Hardy, Galileo and the Art of Transgression

Thomas Hardy’s conflictual relationship with editors and publishers is a well-known fact. So is his resentment at relentless requests to emend his texts in order to properly cater to the taste of Grundyists and to avoid ‘fright[ening] the ladies out of their wits’. His life-long appeal for ‘a sincere school of fiction’ to replace what he called ‘a literature of quackery’ thus puts him at the vanguard of writers well bent on resisting censorship and using their art to expose, question, denounce. His first novel was never published, for reasons of a frankness that was judged all too offensive. His penultimate long fiction Jude the Obscure was withdrawn from W. H. Smith circulating library due to the action of an outraged Bishop; this prompted Hardy to put an end to his career as a novelist. In between, when he was striving to make a name for himself, he had to compromise with conventions and their representatives, through text emendations for example. At the same time though, his art developed writing devices that have his texts harbour unconventional meanings. Still, being the largest read literary genre at the period, his novels were submitted to severe scrutinizing by publishers and critics. His short stories and his poetry were no less daring but, as less widespread genres among the general public, they attracted less attention and his poetry suffered no censorship. It seems that for Hardy, eager to be more ‘sincere’ than what decorum and ‘the censorship of prudery’ permitted, short stories and poems were literary forms that allowed more elbow room than novels: ‘If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone’