On best-selling Allegra Goodman’s recent novel The Cookbook Collector, the following blurb appears: “If any contemporary author deserves to wear the mantle of Jane Austen, it’s Goodman.” Though I love Austen, I find myself wishing that someday I might be blurbed as deserving to wear the mantle of Thomas Hardy. I formed this wish after recently finishing Far From the Madding Crowd and then reading what literary critic John Paterson had to say about Hardy’s philosophy of the novel in Paterson’s book The Novel as Faith: The Gospel According to James, Hardy, Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, and Woolf.
I was 14 when I first read Far From the Madding Crowd, and although it would be some years before I had the critical language to articulate what I loved about Hardy, I would have told you that a Hardy novel has a completely different—and entirely pleasing—sensibility from any other novel. You know when you are reading Hardy.
Now I can name that sensibility—it is the sensibility of substance and truth over style and subjective psychology, of poetry and philosophy over representation and science. Of course, his novels are also composed of the elements he is famous for: bringing classical tragedy into novel form, and with it, a strong sense of fatalism; also his rendering of a rural, agrarian England on the cusp of industrial revolution.
I am a product of George Mason University’s MFA program—a program which I loved and which exceeded my very high expectations. But I felt a strong emphasis on psychological representation in the vein of Faulkner and Joyce and on ridding the text of exposition, favoring scene (more on this later). Contemporary literati tend to distrust any author with abstractionist tendencies; in other words, an author had better not have a prevailing philosophy, and if he/she does, she must be very careful not to let it interfere or impose itself in any way on her characters.
No wonder Hardy is so refreshing. Though his characters have enough integrity to stand on their own and hold interest, the examination of a particular character’s thoughts is never allowed to overwhelm the forward, fated movement of the plot. Leading lady Bathsheba Everdene—a character who certainly holds individual interest in her unconventional and courageous ownership of her own farm—becomes entangled in Hardy’s ingenious imbroglio of three suitors, each of which, though somewhat a type, has, too, his individual qualities. We understand the characters’ motivations, and yet individual motivation is not the emphasis as it has been in so much literature since Hardy. Instead, Hardy’s philosophy of a beautiful and natural universe fixed beyond the whims of individual agency prevails.
