A friend asked what I was reading and was flabbergasted by my answer. “Jude the Obscure? What the hell’s up with that?” I understand. We have so little time in our lives, it seems a bit much to read Thomas Hardy or Dickens or anything less current than, say, World War II. Why torture oneself with social analysis of late-Victorian mores and language?
Yet I read Thomas Hardy and Dickens and the others. My excuses are weak to be sure. First, I still feel obliged to read them even though I’m long gone from college. During my college years when I was an English major, I would scour used book stores and pick up little cheap but excellent editions of authors I was studying. The idea was to read them in my spare time and supplement my education. Get a jump on scholarship or read next semester’s books or just be well read.
I tended toward the English novel, whose form flowered around late 18th century with Fielding and Richardson, matured in the 19th century with Dickens and Hardy, and reached its pinnacle in the 20th with Conrad, Joyce, Orwell, Woolf, and Waugh. (Now were talking English major preferences here, so all those American authors and non-major authors you think I left out just weren’t a part of my interest back then; I was an English major, not an American Lit major after all). Despite moving across county, purging books to make room for cds, videos, and tchotchkies, and discovering new books to love (and thus read), it seems I still have quite a few of those novels and authors on my shelf, so every once in a while I pick one up and dutifully read one.
My other reason for reading Hardy, et al., is that, for me, I don’t like much contemporary fiction. Yes, I’m still into DeLillo, Pynchon, McCarthy, and the other Po-Mo authors, and I can read Tom Clancy or Janet Evanovich just like anyone else, but for the most part, contemporary fiction just doesn’t do it for me. So I drift back in time, reading Nabokov and Carson McCullers, Hemmingway and Faulker, Conrad, Hardy, and beyond. Truth be told, I just like them. And guess what? They’re really good writers, too. Each time I pick up one of these authors I still learn something, both about narrative and about reading. They are authors caught up in their times but they are also still relevant to ours. And if it takes a little more patience to read them, so what? I think I have the patience. And I think they deserve the patience. They’ve earned it.
So that’s why I’m reading Jude the Obscure. That’s what’s up with that.
Filed under: Stuff, Jude the Obscure, novels, reading, Thomas Hardy
