Abstract
This chapter deals with Hardy’s undermining of memory as a guarantor of faithfulness. The prevailing critical view of Hardy as a devout preserver of memory is thus further undermined. Questioning the extent to which the lost person recalled to mind is reconstructed, made up or simply not present in any conceivable form, Hardy probes the basis of nostalgia and the true object of mourning, and challenges the distinction between forgetting and remembering. The figures and images of the dead turn the mourner into a writer or artist, and render the dead a visual or textual image related to poetic creation more closely than to simple memory. Hardy’s emphasis on the survivor’s emotional interests and imaginative faculty reveals the self-absorption and creative capacity inherent in mourning.
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Notes
- 1.
Vickery (2009: 4). He adds that, as a result, twentieth-century elegists “tacitly mount an elegy for memory itself as well as for the individual” (ibid.).
- 2.
First entitled “By the Roman Earthworks,” Bailey suggests that the poem is actually set in England, not Rome , and refers to Hardy’s burial of a favourite cat in the garden at Max Gate , a spot “steeped in antiquity,” with Romano-British urns and Roman skeletons underground (Bailey 1970: 326).
- 3.
Although describing a man (“comrade”), Florence Hardy wrote in a letter that the poem had originally been written about a dead cat , and only later was it revised to describe the loss of a human friend (Bailey 1970: 325). Andrew Norman speculates that the poem refers to the diminishing place that the memory of the late Emma occupies (Norman 2011: 175). This is yet another example of the extent to which the biographical events related to Emma’s death eclipse the discussion of Hardy’s elegiac writing.
- 4.
As discussed in Chap. 1, in “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation” (1972), Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok propose a model that, by emphasising language, distinguishes between healthy and pathological responses to loss, as in Freud ’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (Freud 1966–1974: 243–258). By “introjection” they refer to a process whereby the lost object is made figuratively present, so that its material absence is overcome through a verbal relation of metaphorical absorption. This process allows the grieving subject to accept the fact of loss by turning the absent or dead person into an image. Incorporation , on the other hand, is a pathological condition that reflects the grieving subject’s narcissistic relation to the lost object and a desire to “swallow” it; it involves a denial of loss. With no clear separation between subject and object, or self and other, incorporation differs from introjection in that it is incapable of using language metaphorically in order to turn the lost object into an image (Abraham and Torok 1994: 125–127, 129–131).
- 5.
DeSales Harrison observes that Hardy’s elegy is sometimes an anti-elegy , since it marks, as in “Thoughts of Phena ,” a “shrinking away from knowledge and memory rather than a commemoration” (Harrison 2010: 406).
- 6.
The inscription, presented in the Dorset County Museum , reads thus: “Sacred to the Memory of Mary Elder Daughter of Thomas and Jemima Hardy born at Bockhampton Dec. 23, 1841. Died at Talbothays Nov. 24, 1915” (Bailey 1970: 487).
- 7.
See Brault and Naas 2001: 6–7. In his memorial essay on Jean-Franҫois Lyotard , Derrida talks about the “narcissistic pathos” that the “exhibition of such a ‘we’ [i.e. the mourner-deceased relationship] summons up” (Derrida 2001: 225). He expresses his desire to “stay away from an homage in the form of a personal testimony, which always tends toward reappropriation and always risks giving in to an indecent way of saying ‘we,’ or worse, ‘me,’ when precisely my first wish is to let [the deceased] speak” (ibid.).
- 8.
John Paul Riquelme points out this pun in his essay “The Modernity of Thomas Hardy’s Poetry” (Riquelme 1999: 213). He further discusses Hardy’s anti-elegiac mode on pp. 214–219.
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Benziman, G. (2018). “I Do but the Phantom Retain”: The Mistrust of Memory. In: Thomas Hardy’s Elegiac Prose and Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50713-6_6
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