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Mme de Maintenon’s letters often refer to religious silence. Heart of a christian woman’s life, silence is indeed a way to achieve salvation. Practising silence, both in speaking and writing, allows one to master and reduce one’s pride. It is then a good tool to control others, as it is to pursue a spiritual fulfilment.
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The novel presents a variety of writings of silence; but we limit ourselves, in the context of the present work, to the most relevant aspects, namely interruptions in narratives, narrative ellipses and point of suspension as the particular language of silence. These three modalities nevertheless serve a prolix discourse, and are innovate. Suddenly the novel exemplifies what contemporary literature calls the anti-novel.
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In 19th century French very successful melodrama, discourse is seen as a powerful way to get attention. Criminals and traitors are masters of speech and seductive persuasion, but they never achieve their goals by the end of the play. On the other hand, the mute, humble and shy characters demonstrate that silence can convey values such as honesty, loyalty and show the audience that sensibility should be preferred to histrionic actor play.
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« A Season in Hell » and « Illuminations » both of these collections are considered as masterpieces of Rimbaud’s poetry. Whereas « A Season in Hell » is presented as his artistic testimony, « Illuminations », on the other hand, isconsidered by critics as an abstruse writing, an enigma. Acknowledging critical inheritance on this topic, as well as inherent differences of both collections, this article will show that a link could be found between these two works. This thread, which creates what we would like to call Rimbaud’s embrodery was created by himself through silence and words. That is this will of Rimbaud for these bothsworks and readers, that we will discuss here, a strategy that we have named : Tactic of Emptiness.
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In Les Amours jaunes, Corbière carries out a paradoxical promotion of silence. In fact, the writing features cacophonous poetics. However, the promotion of noise makes it possible to denounce the dysfunction of language. The deceptive experience of communication reveals a wish to implement another mode of emotional transmission. The poet distorts and mocks the romantic tradition to denounce the tricks of a language which is musical and full of imagery. On a quest to find authenticity, he deploys competing and conflicting semiotic layouts which break the textual unity. Renewing the lyrical pact, that fragmentation opens a vacant space that the reader can take over. A reception which is strengthened by the empathic relation between the subject and its recipient is replaced by a formulation based on the evocative power found outside the text. That is definitely a speech ‘addressed’ to the reader but the emotions go through the perception of silence. The formulation of these emotions is suspended, thus letting us read implicitly the mark of its absence. Often considered “unlyrical”, Corbière finds, in the fragile balance between hubbub and silence, an interval filled with the transmission of personal affects.
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It is difficult to define all the meanings and connotations of silence depicted in literary works. In the 19th century, where the Realism and the Naturalism paid much attention to the study of both physical and mental illnesses, silence was considered as one of the distinctive signs of madness. The paper analyzes four examples of this phenomenon in selected Zola’s and Maupassant’s texts (novels and short stories) whose characters, all mad or maniac, embody various aspects of the silence regarded as a pathological condition of a human being.
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This article analyses the essence and roles of silence in the œuvres of Mallarmé and Valéry. The Mallarmé’s musicality gradually gives way to the silent music of words; poetry is becoming spatial and takes the form of the music score. In the poem Coup de dés it gets up to the incarnation of silence which shows the ideal of the Mallarmé’s musicality; the ideal in which an eye serves to listen. The theme of music and silence reappears in the Valery’s œuvre. In spite of the connection between music and architecture, which can incarnate silence, poetry uses the subjectivism of music and the ambiguity of silence to achieve the ideal of pure art which is hidden in the artist’s interior. Silence as nothingness is the starting point for poetry whereas non-incarnated silence can express the mystical sense of poetry.
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The parallel urge of introspection and meditation which comes with the evocation of silence acts as landmark for a whole current of fin de siecle literature. The symbolist era gives the impression that its actors were obsessedwith silence. Symbolist poetry took possession of silence as a way to encapsulate the ineffability of feelings and the various states of mind it explored, leaning towards an aesthetical mysticism. Yet that tendency soon turned into a form of cliché that opened a path towards parody, silence becoming a stigma of the ideological shortcomings of symbolism in the eye of its detractors. The attempt to seize the silence led to a harsh confrontation with void.
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Jean-Victor Pellerin was a representative author of the „school of silence” or, as some called it, „art of unexpressed”, in which emotions are implied in gestures, fragments of speach, and silence. In his first drama Intimacy (1922) the French playwrighter presents a bourgeois marriage living a monotonous life. The characters discuss trivial things of everyday life, they talk to each other, but there is no communication between them, because each of them is closed in their own world. Nobody is listening one another and words are spoken only in order to fill their existential emptiness. The writer is focused on the dialogue between the characters in the context of what they hide and what they do not want to tell themselves. People who appear to them are not flesh and blood human beings but they are the reflection of their own disturbed personality only. In this manner the writer focuses on the inner life of his solitary, their nostalgia for youth or even their hidden sexual motives. This is why the silence grows into the main element of the drama. Intimacy is one of the finest examples of „intimist aesthectic” developed by the avant-garde theater creator Gaston Baty who rejected the predominance of the word for discovering the mysterious world of the spiritual man.
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Technical and rhetorical devices used by Giraudoux to indicate silence vary during its dramatic production. Silences have to do with relationships of the characters, both emotionally and dialogal, and are sometimes loaded the unspoken or unspeakable. By their relationship to the word and to the game, they are at the heart of a dramaturgy that oscillates between mimesis and rupture. And certain silences are like the limit assigned to the power of words in a theater yet claimed as literary.
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From Sous le Soleil de Satan to Monsieur Ouine, Bernanos’ novels are characterized by the emergence of ‘supernatural silence(s)’ (Bernanos 2015 : 679), which can prove to be disturbing. The brutal sign of evil’s appeance in the narrative limits in most cases the character to silence, to verbal incapacity. Indeed, evil has the strength to hold thought and speech in check. That is the reason why the characters that are racked by evil make good use of language so that they don’t say anything genuine nor honest. Bernanos’ writing succeds in defining these silences thanks to numerous ellipsis as well as things that remain unmentioned, embarrased silences, thus emphasizing the presence of the supernatural. Punctuation in particular takes an important part in creating breaks, switchovers within sentences as well as in the narrative. These silences show off an experience that cannot be told. As a consequence, a true rhetoric of what is unspeakable is at stake in Bernanos’ novels. The use of adjectives made up with privative prefixes, indefinite pronouns, rough phrases and other figures of what is unspoken, contribute to explaining evil’s unbelievable experience.
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The silence in Beckett’s plays can be interpreted in many different ways. It often shows the anxiety of the characters faced with the vacuity in their lives. Left to themselves, they hardly manage to let go during these recurring silences (marked in an obsessional way in Beckett’s texts with the word "pause" as an absolute punctuation in the theatrical language). So they really feel the silence as the "arising of nothingness ", a sort of gateway to finitude. This silence is also the one appearing among Beckettian couples to reveal the aporia in language: inability to communicate, "doing" instead of (impossible) "saying". This Beckettian "doing" is shown in a conspicuous gestuality which conveys a certain materiality to this silence as well as it tries desperately to fill it. Thus Beckett’s characters act and give silence some substance, incarnating therefore a full-fledged character. Finally, silence can also embody the religious, at least the expectation (of the divine? in Godot particularly?). This silence grows solemn and reveals a suspension in the speech and characters in search of a follow-up. Silence then becomes the opening of an area where everything is possible since nothing has been said yet, implicitly expressing fantasies of joy and salvation.
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This article try to demonstrate how the silence takes shape : it becomes a dangerous character against whom the narrator has to act. In The Children’s Chamber, the silence is at first an ally, helping the young Georges to resist to the other children who want him to talk. Then it becomes a dangerous character who takes more and more space : the adulte who spies the children from the begining of the novel has to interrumpt their game in order to stop the silence.
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The sartrean autobiographical text The Words may be read as a testament that paradoxically establishes the silence through the excessive word. Sartre says when he does not utter, silences when he speaks and, through the dialectal articulation that he establishes between uttering and silencing, offers us a truly original autobiographical form.
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In this article, we will analyze the figures of silence such as the “litote” and the syntactic ellipse in the works of Georges Perec in order to understand how they interact with the reader. Indeed, the unspoken create an invisible dialogue with the reader who must reconstruct a meaning from the void: the “litote” and the syntactic ellipse become the support of a writing that refuses to express itself in words. The writing of Georges Perec can only be read in a deviation of language which makes reluctance a unifying principle.
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The concept of silence is at the core of the Andreï Makine’s writing. Thus, the aim of this article is to underline its manifold manifestations in the Franco-Russian author’s literary creation. The first part of the article argues that biographical gaps are constitutive of his author image (Amossy, 2009), sincehe is the only member of the French Academy whose biography is still largely unknown, while the second and third parts focus on the narrative and stylistic usages of silence in his novels, as well as on Makine’s philosophy of creation, namely the “theory of the triple birth” (Osmonde, 2011), partially described in his texts.
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From the perspective of the reader-response criticism, this article underlines the ethical and esthetical tension between the duty of memory and the unspeakable in the context of the project « Rwanda : écrire par devoir de mémoire » and specificly in the novel L’aîné des orphelins by Tierno Monénembo. Although the « horizon » of expectations typical to the commitment toward the duty of memory is reinforced by the peritext (Genette, 1987), Monembo’s novel challenges the reader’s expectations by silencing and delaying the personnal story of young narrator-survivor Faustin.This stepback from direct violence allows the novel to focus on structual forms of violence (Galtung 2010) and urges the public to question his responsability in the testimonial reception.
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“A stranger, always a stranger, unavoidably, in the land of my birth as well as in the land of exile”, said the protagonist of Amin Maalouf’s latest novel The Disoriented, weaved around the recurring Maalouf’s topics such as exile and identity. With an image of an ambassador of migrants, the author examines the relationship between those who left their country because of war, and those who stayed, loyal to their native land but faced with tough choices. This article first tackles the attitude of the French writer towards various notions of the exile concept, and then it sets out some paths of reflection concerning real or supposed affiliations of this novel’s characters trapped between different realities of a multi-ethnic state in which various advocates of tribal views of identity confront each other. Are those who have lost their Orient really “disoriented”? What is the impact of the native affi liation on the identity construction? Who is more “Levantine” in The Disoriented: those who have stayed and replaced their cosmopolitan visions with a narrow affiliation or those who have left in order to live elsewhere taking with them the substratum of a plural identity open for the universal?
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The objective of present article is to draw attention on important role of comical element in creating surrealistic world, present in the prose of Boris Vian (1920-1959) – one of the most original French writers in the twentieth century. As a exemplificative material the author used Autumn in Peking, one of the most famous and most representatives Vian’s novels. Employing the classification proposed by Polish aesthetician Bohdan Dziemidok (elementary comism vs. complex comism), the author, placing himself in the hermeneutical spirit, analyses the novel’s narration in order to find various elements of complex comism, revolving around these comical elements, which are the result either of the novel’s composition or of diegesis’ construction. The present analyse is preceded by a short historical-literary reflexion which objective is to present a rich literary production of Boris Vian in the large context of times during which he used to write. Vian was indeed a writer whose literary idiom was influenced by various philosophical movements of those days – surrealism, nihilism, existentialism. A significant element of the article is the hypothesis according to which Boris Vian can be numbered among the artists using in his writing the bricolage technique – the concept proposed in different context by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his work entitled The Savage Mind (1962).
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Among many translation activities characteristic for Canada, a “feminine translation”, meaning an act of re-creation, is particularly worth mentioning. One of its representatives is Susanne de Lotbiniere-Harwood, a translator of the texts of Quebec feminists, including Lise Gauvin’s „Lettres d’une autre” (1984) translated into English in 1989 („Letters from an Other”). De Lotbiniere-Harwood’s translation caused controversy, as — according to the critics — she explained to much to a reader, inserted too many footnotes and feminized the text more than the original. The translation activity of de Lotbniere-Harwood proves how, by using the creative approach to translation, the act of translation itself becomes visible, and the feminization of the target text creates a space for female expression also in a real world.
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