BOVIDS BLOATED ON THE BRAIN: IMAGINING WITH INFLATION IN THOMAS HARDY’S NOVELS

Abstract

A tiny clover enters a sheep’s mouth, ferments into gasses of indigestion that distend its guts, and bloats the sheep into a hefty roundness felt substantially in the brain. Such images of inflation recur in scenes particularly characteristic of Hardy, often lauded for how closely his descriptions approximate direct experience of a real world. This is no mean feat, given how difficult it is to set and keep in motion the imagination’s immensely effortful work of converting words into images, as scholars have noted. How does inflation work through such difficulties in imagining? What do these workings reveal about the place of the imagination in human life? This thesis draws on cognitive literary studies to examine images of inflation in Hardy’s novels. It argues that inflation, through its structural sympathy with the imagination, reduces the strenuousness to imagining that would otherwise threaten the substantiality of the image, then heightens the need and desire for imagining, to coax and compel continuous work on the image. Inflation sets the imagination going by making its work easy, then makes it so necessary and desirable for the imagination to keep going as to overwhelm any aversion to its effortfulness. Chapter 1 argues that inflation, sharing a structural sympathy with the imagination, comes to share in the burden of imaginative work, now made almost effortless to set and keep in motion. In Chapter 2, images of bodily inflation announce imaginative work as necessary for continued bodily substantiality in the world, compelling continuous imagining as a matter of deeply felt existential necessity. Finally, Chapter 3 argues that inflation pictures, provokes, and prolongs the desire for persistent imagining until it becomes a potent force for substantiation in its own right, giving to the imaginary world substance enough to persist even alongside physical reality.