Retranslating Jude the Obscure II

Abstract

What our detour through, or traversal of, The Well-Beloved surely allows us to propose as a premise to all that follows is that what we have in Jude the Obscure is a ‘dephantasmatized’ world – or, rather, that in Jude what we find is a world in the very process of dephantasmatization: it has yet to reach the apodictic condition that prevails at the end of The Well-Beloved. For if Christminster represents anything it is the ruin of a dream and that dream is, once again, that originary scene which we have seen so obsessing and driving and tormenting Hardy in these late novels. For Christminster is nothing less than one more transcription or translation or repetition of what we have more or less established as Hardy’s ‘originary phantasm’ – the hanging witnessed from Bockhampton. For ease of reference I quote the by now familiar passage again: