Nick Harris

Blog June 14, 2024

Immediacy Put into Practice

            Chapter Seven of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure makes a good case study for implementing immediacy as a technique for better understanding of the text, or, as Roland Barthes would claim it, the pleasure of the text. This early episode deals with Jude’s courtship of the country girl Arabella whom he will marry in the following chapter, but for now, is the object of his immediate fascination. He refuses to call their interactions a courtship, indicating that he has no designs in mind other than the sensation of the moment; nothing is leading to anything else, but everything is simply and suddenly present. This sense of immediate satisfaction interrupts his long-range dreams as he struggles to keep subdued his ambitions for studying at Christminster in favor of enjoying each moment he spends with Arabella.

            If we take a structuralist approach, we can interpret the chapter as a grand arch leading from Jude’s decision to approach Arabella after her flirting in the previous chapter to the high point of the kiss at the top of the hill. This kiss, actually the second kiss, realizes the apex of the desires that Jude has been wrestling with, and the top of the hill is an appropriate setting for such an apex. Occurring in paragraph 45 of 76 in the chapter, the definitive kiss defines the top of an arch at the point between halfway and three-quarters of the curve. Certainly, the text shows attention to the accumulative effects of Jude’s desire as it approaches that kiss and the denouement and conclusion that come in quick succession afterward.

            But the theme of this chapter concerns turning away from grand designs. Jude has a lifelong intention of studying at the college in Christminster, a desire that he confirms in his study of Greek. Indeed, the moments of this study are his most longed-for times: “During the whole bygone week he had been resolving to set this afternoon apart for a special purpose,—the re-reading of his Greek Testament…. He had anticipated much pleasure in this afternoon’s reading, under the quiet roof of his great-aunt’s house as formerly, where he now slept only two nights a week” (VII. pars. 2-3). Yet, in the sentence immediately after the last one, Jude shows us that his intentions have had a great interruption: “But a new thing, a great hitch, had happened yesterday in the gliding and noiseless current of his life, and he felt as a snake must feel who has sloughed off its winter skin, and cannot understand the brightness and sensitiveness of its new one” (par. 3). Jude wrestles with his desires for the next paragraphs until the promise of immediate release confirms his decision in paragraph 8: “As he walked he looked at his watch. He could be back in two hours, easily, and a good long time would still remain to him for reading after tea.” He is walking to Arabella, and though he structures his intentions, that two-hour format falls apart in the immediacy of each moment he spends with her leading up to the kiss on the hilltop.

            The story plays out the imagery of Jude’s recognition of the interruption to his life that Arabella has caused through a nature-oriented description. I shall repeat it:  “…he felt as a snake must feel who has sloughed off its winter skin and cannot understand the brightness and sensitiveness of its new one” (par. 3). Jude uses an image of natural beauty here, significant to his unescapable regard for the natural countryside environment in which he has lived his life. Yet, because the image is that of a snake, it also carries with it a sense of danger. Jude’s desires are new and “bright,” but make him akin to the snake as it slithers through the progressions of its natural existence.

            As Jude approaches Arabella’s house, the natural imagery takes over with a similar mix of austere beauty and interruptive disgust: “Here at the base of the chalk formation he neared the brook that oozed from it, and followed the stream till he reached her dwelling. A smell of piggeries came from the back, and the grunting of the originators of that smell” (par. 9). Not only is his desire for escape from the drudgeries of country life symbolized in his dream of philosophical study at Christminster, but Jude insists of the paradox of clinging on to beatific rural images, even if they are replete with sensory irritations such as the smell of a piglot.

            As readers, we experience the sensations along with Jude. The sudden decision to go search for the origin of the smoke disrupts the intended timeline, but neither Jude nor his readers care much for the disruption as we are caught up in the moment. The accumulation of these moments makes the inevitability of Jude’s quick marriage to Arabella, the abandonment of his long-held plans, more acceptable.

And yet, like the snake, the inevitable events carry with them a sense of foreboding. As the reader reads the book, she/he can look back on the celebration of these events in their immediate jouissance as an ironic foreshadowing of Jude’s abandonment of his goals in the face of a series of determined events. In the following chapter of the book, Jude marries Arabella, and she decides to flee the marriage in an escape to Australia. In subsequent chapters, he meets up with his cousin, Sue Bridehead, who also has escaped a troubled marriage that legally has not ended. Together, they embark on a series of life adventures even though they are still married to others. This dichotomy of intentions, immediate decisions, and the irony of fate blocking their path to happiness informs the remainder of the novel.

Yet we remember the “brightness and sensitivity” with which Jude first shed his old skin, a skin that had worn itself out with a long-held intention of escape into the world of ideas. If we read Chapter Seven not as a structured golden arch, but as a series of impactful events and images, then we hold on to the sense of the new skin of our immediate existence. We better understand the paradox of immersion in the natural world, symbolized by the attraction to Arabella, while at the same time having an underlying intention of progression into a world away from Arabella’s, an intention we wrestle with giving up, even though we cannot do so completely.

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The Barthes reference in the first sentence is to Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. by Richard Howard, New York: Hill & Wang, 1980. [original Le Plaisir du Texte, 1973).

Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure references come from the Project Gutenberg publication, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/153/pg153-images.html#chap07 Release date: August 1, 1994 [eBook #153] Most recently updated: August 28, 2022Credits: John Hamm. Revised by Joseph E. Loewenstein, M.D. [original 1895]