Thomas Hardy, Monism, and the Carnival Tradition: The One and the Many in «The Dynasts»

Tom Venetis is a professional journalist and editor in Toronto.

The Dynasts is not as well known or as often read as Thomas Hardy’s
other fictions. It is certainly not as intensely studied or much
commented on as, say, Jude the Obscure, that workhorse for all
undergraduate students studying English literature. Combining epic,
tragedy, poetry, and prose, The Dynasts seemed to exist outside of most
definitions of the literary canon. By the 1970s, most critical opinion
had turned against the novel, pronouncing it a curiosity within the
Hardy canon, at best an interesting failure.

G. Glen Wickens, a professor of English at Bishop’s University, sets
out to show that The Dynasts is not a failure, or even a strange and
unwieldy hybrid, but instead is a serious examination (though presented
in a serio-comical vein) of the ideological issues of Hardy’s day. His
reading of Hardy’s mixing of genres, styles, and characters is aided
by a productive use of Bakhtin’s idea of the carnival. Bakhtin argued
that the Renaissance carnival culture offered a suspension of hierarchic
distinctions and a breaking down of barriers between persons. This
carnival atmosphere, with its mixing of high and low, allowed for often
dangerous ideas and concepts to be explored in ways that might not be
acceptable in any other context.

This idea of the carnival allows Wickens to demonstrate that Hardy’s
novel uses its diverse stylistic and genre elements to offer a critical
exploration of ideological and philosophical monism. Wickens does an
excellent job of using Bakhtin’s ideas to carefully tease out
Hardy’s stylistic and philosophical strategies. His book does much to
rescue The Dynasts from the critical neglect is has so recently fallen
into.