Hands in Hardy

Why do I use the motif of hands as a way of getting a handle on Hardy? For one thing, representations of gesture and other references to hands are frequent in Hardy’s work. Second, I am mindful of Jacques Derrida’s persuasive demonstration, in Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy, that human hands, in their ability to touch and manipulate inanimate objects, the body of another person and themselves (as when my right hand touches my left hand), are, in the Western philosophical tradition from Aristotle through Maine de Biran to Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, in one way or another taken as an essential feature of human beings. Having and using hands, this powerful tradition claims, distinguishes human beings from the other animals. Derrida coins the word humainisme, ‘humanualism’, to name this tradition (main means ‘hand’ in French). Third, so many ordinary idioms in English use ‘hand’ in literal or figurative fashion that, so I hypothesize, what is most distinctive, singular, about a given writer may be identified by way of his or her manipulation of hand idioms. Saying this presupposes that the singular, the special, is what matters most in a given writer, just as Hardy, in ‘The Dorsetshire Labourer’, argues that it is a mistake to think of all rural labourers as fitting one stereotyped ‘Hodge’. Each farm worker, says Hardy, is ‘somehow not typical of anyone but himself’. ¹ Hardy too is somehow not typical of anyone but himself. That includes his use of hands in his work. A fourth and final reason for my hand reading is a somewhat contrarian desire to approach Hardy widdershins, ² rubbing his writings against the grain of the text, so to speak. A novel like The Mayor of Casterbridge is so visibly visual in orientation, so cinematic, that many passages almost read like an elaborate scenario for a film – presented from the perspectiv of a somewhat detached spectator who sees what anyone who was there might have seen, often as a kind of spy, voyeur or invisible looker-on seeing from the outside in or from the inside out. Hardy’s work depends so much on seeing that to approach his fiction and his poems by way of their references to that premier organ of touch, the hand, seems perverse. My hypothesis, nevertheless, might be phrased as a particular form of speech act, a wager: ‘I bet an investigation of how Hardy uses the word “hand” will bring into the open what is most distinctive about his writing’. Whether I win or lose this bet remains to be seen.