Thomas Hardy, Time and Narrative

A Narratological Approach to his Novels

K. Ireland

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137367723
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire européenne

How is Hardy's development of thematics and characters matched by that of narrative techniques and his handling of time? This book uses narratological methods to stress the interdependence of content and expression in a key transitional writer between the Victorian and Modernist eras.

1

Trainspotting in Wessex: Temporal Transparency in Desperate Remedies

Monday came, the day named for Mrs. Manston’s journey from London to her husband’s house; a day of singular and great events, influencing the present and future of nearly all the personages whose actions in a complex drama form the subject of this record.

The proceedings of the steward [Aeneas Manston] demand the first notice. Whilst taking his breakfast on this particular morning, the clock pointing to eight, the horse and gig that was to take him to Chettlewood waiting ready at the door, Manston hurriedly cast his eyes down the column of Bradshaw which showed the details and duration of the selected train’s journey.

The inspection was carelessly made, the leaf being kept open by the aid of one hand, whilst the other still held his cup of coffee; much more carelessly than would have been the case had the expected newcomer been Cytherea Graye, instead of his lawful wife.

He did not perceive, branching from the column down which his finger ran, a small twist, called a shunting-line, inserted at a particular place, to imply that at that point the train was divided into two. By this oversight he understood that the arrival of his wife at Carriford-Road Station would not be till late in the evening: by the second half of the train, containing the third-class passengers, and passing two hours and three-quarters later than the previous one, by which the lady, as a second-class passenger, would really be brought.¹

In this pivotal scene, the villain of the piece consults, all too hastily, a copy of the Victorian rail-users’ bible. The misreading of the Bradshaw’s Guide by Miss Aldclyffe’s steward Manston is to have fateful consequences, anticipating similar instances of accident, chance and coincidence in all of Hardy’s later fiction. A ‘shunt’, a diagonal line scarcely five millimetres long, defined as a ‘thin line in the middle of trains … intended to show the continuous route of the traveller’,² goes unobserved in a microsecond lapse of concentration by Manston. As a result, he meets the 11.45 p.m. rather than the 9 p.m. train, by which his wife actually arrives; in that interval, she decides to lodge at the Three Tranters and apparently perishes when that inn and adjoining cottages burn down.

From the start, then, catastrophe is prefigured, and the essence of the text as ‘complex drama’ is reinforced. Not that this prolepsis (advance reference) is unique in the novel: as early as ch. 1, the reader learns that the heroine Cytherea Graye is about to enter a ‘labyrinth’ lasting twenty-nine months (p. 13; 1.1.3): a span which comprises nearly the entire text from that point. Though Desperate Remedies (1871), Hardy’s first published novel, is perhaps his least familiar, its indications of time are unparalleled. To the delight of narrative statisticians, inured to ferreting out data from obscure corners, Hardy has thoughtfully supplied the needful at the head of each chapter and constituent subsection.

‘Eventful’ aptly describes the novel, with its ‘rhematic’³ (purely designative as opposed to thematic or descriptive) pattern of chapter titles: ‘The Events of Thirty Years’, ‘The Events of a Fortnight’, ‘The Events of Eight Days’, ‘The Events of One Day’. Within each of its twenty-one chapters, moreover, nearly one hundred subsections break up those periods into still smaller units: ‘Midnight’, ‘Ten to Twelve a.m.’, ‘A Quarter-Past Eight o’Clock p.m.’ So radical a degree of overt notation and fidelity to actual calendars of the 1860s, raises issues about the role and value of temporal transparency, in DR, and elsewhere. In what follows, we weigh up the competing chronometric/rationalistic elements with the Gothic/sensational strains of the novel, and adopt narratological approaches by Günther Müller, whose spatiotemporal categories will enable us to evaluate the contributions of subsections, transitions and speech deployment to the overall structure of DR.

Assigned by Hardy himself in his General Preface to the Wessex Edition of 1912, to the lesser category of ‘Novels of Ingenuity’, alongside The Hand of Ethelberta and A Laodicean, DR emerges from Hardy’s failure to find a publisher for his first completed novel, The Poor Man and the Lady (1868),⁴ which he later destroyed. As reader for the London publishing firm of Chapman & Hall, the novelist and poet George Meredith advised against acceptance, suggesting that Hardy replace his sweeping satire with a work having more plot. The 1860s vogue for the Sensation Novels of Elizabeth Braddon and Mrs Henry Wood, Sheridan Le Fanu and Wilkie Collins, offered ready inspiration of highly charged dramatic and emotional, obsessive and criminal material. Thus, the earliest dated incident (12 October 1863), when Cytherea witnesses her father’s plunge to his death from a church spire (1.1.3),⁵ preludes a series of events veering between Gothic thrill and naturalistic detail.⁶

In love with Edward Springrove, she becomes companion to Miss Aldclyffe (herself once in love with Cytherea’s father), whose steward Manston (her illegitimate son) is fascinated by Cytherea, though he is married to Eunice, who is assumed to die in a fire at the village inn. Her brother Owen’s illness pressurizes Cytherea into marrying Manston, but doubts emerge about Eunice’s death, and the ‘Mrs Manston’ from London proves an impostor, Eunice having been killed by Manston, who later hangs himself, leaving Cytherea free to marry Edward. If Hardy’s resort to romantic and melodramatic devices exemplifies the Victorian cult of sentiment, his handling of fictional time relates to a rationalistic vein articulated in nineteenth-century realism, and the tension between these two poles fruitfully illuminates the development of his fiction.

By applying the measure of verisimilitude to the Bradshaw’s Guide of the opening quotation, research shows that no services in November 1864 on the London & South Western line between Waterloo, Dorchester and Weymouth match those in Manston’s Bradshaw, and the only ‘shunt’ is for a morning departure. Trains crucially feature again on Manston and Cytherea’s wedding-day (2.5), when not human error but a natural phenomenon intervenes. An inauspicious ice-storm delays the afternoon express, enabling Edward Springrove, Cytherea’s first and final love, to arrive early in Southampton, to apprise Manston that his first wife is still alive, and, in a literal projection of ‘barrier time’,⁷ to prevent an illegal breach of Cytherea’s still-virginal state.

Hardy, then, takes considerable novelistic licence in his resort to Bradshaw as a real-life reference work, by generous increase of real-life rail provision. His intention might be to create the effect of authenticity and temporal exactitude, while maintaining flexibility in handling the materials of fiction. Few critics and fewer readers, admittedly, would have had ready access to an 1864 Bradshaw, and rail buffs, who might, would be unlikely to read Hardy, early or late. By focusing on the train as vital physical link between capital and region, the novel underlines a sense of mutual dependence, and a uniform, country-wide measure brought about by the adoption of ‘Railway Time’ into Victorian life around 1840. DR reinforces, too, the role of the train as a literally mechanical marker and chronometric standard for the age.⁸

The late oil painting of Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway (1844; London: National Gallery) by J. M. W. Turner, an artist revered by Hardy,⁹ typifies the rising importance of the railway as artistic topos, while between Pickwick Papers (1836) and Dombey and Son (1848), the dominant transport in Dickens’s fiction shifts from stage-coach to train. With his mistress Ellen Ternan, he was involved in a serious real-life railway accident at Staplehurst, Kent, in 1865, the result, echoing Manston’s oversight in the previous year, of a track foreman’s consulting the wrong timetable.¹⁰ In No Name (1862), a novel by Dickens’s friend, Wilkie Collins, moreover, the early death of Mr Vanstone in a train accident triggers the central plot. Apart from its near-contemporary setting and melodramatic devices, Collins’s novel also opens with the kind of spatiotemporal specificity reflected in Hardy’s own first novel:

The hands on the hall-clock pointed to half-past six in the morning. The house was a country residence in West Somersetshire, called Combe-Raven. The day was the fourth of March, and the year was eighteen hundred and forty-six.¹¹

‘Very curious’, notes an unsigned review of DR in 1871, though its writer is uncertain about the dated chapters and punctilious subsections: ‘If carefully carried out … this [procedure] gives an air of reality which is far more satisfactory than the popular mottoes from some book of quotation which form the headings of chapters in nine-tenths of novels, though at the same time it may easily become an affectation.’¹² A later critic, Sir George Douglas, in 1928, invokes Hardy as stonemason and literary architect, the novel being ‘built up from foundation-stone to finial with an accuracy and finish which surpass the best of Wilkie Collins’s mosaic work’.¹³ By contrast, it is Hardy’s failure to conceal the architectural blueprint that, for Albert Guerard, constitutes one of his weaknesses, since outline and timetables should be ‘wholly submerged in the finished product … art should conceal art’.¹⁴ The calendar format of the architect-rationalist Thomas Hardy counterbalances, however, in Kevin Moore’s view, the non-rationalist Gothic elements of the novel,¹⁵ creating a hybrid form.

Those ‘Gothic’ elements include secret marriage, illegitimate offspring, midnight burial, mistaken identity, detective ingenuity and mystery, ‘cinematic’ pursuit and escape, supplemented by a lesbian episode. For J. W. Beach, Hardy’s fiction gradually moves away from plot, clearly dominant here, towards an emphasis on character, and a gradual shedding of the ‘cruder traces of the workshop’.¹⁶ Hardy’s attention to structure, however, in his logical massing of materials and dramatic grouping of subject-matter, displays a sense of architectonics absent in Dickens, but practised by George Eliot, Victor Hugo and Henry James.

In more recent criticism, the novel’s section headings have been described by Peter Widdowson as ‘disconcerting’, and the convoluted plotting suggests that DR is ‘simultaneously mocking the conventions of the genre it is imitating’, giving rise to a ‘curious ambiguity of mode’.¹⁷ Hardy’s recycling of material and calendars from his discarded The Poor Man and the Lady and early poems indicates to Mary Rimmer, a ‘fruitful generic instability’: other genres (epic, romance, realism, lyric poetry) abetted by temporal fragmentation and a plethora of documents and allusions, infiltrate the incipient disorder of the sensation world and destabilize the sensation form itself.¹⁸ For Julian Wolfreys, Hardy’s foregrounding of narrative temporality means that he displaces notions of stable presence, moment or location, in drawing attention to the narrator’s arbitrary choice of temporal moment.¹⁹

One critic, eminently equipped for a narratological analysis, would be Günther Müller, and in what follows, we examine the relevance of his approach to the uniquely transparent structure of Hardy’s novel. As Director of the Morphologischer Arbeitskreis (Morphological Study Group) at the University of Bonn from 1946, Müller’s studies, so far untranslated, are cited by Gérard Genette in the 1970s, and by Paul Ricoeur in the 1980s, while Onega and Landa in the 1990s include an extract from Ricoeur’s discussion.²⁰ It is Goethe’s concepts of unity in multeity, the relations of part to whole, inner to outer, which animate Müller’s thinking, when he compares the role of story-time within a narrative, to that of a skeleton within a vertebrate animal.²¹ His pairing of Erzählzeit/erzählte Zeit relates discourse-time, measured in the spatial units of words, lines or pages, to story-time, measured in temporal units, from minutes to years. Only rarely, as in Joyce’s Ulysses, does a near-fusion of discourse-time and story-time occur.

Tempo in general affects the reader’s perception of how narrative events are represented, how quickly or slowly they seem to proceed, how variable treatment of plot elements produces contrast and variety in the text as a whole. Müller’s spatiotemporal correlation of ratios displays clarity and precision, though, as he himself indicates, the observation that an evening covers so many pages in a particular chapter has little value in its own right. That a whole winter elapses in the next chapter, however, is significant, raising issues of detailed versus cursory, dense versus loose treatment of time, thus contributing to the notion of relative focus and flow in narrative tempo. In the Swiss novelist Conrad Ferdinand Meyer’s Jürg Jenatsch (1876), Müller shows how the bulk of its eighteen-year span is concentrated on a mere two weeks, drawn from the very start and end of that long period, Meyer having reorganized actual historical events to fit this fictional schema.²²

By intertextual comparisons and contrasts, Müller moves from individual examples towards a grouping by morphological types or time-shapes. Changing historical attitudes to time, projected in linear or non-linear texts, are supplemented by ahistorical types such as single- or multi-plot texts. Works of similar length and genre are shown to differ in the quality of events, while variations of temporal exactitude and spatiotemporal intensity, of rhythmic and sequential linkages mark out other texts.²³ Unaccountably, ranging between Homer and Hermann Hesse, Müller makes only fleeting reference to Hardy. Extrapolating from his other case-studies...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations and Editions
• Introduction
• 1 Trainspotting in Wessex: Temporal Transparency in Desperate Remedies
• 2 Seasonal and Serial Time: Under the Greenwood Tree and A Pair of Blue Eyes
• 3 By Sword or by Crook: Cross-Plotting in Far from the Madding Crowd
• 4 Comic Rhythms and Narrative Tangents in The Hand of Ethelberta
• 5 From Jewels to Furze: Transience and Permanence in The Return of the Native
• 6 Martial Music: Time-Signatures in The Trumpet-Major
• 7 Ancient and Modern Revised? Conflicting Values in A Laodicean
• 8 The Better Heaven Beneath: Revenges of Time in Two on a Tower
• 9 Legacy Issues: The Power of Temporal Ellipsis in The Mayor of Casterbridge
• 10 Sylvan Time and Natural Semiotics in The Woodlanders
• 11 Phases of Life and Cycles of Time in Tess of the d’Urbervilles
• 12 Temporal Janus: Retrospects and Prospects in Jude the Obscure
• 13 Triple Time: Avices and Devices in The Well-Beloved
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index