Thomas Hardy

Duny Fongang

Description

Ce livre, qui est une sélection des communications faites au colloque Thomas Hardy organisé à Lyon les 22-23 octobre 2010 par l'Université Lumière-Lyon 2 et l'ENS-LSH, propose des analyses de Far from the Madding Crowd réparties en quatre thèmes principaux. Après une étude sur le silence, le silence énigmatique du non-dit, du secret, de l'inavoué, de ces trous dans le texte qui ouvrent un espace pour l'interprétation, ou le silence de l'indicible, le livre s'intéresse à la dimensionn visuelle, tant dans l'univers diégétique que dans le cadre d'une adaptation télévisuelle.

Sujets

• Harmattan Littérature
• Littérature

Informations

• Publié par: L'Harmattan
• Date de parution: 02 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 102
• EAN13: 9782296450851
• Langue: Français

Extrait

Far from the Madding Crowd


Thomas HARDY
CYCNOS
Fondée sur les rives de la Méditerranée, la revue Cycnos s’est mise sous l’égide d’un antique roi de Ligurie, comptant bien partager le sort du personnage éponyme que le dieu de la poésie plaça parmi les astres du firmament.
La revue, fondée par André Viola, est publiée par le CIRCPLES (Centre Interdisciplinaire Récits, Cultures, Psychanalyse clinique, Langues et Sociétés) de l’Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis. Elle accueille les contributions – en anglais et en français – de spécialistes extérieurs au Centre.
DIRECTEUR : Christian GUTLEBEN
COMITE SCIENTIFIQUE

Elza ADAMOWICZ, Queen Mary University of London
Michel BANDRY, Université de Montpellier
Ann BANFIELD, Université de Californie, Berkeley, U.S.A.
Gilbert BONIFAS, Université de Nice
Lucie DESBLACHE, University of Roehampton, Londres
Maurice COUTURIER, Université de Nice Silvano
LEVY, University of Hull
Jean-Pierre NAUGRETTE, Université de Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle.

COMITE DE LECTURE

Jean-Paul AUBERT, Université de Nice
Jean-Jacques CHARDIN, Université de Strasbourg II
Genviève CHEVALLIER, Université de Nice
Christian GUTLEBEN, Université de Nice
Marc MARTI, Université de Nice
Martine MONACELLI-FARAUT, Université de Nice
Susana ONEGA, Université de Saragosse
Michel REMY, Université de Nice
Didier REVEST, Université de Nice
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CYCNOS


Far from the Madding Crowd

Thomas HARDY


Responsables du numéro
Catherine Lanone et Christian Gutleben


Revue publiée par le
CIRCPLES
Université de Nice – Sophia-Antipolis


Volume 26 N o 2 2010
© L’HARMATTAN, 2010
5-7, rue de l’École-Polytechnique ; 75005 Paris
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ISBN : 978-2-296-13827-8
EAN: 9782296138278

Fabrication numérique : Socprest, 2012
Ouvrage numérisé avec le soutien du Centre National du Livre
Introduction Catherine Lanone and Annie Ramel

This volume offers a selection of the papers delivered at the annual FATHOM (French Association of Thomas Hardy Studies) conference organized by Annie Ramel at Université Lumière-Lyon 2/Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, October 22-23, 2010. The subject of the conference was’Silence in Thomas Hardy’s Work’, but this is a selection of articles dealing with Far from the Madding Crowd, on a variety of subjects ranging from the question of silence to questions on the visual dimension, gender identifications, and intertextuality.
Silence
Any work of art is constructed around a core of silence. Silence may be what punctuates a text and causes the emergence of meaning. It may be the enigmatic silence of the unsaid, the secret, the unavowed, those gaps in a text that open space for interpretation, against the flaunted meaning which the narrative voice would have us believe. It may also be the silence of the unspeakable, the point where voice jettisons sense and becomes loaded with affect, turning into a jubilatory, vibratory substance. Hardy knew to the full how to make use of the three forms, which these papers explore.
Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s paper gives us an overview of the theme of silence in Hardy’s work, from poetry to the novels. His article begins with a philosophical analysis of the concept of silence, offering a subtle taxonomy of the various types of silences one may find in literary texts ; the analysis of Far from the Madding Crowd is then given as a case in point, a pivotal point in Lecercle’s complete analysis of Hardy’s textual strategy. Drawing upon Lacan’s concept of object-voice, Annie Ramel shows how the blind spot of silence tropes the way in which articulate language is replaced by the language of dominant culture, drawing a significant parallelism between Tess and Bathsheba, whose voice might be choked by Boldwood, while recurrent sounds draw attention to the materiality of language. Jean-Charles Perquin argues that Hardy turns Gabriel Oak from the start into a silent observer, doomed to silence even before he is rebuked by Bathsheba ; Perquin moves from Boldwood’s ludicrous madness to Troy’s loud and fruitless agitation to Gabriel Oak’s speechless, eloquent activity, his emphatic renunciation and silent devotion, linking his humble attachment to the way peasants are silenced by a society on the verge of mutation. Michel Morel offers a thorough study of stylistic silences, from aposiopesis to ellipsis. He probes into sudden suspensions of speech, creating suspense, ironic understatements, eloquent undertones or dialogic impulses.
The visual dimension
Hugh Epstein deals with the themes of gazing, independence and sexuality by focusing on the force of light and on Hardy’s fascination with visibility. Epstein returns, for instance, to the spectacular effect of Troy’s scintillating bladework (turning Bathsheba into a sexually alive woman, but at the cost of independence) and to peculiar visual impressions, such as the unforgettable sunrise on snow corresponding to the fateful letter sent by Bathsheba to Boldwood. Gildas Lemardelé also studies two intensely visual scenes in Hardy’s fiction, the baptism of Sorrow in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and the scene in which Bathsheba opens Fanny’s coffin, two episodes that revolve around a baby’s death and that have an intense iconoclastic, as well as iconographic tension, hinting at Hardy’s growth as a writer from melodrama to more tragic undertones in Tess. As Lemardelé points out, Hardy is an agnostic who can never quite give up the sacred, appropriating mystical images and patterns in his fiction. Raphaëlle Costa de Beauregard focuses on the intensely visual aspect of Hardy’s prose and its transposition in the television adaptation of Far from the Madding Crowd. In this film version, the systematic pictorial references that pepper the novel are not transferred but transposed by equivalent visual echoes that recall Ver Meer and Dutch painting as much as the pre-Raphaelites, creating a subtle web of hints that match the novel’s emphasis on detail and atmosphere.
Women and men
Catherine Lanone shows how Far from the Madding Crowd foreshadows the later masterpiece, Tess of the d’Urbervilles . Unlike Tess, who is reduced by Angel to a visionary essence of a woman, Bathsheba is no ethereal creature but a flesh-and-blood woman at ease in her body. The narrative voice in Far from the Madding Crowd refuses to "throw a Nymphean tissue over a milkmaid", the nymphean tissue Angel so happily casts over Tess. Yet Bathsheba does not totally escape the process of sublimation. Tess will blend the figures of Fanny and Bathsheba into an "oxymoronic fusion". Stéphanie Bernard looks for "some cathartic, Aristotelian qualities" in Far from the Madding Crowd, and finds that neither Gabriel, nor Troy are tragic. Catharsis is at best a mock-catharsis, because Troy is a villain who does not arouse pity, and Boldwood is denied our sympathy as well as the relief and grandeur of death. The only tragedy is that of femininity, because the novel stages the slow encroachment of patriarchal order into a sphere that had seemed to allow for feminine freedom. Gilbert Pham Thanh starts with three male characters, Troy, Boldwood and Gabriel Oak, each standing for a historical form of masculine heroism. But he shows that each posture is untenable. Hardy blurs the limit between genders by creating a masculine heroine and feminized men, in defiance of traditional representations. If this reversal of roles, which makes of Bathsheba an embodiment of masculine heroism, is felt as emancipatory, it is however entangled in ideological patterns which ensure that, in the end, it is men who once more lord it.
Intertextuality
Emily Eells pays attention to the process of inscribing and deleting inscriptions in the novel. She unravels the wide scope of quotations used by Hardy in the novel, quotations which the narrator rarely identifies, from Gray or Keats, Greek and the Bible ; she points to the inadequacy of language, as quotes are often at odds with the text they are embedded in. Isabelle Gadoin offers a subtle reading of Hardy’s use of Gray’s’Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, showing how Hardy recycles the clichés of regret and plays on meaningful or ironic echoes, from the poems to Far from the Madding Crowd, paying particular attention to the epitaph on Fanny’s tomb which contrasts with the way in which she has been erased and annihilated by Troy and society.
PART I Silence
Thomas Hardy’s Silences Jean-Jacques Lecercle {1}

Introduction
Silence can be said in many different ways. You may have recognised an allusion to a famous passage in Aristotle’s Metaphysics (book Γ, chapter 2), "to on legetai pollakôs ,"