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Title: The Flesh and the Spirit in Seven Hardy Novels by Wayne Burns ISBN: 0-9718849-0-0 Publisher: Blue Daylight Books Pub. Date: March, 2002 Format: Paperback List Price(USD): $10.00

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (6 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Burns, Wayne. The Flesh and the Spirit in Seven Hardy Novels
Comment: Published as vol. 27 (2002) of the journal Recovering Literature, ( also available for $10 from: Gerald Butler, P.O. Box 805, Alpine, CA 91903)

In the first chapter of this fine book Burns talks generally about the novel and introduces, to those who don't know it, his (or perhaps more correctly Ortega y Gasset's) Panzaic principle, by which either the ideal or ideals of the author or his characters or both are undercut in great literary works by the realities in the given work which hedge in the ideals or by the voice and lives of characters in the work who are not idealistic. His second chapter moves from the reading of (great) novels in general to the reading of Hardy's novels. His third chapter is entitled "Dulcinea as the Immaculate Sister," and it deal with the Victorian ambiance out of which Thomas Hardy, the former architect, emerged in 1867 to begin writing his novels. And although psychoanalytical studies have been done of Dickens's novels, it is only really with the late Victorian Hardy and another late Victorian, the algolagniac Swinburne, that a real breakthrough came. In these three prefatory chapters Burns prepares his readers carefully for the subsequent chapters on seven Hardy novels and his concluding chapter.
Burns dismisses A Pair of Blue Eyes after a few pages on it, saying there is nothing Panzaic in it and seeing the main interest in it in its foreshadowing of Tess of the d'Urbervilles. In contrast, he writes at considerable length on Far From the Madding Crowd, and in that chapter there is an exceptionally fine analysis of that interesting woman, Bathsheba Everdene, who is, however, as much a flirt as she is a sexual woman. Burns says in his chapter on The Return of the Native first that Eustacia is a Victorian Emma Bovary and later that she is an Emma Bovary insofar as Hardy felt able to make her one, and his studies of her and of Clym are exceptionally fine. In the chapter on The Woodlanders Burns's attention is mainly on Felice Charmond and the frightful episode in which Giles refuses to come into his hut because Grace is inside and despite her pleading. In his Tess chapter Burns correctly points out that the ignorant and idly rich Alec is cut out to give a woman genital satisfaction, but he neglects to point out that Alex anally perceives that his money gives him power to keep Tess his mistress when she never liked him in the first place, and by his keeping her in bondage to him he unwittingly causes her to murder him, and the triggering mechanism of course is Angel's blundering back too late. The long chapter on Jude the Obscure is the greatest thing in this book. Previously, the finest things I had seen on Sue Bridehead were Michael Steig's studies of her in an article in Novel and his Hardy article in English Studies in Canada, but Burns's long analysis of Sue is just magnificent. The Well-Beloved, with Pierston loving a girl, then her daughter and last her granddaughter is far too neat, and Burns is right to say that ultimately the novel fails.
And there are times when we all fail, even geniuses have their bad moments, and throughout this book Burns is quick to point out that at times and in dealing with given situations Hardy fails or at least is not at his best. This book also is marked by frequent brilliant insights on sexuality and character. And though I think prophetic novels can be Panzaic and Burns does not and though I have some other disagreements with him, Burns is a critic who, over the years has been right amazingly often, and this generally splendid book is a fitting culmination to his critical work. And he is in his eighties and had already accomplished more than enough, and yet he worked almost nonstop until he finished this book which, to the extent it becomes widely known, should be a landmark in Hardy scholarship.

Rating: 5
Summary: Thomas Hardy for Our Post-Modern Times
Comment: I read this book from cover to cover as if it were a detective novel, or maybe a Dostoevsky novel that would help me resolve how idealistic characters can actually come to terms with the world they live in and yet try to resist how the world of morality kills the life in us and brings us down. The author leaves the reader in suspense about how Hardy will eventually resolve the man-woman, flesh-spirit love tragedy. It is, in the final analysis, a defense of Hardy's female characters as well.So anyone who is perplexed and yet fascinated by Hardy's novels can not help but be spell-bound by this book. The reader will learn along the way that many intelligent critics have been lured into permanent self-deception about love and sexuality and they have ignored Hardy's working out his own evasions. At the same time the reader will learn that Hardy's evasions are his or her own and that there is another, third way, to resolve the struggle between flesh and spirit, reading and living, thinking and feeling.In order to solve the riddle of "flesh and spirit" the reader must follow the clues left by Hardy and the author until the end of the book.

Rating: 5
Summary: Excellent book on Thomas Hardy
Comment: Serious critical study of Thomas Hardy, that is still an excellent
book for the non-expert. An unusual interpretation which should spur discussions. An extremely well written book by a man who knows
his subject