I was talking with a friend on the phone the other day when he suddenly let out a gasp, followed by a long "Ewwww!!" I asked what had happened. He explained that in bending down to pick up what he thought was a piece of wood from the ground, he realized too late that it was actually a cockroach. His fingers had made contact with the bug before its many legs started wriggling and he dropped it, appalled.
I commiserated. Something similar had happened to me on a call, when I had lost my train of thought due to the scurrying of some many-legged arthropod that had suddenly appeared from a crevice in my wall. "Isn't it the worst?" I said. What was terrible about it, I said, was not only the momentary feeling of alarm and revulsion. It was also the knowledge that if one didn't act immediately, while the grotesque creature was still within sight, it might escape; and then one would have to endure the rest of one's days knowing that it was still crawling about somewhere on the same premises, and could emerge at any moment.
That was what bothered me most about these sudden unbidden encounters with insect life: the feeling that a new obligation had been imposed without one's consent. That sense of "now I have to deal with this too! On top of everything else?" (—it always feeling like just the wrong time; like a gross bug was the very last thing one needed at this precise moment, for everyone feels—as Martin Amis once remarked—that at a given moment, they are already at their "pain limit," and so any incremental addition—no matter when it comes—seems to arrive at the worst possible time). I explained this to my friend and then said: "doesn't it just feel so.... unjust?"
"Unjust?" He was confused. He didn't see how justice entered into it. "I just seems more like a misfortune." Here is where we differed. "But doesn't," I said, "every misfortune feel simultaneously like an injustice?"
By accusing ill fortune of committing a crime against oneself, one is of course engaged in an act of personification. I admit this much, and simply say that one's hearer is supposed not to take it too literally. If you curse Fate, God, The Gods, Providence, Destiny, etc., you are most likely speaking poetically, and everyone should be allowed a certain license to do so. However, it's hard to persistently use these metaphors without feeling that there is some truth to them, or leading one's listeners to infer that one believes in their truth. And so one arrives at an ironical position of seeming to betray belief in the Deity in the very act of abjuring its works.
My friend, in interpreting the bug incident as merely an unfortunate happenstance, rather than a cruel and mocking intercession of Providence, was being a more consistent atheist than I. He genuinely perceives the universe as something indifferent and external, having no reference one way or the other to human creation or needs. "Charges of injustice can't apply to the universe," he said. "The universe is not a moral agent."
I of course agree in principle. I just wanted to carve out some permission for myself to speak an artistic if not a scientific truth. In so doing I was in much the same position as Thomas Hardy in responding to his critics. In a preface to one of the later editions of his Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Hardy relates how one of his early readers (actually, according to the Penguin Classics editorial apparatus, the critic was no lesser a light than Andrew Lang) objected to a line in the concluding scene of the novel, in which Hardy accuses the "President of the Immortals" of making "sport with Tess," through unspooling the novel's long string of tragic yet fated events.
The agnostic Hardy confesses that such a line is "illogical," if read in the most literal sense (after all, if there's no God, how can one charge him with malice or neglect?—to my friend's point). However, he states that such a crime against reason—if such it be—"is not such an original sin of mine as [the critic] seems to imagine." After all, the line in question was a near-perfect quotation from a classical source, and, more generally, "to exclaim [...] against the gods, singular or plural" has been common throughout human life and literature in every age, whether faithful or unbelieving. One doesn't have to take it at face value.
Hardy has a point here, and one appreciates his riposte to the pig-headed literalism of his contemporaries; still, in reading his works, one notices that the critique of Providence is—for Hardy—something more than just a figure of speech. It is, to the contrary, one of his most persistent themes—verging on an obsession. It is, safe to say, one of Hardy's most salient philosophical ideas.
The theme appears time and again in Tess, for instance, but not only there. When Hardy rails against the fact that no guardian spirit, no beneficent and watchful Deity protects Tess from her ravisher, at the end of the book's first "phase," he is expressing the same idea that appears in his short poem, "The Blinded Bird"— that great burst of protest and concentrated feeling. The injustice that Hardy objects to most strenuously there is not only the cruelty of humankind—in deliberately blinding a bird—but also the injustice of Providence refusing to intercede to stop them. "And all this [...]/ With God's consent, on thee!" he cries.
In The Return of the Native, Hardy's humanism again takes the form of protesting against the injustice of the Deity. What was promised to us as a just and well-ordered creation—something fitted to our needs—has instead turned out, in Hardy's vision, to be a hellscape designed to torment us. Not only does humankind not deserve such ill treatment at nature's hands, Hardy maintains, (the Mayor of Casterbridge, indeed, ends with the beautiful and noble sentiment—encountered all too rarely in human life, thought, society, or culture—that in fact no one deserves worse than they get in life, and most deserve better), but humanity also accepts and endures this injustice with a patience that is practically saintlike.
Not only do we face the injustice, says Hardy, we also invent false reasons why we must deserve it, so as to shield the reputation of the Creator. (In order, as Hardy puts it, "not [to] degrade a First Cause" or to "conceive a dominant power of lower moral quality than [humanity's] own." (Return of the Native)). In short, we try to salvage the honor of the very spirit that persecutes us, in the very moments of its oppression.
This willingness to suffer divine cruelty without complaint, which Hardy attributes to humankind, is likewise what ennobles the Blinded Bird, in his telling. Like humankind in being subjected to the whims of divine providence, the creature nonetheless "suffereth long and is kind,/Is not provoked, though blind/[...] hopeth, endureth all things/[...]thinketh no evil, but sings[.]" And so at last, says Hardy, the bird is more truly "divine" that the evil, persecuting spirit that created it only in order to passively watch it suffer.
Of course, these many charges of divine cruelty can only be sustained if there is a Deity capable of being held to account. There is no broken promise where there was no promisor to begin with. Likewise, there can be no injustice when what occurred was a mere accident—an inevitable yet invisible working out of blind material causes—which none could have foreseen or prevented.
And indeed, Hardy's official theology (or anti-theology) seems to preclude the idea of holding God morally accountable for the workings of fate. When Tess reaches a state of intellectual enlightenment in the novel in which she appears, one of the arguments she uses to defeat the bogus and short-lived Evangelical conversion of her erstwhile tormentor is to point out that intercessory prayer makes no logical sense. If there is a divine being in charge of the whole cosmic mechanism, after all, then that cosmos is presumably already as well ordered as it can be; thus, such a being could not upset the whole structure by changing things according to the whimsical demands of its creatures.
Likewise, however much Hardy introduces metaphorical personages of Fate, Destiny, coincidence—even supernatural meddling—into his narratives, he always makes sure to note that—in reality—the effects he describes all had a natural cause, without any conscious intent or malice behind them.
In The Mayor of Casterbridge, Henchard is inclined at one time to "think [...] that the concatenation of events [...] was the scheme of some sinister intelligence bent on punishing him." Later on, he ponders whether the tragic events that befall him might not be the work of a neighbor putting a hex on him through witchcraft (a possibility teased in the Return of the Native as well), and when he is saved from drowning himself by the sudden apparition of his own effigy in the water, he attributes this to a more benevolent form of Providence. Yet, at every turn, Hardy as omniscient narrator clarifies that the events in fact had "developed naturally" or had a "natural solution[.]"
Perhaps this is sufficient, then. As Hardy himself tells us, he is speaking metaphorically, in his denunciations of fate, and both his use of coincidence and his apostrophic invocations of Gods, Fate, Destiny, etc. are all mere literary devices. We shouldn't take them literally.
And yet, if the universe is truly neutral and has no moral agency, don't these metaphors become meaningless? Why, then, should we continue to invoke them? We could say that they still ring true emotionally, even if we know that they don't make scientific sense. But what emotional or artistic truth can they convey if they are founded on a false picture of reality? How can we actually continue to nurse a grudge against Providence if there is no such thing?
Some would say—like my friend who accidentally picked up the bug—that we should simply abandon the metaphors as outdated and outgrown. Much of Alain Robbe-Grillet's prospectus for a "new novel" was based precisely on this insight.
Robbe-Grillet objected to the Hardean tragic view of the universe—Hardy's "ache of modernism," which, in the twentieth century, would reemerge as existential angst and alienation—on precisely the same grounds as my friend. It belies its own purported atheism. It claims to be an atheistic and materialistic view—humankind is now lost and adrift in a hostile, inimical universe—but simultaneously betrays the fact that it still believes material objects—inanimate nature—were supposed to be providentially arranged, supposed to have reference to human needs. How could this be the case if there was never a God?
It is a contradiction, and Robbe-Grillet sought to resolve it. His project for a new novel was to finally give inanimate objects their due. If we truly live in a post-theological age, and we are all atheists now, and the universe must be regarded as a material essence that lacks any moral agency, then we should stop limiting our discussion of material objects only to the extent they have reference to human needs and emotions. Instead, objects should appear in our narratives in their own right (hence the strange fixation on "things" and minute descriptions that make the nouveau-romaniste's work so unreadable).
Hardy—though not mentioned, to my recollection, by name in Robbe-Grillet's essay—would be among the worst offenders of what he has in mind. For Hardy, material objects and inanimate nature always appear in his narratives in order to prove some other moral or emotional point (such as underlining the hostility of nature to human aims). Indeed, The Return of the Native often reads like one long exercise in the pathetic fallacy.
Hardy's agnosticism is therefore not of the Robbe-Grillet-approved variety. It is not one that accepts godlessness and therefore celebrates the independent claims of inanimate nature, but rather one of resentful abandonment. There may have been a God, but he left us in a terrible rut. Nature was supposed to have a plan to it; it just turned out to be an ill-conceived one that has left us in miserable state. (In The Return of the Native, Hardy speaks of "the defects of natural laws, and [...] the quandary that man is in by their operation." So much, as he says in Tess, for the Wordsworthian concept of "Nature's holy plan")
Hardy's landscapes serve to illustrate this sense of abandonment and broken promises, either because they accord with and underline humankind's misery (as on Egdon Heath) or because they cruelly mock it by falling out of harmony with it.
Robbe-Grillet's arguments against this Hardean pathetic fallacy are logically unimpeachable. Yet it seems significant nonetheless that Robbe-Grillet's novelistic experiments planned along these lines are scarcely readable, whereas Hardy's tragedies remain stirring and human to this day. There seems to be some reality behind Hardy's pessimistic view of Fate. When he rails against the injustice of the gods, he is saying something important. I cannot dismiss its emotional validity; and yet, for it to be emotionally true, as we have seen, it must have some element of scientific truth as well. So what is that element?
I submit that Hardy's anger—which he directs against the gods—rings true not because the gods are really at fault or deserving of our wrath. Inanimate nature has not in fact wronged us, because it never owed us anything. It was here first. We exist the way we do because we adapted to what nature and material causes had already wrought. They never promised us it would be easier than it is; and besides, they can't, since they don't have brains or mouths or consciousnesses, or any other of the organic instruments that are needed to form promises. To this extent, Robbe-Grillet is right.
But Hardy, I submit, is protesting against the metaphorical gods only indirectly. When he decries their works, his indignation is really intended for the theologians and apologists who try to find excuses and justifications for the way things are: the Panglossians who insist that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and that any apparent maltreatment of human beings by fate must have a valid moral cause. Hardy rightly regards this as a betrayal of the species and a failure of human sympathy. If suffer we must, let us at least not add indignity to suffering. Let us not layer a sense of guilt onto what we must already endure.
If we are indeed placed down in inimical nature, after all, then we may have no right to complain against blind natural causes. But we can rightly vent our frustration with those who refuse to have any fellow-feeling with us in our plight, and who sit around trying to come up with reasons why we must deserve what has happened to us, in order to vindicate the intentions of some non-existent deity. Instead, we should take the fact of our lonesomeness in the universe as all the more reason to band together and protect our fellow human beings. It is the violation of this necessary bond of human solidarity that is implicit in orthodox Christian theology, and which Hardy was truly seeking to resist. And it is his bravery, humanity, and compassion in doing so that renders his works so emotionally compelling today.
And it is also this sense, at last, in which I intend my own words to my friend. No doubt he is right that one cannot blame the bugs (they, like us, are just trying to survive). Neither can one blame the fate that put them in one's path, since fate is not conscious or willful in that way; it lacks moral agency. But one can demand human solidarity in the face of such ills. For, in a godless universe, we are all that we have.
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