The Return of the Native

Thomas Hardy The Return of the Native (1878)
I've had several run ups to Pohl and Kornbluth's allegedly classic Gladiator-at-Law, and whilst I can see that it's well written in terms of elegant sentences, I just can't seem to give a fuck about anything happening within the narrative. Now on my second or third attempt, I make it to chapter eleven and notice that I have no idea what's happening to who or why; then somehow I find myself reading this instead, a big fat Victorian novel of such volume that copies could be used to weight sacks containing stool pigeons destined for large rivers or other bodies of water. No sentence is less than two-hundred words long, typically describing the moral import of some minor feature of someone's face, and nothing happens for the first quarter of the book, or what felt like it - just a bunch of people stood around a bonfire gossiping about some woman being no better than she ought to be, amongst other things; and yet unlike Gladiator-at-Yawn, it's positively gripping.

The story is spun around the doomed marriages of two couples. Clym has been living in Paris but, having decided it was all a bit too fancy, now returns to his beloved and rustic Egdon Heath to marry Eustacia, who only marries him because she hates Egdon Heath and assumes he'll change his mind and will take her to live in Paris. Naturally it all ends in tears, ultimately concluding with lessons learned.

Derwent May's introduction seems to spend a lot of time refuting D.H. Lawrence's assertion that the main character of The Return of the Native is the landscape itself, as described in his Study of Thomas Hardy. Without actually having read Lawrence's Study of Thomas Hardy, I'd say he seems to have a point.

The first part of the book serves to define its cast as ephemerals within a much larger and essentially mysterious landscape across which bonfires are lit from one hilltop to the next in this pre-technological era, itself only a moment in the depths of geological time, with references to arrowheads, bronze age tribes, and Biblical times provided for the sake of scale.

The instincts of merry England lingered on here with exceptional vitality, and the symbolic customs which tradition has attached to each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon. Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still: in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, seem in some way or other to have survived mediaeval doctrine.

Being a Victorian novel, Native pays the same laborious attention to detail as any Pre-Raphaelite painting and is similarly loaded with meaning and allegory - possibly even to the point of the term native - here referring to Clym Yeobright - being a single letter removed from naive. Whilst the principal characters of the novel are not without depth, they are primarily described in terms of how they relate to their environment to the point that we may as well regard them as expressions of the same. Clym's defining characteristic is that he left the heath and has, as Hardy sees it, come to his senses, and it seems significant that we learn hardly anything about his time in Paris beyond that he'd had enough. Here we find this kinship expressed as the one time scholar is reborn back on his home turf as a common labourer who goes accordingly unrecognised by his own mother.

The silent being who thus occupied himself seemed to be of no more account in life than an insect. He appeared as a mere parasite of the heath, fretting its surface in his daily labour as a moth frets a garment, entirely engrossed with its products, having no knowledge of anything in the world but fern, furze, heath, lichens, and moss.

Clym's relationship to the land from which he was sprung is an instinctive rather than considered aspect of his psychology.

He already showed that thought is a disease of the flesh, and indirectly bore evidence that ideal physical beauty is incompatible with emotional development and a full recognition of the coil of things.

It's not difficult to see how this would have appealed to D.H. Lawrence, particularly as a forerunner of his own ideas about blood consciousness, as he termed it, as expressed by Don Ramón in The Plumed Serpent.

'Man is a column of blood, with a voice in it... And when the voice is still, and he is only a column of blood, he is better.'

Returning to the theme of how the characters serve as extensions of their environment, Eustacia is defined more or less entirely by her desire to escape from the heath; and then we have the Reddleman, Diggory Venn, an avatar of the land in the sense of Swamp Thing being an avatar of the bayou. Venn is coloured red from head to toe as a consequence of his work, extracting red ochre from the ground with which to mark sheep. Having no fixed abode, he comes and goes in the fashion of a wandering spirit, a parallel which is emphasised in the first part of the book by reference to a red ghost seen at large on the heath.

The lesson of The Return of the Native may, on the surface of it, seem typically Victorian and conservative - stick to what you know, stay home, honour thine parents, and so on and so forth. Clym shouldn't have gone to Paris in the first place, and his moderately unpleasant wife probably shouldn't make too many assumptions about the grass being greener over there; but I suspect this may be a misreading, or at least an unbalanced emphasis in so much as that it's not really the point of the book which seems too complex to be boiled down to any single, simple lesson. Some of it concerns fate, or what we understand to be fate, and the related dispensation of blame for the occasional shitty hand which we may be dealt.

'But you can't charge yourself with crimes in that way,' said Venn. 'You may as well say that the parents be the cause of a murder by the child, for without the parents the child would never have been begot.'

So, I guess it's about personal responsibility in the sense of suggesting that human agency plays a greater part in how our lives work out than any nebulous ideas of destiny, such as - for example - those which may seemingly root us to a specific patch of earth.

Human beings, in their generous endeavour to construct a hypothesis that shall not degrade a First Cause, have always hesitated to conceive a dominant power of lower moral quality than their own; and, even while they sit down and weep by the waters of Babylon, invent excuses for the oppression which prompts their tears.

The strength of The Return of the Native is not that any of this is necessarily spelled out, but that it allows us to piece these ideas together by whichever terms make most sense to the reader, avoiding the somewhat didactic qualities of, for example, Dickens, not to mention his cloying excess of sentiment.

We open with a sort of death, something coming out of the night, Thomasin returning stillborn to Egdon in the Reddleman's funereal conveyance as bonfires are lit in homage to the death of Guy Fawkes; then conclude with the Mayday rebirth of Spring, Diggory Venn who has scrubbed up fairly well and is no longer bright red, and Clym at last finding his calling as a preacher, but one who prefers not to simply spout doctrine or to go through motions determined by any external influence.

He left alone creeds and systems of philosophy, finding enough and more than enough to occupy his tongue in the opinions and actions common to all good men.

It's therefore about facing the future, I suppose, or something along those lines. It could have been shorter. I'm not sure I don't prefer the sound of the conclusion Hardy submitted for the earlier serialisation, wherein Venn remains a mysterious, borderline supernatural figure; but this 1912 iteration nevertheless holds together well, possibly excepting the laborious distended arse-ache of Diggory Venn and Thomasin Yeobright finally brought together by agency of a missing glove.