Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Part I Theories as stories
- Part II Stories and style
- 4 A for but: Hawthorne's ‘The Custom-House’
- 5 Ill locutions
- 6 Ill logics of irony
- 7 Ill wit and sick tragedy
- 8 Cheng Ming Chi'I'd
- 9 Notes on the metre of Auden's The Age of Anxiety
- Part III Theories of stories
- Part IV Things?
- References
- Index
7 - Ill wit and sick tragedy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Part I Theories as stories
- Part II Stories and style
- 4 A for but: Hawthorne's ‘The Custom-House’
- 5 Ill locutions
- 6 Ill logics of irony
- 7 Ill wit and sick tragedy
- 8 Cheng Ming Chi'I'd
- 9 Notes on the metre of Auden's The Age of Anxiety
- Part III Theories of stories
- Part IV Things?
- References
- Index
Summary
Thomas Hardy has been called ‘innovative’ in his attempts to fuse ‘narrator’ and character (see below), but in this respect he is much more traditional than Crane, where the fusion of the poles NS and RT leads to unstable irony, as we saw in the last chapter. In Hardy the problem lies more with the handling of representation, and notably of viewpoint, and this is involved with questions of knowledge and understanding.
In an interesting essay (1979) John Goode analyses Hardy's most controversial character, Sue Bridehead, as an image in Jude's life, whose function is to open a gap between what she says and the way she is understood, and he argues that we go seriously wrong in treating Jude ‘in terms of a representation which we then find “incomprehensible”’, for it is the incomprehensibility that constitutes the novel's effect' (108).
What is interesting about Goode's essay is that while insisting that representational readings (sexist, feminist, or whatever) are wrong, he inverts, to show this, the type of representational reading that blames Sue: in a naturalistic interpretation, he says, we would question the absurdity of Jude's lack of understanding:
Sue is driven round the country by prejudice and poverty, stuck in Christminster by Jude's obsession, and her children are killed by Jude's son whom she had made her own […] But we don't consider it naturalistically because we never ask what is happening to Sue, it is Sue happening to Jude. So what matters is where this reaction puts her, rather than why it came about.
(108)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Stories, Theories and Things , pp. 103 - 122Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991
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