The “Poetic Justice” Done by Hardy to Nature in The Woodlanders

Abstract

In the diegesis of Hardy’s novels, the symbolic appropriation of nature is manifest: it is brutal, mortifying. Tragedy often results from a linguistic “error” that conflates bodies and tropes – a deadly confusion between nature and culture. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Tess’s “corporeal blight”, which many Victorians viewed as a moral “fault”, ceases to be a metaphor when it turns into “sticky blights” making real stains on her skin. The sexual act taking place in the forest of the Chase is a form of writing on Tess’s body. Nature here is impregnated by culture. The novel ends with the triumph of the sign: the phallic tall staff, the “black flag” fixed on the tower of the Wintoncester prison, is a writing on the sky which indicates that Tess has been hanged. But Hardy’s poetic texts, whether they be poems or fiction, operate differently. This essay will try to argue that they take us beyond the Symbolic, “beyond the printed page”, to the Real, perhaps to “nature” itself. “Stepping over language” is conceivable in the perspective opened by the Lacanian concept of “lalangue” (“llanguage”), which does not reduce language to its signifying function. This essay will focus on the issue of the textual voice and will ask the following question: whose voice is it that we hear as we read the (silent) text? Do the famous assertions by Deleuze and Guattari on “becoming-animal” through literature seem relevant to Hardy? Could we see “llanguage” as operating a kind of reversal which cancels the symbolic appropriation of nature manifest in the diegesis, thus achieving some kind of “poetic justice” through the text?