Stilla i musikk og litteratur

The following text presents a dialogue between author Lars Amund Vaage and professor of Nordic literature Geir Hjorthol. Both are also musicians, and here they discuss the theme of silence in music and literature with particular focus on silence as a connecting link or junction between literature and music, as well as its role in expressing the non-verbal and unverbalized. The latter is a central theme in Vaage’s novel Syngja (Sing) (2012), in which he portrays the relationship between a father and his severely autistic daughter and an absence of verbal language that they both, in strange ways, seem to have in common. Vaage has also reflected over relationships between language, music and muteness in the long essay Sorg og song (Sorrow and Song) (2016). The dialogue below draws on Rancière’s proposal that ‘the music of literature’ is connected to an aesthetic regime in modern literature, in which there is focus on text and form in a different way than previously. Paradoxically, the music of literature springs from muteness at the intersection of textual speech and experience.