jude the obscure- an unintended book report

**friday 30 november 07**
so, i finally got marcel proust's remembrance of things past from the library a week or two ago. it was right after my blog lamenting my philistine reading habits. i have to admit i liked what i read, but it was incredibly dense. i only got through the chapter called overture. it was like a medieval tapestry. it was well made and i could appreciate the weave of the material and i knew that if i followed the threads, they would lead me to the bigger picture of the rest of the tapestry, but i only had so much attention to give. so, i pulled through as much as i could and then put it down. i haven't really cracked it open in a few days. i went to the library yesterday and found that they had finally gotten a copy of jude the obscure by thomas hardy in. somewhere along the way, i got the idea that hardy was kind of the english proust, meaning that you had to plod through his work. i started reading and found myself pulled in. i read 120 pages last night. now, don't get me wrong, it's not a page-turner, but i get some vague satisfaction that i can at least make it through hardy.

**monday 3 december 07**
okay, so let's re-examine the story of jude the obscure. it's your basic story. poor boy dreams of going to college, though he is a peasant. boy meets girl that fakes pregnancy to get him to marry her. girls runs off to australia. boy moves to the city and meets another girl. this one is his cousin. so, of course, he falls madly in love with her despite the fact that he is still married to girl #1 technically. girl #2 makes him chase her like a wolf for the next 100 pages and then she marries his old school-teacher out of obligation(don't ask). after marrying the older man, she finds that she is repulsed by him and asks his leave to have an affair with jude, whom she loves in the unfettered smolder that only the victorian english can manage. turns out girl is a sociopath (though they don't have that term in 1896 when the book was published) and she keeps jude at a distance for a year or so and when his now ex-wife shows up at the door, girl #2 goes into a mad tantrum. to appease her, jude doesn't go out to see the ex. jude has been courting her for almost 200 pages at this point. finally, they decide to get married (after each has had their previous marriage annulled-confused yet?) but they decide that marriage is such an unhappy proposition that they will live together but not actually marry.

turns out that in victorian england, this is the equivalent to being gay. before they even admitted that homosexuals existed, they had to treat someone like shite, so i guess it was unwed couples. they have 3 children and are fabulously happy until they run into trouble finding a place to lodge because it seems to be imposable to find a place that will let out to a couple with children. in a moment of despair and depression, girl #2(the cousin) tells the eldest child that the world sucks and the kid (already a manic depressive child) takes it upon himself to hang himself and his 2 siblings while his mother is out so that the parents would have an easier life.
the girl, now a woman (named sue, btw) is so distraught that she becomes uber-religious and goes back and re-marries the old schoolteacher(she believes that the death of the children was G-d's way of getting her to toe the line). jude is heartbroken and goes on a bender. during which, his ex-wife appears a widow with plans to get jude back because he is a stone-mason and makes a decent wage that she can live off of. she gets jude so wasted that he is easily tricked into marrying her again. like monday morning in Vegas, he sobers up and finds that he was duped. dramatically, jude loses the will to live.
in that spectacular victorian way, he wastes away in depression. eventually, he walks through the rain to the village where sue lives, and says goodbye. he upbraids her for being a twit and a coward. she covers her ears and he walks away into the rain and to his death.

to review, boy meets girl, she's an emasculating bitch. boy meets the love of his life and she loses her mind and becomes a hard-core christian. boy dies in poverty of a broken heart or broken spirit.

not exactly uplifting stuff.

i turns out that i mis-understood the characterization of hardy. it's not that the book is hard. it's written in a fairly free flowing form of prose that isn't hard to understand. what is hard about the book is the wading through the abject suffering of the main characters. the story in the novel is very much like the story of job. only in the story of Job, Job will eventually win out. it's a story about faith. if Job has faith, he will be rewarded.

that's the beauty of the bible for people of limited intellect. there really are no grays. there is good and then there is bad. the good are rewarded and the bad are punish-ed. unless the good are punished to see if they will stay good or turn wicked. then there's the good who turn wicked and stuff happens to them so that they see the error of their ways and become good again. that's it. any ambiguity that may have been there in the gospels is cleaned out in the homogenizing process that translation has become.

i guess the whole point of the book is that because of his poverty, jude was never given the proper opportunities to rise above his dismal circumstances. this is before the scholarship was thought of apparently. in the first few chapters of the book, jude is an incredibly smart and precocious child that teaches himself greek and latin from second-hand books. the idea is that he is more than intellectually capable. of course, he meets a girl and it all starts to turn from there.

i think one of the main differences betwixt "literature" and more modern reading is their approach to the audience. like most abstract expressionist, "literature" expects that you their point is so important that you will suffer through quite a lot to decipher their meaning. the book i started reading directly after jude the obscure is a book called "the sparrow" by mary doria russell. i 've read it before and found it to be a good story written rather well. the author goes to pains to make you like and respect the main character in the first few chapters. even though the main character is a priest, we are told how charming and sexy he is, as if the author was imagining a cleaned-up father karas from exorcist.

you're really supposed to like father sandoz. and then there is jude. jude is supposed to be irrepressibly bright and precocious. the whole point of the book is that his life has been a waste. he is lamentably intelligent in his studies but amazingly naive when it comes to sexual politics. i certainly do not have much room to speak on that matter, but through a greater part of the book, you feel like yelling out "don't do it, you fool!!!"
he meets a girl who has him wrapped around her finger in a few pages and keeps him dangling for pretty much the rest of the book. she is a completely unsympathetic character that utters things like "you musn't love me jude. i am wicked." to which he replies,"but i adore you , my darling. i am the wicked one."

the whole book is like that.

i'm not sure if thomas hardy was a misogynist, the victim of a similar jerking of the heart, or just trying to make a point about courtship in victorian england. by modern standards, jude puts up with her insanity with the patience of a saint. he is rewarded with misery.

am i glad i read the book? yeah. i actually learned a few things. if you approach the book as a document of english society at the turn of the previous century, it's intriguing to notice the difference in cultures and times.

the goal was to start reading literature to learn more about the human condition.

that's one down.....