Jude the Obscure

"My first three books are each about censorship, as well as being the objects of censorship themselves: Jude the Obscure, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Satanic Verses . Jude the Obscure is about a poor young man, a country boy, who is inspired by the example of his village teacher to commit himself to studying so that he can go to Christminster (which is transparently Oxford). For various reasons, he fails, and makes a series of disastrous decisions, and he is rejected in any event for reasons beyond his control and he dies. The epigraph is all about Christianity and the divorce laws and about the self-destructive possibilities in literary ambition itself. Jude wants to study, and he immerses himself in the Classics and so on, and, in the end, it’s that ambition that does for him. So it’s a curiously self-cancelling work in that way. There is a point at which, when he decides he’s going to live with his cousin Sue, he thinks it’s no longer possible for him to study to be a lay preacher because of the incompatibility of the two aspects of his life. So he decides he has to destroy all his Christian works and he burns them all. Now, when Hardy published the book there was a tremendous outcry, because it was considered to be anti-religious and sexually very frank. A bishop wrote to him and inside the envelope there were a few ashes; the Bishop explained that that was all that was left of the book, which he had burnt. It’s interesting because there’s no reference in the letter to the scene in which Jude burns the Christian books – but it’s as if Hardy got his retaliation in first. The relationship between literature and its censors feels like a kind of agon, in which two contradictory principles are articulated in the moment of their collision."