Poetry and Prose in Thomas Hardy – A Challenge to Metaphysics of Presence

Abstract

One of the greatest English novelists and poets, Thomas Hardy, has frequently been occupied by the idea that poetry is a domain where the artist is allowed more freedom to express what is haunting his mind. In many interviews and bibliographical writing, Hardy indicates that he has always preferred poetry to fiction although he owns his renowned status to his novels. Hardy wrote novels to earn money; however, he enjoyed writing poetry and identified himself primarily as a poet. Born and raised in the age of a long Victorian tradition, Hardy defined himself as an “innocent agnostic,” and, similar to many other thinkers of his time, he distrusted the Puritan teaching and the easy reconciliations between religion and science. He was the inheritor of a Darwinian and Post-Darwinian world which witnessed the heated contradiction between the doctrines of Creationism and Evolutionism. Hardy did not have a single philosophy of life; however, he perceived that there was more that met the eye in relation to the irrational machinations of the supreme forces behind the universe. He once exclaimed that he could much more easily “cry out that the Supreme Move or Movers were unfair” in a poem than in fiction (The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 58–59). From this vantage point, poetry, despite its condensation and metaphoricity, renders itself as a kind of a “transcendental contraband (Glass, 244),” to use the term of J. Derrida, to prose writing. In that sense, poetry is like a second text that develops in parallel with the original one, i.e. like a “running commentary” of prose-writing. In the light of what Hardy has said in his commentaries and interviews, it is possible to conclude that for him, the artistic expression in terms of poetry allows more psychological depth and more emotional freedom. It was difficult for an agnostic poet to openly discuss his beliefs in the Victorian age, and Hardy had been often criticized for them. Poetry was a chance for him that allowed a freer emotional outlet. However, poetry is simultaneously the most figurative and concentrated form of literature and it epitomises the anxiety and frustration of the poet in his attempt to articulate his own reality or state of mind, whereby symbolic and linguistic structures inevitably have to collapse, too. Thus poetry has both a stabilizing and destabilizing effect. On the other hand, the interviews, bibliographical editions and personal writings of Hardy must stand out as segments of prose writing in themselves; and have to equally claim to denominate a more mimetic, representational reality. However, as Deconstruction would urge, there should be no clear-cut distinctions that only reinforce the logic of the metaphysics of presence. It is impossible not to keep in mind that human understanding and philosophy distrust all kinds of absolute truths, origins or givens. If language has any power to mean things, signify and denominate, it is only the partial or temporary truth, the “point de capiton,” as coined by J. Lacan, who implies that though it is possible to nail down truths, this act will be only a temporary act (Ecrits, 303). Moreover, as Martin Heidegger insists in Being and Time (25), meaning formation is the continual “flickering of presence and absence;” in that sense, poetic and prosaic expressions will not be taken as the two poles of a metaphysical opposition but as each other’s différance, supplement, or transcendental contraband. In other words, the metaphysical oppositions have to be transcended because even temporary truths will be always open to multiple interpretations whereby undecidability will cast its shadows eternally. In conclusion, genetic criticism has to comply with Poststructuralist premises because if a literary text is considered the “outcome,” the “final end-product” of the artistic creation, other non-literary elements that are subject to literary criticism will have to be considered as either “prior to” or “outside” it. However, distinctions such as “outside” and “inside,” “prior” and “post” have to be avoided, otherwise, they will only reinforce the positioning of further dualities, origins, and logoi, something against the nature of Poststructuralist criticism. When the metaphysics of presence is challenged and shaken down, the act of interpretation will assume a better mould, more fluid, more amorphous and more temporal.