Thomas Hardy: balancing the poetic with the realist style
Reading ‘Intelligence – but not as we know it’ (article on AI in KES magazine Quest No 156), reminded me of writing styles, particularly Thomas Hardy’s and the way he manipulates the English language for very specific ends. Some authors are known for their characters or their plots but in Hardy the prose is almost enough: syntax, rhythm, cadence. To take as an example one of his most well-known novels, in Far from the Madding Crowd Hardy achieves a coherent network of images, repeated and connected and made use of in different ways throughout. The setting is the natural world but it functions more forcefully than as simple background. Descriptions of setting in Hardy reinforce and indeed supply the theme, creating a variety of relationships between background and the unfolding drama and revealing description to have a far more than ornamental role in the structure: ‘It was a fine morning, and the sun lighted up to a scarlet glow the crimson jacket she wore, and painted a soft lustre upon her bright face and dark hair. The myrtles, geraniums, and cactuses packed around her were fresh and green and at such a leafless season they invested the whole concern of horses, waggon, furniture, and girl with a peculiar vernal charm’ (Hardy, 2012, p. 8). Hardy’s prose reveals not only aspects of characterisation and thematic development but also highlights the role of artifice in this depiction of Bathsheba. The juxtaposition of ‘leafless’ nature with Bathsheba’s plants reveals a complex world of interaction: a good choice of words in his adaptation of the realist style although I suggest that this style stretches beyond ‘authentic reality’ to something more symbolic and evocative too. Nevertheless, he avoids the danger of nostalgia in his inferences of constancy in people’s relationship with nature, by an urgent awareness of the changing times of the 19th century, signalled by itinerant workers and careless working practices. Gabriel Oak, for example, reacts to the signs given by the 'Great Mother' that a storm is imminent: a toad on the move, slugs going into the house and sheep huddling together, but this is always against a background of the tough realities of rural communities in Victorian England.
Contribution by KES member Patricia Hodges