« I am content with tentativeness from day to day » : Thomas Hardy et le parti pris poétique du tâtonnement

Abstract

In his notebooks and prefaces, Thomas Hardy dwells heavily on the elusive, non methodical quality of his writing, pointing at the absence of any philosophical coherence in his work. This deliberate artistic preference for uncertainty is visible in the poet’s hesitant stances, wavering between harsh renunciation and the relief of conscious dreaming. The Hardyan approach to life is therefore essentially a « tentative » one, and Hardy’s work functions as a set of impressions, « a series of seemings ». This constitutes a very personal form of literary impressionism which bears testimony to the modernity of Hardy’s writing, though outside the realm of modernism per se.