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Hardy's Poetic Vision in The Dynasts
The Diorama of a Dream
By Susan Dean PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1977 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06324-9
CHAPTER 1
THE ANATOMIZING LIGHT
1. "Key-Scene to the Whole": The View Presented in the Six Transparencies
THE light of the diorama penetrates and makes transparent all of the seemingly solid organisms in the exhibit until it falls upon the organism behind all — the impenetrable web that is the "key-scene to the whole" (Fore Scene, 6). This key scene depicts an enormous brain underlying and animating the whole material universe. Though some of its projections beat to its pulses with more stress than others, all things move and have their being by its rhythms. All kinds of space — mental, terrestrial, extra-terrestrial — are at the same place, because upon that one brain. All the other categories by which humans organize phenomena — time and cause and composition and motive — are only thoughts of that brain, manifestations of its life-beat or "Will."
This is to state bluntly a defining metaphor that is presented with consistent tact in The Dynasts. Hardy keeps before us the uncaptureability of the life-force he pretends to capture in light and shadow at the back-scene of his diorama.
The PRIME, that willed ere wareness was,
Whose Brain perchance is Space, whose Thoughts
its laws,
Which we as threads and streams discern,
We may but muse on, never learn.
(General Chorus, Fore Scene, 7)
It is (italics mine) "like the lobule of a Brain," he says when he first introduces the image; and, in the passage above, "perchance." When the brain next appears directly, "there is again beheld as it were the interior of a brain which seems to manifest the volitions of a Universal Will" (Stage directions, I,I,vi,36). Subsequent displays continue in this openly tentative, approximating fashion: the network of "currents and ejections" behind masses of humanity is "brain-like" (Stage directions, I,VI,iii,118); penetrating vision brings into view the "films or brain-tissues" of the Immanent Will (Stage directions, III,I,1,330); the electric state of mind that animates English forces in Spain and fails to animate French ones is revealed in a vision "resembling as a whole the interior of a beating brain lit by phosphorescence" (Stage directions, III,II,11,368). Thus there is a tentative and approximate, wondering kind of film over Hardy's image for the life-force.
The metaphysical image is presented through the six transparencies that are revealed at strategic intervals in the action. Each contributes its layer of suggestion to the whole image and its shading to the scene in the drama against which it is projected. This discussion will follow the sequence of those transparencies in pointing out the elements Hardy incorporated into his image of the unconscious brain.
The first transparency appears in the Fore Scene (pages 6 and 7), when the drama taking place on Europe is about to be opened to the phantom intelligences "scene by scene." Beneath the far view of "the spectacle of Europe's moves," beneath the closer view of "writhing" peoples, is revealed an x-ray "anatomy of life and movement" that takes the shape of a single organism. The movement is described first by the Spirit of the Pities in a layman's vocabulary: "Strange waves ... like winds grown visible"; winding, retracting, looking as fragile as gossamers but in fact irresistible, and bearing men's forms on their coils. The Spirit of the Years translates this report into a more scientific, properly anatomical vocabulary: "... fibrils, veins,/Will-tissues, nerves, and pulses of the Cause...." Through these bodily organs the Will labors: "These are the Prime Volitions...."
In the second transparency (I,I,vi,36) the same "preternatural" vision that we beheld before the terrestrial drama as an abstraction is now revealed through the context of a particular earthly situation, to show its implications for individual lives. Napoleon's coronation at Milan is an important scene, for it is the first time we actually see him in the drama and it is at the decisive moment when he assumes for himself the symbol of empire and destiny, forswearing the libertarian ideals in whose name he came to power. Ironies are shown behind ironies: the cathedral prelates are constrained to crown Napoleon, and constrained, moreover, to pretend to do so as though by free choice; Napolean crowns himself even as he claims to bend to God's will; and the Pities blame Napoleon's "active soul, fair freedom's child" (I,I,vi,33) for advancing along this hypocritical course; when in reality, according to the transparency-slide brought in by the Years, all of the actors in the scene are passive, and all are unconsciously like the prelates, constrained to act as though by free choice.
The third transparency emphasizes the cruel, crude aspects of the brain's control. This view is shown by the Years in order to correct the Pities' impulse to pray to the Will for some alleviation of the suffering that will come in the battle of Austerlitz.
SPIRIT OF THE YEARS
Again ye deprecate the World-Soul's way
That I so long have told? Then note anew
(Since ye forget) the ordered potencies,
Nerves, sinews, trajects, eddies, ducts of It
The Eternal Urger, pressing change on change.
At once, as earlier, a preternatural clearness possesses the atmosphere of the battle-field, in which the scene becomes anatomized and the living masses of humanity transparent. The controlling Immanent Will appears therein, as a brain-like network of currents and ejections, twitching, interpenetrating, entangling, and thrusting hither and thither the human forms. (I,II, iii,118)
The language of the stage-directions and of the Spirit of the Years enforces the fact that these ordered potencies cannot be addressed as a person and entreated for mercy. The harsh verbs ("twitching," "entangling," "thrusting") indicate not only power but overriding power; the list of the parts of "It," presented without a break to show the relentlessness and totality of the pressures ("potencies/Nerves, sinews, trajects, eddies, ducts"), demonstrates that the humans have no place to hide, as well as no one to pray to.
This is the most harshly and negatively put of the transparencies, but the Spirit Intelligences do not seem here as sensitive to its harshness as we might expect. The Pities do in fact pray again later in the drama to the Will. And at this very point the Ironic Spirits sing a song in which they take the Years' last words, "pressing change on change," and, giving the image of pressing a surprisingly positive twist, compare the Will to "some sublime fermenting vat":
SEMICHORUS I OF IRONIC SPIRITS
Heaving throughout its vast content
With strenuously transmutive bent
Though of its aim unsentient....
(I,VI,iii,119)
They go on to sing that this transmutive process has worked prodigally from as far back as consciousness can remember:
SEMICHORUS II OF IRONIC SPIRITS
He of the Years beheld, and we,
Creation's prentice artistry
Express in forms that now unbe
SEMICHORUS I OF IRONIC SPIRITS
Tentative dreams from day to day;
Mangle its types, re-knead the clay
In some more palpitating way; ...
(I,VI,iii,119)
The image of artistry introduced here is striking: the sublime fermenting-vat, "strenuously transmutive," shaping its tentative dreams, then crushing them, then rekneading them in new trembling outlines. Even with its wastefulness this kind of creative determinism is much easier to accept than that mechanical determinism which merely twitches human forms hither and thither. The change lies in the addition of "fermenting vat" to "pressing change on change" and of the word "transmutive" to the transparency picture of "strenuously."
The fourth transparency gathers up the suggestions from the Spirits that the brain is an unconscious artist. Napoleon is about to cross the Niemen into Russia, and the Pities are moved to wonder how he could make so self-destructive a decision.
SPIRIT OF THE YEARS
I'll show you why.
The unnatural light before seen usurps that of the sun, bringing into view, like breezes made visible, the films or brain-tissues of the Immanent Will, that pervade all things, ramifying through the whole army, NAPOLEON included, and moving them to Its inexplicable artistries. (III,I,i,330)
The shift from a biological and mechanical emphasis is accompanied by a shift in language: the body organs that clotted together into a lobule have here become brain-tissues, films like gauzes moving on a mysterious loom; and where the unconscious brain's omnipotence had resided in its totalitarian power, now that omnipotence lies in the inexplicability of its artistry. The implications of the new quality in the unconscious brain are liberating for man. The harshly, assertively scientific mode reduced brain and man to an object. Seeing the universal brain poetically as another artist elevates brain and man to being subject as well as object. To partake in artistry may not be quite the same as to be entirely unconditioned; yet there is something about art, some "inexplicable" cooperation between inner and outer fulfilment, the nature of the material and the nature of the design, that satisfies freedom. With this transparency Hardy has brought into play in the drama two complementary vocabularies for describing the brain and two modes of looking at it. We will be able to think of both these vocabularies when the poem uses words to do with weaving — web, loom, fabric, threads, strands, spinning, knitting, mending, patterning — for by now Hardy has made us perceive a similarity between the processes of biology and art, and between the wet tissues in flesh and the tissues in the dry artifact we call cloth.
Transparency five, shown behind the Dumb Show of the battle of Puebla Heights in Spain, reveals how the animating Will makes some of its projections potent and others ineffective, impotent.
There immediately is shown visually the electric state of mind that animates WELLINGTON ... and other responsible ones on the British side; and on the French KING JOSEPH stationary on the hill overlooking his own centre, and surrounded by a numerous staff.... This vision, resembling as a whole the interior of a beating brain lit by phosphorescence, in an instant fades again back to the normal. (III,II,ii,368)
The logic that the first five transparencies have contributed to the drama up to this point is that men are to be understood as totally subsumed in the Will's "mechanized enchantment" (Spirit of the Years at Borodino, III,I,V,344). But at Albuera a new note is introduced by the Spirits — a sense in which men can be seen as partly dissociated from the "causal coils in passionate display" (II,VI,iv,299) that has been the spectacle of this drama. It is the sense that perhaps they, too, like the Will behind them, move in a dream.
SPIRIT OF THE PITIES
... On earth below
Are men — unnatured and mechanic-drawn —
Mixt nationalities in row on row,
Wheeling them to and fro
In moves dissociate from their souls' demand,
For dynasts' ends that few even understand!
SPIRIT OF THE YEARS
Speak more materially, and less in dream. (II,VI,iv,299)
The sixth transparency puts that dream-sense before us. Once again the Spirit of the Pities is being corrected by the Years for identifying too closely with the strained feelings of one of the human actors — here, Wellington in his crisis at Waterloo.
SPIRIT OF THE YEARS
Know'st not at this stale time
That shaken and unshaken are alike
But demonstrations from the Back of Things?
Must I again reveal It as It hauls
The halyards of the world?
A transparency as in earlier scenes again pervades the spectacle, and the ubiquitous urging of the Immanent Will becomes visualized. The web connecting all the apparently separate shapes includes WELLINGTON in its tissue with the rest, and shows him, like them, as acting while discovering his intention to act. By the lurid light the faces of every row, square, group, and column of men, French and English, wear the expression of those of people in a dream.
SPIRIT OF THE PITIES
Yes, sire; I see.
Disquiet me, I pray, no more!
The strange light passes, and the embattled hosts on
the field seem to move independently as usual.
(III,VII,vii,505)
As matter, the shapes in the tissue are totally taken up in the whole; as energized consciousness, there is some part in each shape that, while it is being moved, is "discovering his intention" to be moved — some unmoved part that carries on that observing and discovering, some part that is apart from the dream itself, so that it can be said to be in a dream.
These, then, bluntly stated, are the characteristics of the recurring image of the unconscious brain-web that dominates the drama. It is the object of its own predictable scientific laws of matter and force and thus can be described in scientific vocabulary; it subjects matter to certain spontaneous, unpredictable processes of creation and thus can be spoken of in poetic language; and it dreams, a mental phenomenon that, both science and art agree, is essential to the body's creation and renewal.
This much is true of the brain-image itself. But there are other respects in which that key image to the whole opens up the drama for the reader. The spirits, as projectors and viewers of the diorama, present the picture of a great unconscious brain. But this is not the whole picture: the spirits themselves form part of the total image that we see. They are faculties of consciousness that have evolved from the great unconscious center, drawing life-energy from its darkness and beating to its rhythms. They are always "ITS slaves" (I,VI,viii,137) at base, and "at most" its "accessory" and "bounden witness of Its laws" (I,I,ii,15). Grounded in the brain, yet at their tips they are able to circle, bend and sway over the dark matter beneath them, and to commune together over the meaning or meaninglessness of it all.
The composite image of both together, unconscious and conscious, resembles man's brain. Indeed, I read the two, the universal and the human brain, as being interchangeable. The Spirits sing of having been projected from two sources:
CHORUS (aerial music)
Yea, from the Void we fetch, like these,
And tarry till That please
To null us by Whose stress we emanate. —
Our incorporeal sense,
Our overseeings, our supernal state,
Our readings Why and Whence,
Are but the flower of Man's intelligence;
And that but an unreckoned incident
Of the all-urging Will, raptly magnipotent.
(I,VI,viii,137)
But the human mind from which they have flowered is but a film on the Universal Unconsciousness; and so I believe that this particular ambiguity works, as do the "Gauzes or screens to blur outlines" that Hardy recommends in his Preface (xi), to blur the macrocosm and the microcosm into one.
The poem as a whole, with its phantom-audience and diorama-drama, is designed to be experienced in the mind of the human being who reads it. The Overworld is where the intelligences, "spirits," sit and express the human reader's views of life outside of and inside of himself, a conscious and unconscious body.
When the two worlds are given this "free" interpretation and viewed as two layers of the human mind, The Dynasts is opened up and revealed to be a new poem, holding in itself possibilities for life, fluidity, and suggestiveness unexpected by the modern reader. And, conversely, when those worlds are interpreted literally and narrowly, as they have been by most critics, as conventional renditions of the levels of heaven and earth in the old epics, then one is perplexed by the fact that Hardy wrote a poem in the epic-tradition of Homer and Milton without attaining the suspense and the suspension of disbelief of those epics. That perplexity has characterized the majority view of The Dynasts. But there are a few critics who have interpreted Hardy's two worlds in ways that approximate or corroborate the reading offered in this study, and I will cite them here in order to gather into one place what is to date a minority opinion.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hardy's Poetic Vision in The Dynasts by Susan Dean. Copyright © 1977 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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