The Return of the Native: Comedy? or Tragedy?

It's obvious: that no good will come of the quickly arranged marriage between Thomasin Yeobright and Damon (?), in Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native - he's already been a complete skunk to her and we know he'd throw  her over in a moment if he had a chance with Eustacia Vye - the only question is what she, an apparently intelligent young woman, can't see this - or why she wants him after his callous treatment of her. It's equally obvious: that Eustacia Vye should not end up with Damon but is meant for Thomasin's cousin Clym - she's knocked off her feet in fascination with him and has schemed to get him to notice her, which he definitely has - but how much is her passion real and how much is based on an illusion, the illusion that he an, or will, rescue her from her life of isolation in Wessex and will take her home w/ him when he returns to Paris; would she feel the same way about him if he were to decide to remain in Egdon? It's also obvious: that Diggary Venn (?), the reddleman, despite his frightening appearance, dyed with a red stain because of his trade in sheep-marking dye - is the right guy for Thomasin - sweet, intelligent, devoted - but will she ever see that? So much depends on whether Return is a comedy or a tragedy: it certainly has comic elements, such as the many long chapters in which we overhear conversations among the rustics, with their tales, legends, superstitions, and occasional shrewd observations - but then we remember novels such as Tess and think that maybe everything doesn't have to work out as it's supposed to, maybe fate and passion get in the way of the comic resolution, maybe characters to end up with the wrong mate, or with none, maybe passions drive these characters to desperate ends rather than into one another's arms: is it Midsummer Night's Dream? Or Troilus and Cressida?

The two worlds of Hardy's fiction

The "Book Second" (how pretentious) of Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native is, at least at the outset, far more conventional and tame than the weirdly dramatic first book, much of which takes place in darkness,with mysterious characters appearing on dark country roads or emerging from the shadows into the light of a bonfire. In the second book, we meet the returning native - Tomasin's cousin, coming home for a visit from Paris - and most of the focus is on the alluring Eustacia Vye, who has scorned a number of suitors and seems extremely independent but is blown away by the idea of a visitor, a returning native no less, from afar: the arrival of a man from Paris and the ensuing excitement emphasizes the complete isolation of the village on the heath. The novel takes a Shakespearean comic turn as Eustacia, not invited to the xmas ball where the Paris visitor will be feted, works out a plan to join a group of villagers putting on a masked mummer show as entertainment between dances. To do this, she has to disguise herself as a guy - this fools nobody - and recite some doggerel. The mood throughout the section is much lighter and more conventional - woman in love with a mysterious stranger schemes to draw his attention - but there is some depth as well: Eustacia does in fact seem like prisoner of her fate, trapped in a village and society too confining for her imagination, or at least for her self-image. Although Hardy's drama, and his populace, are rustic, his prose is not: he self-consciously, often clumsily, works in allusions to literature, mythology, classic and relatively recent history - and his doing so creates a dual consciousness for his novel: the superficial learnedness of Hardy's prose removes him from his characters, who are largely unread - they tell tales, rumors, legends. Hardy is not at all condescending, but he is intentionally not writing from his characters as from within, but rather as from a removed distance: they're curious specimens - except for his lead characters (women, often) who stand out all the more as three-dimensional because they inhabit both worlds, or, in Eustacia's case, yearn to do so.

It just so happens that: The plot absurdities of Thomas Hardy

Yes Thomas Hardy is absolutely nuts - makes Dickens look like a realist - as we look at the absurdities of his plot structure: Return of the Native - for ex., in which it just so happens that as the young woman Thomasin is returning home to her village where she lives with her elderly aunt, after her intended wedding fell apart through some "technical" paperwork difficulty, she just so happens to run into the man who'd loved her years ago and who has lived in obscurity for the past several years - and she doesn't recognize him - and he gives her a ride in his cart back to her village - where - it just so happens - that, while he's camping out in his cart - he overhears a conversation between two people - who just so happen to be the intended husband of Thomasin and the woman whom he truly loves, Eustacia Vye - and it just so happens that - ... Enough! But you know what?, despite these absurdities of plot there's such rich atmosphere, such vivid characters, and such a high pitch of emotion that we, or at least I, don't care - it's a lot of fun to read and to try to figure out, and despite the lunacy Hardy's a really serious author, perhaps under-appreciated because he was quaint and antique even in his day and much more so today. He is deeply sympathetic to the working class and the agrarian class, he writes openly and frankly about sexuality and illicit passion, and he is constantly exploring the effect of the landscape on emotions, behavior, work, and culture - as noted previously he is the most geographic of all writers. Perhaps he's not for everyone - some would quickly lose patience with the eccentricities of his style and the confinement of his sense of place - but when give in to his style and forgive him his trespasses he's a truly engaging, entertaining writer.

How setting influences plot in Hardy

Thomas Hardy does know how to build a scene and a story - as I move along in Return of the Native - which near the beginning has the very long scene of the village dwellers gathered around a bonfire on the hilltop at night, scaring one another with talk of the supernatural and the dangers of living alone or crossing the heath at night alone - one man in particular, an effeminate guy who laments that nobody will marry him (and is treated very kindly and sympathetically by the other villagers, btw - great to see a 19th-century novelist have such an advanced sensibility and not to be condescending toward the working class and the farm laborers) is particularly nervous. Out of the darkness the "reddleman" - peddler of sheep dye who is himself died to a reddish hue and looks in the firelight like the devil incarnate - emerges and asks for directions; as we see him a chapter or so later, he turns out to be not so frightening but a kind soul who's given refuge to a young woman, Tasmin, who had left the village that day to get married - she has returned to her aunt, with whom she lives, in the back of his cart: something went wrong with the marriage and we're not sure what, but it appears she was about to marry the "wrong guy" because we also learn from the villagers' conversation that someone who'd been in love with her was also en route back to the little village - he will be, we suspect, the native who is returning - and Hardy is building us toward a classic love-triangle plot, perhaps influenced to an extent by Wuthering Heights? His accomplishment in these opening chapters is building the potentially romantic-melodramatic plot within an atmosphere that is highly charged and well-suited to these intense emotions: the darkness, the bonfires on the hilltops, the meeting of mysterious strangers, the dangers and mysteries of the heath with its narrow trails and steep descents, the sense of loneliness and isolation of each farmhouse and dwelling. As noted yesterday, Hardy is the most geographic of writers; this story line, if told in another setting - as it has been, of course - say in London or in a thriving, sunlit village - would be completely different not only in tone but also in substance: part of the intensity of the emotions has to do with the isolation of each family and each life - there are few opportunities for life-decisions, so every choice, every relationship, has it seems much more profound and potentially more dreadful consequences.

The most geographical of all novelists: Thomas Hardy

Started (re)reading Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native last night - he was kind of considered college reading when I was in high school and then high-school reading when I was in college, so I didn't get to him until later in my life - and I'm reminded why he's considered (by me, anyway) as the most geographic of all novelists. Most novels esp with a giveaway title like this one would begin with the familiar opening trope - a stranger comes to town - with in this case the twist that he's not really a stranger, but no, Hardy won't do it that way - he begins with a long (and honestly almost impenetrable, though still kind of fascinating) chapter about the landscape - the moors, the heath, the heather - and how it's both expansive and confining, beautiful and frightening, because everything's pretty much the same hue and it's hard to gain any perspective. After a second chapter in which two stranger meet on the road and we think the plot is beginning to engage - TH steps back again and we get a long view of the landscape, the hills, the vales, the "barrow" (worth looking it up, as he'll use the word about a thousand times) on which people are beginning to gather for some kind of festival of celebration, most of the people carrying "faggots" (look that up, too) and talking about "furzes" - I know this sounds kind of ridiculously comic, and it is to a degree, but it's also the essence of what makes his novels so powerful and unusual, then and today - entree into a world that is foreign to most of us, certainly foreign to most literary fiction, and presented from the point of view of those within that world, so, although it at times can be difficult to access exactly what they (or Hardy) are thinking we see this world with absolutely no condescension, but we are right within the consciousness and way of life of the people of his imagined Wessex - we are, for the moment, transformed. Despite all the flaws and eccentricities of Hardy's style, that's a pretty great accomplishment and no doubt it's something we hope for (though rarely expect from) fiction.

The pursuit of quippiness: A problem endemic in much new fiction

Sam Lipsyte's story, The Naturals, in the current New Yorker, while obviously very well written and even very amusing doesn't amount to much in the end in my view and here's why: he's very adept at creating quirky characters (an Internet professional wrestler) with odd obsessions and behavior (won't let anyone approach her refrigerator) who speak in quippy dialogue, and it's all funny as you're reading it and when you've finished, if you look back at all, you have to say: There's not a single real or even slightly credible character in this story. Nobody speaks like that - except maybe a writer, who doesn't actually speak like that, either, but who crafts speech like that so that his character trade both witticisms and malaprops (koisk for kiosk, omelet for Hamlet) but they all sound the same - like him. So in a story like this one you could pretty much trade one character's "lines" for any of the others, it wouldn't matter that much, as they all sound the same - and it's very hard for us to navigate among them (I have to constantly be looking at the proper nouns: Who's Larry? Who's Stell?). Dialogue in my view should define character and not dance off following a musical line of its own. I don't mean to be hard on this one particular story, but it's a very high-quality representative of an endemic problem in a lot of new fiction - the influence of "the golden age of television" (a term in this story, and also in another recent NYer story btw) including quip-com. Not always a good influence; it's not all about surface wit or even surface beauty, but about depth of feeling and ideas, about people and their lives: read any single Alice Munro or William Trevor story against this one and you'll see what I mean.

Oblomov

Sorry to say I'm getting a little frustrated with Oblomov (Ivan Goncharov) as how much can we take of a protagonist who is entirely listless and narrow minded? He makes a point of noting that he doesn't read he has no apparent social awareness no love life or sex life he's indifferent at best to the friends who call on him he is obsessed with the two problems before him - the need to find a new apartment and the declining revenues from the estate that supports him at the expense of others we might add and for every issue that comes up his first instinct is to blame his servant. Toward the end of book one Goncharov gives us some of the back story on Oblomov (and on servant zakhar as well) and we begin to feel some pity for both - victims of a way of life that assumed one class of people should benefit at the expense of others, a way that's changing and leaving Oblomov abandoned in his dark and dusty rooms. Yes we see esp in his long dream chapter, which is really more of an extended memory of his childhood, that his early years were a paradisal time that is now lost to him, and we see that he has never been happy or fulfilled in life, and we pity him to an extent - he is no doubt clinically depressed and well as seriously OCD - but this isn't pity such as we feel for a tragic hero - hamlet or young werther, say- because he takes no action he is the passive recipient of our sympathy or interest. Yes Oblomov is an extended character study and the character represents his time and his class - but it's also a slog and not sure I will know more by page 500 than I know now by page 150 or so.

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