Dear Serial Readers,
"The Arrival"--the title of this second "book" section of the novel--is a lot of fanfare for Clym's return from Paris. Like much else in the novel so far, there's some slow building up to his appearance on the scene (as "the owner of the awakening voice"), which is filtered through Eusatcia's eager eyes and ears (yes, eavesdropping, as Maura mentioned last time). Her situational boredom and depression for which infatuation seems the only available cure is primed for Clym's arrival. I do see shades of Emma Bovary here, with her great desire for "a sufficient hero," this one straight from Paris. Her plot to play the Turkish Knight in the mummers' traveling Christmas show is a bit of amusing cross-dressing. The segment ends with her searching for her love object's "form"--will he notice her? Do we care?
Like Maura mentioned with the last segment, there doesn't seem much "love" in any abiding sense (between and among Thomasin, Wildeve, Eusatacia, and who knows yet about Clym Y.), with the exception of Diggory Venn, our local Reddleman. Why does he get such top billing in the decent humanity chart? Why, as Maura asked too, are we reminded that he was once a farmer, and not always a reddleman, and that his class position was once better?
I don't know, but I see Hardy trying to reconcile clashes or what seem disparate intersections through the chance encounters and remarkable scenery of Egdon Heath. Mostly I see Hardy trying to undo the puzzle of past and present, of the past's status in the present. My favorite sentence in this episode comes at the end of the paragraph that begins with Eustacia's contempt for mummers and mumming: "This unweeting manner of performance is the true ring by which, in this refurbishing age, a fossilized survival may be known from a spurious reproduction." Hardy's narrator, unlike Eustacia Vye, seems to value customs of the past as "a fossilized survival" over an imitation or "spurious reproduction." Maybe that's why he's not writing a historical novel here set in the distant past, but trying instead to capture that past through place, through the full landscape of Egdon Heath which includes the bonfires and the mummers with their "unweeting manner of performance." "Unweeting" is apparently an archaic word for "unwitting"--funny that Hardy's language has scattered fossils of past words too.
As a stalwart serial reader, I have been paying attention to how each installment concludes with some suspenseful edge--this one with Eustacia as Turkish Knight scanning the audience for Clym's form. However, each chapter seems to end with a suspenseful note, as if to prod readers to turn the page, to continue on. I'm wondering if the cliff edge of suspense at the end of a monthly installment is much higher than those that conclude chapters.
For next time: the rest of Book II, chaps. 6-8 (end of "The Arrival").
Serially suspended,
Susan
6 comments:
I am struck by how Shakespearean the mummery scene is. The troupe is reminiscent of the Dream's mechanicals. And Eustacia recalls that parade of cross-dressing heroines, especially Viola and Rosalind, whose disguise is entangled with their romantic hopes and aspirations. Although I can no longer recall it clearly, it seems to me that there's at least one character who stage-manages her own substitution for someone else as Eustacia does here.
Like Susan, I was very struck by the "fossilized survival" line. The book is chockful of such things. As is Eustacia's brain. In one paragraph describing her dream, we get Nebuchadnezzar, Scheherazade, and the Cretan labyrinth.
I was struck by Susan’s question about whether other readers noticed a difference between the kind of cliffhanger that happens at chapter breaks (—a traditional stopping-place when people are reading aloud in groups or alone, irrespective of publication form—) and the kind of cliffhanger that happens when the published text runs out for Hardy’s first group of serial readers. I’ve used bookmarks to note the divisions between installments in my own copy of the book, but I keep thinking that I would have jumped to the wrong conclusions if I had been reading without these markers and trying to predict where the month’s text ended. While there was a nail-biting delay between Mrs. Yeobright’s demand for an explanation of how her niece ended up in a cart instead of married (#1) and Thomasin’s reply (#2), I was surprised there was no publication delay between Diggory Venn’s resolution to confront Eustacia Vye (Book 1, Ch. 9, #3) and the “Desperate Attempt at Persuasion” he embarks upon the next morning (Ch. 10; same installment). What a great cliffhanger this second confrontation would have been for the original serial readers had Hardy decided to employ it this way! I’m almost disappointed that he didn’t.
All of this led me to wonder: if it’s difficult to differentiate between the ends of the chapters and the ends of the serial installments, is it equally difficult to differentiate between the beginnings of the chapters versus serial installments in this novel? The moment that really crystallized this for me occurs at the beginning of the fourth installment. Book 2 begins with the announcement: “On the fine days at this time of the year, and earlier, certain ephemeral operations were apt to disturb, in their trifling way, the majestic calm of Egdon Heath” (105, emphasis mine). Did this “and earlier” catch anyone else’s eye? It seemed strange to me to call attention to a situation that is already in progress in this way, but then I started to think about the way this description situates the temporal gap between Book 1 and Book 2 for serial readers. It’s almost as though the text is suggesting that the “ephemeral operations” that disrupt Egdon Heath began during the time when the reader has turned her eye away from the narrative— as though we are being told that the plot is still developing in some alternate timeline even though we (as “original” serial readers) are not allowed to see this development occurring because of the publication structure. Perhaps I am reading too much into this, but the “and earlier” in this context made me wonder whether Hardy was creating a kind of backward-looking suspense by constructing sense of belated arrival for the reader.
I was struck by Susan’s question about whether other readers noticed a difference between the kind of cliffhanger that happens at chapter breaks (—a traditional stopping-place when people are reading aloud in groups or alone, irrespective of publication form—) and the kind of cliffhanger that happens when the published text runs out for Hardy’s first group of serial readers. I’ve used bookmarks to note the divisions between installments in my own copy of the book, but I keep thinking that I would have jumped to the wrong conclusions if I had been reading without these markers and trying to predict where the month’s text ended. While there was a nail-biting delay between Mrs. Yeobright’s demand for an explanation of how her niece ended up in a cart instead of married (#1) and Thomasin’s reply (#2), I was surprised there was no publication delay between Diggory Venn’s resolution to confront Eustacia Vye (Book 1, Ch. 9, #3) and the “Desperate Attempt at Persuasion” he embarks upon the next morning (Ch. 10; same installment). What a great cliffhanger this second confrontation would have been for the original serial readers had Hardy decided to employ it this way! I’m almost disappointed that he didn’t.
All of this led me to wonder: if it’s difficult to differentiate between the ends of the chapters and the ends of the serial installments, is it equally difficult to differentiate between the beginnings of the chapters versus serial installments in this novel? The moment that really crystallized this for me occurs at the beginning of the fourth installment. Book 2 begins with the announcement: “On the fine days at this time of the year, and earlier, certain ephemeral operations were apt to disturb, in their trifling way, the majestic calm of Egdon Heath” (105, emphasis mine). Did this “and earlier” catch anyone else’s eye? It seemed strange to me to call attention to a situation that is already in progress in this way, but then I started to think about the way this description situates the temporal gap between Book 1 and Book 2 for serial readers. It’s almost as though the text is suggesting that the “ephemeral operations” that disrupt Egdon Heath began during the time when the reader has turned her eye away from the narrative— as though we are being told that the plot is still developing in some alternate timeline even though we (as “original” serial readers) are not allowed to see this development occurring because of the publication structure. Perhaps I am reading too much into this, but the “and earlier” in this context made me wonder whether Hardy was creating a kind of backward-looking suspense by constructing sense of belated arrival for the reader.
Wow, Naomi, what an interesting point. I like the idea that time continues to pass in Egdon Heath and we as readers are only let into that time in intervals.
Reading this alongside Our Mutual Friend, I continue to be surprised by the isolation and disconnection of the characters. In OMF, it seems like characters from all different social positions and parts of the city are always running into each other. Even though the city is vast, everything seems to happening on top of everything else, and disparate social realms are often brought into contact with one another. The world of The Return of the Native feels so starkly different. Even though the physical space is much smaller than London and the number of people involved much smaller as well, the characters seem so isolated. Much of this section is about Eustacia trying to manufacture a meeting with Clym, even though they are physically and socially not all that far away from each other. This isolation seems to be reflected in the serial parts as well. In Dickens, each serial part brings together so many different characters and parts of London, while this section mainly focuses on Eustacia, mainly alone. We get one short jump over to the Yeobrights, but mainly we just see from Eustacia's isolated point of view.
I was amusing myself with the fact that, in this segment, this very slow moving novel becomes extremely preoccupied with waiting. Of course, the primary focus in the segment is waiting for Clym, especially for Eustacia. And the installment, of course, ends with the reader waiting to be introduced to Clym. But we also wait for the mummers to perform. Granfir Castle is "wating his turn." There is also the delayed marriage of Thomasin and Wildeve as well as the scene between Charley and Eustacia: Charley waits to hold Eustacia's hand while Eustacia waits for Charley to finish holding her hand. Eustacia and Charley bargain over time--from a half hour to a quarter hour. I thought it was interesting that Charley chose to carry out this somewhat creepy hand holding contract in two installments.
Hardy is also introducing a sense of what Turner would call "competing temporalities." The narrator tells us that there is no specific time in Egdon - only doctrines - a very interesting way to look at time. Like Turner, the narrator suggests that time is interpreted; it doesn't exist on its own. In "Return of the Native," within Hardy's slow moving, poetic narrative, time is an object that can be shaped and manipulated according to a hamlet's customs. This segment made me think of time is a resource and how different entities compete for this resource; some people have more control over time than others. Industry and print media seem to have a controlling interest in the resource of time as industrial time and periodical time are the main organizing tools of society. One can think of time as a technology just as Dames thinks of the novel as a technology. Time as technology produces physiological effects - on both a macro and micro level, and one could say the same of the serial novel. To put Dames's argument in a serial context, the serial novel is a type of temporal technology.
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