Victorian Poetry

Nilüfer Özgür’s Hardy Deconstructing Hardy: A Derridean Reading of Thomas Hardy’s Poetry (New York: Routledge, 2018) is a dedicated Derridean reading of thirty-four Hardy poems. Throughout, Özgür aims to explore the crisis of representation thrown up by Aristotelian mimesis and the sort of logocentric thinking that Derrida spent his career undoing. Özgür reads Hardy as a Modernist or, at the very least, “a transitional poet with a modern, questioning mind and a language that constructs and deconstructs mimetic reality” (p. 1). Hardy’s poetry represents a certain Modernist sense of anxiety, and the problematized language manifests in the “instabilities and convulsions” of his work. Derrida’s free play of signifiers, the idea that there is no centre of truth, that the centre is always already somewhere else, lies at the heart of this reading. Ultimately, Hardy’s poetry lends itself to Deconstructionist analysis “as it lays bare this problematic relation between language and truth, sign and referent. In all poems by Hardy, absolute truth is unavailable” (p. 1). The book is organized into four sections that, for Özgür, represent the key concepts that expose this relationship between language and truth: Hardy’s agnosticism, his concept of the self, his language and concept of structure, and his concept of time and temporality. In the first, Hardy’s agnosticism is read as a challenge to logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence. The discussion includes a look at such poems as “The Subalterns,” “A Sign-Seeker,” “In the Study,” and “Hap.” [End Page 342]

The second of the chapters, “Self in Hardy—Unified and Fragmented,” argues that the poems present neither an empirical, Cartesian self, nor a post-Freudian fragmented self but, instead, offer something of a “double self” through “double voice and double vision” and sometimes even “multiple selves” (p. 48). Turning once again to “The Subalterns,” Özgür argues for a “distanced self”—a self, after J. Hillis Miller, that is “neither wholly disintegrated nor wholly integrated” (p. 50). With each stanza, the speaker becomes “more passive and less reliable” through various means, including the use of dialogized speech, reported speech, and unusual punctuation. Similarly, in “Christmas in the Elgin Room,” “plural voices and perspectives challenge the unified and integrated sense of the self” (p. 50). The speakers are gods, or the representations of gods, but the dialogized language works to portray them as anthropomorphized. There are, however, no human voices, an absence that erases “the identity of the conventional unified poetic persona” (p. 51).

After a reading of “Moments of Vision” framed by J. Hillis Miller’s concept of the “unmappable self,” “The Voice” is considered in light of Derrida’s “Différance,” defined here, using Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs (1973), as the “possibility of conceptuality,” “the condition for the possibility for any discourse” and, indeed, “the origin or production of differences and the differences between differences, the play [jeu] of differences” (p. 53). As the speaker of “The Voice” remakes the Emma figure into what she was, what the speaker wants her to be, Emma becomes both “a presence and a non-presence in time and beyond time” (p. 54), a representation, perhaps, of “the Heideggerean notion of Being’s continual flickering between absence and presence” (p. 55). Özgür concludes that Hardy’s “concept of the self is self-disbelieving, questioning, at times frustrated” but “it is not a lost self, but a self that attempts to learn to contain the pain of the present and deal with the loss of the past” (p. 106).

Elsewhere, Özgür considers Hardy’s language of negation and the use of irony as destabilizing elements in poems including “The Ruined Maid,” “In the Room of the Bride-Elect,” and “The Vampirine Fair.” Hardy’s use of female speakers in these poems, Özgür suggests, produces “a semantic and linguistic rupture.” “The Woman,” she argues, “is one element by which Hardy proves to transgress the dual oppositions of social constructs” (p. 111). In Hardy’s poetry, “irony ceases to represent a binary opposition. It should be conceived of, instead...