‘The Open’: Hardy and Jefferies

In his spiritual biography, The Story of My Heart (1883), Richard Jefferies seeks to defeat the time of writing, to transcend the spiritual instant, without abolishing what we might term the scriptural trace of the act of writing. His text illustrates a desire to cancel out the sense of the self as existing in time by means of a quasi-poetic ‘voice’ in which the secret of spiritual renewal is to be located. The literary project of autobiography has often been construed as a means of overcoming the banality of day-to-day memory in favour of an alternative ‘deep’ memory which offers a kind of redemption or cancellation of linear time. Memory, in this instance, is a bringing of the past into the present, restoring experience to life again in the actuality of the present moment, in a structure of feeling which sees the self redeemed from the deathly temporal flow, but is also in touch with a prehistoric past: