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

Damascus University Journal, Vol.28 No.1, 2012Sabbar S. Sultanendless postponing of the literary meaning and concealment as a result ofthe writer's failure to command his own medium or the slippery side ofthe language itself. Also Barthes's famous article 'Death of the Author'(1967) and Foucault's 'What is an Author' (1970)have their own startingpoint in Blanchot's cogent arguments stated in The Space of Literatureand many other books. As De Man puts it, Blanchot' wants us to take thework for what it is and thus to rid it of the presence of the author'(de Man64).Thanks to Blanchot's critical discussions, the idea of 'the death ofliterature' takes its final and conclusive shape. The manifestations of thisepistemological and intellectual malaise are many. Among these is therealization that the reader gradually replaces the author in determining thefinal meaning of the literary text and the critic competes and defeats thewriter in the literary process (Kernan 2). Blanchot anticipated the callsfor the vigorous role of the reader when he mentioned that 'It is said thatevery writer writes in the presence of a certain reader' (Blanchot,1995,359).The only defense or justification for such a lengthy introduction isthe fact that Blanchot is a puzzling figure in the creative and critical scenenot only for people from different languages and cultures but also for hisown European community. Leaving his critique aside, we find that hisfiction never veers from this pivot. Indeed his fiction, represented by hisThomas the Obscure belongs to the self-referential type inaugurated bySterne's Tristram Shandy (1760-7) and Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist asa Young Man( 1914). It seeks to investigate its own tools and reminds thereader of the fictionality of its text. Moreover there is a successfulwedding between the creative and the critical, or if you wish, the creativeis made to serve the critical and exemplify it, concretize it, as it were. Hisfictional texts pursue one invariable line: the keen interest to show how'the formal features of a text, matters of style, can be indices to largeintellectual and cultural matters'(Strier 211).The linguistic levels of hisfiction can not be isolated from his thematic ones. In one of the anecdotesof Thomas, the common notion of reading virtually inverts: it is the textthat reads the reader,Under the pressure of a liminality that binds reader to what hereads ,Thomas's reading mutates until it begins to manifest the131