Little Hardy Query

I’ve been thinking again about characters that feel recalcitrant or resistant to an author’s plot. Part of the process of rereading is reading from a different vantage, which can sometimes prompt further thinking through an earlier reading.

One of my favorite readings— one I remain really convinced by, in many ways— is the reading that began Exquisite Masochism. It’s a reading of Hardy’s Jude, and in it I argued strenuously for the erotic connection between Jude and Sue, a connection I said worked as a plotting engine even after Little Father Time kills Jude and Sue’s children and himself. Part of that came from my sense that Hardy refers almost glancingly to the children of Jude and Sue’s connection, and that their deaths, which prompt the novel’s final pages, feel flimsily earned by the novel’s plot.

All that seems right to me, but it also feels wrong emotionally: too blasé about a plot point that infuriates and horrifies readers, even now. I was thinking a bit about how much my understanding changed after having a child, and, then after having a second child who was very ill at birth. There is, in Hardy’s Sue, a sense of tension at the idea of children’s death or injury that loses against the mechanics of his plot. What is this lag, and where does it come from? Hardy was obviously not a woman, nor a parent. Is it just that he was sensitive enough to parental life that he knew, almost despite himself, that the plot he developed wasn’t quite accurate?

Another Hardy example comes from Tess’s losing power after shooting Alec. She wanders the countryside, and ends up— where? Stonehenge of all places. She has to be a sacrificial victim, not because her energy is gone, but because her story is. What do we make of the places where characters seem to push awkwardly against the edges of their plots? Is it a sensitivity borne of writing someone very different from yourself? A narrative failure at the level of personal difference? Or is it something more basic: that writers, basing their characters on people and stories they knew or experienced, lose sight when the story gets too close to another person?