[Hardy-l] literature, the reader, and history

[Kevin Taylor]

The current lively discussion on teaching, modern readers, and  
television adaptations also reveals an important implicit judgment on  
history and the past in such modernizations and adaptations. There is  
an assumption that the past was wrong, incomplete, irrational, and it  
is our position and perspective that completes and rationalizes it.  
This is unfair to the past, history, or persons, real or imagined.  
It's a similar move when we move to reduce a literary work or era to  
some timeless wisdom--there's a hegemony of the reader/person over the  
text or history.

I'm reminded of this by some comments on one of the more influential  
theology blogs (http://www.faith-theology.blogspot.com), which has had  
some recent comments about history that I think are pertinent:

> "In contrast, the point of historical study (as Rowan Williams has  
> compellingly argued in Why Study the Past?) is to encounter the past  
> in all its irreducible strangeness — and yet to perceive this  
> strangeness itself (not some timeless “core”) as something that was  
> actually possible for … [the past]."

and

> Here’s a quote from Quentin Skinner’s Visions of Politics, Volume I:  
> Regarding Method (Cambridge, 2002) – probably the best work  
> available on questions of historical method (written by one of the  
> world’s most brilliant historians):
>
> “The golden rule [of intellectual history] is that, however bizarre  
> the beliefs we are studying may seem to be, we must begin by trying  
> to make the agents who accepted them appear as rational as  
> possible…. If as historians we come upon contradictory beliefs, we  
> should start by assuming that we must in some way have misunderstood  
> or mistranslated some of the propositions by which they are  
> expressed” (pp. 40, 55).
>
> And if you want to know more about why George Marsden’s methodology  
> is flawed, Skinner has an entire chapter (chapter 4) devoted to  
> demolishing the notion that historical writing should uncover the  
> “timeless wisdom” of certain “universal ideas” – in a nutshell, his  
> argument is that the results of such writing “may be classified not  
> as histories but more appropriately as mythologies.”

These are appropriate ways to approach literary texts and characters  
such as Tess, to respect their history and context, instead of  
demolishing them from our own perspectives, which are vital but not  
totalitarian. We we should allow Tess her bizarreness, her strange  
relationship to Alec, her passivity, her passion and violence, so we  
might best learn from, empathize, and understand her.

Kevin T.
-- 
Kevin Taylor
thomaskevintaylor at gmail.com
darthkt33 at mac.com (AIM)
thomaskevintaylor (skype)

40493 Snuggs Rd Norwood NC 28128 USA
(704) 322-4794
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