ハーディのユーモア : 「惑える牧師」の言語表現(1)

‘The Distracted Preacher’ (1879) in Wessex Tales (1888) by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is quite an interesting ‘long short story’ in terms of humour and narrative techniques. This story was received as ‘capital trifle, light and amusing’ and ‘irresistibly comic’ when published. Hardy is still now regarded rather fixedly as a writer of tragic and pessimistic novels, stories and poems. This conventional image of Hardy is at once blown away if we read this comical story. Hardy started writing novels with an acute critical eye on the society of class-consciousness, and therefore his works are in a sense full of satirical and ironical treatment of the then society and its system. One of his earliest novels, however, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), whose title is from the song in the Wood of Arden in Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It (1599), is a pastoral novel with a tint of pathos and humour. Hardy was an ambitious writer with keen consciousness of narrative techniques and seems to have tried every mode of narrative including humour, which element is as it were an undercurrent even in tragic novels like Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1896).
Focusing on Hardy’s humour might have the possibility of changing the quality of his novels and stories, and would contribute to reevaluation of his writings in general. In this paper ‘The Distracted Preacher’ is discussed and analyzed from the point of humour and narrative technique with the attention to linguistic characteristics in the story.