Ulf Olsson

Epilogue: The Silence of the Sirens

’speech torture’ is what Peter Handke suggests that his play Kaspar could he called: ‘SprachfoItemng’. Speech torture is also what this book has been about: the linguistic violence directed against the one that cannot or does not want to take part in the circulation of speech, whether conversation or interrogation, whether silenced by an ongoing monologue or by a wish to protect a secret. Silence can also be a weapon against linguistic corruption: when words are produced within an economy of inflation, silence might serve as resistance. But language does take on a violent character; it becomes torture, even resulting in physical effects on its victim. Austen’s Fanny Price experiences pain most of all when those surrounding her try to make her speak. Melville’s Bartleby slowly diminishes and finally dies, pursued by words, and unable to utter any words himself (except for just a few). Gombrowicz’s lvona suffocates to death, refusing to defend herself against the speech directed against her. The different interrogation scenes illustrate how a socially legitimate, spoken violence can serve both to silence someone, and to force form upon the other, humiliate the other — interrogation is a form of desubjectification. My different examples of monologue show how monologue depends on the silent answers of another, and how monologue is triggered by that silence.

The Secrets of Silence: Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Musil’s ‘Tonka’

’speak, woman!’ Why does Hester not speak out and confess, why does she instead simply say ‘I will not speak!’? Why does Tonka not say anything, why is she almost mute? The reasons for keeping quiet and not saying anything are many: they might be of an ethical nature, or — on the contrary — only opportunist; there might be a linguistic problem, a language barrier, or a speech disturbance of some kind; it might be shyness or other personal traits that keep one from speaking, or the situation might, for some reason, be overwhelming. One obvious reason for remaining silent is, of course, to keep a secret. And also, many literary texts want to keep their secrets to themselves, be it, say, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson or Marguerite Duras’s Le Ravissement du Lol V. Stein, both novels that refuse, but in totally different ways, to give away any explanations. Novelistic silence is of as many different types as everyday silence, but we shall now have a look at two novels that investigate a kind of silence and secrecy with apparent social relevance.

Interrogation, or Forced to Silence: Rankin, Harris, Pinter, Duras

‘Noirs jumeaux’, Michel Foucault calls them in Histoire de la sexualite: confession and torture are ‘dark twins’. Since the Middle Ages, Foucault writes, torture has accompanied confession as a’shadow’, pushing it out of and further from its hiding places in the soul or in the body.1 However, torture generates not only confession, but also, and paradoxically, its opposite, silence, the refusal to confess — and to speak. Or, as Elaine Scarry writes: ‘Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate recession to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned,’2

The Other of Monologue: Strindberg, Camus, Beckett

Monologue is a strange form of linguistic practice: the name seems to refer to a practice that does not exist. Language is always shared, not in the abstract, but as practised. The voluntary speech of a singular individual always has an address — and perhaps that addressee is the agent of the force that is necessary for the production of speech? Monologue is dialogue — while what sometimes seems like a dialogue, in truth, is a monologue reducing its addressees to an audience, rather than interlocutors. And monologue, however random it may seem, is motivated. The reduction of speech to only one sounding voice results in a concentration of the violence inherent in every linguistic exchange: written monologue puts on display the power of dialogue, exploiting it in order to produce its own Other.