of rigour in [End Page 549] the keeping up of literary appearances"—adding, however, that this diffidence is addictive.2 Davie and Bayley, eminent British critics of the old school, are not given to reflexive or even reception-oriented moves of the sort you just read. That Hardy's poetry should have prompted such troubled gestures in men so at home with their objects of study says something about the kind and the depth of the challenge which that poetry sets the critical paradigms. Moreover, Davie's comparisons of Hardy with Pound and Olson—the highest and hardest of modernists—taken together with Bayley's humdrum, householdy idiom, point up the fact that Hardy's poetry thwarts the highbrow and as it were professional reader without at the same time promoting its obscurity as a critical strategy in the manner of an avant-garde aesthetic. That Hardy writes (or aspires to write) serious poetry as opposed to light verse or doggerel seems to go without saying, and even the earliest and most hostile receptions operate on that assumption. However, that the poetry neither gratifies the expectations that define standardly literary experience nor critiques those expectations, is also generally understood, though never actually stated. What we have here is a body of work that appears not to solicit or even to acknowledge reading. It does not tell us how we should value it nor does it appear to care whether or not we do. It withdraws from reading without a hint of condescension, self-absorption, or even self-awareness. One might say that it has Hardy's name all over it yet lacks the intentionality we associate with signature. Hardy's frequent use of a kind of ideogram or logo made from his initials, in lieu of a signature, gives a literal form...

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