[hardy-l] Satirical President

[carolynmcgrathuk at yahoo.co.uk]

A reader's, not a scholar's, response to the ending of TESS:

Glad Tony has sorted 'arch' vs 'anti' as I was struggling to see how one could flip into the other. Unless anyone informs me otherwise, I understand the assumption to be that 'Time, the Archsatirist' with 'his joke' is Hardy's 'first stab', as Judith puts it, and 'the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase,' with 'his sport' is the revision. 

I know that at 17, when I first read TESS, I would have undoubtedly preferred the more direct 'first stab' as it is more immediately understandable. As I had no knowledge of Greek tragedy (a little less than I have today), the name of Aeschylus did not resonate with me at all and the sudden introduction of some apparently transcendental authority figure grated on me as I sought to make sense of the ending of the book. I remember feeling irritated that the author seemed to be intentionally preventing my 'enjoyment' of the tragedy by demanding that I work harder at discovering what this narrator/authorial comment might mean. 

However unwelcome this may have been, is this in fact its purpose? W.P.Trent calls TESS a 'novel with a purpose'; if this is so, is the 'purpose' satirical? If it is, the second version may better achieve that for a wider audience: the re-naming of 'Time, the Archsatirist' as 'the President of the Immortals', with that authorial metalinguistic and cultural aside, has a sharper ironic edge to it; the shift from 'joke' to 'sport' points to Tess as the target of a blood-sport, although 'sport' reatins the idea of amusement conveyed by 'joke'. 

To me, the puzzling concept of 'the President of the Immortals' rather than the direct reference to 'Time' is one that demands more thought from  the reader. Is it maybe slightly less 'heavy-handed', as some have criticised, by being more cryptic? Does it connect better with the novel as a whole? I thought it 'stuck out' as having a different tone to the rest of the book when i read it in my teens, and still feel it wakes the reader up from the 'tragedy' of the story to consider what forces were bearing down on Tess and how she comported herself: 

"Satire is what happens when there isn't any decent family or society available for the main character to reconcile himself to, or when the desires he has aren't worth desiring, or when the actions he takes aren't worth taking.  Satire is the literature that describes what our world is like when we try to reintegrate ourselves with it and can't, when all anyone can find are unintegrated fragmented pieces of a world."

Edward B. Germain, the copyright date is 1975 if not specified; the source is http://www.pafaculty.net/joyce .

'Aeschylus sees mankind, meeting disaster grandly, forever undefeated. "Take heart. Suffering, when it climbs highest, lasts but a little time" -- that line from a lost play gives in brief his spirit as it gives the spirit of his time.'
from The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton

best wishes

Carolyn McGrath