Language of Silence: Speechlessness As a Response to Terror and Trauma in Contemporary Fiction

The language of silence: speechlessness as a response to terror and trauma in contemporary fiction A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature at the University of Canterbury by Sally Blundell University of Canterbury New Zealand 2009 Acknowledgements This exploration of mute characters in fiction has its beginnings in a postgraduate course on terror and trauma run by Professor Mark Williams at the University of Canterbury in 2003. For supporting this subsequent investigation into speechlessness as a response to such trauma I wish to thank Mark who, as supervisor, maintained an enthusiastic, critical and academically comprehensive overview of the treatment of these bitter tales. I also wish to thank Jed Mayer and Anna Smith from the University of Canterbury, clinical psychologist Sonja Bakker for her perspective on selective mutism, as well as David Trerise for his determined interest in the project. Abstract Following World War II the novel faced a crisis in its mode of address. How could the human and humane function of language and artistic representation be lent to the depiction of historical terror or trauma? Who has the right to speak on behalf of – or to assume the voice of – victims of such real atrocity? And to what extent can a writer attend to another’s pain without aestheticising extreme vulnerability, or losing the reader to indifference or repulsion? The difficulties confronted by the writer of fictional works when addressing such issues as war, rape, domestic abuse, colonisation, slavery, even genocide are not rooted in an inadequacy of syntax; rather they are borne out of the disjunction between the idealistic assumptions that linked language to a sense of humanity, intelligence and the pursuit of goals beneficial to society as a whole, and the extremity of recent acts of human atrocity as conducted not by the savage Other but by modern societies with which the reader would otherwise identify. Since the mid-twentieth century a number of writers have responded to these challenges by forgoing the traditional dialogic form of the novel and electing characters that cannot or will not speak in order to convey, through their speechlessness and – at times – their damaged physicality, the extent of the violence and oppression to which they have been subjected, and the difficulty of assimilating such violence into the stories by which communities, indeed whole nations, define themselves. The unexpectedly large cast of mute characters suggests that silence has a vital role in the literary portrayal of historical trauma. The prevalence of silence in contemporary fiction related to the Holocaust, for example, shows how this group of writers recognises the extent to which this event tested and continues to test literary exploration. Writers the world over continue to refuse to ignore these subjects – indeed, the broken images and fragmented forms common to many of the novels studied in the following pages can be seen as an apt response to the chaos of war and human aggression – but, as is evident from the number of contemporary works of fiction incorporating a mute character, silence has become an accepted and effective tool for the portrayal of historical events of terror or trauma that continue to challenge the ethical boundaries of the imagination. Contents Introduction 5 Chapter 1 “Ruinous spaces”: domestic secrets and personal trauma 16 Chapter 2 “Dark geographies”: tribal wars and civil strife 47 Chapter 3 “Faces split by greasepaint grins”: the rendering of war 88 Chapter 4 “Hardly presentable corpses”: writing the Holocaust 127 Conclusion 176 Bibliography 184 5 INTRODUCTION All the mutes I had ever seen paraded by under my lids. There were not very many of them, and their absence of speech made them seem very much alike. The absurd twitching of their faces tried to substitute for the missing sound of their voices, while the frantic movement of their limbs took the place of their unforthcoming words. Other people always looked at them with suspicion; they appeared like strange creatures, shaking, grimacing, dribbling heavily down their chins. (Kosinski, The Painted Bird 141) Within the dialogic form of the novel silence draws attention to itself. It is stubborn, self-conscious, often vexatious. Amidst the clamour of voices and the discursive clatter of self-expression, a character’s speechlessness is an incomplete telling, a deficiency indicative of an event extraordinary enough, in the experience of the non-speaker at least, to resist traditional forms of disclosure, and fraught enough, in the view of the writer, to destabilise authorial responsibility for full explication. While “traditional genres such as epic, myth and tragedy are dominated by the authoritarian voice of the author working at all costs to maintain a single voice, a single world-view” (Worthington 132), the contemporary novel tends to depend on a multitude of personal viewpoints in order to provide a more multifarious, and less unified portrayal of a specific event. If the novel is, as Georg Lukács says, based on the “autonomous life of interiority” (66), then reader access to that interiority tends to be by way of a range of subjective voices interacting with one another through conversation and dialogue as a primary means of self-expression. Silencing one such voice by way of a character that does not speak, therefore, raises fundamental questions in regards to what must lie beyond language, beyond effability – what act is so harrowing, what information so potentially dangerous, that its articulation need be so restricted? If language is “the deepest habit of our mind” (Hassan 17), then the deliberate withdrawal of language in literature is profound. Why would an author, the appointed “guardian and shaper of speech” (Steiner 53), choose to deny one character, the character with privileged access to knowledge or information, the ability to tell? Time and again we find the restriction of voice in contemporary literature used as a response to – and vehicle for – incidences of terror or trauma, be it rape, domestic abuse, 6 colonisation, slavery, war or genocide. The subject of this investigation is precisely those texts that, since the middle of the twentieth century, have included a character who does not speak, who relies not on direct articulation but on the physicality of the body to represent his or her story. In restraining the subjective voice of the victim of, or witness to, trauma these writers evoke the chaos of the experience of terror and dramatise the paucity of appropriate responses to extreme human aggression. In limiting the reader’s access to such experiences they also allude to the risks inherent in the graphic depiction of historical trauma and the presumption implicit in assuming the voice of the victims of such trauma. I began my research with two such voiceless characters – Friday in Foe by J. M. Coetzee (1987) and Norah in Unless by Carol Shields (2002). Five years later the sheer number of characters who do not speak in novels of terror or trauma – including the twenty-five figures in the texts studied here – suggests that the choice of a mute character is widely regarded as a valid solution to the challenges imposed by extreme atrocity to writers of literature, and as an indication of the caution with which these writers set out to translate historical trauma into literature. The prevalence of silence in contemporary fiction related to the Holocaust, for example, shows how such acts and events have challenged and continue to challenge the ability of the subjective voice to convey this reality without lapsing into cheap horror, overly graphic reportage, or a reassuring if completely unwarranted sense of conclusion (the experience of extreme terror offers no clear resolution, no point of completion that can suggest that such events no longer impinge on the present). It reveals too the extent to which the physicality of the damaged body has proved to be a more effective mouthpiece than voice in providing a judicious avoidance of repellent or inadequate explication, while also placing before the reader the unequivocal proof of a prolonged moment of terror. In their physicality these characters illustrate the burden borne by those who paid the price and who continue to pay the price of being privy to the human capacity for extreme violence within a society reluctant to hear or acknowledge such truths. “What shall Cordelia do? Love and be silent”: a brief overview of silence in literature Speech is never far removed from silence. Within the context of religion, silence has long been regarded as playing a critical role in the relationship between a believer and a divine being alongside the vital creative power inherent in utterance. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition the divine act of articulation fills the silence of an unperceived and unformed world with a primitive, primary utterance that serves as the first organising principle: [I]n the beginning . there is the description of a desert, or abyss, or formlessness or absence. It is the word of the creative god, which is not a dialogue because there is no one to talk to, that performs an organizing function, interrupting the chaotic continuum. (Schon 9) 7 If it is with the “Word, that all began” and that “all continues” (Neher 58), this transmission of divine sound is still regarded as having been born out of silence, be it the chaotic nothingness believed to have existed before the Word, “pre-logos”, or the soundless “phenomena of interiorization . a way of speaking without words” (59) that continues to be regarded by both western and eastern faiths as signifying a closer relationship between the mute devotee and a divine being than that usually experienced by religious followers. In Zen Buddhism, for example, meditative practices are prescribed for “convincing one, once and for all, that the use of words to reach truth or reality (dharma) is a futile and mind-breaking exercise” (Coward 118).

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