Examples of the Pleasure of the Text in Hardy’s Jude

The only method to interpreting a scene from Hardy is to do so with an interpreter’s lens. To do otherwise is foolhardy (fool-Hardy) guesswork at best. Barthes says as much with a load of double negatives. “The pleasure of the text…never denies anything: ‘I shall look away, that will henceforth be my sole negation” (3). In his table of contents Barthes calls this phrase his “Affirmation.” The affirmative betrays itself only through negation, much like light needs dark to achieve its definition. The reader needs the right to look away in order to affirm an interpretation of the text, a pleasure of the text.

Hardy’s description of Jude’s first meeting of the woman Arrabella Donn, who would become his wife, is an affirmation of pleasure, or I think most readers would read it as such.

It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that till this moment Jude had never

looked at a woman to consider her as such, but had vaguely regarded the

sex as beings outside his life and purposes. He gazed from her eyes to her

mouth, thence to her bosom, and to her full round naked arms, wet, mottled

with the chill of the water, and firm as marble.

“What a nice-looking girl you are!” he murmured, though the words

had not been necessary to express his sense of her magnetism.

                                                                                    Part 1. Chapter VI. pars 49-50

 

The positive nature of this passage comes apart in the subsequent chapters as Arrabella marries and abandons Jude. Those moments carry with them an immediacy of knowledge of heartbreak at the unattainable, something that Jude keeps experiencing. The reader experiences the heartbreak along with Jude as the passages flow by. The story takes many turns. Sue Bridehead comes along with her own brand of positivity. Jude feels the affirmation in the instance of each moment with her. But Hardy’s explanation of the nature of fate as the irony plays with him makes the reader feel Jude’s pain as each tragedy goes by on the page.

 

Strange that his first aspiration—towards academical proficiency—

had been checked by a woman, and that his second aspiration—

towards apostleship—had also been checked by a woman. “Is it,” he said,

“that the women are to blame; or is it the artificial system of things, under

which the normal sex-impulses are turned into devilish domestic gins and

springs to noose and hold back those who want to progress?”

                                                                                                Part 4. Chapter III. par 6

 

These musings on his professional situation in relation to his emotional life betray Jude’s sensitivity to life’s tragedies. He attempts to make a black-and-white sense of cause and effect based on sexual impulses in regard to what he sees as the magnificence of the mind. Many tragedies lie here, including a misunderstanding of women as individuals, something the reader would think Jude would have a better grasp on having been in a relationship with Sue.

But these tragedies are small in relation to what comes later. The later tragedies involving his children progressively wrench the emotions of the reader. Both Jude and Sue are in agony over the death of their children, a death caused by Jude and Arabella’s son who suicides. Upon the discovery of the bodies, both Jude and Sue react. “Jude had kept back his own grief on account of her; but he now broke down; and this stimulated Sue to efforts of sympathy which in some degree distracted her from her poignant self-reproach” (VI.II.par. 32). As for Sue:

She sobbed again. “Oh, oh my babies! They had done no harm! Why should

they have been taken away, and not I!”

There was another stillness—broken at last by two persons in conversation

somewhere without.

“They are talking about us, no doubt!” moaned Sue. “‘We are made a spectacle

unto the world, and to angels, and to men!’”

VI.II.pars. 37-39

 

These moments fall with a visceral pain to the reader. The emotion is immediate and full of sentiment, invoking Barthes’ “atopical” text which leaves the author’s intent behind (Barthes 29). Replacing it is the text of pleasure: “We read a text (of pleasure) the way a fly buzzes around a room: with sudden, deceptively decisive turns, fervent and futile” (31). The pain of Jude and Sue, with its sobs and stillness, its heartaches and grief, hit the reader with an immediate empathy.

In the world of Barthes, the reader endures the ironies of the author without acknowledging them except in hindsight. In the immediate moment, the reader is the fool shunned by the expectations of society (3). He/she must have a singular interpretation of the text, his/her own pleasure of the text, first and foremost. The reader defines her/his individuality only through acknowledgement of this incongruity, an acknowledgement that crowds the reader’s mind in what Barthes calls “Babel” (4).

In the examples of Hardy that I have given, the reader approaches each page with this foolishness. The memories of prior pages linger, but the immediacy of the present page is first and foremost the emotional effect that the reader acknowledges. The umbrella effect of the accumulated pages read previously, as well as the anticipation of the arcs of emotion that are to come, creep in only after the immediate sensation of the pleasure of the text. The sensual positivity of Arrabella exists with its unique sensibility to each unique reader. The reader wonders at the ironies of how human sensation may or may not cause a failing of the lofty goals of the mind, in Jude’s world as well as the reader’s own. The tragic nature of the loss of children hits Jude and the reader hard well before the relationship of these tragedies to life’s journey comes into play in human feelings.

A novel as lengthy as Jude the Obscure can overwhelm a reader with its girth as much as its nineteenth-century sense of fatalism. However, the relevance to the workaday world of any reader, perhaps in any time period before or after our own, appears in the immediate impulses of the imagery, the sensual and visceral reaction of the reader, the pleasure given by the text. The reader discerns a defeat of  Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic, an ethic that Jude holds to vehemently throughout his life, in the confrontation with societal irony.

 

__________

References.

Barthe, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Richard Miller trans., Farrar, Straus, & Giroux., 1975.

Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. Project Gutenberg. Release Date: August, 1994 [eBook #153] [Most recently updated: August 28, 2022] [original publication 1890.] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/153/153-h/153-h.htm

Nick Harris

Blog 6/12/2025