Silence in Modern Literature and Philosophy

Beckett, Barthes, Nancy, Stevens

Thomas Gould

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319934785
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319934792
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book discusses the elusive centrality of silence in modern literature and philosophy, focusing on the writing and theory of Jean-Luc Nancy and Roland Barthes, the prose of Samuel Beckett, and the poetry of Wallace Stevens. It suggests that silence is best understood according to two categories: apophasis and reticence. Apophasis is associated with theology, and relates to a silence of ineffability and transcendence; reticence is associated with phenomenology, and relates to a silence of listenership and speechlessness. In a series of diverse though interrelated readings, the study examines figures of broken silence and silent voice in the prose of Samuel Beckett, the notion of shared silence in Jean-Luc Nancy and Roland Barthes, and ways in which the poetry of Wallace Stevens mounts lyrical negotiations with forms of unsayability and speechlessness.

© The Author(s) 2018

Thomas GouldSilence in Modern Literature and Philosophyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93479-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Thomas Gould¹

(1)

King’s College London, London, UK

Thomas Gould

End Abstract

Silence is not an object of study. As in the “clarity” of George Oppen’s 1968 poem “Of Being Numerous”, silence is often predicated, in literature and theory, as an ideal of immediacy, lucidity and meditative privation:

Clarity

In the sense of transparence,

I don’t mean that much can be explained.

Clarity in the sense of silence.

(Oppen 2003, 175)

If silence is clarity, then language is obfuscation and obstacle; to write about silence is to find oneself thrown into the same old prepositional quandary as that described by Jacques Derrida, when he wanders how to write “about” literary texts: “about, with, toward, for (what should one say? This is a serious question), in the name of, in honour of, against, perhaps too, on the way toward” (Derrida 1992, 41). How does one write about silence without writing away from silence, and certainly against it? Perhaps less obviously, I want to insist on the need to frame this question in the context of what might be called the social dimensions and potentialities of silence, the extent to which silence is shared. As the texts, poems and ideas I discuss in this book show, when we nuance our understanding of silence as something more than the absence of language, or the absence of sound, then we too must nuance our understanding of silence as more than the absence of relation.

As much as the study or writing of silence is a prepositional quandary, that is, relating to a dynamic between the subject and the object, it is an ethical quandary, that is, relating to a dynamic between the self and other. Oppen’s line “I don’t mean that much can be explained” articulates the simultaneity of the prepositional (i.e., explained about) and the ethical (i.e., explained to). This ease or lightness of explanation, in the ideal of silence, is at once an ease or lightness of communicability of or by the subject and an ease or levity of communication between subjects: an ideal of relation that language, somehow, lacks. Throughout modern philosophy and literature, silence is broached (and, simultaneously, breached) through the work of negation, negations which almost always affirm the limits of language. Writing “about” silence becomes a kind of metalinguistic strategy. Oppen’s negation “I don’t mean that much can be explained” is a useful example for the way in which it is explicitly, reticently metalinguistic (“reticence” will become an important term in this book; I use it here to refer to the poetic humility of Oppen’s speaker here), and in a way that seems to be almost the opposite of the most famous statement on silence in modern philosophy, at the end of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, which delivers its imperative of silence through its own a metalinguistic negation: “what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” (Wittgenstein 1974, 74). Here, silence is not a symptom or product of inarticulacy or ineffability, it is proper to an active, imperative response to inarticulacy and ineffability. Such negations may be divided into degrees: strong, apophatic negations which assert silence as purely negative and absent (as with Wittgenstein), and weak, reticent negations which, for example, posit silence as unpresentable while at the same time trying to attain language to it, to its “sense”, whatever that may be (as with Oppen). I want to begin with the premise that such negations of silence are typically calibrated with reference to at least four binary criteria. There are many ways in which I could order or adumbrate these criteria, but I have chosen the following sequence or narrative, without intending any logical priority, for the way in which it exposes some important conceptual intersections.

First (and perhaps most elementary) is the binary of plenitude and vacuum, according to which silence is understood either as a monolithic, blank presence or as an abyssal emptiness. Here, silence implies a kind of zero degree of perception (in the case of an auditory silence) or intellection (in the case of a verbal silence), between the presence of an absence and the absence of a presence. This in turn can be linked to, secondly, the binary of transcendent silence and immanent silence, whereby the zero degree of perception or intellection is attributed either to a field of transcendence or to a field of immanence. In other words, silence is understood either as symptom, sign or shroud of an imperceptible or immeasurable beyond (a prominent motif within a rich tradition of theological epistemology) or as the privative guarantor of the privacy of some immanent kernel, imperceptibly within.

If silence is a definitive characteristic of God (as the transcendence of language), then it is too a definitive characteristic of animals, as the impotency or incapacity of language. Human silence is therefore triangulated somewhere between the poles of divine silence and animal silence. The third binary is, therefore, the binary of human silence and animal silence. These two silences are negatively determined in opposition to speech and language: they pertain to an essentialised speechlessness. Human silence is the voluntary suspension or involuntary debility of speech or of language. According to this logic, I am silent because I chose to be. Animal silence is, as I have already suggested, an absolute and inherent inability of speech or of language: an ontological incapacity. And according to this logic, my dog is silent, or rather speechless, because it has no choice.

Finally, the unstable category of human silence, as a linguistic category, is itself divided between what I call the binary of paradigmatic silence and syntagmatic silence. With the category of paradigmatic silence, I refer to instances where silence is deployed as a sign. In verbal communication, silence might be a sign of indifference, resistance or boredom. In written communication, certain punctuation and typographical devices can function as paradigmatic silences, such as an ellipsis deployed to signify a pause pregnant with significance. Whereas a paradigmatic silence is a silence which conforms entirely to the rules of signification, a syntagmatic silence is one which is contiguous with language. I would exemplify this, provisionally, with unintentional pauses, interruptions, faltering speech.

Plenitude and vacuum, transcendence and immanence, animal and human, paradigm and syntagm. Of these eight nodes, I want to seize upon the syntagm, which stands for the occasions on which silence abuts or comes into contact with language, a murmuring or trembling at the threshold of signification. The syntagm, here, stands for what I will call an exposure to silence. Exposures to silence are not all of the same order and resist systematisation, but one of my aims is to show how such exposures can recuperate silence from negative determination, by taking place within the binary formulations I have just provided: a silence which takes place as the exposure of plenitude to vacuum, the exposure of transcendence to immanence, the exposure of animal to human or indeed, the exposure of paradigm to syntagm. My aim in developing the motif of an exposure to silence is a broadly ethical one; I wish to open what might be called an ethics of silence. This ethics of silence is the shared concern of a constellation of questions, which correspond with the four chapters which make up the rest this book: (1) How does the closure or collapse of a divine, transcendent silence recast the field of the ineffable as an ethical rather than theological category? (2) What—if any—kind of demand is implied by the activity of listening to silence, and how might this, as an exposure, correspond to the activity of reading? (3) How might we think of silence as a common ground, an exposure which is shared, whether it be thought towards a modality of community or towards an alternative thinking of togetherness? and (4) How can we read poetry—as a staging of language—as exposing the reader to a keener sense of an ethics of silence? These questions inform both the structure and the corpus of this book. The work of Roland Barthes, the fiction of Samuel Beckett, the philosophical writings of Jean-Luc Nancy and the poetry of Wallace Stevens are unified by their thematic relation to an ethics of silence. I refer to Nancy and Barthes throughout: Nancy because of the prominence within his work of the concepts of exposure, transcendence and immanence, and Barthes for the rigour with which he submits silence to a semiological analysis, an approach which informs my own methodology; I will account for this in more depth shortly. Beckett’s significance, as I discuss in Chapter 3, begins with the way in which his prose yokes a demand of silence to a necessity of relation. The poetry of Stevens, meanwhile, is significant for the way in which it too evinces an acute awareness of a demand of silence which, crucially, poetic language must confront without overcoming. Stevens’s poetry, in ways I will trace in Chapter 5, is a poetry which reconciles and attunes itself to a sense of silence.

First, I want to return to what I will be calling, rather inelegantly, the problematic of silence: the simple observation that the word “silence” is radically non-coincident with its referent, silence. “Silence” then, is a kind of chink in language’s armour, the signifier that most elementarily exposes a larger, more essential non-coincidence. As Georges Bataille puts it in Inner Experience: “the word silence is still a sound, to speak is in itself to imagine knowing; and to no longer know, it would be necessary to no longer speak” (Bataille 1988, 13). Contrast the conditionality of Bataille’s expression with the imperativeness of Wittgenstein’s—“what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” (Wittgenstein 1974, 74, emphasis added). Perhaps, if language compels one into a position of epistemological facticity (in the Heideggerian sense), it also contains, in every instance, the future possibility for non-knowledge and silence. Whereas for Wittgenstein, it is a matter of rejecting such futurity, spatialising silence rather than temporalising it. The threat of silence, which, as in the case of Bataille, begins in its being uniquely problematic to referentiality, tends to summon such interdictions, imperatives (what, elsewhere in French literary-theoretical writing, Roland Barthes would call “fascism”, and what Maurice Blanchot would call “dictare”, as I will come to shortly), for the sake of the integrity of language and, therefore, crucially, the integrity of the plural subject that language unifies (Barthes 1982, 461; Blanchot 2003, 219). Indeed, it is the resistance to such imperatives that an ethics of silence might be formulated. Read in this way, the final proposition of the Tractatus—whose astonishing and contested afterlife in philosophy will be traced throughout this book—is an apotropaic measure, protecting language from an exposure to silence (it should be noted, however, that the metaphor of “passing over”, avoiding contact or exposure, is not present in the original German text). Silence is expelled and negated; mastered and neutered by such imperatives by being emptied as absence or void. It is defined merely as what it is not, and what it is not is precisely the language which, potentiated, proceeds to makes those negative definitions.

Whereas Wittgenstein’s imperative is a negative and protective gesture foreclosing an exposure, there are examples, on the other hand, of such imperatives being subverted in order to recuperate the event of an exposure. Perhaps the most famous repudiation of the problematic of silence can be found in the example of the writing and work of the composer John Cage, most famous for his supposedly silent composition 4’33’’. In his renowned collection of essays and lectures (entitled Silence), Cage recalls stepping into an anechoic chamber at Harvard University (“as silent a situation as possible”) and hearing two sounds: “when I described them to the engineer in charge, he i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Apophasis and Reticence
• 3. Broken Silence: Samuel Beckett
• 4. Shared Silence: Jean-Luc Nancy with Roland Barthes
• 5. Some Senses of Silence in Wallace Stevens
• 6. Coda: Eloquent Silence
• Back Matter