Something I Noticed

When I was adding RAW to my "Days Of The Dead" kitchen calendar, which notes the death dates of the mighty, I saw that Thomas Hardy also died on January 11th, seventy-nine years earlier. That hardly seems like a coincidence.

Thomas Hardy was a prophet of Chaos in his own time. For some reason he is not recognized as such, even today, when his books have been analyzed to death by an army of English professors. I imagine part of the problem is the fact that his best-known novel, Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, is the least chaotic of his stories. In orderly progression, according to the anti-woman mores of the time, poor Tess is fcrewed no matter what she does -- sometimes literally. The message of the story is that "some people just can't win." But you know how that goes. When Roman Polanski makes a movie out of just one of your novels, it becomes the only important thing you wrote.

I took a whole course in Thomas Hardy back when I was an English major, and the professor explained that Hardy had been fascinated all his life with Greek tragedy, and he was writing Greek tragedies of his own. I couldn't make any sense of this idea until I reframed it in Discordian terms. Since this is about the ancient Greeks, maybe I should say Erisian terms. Anyway, I wrote a boss 10-page paper for the prof explaining that Hardy's take on Greek tragedy required that the protagonist not have any particular Fatal Flaw. Any normal, understandable decision you make in a Hardy novel may be the one that brings the Cosmic Piano crashing down on your head. Why? because the Greek god in charge of your fate isn't Apollo, patron of reason and balance. In these stories, Eris is in charge, so buckle your seatbelt.

I got an A on that paper. He told us he never gave out A's. Heh.

One of my innumerable college roommates told me that bad things happened to Hardy's characters because they were all stupid. I started to disagree, and in that really condescending way she had, she cut me off and said again, "They're stupid." Janet, you were so very, very wrong.