Interrogating silence: new possibilities faced by South African literature

Abstract

One of the most challenging statements I have ever heard came from a wise old Frenchman. ‘La parole sert à corriger le silence’, he said; adding under his breath, ‘Mais le silence est in-cor-ri-gi-ble.’ Not that I'm sure language inevitably ‘corrects’ silence: there would be in such a claim an arrogance I hesitate to endorse; but that the word interminably and indefatigably strives to interrogate silence, of that I have no doubt. The writer's primary engagement, I should like to argue, is with silence. Provided the assumptions underlying the statement are clarified. This kind of interrogation is not a power-play but a dialogue. Silence is not to be thought of as an opponent or an adversary; it is not simply the ‘other’ of language. If words are indeed, from a certain point of view, wrested from silence, it is equally true that silence may be read to inhere in language itself. This provides a clue to the kind of dialogic writing I have in mind: a coexistence of silence and the word. If all writing demonstrates the tension between the spoken and the unspoken, the sayable and the unsayable, these elements of the dialogue should not be seen as opposites in a binary equation, but at most as end points on a sliding scale – the kind of notion fuzzy mathematics would express in a scale between 0 and 1.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 72 citations exist upstream.