the wicker man (d. robin hardy, w. anthony shaffer, david pinner)

I had never previously seen The Wicker Man. Even if I feel as though I have seen it a thousand times. At some point in the past decade it began to insert itself into the zeitgeist, the id, the greater consciousness. The film’s title would appear in every meeting, every discussion, every set of notes. The Wicker Man became the ur Wicker Man, the ideal film that lurks at the edge of British filmmaking, a mix of folk, horror and Carry On. Not that the last reference is frequently cited, but Britt Ekland and the horny islanders inhabit a very Carry On dimension, one which is skilfully wedded to notions of fertility and the Gulf Stream. There is artistry at work in The Wicker Man, in amongst the camp. The writers knew what they were putting on the plate. The imagery of the film is part of the reason for the renaissance of the British folk movement and the notion of indigenous rites that have lain dormant through the great upheavals of the industrial revolution and globalisation. It’s not hard to imagine the PhD one would want to write about this film, an idea pays tribute to its calculated pretentiousness and glorious finale. 

the return of the native (hardy)

The Return of the Native offers another of Hardy’s winsome troubled male characters, the other side of the macho go-getting Victorian. Clym Yeobright returns from Paris, where he has been making a good living, and finds himself bewitched by both the land and its female avatar, the restless Eustacia Vye. Physically attracted to one another, they are nevertheless a disastrous match, as she has Smiths-ian dreams of being taken out tonight, whereas he is consumed by the irrefutable lure of the moor, (take me to the Moors). For Clym it feels as though it is the very texture of the landscape which seduces him, just as this same landscape feels oppressive and increasingly repugnant to Eustacia, who dreams of Paris, darling.

The soil to which Clym hoves is one that the local culture is steeped in, and has been for thousands of years. His is a return to the native, as well as being the return of a native. The tension between the two might almost be viewed as a tension between the indigenous and the globalised worlds, one that can only lead to schism and tragedy. It is also a battle between a conservative philosophy and a radical one. In the end, after his wife’s death, Yeobright becomes a lay preacher. But the final image of him preaching on a barrow would almost seem to have more to do with a druidical tradition than a Christian one. Yeobright is a man with no real philosophy or political instinct, and hence he retreats towards a fetishism of the known, as a way of escaping responsibility for having to actually do anything of any use. This might be a reaction to the fleshpots of Paris, but it’s hard not to sympathise with Eustacia’s frustration. 

“The pole lay with one end supported on a trestle, and women were engaged in wreathing it from the top downwards with wildflowers. 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.”

tess of the d’urbervilles (hardy)

The novel’s final chapter, which reveals Tess’ tragic end, occurs in Winchester. There’s a beautiful description of the city: “In the valley beneath lay the city they had just left, its more prominent buildings showing as an isometric drawing - among them the cathedral tower, with its Norman windows and immense length of aisle and nave, the spires of St Thomas’, the pinnacle tower to the College and, more to the right, the tower and gables of the ancient hospice, where to this day the pilgrim may receive his dole of bread and ale. Behind the city swept the rotund upland of St Catherine’s Hill, further off, landscape beyond landscape, till the horizon was lost in the radiance of the sun hanging above it.”

This is part of a eulogistic final chapter which terminates the story abruptly, with little interest in the technical proceedings which lead to Tess’ execution. One imagines these proceedings would have fascinated Dickens and been a key part of his telling of the story, but the difference between the vision of the two authors, contemporaries, albeit from different generations, is immense. In terms of novelistic structure, Hardy flows in the line of Dickens, but in terms of world view, they diverge like separate rivers from the same confluence, one remaining in the nineteenth century, the other heading towards the raging sea of the twentieth century.

Three observations:

Curitiba

The issue of empire underpins so much of the nineteenth century novel, from Jane Eyre to Middlemarch to Vanity Fair. Enterprising men go abroad to make their fortunes and bring back unconscious issues which will plague the twentieth and twenty first centuries. One of the three key characters in Tess is Angel Clare, who also ventures abroad to seek his fortune. But he doesn’t go to the empire. He heads to Southern Brazil, via Curitiba, where nothing goes right for him. Hardy broaches the flip side of the colonial dream. Angel’s flight is a mistake and is touched by the death of a companion and barren soil. Reading the novel I almost imagined him as the counterpoint to those immigrants who have gone the other way, heading to Europe in a bid for glory, only to find the soil rocky and the streets paved with alienation. Hardy’s localised oeuvre stands in contrast to a great globalised movement which fuelled the rise of the Victorian novel. The supposed benefits were mined from colonialism, but Angel’s fate, (and by implication, that of Tess), explores the dark side of this process.

Whitman

Hardy cites Whitman in the novel. It’s one of those culture shock moments, almost as strange as if he had referenced the Velvet Underground or Caetano Veloso. There’s something so solipsistic about the Hardy world, so introverted, and yet on the other side of the mirror, lurks Whitman, a pantheism which is father to the thought of the 21st century. The roots of change are embedded in Hardy’s world in a manner that the characters themselves are scarcely aware of.

Bonny and Clyde

The novel offers Tess and Angel a (slightly) redemptive finale, as they find an epiphany in a deserted house before stumbling into the heart of the pre-industrial, pre-modern Britain, which is Stonehenge. In the brief time the novel permits them together, it is clear that they have stepped out of their societal constraints, crossed over to the other side. They are outlaws on the run, but they are also prototypical romantic heroes, closer to Baudelaire and Verlaine than Pip or Oliver Twist. It is a touching and beautiful sequence, after all the sadness the book has put them through, but it is also a declaration of war against a society whose moral scale has lost its centre, a warning shot across the bows of a seemingly stable world, trapped in hypocrisies, waiting to be ruptured. 

jude the obscure (thomas hardy)

three possible readings:

1, Perhaps the preferred reading. Hardy skewers a system which is weighted against the less fortunate, which promotes mediocrity in place of honesty and talent, which is a damning mirror of a society which hasn’t evolved in over a century. Jude’s calvary, from aspirant man of letters to stonemason martyr remains a pertinent lesson for Britain, where privilege continues to trump endeavour. Most glaringly in the faux glory of Oxbridge, that sham system which has perpetuated class divisions over the course of centuries. 

2, This is a novel which destroys the self-esteem of its supposedly heroic protagonists, Jude and Sue. The writer curses them with a fallibility neither deserve in order to make his polemical point, in the process reducing their struggle to a mean, petty romance, doomed to disaster. The writer’s personal marital hang-ups get in the way of his own characters, whose endless procrastination diminishes them. 

3, This is not a novel about the class system, or even about education. It’s a novel about the pernicious influence of societal norms, driven by reactionary forces, in this case represented by the institution of marriage and the church. It’s Hardy’s counterblast to the conservatism of Shakespeare, to the false happy-ever-after occidental romantic myths, which continue to be perpetuated by the gender stereotypes inherited by females and males alike. As such Jude the Obscure is genuinely radical text, not so much because of its critique of Oxbridge and the education systems, but because of an altogether more radical critique of marriage and monogamy. A critique which was a precursor of the sexual revolution of the sixties/ seventies and the identity revolution of the 2010’s.

Of course there’s no reason why these readings are mutually exclusive. Suffice to say that Hardy’s last novel is a slippery, complex beast, which frustrates straightforward interpretation. With moments when it feels as though even the writer isn’t exactly sure where his novel is headed, what he’s going to do with the troubling characters he has created. Mulling it over it’s curious to think how close Hardy’s world was to Laurie Lee’s. Which suggests that for a brief time in the twentieth century, social mobility became more feasible in the United Kingdom, although one fears that at some stage the tide has turned and we are receding back towards the obscurity of the Britain whose pathways Jude forlornly patrolled.