[In the following excerpt, Sonstroem focuses on Jude's at times "disorderly, random, [and] repetitive" migrations within the structured course of Jude the Obscure to illustrate the thematic implications of Hardy's framing of chaos in "intricate order."]

In his thought-provoking "A propos de la construction de Jude the Obscure,"¹ Fernand Lagarde presents Hardy's novel as a rigidly balanced quasi-architectural construction, within which characters dance an intricate "ronde" or quadrille. In support of his view he points to the symmetrical disposition of chapters within each Part of the novel and among the six Parts, to the placement of a crisis at the precise center of each Part, and to many other such structural harmonies. He notes, too, the extensive network of similarities and contrasts among the personalities and careers of the four leading characters—implicit relationships that Hardy carries into even minute details: "Le roman tout entier est un subtil entrelacs de correspondances" (211); "On n'en fimirait pas de dresser une liste de ces rapprochements, de ces répétitions de l'expérience" (208). In short, for Lagarde Jude the Obscure is a thoroughgoing "recherche de la symétrie" (191).

At least one critic takes issue with his reading, finding it "remarkable" but "ultimately resistible." ² I suspect that Michael Mitigate's wariness is due to the abiding impression of disorganization conveyed by Jude—an impression of messy randomness that no skillful, extensive demonstration of order can dispel. Nor is he alone in sensing a chaotic streak: Ward Hellstrom, for example, has noted that "Jude's movement from place to place is a dramatic illustration of 'the modern vice of unrest,'" and Ian Gregor has similarly observed, "our sense of the form of the novel in reading it, is of something … turbulent, a sense not of imposed design but of vexed movement.… "³

For my part, I find Lagarde's reading of Jude irrefutable but incomplete. The intricate design that he describes is demonstrably present in the novel, and he deserves thanks for opening our eyes to the remarkable extent of it. But in discerning narrative symmetries and thematic designs, he scants the erratic emotional, intellectual, and especially physical vagaries of the leading characters, those of Jude especially. At one point Lagarde does recognize a strain of disorder in this aspect of the book: referring to Vilbert, he remarks, "sa ronde immuable, placée comme elle l'est au début et à la fin du roman, vient à point nommè souligner la déroute de ceux qui osent tenter d'organiser à leur guise leur destinée." But within a few lines even Jude's peregrinations are included in what Lagarde calls "les mouvements de la danse" (199). I would maintain that Lagarde is at his weakest in considering simple movement of characters from place to place—the aspect of the novel from which other readers gain their impression of it as chaotic. To right me balance, I wish to examine Jude's itinerary in detail. I shall then proceed to a brief consideration of the relationship between the extraordinary order and the extraordinary disorder that Hardy depicts in Jude the Obscure.

Jude's journeys take place in and about "Wessex"—southwestern England overlaid with Hardy's fictive place-names, contracted somewhat, and suffused with his significances. We are led to assume that Jude is born in Marygreen. After his mother's death he lives for a time with his father in Mellstock, South Wessex. When his father, too, dies, the ten-year-old orphan returns to Marygreen to be reared by his great-aunt Drusilla. In this drab hamlet Jude reaches young manhood while nursing an obsessive, unrealistic vision of Christminster, the university town he worships from a distance as "the heavenly Jerusalem" (I, iii, p. 18). Jude's next move is to Alfredston, where he learns stone-masonry to support himself while preparing for entrance to Christminster. On one of his weekly walks between Alfredston and Marygreen he encounters Arabella Donn. An onrush of animal passion prevails, and shortly he finds himself married to her and living in a cottage between Alfredston and Marygreen. Even in geographical terms he has taken a backward step on his way to Christminster. But Arabella soon leaves him, and he returns to Alfredston. Three years later he finally goes to Christminster, taking a room in a suburb nicknamed "Beersheba" (the original Beersheba, we remember, was at a great remove from Jerusalem, being on die very outskirts of the Promised Land). In Christminster Jude comes to know his cousin, Sue Bridehead, to whom he has felt a rarefied attraction even before meeting her. In the course of their first interview they walk from Christminster to nearby Lumsdon to call on his old schoolmaster, Richard Phillotson, under whom Sue promptly takes a position as pupil-teacher. Jude journeys at least twice to Lumsdon to see her and once to Marygreen to visit his aunt, now in failing health. Discouraged by his inability to gain access to the university or to Sue's affections, Jude eventually returns to Marygreen. But soon he moves to Melchester to be near Sue, now attending the Melchester Normal School in preparation for marrying Phillotson. When she anticipates her rustication and flees to Shaston, Jude visits her there. After Sue weds Phillotson, Jude revisits his sick aunt in Marygreen and then continues to Christminster. There he happens upon Arabella, with whom he goes to Aldbrickham to spend the night. Returning the next day to Christminster, he is sought out by Sue, and he goes with her to Marygreen to visit their aunt yet again. Thence he reverts to his old quarters and employment at Melchester. After a disillusioning round trip to Kennetbridge to meet the composer of a hymn that has moved him, Jude journeys to Shaston to see Sue. Within a week he is called from Melchester to Marygreen upon the death of his aunt. There he again sees Sue and then goes back to Melchester.

When Sue forsakes Phillotson for Jude, Jude boards her train at Melchester, and they proceed to Aldbrickham—the first stage on their travels as a couple. There the discordant keynote of their relationship is struck: they quarrel when Jude inadvertently takes Sue to the very hotel to which he had brought Arabella a month before. Nevertheless, they remain together in Aldbrickham for some time. When gossip over their irregular domestic connection hinders Jude from finding work, they leave Aldbrickham to lead a nomadic life, driven for several years from place to place. Hardy mentions Sandbourne, Casterbridge, Exonbury, Stoke-Barehills, Quartershot, and Kennetbridge as typical stations in their wayfaring, and he pauses to present the couple in more detail at fairs at Stoke-Barehills and Kennetbridge. Eventually they return to Christminster, where after much difficulty they find lodgings for Sue and the children in one place and for Jude in another. The catastrophic death of the children ensues, and a chastened Sue returns to Phillotson, now teaching at Marygreen. Still at Christminster, Jude remarries Arabella in the carelessness of his despair and contracts consumption. He recklessly travels to Marygreen in a driving rain for a final meeting with Sue. Then he returns to Christminster and Arabella, where after a time he dies, utterly discouraged and embittered, at the dismal locus of his brightest dreams.…

[A map of Jude's migrations would indicate] a course remarkable for its length, its frequent shifts in direction, and its asymmetry—remarkable, too, for its repetitious revisitings, yet its apparent randomness. What do these qualities signify? The peculiar purport of Jude's itinerary emerges when we compare it on the one hand with the direct course of the protagonist in a shapelier novel and on the other hand with the utterly random course of the protagonist in a loosely organized novel.

Although Jude's path is probably an accurate condensation of that which most human beings actually take through life, it is extraordinarily elaborate and ungainly for the protagonist of a novel. Compare it, for example, with that of Jane Eyre. In Jane Eyre each place has its own meaning, and Jane's path is one of progress. Jane proceeds from Gateshead to Lowood, Thornfield, Marsh End, and finally Ferndean. Every new locale marks a stage in her growth, presenting her with a more advanced opportunity or challenge, as geographical movement reenforces personal development. Although Jane revisits Gateshead once and once Thornfield, Charlotte Bronte permits her to do so largely to show the reader that Jane cannot in fact reenter a situation she has outgrown. As Jane develops, she suffers her full share of dilemmas, but the relatively limited number of stages in her trim itinerary and their sharp differentiation bespeak the sureness of her growth.

In comparison with Jane's course or any other typical protagonist's, Jude's is much more extensive and far untidier. Others may log more miles than Jude does, but it would be hard to find a protagonist who changes direction so often. Jude's course is unusual, too, in its lack of economy—its turns and returns that bring about no real changes. Melchester, Lumsdon, and especially Marygreen and Christminster draw Jude time and again but to no significant effect. He leaves as he arrives, no happier and little wiser. None of the many removals marks an advance or makes a big difference. ⁵ Indeed, much of the poignancy of the novel hinges on Jude's expectation, which dies hard, that a change of place will bring about an improvement in his circumstances: his very last words to Sue are "Let us … run away together!" (VI , vii, p. 309). Jude never fully learns that the novelist's convention is not true to life: a change of place is not accompanied by a change in the human condition.

On the other hand, Jude's path through life is extensive and erratic enough to be that of a picaro, yet again there are telling differences. Unlike a picaresque novel, Jude the Obscure is not episodic. Jude holds to the same or at least related goals as he moves from place to place, and he suffers in one place the consequences of his behavior in another. In other words, Jude's world is uniform and interconnected, as the picaro's is not. Furthermore, the picaro instinctively comprehends and makes the most of the world in which he finds himself, whereas Jude mistakes the nature of his world, to his greater sorrow. The typical picaro, an unreflective creature, has no goal in life other than random adventure; he attends utterly to the here and now. Never bored because everything that concerns him changes as he goes, he lives on the difference between place and place, each locale appearing to him as a fresh and self-contained world. One might say that he is reborn with every removal. Not so Jude. Jude is never satisfied with the here and now, looking always beyond immediate circumstances for fulfillment. Unlike the picaro, he is always disappointed: as he moves, the world stays the same at base, and his past hounds him. His constant revisiting of Christminster and, to a lesser degree, Marygreen and Melchester (whereas Jack Wilton, for example in Thomas Nash's The Unfortunate Traveller visits no place twice) is a sign of the dreary uniformity of Jude's world. Unwilling to give up the premise that things are different elsewhere, Jude compulsively returns again and again to the sites of his greatest expectations in the hope of finding something fresh and better that he has overlooked. He never finds any such thing. His failure is especially galling because of the presence in the novel of Arabella and the itinerant Vilbert (a well-matched pair indeed), both of whom operate on picaresque assumptions and thrive in so doing. In short, the extensive, random path of the picaro signifies the vibrant exploration of a perpetually varying world, whereas Jude's extensive path—sometimes repetitive, sometimes random—signifies a wearisome struggle to escape a world teasingly diverse in superficial appearance but always ultimately noxious to decent, sensitive humanity.

Comparing Jude the Obscure both with the conventional novel and with the picaresque novel, we find it differing from both in the same basic way. Whereas both assume the fictive convention that change of situation is accompanied by important changes in the human condition, Jude contradicts the assumption. In any respect that matters, one place is like any other.

Hardy makes his point by means of Jude's travels and also by subsidiary means. For instance, the second chapter shows Jude in the middle of Farmer Troutham's field, a "wide and lonely depression in the general level of the upland." In this "vast concave"

the brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year's produce standing in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and the path athwart the fallow.… The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings in a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history beyond that of the few recent months.… (I, ii, p. 13)

The field in all its ugly uniformity is the world writ small, and the map of Jude's wanderings might well be scored into its soil.

Another way in which Hardy develops the meaninglessness of situation is to show Jude pursuing more than one goal. Jude is attracted not only to Christminster but also, of course, to Arabella and Sue, human counterparts to his geographical desires. The easily won Arabella and the skittish Sue promise, like Christminster, a fulfillment that proves chimerical. Life with each of them, like life in Christminster, is ordinary and distressing after all. By having Jude pursue several unsatisfying goals—companions as well as locations—Hardy leads us beyond questioning the individual objects of Jude's aspirations to questioning the assumption common to them all, namely, that a better situation is somewhere to be found. Hardy encourages this more radical consideration by taking every opportunity to show, in the latter half of the book especially, how very much the earthy Arabella and the aetherial Sue resemble each other. Sue winces when Arabella remarks, "Bolted from your first [husband], didn't you, like me?" (V, ii, p. 213) but the parallel is justly drawn. Again Arabella tells a grating truth in saying of Sue, "she's took in a queer religious way, just as I was in my affliction at losing Cartlett…" (VI , iVol. p. 282). The cumulative effect of these and many other such passages is a drastic reduction, in the reader's eyes, of the distinction between the two women. At first glance they seem remarkably dissimilar, but we come at last to see them as sisters under the skin. Hardy's masterstroke in this regard is having Arabella and Sue trade places at the end. Early in the novel we find Jude with Arabella in Marygreen, where he is hindered from going to Christminster and to Sue, who lives there and is associated with the place. At the close of the novel we find Jude with Arabella in Christminster, where he is hindered from going to Marygreen and to Sue, who now lives there. ⁶ Having the two women exchange the places with which they are first associated blurs the distinctions on which Jude's quest depends. We are led to feel that, whatever Jude may think or do, any change in situation—from place to place, companion to companion—makes no real difference at all.

In sum, Jude's itinerary is an important part of a gruelling demonstration that situation does not matter; wherever he happens to be, "Jude stands alone and in the open.…"⁷ The broadest, most telling irony of the book is that physical sense Jude does achieve his goal: born in Marygreen, he dies in Christminster; his tortuous path does lead to the city of his desires. But the bitter irony is that Christminster proves merely another clod or stone upon the expanse of earth. Jude might just as well have saved himself the trouble and stayed where he began.

To be sure, easy acceptance of his surroundings would diminish Jude's stature. We respect him for the dogged pursuit of his visionary ideals. But because he cannot begin to approach the ideal he pursues, he remains in effect a creature in a tormenting snare. The tale told by Jude's course is one of entrapment in circumstance. His protracted, errant path through life betokens neither progress nor even fresh adventure, as in a more typical narrative, but the sometimes repetitive, sometimes erratic, always futile writhings of an animal in a springe—a recurrent image in the novel. Unlike the pig he kills, Jude bleeds all too slowly. His long, contorted path through life and the imagery of entrapment it represents are admirably suited to Hardy's high argument; the exquisite misfit between the external world and the individual mind, and the painful meaninglessness of human existence.

We must now make what sense we can of the fact that the path of Jude winds through a novel that is nevertheless an extensive "recherche de la symétrie." How can we reconcile the erratic course of the protagonist with the dance-like disposition of the four leading characters and with the ornate architectural symmetries of the novel as a whole? We can only speculate on Hardy's deepest intentions. We can, however, recognize a similar pattern in other works by Hardy. Moreover, we can note a common effect produced by all such works and tentatively infer a purpose behind that effect.

Everyone knows that after writing Jude, Hardy quit novels to write poems instead. In one respect, though, he did not change his course, for the poems tend to reproduce in miniature the aesthetic pattern of Jude. By and large, the poems, too, are one shapely presentation after another of things gone awry. In the incidents related in the poems—example after example of "life's little ironies"—we repeatedly find the random or unexpected subsumed by a larger order. "The Convergence of the Twain" (1912) aptly illustrates the process:

      And as the smart ship grew
      In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

     Alien they seemed to be:
     No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,
       Or sign that they were bent
     By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event 8

The "path" of the iceberg seems determined by physical laws; that of the Titanic, by the allied aspirations of its builders and passengers. Disparate in almost every way, the two enormous objects seem quite "alien," worlds apart. From this perspective their collision appears a freakish, meaningless disaster, an absurd, inexplicable disruption of natural and human order. But Hardy presents it instead as supremely orderly—as the climax of an elaborate cosmic practical joke. "The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything" choreographs the seemingly independent courses of the two objects into a shocking union.

The speaker of the poem clearly takes grim pleasure in this mock marriage arranged by the Immanent Will. The speaker justifies the prank on the grounds that it is a suitable punishment for human pride. What makes the moralizing ring false is the speaker's (and, through him, the Immanent Will's) relishing the scheme. Life's disasters seem due far less to human pride than to the Immanent Will's penchant for contriving. The poem suggests that Hardy preferred an orderly world, even one governed by gloating sadism, to an absurd one, subject to meaningless, random calamities.

Hardy's very metrics turn apparent chaos into larger harmonies. His preoccupation with meter is evident and often noted. He experiments with stanzaic form especially, seldom using a scheme for more than one poem. In a typical poem of his, a line will vary greatly from other lines in the stanza in its number of feet, yet the lines do always obey a rhyme scheme, and later stanzas do faithfully repeat the peculiar pattern of the initial stanza. What at first seems random and even chaotic is finally incorporated into a larger, rigid pattern. In "The Convergence of the Twain," for example, we find two rhyming three-stress lines followed by an "irregular" line of six stresses; the incipient pattern of trimetric couplets is disrupted. It is replaced, however, by a new pattern, which serves as metric analogue to the actual convergence: two lines go their separate ways so to speak, until in the third line they are unexpectedly mated. The triple rhyme blesses the union of the whole. An d as stanza follows stanza, we meet with an unbroken series of converging twains. In this way, too, Hardy schematizes the irregular.

I have glanced at the poems to establish that Jude the Obscure is not unique among Hardy's works for framing chaotic randomness within an intricate order. The aesthetic disposition is apparently a habit of mind, not a local stratagem. With respect to this disposition, Jude differs from the poems in at least two ways. The first is, of course, the sheer extent to which the two aspects are developed. Jude would be remarkable simply for its "subtil entrelacs de correspondances," traced by Lagarde, or for the protagonist's lengthy, tangled path, traced above. How much more remarkable it is, therefore, that Hardy painstakingly worked both these extensive linear configurations into the same novel. His doing so is especially intriguing because the two are contradictory in purport, one set of lines describing a messy, meaningless world, the other a harmonious one. Why Hardy would dwell thus on a contradiction may be implied in the second difference between novel and poems: in Jude the disruptive element is far more prominent than it is in the poems. The poems, their tidy schémas visible for all to see, are finally not so disturbed or disturbing as Jude, whose structural symmetries, once noted, can seem merely an elaborate game, quite beside the point of the tale told by Jude's path of pain and confusion. Mitigate's resistance to Lagarde's essay is evidence that the symmetries of the novel can seem irrelevant to it.

The two linear configurations are demonstrable aspects of Jude; the significance of their relationship is open to interpretation and conjecture. To me the conjunction of the two patterns suggests the following possibility. The path of Jude drew Hardy to the brink of universal shapelessness—to nihilism. Courageous enough to mark the path and its purport thoroughly and clearly, Hardy remained profoundly unwilling to follow his protagonist to its end. The artist in Hardy manifested this unwillingness in the elaborate symmetries that Lagarde details. When the path of Jude nevertheless overwhelmed Hardy's attempts to resist its implications, Hardy turned to poetry, the most conspicuously orderly of genres. There the conflict between absurd chaos and design could be resumed on grounds more favorable to the latter element. Hardy proceeded to write poem after poem revealing both the continuance of the conflict within him and the preference for an orderly universe, even a malicious one, over one without underlying shape or purpose.

¹Fernand Lagarde, "A propos de la construction de Jude the Obscure," Caliban, III (Jan 1966), 185-214.

²Michael Millgate, "Thomas Hardy," in Victorian Fiction: A Second Guide to Research, ed by George H. Ford (NY: Modern Language Association of America, 1978), p. 329.

³Ward Hellstrom, "Hardy's Use of Setting and Jude the Obscure," Victorian Newsletter, No. 25 (Spring 1964), 11; Ian Gregor, The Great Web: The Form of Hardy's Major Fiction (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1974), p. 207.

⁴"Most commentators have assumed that Jude was born in Mellstock. They do so on the basis of Drusilla Fawley's remark, p. 12 (I, ii), that Jude "come from Mellstock, down in South Wessex, about a year ago… where his father was living.…" But they overlook I, xi, where Drusilla says that, when Jude was a baby, his parents left each other permanently near the Brown House barn, on the outskirts of Mary green: "Your mother soon afterwards died—she drowned herself, in short, and your father went away with you to South Wessex, and never came here any more" (p. 58).

Quotations are taken from Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, ed by Norman Page (NY : Norton, 1978). The many editions of the novel lead me to refer to part and chapter as well. All subsequent references are given in parentheses in my text.

⁵See Jean R. Brooks, Thomas Hardy: The Poetic Structure (Ithaca, NY : Cornell UP, 1971), p. 268: "The return to certain places connected with significant action is a well-tried narrative technique, which Hardy does not disdain to use in his most modern novel to mark the ironies of human progress." Here Brooks underestimates Hardy's originality. Hardy uses an old technique to new effect: Jude's returns measure no progress at all, except, perhaps, a painful, slow awakening to grim realities—if that be progress.

⁶Although he does not interpret it as I do, the reversal of place is pointed out by Bert G. Hornback, The Metaphor of Chance: Vision and Technique in the Works of Thomas Hardy (Athens, Ohio: Ohio State UP, 1971), p. 137.

⁷J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1970), p. 3.

⁸The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed by James Gibson (NY: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 306-7.