The great “chain of beings”, which formed the whole of Creation, was organized by a divine plan.
In the Renaissance, the entire universe made sense: the macrocosm, microcosm, and the Body Politic were harmoniously ordered, and bound together in an analogical relation. Miller, the rise of the discourse of science, from Galileo onwards, has caused the substitution of knowledge for meaning. The Lacanian approach, as developed by Jacques-Alain Miller and Éric Laurent in a seminar, may be useful here.
(Beer 229)Ģ In that polarity, Gillian Beer argues, Hardy is indebted to what she refers to as Darwin’s Romantic materialism. Happiness and hap form the two poles in his work. Life is devious and resourceful, constantly reassembling about new possibilities which lie just off the path of the obliterative energies of event. Hardy’s writing isĬharacterized by creative vacillation, by a shiftiness which survives the determination of plot. Yet much of the beauty of his fiction comes from a focus on the present moment, on the “recuperative powers” of an individual, on his unquenchable “appetite for joy”. The emphasis may be on “systems more extensive than the life span of the individual” (Beer 224), a fact which has often prompted commentators to connect Hardy and Darwin in terms of pessimism.
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In Hardy’s work, there is a contradiction between plot and writing: for plot is almost always malign or entrapping, while “the text in process awakens us to sensation full of perceptual pleasure” (Beer 222). Darwin, she also notes, had a quick eye for exceptions. Hardy and Darwin, she writes, had in common a strain of “Romantic materialism” which is “a sensuously grounded response to the world of forms and life,” a delight in “the palpable, the particular” (Beer 37). Top of pageġ In her ground-breaking reading of Thomas Hardy, Gillian Beer argues that Hardy “shared with Darwin that delight in material life in its widest diversity, the passion for particularity, and for individuality and plenitude which is the counter-element in Darwin’s narrative and theory” (Beer 240). Only the death of Eustacia will erase the stain: by causing the disappearance of the surplus object, the expulsion of the tragic scapegoat, which achieve catharsis, is thus rewritten from the perspective of Darwinian selection. The stain is a figure of the Lacanian object-gaze, the unrepresentable object which should normally be “extracted”, and whose inclusion in the field of the visible causes devastation all around. The fiery (or blood-red) stain is Eustacia’s hallmark, but the ubiquitous presence of the reddleman suggests that the whole Egdon community has somehow been contaminated. In The Return of the Native, Eustacia Vye is such a sublime object failing to adapt to the demands of evolution: her figure on the heath stands “singularly” against the sky, her bonfire is unique-a fiery spot which is her true identification trait. Of the Real, science can give no account, but it is precisely the left-overs of science which are the proper domain of literature. Miller has shown, the rise of the discourse of science has caused the substitution of knowledge for meaning and, by way of consequence, the emergence of what Lacan will later call “the Real”. Gillian Beer argues that Hardy shared with Darwin what she calls “the passion for particularity.” Hardy’s relish in details is undoubtedly an effect of science for, as J.-A.
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