k-oink-adink

Doug Millison millison at online-journalist.com
Fri Sep 8 15:10:58 CDT 2000


I've been reading  Hardy's _Jude the Obscure_ on the recommendation 
of a Pynchon Scholar Who Will Remain Unnamed, and was pleased to find 
what might be considered a Pychonesque echo therein.  Towards the end 
of the first part of the novel, Jude and his sluttish wife Arabella 
kill a pig; the scene reminded me of Slothrop's ancestor and his pigs:

"The animal's note changed its quality. It was not now rage, but the 
cry of despair; long-drawn, slow and hopeless.

" 'Upon my soul! I would sooner have gone without the pig than have 
this to do!" said Jude. 'A creature I have fed with my own hands.'

"[....] The dying animal's cry assumed its third and final tone, the 
shriek of agony; his glazing eyes riveting themselves on Arabella 
with the eloquently keen reproach of a creature recognizing at last 
the treachery of those who had seemed his only friends."

At the end of the following chapter, ending part one of the novel, 
Jude returns to a stone on the road to Christminster, where he dreams 
of becoming a scholar and bishop, to find the inscription he had 
carved some time before.  It reads, "Thither J.F." with a pointing 
finger illustrated in the text just as we find in GR.

-- 

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