Chapter **: Phantoms, or the Child in Time

THIS IS AN UNCORRECTED VERSION OF THE CHAPTER

Phantoms, or the Child in Time

Shall I sing, dance around around around,

When phantoms call the tune!

Hardy, ‘Song to an Old Burden’

And where is truth? On tombs? for such to thee

Has been my heart – and thy dead memory

Has lain from childhood, many a changeful year,

Unchangingly preserved and buried there.

Shelley, ‘Fragment: The Sepulchure of Memory’

Thomas Hardy’s poetry, like his life, is full of secrets: occasions not specified, biographical identifications which cannot readily be made, lacunae left to us as the residue of those bonfires at Max Gate from 1918 on, in which he and then his second wife Florence destroyed early diaries, letters, drafts, stirring the ashes of the fire to ensure that no fragment remained to contradict the picture given in his disguised autobiography. Or perhaps we are dealing with ancestral secrets never committed to paper, dying with the memories of his tight-lipped and childless siblings. That secrecy, or its possibility, is thematized regularly in the poetry; a late poem, ‘The Single Witness’, even has a protagonist willing to kill to preserve a family secret, and Hardy’s final poems in the mode of the envoi contain repeated references to what he will take with him to the grave.

The movement between apparent confession and withdrawal of context is typical of Hardy’s poetry, and is close in structure to his description of the freedoms offered by lyric – the declaration in the Life that ‘Generally, speaking, there is more autobiography in a hundred lines of Mr. Hardy’s poetry than in all the novels’ (LY 196) coexisting with repeated warnings in his prefaces that his poems are ‘fancies’ not to be confused with ‘fact’, so that biographical inferences are both licensed and obstructed. The result is a sense that the author is at once present and absent, both the source of affect in the poetry and, ostensibly, simply a ventriloquizer of ‘seemings’. There is, accordingly, a necessary obscurity, a gap in meaning which is constantly presented to the reader of Hardy’s poetry, and which is structural rather than simply involving a poverty of information. Some of his poems are so deeply obscure that they appear to be about nothing, signalling an absence which nonetheless generates poetry and subsequent interpretation. A good example is the inaptly named ‘An Experience’, a poem which self-consciously describes anything but the nature of the experience which is supposedly its subject; which defines it almost entirely in terms of negatives – it was not ‘In anything that was said, / In anything that was done’ – and concludes with a declaration that it was something that the speaker ‘Was never to forget’, still with no obvious objective correlative for the reader.

This chapter offers an account of the notion of the secret in Hardy from a number of perspectives: theoretical, interpretive, and (in a limited sense) biographical. In order to provide a framework for my analysis, I will begin with the work of psychoanalysts Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok.[1] From the 1960s, Abraham and Torok began to offer a reinterpretation of Freudian practice focused less on childhood sexuality, repression and conversion than on the way in which the expanding self encounters and deals with traumatic events and losses, either in terms of the subject’s own experience or that of others. The terms introjection and incorporation are central to their work, the former designating a ‘healthy’ encounter with the world, broadening the ego; the latter involving a trauma which is simply absorbed into the self or body as a foreign presence. Focusing on the mechanism of incorporation, they produce a psychic topography which includes the crypt – the site of a ‘preservative repression’; of an incorporation which, in contrast to the dynamic repression of neurosis, cannot (in theory – this is a contentious proposition[2]) be accessed indirectly or expressed via such mechanisms as projection and denial; which is cloaked in a silence which disrupts the possibility of linguistic expression itself. Typically, the crypt is associated with mourning, with the incorporation of a lost object.

A related, and arguably more useful concept is that of trans-generational haunting, articulated via the notion of the ‘phantom’. As Torok defines it,

the ‘phantom’ is a formation in the dynamic unconscious that is found there not because of the subject’s own repression but on account of a direct empathy with the unconscious or the rejected psychic matter of a parental object. Consequently, the phantom is not at all the product of the subject’s self-creation by means of the interplay between repressions and interjections. The phantom is alien to the subject who harbors it. Moreover, the diverse manifestations of the phantom, which we call haunting, are not directly related to instinctual life and are not to be confused with the return of the repressed.[3]

These are ‘family secrets’, relating to parents or other love-objects, or to those in previous generations, and passed down as an area of the psyche which is interdicted. The phantom typically appears not in displaced symptoms, but in imaginings which seem to come from outside the self, which are ‘gratuitous’ (as in phobias or obsessive behavior) or ‘ventriloquised’. Psychology here moves closer to one of its suppressed origins in spiritualism; in the nineteenth-century psychologizing of the uncanny. As Nicholas Rand comments, Abraham and Torok are ‘primarily concerned with converting obstructions into guides to understanding . . . ways in which signification can be conjectured despite its apparent absence’.[4]

It is also important to note that Abraham and Torok first encounter the phantom as an effect in the analyst, that is as something already transferred to another person who listens and interprets.[5] To study the phantom, then, may also be to study its effect a as a symptomatic structure in others – potentially on anyone who forms an affectual link with the analysand. It is to read with an attention to slippages involving the incorporation of another: the ‘I’ of the patient’s story, Torok suggests, often conceals another, in a movement like that of the author’s into a displaced first-person, an ‘I’ which is disavowed, ghostly, and which signals a removal of affect in the self – since the affect is another’s.

Cryptonomy as practiced by Abraham and Torok can seem, to the reader outside a tradition in which analytic practice might provide its own justifications, a rather arbitrary search for linguistic clues.[6] Neither does one wish to retrospectively psychoanalyze Hardy. But the strength of their work is that it allows us to conceptualize material which is unspoken and unspeakable, and to conceive that material as part of a broader family history, with all the economic and even political vicissitudes that involves. As Esther Rankin comments, ‘reconstituting an unspoken trauma does not imply inventing a false, fantasized past history for a character but rather understanding that that the text calls upon the reader to expand its apparent parameters to include invisible scenarios’. She adds, however, that ‘although predating the events of the text, these unelaborated dramas have no reality outside the outside the limits of the text. Such limits, however, have to be construed as extending beyond their readily available borders.’[7] The drive beyond the text, with a fictionality both disavowed and partially admitted within this psychoanalytic tradition, is complicated, as suggested above, by the possibility of incorporation on the part of the reader, involving a carrying of the phantom into yet another psyche – a story of Hardy’s readers told in one part of this chapter.

‘Family Portraits’: Haunting Pain

There are a number of features of Hardy’s poetry which suggest less an analysis in the terms offered by Abraham and Torok than a convergence of terminology: a fascination with intergenerational haunting and areas of psychic resistance, with phantoms and secrets. Hardy offers a startlingly self-conscious version of the crypt in his late poem ‘Family Portraits’ (published in 1924, and then in a substantially revised version near the end of Winter Words in 1928).[8] The last of the great phantasmagoric series including ‘The Pedigree’ and ‘The Chosen’, with its description of three ‘picture-drawn’ people stepping from the frame it provides another version of the love-triangle which Hardy had recently explored in The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall.[9] The three give their names – though to the poem’s speaker (‘Full well though I knew’) rather than to the readers, then,

They set about acting some drama, obscure,

The woman and he,

With puppet-like movements of mute strange allure;

Yea, set about acting some drama, obscure,

Till I saw ‘twas their own lifetime’s tragic amour,

Whose course begot me;

Yea – a mystery, ancestral, long hid from my reach

In the perished years past,

That had mounted to dark doings each against each

In those ancestor’s days, and long hid from my reach;

Which their restless enghostings, it seemed, were to teach

Me in full, at this last.

But fear fell upon me like frost, of some hurt

If they entered anew

On the orbits they smartly had swept when expert

In the law-lacking passions of life, – of some hurt

To their souls – and thus mine – which I fain would avert

So, in sweat cold as dew,

‘Why wake up all this?’ I cried out. ‘Now, so late!

Let old ghosts be laid!’

And they stiffened, drew back to their frames and numb state,

Gibbering: ‘Thus are your own ways to shape, know too late!’

Then I grieved that I’d not had the courage to wait

And see the play played.

I have grieved ever since: to have balked future pain,

My blood’s tendance foreknown,

Had been triumph. Nights long stretched awake I have lain

Perplexed in endeavours to balk future pain

By uncovering the drift of their drama. In vain

Though therein lay my own.

The ‘mystery’ here is encoded both as organic inheritance (‘blood’s tendance’) and as an original ‘drama’; both as hurting the speaker via a direct transference (‘some hurt / To their souls – and thus mine’) and as producing a mirroring repetition in his actions. Causation is uncertain; indeed, in the earlier version of the poem the stanza beginning ‘Why wake up all this’ precedes the third stanza above, refering to the ‘orbits’ of the actors, and the later phrase ‘which I fain would avert’ replaces an earlier ‘but I found them inert’, shifting the question of causality radically from the past to the present of the speaker. Moreover while in the 1924 version the poet is reactive, asking ‘Could it have hurt [to have watched?]’, in the 1928 version he is fearful and preemptive, as if slowly admitting that the blame was in fact his, and that the hurt is bound up with a willed failure to watch and see the truth. This is close to the mechanism of disavowal or repudiation as described by Freud and Lacan: the narrator seems both to already know the story (‘full well though I knew’) and to refuse to know it (‘Why wake up all this?’).[10] He seems to see that the story has tragically predicted his life (‘therein lay my own’), but also suggests that the mystery remains intact, unopened, as does the question of the future.

The unstated and deeply compulsive material of this ‘drama’ is bounded, then, by what is, formally, a refusal to remember. The poem exists in the space of what Abraham and Torok call incorporation, expressed in the ventriloquism, puppet-drama, and phobic avoidance which they see as characteristic of the phantom, the ‘mute’ and ‘numb’ state of both the actors and speaker suggesting – but never fully expressing – trauma. The phantom is incorporated as a rigid and frozen foreign object in the psyche, the marker-stone of a secret (becoming-stone is a state traced in Hardy’s reading and his poetry, from his marking of lines in Byron’s ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’, ‘Among the stones I stood a stone / And was scarce conscious of what I wist’, to the late poem ‘A Wish for Unconsciousness’: ‘If I could but abide / As a tablet on a wall’).[11] Something strikes the speaker dumb, stiffening and freezing, obscuring the story or origins; in both ‘The Pedigree’ and ‘Family Portraits’ the word ‘drift’ punningly suggests a cloud-hidden primal scene, a drift which we cannot quite get.[12] For Abraham and Torok the material of the crypt or phantom cannot be represented directly, but can appear as an ‘undecipherable fetish’. The interdicted ‘silent word’ is, they comment, can appear as such an image as Hardy’s poem presents: their phrase is ‘love disguised and dressed up in a “painting”’.[13]

I am not suggesting that ‘Family Portraits’ can be directly applied to Hardy’s life (what is there to apply?), but rather that it offers an account of what it is like to read Hardy, or to have to read into Hardy’s poetry. We are presented with various repeated traumatic scenes which invite interpretation, which offer to solve the mystery, but also face a form of psychic censorship which exiles reading to a deferred and subjunctive mood (the ‘had been triumph’ which signals an unachieved meaning). Meaning is both present and absent, both figured and declared to reside in an undeclarable literalness. This is a structure we find throughout Hardy’s verse, nicely defined by the two mirrored quatrains of ‘The Wound’:

I climbed to the crest,

And, fog-festooned,

The sun lay west

Like a crimson wound:

Like that wound of mine

Of which none knew,

For I’d given no sign

That it pierced me through.

Here the ‘sign’ is both everywhere and nowhere to be seen; the ‘wound’ is first bodily and deployed (to signal redness) in a simile in which its visibility is the point; but then becomes a vehicle in a strangely unrelated simile in which the invisibility of the a psychic wound is signalled. It is gestured at in the demonstrative pronoun (‘that wound’), but only specified in a doubly displaced form: a sunset like a wound, a (physical) wound like ‘that’ (psychic) wound. Trauma is both revealed and hidden in this language. Many of Hardy’s poems are encoded in this way, so that, to take an example almost at random, anyone who has read deeply in Hardy can immediately recognize in his cryptic poem ‘Where Three Roads Joined’ a vocabulary of terms shared with other poems – life laughing onwards; a scene of blankness; muteness in its witnesses; a ‘spectre-beridden’ place; the void of a ‘plumbless well’ down which hopes and happiness roll; a dwelling on memory and loss – so that the poem is perfectly readable; even though the details of what it refers to are absent, the reader understands the structure of that absence.

At this point, however, I want to move away from the metapsychology of the phantom (though the subject will remain implicit) to a more specific set of concerns raised by ‘Family Portraits’, relating to the issues of wounding and pain, and ultimately the notion – not fully articulated in this poem, but circulating throughout Hardy’s work – of childhood trauma. For all that ‘Family Portrait’ describes the impossibility of fully representing its own subject-matter, it is possible to follow threads and clues which extend into Hardy’s other texts. One such clue is the repeated phrase in the final stanza, ‘balk future pain’ – a phrase Hardy added as he re-wrote the poem, replacing ‘heal my own pain’. Pain is an interesting issue, not only because of the metaphorical link to the idea of psychic wounding or trauma which we have already seen in ‘The Wound’, but more generally because in the nineteenth century physical pain become an increasingly problematic issue for progressive and Darwinian traditions.[14] In what follows, we will move rather circuitously from a general consideration of the topic back to the issue of childhood pain.

With the waning of religious interpretations of pain (pain as punishment, as Fall), and the possibility of its elimination in many situations as a result of advances in medicine and humanitarian action, a debate on its meaning ensued; a debate which broadened to take in issues such as vivisection, the subject of a Royal Commission in 1875-6 (cruelty to animals is of course a recurrent concern in Hardy’s writings).[15] Darwin was a witness in the hearings of the Royal Commission. His interest in the treatment of animals, as one commentator notes, ‘effected a powerful conjunction between the assault on pain and the accomplishment of [his] life-work’.[16] But from the evolutionary point of view, the model in which pain was simply the stimulus for action, as in putting the hand in a fire, seemed to fail to account for persistent forms of pain (particularly those with no apparent trauma). In The Expression of Emotion in Man and the Animals, Darwin includes pain in his discussion of the stronger emotions, borrowing Herbert Spencer’s economic argument that pain produces an ‘overflow of nerve-force’ which ‘must expend itself in some direction’, taking over successive systems of muscles, beginning with those closest to the seat of pain and continuing with the most-used (facial muscles, speech). This argument explains the expression of pain in terms of discharge. But Darwin has trouble uniting this view with that of the utility of pain, and indeed the reference to ‘nerve-force’ suggests the way in which the intensity of pain in humans is a special consideration. For T. H. Huxley, that intensity of human pain was an effect of evolutionary advances which places consciousness increasingly in tension with the rest of nature. Its excessive nature, the sense that in evolutionary terms its intensity hardly seems necessary (even if it can sometimes be interpreted as a signal of bodily disruption or danger), meant that it seemed like a reminder of a kind of thought which inheres in the body – the complement, Elaine Scarry has recently argued, of imaginative activity which projects the self outwards into other objects.[17] Thinking on the evolutionary redundancy of pain was to culminate in the 1930s in Gerald Stanley Heard’s Pain, Sex and Time. His book begins with a simple question: is human evolution continuing, and are there untapped human potentials we have not exploited? His answer is a qualified ‘yes’: the potential is there, but such energies are at the moment wasted. The proof is in the pain: for Heard – as for the early Freud of the Project for a Scientific Psycholoy – pain is waste psychic energy which has not been tapped (thus, the mind can exclude pain if it is concentrating hard on other things). The aim of existence is ‘to be conscious in a way which uses up the energy which was leaking and discharging in pain’.[18]

Hardy attacked philosophical attempts to explain away pain in a 1886 note on Hegel, noting that the argument that ‘real pain is compatible with formal pleasure – that the ideal is all, etc.’ does not offer much consolation to those in pain (EL 234). Schopenhauer, in his powerful essay on ‘The Vanity and Suffering of Life’ had attacked the Hegelian subordination of individual pain to human destiny in a similar way. For Schopenhauer pain is a ‘positive’ force in the neutral sense that its presence outweighs all other factors, while well-being is only strongly defined when it is succeeded by other states: ‘We feel pain, but not painlessness; we feel care, not the absence of care; fear, but not security . . . for only pain and want can be felt positively, and therefore announce themselves; well-being, on the other hand, is merely negative.’[19] Pain binds the individual intensely to a particular moment (in contrast to the Hegelial dialectic, which lifts us towards transcendence), representing the predicament of consciousness in the world, a state of ‘debt’.

Hardy was also undoubtedly influenced by John Stuart Mill’s famous indictment of the indifference and malevolence of Nature in the first of the Three Essays on Religion; it is echoed in his response to a 1902 review of Maeterlinck’s Apology for Nature:

Pain has been, and pain is: no new sort of morals in Nature can remove pain from the past and make it pleasure for those who are its infallible estimators, the bearers thereof. And no injustice, however slight, can be atoned for by her future generosity, however ample, so long as we consider Nature to be, or to stand for, unlimited power. (LY 97)

The same harsh doctrine is expounded in a letter attacking Henri Bergson in 1915. Writing to Caleb Saleeby, who had sent him a copy of Creative Evolution, Hardy denounces Bergson’s mixture of Vitalism and materialism:

the most fatal objection to his view of creation plus propulsion seems to me to lie in the existence of pain. If nature were creative she would have created painlessness, or be in process of creating it – pain being the first thing we instinctively fly from. If on the other hand we cannot introduce into life what is not already there, and are bound to mere recombination of old materials, the persistence of pain is intelligible. (LY 273)

Pain, here, is the mark of ‘mechanism’, of animal responses which cannot be eradicated by an act of will, and ultimately, of a view of the world which sees it determined by germ-plasm rather than élan vital. In both the passages above it is the residue of the past which is linked to pain – an observation which makes ‘balk[ing] future pain’ an impossibility. Having denounced Bergson for his Dualism, Hardy continues, in a passage examined in the previous chapter: ‘You must not think me a hard-hearted rationalist for all this. Half my time (particularly when I write verse) I believe – in the modern use of the word – not only in things that Bergson does, but in spectres, mysterious voices, intuitions, omens, dreams, haunted places, etc., etc.’ (LY 271-72). Belief in some provisional ‘modern sense’ would ultimately involve a refusal to confront the difficulty of positions which cannot be reconciled. If we put these passages together, then it is apparent that pain and the spectral are close together in Hardy’s mind – not as cognate, since pain must be believed in whereas spectres are simply assented to, and any notion of the life-force as having an immaterial existence is ruled out. Rather, pain and the spectral are connected in that both represent evolutionary traces of an earlier existence; they act as the human residue of a past which must, strictly, be interpreted in material terms, but which nevertheless represents an ineradicable haunting. Pain is ghostly, a haunting persistence of ‘old materials’; or of the material itself in its historicity.

Correspondingly, any rationalist attempts to eradicate pain are dubious – as in the comic episode in Hardy’s The Hand of Ethelberta in which the heroine attempts to decide her course of action using Mill’s Utilitarianism, reading there that ‘The ultimate end . . . is an existence exempt as possible from pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments, both in point of quantity and quality’.[20] Interestingly, Mill adds that the standard here is ‘not the agent’s own happiness but that of all concerned’, and Ethelberta notes carefully that ‘all concerned’ normally refers to a small family circle – initiating her self-sacrifice in the name of her siblings. The self may be sacrificed to the family, just as in Hardy’s genealogical poems the ‘line’ may render the individual subject ghostly. Tess O’Toole notes (and she is thinking of Tess of the D’Urbervilles) the way in which for Hardy ‘the genetic product appears not as an example of rejuvenation but as a crypt inhabited by the relics of those long dead’, producing ‘the genetic legatee as a kind of ghost or specter’[21] – a ghost inhabiting the site of an ancient passion.

If pain is a register of the spectralized past, the formula ‘to balk future pain’ which began this discussion is also interesting for the word balk. The noun balk is, the OED suggests, descended from a root meaning ‘bar’; its oldest and later dialect meanings refer to ridges or unploughed areas separating different plots. Some of the meanings of the verb are connected, though ‘to balk’ also has the meaning of shunning a place, hesitating (as in a horse balking at a jump), as well as the common transitive meaning of frustrating or placing an obstacle before. ‘Balk’ thus has some of the complexity of Freud’s antithetical words: it is to mark out ownership by creating a barrier, but also a refusal to cross a barrier. What is enclosed is this a space both shunned and guarded – the space of the phantom. Indeed, the word ‘balk’ is explicitly linked to a sexual secret in ‘A Sunday Morning Tragedy’, Hardy’s controversial poem on abortion: the herb supplied by a shepherd is meant to ‘balk ill-motherings’ in ewes. Here balking is preventative abortion, the shunning of a life which will prove traumatic. As in Schopenhauer, the issue of pain finds its ultimate focus in the question of being born: Schopenhauer cites Lessing’s admiration of his son’s understanding, when he refused to be born and ‘had to be forcibly brought into [life] with the forceps, but was scarely there when he hurried away from it again’. Hardy’s ‘To an Unborn Pauper Child’, with its stress on the triumph of pain over pleasure, reads like a verse commentary on this essay.[22] The issue of the lost, aborted or mis-placed child leads us to a more developed cryptonomy in Hardy. First, however, a excursis into an interesting episode in critical history, and what we might call the cryptonomy of reception.

Randy’s Hand, or the Lost Son

‘Free among the dead, like unto them that are wounded, and lie in the grave: who are out of remembrance, and are cut away from thy hand’.

Psalm 88, as marked by Hardy[23]

Yet It may wake and understand

Ere Earth unshape, know all things, and

With knowledge use a painless hand,

A painless hand!

Chorus of the Pities, conclusion to Dynasts Part II

In the late 1960s the world of the Hardy Society was disturbed by the claims of Lois Deacon, an ‘amateur’ scholar from Dorchester, that she had uncovered the greatest mystery of Hardy’s life: the existence of a child called ‘Randy’ (Randolph or Randall), fathered in an affair with his cousin Tryphena Sparks and raised by Tryphena’s older sister Rebecca. ‘Hardy’s marriages were childless’, as Deacon rather bathetically notes in the book which she co-authored with Terry Coleman, Providence and Mr Hardy (1966), ‘but he was probably not altogether without issue’.[24] Her claims were based largely on an identification of a photograph of a boy in a family album, made by Tryphena’s daughter, Eleanor Bromell, near death at the age of eighty-six. This, for Deacon, was supported by ‘internal’ evidence in the form of readings of a number of poems said to deal with the affair and illegitimacy (‘To an Orphan Child’, ‘The Place on the Map’ and others), as well as other details like initials in family albums, lacunae in Hardy’s autobiography and omissions in the genealogy which he drew up. The aim of Providence and Mr. Hardy is to rescue Tryphena from her ‘suppressed’ status, and reveal Randy to the world.

Nothing if not an industrious reader, Deacon also ‘discovered’ further scandal in the tangled skein of Hardy family history. She suggested that Tryphena was not in fact the daughter of her aging parents (her mother Maria, Hardy’s aunt, was an improbable 46 when she was born), but was in fact the illegitimate issue of her older sister Rebecca and Rebecca’s employer. And – a final twist – Deacon more cautiously suggested that Typhena and Hardy may have been more than just cousins, and adduces evidence that Rebecca was in fact the early illegitimate offspring of Hardy’s mother Jemima (neé Hand), subsequently passed off as the child of her elder sister Maria, already married to James Sparks (such transferences were a common rural practice, and are described in Hardy’s ‘A Hurried Meeting’). This makes Tryphena Hardy’s niece – a fact which Hardy was unaware of at the time of their romance, Deacon proposes, but which he subsequently learnt, and which works its way into the Shelleyan theme of near-incest in his late novels. ‘Randy’ would thus be the issue of a series of tangled illegitimacies and transferences across generations and between sisters.

Deacon’s work has been the object of some derision amongst Hardy’s subsequent biographers – perhaps understandably, since she can offer no real proof of Randy’s existence (there are no written records relating either to his supposed birth in 1868 or death sometime before 1917), and instead engages in highly selective and speculative biographical readings of poems. One Hardy scholar, F. R. Southerington, did support her in 1968, and one or two reviewers thought the story likely enough.[25] Hardy’s most recent biographer, Martin Seymour-Smith, is more charitable in describing her book as ‘a speculative novel of what, just possibly, might have been’.[26] But the important question here is perhaps less ‘is the story true?’ than ‘what supports and generates such narratives’? Why is the story so persuasive as a ‘speculative novel’? For Deacon is not the only example of a reader who concretizes phantoms in biography: if she obligingly supplies a child to deal with Hardy’s childlessness, the sober-minded biographer Michael Millgate suggests that Hardy might have been impotent – a suggestion vigorously contested by Seymour-Smith, but illustrative of more than simply biological speculation since it attempts once again to identify a defining area of ‘deadness’ in Hardy, a phantom presence. Deacon’s symptomatic reading responds, that is, to a real trauma in Hardy, a trauma which is inevitably reproduced in the stories told by his readers. Deacon’s comment in an earlier pamphlet suggests her own involvement in a drama of veiling and unveiling, a play of desire and identification: ‘What most Hardy biographers have not perceived is that although Hardy frequently draws a discreet veil over the truth, he invariably leaves gaps and rents in the veil through which he later sheds a powerful and revealing light’.[27] Through these gaps Tryphena emerges as ‘the dark lady of the lyrics’, the key to Hardy’s poetry of non-specification.[28]

One key to Randy – though one which might too easily represent a premature acceptance of a deconstructive line – involves seeing him as a linguistic ghost, a retracing of Hardy’s texts and accounts of his life. As Southerington reports, Eleanor Bromell ‘described [Randy] as “delicate”, “frail”, older than herself, fond of birds, reading poetry, and of drawing’; she also claims that she was an architect. All these were, of course, Hardy’s own attributes, suggesting that one unstated case for ‘Randy’ – unstated because formal, and perhaps also because it suggests a slippage in Mrs Bromell’s memory – seems to be a homology between father and proposed son, another intergenerational mapping. A similar sense of assimilation is present in Deacon’s stress on the singularily of Tryphena. If Hardy’s biographers note that he may have had liaisons with many women in the period around 1868 (including Tryphena) and that he identified many women as the model of Tess, Deacon wishes to make Tryphena the great Ur-romance of his life, incorporating even Emma Hardy’s body: ‘Poor Emma Lavinia! She lent her very eyes and hair, her riding-habit and her Cornish home of St. Juniot’s for the effective disguising of the dark-haired Dorset Tryphena in A Pair of Blue Eyes’. Tryphena multiplies within his texts. When Tess is described as younger than she looks, Deacon notes that Tryphena had been similarly accused when she applied for the job of headmistress in Plymouth. But a footnote adds that a parallel phrase (‘looked more womanly than she really was’) is applied to Geraldine in An Indiscretion.[29] Here, the very conventionality of the phrase is evidence of its application to a specific ‘real’ context. In a similar way, Hardy’s texts multiply evidence in the world: a footnote remarks that ‘it is curious that’ a church in Brixton, only one and a quarter miles from where Tryphena taught, ‘should be called St. Jude’, and that a house in Topsham, 100 yards from where she lived, ‘should be called “St. Jude’s Cottage”’. The ‘should’ here signals a textual agency; ‘a pattern emerges’, Deacon and Coleman note, even as they weave it.[30]

Such ‘textual’ readings co-exist with a desire to find a ‘real’ Randy, a body behind the text (Abraham and Torok comment that ‘the analyst-judge also acts as a morphologist: they have to reconstruct the event from a few scattered bodily fragments’).[31] For Deacon the reality of the body is supplied above all by the two photographs which she identifies as being Randy. But one interesting detail in the story of ‘Randy’ concerns a missing part of the body, what we could call a ‘phantom’ limb. Mrs Bromell made repeated reference to an injury to his right hand, attributed to two different causes (a cycling accident, a dog). This is a detail both Deacon and Southerington fuss over without attempting to do more than link it indexically to the boy in the photograph – the latter eliciting opinions from a medical expert that the boy in the photograph might conceivably be missing fingers. It is as if in providing another detail of identity – there was a boy, his hand was hurt – it acts as a symbol of a larger absence.[32] But we might also see that loss as inscribed within the story itself: ‘Hand’ is Jemima Hardy’s ‘maiden’ name – the name she had when, Deacon suggests, she bore the illegitimate Rebecca, Randy’s alleged grandmother (an earlier name in what Hardy called his ‘beclouded’ maternal line, incidentally, was Childs or Childses [EL 7]). The wounded hand us thus a stigmata marking the ancestral mystery rather than ‘proof’ of it; it points to the wronged woman, and perhaps also the absent father, the man who makes his living by his pen. Like Oedipus’s swollen-footedness (oideo-pous), a wound signals incest, a maiming and a secret naming (Oedipus is also etymologically oi-dipous, Simon Goldhill points out: ‘alas, two-footed’, as if he were himself the answer to his own riddle[33]). Randy as riddle; Randy as handy; Randy as the name for desire; ‘Randy’ as only a stroke away from being an anagram for ‘Hardy’ – Deacon’s story of incest and endogamy itself seems to generate tricks and embodied clues.

Here we might pick up a clue which Deacon misses, and continue with her supplementary story using a poem which features both a bastard child and a missing hand, ‘Panthera’. Panthera is a veteran Centurion who still feels twinges in ‘the hand he had lost, shorn by barbarian steel’. This is the ‘phantom limb’ which emerged as a focus in nineteenth-century neurological work, particularly in Weir Mitchell’s writings on American Civil War victims – an entity which suggests the virtuality of the body, its being coordinated by an image of phantasmic unity, a body-image. The tale is told by an old soldier, who himself doubts the story Panthera told him years earlier, ‘His mind at last being stressed by ails and age: – / Yet his good faith thereon I well could wage’. The speaker had wished for offspring, even if illegitimate, to continue his line, and Panthera had warned him off it with an account of his own Palestinian love-child, fathered during an idyllic stopover in Nazareth over thirty years earlier, and only re-encountered at the point where the son is being crucified for sedition at Golgotha. Panthera recognizes the weeping mother, but does not care to ‘close the silence of so wide a time’. The narrator casts doubt on the story, which Panthera seems to want to believe, despite acknowledging ‘vagueness of identity’ in this case.

This is the shockingly apocryphal Ur-tale of Christ, the child of mysterious origin (for volume publication Hardy was careful to supply a headnote detailing a number of sources for the legend, as if wishing to disclaim it as his ‘issue’).[34] The relationship to the canonical text is important here: the story is told by a would-be father who can only watch him at the point where the son is, like the limb, cut away from him and assigned an afterlife in an entirely separate text with a different story, which both covers and interdicts – balks – the apocryphal account. This might be read, in Deacon’s manner, as simply an allegory of the story of Randy. But more obviously, it signals the questions of paternity and narrative which surround the issue of textual authority itself: who authors this account, the Centurion with the missing hand and the secret, or the later teller who doubts the story? How does it relate to the text of the Gospels, ostensibly written by the hand of God? ‘Panthera’ is a poem on the mysteries of identity within an order which is double-coded: the centurion recognizes the ‘ardent blood’ of Christ as his own only through the mother and his memories of a sexual idyll, but she is nonetheless decked in the symbolic insignia of the Virgin (blue cloak) rather than simply being depicted naturalistically. The story supplies a naturalistic account of the paternity of Christ, but nonetheless depends for its force – and for an explanation of these events on Panthera – on the Christian world-view.

As in ‘Family Secrets’ we can attempt to press a little further, to riddle the language of the poem. It is ‘cynic Time’, the narrator tells us, which maims Panthera and breaks his spirit. ‘Cynic’ is a word Hardy uses in ‘The Pedigree’ to mark the twistings of a genealogy, its tendency to go awry: the ‘cynic face’ and ‘cynic twist of the page’ suggest the palsy known as a cynic spasm, a deformation of the self created in its antecedents, rather than cynicism in the philosophical sense. Panthera suggest that the lesson of the story is ‘That when you talk of offspring as sheer joy / So trustingly, you blink contingencies’, adding that ‘He who goes fathering / Gives frightful hostages to hazardry!’. ‘Blink’ is used in its older meaning of flinching from something, shutting one’s eyes to it: that is, balking [at] future pain. We can also ask what the Centurion hopes of his child – and it is here that Hardy’s pessimism intersects most forcibly with Christianity. If he, the ‘ardent soldier’, shares his ‘ardent blood’ with Christ, then he expects nothing of the future, no flame to be kindled. The root of the word ‘ardent’ is ardere, to burn, a root Hardy turns to in ‘A Commonplace Day’. There he writes, almost tautologically, of ‘that enkindling ardency from whose maturer glows / The world’s amendment flows’, before noting that it ‘has missed its hope to be / Embodied on the earth’. Ardency or enkindling passion is, then, that hope for a meaning to history which is incarnated in Christ (in ‘Panthera’) but also frustrated, ‘benumbed at birth’ (‘A Commonplace Day’); it is what dies with the day which ‘is turning ghost’, and which is figured forth in the embers of the fire which Hardy rakes. Compare the following exchange recorded by Ernest Brennecke in his 1925 biography. Visiting Max Gate, he had suggested that Hardy was a ‘ardent meliorist’. Hardy replied: ‘I am not . . . And really, you must never call me “ardent” about anything. I am not. I am as indifferent as I find it possible to be. I wish you success, however. Good-day.’ Here, ‘ardency’ is reduced to a suppressed trace; the word is cancelled.[35] The disruption of Judeo-Christian history described in ‘Panthera’ is thus the reducing of a flame (perhaps even the Pentecostal flame) to ashes, reducing history to a succession of dead days, to a denatured geneology carried in Hardy’s story of the lost child and the wounded hand.

Interestingly, the hypothetical existence of a ‘hidden’ story of Christ has been linked to Abraham and Torok’s thinking by Nicholas Royle in a recent review article taking in the starting combination of translations of Derrida’s Spectres of Marx and The Nag Hammadi Library of Coptic Gnostic texts.[36] Royle argues that these early Gnostic texts ‘phantomize’ our reading of the Gospels, and playfully proposes his own phantom text, a non-existent and at best fragmentary story he describes as ‘ashes in the wind’. In this phantom text, Jesus speaks to Mary Magdalene after his crucifixion, explaining that he was not the one who was crucified; he had been replaced by a ‘stranger’ – initiating, for Royle, a dissolution of Christianity’s haunted onto-theology into a theology of the lost other. This kind of experiment in deconstructive Christianity (including the figure of the ‘real’ Christ who survives the crucifixion, perplexed by his cult) was common enough in the late nineteenth century, and seems to find echoes in late twentieth-century theory.

Hardy’s fiction contains a striking example of haunting akin to that which we have seen in ‘Panthera’ and in the Deacon case – one of many examples of lost or displaced children in his prose, most famously the self-cancelling children of Jude the Obscure. In her description of the ‘cancelled words’ in Far from the Madding Crowd, Rosemarie Morgan describes the material which Hardy revised or removed under pressure from his cautious editor Leslie Stephen as the book was serialized in the Cornhill Magazine, Morgan tells a story of suppression and designification. In the original drafts, Fanny dies with Troy’s illegitimate and stillborn baby in her arms, and Bathsheba, now secretly married to Troy, sadly and compassionately inspects mother and baby in their coffin. Leslie Stephen was keen to omit the baby, but Hardy left it in – only, however, as a trace, present as the two words on Fanny’s coffin which Gabriel Oak erases, ‘and child’. The ‘massive cancellations’ Hardy did agree to make, Morgan shows, ‘have the effect of rendering the stillborn infant entirely invisible’ – even, seemingly, to Bathsheba; and further revisions (and one spectacular reversal) shift Bathsheba from a position of empathy with Fanny to something closer to rivalry.[37] The result is to produce a version of Bathsheba who is herself truncated and haunted by the phantom of the child, reduced to a barely-comprehendible passivity and pitifulness. Her motivations have, in the Cornhill, to be understood without the child whose trace is nevertheless there (and which was only very partially restored when Hardy revised the book again for volume publication). Two of Morgan’s comments are of further interest here: first, that Bathsheba was ‘in his original conception of things, as vivid, as immediate, and as palpably real as his own flesh and blood’, but is here reduced to being an ‘echo’ of that reality; and second, that Hardy spoke of censorship as ‘paralysing’. Here we have a model for transgression, censorship, and the effect of that censorship on the subject, enacted both in the novel and in Hardy’s encounter with social constraint. ‘Cancelled words’ signal the presence of the crypt (Morgan’s title is taken from the volume of verse the secretive heroine publishes in The Hand of Ethelberta – their publication under a pseudonym again concealing origins). The crypt in turn opens into the space of reading – the space of Deacon’s reading, but that, too, of the reader of Far From the Madding Crowd, and of all our reading.

What Deacon’s excavations and extrapolations suggest is both the intensity with which Hardy’s texts do generate readings in terms of phantasmic structures, absences and blockages, and at the same time the hazards of such interpretation. Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of her case is that amidst the welter of ‘evidence’ which she extracts from various poems in elucidation Hardy’s allegedly tangled genealogy, she never cites the two poems which most directly and self-consciously address the issue of the ‘dark doings’ of genealogy: ‘The Pedigree’ and ‘Family Portraits’. Where poems like ‘The Place on the Map’ can be mined for displaced clues, these poems meditate on the space of the secret itself.

‘A deed back in time’

Where else might we pursue Hardy’s ghosts? His family’s ‘authentic’ ghost story, recounted to William Archer, also concerns a lost child. His mother dreamed that a sick friend came to her in the night, just at the point that, some distance away, the friend was dying. The woman appeared with her young child in her arms, ‘but the odd thing was that, while she was sinking, she continually expressed a wish that my mother should take charge of the child’.[38] Like the child attributed to Jemima Hardy in Deacon’s account, it is offered to another, but its final location is uncertain – no mention is made of its subsequent fate. Phantom presence, orphan, supplement; in the story it never moves beyond spectral status.

This family story gestures towards the general instablity of the child in Hardy’s texts, an instability which Deacon’s account presents in a manageable way, making Little Father Time and other ‘lost’ children versions of Randy. Hardy often marked poems about dead or bereft children in his reading.[39] The list of possible disruptions of childhood in his own poetry is immense, including illegitimacy; regret at lost children (‘The Dead Bastard’); children disowned by their fathers (‘The Supplanter’); a woman killed defending a child not her own (‘By the Barrows’); a dead child being christened (‘Royal Sponsors’); a woman ‘giving’ her husband to a woman with whom he has a child (‘A Wife and Another’) or wishing to die so that another woman can have her husband-to-be and child (‘The Wedding Morning’); a woman seeking a more vigorous father for her child; and a poem whose speaker wishes that a child whose mother has died might reincarnate her (‘To a Motherless Child’). Children may haunt: ‘The Bird-Catcher’s Boy’ describes a child who leaves a ‘cruel’ home and only returns as a ghost when the sea gives up his body. There are a number of poems including abortions (‘the child – that should have been, / But was not, born alive’ of ‘The Ballad of Love’s Skeleton’; ‘A Sunday Morning Tragedy’) and other poems recommending that children not be born (‘To an Unborn Pauper Child’; ‘The Unborn’; ‘Epitaph on a Pessimist’).

A cluster of these poems is situated in Time’s Laughingstocks, the volume in which ballad-memory is most dominant, but also the first volume to appear after the death of Hardy’s mother – a fact which might indeed suggest a posthumous release of memory, and even of interdicted material (‘The Christening’, for example, is a tale of a bastard child dated 1904, the year of Jemima’s death; ‘Panthera’ is in the same volume, and other examples include ‘A Trampwoman’s Tragedy’; ‘Unrealized’ with its children whose mother is dead; and one of Deacon’s favourites, ‘The Dawn after the Dance’, with its hinted illegitimacy). It is interesting to meditate on Hardy’s dry report in the Life that ‘By reason of her parent’s bereavement and consequent poverty under the burden of a young family, Jemima saw during girlhood and young womanhood some very stressful experiences of which she could never speak in her maturer years without pain, though she appears to have mollified her troubles by reading every book she could lay hands on’(EL 9) – a clue, perhaps, to the way in which his own investment in the literary imagination of childhood pain might indeed have centred on his mother.

One repeated topic is that of child fathered by the rival, with violent results: the ‘cuckoo-child’ placed in another’s house (described in ‘At a Pause in a Country Dance’, ‘A Conversation at Dawn’, ‘In the Restaurant’ and many other poems; even Little Father Time). In ‘A Flirt’s Tragedy’ a man hires a gigolo to seduce the woman who spurned him, then kills the gigolo after she becomes pregnant, raising the child as his only to have him flee his ‘false father . . . [who] murdered my true!’ Arguably the most important such poems, offering a key to Hardy’s metapoetics, are those in which the issue is the plotting of such a story rather than its actuality. In ‘A Trampwoman’s Tragedy’ a woman pretends that her child is not her lover’s, at which point he kills the imagined rival. In such poems, it is the story itself which generates violent acts. ‘Her Death and After’ also meditates on the status of the story of infidelity. The protagonist is called to the deathbed of a woman he loves who married another; she suspects her unloving husband will not care for their lame newborn child:

such my unease

That, could I insert a deed back in Time,

I’d make her yours, to secure her care;

And the scandal bear,

And the penalty for the crime.

The lover haunts her grave, and when he is challenged by the dead woman’s husband (who has remarried and does, as predicted, neglect his first child) he concocts the story suggested by the dying wish, telling the husband that the child was indeed his; it is handed over to him to raise. This is the story of a fiction which activates a buried truth. A ‘deed’ in the sense of a legal intention becomes a deed in the sense of an action validating that intention (as in typology), but there is a residue of guilt attached because the process involves the overwriting of history (‘but compunctions loomed; for I’d harmed the dead / By what I said / For the good of the living one’). The ‘deed back in time’ is not a guilty secret, but rather the secret of a guilt: there is no original act of sin. This is perhaps the most cogent comment on the lost child in Hardy: as a device, it concerns itself with the failure of love to find its ‘proper’ locus; or a love which only finds expression outside its official channels, via an act of imaginative surrogacy which is, here, predicated on mourning. This sense both of the need to recapture the past and of the violence of that process is also, as we will see, a feature of Hardy’s relation to history generally.

We can add a final, late, example of this notion of the encrypted (fictional) child. ‘Aristodemus the Messenian’, published in Winter Words, seems the grotesque product of a seriously decayed imagination, to the point where it is almost unreadable (understandably, it has received almost no critical discussion). When King Aristodemus (circa 735 BC) decides that he must sacrifice his virgin daughter to save his people in battle, her lover attempts to prevent the act by claiming that she is pregnant, invalidating the sacrifice – the fictionalizing but recuperative gambit of ‘Her Death and After’. The king refutes the story by ripping his daughter’s womb open with his sword, an anatomical investigation and violation in which a vortex of issues – paternity, rape, birth, murder – devolve on the question of a sexual secret; a secret whose essence inheres, in fact, in being a fiction which generates rupture and uncertainty. What is in the womb? the poem asks, and the answer might be ‘Nothing, just a story’. Could we say that this is the final displacement of the structured absence which constitutes Hardy’s crypt?

It is not, I would suggest, easy to press further in discussing Hardy’s family secrets; the point is less the need for a definitive account of ‘what happened’ – a need which in ‘Aristodemus the Messenian’ is shown to itself be violent – than an acknowledgement of the existence of a topic which is repeatedly raised and evaded, claimed and disclaimed, balked about and balked at; which is resolved into the story of another, or into silence. Some poems might suggest abortion or infanticide as one trauma; other poems the fostering of children. Both topics refer to the displacement of the child from its rightful position in the family, for reasons which are to do with the ‘law’ of morality, death, economics, or desire itself. For this reason, we might see Hardy as offering both a general account of the vulnerability of the child in rural society and an account of the effect of that vulnerability as it is transmitted through the family; the terror and displacement of childhood as both existential plight and psychic legacy. We might also see that plight as a historical residue, as in a passage from Mahaffy’s Social Life in Greece (1874) which Hardy summarized: ‘Not to be forgotten in our admiration for Greek culture – conflict between rich and poor: when the demos was victorious the children of the vanquished were trampled to death by oxen: when the rich got the upper hand they burnt in pitch all whom they got into their power’ (LN 555, Hardy’s emphasis).

How is this related to the complex shift in attitudes which, recent historians of childhood have suggested, characterized the nineteenth-century? The early part of the century saw the continuation of earlier regimes in which the child was harshly disciplined, imprisoned, transported (up to 1870), or made to work at an early age. In the West Country, Hugh Cunningham reports, the children of the poor were bound out as rural apprentices as early as 8 years old.[40] At the same time, in the mid-century (the period in which Hardy was growing up), there emerged a heightened sense of the child as abused by these practices – as a being radically separate from adults, who should be freed from work, protected, educated and nutured. This ‘story of outrage’ (as Cunningham calls it) was reflected in a variety of philanthropic institutions and legislation: the Ten Hours Act (1847), the Gangs Act (1867), the Agricultural Children’s Act (1873); in the work of Barnardo and Booth in London in the 1860s; in the establishment of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in 1884.[41] Scandals like the baby-farming and infanticide cases of the 1870s and Stead’s exposure of child prostitution in ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ (1885) focused attention on specific abuses.[42]

There is also, some historians of sexuality have suggested, a progressive eroticization of abuse, and one might say a fictionalization of the subject. The most extreme claim here is that of the C. J. Somerville, one of a number of revisionist historians attempting to modify earlier studies by Ariès, Stone and others which had stressed the harshness of childhood up to the twentieth century. Somerville argues that stories of abuse by Dickens and others ‘do not seem to have much to do with the actual suffering of contemporary children . . . Child characters were dying in record numbers in fiction even as actual child morality was declining.’[43] His conclusion that these figures represent ‘the author’s self-pity’ is unnecessarily crude – one might, for example, argue that a decline in mortality is a necessary precondition of certain investments in children; and the figures suggest that it was only in the twentieth-century that child mortality figures fell sharply. But Hardy himself shows himself conscious of the child-victim as device in his work – in particular Little Father Time, who appears in Jude the Obscure as a figure for the foreclosure of hope, for a folding of the child back into death of the kind depicted in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s radical ‘The Cry of the Children’ and Robert Browning’s ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’.[44] Little Father Time could, by an extravagant but not inconceivable leap, be a version of the child who hangs himself with cord and nail in ‘Rope’, one of the famous prose-poems which Baudelaire published under the heading The Spleen of Paris in Figaro in 1864. Baudelaire’s child is full of ‘precocious sadness’ (compare Hardy’s ‘Age masquerading as Juvenility’), and with ‘an immoderate taste for sugar and liqueurs’. He is adopted by a painter who has used him as a model; when he is threatened with return to his indifferent parents, he kills himself (the story was based on that of a child who hung himself in Manet’s studio).[45] Baudelaire describes the death in terms which are both tender and sadistic; both ‘the cheeky companion of my life’ whom he mourns and ‘the little monster had used a very thin cord which had bitten deeply into the neck and I now had to use a pair of small scissors to find the thread between the two rolls of swollen flesh’. The story climaxes in the child’s mother seeing the nail and cord, and asking for it after the painter is about to hurl it out the window; it is only later that he realizes that she plans to sell sections of it, since a rope from a hanging is considered a lucky charm. This commoditization has, however, already been prefigured in the painter’s own activities, which both sexualize the child and associate him with fantasies of death. In painting him, the narrator reports, ‘I made him carry the vagabond’s violin, the Crown of Thorns and the Nails of the Passion, and the Torch of Eros.’

A similar undoing of the Victorian figure of the dying child as de-eroticized angel (Dickens’s Little Nell, Stowe’s Eva) is central to the story of Hardy’s children, who flee from their violent parents (‘The Flirt’s Tragedy’, ‘The Bird-Catcher’s Boy’), often dying in the process. The beaten or whipped child is, as James Kincaid points out, a fixture of Hardy’s novels, even if a problematic one in terms of the kinds of identifications which the reader might make and the kinds of pleasures associated with it. Kincaid ultimately sees the child as a figure for ‘an erotics of loss’; like the Tamagawa pet, it is the toy that dies. It is ‘this emptiness called a child’; it ‘could be erased, was in fact in the process of being erased even as we packed the meaning in’.[46] More radically, U. C. Knopfelmacher points out the way in which Hardy’s poetry can suggest a child-like return to a lost maternal body; a return involving the reversal of a harsh ‘masculine’ poetics which might impose discipline.[47] Both these narratives, that of abuse and that of healing regression, confront the problem of pain, of what we have come to call ‘trauma’ – which is also, since Freud, the problem of consciousness and its obscured origins. What happens to childhood pain? Into the twentieth century it was relatively common practice, in France at least, to operate on newborn babies without anesthetic, because they were thought to have, like animals, undeveloped nervous systems and little consciousness.[48] Hardy was certainly aware of some of these issues: he was on friendly terms with Sir James Crichton-Browne, the leading Victorian child psychiatrist, who stressed the vulnerability of children and the necessity to avoid over-taxing their nervous systems (his emphasis on their susceptibility to mental disease points towards Little Father Time).[49]

Hardy’s work constantly returns to the issue of childhood pain and its persistence. His ‘Lines’ – really an epilogue – written for a performance on behalf Lady Jeune’s Holiday Fund for City Children in 1890 are perhaps just the kind of awkward occasional verse that one skips over in the Collected Poems:

Most tragical of shapes from Pole to Line,

O wondering child, unwitting Time’s design,

Why should Man add to Nature’s quandary,

And worsen ill by thus immuring thee?

– That races do despite unto their own,

That Might supernal do indeed condone

Wrongs individual for the general ease,

Instance the proof in victims such as these.

The poem then wonders whether disadvantaged children would rather not have been born. These lines suggest a response both to the eugenic discourse of ‘races’ and Utilitarian calculus of ‘general ease’ and ‘individual wrongs’. With Darwin the relations of resemblance between child and parent are re-coded, with issues of inheritance, variation and, in particular, the development of latent ‘faculties’ becoming part of a broader social calculus rather than simply an issue of patriarchal succession. This concern is expressed in Herbert Spencer’s essay on ‘The Rights of Children’ in Social Statics, in which he asserts that children have the same rights as adults, draws parallels with the emancipation of women, and attacks the ‘coercive system’ which employs force on children rather than developing self-control.[50] Spencer stresses the duty of the parent to create an environment in which the child’s faculties might develop, rather than imposing a disciplinary framework. Hardy similarly focuses on the issue of environment, but registers the place of the individual consciousness within these larger social calculations. The ‘wondering Child, unwitting Time’s design’ and the ‘deed back in Time’ are both formulae which register the plight of that maimed consciousness, and the paradoxical recovery of pain as part of what this poem (speaking of Lady Jeune’s efforts) calls ‘Some palliative for ill they cannot cure’.

This conclusion has all the pessimism of Freud’s admission of the impossibility of ever resolving the traumas of childhood – though notably we have seen Hardy imply a more socialized account of childhood pain than Freud’s patriarchical model. Hardy’s account suggests disruptions which may be external to the family as much as internal. Maria Torok has hinted at similar possibilities in her 1984 paper ‘Unpublished by Freud to Fliess: Restoring an Oscillation’. Recalling Freud’s abandonment of the thesis of actual trauma or abuse in childhood in favour of the notion of universal endopsychic fantasy, she discusses a 1897 letter to Fliess partly-suppressed, presumably in the interests of theoretical consistency, by the editors of The Origins of Psychoanalysis (1954), and only published entire in Jeffrey Masson’s The Assault on Truth (1984). The letter describes in detail the sexual abuse of a patient and her mother, and concludes with Freud’s proposal of ‘A new motto; “What has been done to you, you poor child?”’[51]

Was hat man, Dir, Du armes Kind getan? – the words are from the famous song of Goethe’s illegitimate, abused and ultimately effaced child Mignon in Wilhelm Meister, set to music and rewritten throughout the nineteenth century.[52] As Carolyn Steedman argues in her brilliant study of the Mignon legend, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, the story’s framentary meanings which never achieve a total shape, representing the plight of the child itself as historical rebus, as a necessary obscurity. Torok notes that Freud’s letter to Fliess contains its own comments on deletion. Freud writes:

Have you ever seen a foreign newspaper which has been censored by the Russians at the border? Words, whole clauses and sentences are blacked out so that what is left becomes unintelligible. A Russian censorship of this kind comes about in psychoses and produces the apparently meaningless deliria.

This, in Torok’s commentary, is the mark of an uncertainty within psychonalysis which is not simply local – was there abuse here? – but fundamental:

Circulating Freud’s letters with fragments happening to pass ‘Russian’ censorship is enough to throw the reader and psychoanalysis into a kind of historical neurosis in which deletions impede us from attempting to read the fact of an oscillation as a symptom-symbol. Once this road is open, it will be easier to read the deletion itself, rendering it intelligible.[53]

A similar question could be applied to the Hardy texts we have examined here: with their cancellations, burnings, and reticences, they are, as we have seen, systematically uncertain about the status of the child and of the trauma attached to the child; to childhood pain. The suppressed motto might be Hardy’s, as applicable to the figure of Randy as to Lady Jeune’s children, but suggesting a wounded self whose location is problematized by Hardy’s own deletions and erasures.

Perhaps it is also the trace of the ‘real’ of history itself which is erased from Freud’s text. One of Steedman’s comments on Mignon is useful here: ‘child-figures, and more generally the idea of childhood, came to be commonly used to express the depths of historicity within individuals, the history that was “linked to them, essentially”’.[54] The final phrase is a citation from the passage in which Foucault, in The Order of Things, describes ‘The Age of History’, the period in which, for Foucault, the self erupts from the continuum of the classical order, and history becomes, painfully, ‘the mode of being of all that is given us in experience’.[55] That sense of the intensity of human pain as out of step with a biological or even cosmic order which saw earlier, is one symptom of the pressure on the notion of origins, of originary trauma, within the new characterization of childhood which was growing up as Hardy did; as Steedman writes, ‘a particular form of time came into being in the child’s body’.[56] Giorgio Agamben has also argued that the infant is the place where ‘the space of history’ is opened; and where the discourse of the self-constituting subject erupts from the synchronicity of language. For Agamben, infants are liminal figures, representing the transition from death or non-being to life, and in this way they resemble, and may even come to be entangled with, ghosts rather than adults (since ghosts represent the transition from life to death, and from discourse to language).[57] The ‘wondering child, unwitting Time’s design’ is, then, a trope for the historicity of the self: ‘I had glanced down unborn time’ is Hardy’s figure for prophecy in ‘I Said and Sang Her Excellence’. This is one conclusion: that Hardy’s sense of the originary trauma of the self’s historicity is what underwrites his sense of a haunting pain as written into the construction of the self.

But perhaps a more suitable point of closure is the healing offered by ‘He Never Expected Much’, Hardy’s ‘reflection’ on his eighty-sixth birthday – surely one of the most astonishing poems in the English canon in its audacious claims for the continuity of the poetic self across eight decades, and in its redemptive minimalism. The poet addresses the World and says that it has ‘kept faith’ since childhood (note the conjuring of the year’s brink as the mark of the self’s entry into history: a topic taken up in the next chapter):

‘Twas then you said, and since have said,

Times since have said,

In that mysterious voice you shed

From clouds and hills around:

‘Many have loved me desperately,

Many with smooth serenity,

While some have shown contempt of me

Till they dropped underground.

‘I do not promise overmuch,

Child; overmuch;

Just neutral-tinted haps and such’,

You said to minds like mine.

Wise warning for your credit’s sake!

Which I for one failed not to take,

And hence could stem such strain and ache

As each year might assign.

This appears less as a final confirmation of ‘pessimism’ than as a fantasized utopian warning on the part of Time (or ‘World’, here), registering a healing contract which Hardy’s poetry teaches us could never have happened; a constantly-renewed contract in which, impossibly, consciousness is always with the child and carried forward as intention, forever balking future pain. A similar pastoral resolution is offered by another poem in Winter Words, ‘The Boy’s Dream’, a poem which picks up on the tradition of Hardy’s many bird-poems – in particular ‘The Blinded Bird’, in which he had marveled that the bird could sing, ‘Thy grievous pain forgot, / Eternal dark thy lot’ (the Miltonic echo reinforcing the sense of the persistence of pain). ‘The Boy’s Dream’ describes natural song as recompense for the lameness and deprivation of a ‘provincial town-boy’ who dreams of owning a green linnet. The poem begins with external circumstances, the courtyard he lives in, ‘Where noontide shed no warmth or light’, and the corresponding paleness of his face; it ends with his mood radiating outward as he dreams of birdsong: ‘His face was beautified by the theme, / And wore the radiance of the morn.’ An internalized nature, pastoral – the tropes of mourning return here as a final cure for the ineradicable memory of pain, closing the book on one of Hardy’s enduring subjects.