Notes about Thomas Hardy's Literary Production (5/6/12)

In T. Hardy's novel Jude the Obscure there is the influence of C. Darwin's theories and A. Schopenauer's philosophy (the existence of immanent will, against to man can not do anything). Mr Hardy was a painter before being a writer, but he was also interested into architecture. His interesting into painting appears also in his novels: he describes scenes with references to these concepts.
The narrator is a third person omniscient unobtrusive narrator, who shows characters and situations. In this way the position of the reader is free. The novelist tells the story with a strong insistence on specific details of a character or a situation. In this way he creates a dramatic effect, making the reader feel as if he were there. T. Hardy presents something to the reader to make him see and allow him to make his own opinion.
In addition Mr Hardy's narrator seems to privilege certain morbid details: he sometimes uses grotesque or make a grotesque use of the language to reach an effect of disgust and tragedy. His novels had been compared to Greek tragedies and together with Schopenauer's idea of immanent will, Mr Hardy's characters appear the victims of some inscrutable force.
Jude the Obscure offers a perfect example of a character, a protagonist whose tragedy depends on his strongest flaw, which is his inability to reach a balance between rationality and instinct.
The figure of the doctor is very important: he represents the scientific culture. He interpretates the hanging of the children as the inability to adapt to the society. In this period children who were born have a nature like adults' one: they are aware of what is happening and they refuse to live in this way. This is the basis for the epigraph of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, where the Sybil, who represents human essence, wants to die.
The previous generation had not such problems: they were educated without asking them to reflect on the world (Dickens clearly shows this in the novel Hard Times).
The inability to resist and to bear what is happening is the inability to discipline themselves.
Even if man looks for answers in science, he does not find anything and science leaves in him a sense of emptiness. As Jude says, science does not deal with emotions: there are facts but not feelings. T. Hardy's artistic vision can be associated to philosophical scepticism. Darwinism as well as his love for Wessex, gives a flavour to his novels.
Mr Hardy shows harmony of view with Huxley, Spencer, Comte, and Hume as "evolutionary meliorism".
There is an affinity between his view on Schopenauer's concept of immanent will or blind will. Man's struggle and the conflict between instinct and reason take place a world dominated by omen, unhappy coincidence, accidents.
Mr Hardy's fiction has been compared to Greek tragedies. The novelist's characters become victims, getting to tragedy by a flaw in their nature.
The novelist himself says that "Man's character is his personal destiny or demon".
Themes of guilt, sin, responsibility and remorse are typical of T. Hardy's fiction. Jude is brought to his downfall by his scholarly ambition. By his own humanitarian ideals he is a man who believes in values of spiritual emancipation but ends up discovering they are hollow and false. His most intimate problem is the conflict between flesh and spirit.
His intellectual aspiration is crashed by his own sensuality, especially for Arabella. The embodiment of instinctual desires and of his weaknesses. Jude leaves Arabella but he cannot bear the burden of his earlier mistakes and decides he has too many passions in conflict with one another.
The novels for runs 20ieth century literature through the density of psychic life, of introspection, inner tallments and the description of the inner side.