The Experimental and the Absurd in Two on a Tower

Abstract

Though usually and rightly classified as a minor novel, Two on a Tower contains some of Hardy’s most original and adventurous experiments. It explores imaginatively an idea he expressed theoretically nine years later in ‘The Science of Fiction’: ‘with our widened knowledge of the universe and its forces and man’s position therein, narrative, to be artistically convincing, must adjust itself to the new alignment.’¹ Yet his use of ‘the stupendous background of the stellar universe’ has come in for a good deal of criticism, on the grounds that it is not integral to the novel, that it does dwarf the characters in spite of Hardy’s claim to the contrary in the Preface, and that it is too remote from human concerns to function effectively in a novel. This dismissive attitude is strange since it is generally accepted that the way the background is used is one of the distinctive features of Hardy’s major novels. As Lawrence says in his ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’: ‘… this is the quality Hardy shares with the great writers, Shakespeare or Sophocles or Tolstoi, this setting behind the small action of his protagonists the terrific action of unfathomed nature.’² In Hardy’s exploration of this theme in Two on a Tower he arrives at a vision of the universe which is fundamentally different from that presented in his earlier novels.