The “passion for particularity” in The Return of the Native

Miranda: Revue Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone

关键词: anamorphosis;    anomaly;    evolution;    litter;    object-gaze;    real;   

DOI  :  10.4000/miranda.719

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Gillian Beer argues that Hardy shared with Darwin what she calls “the passion for particularity.” Hardy’s relish in details is undoubtedly an effect of science for, as J.-A. Miller has shown, the rise of the discourse of science has caused the substitution of knowledge for meaning and, by way of consequence, the emergence of what Lacan will later call “the Real”. Of the Real, science can give no account, but it is precisely the left-overs of science which are the proper domain of literature. In The Return of the Native, Eustacia Vye is such a sublime object failing to adapt to the demands of evolution: her figure on the heath stands “singularly” against the sky, her bonfire is unique—a fiery spot which is her true identification trait. The fiery (or blood-red) stain is Eustacia’s hallmark, but the ubiquitous presence of the reddleman suggests that the whole Egdon community has somehow been contaminated. The stain is a figure of the Lacanian object-gaze, the unrepresentable object which should normally be “extracted”, and whose inclusion in the field of the visible causes devastation all around. Only the death of Eustacia will erase the stain: by causing the disappearance of the surplus object, the expulsion of the tragic scapegoat, which achieve catharsis, is thus rewritten from the perspective of Darwinian selection.

【 授权许可】

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