Silence and Subject in Modern Literature

Spoken Violence

U. Olsson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137350985
• eBook ISBN: 9781137350992
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Why does interrogation silence its object and not make it speak? Silence vs speech is a central issue in classical and modern literary works. This book studies literary representations of the power relations in which we are forced to speakusing a range oftexts rangingfrom the modern crime novel, via classics, to avant-garde plays.

1

The Exemplary Becomes Problematic, or Gendered Silence: Austen’s Mansfield Park

‘No, indeed I cannot act.’ Spoken by Fanny Price in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, the simple constative also has a certain air of refusal (‘indeed’), and, as such, her statement will be voiced again, by other characters, in slightly different words, throughout my book. Fanny’s utterance is ambiguous: it not only describes a position, taken by Fanny; it is also the performance of an act – when saying that action is not possible. Fanny’s words are inscribed in a world of ‘delicate balance’,1 in a conversation culture, where a refusal to speak is absolutely unacceptable. And the action that Fanny talks about is most of all linguistic: she cannot speak with another’s tongue, she must be sincere, and not disguised; at the same time, her social and moral standing makes conversation difficult for her, especially since conversation does not promote sincerity, but rather politeness.2 Fanny speaks only to voice her silence.

The Economy of Language

One can read the novels of Jane Austen as speech economies or, to paraphrase Michel Foucault, as economies of ‘discursive constellations’.3 By this I wish to suggest that the lines uttered in a conversation not only form a balance between interlocutors, but that this balance is a form of monetary economics, in which a line can be exchanged for the answers of one’s conversational partner – which is not to suggest that it is a free, voluntary and equal exchange. It is, rather, the opposite: this exchange is marked by power relations.4 The idea of a spoken ‘economy’ is of course not mine: among others, Nancy Armstrong states that ‘[p]olite speech is not simply a psychological function … but a medium of exchange, a form of currency that alone ensures a stable community.’5 This thought was already circulating in the eighteenth century: ‘Conversation is a sort of Bank, in which all who compose it have their respective shares.’6 We can, of course, also find this economic discourse much later, and more frequently, in modern literature. The ‘economy’ of language is a recurrent figure of thought, and in Austen’s novels we read how the general rules of linguistic exchange and balance materialize locally. It is not accidental that Mansfield Park starts out with the emphasis put on the economy, or the oikonomia: a ‘handsome house and large income’. On the very first page, the relations between people are interpreted as financial relations: while some have big mansions, others have ‘scarcely any private fortune’ – and who, then, is the most attractive on the marriage market? And we see how, as in a literary fantasy, with the formation of a market economy the lowest-priced object, Fanny, might transform into the most valued good, Fanny Price. Or, as Austen’s ironic view of these things is formulated: ‘there certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world, as there are pretty women to deserve them’. A phrase like ‘the circles in which they moved’ (2) says something not only of the class-based and carefully delimited patterns of social interaction in this world, but hints also at its financial character: capital has to be circulated in order to grow. And financial capital cannot grow only within the restrained circles of the English countryside. Austen is quick to hint at Sir Thomas’s – after Edward Said’s analysis quite well known – ‘concerns of his West Indian property’ (3).7 But this source of income here lies outside the reach of literary representation: a slave plantation is the condition of possibility for the English rural world, but it is not at hand for Austen to denominate.

In Austen’s smaller world, capital circulates also, and perhaps foremost, in the form of, and as an effect of, linguistic circulation. Economy is the portal through which we enter her world, but well inside it, we find that economy is materialized not as exchange of money, nor as trade of goods, but as conversation.8 Austen not only offers a fascinating view of a conversational culture; she also shows what is at stake in this balancing act, namely subjectification. Also, at its most playful, conversation is a process of a mutual defining and acknowledgement of the interlocutors, a trying out of subject positions, a negotiation on the rule of the speech economy and its investors.

Austen’s novels depict why this linguistic economy has to be kept in balance, and which means the interlocutors can employ in order to contribute to this balance, but they also disclose the means and ways through which this economy to a large degree is upheld through linguistic violence. It soon becomes clear that the threats directed against the distribution of polite speech proliferate in Austen’s novels: one is the much too abundant, wanton speech that really promotes an inflation of speech; another, though, is the opposite of the first, a reticence that supports a deflation of speech; a third one is a counterfeit and dissimulating speech. And identifying these types of threat directed at good conversation, we also notice that speech in Austen is an ‘economic’ aspect of a general political system, regulating the problem of individual and citizenship, or the relation between individual and society.

But the problem of the ‘total speech situation’ must be kept in mind: linguistic exchange in Austen can never be separated from other forms of exchange, be they financial or different symbolic forms. Looking at Austen’s world as a minutely organized communicative system, as a linguistic economy, we must observe that this economy includes also the body, with its language in the form of manners and gestures, as well as the space that the body moves through: speech economy here means a symbolic economy, including financial as well as linguistic and other symbolic transactions. But Austen’s novels also put before us the difficult task of trying to define the ‘total speech situation’: trying to understand the mechanisms of conversation and dialogue in Austen does not mean a reading of the novels as a totality. Such a reading might easily lead the reader to give Austen’s characters specific identities: for instance, is Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, a Christian or a feminist heroine? And, as an extension of this question of identity, is Austen a conservative or a liberal writer? Instead of looking at these novels as forming a stable, finished world, whose inhabitants, as well as the novels themselves, can be identified and classified, I will try to follow what John Searle would have called ‘the performance of the speech act’,9 which I will read as a process of subjectification, leading not to other or alternative definitive identities for the characters, but – hopefully – to an understanding of how Austen’s characters accept subject positions that in fact are forced upon them.

Power relations in Austen are to a high degree mediated through conversation and dialogue, through polite socializing in the salons. Remembering J. L. Austin’s dictum of the ‘total speech situation’, but at the same time rejecting a totalizing reading, conversation and dialogue must be understood as both an apparatus in themselves, generating their own rules, but also as part of a literary representation, which is another apparatus. This two-sided perspective is my answer to Austin’s emphasis on the total speech situation.

Normalization and Decorum

In one of his entries in Minima Moralia, Theodor W. Adorno laments the disappearing sense of ‘tact’. In his short analysis, tact has its ‘precise historical hour. It was the hour when the bourgeois individual rid himself of absolutist compulsion.’10 Austen’s novels are probably situated precisely at Adorno’s historical moment: in her world, individuals can still socialize while observing convention. But social life is slowly becoming more and more empty, gallantry a gesture, its only legitimacy the upholding of male power – and in social life, a new individual, the middle-class individual, becomes more and more obvious and influential: this individual is still being polite but he is also a representative of a practical reason, of agency and not only empty speech. But Adorno’s observation might also be transposed into another register: Austen writes at a historical moment when the categories of the example, and the exemplary, have become increasingly problematic, challenged by liberal individualism. Another way to understand this historical shift is offered by Michel Foucault, who in his study on prison talks about ‘the transition from historico-ritual mechanisms for the formation of individuality to the scientifico-disciplinary mechanisms, when the normal took over from the ancestral, and measurement from status, thus substituting for the individuality of the memorable man that of the calculable man … and a new political anatomy of the body were implemented.’11 Austen does actually give a glimpse of this process: normalization is a central practice in her works, while ritual forms of social life are still, at the same time, being practised. And through her work, one could study the process in which normalization becomes measurable: her last novel, Persuasion, marks the triumphal advent of a new political subject.

It is in conversation that the individual makes him- or herself obvious in Austen. Her novels are superficial in a deeply penetrating way. Charlotte Brontë suspected the importance of superficiality, but when commenting upon Austen in a frequently quoted letter, she commended her study of ‘what sees keenly, speaks aptly, moves flexibly’, but criticized her for ignoring ‘what throbs fast and full, though hidden’.12 Austen herself probably was aware of this – in Emma, she has one of the characters say exactly that: ‘Compare their manner of carrying themselves; of walking; of speaking; of being silent.’13 The observation that Brontë makes is the affirmation of Austen as an eighteenth-century writer, while Brontë for her own part will follow another, more interiorized – or, rather, psychological – path for novelistic art. But Austen, too, is interested in the interior of her characters, though this interest focuses on them precisely as characters and not as psyches. And it is character that is at stake in that system of gestures that Austen studies in the way people walk, talk and, not least, how they keep silent. The rituals of social behaviour, though, will not be enough for Austen; her persons will have to leave their exemplary lives behind in speaking out, thereby individualizing themselves at the same time as they subjugate themselves to a different order than that of ritualized bodily gestures.14

The power and influence of convention in the world of Austen is rigorous, and I will from now on call it decorum.15 That concept includes how people behave, how they ‘walk, talk, keep silent’, to paraphrase the quote from Emma above, and how they relate to each other in social life, as well as the mores that are being produced in social life. Decorum is, in different varieties, a recurrent word in Austen’s world and related to a couple of other, likewise recurring keywords: ‘proportion’, ‘propriety’. These keywords are all related to each other, they are all a matter of balance. Decorum determines how these figures of Austen inhabit their lives. Originally, decorum was an architectural term, and Bharat Tandon, in his study of the role of conversation in Austen, quotes an English seventeenth-century definition: ‘Decor is the keeping of a due Respect between the Inhabitant, and the Habitation.’16 But as a concept, décor is even older than that, and also has a more complex significance than just the decency that is suggested in the British transmission of its meaning as ‘due respect’. We find décor in De architectura, written by Vitruvius more than two thousand years ago: ‘Décor demands the faultless ensemble of a work composed, in accordance with precedent, of approved details. It obeys convention …, or custom or nature.’17 The perfection of the building, then, will be the effect of the builder having followed the rules and conventions that apply to building, or that he has adapted, or accommodated, the building to the site where it is erected (for instance, one builds hospitals where there is fresh water). In Mansfield Park, architectural décor comes to the foreground in two episodes in particular where conversation is directed towards buildings and parks; one concerns Sotherton (ch. I:VI), the other Thornton Lacey (ch. II:VII). A typical discussion on these matters is formed when Henry Crawford speaks about what must be done to Thornton Lacey, and then emphasizes quite a few ‘musts’; while Edmund Bertram states that it should instead be ‘given the air of a gentleman’s residence without any very heavy expense, and that must suffice me; and I hope may suffice all who care about me’ (219). Bertram, then, does not approve of Crawford’s desire for luxury, he prefers ‘rather less ornament and beauty’ – and in this discussion he also spends far fewer words on the topic than the excessive Crawford. Any ‘heavy expense’, whether financial or linguistic, upsets the delicate balance. Decorum, then, forms part of the economy of social life: it regulates the relation between the individual and the material surroundings, such as parks and buildings – that is, it balances the body of the individual to the body of social structure.

Decorum often appears as a concept in Austen’s novels, but then it refers not primarily to architecture, but to the demands of social life: decorum here implies that the due respect, or balance, has been expanded, from the relation between the building and its inhabitant, and into the field of social life, as a demand that the right proportions must be observed between interlocutors and among those taking part in social life. Conversation must also be adjusted to the situation; it is to be practised in accordance with the rank and identity of your conversation partner.18 Thinking is one thing – ‘I do not censure her opinions’ – but making the same opinions public is an ‘indecorous’ and ‘improper’ act (57). Exaggerated gestures or too quick or abrupt bodily movements will disturb the relation between individual and space, put it out of balance. Such movements are therefore very rare in Austen’s novels, and, when they do appear, are often defined as states of sickness. Lapses in decorum have disastrous effect, and they eventually lead to the elopement of two lovers. In this oeuvre, the good-mannered and the well-behaved rule, so that the spontaneous can be kept at bay; and this rule is also transmitted in the form of the good example: ‘In all points of decorum, your conduct must be law to the rest of the party’ (126).

The Balance of Conversation

Literature too must answer to decorum, or to rules, explicit or not, on what can be said, and how. Writing not only represents or reproduces situations where the rules for speech are obeyed or disregarded, but literature as such is part of, inscribed within, subordinated social conventions. How is it possible for writing to claim legitimacy in critically scrutinizing these conventions?

This central problematic is allegorized in Austen’s oeuvre. There is in her work an abundance of textual sites where interpretation and understanding are put to the test. The proposal scenes in Pride and Prejudice immediately come to mind: why, for instance, are we as readers not allowed to learn what Darcy actually said when proposing the second time to Elizabeth? And are not these novels based on eavesdropping, and the transformation of gossip, heard at a distance, into writing? Bharat Tandon suggests that Emma is a ‘reticent’ novel, and there is actually much to be said for such a characterization, even though these novels seem to be filled to the brim with spoken words.19 But in the reticent novel, words are also exchanged for gestures: significant meaning is produced not only in lines spoken, but in the gestures performed and described. The symbolic economy is still at work.

In Mansfield Park, the performance of a dramatic piece offers the involved persons the possibility to say aloud that which is normally not allowed to be expressed: the company, as Edmund puts it, is a ‘set of gentlemen and ladies, who have all the disadvantages of education and decorum to struggle through’ (112). But his brother Tom replies: ‘and I can conceive no greater harm or danger to any of us in conversing in the elegant written language of some respectable author than in chattering in words of our own’ (113). At one level, the performance serves only to reinforce the characters in the novel. But this episode also says something else about the ‘bewitching’ (109) character of theatre. Fanny comprehends the whole of the performance as utterly improper, but even so, she tries to be helpful in trying to te...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Cordelia’s Silence, or Spoken Violence
• 1 The Exemplary Becomes Problematic, or Gendered Silence: Austen’s Mansfield Park
• 2 The Secrets of Silence: Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Musil’s ‘Tonka’
• 3 Refusal, or The Mute Provocateurs: Melville’s Bartleby Meets Gombrowicz’s Ivona
• 4 The Other of Monologue: Strindberg, Camus, Beckett
• 5 Interrogation, or Forced to Silence: Rankin, Harris, Pinter, Duras
• 6 Literature as Coerced Speech: Handke’s Kaspar
• 7 Epilogue: The Silence of the Sirens
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index