Thomas Hardy: Towards a Materialist Criticism (review)
Page's Thomas Hardy Annual No. 3, by contrast, is utterly western and conventional. It contains nine essays (three of which I found to be first class), six book reviews (thirty-six pages of the book), and a Hardy Bibliography for the years of 1982-1983 (six pages), Robert Langbaum's "Hardy and Lawrence" explains how Lawrence sought to "complete" what Hardy began, "to continue his direction, to fulfil the implications of Hardy's art that Hardy as a Victorian could not fulfil." Like Lawrence, Hardy believed that "the centre ... of man's life ... is his sex-life," and Langbaum asserts that Hardy was "perhaps the first Victorian novelist, perhaps the first English novelist, to have thought so." And in arriving at this position, Langbaum makes a fine case for the position that Hardy is "the first to elaborate the sphere of unconscious motivation," much of which is sexual. Had Hardy been born a generation later, Langbaum concludes, he would have "become a novelist very much like D. H. Lawrence." Rosemary Sumner's essay on surrealism in Hardy begins with a quote from Hardy about how "Art is a disproportioning . . . of realities." She goes on to illustrate and explain affinities between Hardy and Magritte, AndrÃ© Masson, Max Ernst, Picasso, AndrÃ© Breton, and Duchamp. Norman Page's essay, "Hardy's Deathbeds," argues that although Hardy's imagination "was richly and readily nourished by the idea of death and its concomitants," his narrative presence withdraws from the actualities of death and typically shows death "not as a process but as an accomplished fact." But after the process itself is done, he has "no reluctance to contemplate a corpse in its coffin or a new-made grave." Other essays here discuss parallels to Milton, sources of Tess, parallels to Joyce, dialect in the short stories, and Hardy's humor. The reviews consider the new Complete Poetical Works of Hardy, a new edition of Tess, volume three of the Collected Letters, and works by Peter J. Casagrande, Richard H. Tayler, Kristin Brady, and Marlene Springer.