Category: British and Irish Literature

Character and Fate in Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge

We can say that character is our decision when faced with an event. An event, meanwhile, can be a thing of chance, or a thing of fate. Fate suggests an external ordering impulse, unlike random chance . Fate and character can be essentially the same if we say that each event that happens to someone is caused by a previous reaction of that character to an event so that everything is linked. Fate seems to presuppose the impossibility of the growth of character except within defined bounds, while randomness lets character change randomly. Randomness is real, whereas fate is generally reserved for stories that are consciously stories. To give us a neat little moral, this sense of cause and effect ought to be maintained. There is no room for randomness.

Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, subtitled “the Life and Death of a Man of Character”, is a grand drama about the fate of Michael Henchard, a man who makes decisions that are not usually very good. It is my first Hardy, and going into it I was aware that I was likely to become acquainted with a pessimistic worldview and challenging local accents. One reason why the work is interesting is that it sheds some light on a problem regarding this connection between character and fate.

The novel begins with Henchard selling his wife and daughter one evening while drunk. It is a shocking scene, as we witness Henchard becoming drunker and drunker, and his attempts to rid himself of his wife Susan ever more serious. At last, he succeeds, and his wife disappears to a sailor (who is only there for a page) in what we could call a thing of absolute chance – indeed, perhaps the only time where chance figures in the novel. The next morning Henchard wakes up and regrets his rash decision, makes a vow to quit drinking for twenty-one years, and half-heartedly tries to find his wife.

The next time we meet him almost twenty years have passed and Henchard is now the mayor of the town of Casterbridge. While he was selling his wife, he declared that she had been holding him back. So, indeed, it seems. But the rest of the novel becomes a downhill race for Henchard, as his wife and daughter return, his past keeps popping up, and he ruins himself through awful decisions. His character, brash, confident, powerful, and mercurial is to blame for these decisions. He fires an excellent manager, the Scot Donald Farfrae because he danced with his daughter. He disobeys his wife’s dying request and in so doing estranges himself from his daughter. It seems, to some extent, that Henchard’s character is responsible for his fate. Things do not happen to him so much as he, through his character, causes the events that bring about his downfall. In a brilliant phrase, Hardy declares that “the momentum of his character knew no patience.”

Henchard believes in fate. He obeys the oath to stop drinking that he swore in a church. And when things start going wrong, he believes a hostile, “occult”, force is working against him and grows increasingly paranoid. But Henchard’s faith in fate, even his damnable one, is not absolute. Late in the novel, Henchard visits a man who appears capable of magic to discover the fate of the upcoming harvest so that he can speculate profitably and destroy Farfrae, now a commercial rival. The seer provides an accurate forecast, but just before the harvest Henchard gets nervous and adjusts his financial position, losing all of his money when things go as predicted.

Henchard is right to believe in a hostile fate. His author is not a kind one. While Henchard’s character seems partly responsible for his miseries, it is certainly not the only thing. Hardy’s novel is peppered with ridiculous encounters orchestrated especially to make its protagonist miserable. If halfway through a chapter Henchard declares to himself that he will love his daughter, something is certain to happen a few pages later that dashes his hopes. People turn up who should have been dead precisely at the moment when they will cause the most suffering. It becomes increasingly ridiculous. Where Henchard’s character may have damned him to poverty, Hardy’s fate weaving damns him to an early grave and abject misery.

There is something important in this that is worth looking into. I liked the novel and agree with those assertions that Henchard is this larger-than-life, Shakespearian monster of a man. But there is something about its structure that is unsatisfying, and it relates to this very element of fate.  Stories, at least originally, seem to have been about unstoppable fate. Chosen ones fight chosen enemies. The universe has a plan and order that is God-given. Fate here determines the shape of lives before they are lived. The oracles, the prophecies, that haunt tragedies, are all bearers of this word. Characters attempt to fight their fates, but they always comply in the end, albeit often through ways unexpected.

But the fates that we think of are all simple. A dragon is slain, a mother is bedded, and a child is killed. They can be reduced to a single act. A tragedy, generally, works similarly – a single decision is what is necessary for the fall. Othello’s refusal to reflect, for example, seals Desdemona’s fate. By reducing the number of events to a small number, the character becomes more important. In The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy writes that “in the end… no man can see his life until his life is done and where then to make a mending?” This is the case with lives that are made of small events. Henchard’s life, seen by a reader, has a shape, but for himself, it is like the one McCarthy describes – it takes time for his own character’s role within it to become visible to himself.

In a world where we have to make big decisions, a world of tragedy and high drama where the stakes are high, we see immediately the consequences of our actions and the role of our character in shaping the fundamental direction of our lives. You cannot drift in a tragedy; you can drift through ordinary life. Henchard’s daughter, Elizabeth-Jane, simply lives, passively, for most of the novel. She cannot be the main character. But you only need to force her to make one real decision to have a story. Any more, and you run the risk of getting something that seems picaresque, unreal. There are only so many serious decisions we can face in life. For a story, however, only one is often enough.

We cannot ask our stories both to show us character and to show us the world – the emphasis must be on one or the other for maximum effect. In The Mayor of Casterbridge Hardy seems to want to do both – both show an objectively “sorry world”, and also a character that makes it sorrowful for himself. This undermines his artistic purpose here, I think. If bad things keep happening to Henchard, that is bad luck in real life or authorial cruelty in a work of fiction. If Henchard keeps making awful decisions, then it is his character that is to blame for his bad luck. But in the novel, Hardy seems to orchestrate matters so that it is precisely when Henchard seems most determined to make good decisions that bad luck creeps in. That is not fair, and though life itself is not fair, as noted it seems to dilute Henchard’s responsibility in the text whilst strengthening the resonance of his tragedy.

Donald Farfrae comes to Casterbridge and sets himself up as a successful merchant, eventually toppling without malice the man who gave him his first role there, Henchard himself. He marries, gains prestige, and life is good for him (mostly). His world is not that miserable one inhabited by the other characters, like Elizabeth-Jane or Henchard’s wife Susan. Their misery, however, in many cases stems from a refusal to utter a certain piece of information – in short, from decisions stemming from character, which takes us around in a circle. The point is that misery is the result of character in The Mayor of Casterbridge, except when it is the result of Hardy being mean. 

I spent most of the novel wondering how exactly Hardy was going to make me and all of the characters miserable at the end. He did not, of course, disappoint in this. And it is true that to have character failings make a tragedy, fate, or even just a story, we need events. Information, or its absence, can only have an effect when something happens whose outcome that information could have changed. But Hardy’s events are too much, too cleanly orchestrated. It made me conclude that if we want to make a truly blunt argument about the links between character and fate, we should probably rely upon those single powerful decisions and events that reveal character to the utmost, rather than attempting to substitute for them many smaller events. Or if we wish to use smaller events, making them seem like chance events, rather than forced events. We tolerate the deliberate tendency of a tragedy towards a single grand and silly conclusion, but the composite tragedy, built of many smaller but still deliberate things, is harder to stomach. It is hard to read The Mayor of Casterbridge and not think that Henchard is going to have struggles ahead. But he did not need Hardy standing behind him, constantly kicking him down the stairs.

Joseph Conrad’s anti-Russian novel: Under Western Eyes

Under Western Eyes was written by Joseph Conrad in 1911, after one unsuccessful revolution in Russia and before the rather more successful ones of 1917. It is a political novel, exploring the fates of revolutionaries abroad, while also displaying Conrad’s characteristic preoccupations with the conflicts of the human soul. When I read it for the first time, about four years ago, I did not like it. Its descriptions of Saint Petersburg were unrecognisable to anyone who had been there, but worse was Conrad’s virulent hatred of the Russian people and state, which in spite of assertions to the contrary in his author’s note, are neither well hidden nor very fair.

On a second reading, I now feel a little more understanding towards Conrad’s hate. I also have met various people whom we could call the Russian revolutionaries of our own day, including one friend who after a campaign against him involving physical beatings and bricks through windows was given 24 hours by the police to leave Russia or else his entire family would be charged with fabricated crimes. My personal experiences have also made me a little more sympathetic, including an incident one morning where the secret services raided my flat, throwing me against the wall and pinning me while masked men with machineguns and balaclavas conducted a search for something that wasn’t there and never had been (stolen cash).

Conrad’s novel talks a lot about the impulses we have to mysticise Russia: “that propensity of lifting every problem from the plane of the understandable by means of some sort of mystic expression is very Russian.” The problem is that the novel itself serves this mysticising impulse. Ultimately, Russia is not a special country. It is just a country with shoddy institutions and a consolidated media landscape which allowed autocratic rule to flourish in the early 21st century and reach a point where it was unchallengeable, even though the man in charge has lost his mind. Russia has sufficient democratic traditions to build upon, as some of the revolutionaries of the 19th century such as Alexander Herzen knew, but the informational control effected by the ruling powers has emphasised the more idiotic parts of Russia’s history – its sense of a special path, its victimisation and difference from everyone else. The result is that it is now indeed doing something unthinkable, insane, and uniquely awful in our day.

The story of Under Western Eyes concerns one Razumov (his name comes from the Russian for “reason”). An average student with no family, he dreams of winning a silver medal and establishing himself in a world where connections are everything. One evening, after the assassination of a member of Russia’s autocratic state apparatus, Razumov discovers in his rooms one Victor Haldin, who confesses to the murder. He asks for Razumov’s help in escaping the authorities and leaving Russia to join his family in Switzerland. Razumov, who has no revolutionary sympathies, first attempts to save Haldin, and then decides to betray him.

We next encounter Razumov in Geneva, where he meets Haldin’s sister Nathalie, and her mother. We also meet several other revolutionaries, encamped nearby, and the teacher of languages who narrates our story. To them, Razumov appears as Haldin’s successful accomplice, and he is welcomed in spite of his taciturnity and occasional outbursts of anger. In a letter to Nathalie Victor had described Razumov as one of those “unstained, lofty, and solitary existences.” He is the only friend he had ever mentioned, and this allows Nathalie to create a Razumov that blinds her to the real one.

But she is not the only one. Under Western Eyes is fundamentally about seeing – it’s in the title, after all – and what we cannot see. The characters are constantly making miscalculations and misjudgements. The first is Victor Haldin himself. He comes to Razumov, having come to believe that the latter’s quiet nature indicates his revolutionary sympathies – “There is a solidity about your character which cannot exist without courage.” It is not so. Razumov himself, like certain people I know in Russia, had believed that he could exist under autocracy without picking a side. That he could pursue his silver medal in peace. But as soon as Haldin enters his door, Razumov is forced to decide what he stands for. His illusions of the way his world is run are immediately knocked down.

When Razumov arrives in Geneva, Nathalie mentions her brother’s name to him and sees how “this distressed him. He was quite overcome.” She assumes it is affection for her brother and has no idea that it is rather guilt at being his Judas. When talking with Sophie Antonovna, another revolutionary, Razumov once again reveals something of his internal conflicts, to which she asks: “What is it? Self-reproach, or what? It’s absurd. You couldn’t have gone and given yourself up because your comrade was taken.”

Razumov himself notes that he has “the gift of inspiring confidence.” But of course, he too works at creating himself and cultivating these mistakes in others. While dealing with one revolutionary we read how “he remembered another detail and dropped it before her.” He uses what others know – the newspaper details of the crime, and secret letters that have reached the others, to tell them what they want to hear, while keeping himself from lying outright. They all believe him, some willingly, some after a little persuasion, but all do in the end.

The overall effect of this is to make an argument about the revolutionaries themselves – namely, that they are a bunch of incompetents. Conrad fits neatly into the tradition crafted by Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev, which deals with revolutionaries, and he lies on the more cynical, dismissive end. His conservatism is similar to that of Dostoevsky in particular, which is funny because Conrad couldn’t stand the Russian. Peter Ivanovitch is a noted “feminist” whom Conrad demonises by showing how mean he is to a female servant. Various others are ridiculed by showing how dependent they are on money siphoned from the owner of the chateau where they all meet.

This is not new to us. Such irony we have encountered many times before, most obviously in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. The key revolutionary there, Bazarov, says one thing and eventually, after he falls in love, does another. At first, he demands the negation of emotions and the total reliance upon rationality and logic, and then he starts throwing around such ridiculous words as “feelings”. This irony was Turgenev’s secret weapon. It allowed him to create a novel which, when it came out, divided both conservative and liberal Russians – with both accusing him of being too soft towards the “other side”.

Conrad’s has two main problems in Under Western Eyes, at least when we look at it against the backdrop of its Russian forebears. The first is that it could never divide opinion in the way that Turgenev’s novel does. This book is obviously anti-Russian. The revolutionaries and the state are both stupid, mean, and petty. Or, as Conrad writes in the author’s note, Russian history is just a cycle of “senseless desperation provoked by senseless tyranny.” There are no sympathetic characters, except perhaps Nathalie Haldin. Even she appears out-of-touch and naïve. Razumov himself reads like a thing that an algorithm would churn out after having been forced to read Dostoevsky, over and over. He says cynical, spiteful, angry things without any real interest in them.

Sympathy is by common consent the thing that makes Russian literature most special. Conrad has no sympathy. He does not like his characters. He does not have any time for their views. And that leads to the novel’s second big artistic weakness – it really has very little to do with ideas. Nobody actually shares any interesting views on the rights of women or the future organisation of Russia. People are happy enough to advocate for a life of action and revolt over passivity, but that’s as far as we go. There are no debates, there is no passion. The only idea that really gets any airing is that Russia is a poisoned land, “where virtues themselves fester into crimes in the cynicism of oppression and revolt” and that autocracy is bad.

The attack on autocracy is made with some effectiveness. When at the end of the novel’s first part Councillor Mikulin, Razumov’s point of contact among the elite, asks Razumov where he will go next – “where to?” – it is positively chilling. We all know at this point that even though he has done something that benefits the state, he has also given up what little freedom he has had. Such relative subtleties are more effective than the constant complaints about autocracy, which quite frankly we do not need. Russian autocracy is/was awful – we do not need convincing. But learning about the way that it exerts its hold upon an individual is much more interesting for those of us with “Western Eyes.”

Razumov goes to Geneva as a servant of his state, and there his life unravels. The stories he is forced to tell about himself are insufficient to solidify his identity. In the end, it all collapses. To see the revolution from the side of an informer was new to me, and that is perhaps the most interesting thing about the novel. But the novel’s complex structure, namely a dramatization of Razumov’s journal by the teacher of languages, means that much of his soul is hidden from us. When we catch glimpses of it, it is suitably unattractive. “It was myself, after all, whom I have betrayed most badly.” Such words are ridiculous for a man whose actions lead to two deaths. So too are his excuses and justifications: “I was possessed!”

Taken as a whole, in its refusal to engage with the ideas of the revolutionaries, or even portray them, the novel comes across as somewhat empty. In some sense, amusingly, it conforms to its own ideas about how little those of the West can understand Russia. But this will not do. Russia is comprehensible, it just requires time and effort. It is not special, just extremely poorly run. An orientalising impulse serves no purpose other than to excuse and legitimise the actions of the people who control the place. And legitimisation is the last thing that these people deserve. All in all, the novel is just okay. In this at least in my opinion, four years later, has not changed.  

Leaving an Impression: My First Dickens – Bleak House

Well, that took a while. A month and a half, pretty much exactly. Bleak House, which I read because I had heard it was the best Dickens, was also my first Dickens – the first I finished anyway. I think I started Great Expectations about ten years ago. And how do I feel? Overwhelmed, that’s for sure. This wasn’t the life-changing event that some other books are, but it was awe-inspiring in its own way. I know about Dickens, of course – how can you avoid him? That he is larger than life, that his characters and books and everything else are all massive – well, yes, I was half-ready for it. But still, faced with such a whirlwind, no amount of preparedness will let you stay anchored to the ground. Readers, I was blown into the air by this mad book, and only now am I beginning to sink back down to earth.

Bleak House has a hugely intricate, complicated plot, filled with more characters than I and my extended family have fingers and toes to count on. It is a state-of-the-nation novel, one that aims to contain everything and everyone, every idea, and every thought, every word, and every punctuation mark. And so, it does, so far as I can tell. We deal with a murder mystery, our narrator’s mysterious parentage, and many other bits and pieces as Dickens accumulates and articulates everything he wants to say about the world. Much as with War and Peace, which I read and couldn’t write about here, I struggle to know where or how to begin. But as this is my first Dickens, perhaps there’s some value in thinking about that most distinctive of Dickensian elements – his characters.

Character

I think it was James Wood who said of Dickens’ characters that they are real, far more real than real people, not because of their depth, but precisely because of their flatness. Most of the people here can be reduced to a single trait or mood or thought or image. Mrs Jellyby is surrounded by papers, so obsessed with bringing civilization to the Niger delta that she neglects to bring it to her own family, who live in squalor. Mr Chadband sweats oil whenever he speaks. Mr Turveydrop is extremely proud of his deportment, to the detriment of everything else. Volumnia Dedlock is as airy as her name. I could go on. Give me one of the silly names and the character returns, here bent over like Mr Smallweed, there standing tall like the ex-soldier George.

In the preface to my edition, Terry Eagleton suggests that Dickens’ broad-brushstroke method of characterisation reflects the urbanising environment in which the novels were written. When we see people for only a brief moment, on a street corner say, then they will inevitably be reduced in our minds to their simplest and most striking characteristics. I quite like the idea, save that the characters really do not have any depth, for the most part. They are who their name literally says they are, mostly incapable of change, mostly without any complexity going on behind the scenes.

And yet they are real. The more I read and live, the more I appreciate that character is the hardest thing for a writer to make. A simulacrum of a human being, this can be done – “a man enters the room”. But the realification of the image within an author’s mind is a sacred mystery. Plots, by comparison, are easy. Intelligence alone and a bit of time will allow the majority of us to weave some interesting interconnection(s), to build a network of symbols and thoughts and motives. But a network is dull and empty without life, without character.

Who are the characters that I remember? Dostoevsky’s mostly, so perhaps it’s no surprise that Dostoevsky simply adored Dickens, and there are even legendary if false stories of their having met in London. Dostoevsky’s characters – the ones we remember – burn with passion for ideas. This fact simplifies them just as Dickens’ characters are simplified. But Dostoevsky understood that to take an idea into your soul and to live by it is to transform yourself utterly so that no interaction is left unaltered. This is inspiring, which is why we want to be, especially when we are young, like his characters. With the exception of those whose lives end in suicide, nobody can accuse Dostoevsky’s people of being empty. Repulsive at times, doubting-stricken, but always filled.

Dickens’ characters are not like this. They are startling because of their lack of interiority – it does not matter if their souls are filled because they do not seem much concerned with them, to begin with. Very few of them seem capable of reflection or thought, only our occasional narrator Esther and a few of her friends. The rest float through life in an uncomprehending daze.

A character’s reality lies in the little details, more even than the big ones. One of the first moments in Anna Karenina that had me on the verge of awestruck tears is when Levin, at a party, repeats the same joke twice. Few authors would consider writing something similar because it’s a waste of space and might convince an editor that they don’t actually proofread their own work. But it’s also a truth, a real truth, that some of us social incompetents really are socially incompetent. It is showing, rather than telling, at its very best. Thomas Mann got from Tolstoy the importance of such details for allowing for many characters within a relatively short book. Buddenbrooks, that supremely realist novel, features a number of minor characters who are distinctive only because every time they are mentioned we hear the same thing about them – whom they tailor, for example.

Dickens’ characters are their details, as I’ve said. Name, description, and speech with them are all possessing a certain unity. They create an overwhelming impression which means that within a few lines we know all we need to know and know enough to remember them even as a wave of other such characters crashes over us. I never remember what a character looks like – hair colour, eyes, and all those traditional bits and pieces – I cannot even picture most characters in my mind as I read the description. But Dickens does it, easy as that. In Bleak House, their simplicity, and their purpose, give them energy.

And I suppose that’s what makes them interesting, beyond the book. What does it say that these people are so powerful in our minds? I am no Dickens, but I have been alive. How many people do I know whom I could write about as Dickens does? Nobody, because people in real life are not so simplistic – I am being ridiculous to suggest that such a thing is possible. But I also think I can say, begrudgingly, that few people, even those close to me, leave such a vivid impression as these characters have. And is that not something to be regretted, even worried over?

Perhaps only if we are as anxiety-ridden as I am. We look at ourselves and find ourselves wanting. If only I could be so distinctive, as one of Dickens’ characters. I won’t change my name, but all the rest… – don’t I want to be remembered? For one thing, success in life is at least partly dependent upon standing out in people’s minds. We don’t just want to be an office drone, we want to be the guy who is selected for a promotion, or the girl whose work is remembered for a commendation. If we want an active social life we should message other people, but we should also be the person who comes first into someone’s head as they lie on their bed, aimlessly scrolling through their contacts looking for something to do.

All this raises the perennial question, what must we do? Must I focus on one distinctive facet of my character and ham it up to no end? As a ginger, ought I not perhaps exclusively dress in reds, so that the impression of being aflame is so overwhelming that people rush for a fire extinguisher every time I enter the room? There was a moment, after watching the anime Death Note as a young teen, when I started crouching on tables and making structures from match sticks – do I need an obnoxious hobby, perhaps, or an unattractive habit?

Almost certainly not, for the simple reason that memorability is not the only reason why we might succeed in life. We must marry it to being attractive – having those traits that make others think of us positively when we come into their minds. The last thing I want to be known as is that ginger with the dreadful dress sense. But it must be admitted also that the traits that are most attractive are also, for the most part, ones that are less memorable than their Dickensian counterparts. Esther Summerson, our narrator for part of Bleak House, is boringly good and kind. As Eagleton notes in his preface, Dickens was faced with the rather common problem of “how to make virtue artistically attractive”. Esther, whose defining trait is her radiating goodness, is ultimately memorable for being annoying.

Working hard, being clever, being kind – these are all things that leave a positive impression. But they are also to some extent incompatible with leaving a strong impression. If you work hard, you have no time for being distinctive in other ways, and being kind requires modesty to really leave a positive impression, or else it just annoys people. And modesty is quiet. Some things work for positive impressions and strong impressions, but I cannot think of many – things like wit and the ability to laugh easily and make people feel at ease.

Where, then, does Dickens come in? We are often told to be ourselves, and authenticity is almost always an attractive trait in a conforming world. Being an individual then, perhaps, is already enough to be distinctive. Mixed together with some good traits, we may not be as memorable as Mr Tulkinghorn or Detective Bucket, but we will still be pretty well-off compared to some. Have a hobby, read the odd book, go outside, think for yourself, and do your own thing. We cannot achieve a Dickensian personality, nor should we aim to. But there is plenty we can do to avoid being a forgettable a side character in everyone’s lives, even our own.

If there is something in Dickens that we must take note of for our own lives, besides the obvious social messages, it must be the importance of distinctiveness. When we meet many more people over the course of a week than we do even in the madness of Bleak House, we see just how important being a non-mushy part of someone’s experience of the world is. Sometimes this is impossible, for example because at work people may adopt a mercantile attitude towards others that only allows them to exist provided they bring a benefit, but for the most part it is not so. So, reader, let’s go and exist distinctively, so that we may become memorable for the right reasons, and fill the hearts of others with joy.

Anyway, these are some of the thoughts that my first full encounter with Dickens inspired in me.