Thomas Hardy and Cinematographic Form

TLDR: Spielman as mentioned in this paper argues that the evolution of the modernist or symbolist novel can be traced back to the development of the cinematographic form, and argues that Hardy is a more cinematic novelist than any of the writers discussed in detail by Spiegel, though this judgment entails taking a slightly different view of "cinematographic" form from his.

Abstract: Alan Spiegel's article "Flaubert to Joyce: Evolution of a Cinematographic Form" (NOVEL, vi, 1973, pp. 229-43) is interesting and instructive, but I should like to suggest that Thomas Hardy deserves a more prominent place in this context than Mr. Spiegel accords him. Indeed I would argue that Hardy is a more cinematic novelist than any of the writers discussed in detail by Spiegel, though this judgment entails taking a slightly different view of "cinematographic form" from his. Spiegel tends to identify the evolution of that form with the evolution of the modernist or symbolist novel. Thus Flaubert only shows the way: essentially he is a "scenographic" novelist, handling visual space in terms comparable with those of the proscenium-arch theater. James and Conrad mark a later stage in the evolution of cinematographic form, but it is Joyce who emerges from Spiegel's discussion as its fully-fledged exponent. There seems to be a problem, or at least a paradox, here, for in most respects film, as a narrative medium, has more in common with the traditional realistic novel than with the modernist or symbolist novel. In his distinction between metaphor and metonymy, as the two poles towards one of which all forms of communication and representation tend, Roman Jakobson classes prose, realism, and film as metonymic, as against poetry, romanticism/symbolism, and drama, which are metaphoric.1 It is true that in this scheme the film technique of montage is metaphoric (as against the metonymic, or rather synecdochic technique of close-up), but a film that was all montage, like a novel that was all metaphor (Finnegans Wake?) would be highly unrepresentative and probably incomprehensible as narrative. Film, like prose fiction, is essentially a metonymic form, connecting items that are contiguous rather than similar, and making much more use of match cuts and close-ups than of jump cuts and montage. Hence the traditional realistic novel is more easily adapted to film than works of modernist, symbolist fiction in which prose is always threatening to turn into poetry, and sequentiality dissolving under the pressure of consciousness. Which could be more easily translated into film-the passage from Ulysses quoted by Spiegal, or this passage