« A peculiar poetical-like murmur » : répétition et poéticité dans The Mayor of Casterbridge

This paper tries to explore the poetic dimension of Hardy's prose, by showing how the poetic voice proceeds from various voices that are heard in the diegesis. For a prose text to become poetic, the dimension of automaton must be at work, with the repetition of equivalent units, but the dimension of tuché must also come into play—the encounter with an unsymbolizable Real. In The Mayor of Casterbridge, it is the signifier « ring » which commemorates the traumatic moment when Henchard sold his wife on a fair (when she flung her wedding-ring in his face), a punctum effect (in the acoustic field) whose recurrence punctuates the text and produces all sorts of reverberations—repeated letters, alliterations, acoustic debris and fragments—whereby something of the « voice qua object » is overheard. Once Henchard is fallen, his roaring voice is heard no more, but he lends an ear to the « voice of desolation », the inhuman voice of the river which invites him to take his own life, while Lucetta is killed by the destructive voice of the « skimmity-ride ». The tragic characters are « riveted to the matter » (to Das Ding), but the poetic voice is pacifying because it brings about that flicker of meaning which makes it impossible to take language literally. It puts a bar between words and things, and thus prohibits tragic jouissance.