Haunted Hardy: Poetry, History, Memory

by Tim Armstrong

Hardy was a poet of ghosts. In his poetry he describes himself as posthumous; as rekindling the cinders of passion; as the guardian of the dead forgotten by history; and as haunted by ghosts, particularly the spectre of the lost child (as in the rumour that he fathered a child in the 1860s). Using Derrida, Abraham and Torok and other theorists, and referring to Victorian debates on materialism, this book investigates ghostliness, historicity and memory in Hardy's poetry.

206 pages, Hardcover

Published November 10, 2000

About the author

NOTE: There is more than one author with this name. For the Gaelic-language author Tim Currie Armstrong, see Tim Armstrong.

Reviews

[Ellis]

In hindsight, I should have read this before The Unconcept: The Freudian Uncanny in Late-Twentieth-Century Theory, because it introduces some of the concepts that return in The Unconcept and I think I might have understood most of it better then.

Armstrong covers a lot of bases when it comes to the poetry of Thomas Hardy, and sometimes draws parallels with the novels. The novels are not the focus here, but it underscores some of the elements that permeate Hardy's work, cross-genres to say.

The main argument revolves around the way history is presented in Hardy's poetry, and in that Armstrong uses both close-reading of particular poems and autobiographical elements of Hardy's life to build his case. Apparently, Hardy was fascinated by ghosts and the like, so different interpretations as to what these "ghosts" might be are given. They include the posthuman, actual ghosts, intertextual traces of other texts, what Derrida calls "the cinder" (with a reference to Cinderella and the absence of maternal figures in fairy tales, which was unexpected but interesting), and then the last part delves into a hypothesis that Hardy was trying to reanimate the female voice, and that of the female writer/poet, in his poetry.

I thought it was intriguing and while I still think some of Hardy's interests/fascinations/obsessions are downright creepy, the writing is what I'm interested in after all, and that was all explained extremely well.


I'll list the different chapters to give a better idea of what Armstrong discusses:

1. Supplementarity

2. The Ghost of Thought

3. The Child in Time

4. The Politics of the Dead

5. History, Catastrophe, Typology

6. Mourning and Intertextuality