Abstract
The Polish language contains a number of words that disclose the secret nuances of silence and are untranslatable into non-Slavonic languages, English included. When we want to describe objective reality in which no sound is heard we use the noun cisza; whereas when we refer to the voluntary act of declining to speak or remaining silent as a consequence of not knowing what to say we have a different verb to describe this non-action (milczeć) and a noun related to this verb (milczenie). The silence that may surround us (cisza) is then different from the silence between two people who are not speaking (milczenie). The former can have a specific resonance (‘the sound of silence’ can be translated as brzmienie ciszy), the latter is always embarrassingly voiceless, mute, dead (in Polish we also say głuche milczenie which literally translates as ‘deaf silence’). Moreover, we can express the subtle difference between complete silence and the strategies which permit something to be passed over in the utterance (przemilczeć) or suddenly to break it (zamilknąć).
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Notes
Brian Woolland, ‘The Gift of Silence’, in Ben Jonson and Theatre: Performance, Practice and Theory, ed. by Richard A. Cave, Elizabeth Schafer and Brian Woolland (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 125–42 (126).
Jerzy Limon, ‘The Fifth Wall: Words of Silence in Shakespeare’s Soliloquies and Asides’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 144 (2008), 47–65 (48).
All quotations are taken from William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. by R.A. Foakes, The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (Walton-on-Thames: Nelson, 1977).
The Tragedy of King Lear, ed. by Ernest A. Horsman (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), quoted in the Arden Shakespeare edition, 162.
Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study, trans. by Matthew T. Bliss, Annemiek Jansen and David E. Orton (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 396.
Silvia Montiglio, Silence in the Land of Logos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 133.
This assumption derives directly from Emmanuel Levinas’s response to the existentialist philosophy of Martin Heidegger. According to Levinas, every ethical relation stems from the fear of occupying somebody else’s ‘place under the sun’. Thus, if I agree that the Da of my Dasein occupies the space that belongs to another human being, every instance of selfless love must then entail a necessary sacrifice on the part of Dasein. See Merold Westphal, Levinas and Kierkegaard in Dialogue (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), 16.
Eli Rozik, Generating Theatre Meaning (Brighton and Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2008), 87.
Thomas More, A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, ed. by Louis L. Martz and Frank Manley (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 213.
The observation that ‘the ontology of whoever utters an aside is different from the figure hitherto enacted by the actor’ plays a crucial role in Jerzy Limon’s distinction between the aside and the soliloquy: see The Chemistry of the Theatre: Performativity of Time (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 171. It is also vital for my argument that Cordelia’s ‘nothing’ transcends the deixis of her world; for, if we follow Limon’s line of argument, and agree that in the aside which foreshadows her rebuttal Cordelia is indeed aware of the presence of the audience, then the aside proves a particularly fitting device to imply the possibility of some extrinsic knowledge on Cordelia’s part, which allows her to point outside the text of the play and beyond the fictional reality created on the stage.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, trans. by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961);
Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969).
Both references are quoted in Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being: Hors-Texte, trans. by Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 234–6.
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© 2013 Małgorzata Grzegorzewska
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Grzegorzewska, M. (2013). The War of ‘Nothings’ in The Tragedy of King Lear. In: Dente, C., Soncini, S. (eds) Shakespeare and Conflict. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311344_5
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