M Sinclair Stevens– 2015-09-08 21:50:34-0400– Updated: 2015-09-08 21:57:35-0400
Book: Far From the Madding Crowd
I bought and read this book in high school, probably enticed into its pages by the Julie Christie movie. Apparently it made no impression. I remembered nothing about it not even the names of the characters. And it sat ignored on my bookshelf these intervening decades. Never once was I tempted to peek in on it.
Recently I whiled away an afternoon watching the new film adaptation. It did not jar my memory of the book or the earlier film but it did pique my interest. Although set in rural Victorian England (an insular world, “of slow time and little change”), the story seemed very modern both in the depiction of its characters and the focus on their psychology. Here is the unflinching realism of the indifferent universe in motion…the course of various lives is changed by chance.
I wondered if the adaptation was true to the book or whether it was tainted by contemporary biases…adjusted to current tastes (as so many bad adaptations of classics have been this last decade).
So I reread the book and found the new film to be very true. On the one hand I’m surprised that the story hadn’t asserted itself more forcefully in my brain. I do understand that my younger self probably skimmed over many long descriptive passages. My current self is almost as impatient.
However, having since spent some time walking in similar places, I am much more impressed at how well Hardy captures them. I marked many passages this time because I thought they were insightful or cleverly worded.
Mostly, I was struck by how difficult life is for those who labor. The Western nations seemed to have made so much progress in the century between the time Hardy wrote Far From the Madding Crowd and I first read it. Now we seem on a mad rush to undo it all. Or perhaps I was just young and idealistic when I first read it and less so now.
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Photo: The Cotswolds, 2007
M Sinclair Stevens – 2015-09-08 21:55:57-0400 The photo looks better in the original size in Google Photos. I took it with a 35mm film camera and when I got the film developed, I also go the digitized version on a CD. Old school.
Peter Strempel – 2015-09-09 01:37:06-0400 This was one of my high school English texts, in fourth or fifth form – I don’t remember which all these years later. What I do recall is that the main texts in those years, in which I turned 15 and 16 respectively, were the contemporary Kes and Thomas Hardy’s Victorian fable.
At that time I was rather embedded in Asimov, Fleming, Heinlein, Le Carré, Solzhenitsyin, van Vogt, and similarly fiction and non-fiction. From that vantage I thought Kes was patronisingly juvenile and rather dull, if these weren’t actually symptoms of my antipathy towards stories for ‘young adults’. I had special tuition to ‘appreciate’ Far From the Madding Crowd, but regarded it as an excruciatingly drawn-out melodrama.
At length I rejected my tutor’s rather romantic focus on the pastoral conservatism of Hardy’s bucolic romanticism, and, instead, thought I was pretty clever to discover in the denouement a moral wagging finger about socio-economic inequalities condemning people to sad fates in Hardy’s stultifyingly ascetic, priggish Victorian Britain. An environment in which class divisions that persist to this day were entrenched despite social reform movements.
I saw in Gabriel Oak the kind of knock-about bloke, a hippie or just a day labourer, who were held up to us as necessary undesirables in polite society. I saw in all the others a species of conceited and cowardly slaves to preordained rôles they did nothing to rebel against or resist.
But my schoolboy opinions carried no weight; orthodox interpretation was to be about Hardy’s place in the British literary canon as one the gentlemen authors of his era who elevated parochial, bucolic natural order over the social upheavals of his times, creating stimulus among his largely well-to-do readership to think about the order of life (though, apparently, not to do much about it).
I saw the 1960s film as part of my school studies, but don’t remember it well. I’ll see whether this year’s version can tempt me sometime. However, re-reading the novel appears unlikely for me; there are many, many other books much further up my list of things to absorb and ponder.
Before and after encountering Hardy, I much preferred Robert Louis Stevenson (particularly Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde ), and I loved Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii. I also absorbed Thomas Carlyle’s history of The French Revolution (the later edition), which infuriated my history master, who objected to the almost journalistic narrative style, despite Carlyle’s firmly established reputation.
Much later, I think, I came to regard novelists of Hardy’s era as largely weightless and inconsequential, though I did have some passing familiarity with Lewis Carroll, Arthur Conan Doyle (the complete adventures of Sherlock Holmes), Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens (much against my will), H Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, H G Wells, and Oscar Wilde. I preferred the German adventure novelist Karl May, and French fantastisist Jules Verne. But on the whole the entire period seemed like juvenilia to me after the 1970s, which probably explains why I’m no great novelist or literature don at some leafy university.
Daniela Huguet Taylor – 2015-09-09 05:36:23-0400I really enjoyed the film, it was lovely. And I have the book on my “to read” list.
M Sinclair Stevens – 2015-09-09 11:19:01-0400 – Updated: 2015-09-09 11:22:34-0400I threw this post up as a bookmark which I think is a good use of Google+. Throw a topic out and hope that the resulting discussion (or even blank looks) will help my thoughts crystallize into something more substantial. What could be more fun than sitting around with friends and chatting about books? Posting something (anything) forces me to stop and consider what I passed over once before in my life, and might pass over again. So thanks, +Peter Strempel and +Daniela Huguet Taylor for showing up.
I decided before I saw your comments, that I was going to copy out my quotes and notes here, one at a time. I find it easier to digest the whole by chewing off small bites.
Some of the things I want to explore about the novel are its time and place, the novel’s point-of-view (or how I love these old third-person narratives compared to the overuse of first-person in contemporary novels), and the changing social landscape and political economy.
But as Peter has brought up some interesting points, I’ll take a detour and talk to one of those first. Although the story is set in the countryside there is nothing pastoral or bucolic about it…as those words conjure an idealized romanticism about country living.
The point of Hardy is anything but romantic (in the literary sense). Maybe that’s why so few of us take to it in our youth, when we prefer stories of idealized derring-do. (My British sisters-in-law were both forced to ready Hardy in school and both hated him.) I don’t think students should be forced to read this kind of thing when they are too young, not if the result is to put them off literature forever.
Hardy’s penetrating assessment of country life shows it as difficult and unforgiving. It only takes one mistake or stroke of bad luck to undo a decade of planning and scraping in an attempt to better one’s position in life. The universe is not necessarily malignant but neither is it benevolent. It’s not personal.
In the introduction, Bergen Evans writes on Hardy’s renunciation of Christianity,
“Christian teachers have always said that if Christianity were not true, life was a tragedy. Hardy agrees. Christianity, he says, is not true and life is a tragedy.”
Bergen Evans on Thomas Hardy
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Note. I’m not trying to persuade anyone to read Hardy. Moreover, I’m going to discuss details of the story under the assumption that, as this is classic English literature, there is no such thing as spoilers.M Sinclair Stevens – 2015-09-09 18:28:36-0400Quote p 40
“It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail.”
A bit long for wisdom of the Tweets…but maybe material for a meme?