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

Types of Obscurity in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure and Maurice Blanchot's …enigmatic properties that it finds in the book he is reading—like a language with no bottom, rooted in the absolute ,aspontaneous cabala opening the worlds on the page intensivelyread. (Quash 218)This great emphasis on the linguistic components of literature is part andparcel of the intellectual movement that Balnchot initiates or founds(post-modernism) whose overriding principle is the view that language isnot simply a means of knowing the truth; rather it is the means ofproducing or generating that truth. Hence the whole issue in his fiction isa celebration or the attempt to show the different variations of this topic.Out of this linguistic texture keenly wrought the reader is expected topick up the topics he feels gaining foregrounding and charge withvarious connotations and references.One of these issues informing Thomas the Obscure is the impossibilityof death. Thomas repeatedly fails to reach the end that death signifies. Hetherefore remains consigned to the state of indeterminacy and vacillation.Anne's death appears to be a gift for him so that he can have the idealimage of death. In The Space of Literature, there is detailed rationale ofthis topic in Thomas. Here is his account,At first glance, the preoccupation of the writer who writes inorder to be able to die is an affront to common sense. It wouldseem we can be sure of at least one event: it will come withoutany approach on our part, without our bestirring ourselves atall, it will come. That is true, but at the same time it is nottrue, and indeed quite possibly it lacks truth altogether. At leastit does not have the kind of truth which we feel in the world,which is the measure of our action and of our presence in theworld…This explains why no one is linked to death by realcertitude. No one is sure of dying.(p.95)132