For instance, in the Mayday dance scene at Marlott, nothing is said about the music to which the girls are dancing, we could almost fancy that the girls are dancing in silence (if one excepts the brief mention at the end of the previous chapter that “the faint notes of the band were the only human sounds audible within the rim of blue hill”, Hardy 1991, 17). In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, all sound aspires to the condition of silence.
But the reader of Hardy’s fiction is made to use his visual imagination even in cases when he should be made to hear rather than see, because the characters remain silent when they should be speaking, or because the narrator/focaliser makes us hear what I have called “the sound of silence”. As Jacques Ranc (.)ġ Hearing with one’s eyes is what any reader of literature does: the “textual voice” is the silent voice which the reader fancies he can hear 1. 1 The “textual voice” is a concept developed by Claude Maisonnat (Maisonnat 164-180).
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