It seems the first thing one must say today is in response to Hardian pessimism: to the aversion I have to reading novels that beat up on their protagonists. Hardy pulls out fingernails and pushes needles slowly into eyes with what feels like self-loathing, sadistic, pleasure.
These stories go beyond tragedy, which always
has a cause, which always tells us that “it had to be” even when we respond, “it
should not have to have been that way.” Hardy wants us to know, “it didn’t have
to be that way.” In his works it may be an evil individual, and it may be the
arbitrary rules of the social unit (that put so much pressure on who may have
sex with whom in its most obvious example of the “it didn’t have to be that way”
variety) or pure chance. When the gods condemn us, we just have to submit. When
society punishes us for mere natural actions that give us happiness or pleasure
at no one’s essential cost, we can change those rules. But when well meaning
people doing good are ground down for their virtue, the most natural reaction
is disgust followed by despair. That which cannot be altered or resisted or
blamed offers no meaningful response. Hardy’s universe is one no one wants to
live in. There’s no fixing it. There’s no reconciling oneself to it.
Hardy’s response is “but that’s the universe you do live in.
I’m just showing it to you. I’m taking the veil off the bullshit presented to
you as food by all previous literature (with the possible exception of King
Lear). I’m not telling you what to do with this knowledge, because there’s nothing
you can do with it. Accept it if you choose to live in truth; deny it if you
choose to live in delusion.”
But is this the universe we actually live in? Of course
there IS a force behind the arbitrary destruction of all of Hardy’s admirable
heroes. Hardy himself. The manipulating author who keeps good at bay while he
opens all the apertures to destruction. That doesn’t however reveal anything about
the accuracy of the portrayal. Hardy is Tess’s Apollo. But Tess might have died
as she did without any Apollo. People die by chance on their way to doing good
every day.
What strikes me as in indication of something deeply false
about Hardy’s novels is the reaction of readers. Some of us turn away in
disgust. Some of us in satisfaction of a kind. Some cry at the tortured
goodness. But no one, I imagine, puts them down out of boredom, at least no one
who wouldn’t put down any novel out of boredom. (That’s to say, if anyone is
bored by Hardy it’s not because of his plots or his characters but because they
don’t have the wherewithal to read.) But boredom is the only proper response to
a Hardy novel if Hardy’s representation is accurate. The very idea that
something wrong has happened, that some deep injustice has been perpetrated,
that there’s something wrong with this indifferent universe may be the effect
of centuries of bad storytelling, indoctrination into the myth of meaning. But
it may also be from the deeper sense that there is something wrong,
something broken in this universe. If Hardy’s right, he shouldn’t have sold any
novels. When you hold the mirror up to the reader who sees himself for the
first time, there may be an initial shock. But once “that’s who I am” settles
in, the shock, whatever intermediary stages of denial and sadness must be made
through, comes eventually to resignation and indifference. And we have still
not got to indifference.
