The Abyss, the Image and the Turn: Writing Desire in Three Poems by Thomas Hardy

Abstract

This essay examines the relationship between the desiring subject, the power of the gaze and the writing process. “Desire” is understood as “the energy of the human spirit as it struggles for articulation and recognition against, on the one hand, the impossible and unspeakable nature of the Real and, on the other, the productive constraints of language” (Thomas 2). The “gaze” is defined here as the “Orphic turn” away from its object: not exactly the “look awry” (askew or to one side) but the deliberate turn away from the object of desire in order to draw or lead it out of the realm of the unspeakable and into the compromised arena of language. The “desiring subject” is Orpheus, the spirit of the artist writer, embodied in the texts of Hardy’s elegiac poems, in the form of their various first-person narrative “voices”: what might be called (in a nod to J. B. Bullen) the “Expressive I”. The essay takes as test cases three poems by Hardy: “Where the Picnic Was”; “The Voice” and “The Shadow on the Stone”.