7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
an edition with plenty of background information and some criticism, March 29, 2006
This review is from: The Return of the Native (Norton Critical Editions) (Paperback)
The opening of the novel has so many ruts and hairpin bends that the reader is almost forbidden to progress. Schklovski says that "the crooked road, the road on which the foot senses the stones, the road which turns back on itself - this is the road of art". It is a device familiar in comic texts such as Tristam Shandy and in texts designed to maximize suspense such as the novels of Wilkie Collins, but deliberate as it seems to be here, its purpose is entirely ideological - it is to push the narratives, the lives of the individuals, to the side of a context which is as a whole immovable, levelling or, to use a word which is used at key moments of the text and which will be central to the novel, "obscuring". The novel is its own Promethean resistance to its metaphoric sublimation.
Yet once the story is initiated it proceeds with amazing single-mindedness. The obscuring perspective re-enters rather as a sequence of parenthetical closures on the crises of the narrative. Thus immediately after having decided on his wedding day with Eustacia, Clym feels overpowered by the flatness of the landscape. After he has discovered Eustacia's guilt, Clym is confronted with "the imperturbable countenance of the heath, which, having defied the cataclysmal onsets of centuries, reduced to insignificance by its seamed and antique features the wildest turmoil of a single man". (V.2).
The several allusion to Sophocles' Oedipus and to Greek tragedy in general, together with the general shape of the novel, its relative unity of shape and action, is sometimes taken to mean that Hardy is trying to write the modern equivalent of classical tragedy. But equally the "oppressive horizontality" and its reduction of man's emotional dramas to "insignificance" is taken to indicate that the deterministic ideology of the novel precludes the "dignity" of tragedy.
This was D.H. Lawrence's view, who in his essay on the psychology of the characters in Hardy's novels related these to Tolstoy's, and more indirectly to Shakespeare and Sophocles because of this switch of vision (from the heroic in Shopocles and Shakespeare to the "insignificant" in Tolstoy and Hardy). I would say that the heroic vision is only the Greek, since Shakespeare stands at the level of humanity; Tolstoy does move to an upward vision that renders the characters ridiculous. Hardy, in my opinion, alternates between the three perspectives, relying more heavily on the last. According to D. H. Lawrence: "There is a constant revelation in Hardy's novels that there exists a great background, vital and vivid, which matters more than the people who move upon it. Against the background of dark, passionate Egdon, is drawn the lesser scheme of lives. The vast, unexplored morality of life itself surrounds us in its eternal incomprehensibility, and in its midst goes on the little human morality play, with its mechanical movement." But there is no doubt that in his handling of the upward perspective Hardy presents itself as a seemingly unlikely precursor of much twentieth-century art, and an efficient, tasteful abridger between the old and the new.
Hardy is conscious of his role in introducing this new (in)version of the Greek mode: "The truth seems to be that a long line of disillusive centuries has permanently displaced the Hellenic idea of life, or whatever it might be called. (...) That old-fashioned revelling in the general situation grows less and less possible as we uncover the defects of natural laws, and see the quandary that man is in by their operation." (III.1) Clym himself describes Promethean rebelliousness as a phase he has grown out of.
On the other hand, the landscape of the heath is characterized as modern precisely because of its obscurity, which makes it one with the darkening spirit of human kind. It stands against the simple joy of the Hellenic, and is linked with the revival of interest in Nordic art and mythology which is found in Ruskin, Arnold and Morris. It is the landscape of the excluded, the "barbarous" - that which the Hellenic and post-Hellenic worlds ignore. This natural world is contrasted with civilization in the same way in which Eustacia is contrasted with Thomasin, who meets Venn by the old Roman road that crosses the heath.
Tragedy is therefore not heroic, but the result of the obscure determinism of nature, and is brought about by the interplay of human intention and chance. A minute instance of this technique is presented in the gambling on the heath. Christian compares chance with the magic work of the Devil: "That these little things should carry such luck, and such charm, and such a spell, and such power in 'em, passes all, ever heard or zeed." Human intention is carried away by mysterious forces: Wildeve originally intended to gamble so as to earn back his wife's money, but "as the minutes passed he had gradually drifted into a revengeful intention without knowing the precise moment of forming it." Ultimately, it is the reddleman, who is associated with the Devil since the beginning of the novel, who wins the game and eventually re-inclusion in the social order of the heath. Venn submits to the mysterious power of a higher will which is in agreement with his own: "He might have been an Arab, or an automaton; he would have been like a red-sandstone statue but for the motion of his arm like a dice-box." (III,8) Eustacia, the only superior, though limited, character in the novel, is seen to possess the attributes of a goddess, as seen on her influence on the child who keeps her bonfire. "The little slave went on feeding the fire as before. He seemed a mere automaton, galvanized into moving and speaking by the wayward Eustacia's will. He might have been the brass statue which Albertus Magnus is said to have animated just so far as to make it chatter, and move, and be his servant." (I,6) Still, Eustacia is heroic only in so far as she is the result of "a happy convergence of natural laws" (I,7); this is showing the influence of Darwin's Origin of the Species, and does much to discredit the orthodox tragic interpretation.
Together with this book you may like to read J. A. Symonds' The Greek Poets, where Symonds modifies Schlegel's description of Greek tragedy as a protest against fate and which Hardy extracted at some length. Also, Arnold's Literature and Dogma links the "Ishmaelitism" that is taken to characterize the heath with the modern cult of nature and with the ideal of Bohemian Paris.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A Year and a Day on Egdon Heath, September 26, 2011
This review is from: The Return of the Native (Norton Critical Editions) (Paperback)
There was a time, before iPods, Walkmans, TV, radio, record players, in which workers (usually women) that were assigned to long hours of menial labor would assign one amongst them to read a book to the rest. The Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy's sixth novel, would be a terrific choice for such a reading group. Few in the 21st century have the leisure, or the inclination, to delve into a tale in which many pages might be given to the description of a natural scene, or to the intricate development of the personalities of the main characters of this book. But if there were a modern reader that either had, or made, time to read this book at the deliberate and careful pace that is required to experience its depth and richness, that reader would be richly rewarded. As was I.
Thomas Hardy, better known for Tess of the D'Urbervilles, was one of the most influential of the English authors of the 1800's. Both D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf pay him homage and cite him as a source of their inspiration. His stories can be explored on two levels, both levels very accessible to the moderately experienced reader, neither level involving a journey into the deep complexities of books such as Pinchon's Gravity's Rainbow or James Joyce's Ulysses.
The first level of The Return of the Native: it's simply a wonderful tale. For the price of a tiny bit of patience, as Hardy's narrative begins to unfold the reader receives a rich story involving integrity, duplicity, humor, passion, selfishness and selflessness, nobility and narcissism, as well as the consequences of impetuous action and the rewards of patient persistence. As a well told story it stands on its own and stands proudly, with or without the embellishment of scholarly opinion or critical review.
The second level: Hardy infuses the story with his philosophy of the relationship between nature and mankind, his criticisms of the tragic consequences of societally ordained values (Victorian values colliding with human desires and capabilities), and beautiful symbolism. For those who feel that plots are not the core of a novel but merely scaffoldings upon which to hang literary/philosophical schools of thought and layers of symbolism, The Return of the Native serves well as a cerebral playground. This particular edition is a wonderful companion to those who delight in experiencing every nuance that can be brought to life.
Taken at the first level, The Return of the Native is an absorbing tale complete with unpredictable twists of plot, human souls whose fates are determined by letters that arrive moments too late, and bouts of comic relief.
At the second level, The Return of the Native is rich in philosophy, anthropology, even theology.
Take both levels together, and you have what is deservedly called a classic. The word classic makes many cringe. No need to recoil from The Return of the Native: this story is fascinating and rewarding for any who are patient enough to let its rich flavors and constructions emerge at a pace reflective of an era gone by.
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