Abstract
In their evaluation ofJude the Obscure (1895), some earlier literary critics have justifiably (given the historical context) judged the text by the standards of the then dominant and sustained New Criticism trend, taking into account its symbiotic relationship with modernist aesthetics. The basic premise behind this conception was the aesthetic notion of structural and thematic unity as well as coherence and integrity of character. These notions were high on the agenda of the New Criticism of the 1940s and onwards. The narrative was found most lacking in this respect. An article entitled, Hardy and the Fragmentation of Consciousness (1975) by Harold L. Weatherby, a foremost Hardy critic, serves as an outstanding example of such a critical view. It makes the case that what ails Jude is its unruliness and disjunctiveness: the brilliance of the novel's peripheries can scarcely compensate for a profound weakness at its center. Indeed the centre cannot hold: the book falls into fragments (Hardy 469). Weatherby continues, arguing that There is no unified authorial consciousness (470), that Hardy as narrator contradicts himself repeatedly in his estimation of what is right or wrong, good or bad, for his characters (470), and that it is an artistic failure ... failing to achieve unity and coherence (479). Hardy, in addition, is undeservedly dismissed as the old-fashioned man from Wessex (483) - which reminds us of the well-known good little Thomas Hardy epithets of Henry James's adverse judgment (Cox xxxi). The article also associates incoherence and contradictions in the narrative with attitudinal ambivalences in Hardy's own mind (473, 476). Undeniably, Jude is permeated with incoherence. Who can disagree? It is deeply involved in sustained and unsettled opposition and what may be termed the play of Derridean differance (Positions 14). And, indeed, Hardy himself acknowledges the tangle of disconnections and self-contradictions disrupting the stability of character in a notebook admission (which shows it to be his design): Of course the book is all contrasts ... Sue and her heathen gods set against Jude's reading the Greek testament; Christminster academical, Christminster in the slums; Jude the saint, Jude the sinner; Sue the Pagan, Sue the saint, marriage, no marriage; &c., &c. (Life 272-73)