Fwd: [hardy-l] Satirical President

[Betty Cortus]

I'm forwarding Judith's response to your good messages about the  
alternative ending to Tess.
Thanks to all who wrote.
Betty

Begin forwarded message:

> From: "Judith Flanders" <mail at judithflanders.co.uk>
> Date: May 20, 2009 10:01:12 AM PDT
> To: "'Betty Cortus'" <bcortus at HARDY-L.COM>
> Subject: RE: [hardy-l] Satirical President
>
> Interesting. I don’t know anything about Hardy except as a reader  
> of his novels – I’m not sure, therefore, what censorship he might  
> have felt himself constrained by, but was certainly not remotely  
> forbidden or even frowned upon to write against capital punishment  
> – there is reams of the stuff, from the 1840s onwards.
> And, as an additional connection, that Carolyn McGrath’s post  
> brought to mind, I wonder if anyone has linked the President of the  
> Immortals with the Bion tag about boys killing frogs in sport, but  
> the frogs dying in earnest.
> And indeed Hardy did see an execution, that of Martha Elizabeth  
> Brown, who murdered her abusive husband. I am writing about murder  
> and its transformation into ‘entertainment’ – books, newspapers,  
> theatre and so on, and that was why I was checking Tess in the  
> first place. I will be mentioning Hardy and his connection to Mrs  
> Brown, but only briefly, as he really only fleetingly touches on  
> what he saw (and I posit that he actually merges the memory of that  
> with a far more famous execution which he did not see, but must  
> have read about).
> Thanks again for being the conduit, and please thank your co- 
> posters – I am enormously grateful to them all, and to you.
> Best
> Judith
>
> From: Betty Cortus [mailto:bcortus at HARDY-L.COM]
> Sent: 20 May 2009 17:00
> To: Judith Flanders
> Subject: Fwd: [hardy-l] Satirical President
>
> Here are a couple of late responses Judith.
> Betty
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
>
> From: <carolynmcgrathuk at yahoo.co.uk>
> Date: May 20, 2009 8:01:40 AM PDT
> To: <hardy-l at coyote.csusm.edu>
> Subject: [hardy-l] Satirical President
> Reply-To: carolynmcgrathuk at yahoo.co.uk, hardy-l at coyote.csusm.edu
>
>
> 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
> __________________________________
>
> Hardy had personally witnessed the brutal hanging of a young woman  
> who had (if memory serves) killed her husband. He also made  
> notebook entries of like capital punishment horrors.
>
> I had always interpreted his Aeschylean phrase to indicate, by  
> transference, an abhorrence of a law which is more pagan than  
> Christian and more brutal than humane. For reasons of censorship,  
> Hardy couldn't aim his fire at the current British legislation but  
> he could, indirectly, condemn it by analogy.
>
> That 's my take on it - for what it's worth
> Rosemarie
> _______________________________________________
> Hardy-l mailing list
> Hardy-l at coyote.csusm.edu
> http://coyote.csusm.edu/mailman/listinfo/hardy-l
>
>
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://coyote.csusm.edu/pipermail/hardy-l/attachments/20090520/cd56db12/attachment-0001.html