The Uses of Silence in Literature

Silence and grief are a natural pairing. Grief hits you like a wrecking ball, leaving you gasping for breath. When his beloved friend Arthur Henry Hallam died at the age of 22 in 1833, the lack of words was, for the 24-year-old Alfred Tennyson, a personal and professional affront. So, in In Memoriam, his great poem of almost 3,000 lines, he threw all his skills and resources at the problem.

He wrote about the ship that was carrying Hallam’s body home; how he couldn’t sleep for thinking of it being tossed about by the waves. He tried to convey what the pressing absence felt like: he described going to Hallam’s house and becoming upset about the door where he used to knock and wait impatiently for his friend, and which would never now be answered again. He wrote about the unbearable knowledge that Hallam’s potential would be unfulfilled, this young man who had been the brightest and best of them. He imagined Hallam’s silenced voice silently speaking to him. He told of a dream – the ultimate in wish fulfilment – in which a shining ship appeared with Hallam on the deck: he climbed on board and simply fell in silence on his friend’s neck. But the emotional impact of In Memoriam is not in what it says, but in what it doesn’t say – in what it is silent about because it cannot be expressly communicated.

For others, silence is about solace rather than inexpressibility. In 2016, the 16,141,241 people who voted remain in the Brexit referendum, myself included, got to know what it felt like to be on the losing side of a historical turning point. Disbelief, anger, grief, shame, denial. Being a remainer after the Brexit vote offered a taste of a widespread experience in the second half of the 17th and early 18th centuries. In that time, those who felt what it was like to be on a losing side included royalists during the Interregnum, republicans after the Restoration, Nonjurors who refused to swear the oaths of allegiance to William and Mary after the Glorious Revolution, Whigs under Queen Anne, and Tories under George I.

Defeat had enormous ramifications: many individuals were led to question their understanding of God’s providence and rethink what it meant to live a good life. Some quit the public sphere. The withdrawn silences of writers such as John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Anne Finch, the Countess of Winchilsea, and Alexander Pope have a setting and a colour. Whether expressing devastated defeat or calm self-possession, they are the green silences of gardens and country estates.

The blockbuster genre that is the 19th-century novel is the last place most people would think to look for silences. But there are numerous examples of novels of the period suggesting just how liberating it can be to opt out of conversation and other social verbal requirements. Elizabeth Gaskell’s tactful silences are a gentle reminder that it is sometimes kinder not to say everything we know, all of the time. Thomas Hardy’s companionable silences convey an easy togetherness that words would only ruin. George Eliot wrote silences that make empathic connection when feelings are running at their highest.

The tiniest of silences in the 19th-century novel are also the funniest. In Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1817), financially pressed Sir Walter Elliot is talking to his land agent, Mr Shepherd, about finding a soldier or sailor to tenant his country house, Kellynch Hall. Mrs Clay, who is amorously pursuing Sir Walter, is in favour of the suggestion and observes that such a tenant could look after the gardens and shrubberies. But Sir Walter has other ideas:

As to all that,” rejoined Sir Walter coolly, “supposing I were induced to let my house, I have by no means made up my mind as to the privileges to be annexed to it. I am not particularly disposed to favour a tenant. The park would be open to him of course, and few navy officers, or men of any other description, can have had such a range; but what restrictions I might impose on the use of the pleasure-grounds, is another thing. I am not fond of the idea of my shrubberies being always approachable; and I should recommend Miss Elliot to be on her guard with respect to her flower-garden. I am very little disposed to grant a tenant of Kellynch Hall any extraordinary favour, I assure you, be he sailor or soldier.”

After a short pause, Mr. Shepherd presumed to say,

“In all these cases, there are established usages which make every thing plain and easy between landlord and tenant.”

Mr Shepherd’s nonplussed “short pause” is perfectly timed. One of those you-can-not-be-serious silences that follow something preposterous, it allows the full folly of Sir Walter’s remarks to bloom into view.

Silence: A Literary History by Kate McLoughlin is published by Oxford University Press

- Author: Kate McLoughlin, The Guardian

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