Goethe, Schopenhauer had denounced allegory because it violated the
Kantian idea that art must not be a translation of pre-existing concepts
into artistic shape, for the true artistic symbol ‘expresses itself immediately
and completely, and does not require the medium of another thing
through which it is outlined or suggested’ (I: 237 ). Allegories separate
their appearance from their true meaning, unlike what Benjamin calls the
‘organic, plant-like... disinterested self-sufficiency’ ( 165 ) of the symbol.
But Benjamin’s melancholic will have no self-sufficiency, for ‘any person,
any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else’ ( 175 ),
which means that ‘awkward heavy-handedness, which has been attribu-
ted either to lack of talent on the part of the artist or lack of insight on
the part of the patron, is essential to allegory’ ( 187 ). In a world inspired
by fate, all styles must be extraneous, for there is no intrinsic content. ‘Its
language was heavy with material display. Never has poetry been less
winged’, writes Benjamin of a typical play, because in allegory content has
to be revealed in its emptiness: ‘Written language and sound confront
each other in tense polarity. The relationship between them gives rise to a
dialectic, in the light of which “bombast” is justified as a consistently
purposeful and constructive linguistic gesture.’( 200 – 1 ).
Unlike symbolism, unlike the modernist aesthetics that grew out of it,
Hardy’s poetics refuse the union of thing and word in the symbol for
the externality of Benjamin’s ‘allegory’, and its fascination with the idea
of the ruin, the intervention of time and death between the thing and
its meaning; after all, no one was more interested than Hardy in the agony
of being always too late. Most ironically, though, one of Benjamin’s aims
in thinking of art as a ruin was to wrest the idea of the fragment away
from Schlegel’s hedgehog-like self-completion for a properly modern
form of brokenness and non-closure.^52 But if Eliot’s notion of tradition
maps directly onto Schlegel’s fragment-system, as I have argued, then
Hardy’s melancholy commitment to poetic externality begins to look less
like rural clumsiness, and rather more like the principled opposition to
Romantic aesthetic unity that post-modern criticism has tended to reserve
for the summits of high modernism.
hardy’s indifferenceHardy’s form and philosophy come together in the aesthetics of melan-
choly. His consistent stylistic detachment from the poem’s material
testifies to that material’s pure manipulability, and hence its inner empti-
ness, yet this very emptiness is fascinating, because it is witness to the
Hardy’s indifference 169