Hardy’s Historians

Abstract

When a novelist looks back on his novels, and writes retrospectively about them, he is issuing instructions to posterity. This, he is saying, is the way to read my books, because this is the kind of books they are. So, when Henry James wrote his prefaces for the New York Edition of his works, he reduced the sources of his stories to mere ‘germs’, in order to emphasize the shaping role of his imagination, saying in effect: you must read each novel aesthetically, as a work of art, not as an imitation of reality. Conrad’s prefaces, on the other hand, give a good deal of attention to the sources of his stories in his sea-going, exotic past; yet the point about reading that he comes to again and again is not biographical, but philosophical: that the world is a darkness, and man’s understanding of it uncertain. What Conrad seems to be saying is: read these novels philosophically — not as adventure stories, but as models of that dark, uncertain world that I have seen.