Silences

Abstract

This chapter works on the premise that what is not here in the text is often as meaningful as what is. I want to produce a method of interpreting these absences or silences. Silences have an identity and we need to establish what it is. Susan Sontag noted: ‘A genuine emptiness, a pure silence are not feasible — either conceptually or in fact’.¹ This discussion will attempt to construct an explanatory model to address the problematic area of silences, and to produce a method whereby silence, in its many forms, can be constructively analysed and shown to be as informative as the written word. Textual silences are the aspects that can be revealed through the appraisal of various stylistic configurations and devices, such as punctuation, ellipses, pace, tone, and spatial use of the page. Since ‘silence’ is such an umbrella term and comes with a raft of connotations, I have chosen to describe all these configurations of silences under the term of ‘textual gap’. This I believe, will provide for a freer examination and give cohesion to the various forms into which this rhetorical device can morph.