Summary
Novelist whose last novel, Jude the Obscure (1895) — in Said’s opinion his greatest — is in the forty-fourth essay of Reflections on Exile and Other Essays a savage attack on the palliative of Saint Jude, patron of lost causes: even the saint is of no value whatever to Jude Fawley, his modern namesake (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.494-496).
Details
- Jude Fawley, a mediocre young country boy of sensitivity and admirable if inappropriate ambition, is infected at age ten with the idea of following his schoolmaster to Christminster, and drifts in and out of the city for the rest of the novel seeking learning, success and higher purpose, meeting only setback, disappointment and entanglements leading to desperate degradation (PDF p.494).
- His self-teaching in Greek and Latin from primers is abandoned when he realizes languages cannot be learned simply by reading a book; Arabella and Sue Bridehead exhaust him; he goes from job to job growing poorer, humbled further by the suicide of his children and by his and Sue’s passionate love, for which they risk social ostracism and greater poverty (PDF p.494).
- He dies in impoverished Christminster quarters as the “Remembrance games” take place outside his windows, Hardy interweaving his recollections from the Book of Job with the triumphant hurrahs and glorious music: “Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.” (quoted, cited “(Jude, 321)”, PDF p.494-495).
- Hardy’s hallmark as an unbeliever: Job has displaced Jude, Jude is incapacitated from the start, and no Eliphaz the Temanite offers seven bullocks and seven rams to restore him; the remnants of the earlier world are obliviously mocking or deliberately unredemptive, like the folk doctor Vilbert or Arabella, who first attracts Jude’s attention by throwing a pig’s pizzle at him (PDF p.495).
- With Cervantes and Flaubert, Hardy’s narrative is a mature summing-up work written near the end of his career; the novel affords its figures two dispiriting alternatives — conform to the world’s sordid practices, or be killed off as Jude, Emma Bovary and Quixote are (PDF p.495-496).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Saint Jude, Gustave Flaubert, Late Style