ABSTRACT
Referring to the narrative of Gaudete, Ted Hughes remarks how ‘at every point the intonation of the language becomes infected by the tempo and style of whatever character it’s dealing with at the time’. As in Gaudete, in the ‘adventure novel of everyday life’ the initiatory role of chance is played down, the emphasis falling squarely on the hero’s own moral accountability: ‘He undoes the game of chance by his own prurience. The long lines of Gaudete detonate metaphor after metaphor in this way, the ‘bursting fullness’ of the language testifying to an ontological lack over which it makes its sound and fury. Gaudete might be seen as a work in which Hughes vindicates the genre which concedes least to the secular and bleak irreversibility of ‘empirical time’. Hughes speaks of ‘the whole situation being impossibly crystallized in the immovable dead end forms of society and physical life’.
