Lecteur silencieux et paysage silencieux : l’incipit du Mayor of Casterbridge de Thomas Hardy

To describe the polysemy of the concept of silence in the novel, we choose to question the nature and the function of silence as a descriptive motive as it appears specifically in landscape description. A history of reading related the emergence of silent reading, but the present contribution studies how silence also creates an analogy between landscape perception and textual reading. The introductive descriptive sequence of Thomas Hardy’s novel The Mayor of Casterbridge proves that Jean-Pierre Richard’s literary chiasmus between “pages” and “landscapes” is not just an abstract metaphor, but crucial to the novel’s imaginary.