[Hardy-l] history and readers

[Kevin Taylor]

Thanks, Rosemarie, for kind words and a rich response. Apologies for  
my tardy reply, but a family health matter has kept me occupied until  
now.

I take it you are questioning how the reader relates to the narrator  
of Tess and his (Hardy being male, I'll stick with that more probable  
perspective, knowing some argue for a female narrator) reticence about  
Tess' rape-seduction, and how this topic further relates to my  
suggestions—or better, my recounting of others' suggestions—regarding  
history and perspectives. That turns my posting in a whole new  
direction, so all I can do is make a feeble stab at it, if I've  
understood you correctly.

Although Hardy is ambiguous about the events of that night, it clearly  
plays along some sort of rape-seduction continuum. One could argue it  
was more rape than seduction, or vice-versa (and Hardy's revisions  
further muddy this), but the equivocal nature of this continuum  
remains. So the example of Keith Wilson's student who blames Tess  
completely for that night just doesn't hold water. Hardy's narrator's  
ambiguity doesn't mean that anything and everything is permitted in  
terms of our reading (though we might distrust the teller as DH  
Lawrence says, though not plausibly with this particular novel). So to  
me Hardy's ambiguity doesn't open the door to all things, but rather  
holds to ambiguity and mystery, to some kind of preservation of  
paradox. Sort of like the Council of Chalcedon does when it speaks of  
Christ's two natures, divine and human, that they are are neither  
confused (or mixed), nor separated. Huh? There's a preservation of  
paradox here, and that seems to be where it all stands. Paradox  
doesn't mean anything goes, or sloppiness, but rather a precise,  
defining incongruity.

In terms of precision of what I'm saying: we should not readily  
discount, demythologize, or oppress a text or historical event/moment/ 
person. If it's strange, we should live with the strangeness as best  
we can (as Williams is saying in my earlier quotation). Perhaps the  
strangeness is ultimately rejected, but it shouldn't be rejected  
outright, or else the baby is out with the bathwater. This seems to be  
a most basic problem for modern readers when we casually pick up a  
book, to forget its utter strangeness and history and place.  
Christians think the Bible fell out of the sky, ex nihilio and fully  
formed, and students think Tess is too passive and should get a job in  
Manhattan. This is a destruction of history and and perspective, a  
reduction to the absurd. It makes me think of something Simone Weil  
says somewhere, about orbiting a text instead of landing directly on  
it, listening to a text we are translating and letting it evolve  
instead of pressing into it directly.

The trick is that this move to respect the text's history and voice  
should not destroy our own perspective or judgment, which gets back to  
your initial question. I don't have a clear answer of how to navigate  
these waters, between our own point of view and judgments, and that of  
the text, except that we should restrain our point of view for some  
time to allow the strange world of the text/history to have its own  
reality--even if such a reality remains fictional, since no moment can  
truly be recreated or communicated as it was. And it's all perceived  
through our own point of view. Agh.

Kevin
-- 
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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