Epilogue

Abstract

In the last chapter I noted the analogy between the object and the vehicle of representation in the family chronicle. This analogy is registered in the language of Miller’s description, which underscores the fertility of genealogical narrative. The family story, like the unit whose history it records, bears the power of renewal: multiplication is, after all, an essential condition of this narrative form. (It is for this reason that the family saga is especially amenable to sequels and prequels.) Its potential for self-perpetuation, dramatized so vividly in the single volume of The Well-Beloved, is also displayed by series such as Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart and Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Chronicles and by the genre itself, by the fecundity of the family saga as a literary form. In this epilogue I will move beyond the single example of Hardy to the broader context of the family novel. In the previous chapter, I showed how The Well-Beloved throws into prominent relief mechanisms governing genealogical narrative. Here I will point to the presence in other nineteenth- and twentieth-century family plots of structures and motifs related to those I have located in Hardy. His characteristic treatment of genealogy, which emphasizes both the subject’s imaginative response to family history and the reproduction of that history through narrative transmissions, foregrounds issues that link his concerns to those of novelists writing in different national traditions and different eras. In tracing the affinities between Hardy’s texts and novels by authors as diverse as Hawthorne, Zola, Graham Swift, and Rushdie, I am making a claim not for influence, but rather for genre; certain features tend to recur in genealogical narrative beacuse of the potentialities of the form.

‘The family story proliferates from one generation to the next or laterally from one family to another in inexhaustible permutation.’

J. Hillis Miller, Ariadne’s Thread