The Torn Letter

Witness "The Torn Letter", by Thomas Hardy.

I tore your letter into strips

No bigger than the airy feathers

That ducks preen out in changing weathers

Upon the shifting ripple-tips.

In darkness on my bed alone

I seemed to see you in a vision,

And hear you say: 'Why this derision,

Of one drawn to you, though unknown?'

Yes, eve's quick mood had run its course,

The night had cooled my hasty madness;

I suffered a regretful sadness

Which deepened into real remorse.

I thought what pensive patient days

A soul must know of grain so tender,

How much of good must grace the sender

Of such sweet words in such bright phrase.

Uprising then, as things unpriced

I sought each fragment, patched and mended;

The midnight whitened ere I had ended

And gathered words I had sacrificed.

But some, alas, of those I threw

Were past my search, destroyed for ever:

They were your name and place;

And never did I regain those clues to you.

I learnt I had missed, by rash unheed,

My track; that, so the Will decided,

In life, death, we should be divided,

And at the sense I ached indeed.

That ache for you, born long ago, Throbs on;

I never could outgrow it.

What a revenge, did you but know it!

But that, thank God, you do not know.

This poem tells of a person who, upon receiving a mysterious epistle, initally offers tremendous resistance to unravel its contents lets he falls prey to an unmistakable power (a dangerously indeterminate perlocution in the Austinian sense) that the letter would wield over him. However, in an ironic twist, his physical destruction of the letter only serves to accentuate his anguish. For when he eventually succumbs to temptation and ravenously devours the remnants of the message, he realises that the return address; that vital umbilical cord through which the awe-inspired, fragile infant draws nourishment from a surreal nobility, is lost forever. Thus the ultimate tragedy- while seeking out initially to avoid being manipulated by a force so powerful yet so subtle and tender, he finds himself completely crushed by his longing instead. And he still musters enough vanity for self deception, thinking that his plight remains unknown to the perpetuator! How could this be, when by the very act of confession, he has already declared it unabashedly!

Notice the singular, intense power that our unnamed letter writer holds over the reader, monstrously twisting his ego and personality within a matter of lines. Is it the case that letter-writing has unwittingly manufactured phantoms of both writer and reader, the former who appeared in the latter's dream, and the latter whose existence is painfully obvious? Kafka was right about the "dislocation of souls" whenever letters are crafted. So was Derrida, typically astute in his observation of a letter's formidable performative ambivalence. Two ill-defined loci of consciousness negotiating with intentions cast in ink and stone. What insanity! All this should make one shudder and meditate upon the power of the written word- a blessing, curse, promise, threat or a silent kiss, all uttered in the physical absence of the recipient- the infinite gap of feedback, its latent abusive power to shape and mold, to trap an innocuous recipient into the creation of a duplicated, diminished self, simply for the invidious purpose of aligning with concocted intents and representations.

So next time we write letters, please think twice, think thrice, lest we manufacture phantoms that return to haunt us for eternity.