Silence

  Silence and literature

La Leçon de Piano, John Cage's 4''33, sister art theory , Thelonious Monk, Body Language in Morrison's Beloved... In Le Silence de la Mer (1942-),Vercors (1902-1991) narrates how, under the German occupation, a French family decides to remain mute to everything a German officer, who has chosen to dwell in their house, says. The members of the family are part of what was called the "Armées des Ombres". Silence and mutism are the weapons they chose to resist the occupant in their own dignified way. Dead silence does not exist. It always has a significance of its own , and can even be endowed with a roaring meaning.

Whatever the form of art the presence of silence is never gratuitous for it often carries intentions by their authors. Many writers make use of it as a pattern which erects muteness, voicelessness or soundlessness into a meaning device likely to transmit their intentions. In Morrison's Beloved, slavery has silenced the ex-slaves characters. By ripping the veil of their forgetfulness, Tony Morrison has her mute and speechless characters actually speak louder than if they had been using some words of sorts. Roland Barthes thought over a lot over the relations between silence and speech, between the writer's message and silence.Where silence is best expressed in literature is when writers attempt to break away from the supremacy of forms and conventions, what R. B. called the 'artisanat du style'and the "fatalité du signe littéraire". In some works , the fact that the narrator never takes side expresses a form of silence suppressing every ideological intentions (Camus's innocent and neutral mode of writing "accomplit un style de l'absence qui est presque une absence idéale de style" disait Barthes ) J. P. Sartres in Le Sursis attempts to mirror the ubiquity of life by splitting in two the narration. In Proust the characters are presented in the way they are and made say things that are consubstantial with their own social and historic life. Mallarmé (1842-1898), chantre du vide et du silence, refused all reality and was a murderer of words, a minstrel of void and silence. Surrealism made an attempt to exploit the unconscious and expressionism at representing emotions But all this is silence in asmuch the writer's tools are too imperfect to tell it all. That's why the present history is betrayed by the fact that no writer can actually represent what he or she can see and hear. Hence La Force de Dormir de Pierre Rachet nrf 1988 et Roland Barthes 's Pour en Finir avec La Littérature.

The following text by Updike shows that silence is meaningfull

A Month of Sundays

The silence of this room m'effraie. It is not one silence but many, the lampshade is silent, the bulb silently burns, the bed in silence waits for my next oblivion, the bathroom mirror silently plays catch with a corner of my bathrobe, the carpetting is a hungry populace of individual acrylic silences, even the air conditioning, today is silent. Has the power failed? Has the desert cooled? Has the beautiful last beseeching of the Bible ('even so, come, Lord Jesus' –rev. 22-20) been at last answered, and Man's two millemnia of In between times ended>? No, my clock says an hour to noon remains. -Updike

In L'ère du soupçon (1956), Nathalie Sarraute coined the term "sub-conversation"- "cette limite fluctuante qui sépare la conversation de la sous-conversation" . The fluctuating border which separates conversation from sub-conversation is where the exchange between the speakers can take place.

In The Waves , for example, the six figures speak in turn but they never engage in dialogues. Their speech are merely juxtaposed. They become longer and longer quoted monologues. The fact that they are juxtaposed and quoted (although not placed in quotation marks and not introduced with speech tags) makes them ressemble dramatic soliloques. Virginia Woolf is drawing on two different genres (the novel and the drama) At the same time they seem to be silently exchanging thoughts Bernard reads Suzan's mind (143) A form of unspoken communication and silent comprehension is thus suggested .A symbolic fusion is even explicitely stated by Bernard : " But when we sit close,' said B, 'we melt into each other with phrases' " (423) Painting and silence Painting as mute poetry and poetry as speaking painting ( Petrarch)… Representation of indeterminated forms, Klein's monoichromic works tell a lot about the mystery of life

Music and silence

Thelonious Monk's unfinished melodies are a message of freedom and mystery, the significance of which , although it sometimes escapes our comprehension, is not altogether deprived of meaning.. In 1951, Cage [ born 1912] 's 4"33 broke the imposed codes of composition and artistic copyright by inventing the "happening" . The experience took place in a deaf-mute room, and it was quite a revelation to Cage when he heard all the noise that his body was producing. According to Cage , the issue of silence comes out into indetermination- experimental art of that kind is no scientific experiment, there is nothing to prove or find.Cage is not an obstetrician of sounds , the happening has no particular aim other than reaching the aim for which the experiment was conceived by the experiment itself. No preconceived aim and freedom overlap to enable something , anything to happen. Rather than speaking about time in terms of playing around it, Cage prefers to speak of "time celebration". It is in this sense that we must underrstand his 4"33 for one or several musicians and other compositions (My silent works) The silence of Cage's music is like a wide preoedipal cry. It can be read as a code meant to disturb and break all imposed codes. Even the copyright code is challenged –who owns silence? The composer is only a catalyst for the real composers are the musicians , who on the stand have all the freedom of interpretation (only a grid as in Jazz music is given to them) What counts is what is really happening during the performance. In Imaginary Landscapes 4 , twelve radios, 24 performers and one conductor were used. In IL 5 forty two jazz records were used . In the Piano Concerto indetermination reaches high peaks.the 13 instrumental parts are independent and the performers are free to use them or not.There is no coordinated time sequence between them. Cage's intention was to have them perform in their own way and the way it looks in the real and natural world (in a forest or in a street). Of course one is free to create one's own experience during the performance. The whole work is in progress, and thus never completed even if it considers that each performance is definitive. Cage influenced other forms of art, especially in the theatre. He wrote several books in which continuous shifts are operated between the critical opinion and text at the crossroad of multifarious modes and patterns of expression. Neoprimitive but not anarchic mode of expression which had been socially constructed by a musical set that was stiffling under the restrictions of taboos. (voir Silence and his Journal) Silence is the severest criticism. - Charles Buxton, brewer, philanthropist, writer and politician (1823-1871)