H050550 AUTHORIAL INTENT / OSCAR WILDE 6/27/05 - HARDY FORUM ARCHIVES ____________________________________________________________________________
From: patrick@prassociates.co.uk
Subject: Something half understood
Date: June 27, 2005 7:16:10 AM PDT
I was listening today to a BBC Radio 4 programme called 'More Than The Sum'
in the 'Something Understood' series.
It reminded me of the many discussions we have had on this group of the
meaning of one or another passages of Hardy and pointed out that many of the
'meanings' we enjoy in literature may never have been part of an author's
intentions.
One of the works they quoted from was Oscar Wilde's 'The Critic as Artist:
"the meaning of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the
soul of him who looks at it, as it was in his soul who wrought it. Nay, it
is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meanings,
and makes it marvellous for us, and sets it in some new relation to the age,
so that it becomes a vital portion of our lives." etc.
I wonder how subscribers to this group feel about the idea that we are
'developing', as well as enjoying and understanding, the works of TH. I
expect this idea of the creative role of the reader is well-known in
academic literary circles but, as a non-academic, I am curious about it
because I feel I am often getting something out of a text that the author
could not have dreamt of putting in.
I also wondered what TH thought of Oscar Wilde and vice versa and what he
might have made of 'The Critic as Artist'.
The BBC Radio programme website (with a 'listen again' facility) is here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/religion/somethingunderstood.shtml
And 'The Critic as Artist' here:
http://www.ucc.ie/celt/published/E800003-007/
Apropos of all this, I have always assumed the title of the series
'Something Understood' comes from George Herbert's sonnet on prayer which
ends:
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
The land of spices; something understood.
I think those are just the sort of lines where endless 'meanings' may be
generated in a reader that were not part of the writer's original intention.
After that diatribe, I think I will go back to the gardening - if you know
what I mean.
Patrick Roper
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From: michael@perceptivecreation.co.uk
Subject: Re: Something half understood
Date: June 26, 2005 9:44:23 PM PDT
I think you're absolutely right, Patrick. I always remember from my relative
youth Peter Hall stating that there was a new version of Hamlet
approximately every 11 days. The eternal truths of life and the ways we
relate to nature and each other go through endless variations as history
ploughs ever onwards. Perhaps one can validly assume that had Shakespeare or
Hardy been around today they would almost certainly recognize the truths
they saw before in their new guises?
Michael Barry
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From: Rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu
Subject: Re: Something half understood
Date: June 27, 2005 8:36:52 AM PDT
Hi Patrick --
I think the first thing to notice is that Oscar Wilde doesn't use the word "intention" and does not suggest that the author never "dreamt of putting it there." In scholarship these aren't helpful (or valid) concepts. There is no way of determining the truth element in either of them, unless the author specifically says, extra-textually, that "this is what I meant" (and that also might be open to query).
What Wilde is pointing to is the act of interpretation. I think it was James Joyce (among others, no doubt) who said that a work of art aims at ambiguity- - the sort of ambiguity which allows for the act of interpretation to happen.
Those of us who teach writing courses take pains to stress such things as the essential difference between denotative and connotative language. We use the first for instruction handbooks and certain scientific discourses where the words strive to avoid ambiguity at all times. Connotative language aims at the opposite. The idea is to open, not close, the doors to philosophical understanding. Ambiguity in the sentence, if it is artfully done (as in poetry, for example), allows for shades of meaning to open up, especially in instances where there is not (and should not be) any such thing as a single, concrete "truth" but rather an understanding of the complexity of meaning and of knowledge.
I am trying to avoid writing a "diatribe" here -- hoping this very inadequate note will suffice for now.
Cheers
Rosemarie
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From: rnemesva@stfx.ca
Subject: RE: Something half understood
Date: June 27, 2005 8:37:35 AM PDT
To: HARDY-L@csusm.edu
Reply-To: HARDY-L@csusm.edu
In his essay "The Profitable Reading of Fiction" Hardy directly
addresses the question of a reader's involvement in creating meaning.
There he encourages in his audience
"the exercise of a generous imaginativeness, which shall find in a tale
not only all that was put there by the author, put he it never so
awkwardly, but which shall find there what was never inserted by him,
never foreseen, never contemplated. Sometimes these additions which are
woven around a work of fiction by the intensive power of the reader's
own imagination are the finest parts of the scenery."
I often find this to be the hardest idea to "sell" to my students--that
an author doesn't necessarily consciously insert everything which may be
perceived in a text, but that textuality ("meaning") is a complex
combination of authorial intention (a slippery concept at the best of
times), unconscious authorial creativity, and reader response.
As for Hardy and Wilde, although the two men met following Wilde's talk
on "The House Beautiful" in September 27, 1883 (Millgate, p. 225), and
Hardy saw a private performance of *Salome* in 1906 (Millgate, p. 411),
I don't know of any comments by Hardy on Wilde. As far as I can tell
there are no direct mentions of Wilde in either the *Literary Notebooks*
or the *Collected Letters,* although I'm open to correction on this.
All the best.
Richard Nemesvari
Department of English
St. Francis Xavier University
rnemesva@stfx.ca
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From: nhardyboy@aol.com
Subject: Re: Something half understood
Date: June 27, 2005 10:44:20 AM PDT
Hardy wrote an appreciation of Wilde that was apparently meant for an introduction to a 1908 collection of Wilde's works. Hardy praises Wilde for his use of levity to attack materialism in literature and for holding forth rigid standards for literary criticism. I'm not sure why the piece wasn't published, but it appears in Vol. 2 of the _Literary Notebooks_, on pp. 255-57. I also speculated elsewhere that some of Wilde's ideas in "Critic as Artist" may inform Sue's aesthetic sensibilities in _Jude_, but that's neither here nor there.
Best,
Paul Niemeyer
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From: rnemesva@stfx.ca
Subject: Hardy and Wilde (was- Something half understood)
Date: June 27, 2005 11:25:40 AM PDT
Thanks to Paul Niemeyer for calling attention to Hardy's comments on Wilde in Volume 2 of the *Literary Notebooks* (can't think how I missed them). Just to continue the digging, Wilde is mentioned a few times in Jim Gibson's *Thomas Hardy: Interviews and Recollections.* One such passage is take from Siegfried Sassoon's Diaries, 1920-1922, recounting a visit on June 28, 1922:
"F. H. (at lunch) speaking of A. C. Benson. 'He is very fond of young men, and gets on extraordinarily well with them. But he takes no interest in women. Even refuses to lecture at the women's college.' The remark startled me. I realized once again how remote my secret affairs are from even the Hardys who are so fond of me. T. H. speaks of 'that man Oscar Wilde'. It isn't likely that T. H. would be unfair or prejudiced. It is merely that he doesn't recognize the existence of the problem. F. H. would be horrified, I'm afraid...." (Gibson, p. 130).
I'm not sure I fully accept Sassoon's evaluation of Hardy's "innocence" on such matters, although I agree with him that Hardy wasn't likely to be "unfair or prejudiced." Nonetheless, it's an interesting observation. Other passing mentions of Wilde occur on pages 65, 94, and 95.
Richard Nemesvari
Department of English
St. Francis Xavier University
rnemesva@stfx.ca
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From: Rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu
Subject: Re: Hardy and Wilde
Date: June 28, 2005 10:06:24 AM PDT
Ref: Oscar Wilde
Just to continue the digging (as Richard puts it) .
___________
Hardy attended Wilde's *Salome* on June 10, 1906, despite the fact that it had been banned by the Lord Chamberlain. The production was given a clandestine performance by the Literary Theatre Society and Hardy was rather bemused by the fact that no address (for payment) was given on the prospectus and that he had to mail his payment privately to Arthur Symons. He declared to Symons that he was willing to take the risk.
Aside from this it appears he was a Wilde admirer. To Sassoon, upon his lecture tour to America, Hardy (jokingly I suppose) says that he doubts many new ideas will be found there and then cites "a witty man's" words: these are Wilde's words in 'The Canterville Ghost' where the narrator remarks that 'we have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language'. Hardy is clearly fond of this comment because he repeats it also to Galsworthy upon *his* trip to California.
And so it goes.
Cheers,
Rosemarie
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From: michael@perceptivecreation.co.uk
Subject: Re: Hardy and Wilde (witty xenophobia?)
Date: June 27, 2005 6:45:09 PM PDT
This (joking?) xenophobic attitude of England towards America may perhaps have been quite common at the time? In 1912 (I don't know when the lecture tour (Hardy's?) to America was) Max Beerbohm wrote (in "Zuleika Dobson", which I was lucky enough to dramatise for the BBC World Service a few years ago): (the Duke - of Dorset, no less -) "held, too, in his enlightened way, that Americans have a perfect right to exist. But he did often find himself wishing Mr Rhodes had not enabled them to exercise that right in Oxford". (Mr Oover, the American in question, later gives "the Yale cheer" - demonstration please, Rosemarie!).
Whilst wits will traditionally be cruel to their targets, it's not something I would expect from Hardy. Was this a one-off aberration on his part?
Michael Barry
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From: hardycor@owl.csusm.edu
Subject: Re: Hardy and Wilde (witty xenophobia?)
Date: June 28, 2005 1:14:04 PM PDT
To: HARDY-L@csusm.edu
Reply-To: HARDY-L@csusm.edu
I doubt that Hardy's repetition of Wilde's quip about the language
differences between the two countries was meant as anything more than a
mild witticism Michael, and not altogether without an modicum of truth.
Hardy, who never did make it to the New World describes his reasons for his
reluctance to visit America in the poem "On an invitation to the United
States" in which that country bland newness and lack of history, compared
to England's storied, though often tragic past, are the elements that fail
to draw him there. If this counts as xenophobia, then I think you are
right that it cuts both ways.
Betty
I
My ardours for emprize nigh lost
Since Life has bared its bones to me,
I shrink to see a modern coast
Whose riper times have yet to be;
Where the new regions claim them free
From that long drip of human tears
Which peoples old in tragedy
Have left upon the centuried years.
II
For, wonning in these ancient lands,
Enchased and lettered as a tomb,
And scored with prints of perished hands,
And chronicled with dates of doom,
Though my own Being bears no bloom
I trace the lives such scenes enshrine,
Give past exemplars present room,
And their experience count as mine.
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From: michael@perceptivecreation.co.uk
Subject: Re: Hardy and Wilde (witty xenophobia?)
Date: June 27, 2005 5:55:04 PM PDT
Thanks Betty and Rosemarie - I'm glad to see that any xenophobia was at
least thoughtful and reasoned (and therefore appropriate to my maybe
simplistic image of Hardy). I must digest the poem more (on my return in 3
days). I've never been able to take poems on board easily!
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From: Rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu
Subject: Re: Hardy and Wilde (witty xenophobia?)
Date: June 28, 2005 1:33:07 PM PDT
Apologies Michael - my wayward syntax. It wasn't Hardy's lecture tour it was Sassoon's (and Galsworthy's). Hardy declined all invitations to America.
Bitter wit ? How about this? Hardy -- in questioning why the press is so afraid of George Moore (one of his harsher critics) whereas he thinks Moore the most tempting sport for robust critics, TH adds that somebody (himself?) "once called him a putrid literary hermaphrodite, which I thought funny, but it may have been an exaggeration."
Cheers,
Rosemarie
PS This implied slur on "hermaphrodites" possibly IS a "one-off aberration on his part."
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From: Rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu
Subject: Re: Hardy's xenophobia
Date: June 28, 2005 8:35:23 PM PDT
Hardy's xenophobia.
I think "thoughtful and reasoned" is a most apt way of putting it! There is no way, to my mind, of taking a poet's work of art and using it to see clearly and accurately into the life of the man behind the poet. One day the poet might create "x" and on another day, "y." Meantime the man behind the poet is living his own life. Perhaps he is beating his wife while writing poems of idyllic, romantic love. Perhaps, like Hardy, he is going to church every Sunday and yet, every other day of the week, creating a world in which a cruel, vindictive God shows the way to gross human error -- that is, in the invention of Himself!
We all know how this duality works even if we are not artists. We know exactly how it is to sit, transported to ecstasy by the beautiful music of Wagner and then to walk from the opera house to the parking lot experiencing the hunger of Parsifal in the eyes of our own street people with whom we feel we have nothing whatsoever in common. Why do we anguish for the one but not for the other?
Xenophobia? Hardy was torn about America. He experienced years and years of conflict and confusion at the hands of an American media which consistently exploited him. He hated the whole business. The piracy. The copyright theft, his uncertainty about what he called the sharp practice in literature which "apparently exists in America and which perfectly astonishes me."
But yet -- but yet -- his stories sold well and dramatised versions of his novels in particular were extraordinarily popular. What to do? He longed for an appreciative public, after all., yet he is "uncertain as to what rights really do exist, or rather what the meaning of "rights" is as applied to America in this case." Why was it that his MS was dispatched to America, where it was printed without his seeing the proofs.? Why was it that he felt that " the literary insight of America cannot be depended on. With even our own best printers you know what happens sometimes, & there it is worse." Why should he feel that " I am unhappily obliged to include [these] in my set of books because pirated editions of some, vilely printed, are in circulation in America? "
How torn can you get?
:
"All his books before 1891 were non-copyright in America, and pirated. By looking in "Who's Who" you can see the list of them. All these non-copyright and pirated books are inaccurate and incomplete in many ways, besides being without prefaces and notes. [Hardy] therefore prefers to have nothing to do with any reprints of them."
Ultimately, Hardy did not envy anyone the trip to America:"The change is not enough for the mileage."
Xenophobic? Maybe. But with much justification. Or, as you say, with a "thoughtful and reasoned" response.
Cheers
Rosemarie
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From: nhardyboy@aol.com
Subject: Re: Hardy's xenophobia
Date: June 29, 2005 7:46:12 AM PDT
Thanks, Rosemarie, for your excellent commentary. Not that I could really add to it, but I think it should be kept in mind by everyone that Hardy wasn't the only British writer to express a great deal of disgust toward the blatant literary and theatrical piracy that took place in America in the nineteenth century. Gilbert and Sullivan, in fact, went so far as to stage _Pirates of Penzance_ in New York before the London premiere in order to establish copyright and prevent the kind of REAL pirating that occurred with _H.M.S. Pinafore_. It wasn't so much America that was disliked by so many British writers (well, Dickens and Trollope were exceptions) as American business practices.
On the larger issue of Hardy's "prejudices," I remember thinking that Hardy was refreshingly free of the kinds of biases and prejudices you see from other writers of the time, and then feeling dismayed to stumble across the so-called N-word in one of his novels. (I honestly can't remember which.) Still, one instance in such a large body of work speaks very well of Hardy's sensitivities. Finally, whatever Hardy's private prejudices may have been, he always valued the quality of the art over the artist, which was why he could admire Henry James's work while disliking the man. But Hardy could get snarky at times: as Michael Millgate reports, after Hardy learned that James and R. L. Stevenson had savaged _Tess_ in their correspondence, "Hardy called them the Polonius and Osric of novelists and exclaimed: 'How indecent of those two virtuous females to expose their mental nakedness in such a manner'" (TH: A Biography, 1982, p. 373).
Best,
Paul Niemeyer
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From: Rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu
Subject: Re: Hardy's xenophobia
Date: June 29, 2005 8:26:41 AM PDT
Yes! -- what great riposte! I wish TH had been less discreet, less reserved, less private. I would dearly like to hear more of this kind of "cruel" wit (as Michael Barry puts it). Such comments reflect the spontaneous feeling of the moment and reveal an irrepressible passion TH rarely allows us to see. For the "everyday" truth is, as you say, that he read and admired HJ ( I think he says somewhere that HJ is the most important living novelist) and got along well with RLS - even contributed a few lines to Rosaline Massey's (sp?) biography of RLS.
Cheers,
Rosemarie
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