Coincidences in Hardy’s novels are at the heart of that tragic mischief, but they are also susceptible to misunderstanding, not least because there are too many. Michael Jackson’s Coincidences: Synchronicity, Verisimilitude, and Storytelling acknowledges that “Whether coincidences are construed as fortunate or unfortunate, tragic or transformative, they always evoke wonder and, as the saying goes ‘make us think’ ” (ix).³

Hardy’s novels certainly evoke wonder, even in their opening scenes: a couple with a young child and dust on their shoes in The Mayor of Casterbridge; a shepherd walking with a watch the size of a clock in Far from the Madding Crowd; a small boy on an “ancient track” in Jude the Obscure; a pair of “rickety” legs “with a bias in his gait” in Tess of the d’Urbervilles (13). The opening paragraphs of The Woodlanders “contrast between what is and what might be.”⁴ As preludes to encounters of consequence, the paths of coincidence in Hardy’s novels are a way to explore existential questions about time and contingency, morality and (in)justice, and the precarious place of the individual in the community and the cosmos.

In 2021, Jackson mentioned to me how he had planned to include a chapter on Hardy in his book and had wondered (when reading The Mayor of Casterbridge) whether a dependence on coincidences could ever be broken. This is a question Jackson poses throughout his interdisciplinary considerations of coincidences, culled from anthropology, psychology, philosophy, literature, music, and biography. Are coincidences mere “confirmation bias”? A tendency to “select from a constellation of elements those items that confirm our beliefs or support our prejudices” (12)? Careful to avoid reducing the “experiencing subject or the object that is experienced” (40), Jackson draws attention to the indeterminate aspects of coincidence and the interpretive possibilities that they offer as allegories of separation and loss, as a means of redress, as a mode of consolation, even as a form of freedom from desire for revenge (42). Jackson shares stories of coincidences that grasp the uncertainty of life while exploring the ingenuity with which these stories, simultaneously formulaic and unfathomable, are put to use. Natural disasters are viewed by some folklorists as cosmically connected to “aberrations in the social realm” (22); but how is it that survivors of a plane crash miss calamity through a string of ordinary decisions? How to account for synchronicity in the death and funerals of an adopted child’s birth parents (18) or for the perfect (mis)timing of love (68, 72)? As intriguing as coincidences are in themselves, it is “not the light that [they] cast on the inner workings of the world” that is of particular interest, but the glimpses they offer into the worlds of storytellers and storytelling (19).

Significantly, Jackson offers a genealogical framework for understanding coincidences that resists notions of exceptionalism by showing how “each human life shades into others” (146) and how narratives of happenstance provide ways of relating to events and persons we might otherwise disavow. War and exile leave traces confounding generations; perhaps terror can be acknowledged through an ineffable mix of mystery with the mundane. Seeking patterns of belonging may prove illusory (14), but storytelling is not capricious, even if the meanings of the inheritance of nothing but an irksome heirloom, a coerced likeness to a dead relative (119), or a barely known past (18), prompt coincidences to explain—but not answer—lifelong riddles. Peering between the intrapsychic and the intersubjective (x–xi), Jackson notes that a coincidence is “a good story” and “a moment when life discloses its dark secrets” (13). Often uncanny, occasionally haunting, sometimes charming, coincidences emerge from legacies of omission, reinvention, estrangement, and displacement; but they are also a means of agency and forgiveness.

 

Tess’s execution after an act of vengeance (446), Giles Winterbourne’s self-sacrifice in The Woodlanders, and Michael Henchard’s wish to be forgotten in The Mayor of Casterbridge are of a piece with the “drama of pain” that characterizes Hardy novels.⁵ While the dependence on coincidence is “broken” in these endings, Rowan Williams writes that (with the exception of parts of Jude the Obscure) Hardy’s novels are not tragic but melodramatic. This is due in large part to their reliance on “if only” and on the “ ‘hostile’ circumstance as the trigger of catastrophe.” Williams clarifies: “Contingency alone is indifferently comic and tragic, depending on the effect of the accident; it is another sort of vulnerability, the ordinary uncertainty of life.”⁶

Tragedies are not free of happenstance, but the tragic stems out of the irredeemable natures of the protagonists and situations themselves. Melodramatic coincidences, meanwhile, are the building blocks that shape contingency. Williams suggests that the melodramatic aspects of Hardy’s novels lend themselves to an examination of the ordinary uncertainty of life—the landscape of Jackson’s query.

In Hardy, one finds a “layering of time,” his “The Convergence of the Twain” being exemplary.⁷ Though this poem from 1912 refers to the wreck of the Titanic that “jars two hemispheres” (stanza 11, line 3), its title and subject, “by paths coincident” (10.2), are redolent of colliding forces elsewhere and of consummations and crises yet to come. Who or what among these, then, is the “Spinner of Years” (11.1)? Who or what declares “Now!” (11.2).⁸ In a letter from March 1917, Hardy objects to the term “atheist,” while expressing irritation that critics continued to view his writings “as if they were a scientific system of philosophy”: “I have repeatedly stated . . . that the views in them are seemings, provisional impressions only, used for artistic purposes because they represent approximately the impressions of the age.”⁹

Hardy’s response captures the pressure of writing at the fault lines of debates about theodicy, science, and culture. Jackson writes of the pressure on the analyst, in this case Jung and his contemporaries, to view a wartime coincidence of double-exposed photos as loosely based on elective affinities (15). Jackson offers an intersubjective retelling that encompasses human relationships. The nod to the narrative allure of scientific explanation—one in which the layering of time is manifested materially, chemically—offers an impression of an age when the loss of manpower belied human ambivalence in the light of the emergent female—a subject perhaps all too intimate to broach.

For Hardy, crises of manhood and the emergence of powerful women had often little to do with “external displacements” but instead with subjective experience, as well as a dance with chance (178–79). That dance involved pushing the boundaries of class and social conventions through direct encounters. According to Jackson, such “face-to-face relations” forever alter our being (62).

The sense of an over-reliance on coincidence in the novels of Hardy’s era could well reflect the speed with which these transformations were occurring. The “hostile circumstance” that gives rise to heartbreaking events is less the in-breaking of mystery than the presumptive force of new ways of relating that seem to have displaced old and ancient customs. Jackson writes that nineteenth-century culture tamed chance by subjecting it to calculation (36). Yet this impulse was paradoxical. The calculations of Bayesian probability and Charles Babbage’s difference engine were set alongside John Ruskin’s village England. In Hardy’s melodramas, we should not see such movements as merely reactionary but as responsive to deep-seated claims on experience.

If the term “melodrama” summons up the banal, it may be helpful to think of it as a heuristic technique in Hardy’s novels in an observance of ritual and ritual time. Coincidence as a crisis, or turning point, allows for the revelation of moral disposition not only as an exercise of ethical judgment in view of social hierarchy¹⁰ but as a test of endurance in a convergence of the past, present, and a host of possible outcomes. Hardy’s depiction of coincidence as a strategy of survival as well as agency may be in line with what Jackson refers to as a working out of a cosmology of the powerless whereby revenge is displaced or deferred (42–43).

My great-grandfather was confronted with crisis on the day of Luz’s betrothal. Her suitor, Carlos, was only a few years older, and already owned his own business in the rice trade. He was industrious yet unassuming, like Luz, but how could a man who had turned a visit into a betrothal be trusted? And why the insistence on an early wedding? Was it the rumblings of war, or a baby on the way? With no hint of scandal and no word of objection to the match, why, then, did Pastor flee? Was it the rumors that Pastor himself had “married up?” Not so! Pastor stood on his family’s own land! The tikling was his. Other farmers set traps, but the bird roamed free on his land, the land after which Luz had been named. How to make amends?

Coincidence as crisis can be upended by kairos—the appointed time when speech, right action, and moral disposition come together in a moment of poetic justice that breaks free from melodrama. Although it is typically chronos that is set in opposition to kairos,¹¹ in novels replete with coincidences, in my view, the tension between crisis and kairos may better uncover the reciprocal—and therefore intersubjective—aspects of coincidences. For Jackson, it is essential to “recognize the mutually constituting dynamic of subjective and objective forces, that is to say their ‘relational character’ ” (7–8).

 

In Hardy, nowhere is this relational character more keenly felt than in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. “What a step!” (27) notes the narrator as Tess enters her home. Persons and place are already transformed by two chance encounters: her father’s with Parson Tringham informing him of Jack Durbeyfield’s noble lineage, and that of Tess’s meeting with a young man during a ritual of “club-walking.” Although the prospects of each are dubious, hearts vulnerable to restoration of loss can succumb to the dynamism of if: “ ‘Sir John d’Urberville—that’s who I am’ continued the prostrate man. ‘That is if knights were baronets—which they be—‘Tis recorded in history all about me’ ” (17, emphasis added). In one breath uttered from a position prone—indeed, to delusions of grandeur—Jack Durbeyfield’s conjecture about his claims to the d’Urberville lineage becomes historical record. Jackson says we edit the stories we tell about ourselves, that “stories sustain the illusion that our lives are within our grasp or, if they are not, then they are in the hands of someone or something that will take care of us” (17). Tess’s parents muse about Parson Tringham’s disclosure at Rolliver’s Inn. From this liminal space and in an intoxicated state at the “end of a long and broken village” (33), storytelling reveals what Hannah Arendt has referred to as a “web of human relationships.”¹² Once informed of an ancient web, Tess’s family is caught in its designs, including being thrown in the path of Alec d’Urberville, a supposed “cousin”—rich and marriageable—upon whom the restoration of Tess’s family fortune depends (55).

An existential threat soon presents itself: Whereas Jack Durbeyfield experiences an unfurling of imagined being and belonging, a struggle of unbeing is unleashed for Tess as she laments her ancestors and her body so mournfully she “could have hidden herself in a tomb” (102). Tess’s melancholy uncovers the burden of descent and the bequest of a past hidden in her name.

Similarly, Jackson tells the story of Renata, a woman named after her dead uncle (Renato). Renata’s mother had heard her brother Renato’s voice speaking to her from the mountains on the day he died. The event was so uncanny that she believed “the child she was carrying would reincarnate him” (118). In Renata’s words: “I think I always knew, from when I was a little girl that I was supposed to be dead. That I didn’t have a life of my own. . . . It was her brother [my mother] wanted to be alive, not me” (120).

Renata’s childhood agony shows how a coincidence can be a source of affliction. Jackson interprets such compulsive replaying of the past as symptomatic of trauma (160). For Renata’s mother, the coincidence of hearing her brother’s last words while pregnant provokes a crisis. Grief over the loss of her brother turns into a fetish. As the story of coincidence is passed to the next generation, hope is displaced and becomes a weapon to be used on those who do not meet expectations.

Renata is able to reclaim her existence through identification with a creative writer who “wanted to belong to the world” (116). Tess also finds belonging as a dairymaid at Talbothays, albeit temporary and fraught. Once her prospects are known, she cannot escape her “relations,” although death itself is a “cold relation” that does not frighten her (119). The world and people around Tess alternately console, judge, and mirror her despair. “Every contour of the surrounding hills was as personal to her as that of her relatives’ faces” (46).

After Tess’s violation by Alec (90), her prospects regarding society are dimmed. Yet she marks her son Sorrow’s short life with a secret baptism (114), an act of agency that enables her to cling to fragments of religion and community. Having forbidden Tess from calling for the parson lest her “smudge” be known and her father’s sense of nobility disturbed, Jack Durbeyfield’s pride has endangered his grandson’s soul, were it not for Tess’s nimble act of mercy. Afterwards, when Tess visits the vicar to enquire about the ritual’s efficacy, the vicar is moved by “the dignity of the girl” and acknowledges “it will be just the same” as if he had baptized the infant himself. Although Sorrow is buried among the damned, the vicar offers the same spiritual consolation: Tess’s compassion overcomes her father’s hauteur and the vicar’s high office, revealing her nobility through humble defiance (116–17).

Ritual plays a role in Tess’s recognition of Angel Clare when he tells a story of how a bull is brought to its knees by a Nativity hymn (132). Occurring on Tess’s first day as a dairymaid at Talbothays, storytelling becomes shared ground for reestablishing community in the light of a stranger’s arrival: the bull appeased by timeless ritual, its rage checked by timely caroling.

Jackson explores strategies for agency in the midst of chaos, including divination among the Kuranko. “It is, paradoxically, through acquiescence to the powers-that-be that clients recover their ability to act decisively and with confidence. . . . [R]andomness is a ritual means for discerning underlying order and acting in accordance with it” (36–37). Tess’s own response to Angel Clare’s harp-playing mirrors the story of the bull and the Nativity hymn: “The exaltation which she had described as being producible at will by gazing at a star, came now without any determination of hers; she undulated upon the thin notes of the second-hand harp, and their harmonies passed like breezes through her, bringing tears into her eyes” (145). When Angel plays his harp, Tess’s soul experiences ecstasy without sexual aggression and the coincidence of her second meeting with Angel Clare appears to overcome the plight of blighted stars. As their love unfolds, it would seem that Angel understands the complexity of Tess’s consciousness—at once deep and quixotic: “This consciousness upon which he had intruded was the single opportunity ever vouchsafed to Tess by an unsympathetic First Cause—her all; her ever and only chance” (179).

Despite this knowledge, Angel wastes his second chance with Tess as a result of his obsession with her d’Urberville lineage, how she must spell her name henceforth, and more insidiously, with his plans for Tess “after I have made you the well-read woman that I mean to make you” (217). Angel chides himself for not having seen “the resemblance of your name to d’Urberville” (217), and assumes Tess’s secret revolves around him, his principles and desires. Angel does not realize that in his selfish aims, he is a snob, despite his pretensions to the contrary; and Angel proves no less exploitative than Tess’s father or mother. Angel’s eventual recognition of Tess as a girl he had met before evokes foreboding as she reminds him that he did not dance with her during the ritual of club-walking (219). She hopes that the coincidence does not signal an ill-omen. Still fearful of her d’Urberville relations and of disclosure pertaining to her untimely liaison with Alec, Tess remains in crisis. Encounters with ancestral portraits on her wedding night highlight resemblance without affinity (247); and Angel proves to be a husband incapable of forgiveness (259).

Birds grieve with Tess in Angel’s absence following painful revelations about her past (379). Birds accompany Tess in her travails, from Mrs. d’Urberville’s chickens (71) to sinister herons (425) and wounded pheasants with whom Tess shares shelter when she longs for death (314). Jackson writes about a time when the sight of Senegalese firefinches overwhelmed him with anxiety over his first wife Pauline’s pregnancy (105). This memory is embedded in a recollection of an agitated bird outside a window of a home in Australia where Jackson and his daughter had relocated after his wife’s death (104).

The tikling enchanted my great-grandfather. The only variant of this story appeared at the time of Luz’s death in 2010: that Pastor wanted to return home with the tikling as an offering to the betrothed. He observed the tikling tiptoeing at first and then seeming to dance with alacrity in the verdant field. What was the secret of this sweet bird? When Pastor drew near, however, a cobra, the color of mud, bit him just above his leather boot. My great-grandfather then walked to the house of one of his tenants, where they tried and failed to extract the cobra’s venom from the wound.

Tess walks with Angel Clare after her vengeful murder of Alec. At Stonehenge, when Tess hears one of the pillars humming, it seems to Angel “like the note of some gigantic one stringed harp” (440). Their previous harmony is thus restored at a place of ancient ritual where the Sun (the mightiest star) was venerated. While Angel’s beliefs forbid him to agree to meeting Tess in the afterlife, her resemblance and affinity with her sister, Liza-Lu, provide an earthly resolution to Tess’s dilemma and a way for her love to endure. Once a source of anguish, Tess’s crisis gives way to kairos. Before Tess surrenders to local authorities, she is allowed a moment’s sleep on the altar of her choosing. Then, without apprehension, Tess stands, moves forward, and says quietly, “I am ready” (444).

 

Luz did marry Carlos after Pastor’s death—the pamanhikan had continued under the auspices of my great-grandmother, Emilia, a woman of wealth and status in her own right. Luz and Carlos had insisted on a wedding precisely one month from the date of their betrothal. Luz refused to postpone the event to allow for mourning. As it happens, I would be born on the anniversary of her wedding, 31 years later. Due in December, I was born two months premature, and within hours of my birth, my grandmother was outraged to discover I had been placed in an incubator with a dead baby.

When I learned to walk, something was not quite right: I tiptoed. An operation at five would lengthen a tendon in my left leg and enable me to walk without a brace, and an eye surgery would correct strabismus. However, my limp and left-sided weakness would remain, and not just as hallmarks of cerebral palsy. In the light of coincidence and storytelling, my inheritance became clear: I have a permanent share in my great-grandfather’s ordeal—his crisis and his kairos in the rice fields of Santa Lucia.

In Hardy’s novels, the steps taken by fathers, daughters, and suitors, including “the track of shoe” left by Grace Melbury before going to boarding school and Fancy Day’s boot, are not just symbols of emerging grace and fancy. In Under the Greenwood Tree, the shoemaker mends Fancy’s boot because “there’s no knowing what it may lead to” and, upon presenting her father’s shoe last¹³ together with her boot, he comments upon the breadth of human interconnectedness through family descent: “Now, naihbours, though no common eye can see it . . . ’tis father’s foot and daughter’s foot to me plain as houses.’ ”¹⁴

Steps and prospects reverberate through generations and provoke mutually affective responses. On the day of his death, Pastor wore knee-length leather boots that did not protect him from the cobra’s strike; as she neared death in August 2018, my grandmother’s final words to me were these: ikaw ang haligi, “You are the pillar”; but how to stand one’s house on the leg of a limping bird or the memory of a man walking toward death with venom coursing through his body?

For Hannah Arendt, forgiveness allows an individual to “reclaim one’s own life” and offers release from “those thoughts of revenge and those memories of one’s loss that might otherwise keep one in thrall to one’s persecutor forever” (188).

How does the past return to us in the present? Jackson presents Martin Amis’s view that “unlike narrative, life is poorly plotted, suffers for want of good dialogue, pattern, or completeness” (174). As though reproaching her own author, Tess asks in hindsight: “Why didn’t you warn me? Ladies know what to fend hands against because they read novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance o’ learning in that way, and you did not help me!” (100).

What lessons, then, do Hardy’s novels teach? Whereas the genre may offer the illusion of artful control, with his respect for storytelling, country spaces, and rituals, Hardy eschews the pretense of polish for his “seemings.” The ground of coincidence then gives the latitude for introducing other “impressions of the age,” such as an unconventional marriage, a female farmer, educated women from various classes who teach or secretly write sermons—encounters that, perhaps, speak to Hardy’s need to justify his own path as a novelist.

In A Pair of Blue Eyes, as Elfride makes preparations for her elopement, she remembers how a packet of books once fell from her grasp, “kissing” mud.¹⁵ In this image, Hardy’s earthen plots, muddied with coincidence, may be the “novel forms of writing” Jackson calls for (7). The packet of books falling and yet kissing mud testify to a woman choosing her own path, but they also signify authorial presence. Indeed, the image of books and mud together, associated with a female character, has an Edenic quality that reveals the “perennial possibility of redemption” (29) in coincidences. In the kiss between books and mud, we find touch, encounter, recognition—recognition of seeming selves and sundry webs of relation. Is this not kairos—the nascent and the potential met in consummation with sublime intent? In the kiss of mud and under cover of the printed word, there is the promise of intimacy with lives other than our own on whose generosity and work we (un)knowingly depend from one page (and age) to the next.

Maria Cecilia Holt (ThD ’14) is in collaboration with two theater productions that explore love and freedom in limit situations, as a literary advisor for Narrow Spaces by moON Productions in the Netherlands and as the US-based production advisor for Noway in Tbilisi, Georgia. This essay is for the descendants of Maria’s grandmother and her sister, among them Jacob Holt Sievers, Giovanni Pastor Aguilar, and Carl Matthew Rodriguez.