The Descent of the Imagination

Postromantic Culture in the Later Novels of Thomas Hardy

Kevin Z. Moore

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1990
• ISBN:
  9780814761045
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Descent of the Imagination places Thomas Hardy's writing within the context of nineteenth-century fiction writing as a genre. Moore therefore regards his examination of Hardy's work as a form of archaeology as well as a genealogy of the romantic figure in fiction, from Wordsworth through Hardy. The book provides a new interpretation of Hardy's method of composition and uses new source material that will interest Hardy scholars. It offers an original view of the novelist that argues that his work, especially his later writings, were a deliberate rewriting of romanticism.

PART ONE
HEBRAIC SATIRES

[1]
Dissembling Henchard: The Mayor of Casterbridge

If thou beest he—but O how fallen! How changed
From him who, in the happy realms of light
Clothed with transcendent brightness, didst outshine

Myriads, though bright!

Paradise Lost

In Hardy, almost for the first time, we have an author
who is counter to the central tendencies of his age.

Frederick Karl, “The Mayor of Casterbridge:
A New Fiction Defined”

THOUGH IT MIGHT seem excessive to compare Michael Henchard to Milton’s fallen Satan, the distant comparison locates the proximate source of Henchard’s character in Carlyle’s romantic formulation of Goethe’s Mephistopheles. As we shall see, Hardy’s “man of character” is Carlyle’s Demon of the Void, “a child of Darkness, an emissary of the primeval Nothing” and the “best and only Devil of these latter times” (“Goethe’s Helena,” Essays, 1:158). The impending spiritual void of Carlyle’s “latter times” paradoxically constitutes a rich source of themes and figures in Hardy’s mature fiction, of which Henchard’s story is the prologue. Henchard is an ambitious materialist who commits his ungenerous error by revolting against romantic eros in order to dominate the capital of Wessex; thus, he is “satanic” because his character is contrary to the central themes and tendencies of imaginative literature from Blake to Carlyle.

As Carlyle’s Mephisto, Henchard represents a return to “the void” or abyss which the romantic imagination had attempted to obliterate by fostering correspondences between man and nature, man and man, and man and society. By divorce, Henchard cuts himself off from potential correspondences of any sort. At Weydon, he severs himself from the totality of communal and transcendental possibilities promoted by romantic love. In so doing, he damns himself to a hell of despair and, ultimately, to work without hope of gaining either sympathy or love. Though not as forceful a presentation as “the Sole positive of Night” in Coleridge’s “Ne Plus Ultra,” Henchard nonetheless is a portrait of “The Substance that still casts the shadow Death!” the “unrevealable,/ And hidden one” and “sole despair/ Of both th’eternities in Heaven” (1—15).

Rather than a typically romantic allegory of regeneration, The Mayor of Casterbridge presents us with a postromantic epic of degeneration. In order to construct this negative emblem (or positive negation, in Coleridge’s sense), Hardy read deeply in Carlyle’s admonitory cultural writings of the 1830s. In those tracts for the times, Carlyle assumed the mantle of a latter-day Coleridge recalling a backsliding Albion to the romantic faith. Hardy’s intimate knowledge of Carlyle was instrumental in the production of The Mayor of Casterbridge, which presents us with a “reading” of the message and impact of Carlyle’s writing.¹ In Hardy’s reading, the Scot’s plea had fallen upon deaf ears; thus since the thirties England had become a Casterbridge, a place of getting and spending which laid to waste its ever-weakening imaginative powers as it moved further away from the aspirations and tenets of Carlyle’s gospel of “The Everlasting Yea” (Sartor Resartus).

At Weydon Priors, Henchard commits his “original” sin for which he will be exiled from the garden of romantic possibilities defined by the “Hebraic” line of English romantics—those strongly influenced by German romanticism—-from Wordsworth to Carlyle. Henchard’s divorce completes his turning away from a romantic past in order that he might acquire a modern present. In essence, he interdicts Wordsworth’s and Carlyle’s desire that the past inspire the present in traditional and imaginative ways. By selling his wife and child, Henchard initiates the tragedy of a deracinated selfhood which Hardy entitles “the story of a man of character.” Ambition is Henchard’s crime; possession of the world in its historical, factual, and mechanical forms both his reward and his punishment. In betraying his romantic self, Henchard becomes public man, a social being whose consciousness Wordsworth characterized as a “pensioner/ On outward forms,” “rich one moment to be poor for ever” (Prelude, 6:736-38). In short, he is Carlyle’s mechanical man, the willful dynamo of the “Steam-Engine Universe” and the antithetical self to the dynamic personality.

Divorce then is the midwife or agent which bears Henchard into history as fallen, public man cut off from his interiority. Bizarrely, Henchard is nonsubjective man, a fantastically objective character whose subjectivity is completely superficial and therefore deeply problematic. One way of comprehending this form of character is to read it literally. Henchard’s character is like a character in the alphabet. He is quite literally presented as a social being whose essence is a social construction, whose actions are public performances, and whose life is valued in quantities and not qualities. In this reading, his character bears comparison to Blake’s Urizen as he appears in The Book of Urizen. Henchard is Urizen-like after Weydon where he falls from the romantic eternity of desire, an interior condition which redeems the external world from its very externality. Divided from his redemptive powers, Henchard becomes a self-enclosed, all-repelling, and gloomy worshiper of his own limited self-creation called the mayor of Casterbridge. Both Hardy’s and Blake’s epics or prophecies of history depict the fate of a willful subjectivity which divides, separates, limits, and diminishes its own existence in order to rule a mechanical universe of satanic wheels within wheels cut off from the imagination’s resourceful eternity. Born of divorce, Henchard is a self-divisive character, and Casterbridge is his walled city of self-destructive limitations.

Though Hardy did not have Blake in mind when he drafted The Mayor of Casterbridge, he did have Carlyle’s formulation of the Urizenic “mechanical” character which by the eighties had become a critical commonplace in romantic culture’s debate with history. The terms of that debate opposed culture to society, the lyric to the narrative, romance to realism, and the imagination to fancy, and it is these terms which return to inform the drama of Henchard’s narrative. The Mayor of Casterbridge continues this debate by portraying a character who favors social narratives over cultural lyrics, realism and history over idealism and romance, spectacles of the “Phantom Opera” (Wordsworth’s emblem of London) to the realities of the imagination, and the proprieties of expression over the vitalities of self-expression. The story of this form of character is one of spiritual loss achieved through material gain, and in this way it constitutes a continuation of Carlyle’s tragedy of romanticism, his worst-case scenario for historical man.

Read at its simplest, Henchard’s fable depicts the triumph of death over life, of thanatos over eros. The totality of the defeat is indicated in many ways: by the allegorical (and not symbolic) character of the narrative, by the absence of poetry and dreams in Henchard’s life, by the vacant and unenlightened character of nature surrounding Casterbridge, by the relentless incursion of the mechanical into the town’s daily life—from Farfrae’s “mechanical miracle” which cures Henchard’s “grow’d wheat” to the seed-drill which replaces the sower in the fields, by Hardy’s casting Weydon Priors as Wordsworth’s St. Bartholomew Fair from Book Seven of The Prelude, and by the description of the Casterbridge Roman Ring as a Wordsworthian “spot of time” whose terror cannot be imaginatively transformed into a moral lesson for world-historical man. Moreover, Henchard is portrayed as a character who disintegrates rather than as a personality who integrates as his mode of being. His character is depicted as a collection of “fixed counters” in Coleridge’s phrase for the elements of allegory, and his three attempts to idealize a relationship—once with Farfrae and again with Lucetta and finally with the second Elizabeth-Jane—result in strife.

When we first see him on the road to Weydon during the “preludium” to his history, Henchard walks beside his family, willfully setting himself apart from them, treating them as though they were an albatross hung round his neck which prevents his ambitious ascent in the world. Wandering in search of a more prosperous form of labor, the narrator initially portrays him as an unregenerate mariner “that on a lonesome road/Doth walk in fear and dread,/ And having once turned round walks on, / And turns no more his head;/Because he knows, a frightful fiend/ Doth close behind him tread” (Rime of the Ancient Mariner 6:445-51).

The demon which dogs his heels is the spirit of a perverted Promethean ambition with whom Henchard strikes a bargain at Weydon. There, he enters the modern capital of Wessex—Henchard’s provincial version of Wordsworth’s “vast mill” of London (Prelude, 7:719)—with the assistance of the furmity woman, his “modern Merlin.” Intoxicated by her adulterated potion, Henchard divorces his wife. In so doing, he puts “the whole creative powers of man asleep,” in Wordsworth’s estimation of the dangers which lay in store for those who crave the seductive spectacles of the city. Years later, Henchard appears as mayor, the chief showman in the Phantom Opera of Casterbridge.

Henchard is “discreative” man. Understood in terms of the Carlylean cultural debate, The Mayor of Casterbridge depicts antiromantic man subject to time, chance, and change. Subject to time and a subject of time, history will be his nemesis. Because he uproots himself from “timeless” community rituals and traditional structures of relationship, he places himself in the jeopardy of history. The furmity woman exemplifies history as nemesis, for among other things she is an agent of history. It is she who holds the secret to his past, that spot of time which, when recalled, causes Henchard to forfeit his good name, that professional name invested with mayoral power for which he sold his wife, child, and rural past.

As devastating as this loss is, it would not be so disastrous were Henchard permitted to regain his forfeited romantic capacity and thereby achieve the redeemed state of “organized innocence” after his fall from grace. But he is not given this opportunity for regeneration, even after he begins to desire such. This is one reason why Hardy’s novel is so unremittingly gloomy and dark, while it exemplifies Hardy’s shift away from the reiteration of romantic tales of redemption as the expected form of public, literary therapy. As a type for all of Hardy’s late novels, The Mayor of Casterbridge is written on the cusp between a desire for romantic redemption and the recognition that history does not afford opportunities for recuperation. Time destroys all romances—even Henchard’s paradoxical romance not to be romantic or idealistic. Thus, the recognition of loss in the later Wessex does not lead to gain or restitution. It leads rather to a literal or purely historical awareness that time is difference and that difference means a disappearance of all that was vital in the past without any hope whatsoever that it will reappear once its value is recognized.

Divorce, the agent of Henchard’s primal loss, becomes particularly significant in light of the weight which M. H. Abrams gives to epithalamic metaphors in romantic writing. According to Abrams, marriage is “the prominent period-metaphor which served a number of major writers, English and German, as the central figure in a similar complex of ideas concerning the history and destiny of man and the role of the visionary poet as both herald and inaugurator of a new and supremely better world” (Natural Supernaturalism, 27). Henchard inaugurates his fate (his character) through divorce, an act at odds with marriage, the central figure for the romantic complex of ideas in England and in Germany. If marriage is but another word for “correspondence,” which undoubtedly it is, and if the doctrine of correspondence in its various formulations describes summarily the Utopian agency of the supremely better world envisioned by romantic idealism, then Henchard’s divorce and the story of its results should be read as Hardy’s supremely negative fiction representing the fate of historical consciousness cut off from all idealistic principles and from the very desire for idealism itself

Initiated by divorce, Henchard’s life goes against everything implied by the romantic metaphor of marriage, which is quite a lot. By juxtaposing epithalamium to divorce, we define by contrast Hardy’s position regarding the prominent themes and forms of the “Germanic” or mystic strain of English romanticism from Wordsworth and Coleridge to Carlyle. Divorce, and not marriage, is Hardy’s great theme in his mature fictions. And we shall see that Hardy overtly and covertly deploys the emblem of divorce to define his sense of tragedy without redemption. Otherwise put, it is history divorced from the imagination that is on display in Wessex. Such a display can only be specular, “a picture-language which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the sense” and a “phantom proxy [of] empty echoes” in Coleridge’s definition of allegory (“Symbol and Allegory,” from The Statesman’s Manual, 437). Given that Wessex is such a place of divorcement, we might say along with Coleridge, “Alas, for the flocks that are to be led forth to such pastures!” (“Symbol and Allegory”).

The antipastoral character of such a history appears first on the road to Weydon. There Henchard willfully refuses to acknowledge the presence of his wife or child, nor does he hear the nightingale singing in the bush. In emblem, we see a man willfully recoiling away from romantic eros, from family, tradition, generation, nature, and from that gothic “sense of a past” which romantics like Carlyle hoped would return and dominate the present. In sum, we see a man overcome by a “savage torpor,” feeling a “peasant disgust” toward those realms of pastoral delight to which romantics had once fled from the horrors of the city (quotation from Wordsworth’s Preface, Second Edition of the Lyrical Ballads [1800], 449).

Instead of holding a sustaining intercourse with nature and family, Henchard stares steadily at the dusty ground. He never lifts his eyes into the distance as Jude does to see the glowing dome of Christminster, nor does he reflect upon the beauty of his companion as does Angel. Beauty and imaginative truth do not exist for him. Nature, too, is a dead thing in his eyes as it was not for the solitary, wandering characters in Wordsworth’s fiction. As a premise to the whole, we see a Henchard whose heart is “dry as dust,” in Coleridge’s and then Carlyle’s pejorative description of a “loveless,” uncharitable, murdering man, in, respectively, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Sartor Resartus. We see too a man who “attempt[s] to exist without human sympathy,” a “selfish, blind, and torpid” man who will experience “the lasting misery and loneliness of the world,” in Shelley’s description of unromantic, Hobbesian man. Because he is one of those “who love not their fellow beings,” Henchard will live “a fruitless life” in preparation for “a miserable grave,” his “heart dry as summer’s dust” (the very dust we see him tread on his way to Weydon), “burning to the socket” (quoted and paraphrased from Shelley’s Preface, Alastor, 70). Lastly, we see Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner in the act of shooting the albatross. Indeed, Coleridge’s mariner returns in Hardy’s novel as Newson, the regenerate mariner who accepts the cast-off woman and child and presides over the second Elizabeth-Jane’s wedding in place of Henchard, the uninvited wedding guest.

Although these crimes against the heart are clear enough as analogues to Henchard’s fate, the character and destiny they describe are extremely difficult to comprehend. As unromantic man, Henchard represents Hardyan “unbeing,” a condition which we might understand as motivated by the compulsion to disintegrate. Driven by the Freudian death drive whose aims are antipathetic to those of the libido and whose mechanisms are to date poorly understood,² Henchard is radically “unerotic” man. Subject to (or a subject of) the death-drive, he cannot properly be described in Freudian psychoanalytic terms which belong to the realm of eros and the libido. Thus, Henchard’s story can only be told, not analyzed. In this way, he is a portrait of Burke’s “sublime” of terror, yet his character is genuinely mysterious and not just mystically so. The fable of such a mysterious will to unbe depicts what we might call the “historical sublime” wherein terror arises as an effect of history in conjunction with a perverse desire for nothingness enacted through the acquisition of property and power. Part of the terror arises because we do not know the “law” or “essence” of his being, all we see are its effects in time.

In this connection, we might note that all seemingly romantic or libidinous moments in Henchard’s life are mechanical and deadly attachments bound by the letter of convention and not by any sense of an elective affinity which exceeds that letter. That is, the narrator depicts each and every one of his “marriages” as a business “contract” and not a love affair. At Casterbridge, he contracts to remarry a “ghostly” and dispirited Susan whom he does not love; he strikes a bargain with Farfrae to keep him in town because the Scot reminds him of his dead brother, and he demands that Lucetta marry him as though she were breaking a contract by not doing so. His stepdaughter, Elizabeth-Jane, can live with him provided that she follows the letter of his laws on propriety, while he returns Lucetta’s love letters with an air of giving her back a contract which she did not honor. Even in death Henchard prohibits the resurgence of eros. His last will and testament demands that all forget him; in effect, he prohibits the therapy of recollection and recital which constitutes the terms of the Ancient Mariner’s redemption. It is explicitly by “not forgetting” or by recollecting the horror of his isolation and his drive toward unbeing that some small recompense could arise and, if cultivated, adjust the future; yet it is precisely this therapy that his last will and testament prohibits.

If we imagine him as Hardy did, as a gloomy Wordsworthian “spot of time,” we see that it is by constructively overcoming the memory of Henchard that beauty and joy can arise. If we agree further that romantic representations of joy arise as the imagination recoils from history and that correspondences occur when we repress the awareness of strife and difference, then it would seem apparent that those who manage to either flee or overcome the memory of Henchard would be able to recuperate some small portion of romantic contentment. Thus by ignoring Henchard’s last will and testament and recalling the lesson of his life, the second Elizabeth-Jane partially romanticizes her life. By denying the anti-romantic character she has called father and acknowledging New-son’s natural paternity, she becomes a somewhat romantic character in her own right.

This calculous is borne out by the narrative. Freed of Henchard by her small inheritance, Lucetta falls in love with Farfrae, while Elizabeth-Jane is capable ultimately of finding “microscopic” joys in small acts of social welfare after Henchard’s death. In this respect, Henchard’s interaction with Abel Whittle is a negative parable of remarkable proportions, especially when Abel accompanies his “brother,” Cain-Henchard, into the wilderness. Then, the mayor’s “desire not to desire” finally achieves its perverse goal and the archetypal murderer of brotherly, familiar, and sacred love is murdered in turn by his own hand as an act of kindness toward himself and others. Ironically, it is through the doubly negative effect of his will to die (of his desire to kill his desire not to desire) that Henchard achieves the equivalent of redemption, which is oblivion. That is to say that by escaping from himself he becomes worthy of an equivalent form of that grace which others have merited and received by escaping from him.

What is truly remarkable about Henchard is that he exists as pure quantity without quality. Henchard is repeatedly referred to as a quantum whose stock of “goods” is eroded by time and chance. He has no purchase on anything eternal and immutable; he is thoroughly temporal man. The narrator describes Henchard’s temporality by charting his “fall” as though a stock were falling in value on the stock exchange. We will recall that Mr. Fall is instrumental in his “fall,” that Fall’s nickname is Wide-O, which names Henchard’s sin (he widowed himself) as well as the zero that he is, and that Henchard’s fall is precipitated by his distrust in the prophet of nature’s prophecy, which turns out to be true. Devoid of natural qualities, Henchard is perhaps the first narrative portrait of modernism’s “man without qualities,” a radically pathological extension of the typically Victorian villain of materialism who appears in fiction from Dickens to Galsworthy.

Given the pure exteriority of his character, Henchard can only acquire culture in its purely specular forms. He is a man for whom beauty and learning are but the thespian acquisitions of “the quality,” a word whose social ironies are thematically central to Hardy’s satirical intent in the novel. It is this specular sense of culture that interests Henchard in his concern for his good name and for Elizabeth-Jane’s education. We will recall that he prohibits his stepd...