NOTES OF 5^TH JUNE 2012

The insistence on focus on specific details of characters or situations creates a dramatic effect as the one you come across in reading a tragedy. All this is apparently at the expense of plot development and some frequent part of the novel are arranged as if the novel were made of scene that is very similar to what happens in modernist novels.

In addiction Thomas Hardy seems to privilege certain more bit details.

We can understand that there is the use of the grotesque in order to reach an effect of disgust and tragedy, where the human being appears harmless, alone.

Hardy’s novels have been compared to Greek tragedies and together with Schopenauer’s idea of immanent will, Hardy’s characters appear victims of some inscrutable forces.

Jude the Obscure offers a perfect example of a character who strangely depends on his strongest flow: his inability to reach a balance between rationality and instincts.

Hardy’s artistic vision can be associated to philosophical scepticism and Darwinism as well as his Wessex, which gives a realistic flavour to the novel.

Hardy showed harmony of view with Spencer, Hume, and Comte and defined his ideas as “evolutionary meliorism” based on the attempt of perfecting life.

 There is an affinity between his view and Schopenauer’s concept of immanent will. Indeed, Thomas Hardy’s philosophy is a sum of Darwin’s selection theory and Schopenauer’s philosophy, which is based on the existence of a will incontestable by man.

Man’s struggle and the conflict between instinct and reason take place in a world dominated by omen, unhappy coincidences, accidences.

Hardy’s fiction has been compared to Greek tragedy. As in the Greek tragedies, Hardy’s characters become victims getting to tragedy by a flow in their nature.

MAN’S CHARACTER IS HIS PERSONAL DESTINY OR DEMON.

Themes of guilt, sin, responsibility and remorse are typical of Hardy’s fiction. Jude is brought to his downfall by his scholarly ambition, by his humanitarian ideals; he’s a man who believes in values of spiritual emancipation by ends up discovering they are hollow and false.

His most intimate problem is the conflict between flesh and spirit. His intellectual aspirations are crashed by his own sensibility, especially for Arabella, who is the embodiment of instinctual desire and of his weaknesses. Jude leaves Arabella but he cannot bear the bourdon of earlier mistakes and beside he had too many passions in conflict with one another.

The novel foreruns twentieth century literature through the density of psychic life images, of introspection, of inner torments and the description of an all high society.