Silence: a brief literary history

Literature expresses complex and nuanced ideas – the powerful feelings that define us as human beings and the detailed observations that illuminate all aspects of our lives. It does so with words put together with consummate skill.

So, surely silence is a nothingness, an affront to the communication of both rational argument and strong emotion – literature’s opposite, even its anathema?

Well, no. In my new book Silence: A Literary History, I’ve set out to show that, over 1,200 years, English literature has spoken to us – and spoken to us eloquently – through silences as well as through words. Without silences, both formal and thematic, we wouldn’t have the exquisite hush of medieval lullabies, the suspenseful secrets of the realist novel, or the jagged fragmentation of modernist poetry.

We would lose implicitness, a good deal of ambiguity, much precision, a powerful mode of protest and a variety of moods. Iago would explain exactly why he wanted to destroy Othello in Shakespeare’s play. The dog would bark in the night time in The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Arthur Conan Doyle. And D.H. Lawrence’s sex scenes would come with a running commentary.

The start of silence

If silence has a starting point in English literary history, it’s a man at sea. The 9th-century poem The Wanderer, composed in the Old English language of the Anglo-Saxons, communicates the sheer strangeness of silence via an alien grey seascape in which the protagonist is utterly alone.

This silence is composed not of complete noiselessness – the hail beats on the waves and a seabird occasionally mews – but of an intense and total absence of human voices.

The poem conveys the difficulty of this silence – its wretched, aching loneliness and its perpetual reminder of lost happiness. But it also portrays silence as a duty, the mark of a seasoned warrior forged by Graeco-Roman stoicism, the Germanic hero ethos and Christian asceticism.

And it confronts readers, here at the very beginnings of English literature, with a silent inner voice: the necessary basis of an interior life.

Scroll on 1,200 years. En route, we will take in the tongue-tied silences of Renaissance love poetry, the green silences of 18th-century pastoral scenes and the dumbfounded wonder of the romantic sublime.

We will pause, awestruck, at Tennyson’s great epic of speechless grief, In Memoriam. We will relish the social silences of the Victorian novel, from the hilariously awkward to the emotionally profound.

The fascism-bordering silences of Modernism will make us shiver, before we ponder 20th-century experiments with visual, acoustic and dramatic silences. And we will arrive at the genre-defying, multimedia poetry collection that is Jay Bernard’s Surge (2019).

Voices that we cannot hear

In 2016, Bernard took up a residency at the George Padmore Institute in London, an archive dedicated to radical Black history in Britain. The New Cross fire, which in 1981 had killed 13 young Black people, was playing on their mind. And then on June 14 2017, as Bernard puts it: “Grenfell happened”.

Bernard was sickened by the similarities: “The lack of closure, the lack of responsibility and the lack of accountability” at the centre of both conflagrations.

Surge’s response takes its title from a remark by the Black activist Darcus Howe, one of the organisers of the Black People’s Day of Action in 1981: “When you surge and you don’t deal with the question, barbarism expresses itself.”

Speaking over the barbarism, Surge registers a gamut of other silences as it winds between the New Cross and Grenfell fires, and historic and ongoing injustices to Black people.

There is the “muffling” of the New Cross fire by the police, and the details that were literally “tippex’d out” of the file. The silence of the media cannot dispel the weighty silences of the ghostly dead. Then there are the silences that surround transness: hiddenness, rejection and defiance of conventional categories.

With this last issue, we can scroll back up the centuries again. The 13th-century romance Silence, written in Old French by a Cornishman, Heldris de Cornualle, relates the legend of a girl-child being brought up as a boy called Silence because women are forbidden to inherit their parents’ estates. This causes a furious argument between the characters of Nature and Nurture, which anticipates our own age’s differences over transness by eight centuries.

“They have insulted me,” complains Nature, “by acting as if the work of Nurture / were superior to mine!”

But Reason, on behalf of Nurture, urges Silence to resist Nature’s blandishments, or “you will never train for knighthood afterwards. / You will lose your horse and chariot.”

Nature is the winner in the story, but the poem is able to accommodate Silence as both male and female – effortlessly embracing apparent contradictions in such lines as “he was a girl”.

I believe noticing silences in literature makes us better readers. We come to recognise that some things are better left unsaid – indeed, that some things can’t be said. As a result, our antennae become attuned to literature’s stock-in-trade: the indirect and the inexplicit.

Importantly, we become aware of who hasn’t spoken. All this means we gain a better understanding of what communication is, and how we interact with other people. As our reading acquires a new, slower tempo and a new rhythm, our interpretations change.

What can silences speak to us about? Some of the profoundest aspects of our existence: our understanding of what makes a self; our sense of sacredness; our most powerful and intimate feelings; our place in the natural world; our capacity for wonder. All we have to do is notice.

The excerpt from Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance was translated by Sarah Roche-Mahdi. This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Kate McLoughlin was awarded a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust to write Silence: A Literary History.