Types of Obscurity in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure and ...

Damascus University Journal, Vol.28 No.1, 2012Sabbar S. SultanI shall write a book, he moved, tired of the harlots of earthand air…a book where the phrase is self-consciously smartand slick. The experience of my reader shall be between thephrases ,in the silence, communicated by the intervals, not theterms of the statement.(Ben-Zvi 186)Many of Blanchot's critical and creative texts focus on the act ofwriting itself, its ephemeral nature, and evanescence. In this particularpoint ,one may add, Blanchot is not unique or pioneering as the RussianFormalists such as Jakobson or Schklovsky have already investigated thisfield and emphasized the literariness or 'poetics' of the literary text. IfHeidegger believes that 'the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extra-ordinary,uncanny', this call is actually a reiteration of the Russian concept of'defamiliarization' which Blanchot elaborates as the attempt of literature 'to make the stone stony, a continual search for that which has precededliterature into language'(Schwenger 100).In his experimental novel,Thomas the Obscure, these topics actually form the leitmotif or the cruxof the book. Here Thomas sees himself in various settings, some or all ofthem are hallucinatory. As indicated earlier, the writer is seeking to purgehimself of the 'ordinary' common poison, his own perception. As one ofhis critics puts it, Blanchot 'see the word-on-the paper of the writerdestroying the object it signifies'(Seymour-Smith 507).Yet Blanchot hashis own contribution to this resourceful subject. In his The Space ofLiterature (1955) he emphasizes the absence of a synthesis orrapprochement between the writing subject and what is being written.The critic Paul de Man clarifies Blanchot's critical stand in the followingexcerpt,The writer can never read his own works. It is, for him, strictlyinaccessible, a secret which he hopes not to wish to confront…The impossibility of self-reading coincides with the discoverythat, from now on, there is no longer room for any addedcreation in the space opened up by the work and that,consequently, the only possibility is that of forever writing thesame work over again.(De Man 65)129