L’amour et la lettre : épîtres pauliniennes et réécriture romanesque chez Thomas Hardy

Abstract

In Hardy’s fiction love often entails biblical resurgences, notably from the New Testament. Among these, the first epistle to the Corinthians seems to be the most widely used. One thinks for instance of the strong echoes of it in The Return of the Native, Tess of the D’Urbervilles or Jude the Obscure.However, the attention granted to Job and Ecclesiastes has often led the diffuse yet insistent presence of Pauline writings in Hardy’s novels to be neglected, or has led to excessively narrow parallels. It will thus be necessary to probe into the patterns shared by the apostle and the writer, and into the modes of this intertextuality, in the light of Hardy’s well-know ambivalence towards Holy Scriptures, and of the paradoxes of his religious approach. This paper endeavours to get a better grasp on the torsions and inversions imposed by Hardy on the principle of love par excellence (Christian charity or agape) that is expounded in the epistle to the Corinthians. The integration of this biblical hypotext, and its appropriation by Hardy, lead in effect to the transformation of the epistle and of peripheral Pauline writings. This process of rewriting, which obviously implies a secularisation of the sacred and evinces a loss of the original divine perspective, constantly establishes and dissolves links between St Paul’s precepts and hardyan thought.The supposed influence of paulinism therefore seems to contain a strong polemical dimension, which the author weaves and unveils novel after novel. The novels illustrate the cruel or ironic limits of ideal love, which becomes deadly when it is elevated as a law, and remains inaccessible for the human subject without a divine perspective.