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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Silence is not simply the absence of noise. It is within us, in the inner citadel that great writers, thinkers, scholars and people of faith have cultivated over the centuries. It characterizes our most intimate and sacred spaces, from private bedrooms to grand cathedrals - those vast reservoirs of silence. Philosophers and novelists have long sought solitude and inspiration in mountains and forests. Yet despite the centrality of silence to some of our most intense experiences, the transformations of the twentieth century have gradually diminished its value. Today, raucous urban spaces and a continual bombardment from different media pressure us into constant activity. We are losing a sense of our inner selves, a process that is changing the very nature of the individual. This book rediscovers the wonder of silence and, with this, a richer experience of life. With his predilection for the elusive, Corbin calls us to listen to another history.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Contents
Cover
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Prelude
1 Silence and the Intimacy of Places
Notes
2 The Silences of Nature
Notes
3 The Search for Silence
Notes
4 The Education and Discipline of Silence
Notes
5 Interlude: Joseph and Nazareth, or Absolute Silence
Notes
6 The Speech of Silence
Notes
7 The Tactics of Silence
Notes
8 From the Silences of Love to the Silence of Hate
Notes
9 Postlude: The Tragedy of Silence
Notes
Index
Plates
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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A History of Silence
From the Renaissance to the Present Day
Alain Corbin
Translated by Jean Birrell
polity
First published in French as Histoire du silence. De la Renaissance à nos jours © Éditions Albin Michel, Paris, 2016
This English edition © Polity Press, 2018
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1739-8
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Corbin, Alain, author.
Title: A history of silence : from the Renaissance to the present day / Alain Corbin.
Other titles: Histoire du silence. English
Description: English edition. | Medford, MA : Polity, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017048521 (print) | LCCN 2017061303 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509517398 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509517350 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509517367 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Silence (Philosophy) | Silence--Religious aspects. | Silence--Psychological aspects. | Meditation.
Classification: LCC BJ1499.S5 (ebook) | LCC BJ1499.S5 C5813 2018 (print) | DDC 204/.47--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017048521
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Fabrice d’Almeida for his careful editing of the final version of this book and Sylvie le Dantec for her help with the preparation of the manuscript.
In silence there is always something unexpected, a beauty that catches you unawares, a tonality to be savoured with the finesse of a gourmet, an exquisite repose … never automatic, it happens as if impelled by some inner force. Silence descends … it comes softly and silkily.
Jean-Michel Delacomptée
Petit éloge des amoureux du silence
Prelude
Silence is not simply the absence of noise. We have almost forgotten what it is. Sound cues have changed their nature, become weaker and lost religious significance. The fear, even dread, caused by silence has intensified.
In the past, the people of the West savoured the depth and the qualities of silence. They saw it as the precondition for contemplation, for introspection, for meditation, for prayer, for reverie and for creation; above all, they saw it as that inner space from which speech came. They scrutinized its social tactics. For them, painting was silent speech.
The intimacy of places, that of the bedroom and its furniture, like that of the house, was bound up with silence. With the rise of the sensitive soul in the eighteenth century, and inspired by the cult of the sublime, people began to appreciate the many different silences of the desert and to listen to those of the mountains, the sea and the countryside.
Silence testified to the intensity of a love affair and seemed a precondition for union. It foretold the lasting nature of the emotion. The life of the invalid, the proximity of death and the presence of the tomb gave rise to a range of silences, which survive today only in vestigial form.
What better way could there be to experience them than to immerse ourselves in quotations from some of the many authors who have embarked on a veritable aesthetic quest? Reading them, we put our own sensibility to the test. History has too often claimed to explain. When it tackles the world of the emotions, it must also and primarily make people feel, especially when the mental worlds have disappeared. This makes a large number of revealing quotations indispensable. They alone can enable the reader to understand how people experienced silence in the past.
It is difficult to be silent today, which prevents us from listening to the inner speech that calms and soothes. Society enjoins us to accept noise in order to be part of the whole, rather than to listen to ourselves. Thus the very structure of the individual is modified.
True, a few solitary walkers, artists and writers, practitioners of meditation, those who have withdrawn to a monastery, a few women who visit graves and, above all, lovers who gaze wordlessly at each other are in search of silence and remain sensitive to its qualities. But they are like travellers washed up on what will soon be a desert island, whose shores are wearing away.
The main culprit is not, however, as might be thought, an intensification of the general noisiness of urban life. Thanks to activists, legislators, hygienists and decibelmeasuring technicians, city noise is now different but probably no more deafening than in the nineteenth century. What is new is hyper-mediatization and permanent connectivity and, in consequence, the incessant flow of words that is thrust on people and which makes them dread silence.
My evocation in this book of the silence of the past and of how people searched for it, and of the qualities, disciplines, tactics, richness and power of the speech of silence, may help us to relearn how to be silent, that is, to be ourselves.
1Silence and the Intimacy of Places
There are specific places where silence makes its subtle omnipresence felt, where it can be more easily heard, where it may appear as a sweet, soft, continuous and anonymous sound; places to which the advice of the poet Valéry applies: ‘Listen to this delicate sound which is continuous, and which is silence. Listen to what you hear when nothing makes itself heard’; this noise ‘blankets everything, this sand of silence … Now nothing. This nothing is huge in the ears.’1 Silence is a presence in the air. It is ‘not visible’, wrote Max Picard, ‘and yet its existence is clearly apparent. It extends to the furthest distances, yet is so close to us that we can feel it as concretely as we feel our own bodies.’2 It is not only thought and ideas that are affected; behaviour and decisions are also subject to its strong influence.
Among the places where silence particularly makes itself felt are the house, with its rooms, hallways and bedrooms, and all the objects that furnish it, but also certain specific buildings, such as churches, libraries, castles and prisons. I shall begin by quoting examples of what was said of these places in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a time when discussion of the silence of intimate places intensified. I will reserve for later the silence that is associated with contemplation and interiority, and is a precondition for meditation, prayer and listening to the word of God.
There are houses that breathe silence, where it seems to permeate the walls. This has been powerfully conveyed in our own day by the paintings of Edward Hopper. It is equally the case with Quesnay, the house of the married priest described by Barbey d’Aurevilly: it was ‘in the silence of this house where silence had always held such sway’ that the hero, Néel de Néhou, awaiting the return of Sombreval, watched over Calixte.3
Silence was central to the work of Georges Rodenbach, for example that of the patrician residences of Bruges. All along the canals, in this dying town, the silence of these hushed houses oppresses; walking the deserted streets, the novel’s main character, Hugues Viane, ‘found himself the brother in silence and in melancholy of this doleful Bruges’.4 Here, says Rodenbach, silence is something living, real, despotic, hostile to anything that disturbs it. In this town, every sound shocks, is sacrilegious, crude and gross.
The presence of silence is crucial to Julien Gracq’s novel The Opposing Shore.5 It reigns in the palace, Vanessa’s old home, all over the town of Maremma in which it stands and in the capital, Orsenna, in fact everywhere where the decadence can be felt. I will return to this novel, which is obsessed by many different forms of silence.
Inside houses, various types of silence impregnate rooms, halls, bedrooms and studies. The silence that is the main subject of the best-known novel of Vercors, The Silence of the Sea, lay heavy in the ground floor room in which the uncle and his niece awaited the German officer Werner von Ebrennac.6 From the beginning, the German sensed it and he seemed ‘to be gauging the depth of the silence’ even before he entered the room. After he had spoken, the silence persisted; it ‘was unbroken, it grew closer and closer like the morning mist; it was thick and motionless’; the immobility of the niece and the uncle ‘made it even heavier, turned it to lead’.7
Silence then accompanies events as they unfold; it was the silence of France which the German officer struggled to overcome during ‘more than a hundred winter evenings’. To this end, he accepted the implacable silence: ‘let [it] invade the whole room, and, like a heavy unbreathable gas, saturate every corner of it’. It was as if, of the three protagonists, it was he who felt most at ease.8 On his return, years later, having lived through various traumas and understood the resistance put up by France, Werner von Ebrennac now approves the ‘healthy obstinacy’ of the silence that ‘once more fell’, but which was now ‘much more tense and thick’.9 What had been, in 1941, the silence of dignity had become the silence of resistance.
‘Every bedroom’, wrote Claudel, ‘is a huge secret.’10 Indeed, bedrooms are the private space of silence par excellence. It is necessary to them. The nineteenth century, observes Michelle Perrot, saw the rise of the desire for a private bedroom, for personal space, a shell, a place of secrecy and silence.11 This desire is historical fact. Baudelaire proclaimed the delight he felt when at last, in the evening, he was alone in the haven of his bedroom. There, he wrote, citing La Bruyère, he escaped ‘the great woe of not being able to be alone’, by contrast with those who lose themselves in the crowd, ‘probably afraid they couldn’t tolerate themselves’. ‘Finally alone! Now only the rattling of some lingering and exhausted carriages can still be heard. For a few hours, we will possess silence, if not rest. Finally! The tyranny of the human face has disappeared, and now only I myself will make me suffer.’ Then, ‘annoyed with everyone and annoyed with myself, I long to redeem myself and to bolster my pride a bit in the silence and solitude of the night.’12
Huysmans attributes a similar desire to several characters in his novels. Des Esseintes surrounds himself with almost mute servants, old people weighed down by years of silence. He contrives a silent bedroom for himself: a rug, a padded ceiling and well-oiled doors ensure that he never hears the footsteps of the servants. He dreamed of ‘a sort of oratory’, a false ‘monastic cell’, a place of ‘retreat for thoughts’, though eventually he found the silence burdensome.13
Marcel Proust had the walls of his bedroom covered with cork and bribed the workmen not to do the jobs for which they were hired in the apartment above his. Kafka expressed the desire to have a hotel room that would allow him ‘to isolate himself, say nothing, delight in silence and write at night’.14
Other writers have analysed in more detail the roots of this widespread desire for silence in a room of one’s own. Its importance is often linked to the emotions stirred by the faint and familiar sounds emanating from members of the family. Walt Whitman acclaims ‘the mother at home, quietly placing the dishes on the supper-table’.15 Rilke describes the happiness he felt in the ‘silent room of an ancestral house among the quiet things in their abiding places’, hearing ‘the tits sounding their first notes outside in the green and sun-shot garden, and away in the distance the village clock’.16 Here, happiness comes from the osmosis between private space and an indeterminate external space.
Rilke also described the various silences created for a child by the mother’s visit:
O the silence on the staircase, the silence in the next room, the silence high up under the ceiling. O Mother: O you, the only one who dealt with all that silence, back in my childhood; who took it upon herself, saying: Do not be afraid – it’s me; who had the courage, in the dead of night, to be that silence for one who was frightened, who was scared stiff. You light a lamp, and that sound is already you.17
There is, he said, another particular silence within a bedroom, the silence created when the neighbours stop making a racket: ‘And now … silence fell. It was as silent as in the aftermath of pain. The silence was strangely palpable and prickling, as if a wound were healing.’ It was a silence that came as a surprise and kept him awake; ‘the nature of that silence had to be experienced; it cannot be described.’18
The narrator of In Search of Lost Time frequently analyses the nature of the silence that surrounds him. He savours the ‘charming quality’ of silence on the Legrandin terrace. In a much-quoted passage, he describes the interior of Tante Léonie’s bedroom:
The air of [this room] was saturated with the fine bouquet of a silence so nourishing, so succulent that I could not enter … without a sort of greedy enjoyment, particularly on those first mornings, chilly still, of the Easter holidays, when I could taste it more fully, because I had just arrived then at Combray.19
We shall return to the care with which the narrator maintains his silence in the room in which Albertine sleeps.
I shall also return to the subtle eroticism pervading the bedroom evoked by Barbey d’Aurevilly in ‘The Crimson Curtain’. Here, I shall consider only the various menacing silences inside the house, which is a veritable kingdom of silences. The lover, awaiting the silent arrival of Alberte, checks the ‘terrifying silence’ of the sleeping house. He listens to the ominous silence of the parental bedroom. Stealth was essential to avoid any surprises, to prevent any noise from the creaking hinges of the doors. Alberte’s first appearance in the narrator’s bedroom comes when he is cocooned in the silence of the room. The street itself was as quiet as ‘the bottom of a well’. ‘I would have heard a fly move’, he says, ‘but if, by chance, there happened to be one in my bedroom, it must have been asleep in some corner of the window or in one of the deep pleats of this curtain … that hangs in front of the window, perpendicular and immobile.’ In this ‘profound and total silence’ – we should reflect on this distinction – the door, all of a sudden, gently opens and Alberte appears, terrified she may have made a noise.20
Another bedroom imagined as impregnated with silence is that of the young woman bent over her work who is so feelingly described by Victor Hugo. Work, purity, piety and quiet coexist in her attic. In this ‘obscure refuge’, while ‘musing on God, simple and without fear, this maiden performed her noble and worthy task, dreamy Silence was seated at her door’.21 The voices on the wind, which ‘rose vaguely from the silent doorsteps’ of the street, say to her: ‘Be pure! … Be calm … Be joyful … Be good.’22
Angelique, the heroine of Zola’s The Dream, a novel in which a permanent silence contrasts with the sound of the nearby cathedral bells, seems to illustrate the Hugolian dream. Silence is crucial to one of the novel’s great scenes: on the evening when, for the first time, the lovesick Félicien appears, the silence in the bedroom was ‘so absolute’ that it accentuated every sound and revealed the noises ‘of the quivering, sighing house’, the noises that inspire night terrors.23
Jules Verne, in a comic short story with the title A Fantasy of Dr Ox, pushed his description of the total silence that reigned within an imaginary Flemish town to absurdities, which allowed him to itemize all the noises that would ordinarily have been heard. Thus the residence of the Burgomaster van Tricasse was a ‘peaceful and silent’ mansion, ‘whose doors never creaked, whose windows never rattled, whose floors never groaned, whose chimneys never roared, whose weathercocks never grated, whose furniture never squeaked, whose locks never clanked, and whose occupants never made any more noise than their shadows’. The god Harpocrates, he adds, would assuredly have chosen it for his Temple of Silence.24
The French novelist of the next century most obsessed by the silence of the bedroom and driven to describe it and convey it was undoubtedly Georges Bernanos. This is particularly visible in his Monsieur Ouine. The quality of the silence of this man’s bedroom reflects his character, ‘genius of nothingness’, of emptiness and of evil, ‘schoolteacher of nothingness’, ‘pederast of souls’, monstrous reptile. Here, silence expresses desperation. It accompanies a death, preceded by a long last agony.
The young Steeny, when he first enters Monsieur Ouine’s room, is at once struck by ‘the wondrous silence of the little bedroom, softly turning on an unseen axis’. He even thinks he can feel it ‘slipping across his forehead, over his chest and along his palms, caressing him like water’.25 He then becomes aware of a murmur, a distant weeping. ‘One could not say that the silence was broken, but it did flow by him, little by little going on its way.’ Behind him, there was ‘a scarcely perceptible shudder’, which was not yet a noise, but which preceded and foreshadowed one.26
Later, Monsieur Ouine talks of Anthelme, his landlady’s husband, who was on his deathbed.
He spoke calmly, deliberately, in a voice hardly lowered at all, yet [Steeny], not without a vague sense of fear, thought he felt that they were enclosed within the same silence, a silence absorbing only the higher registers of sound and leaving the illusion of becoming itself some sort of audible purity.27
In fact it was Monsieur Ouine, who was himself a silence that poisoned minds and corrupted instincts. This was evident when he was on the point of death: ‘Monsieur Ouine’s breathing did not disturb the silence of the little room, but just gave it a sort of funereal, almost religious, dignity.’28 ‘For the length of my solitary life’, the dying man confides, ‘I’ve [never] been one to talk to myself, in the proper sense of the expression, but I rather spoke in order to avoid hearing myself.’ The silence that followed ‘brought no relaxation. It was a silence full of other words, unpronounced words, which Steeny thought he heard hissing and twisting in the shadows like a tangle of snakes.’ And then, as he died, Monsieur Ouine laughed softly, a sound that ‘scarcely even rose above the silence’.29
It would be quite inadequate to restrict my discussion to the bedroom as refuge, confinement, fear, the osmosis of silence and the vague susurration of noises coming from outside. A consideration of the silence of bedrooms must also include their furniture, and the objects and even people who have a particular affinity with the silence of these spaces.
The silent discourse of the objects that constitute decor has been called the ‘mute language of the soul’.30 ‘Every object’, wrote Max Picard
has a hidden fund of reality that comes from a deeper source than the word that designates the object. Man can meet this hidden fund of reality only with silence. The first time he sees an object, man is silent of his own accord. With his silence, man comes into relationship with the reality in the object which is there before ever language gives it a name. Silence is his tribute of honour to the object.31
The object ‘speaks’, says Georges Rodenbach; ‘it expresses its nature in a silent discourse, private because perceptible by its interlocutor alone’. In his poetry, Rodenbach exalted many objects which speak silently to the soul. They include the ‘thin window panes always complicit with the outside’, against which women press their faces, on Sundays, gazing on emptiness and silence; the mirror, ‘sister soul of the bedroom’; old chests; ‘the bronze statuette with arching back, reflecting in a silent hymn’. Here, dreams hang in the air like balloons, and ‘the bedroom remains silent and juggles’ with them. When evening falls, only the gently vibrating chandelier ‘emits its discontented noise in the enclosed silence’. Rodenbach sees the bedroom as a ‘regalia of silence with motionless fabrics’. Here more than anywhere else ‘the pensive virginity of silence’ reigns.
There are many other objects that speak silently to the soul: the bedside lamp; the old portraits ‘with which we often converse in silence’; the fish tank, a vessel which communicates a rejection of exteriority, where the water flees ‘to the bottom of its house of glass’; and, among the jewels, the pearl, ‘being without being’. Rodenbach saw grey as the sensitive colour of silence, together with the white of the plumage of the swans of the canals of Bruges and the black of night. Bedrooms, he wrote:
… vraiment sont de vielles gens
Sachant des secrets, sachant des histoires …
Qu’elles ont cachés dans les vitres noires
Qu’elles ont cachés au fond des miroirs.
[… are really old people / Knowing secrets, knowing stories … / Which they have hidden in the black panes / Which they have hidden at the back of the mirrors.]
And night-time sees ‘a cascade of secrets that no one tells’.32
If decor is the silent language of the soul, silence itself imposes on the soul its subtle omnipresence. This is what gives a particular object its aura, that ‘boundary where being becomes absence’, which then constitutes ‘like a subtle vibration, a silent speech’.
Certain beings have an affinity with silence, in particular children. As we have seen, they sense its motherly presence. ‘The child’, wrote Max Picard, ‘is like a little hill of silence’, on which ‘suddenly the word appears … more silence than sound comes out through the words of children.’33 Many film directors have made children’s silence telling. For Philippe Garrel, children induce silence and turn it into territory.34
Max Picard dwells on the ‘dense silence’ that is in animals. They ‘carry silence around with them on behalf of man’, he wrote, ‘and are always putting silence down in front of man.’ They are ‘images of silence’. But the silence of animals is ‘a heavy silence. Like a block of stone’; they try ‘to tear themselves away but [are] always chained to it’.35 Among animals, the cat in particular inhabits the silence it seems to symbolize, a feature that film directors have used to good effect.
Some buildings, too, are temples of silence, though in a different way from the house, its passages and its bedrooms. The most notable are churches and cloisters. ‘Cathedrals are built around … silence’, wrote Max Picard; ‘the silence of a Romanesque cathedral exists as a substance … it is as though the cathedral, by the very fact of its existence, were producing walls of silence, cities of silence, men of silence.’ Cathedrals, he continues, ‘are like silence inlaid with stone … [they] stand like enormous reservoirs of silence.’36
