But the horror of public judgment, as it is discussed by the narrator of Desperate Remedies, remains powerful in the story, shaping Sue's curious career and Jude's as well. After their abortive attempt to marry, Jude and Sue find the grocer's boy no longer tips his hat to them, and they are encircled with 'an oppressive atmosphere'; the communal rejection finally extends to Jude's work. Jude and Sue cannot escape observation-'I had no idea,' says Jude, 'that anybody was going to intrude into such a lonely place and see us,' and they come to understand that they have lived in 'a fool's paradise of supposed unrecognition.' Here again, Jude brings to a climax the obsession of Hardy's novels with being observed: distraught at Father Time's suicide and the killing of her children, Sue hears 'two persons in conversation somewhere without': -556- ''They are talking about us, no doubt! moaned Sue. 'We are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men! ' It is, ironically, this shamed assumption of being observed that leads her back to Phillotson and his repulsive but respectable touch.
Even the invisible are observed in Hardy's world, and even a novel deliberately withdrawn from the extraordinary if painful pleasures of Hardyesque observation of the natural world is built upon a recognition that everything is watched and judged. But the window that is central to the last moments of Hardy's career as novelist, as it is to Jude's last moments, is not the sort of medium of distanced observation that it would have been in earlier novels. This is no scene of a fall like Cytherea Graye's from innocence to knowledge. Rather, the scene begins with a fallen figure, almost without the powers of perception, who has never succeeded in rising above his class and whose sexual energies have been almost equally thwarted. Having lived in a fool's paradise of social invisibility, Jude, dying, becomes almost literally invisible-and blind. When he calls out for 'a little water' in the room that Arabella has abandoned in answering the seductive call of the sounds of music and celebration that drift through the window, nobody can hear him. He is too ill to see out. In effect, while the narrator's eye ironically juxtaposes the inside and the outside, Jude is both blind and invisible. As Jude whispers the bleak verses from Job-'Let the day perish wherein I was born'-the voices from outside are counterpointed, cheering the Remembrance games with their 'Hurrah.' Jude's death is unwatched.
What enters Jude's consciousness through the window marks a final irony on a life that has failed to be respectable. While the ironies of this scene seem crudely to reinforce a bleak cosmic imagination of the darkness and irrelevance of human life, it is also a final narrative exploration of that strange complex of vision, class, and sex that I have been arguing is central to Hardy's entire narrative oeuvre. The scene, in which vision fails, can be taken as a critique of the very strategies of distanced, unobserved seeing that provoke Hardy's characters to shame and guilt in their quests both to protect themselves and to indulge their dangerous ambitions. Arabella survives by leaving the window and self-consciousness; Sue crosses the threshold to touching in a desiccated recuperation of propriety; Jude becomes invisible while the outside world retains its power to wound.
By foregoing his strategies of distanced and protected observation in Jude the Obscure, then, Hardy makes it clear why they are so important -557- to him as a novelist. Jude is Hardy's most disturbing if perhaps not his most satisfying book for several reasons. First, it does not provide the consolations of the visible world that so extraordinarily enrich almost every one of his earlier novels, no matter how bleak their implications might be. It is difficult to find in Jude what Gillian Beer rightly finds in most of Hardy's work: 'Alongside his doomed sense of weighted past and incipient conclusion, goes a sense of plenitude, an 'appetite for joy. ' Second, it foregoes the protection of distanced viewing. While the narrator's voice occasionally sagely and gloomily endorses a dark vision of modern civilization, most of such commentary is given to the characters themselves. There are few moments of visionary respite or protection as windows become permeable and touch replaces sight as the dominant, impelling narrative sense. Third, in Jude the fantasy of aspiration beyond the limits of the working class is entirely thwarted. Ironically, although one would imagine such thwarting is characteristic of all of Hardy's writing, his novels tend to reflect a vision of a mobile society in which, from one generation to the next, a Stephen Smith or a George Somerset or an Egbert Mayne might lift himself by professional and intellectual effort (and supreme alertness to observation) into the middle class. The comedy of The Hand of Ethelberta actually sustains Ethelberta's attempt to move into the aristocracy from a workingclass family. In Tess, Liza-Lu does in fact end up with Angel Clare. But in Jude, the working class is invisible. Each figure is locked inside a conventional and repressive social system. And finally, sexuality, always dangerous in Hardy though always attractive, becomes thoroughly repulsive in the relation between Sue and Phillotson. Arabella's exuberant sexuality, perhaps the one instance of joyful touching in the book, insistently impedes the fragile and neurotic love of Sue and Jude and any possibility of Jude's advancement.
Finally, then, Jude rejects seeing as the narrative impulse of Hardy's writing. The daring of the novel's engagement with the modern and with his own career exposes Hardy to the sorts of critiques that, he imagines here, might well have thwarted his ambitions, his urgent need to remain unobserved and respectable. The visionary, the emphasis on seeing, diminishes as Hardy confronts the consequences of «touching» and engagement: Jude becomes a powerfully antivisionary narrative, and as such it can be taken as a fitting conclusion to Hardy's career as novelist.
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The Nineteenth-Century Novel and Empire
WITH Balzac's Human Comedy in mind, Pedro Salinas has called the novel as such 'the imperialistic genre.' Perhaps the totalizing aspirations of all nineteenth-century European novels-including omniscient narration, empiricist description, individualistic assumptions about character, and other conventions of fictional realism-are forms of dominative and hence imperialistic representation. A contrary definition, however, would treat the novel as the undoing of totalizing, imperialistic aspirations. Echoing Mikhail Bakhtin, we might say that, far from being unified, coherent ideological constructions, novels are intrinsically pluralistic. Bakhtin's theory of heteroglossic discourse views the novel as generically subversive of the coherent, univocal structures of earlier literary genres. The novel tends to erode linguistic exclusiveness and therefore also the ideologies of linguistic and racial purity that underpin modern nationalisms and, hence, imperialisms. In contrast to the state-founding theme of the epic, the novel enters 'into international and interlingual contacts and relationships.'
It seems likely, however, that these two definitions of the novel are not mutually exclusive: the novel unifies as it pluralizes, or imperializes as it democratizes. But theoretical debates about the intrinsic ideological bearings of such a wide-ranging literary genre as the novel are likely to be inconclusive; as Bakhtin notes, 'the experts have not managed to isolate a single definite, stable characteristic of the novel.' Nevertheless, starting from the proposition that the British Empire is the outer -560- most perimeter or context within which the expansive text of 'English literature' has been written, all nineteenth-century British novels must in a general way be imperialistic, just as they
