Thomas Hardy’s Silences
The article aims at analysing the various forms of silence. It offers a classification of the different forms silence can take: the linguistic silence (ranging from the silence of infantia to the silence of communion, also including silence as a sign), the aesthetic silence (from the silence of the...
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| Veröffentlicht in: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/fathom, |
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Sprache: | Anglais |
| Veröffentlicht: |
FATHOM
2013
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| Online Zugang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Zusammenfassung: | The article aims at analysing the various forms of silence. It offers a classification of the different forms silence can take: the linguistic silence (ranging from the silence of infantia to the silence of communion, also including silence as a sign), the aesthetic silence (from the silence of the ineffable to the silence of vision or intuition), the metaphysical silence (from the silence of things to the silence of God), the narrative silence (a narrative calls a world into being by wresting it out of silence, only to throw it back there once the reading is done), and the temporal silence (what is written is caught between the silence of what is no more and the silence of what will be, between nostalgia and expectation). Hardy’s poetry essentially resorts to three forms of silence: aesthetic, temporal and metaphysical. In Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy uses almost all forms of silence as language, yet very rarely the silence of things, unlike what he does in The Return of the Native where the silence of Nature (in the description of Egdon Heath at the onset of the novel) serves as metaphor for the silence of inexistence that precedes the narrative. Framed between the silence of narrative inexistence and the silence of things, or of God, Hardy’s language is the privileged vector of the creation of a world out of silence. Concerning Hardy’s style, the article uses again an opposition between suture and polyphony, and concludes that Hardy’s style, rather than polyphonic, may be defined as the linguistic transmutation of a multiplicity of silences. |
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