Moving towards Literary Silence

Abstract For the critic to approach and define a concept of silence is to approach a seductive concept. To seduce, from seducere, means to lead astray or to separate from, and my suggestion is that a critical approach to silence can easily be led astray, separated from its original intention. First of all, silence resists empirical observation and description. It cannot be analysed as a thing or an object, it cannot be pointed to or defined. Silence slips away from description: to talk of it is to lose it, or at least to defer it. As such, silence is always just ahead of our critical discourse, seducing us to follow it just one step further in the attempt to catch it, but never there to be caught. Critical discourse about silence lags behind its object of study. The seductive impact of silence is also linked to what might be called its flexibility. Silence, precisely because it is not a definable, graspable thing, is subject to numerous different understandings and can be used in a sufficiently vague manner to make it serve many purposes. It is available for various projections of meaning because no meaning or definition can ‘match’ the notion of silence; it is always already somewhere else.