Strategies of Silence

Reflections on the Practice and Pedagogy of Creative Writing

Moy McCrory, Simon Heywood, Moy McCrory, Simon Heywood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367467630
• eBook ISBN: 9781000346886
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This unique book takes silence as its central concept and questions the range of meanings and values which inform the idea as it impinges on the creative process and its content and contexts.

The thematic core of silence allows a consideration of silencing and silence as opposite ends of a spectrum: one shutting down, the other enabling and opening up. As a multidisciplinary collection of essays derived from the teaching and implementation of Creative Writing at university level, the contributors consider silence as strategic, both through the need for silence and as something which compels resistance. They explore how writing has employed images and tropes of silence in the past, and used silence and gaps technically. In considering marginalised and forgotten voices, this book shows how writers bring their diverse range of backgrounds and experience to work with and against silence in Creative Writing Studies.

The first theoretical work on silence in Creative Writing, this field-shifting book is an essential read for both practitioners and students of Creative Writing at the higher education level.

Part I

Silence, solitude and imagination

1 Daydreams and solitude

Working the silent space

Luke M. Thompson

Imagine a ship’s hold, its tightly packed human cargo. The hot air is claustrophobic; rank with the sweat of fearful bodies long unwashed. The incessant pounding of the Indian Ocean on the clinkered hull drowns any attempt at colloquy. In a corner, enveloped in this crowded loneliness, sits a young Portuguese boy. With his head lowered, an observer would never divine the boy’s resemblance to his late father; nor would they see the similarities between this boy and another, the same age, six feet beneath disturbed earth. As the waves roll, the boy remains unmoved, anchored by the weight of his isolation. He is considering his future. He thinks upon his mother’s rash decision; this trip, this exile to strange shores, the wealthy man his mother swears shall return sunlight to their melancholy lives. He holds little hope for such things. He knows he shall be abandoned, ignored in the furnace-glow of a fresh relationship that has scant room for a precocious boy. And he knows, with dull certainty, that he shall never return home, nor play again upon those slick cobbles that the morning sun barred with luminous gold, where the dirty, happy children ran and sang and called to him, this quiet boy, who was their gentlest, kindest friend …

For this Portuguese boy, these feelings of loneliness and isolation were to endure. They would shape his future and personality, and awaken the latent creative talents that lay sleeping within. For this boy, loneliness and silence were to be a way of life: an unshakable influence that would ultimately lead to his early passing. But for the world of literature, his unbroken melancholy was to be a profound and lasting blessing.

This boy was Fernando Pessoa, one of the greatest Portuguese writers of the 20th century and a man for whom the themes of loneliness, silence and isolation were to be definitive and persistent (Boyd 1991). Without the loneliness of bereavement and the silence of his lifelong exile it’s unlikely that Pessoa would have developed the rich inner worlds and characters that led to the creation of his poems and fictions. We would have no Alberto Caeiro; no Bernardo Soares; no Book of Disquiet. It was a desire for sound and community that drove the young Pessoa to populate his inner world with separate personalities, heteronyms and alter egos, fictional identities that possessed different thoughts, feelings, and beliefs from his own, that could communicate with each other, argue with each other and fill his long, lonely silences with the music of intelligent discourse. Silence and loneliness were extremely beneficial for his creativity. But at the same time his loneliness and the mechanisms he employed to deal with his isolation crippled him. Pessoa left this world having never known the joys of a lasting romantic relationship. His friendships were few and far between, and even those who sought to grow close to him were kept at bay by his private and withdrawn nature (Pessoa 2003). In later life loneliness drove Pessoa to drink; a common problem for the chronically lonely (Åkerlind and Hörnquist 1992). And in 1935, after a bout of hepatitis brought on by his alcoholism, Fernando Pessoa passed from life, leaving behind a corpus of unpublished writings that are still being sorted and translated to this day.

Loneliness and the silence that accompanies lonely hours is a cursed chalice. While isolation may provide the inspiration and physical opportunities to create masterful works, the price on an individual’s health and well-being is often great. Lonely people experience more stress in their lives, affecting their hearts (Cacioppo et al. 2006). They find social intercourse more difficult, and will avoid it even while they long for closeness with another (Cacioppo and Patrick 2008). Lonely people perceive themselves in a more negative light and find positive social scenes less rewarding than being alone in natural spaces (Cacioppo and Hawkley 2009). They find that sleep doesn’t refresh them as well as it should (Cacioppo et al. 2002). And they often die at a much earlier age than people who have lived more socially connected lives (Thurston and Kubzansky 2009, Patterson and Veenstra 2010). And yet when we listen to a composition by Beethoven, read the fictions of Virginia Woolf, Rudyard Kipling or Fernando Pessoa, or admire the haunting paintings of Edvard Munch, it’s hard to argue that loneliness, and the profound silence which accompanies it, isn’t sometimes worth the high price. Loneliness and silence are essential ingredients for the development of a creative soul (Storr, 1988, Buchholz 1997, Long and Averill 2003, Averill and Sundararajan, 2014). Without them, many of the world’s greatest works may never have come into being.

Silence and creativity

The world of humankind is formed from the crystallisation of imagination. When we stand in the centre of London and admire the buildings, streets and statues that constitute the British capital, we are admiring the products of human imagination; of thoughts, feelings and concepts that were first crafted in the mind (Ribot 1901). The same is true of poli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: On silence in language and writing
• Part I: Silence, solitude and imagination
• Part II: History and traditions
• Part III: The poetry of silence
• Part IV: Silence as structure: Prose, script and the unsaid
• Part V: The waiting game
• Index