News
With nothing to say: the unspeakability of social violence
21 November 2007
| Byline: | Sally Blundell |
|---|---|
| Source: | Humanities Research Network |
A paper given at Transformations '07: Composing the nation: ideas, peoples, histories, languages, cultures, economies, the Congress of Te Whāinga Aronui The Council for the Humanities (VUW, Wellington, 27-28 August 2007).
The Gurkhas in Malaya
cut the tongues of mules
so they were silent beasts of burden
in enemy territories
after such cruelty what could they speak of anyway
- from 'White Dwarfs', Michael Ondaatje
According to Michael Bernstein the stories of a particular people are held within a culture by a chosen narrator - a writer, poet or musician - not as a form of entertainment or even moral instruction, but as a vital bonding mechanism that defines a particular tribe or nation. Such stories, Bernstein claims, become locked in the memory of that nation as a form of tribal encyclopaedia that 'becomes instrumental in shaping the world-view of succeeding ages, so that, in the words of the tale, past exempla and present needs find a continuous and unbroken meeting-ground (1).
This encyclopaedia can be regarded as the ultimate reference text on national identity, but such texts exist only through the exclusion of other voices, voices that, as a community, we choose to leave in silence.
Keri Hulmes the bone people(2) and Reading in the Dark by Irish writer Seamus Deane(3) draw our attention to the voicelessness of those figures who represent the broken tribe, those nations fractured by events which challenge the very coherence of Bernstein's bonding narratives. Both these stories enlist the silence of a central character to illustrate the limited scope of our carefully edited encyclopaedia and the censorship implicit in such terms as 'national identity'. The silence of both the young mute boy, Simon, in the bone people and the young narrator's mother in Reading in the Dark evoke a horrific truth that we as a society and as a reading public are unwilling to hear - that is, the truth of child abuse and the truth of civil violence as it spills over into family allegiances.
From the moment that Simon first enters Kerewin's life in the bone people he is defined primarily by his speechlessness, by the sign around his neck saying: 'SIMON P. GALLAYLEY CANNOT SPEAK'. Like other mute characters, he is immediately marked by this absence - he is denied textual wholeness and he remains marked by this denial throughout the book.
In his silence he is regarded as almost non-human, with Kerewin constantly referring to him as 'it', 'the brat', 'oddbod'. To others in the book he is a mere physical presence around which songs, conversations and laughter stream. To Jo he is a shallow reflection of his own erratic emotions.
For Simon, release comes only in long screams of pain, a noise 'full of abject fear, of someone driven to the point where only terror and anguish exist' (4). Such manifest suffering is again suggestive of the non-human, the unformed and under-textualised character. In terms of child abuse, such objectification helps pave the way for Joe's violent attack against the boy - in many accounts of atrocity a process of dehumanisation is undertaken as a pre-requisite for the ensuing violence.
Yet such conduct also works as part of a whole body of evidence that validates Simon's position as an outcast. He cannot speak, his behaviour is out of the ordinary, he has an incomplete and slightly dishonourable history and a thrown together and dysfunctional stand-in family. He cannot articulate his defiance, he cannot even describe his pain.
Stranded in the prosaic and unromantic realm of drug dealing and domestic abuse, he fails to even fit the traditionally romanticised role of the archetypal sufferer. His experience, Hulme suggests, lies beyond the conventions of his culture and the traditions of literature in general, his silence endorsing his status as lying outside the acceptable myths as told by the dominant - the speaking and reading - community.
Denied the individuality that is relayed primarily through speech, stripped of the security of group identification, he becomes a physical embodiment of unspeakable victimisation, a manifestation, as Kim Worthington says, 'of his excommunication, his utter solipsistic isolation. He is free, yes, but the price of his freedom is that he remains wholly outside the dialogic community' (5).
According to Graham Huggan the bone people is an allegory of New Zealand's attempts to come to terms with a history of colonial dependence and the continuing tensions between its indigenous and European communities. Within these tensions, Huggan says, Simon's silence is 'a gesture of resistance to prescribed social 'norms'' (6). This theory is complicated, however, by the fact that Simon is clearly a victim of, rather than a resistance fighter against, such norms. Disabled, traumatised and ostracised, Simon may well forgive his abusers - he actually seeks them out in order to do so - but his status of victim and the ongoing mystery surrounding his background emphasises the placement of his experience outside the bounds of our encyclopaedic entries.
Susan Najita argues that Simon is mute testimony to a relatively obscure chapter in New Zealand history - the forced transportation of child convicts from England's overcrowded penal institutions to Australia and New Zealand during the 1840s(7). Banished 'beyond the seas', these children arrived in New Zealand undersized, weak and malnourished. Certainly Simon fits these descriptions, being small, thin, 'bird-boned'. His age is indeterminate. He is suspected of stealing and he is referred to as an outlaw, a vagabond or vandal. His instinctive hand blocks, his nightmares, his fear of needles (alluding to his father's heroin addiction) - all signify an abusive past. Even his muteness can be seen to allude to the silence enforced in English institutions for wayward children.
But while it is possible to regard Simon as a representation of the historic maltreatment of children or the ongoing wrangling over the impact of colonisation, his silence is also used to question our faith in language as a redeeming symbol of humanity or as evidence of a certain standard of civilised behaviour. Throughout the bone people Kerewin, a self-declared word junkie, uses words that are spontaneous, hurtful and ultimately nearly fatal. Kerewin's anger and her unthinking endorsement of Jo's planned punishment pave the way for the vicious beating that puts Simon in hospital.
Here we are reminded that the ability to talk, the one skill that the child lacks, is not only unconvincing as proof of the humane capacity for reason; it can also be enlisted to orchestrate acts of cruelty and physical atrocity - acts that tend to be omitted from our cultural narratives.
In describing Jo's vicious attack against Simon, Hulme has been accused of abandoning any 'aesthetic distance'. The description of this attack is shocking - as it must be shocking - yet it exists too as a metonym for all those other acts of violence to which Simon has clearly been subjected but which remain unuttered. In this regard Hulme does not abandon all aesthetic distance - indeed she draws attention to such a distance through her very transgression of it in this one instance and in Simon's ongoing silence.
Silence as a metonym for unspeakable horror is also central to Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark. In this work the bloodied history of Ireland is honed down into the story of a single family and the mistaken revenge killing of Eddie, the young narrator's uncle. The knowledge shared by the mother and the young narrator - that Eddie was innocent and that it was the boy's maternal grandfather who ordered the misguided execution - becomes an unspeakable secret with a profound and harrowing impact on the entire family.
The gradual unfolding of the truth to Deane's young narrator occurs within an amorphous landscape of silence and fear. As he walks alongside his father we are told 'I knew then he was going to tell me something terrible some day, and, in sudden fright, I didn't want him to; keep your secrets, I said to him inside my closed mouth, keep your secrets and I won't mind' (8). When the boy's father subsequently confides in his son, telling him a sadly incomplete version of events, he does so in a church, a place of historically sanctified silence in a macabre reversal of the Catholic confessional with its association of divine forgiveness. Rather than release or resolution, this confession offers only the promise of further silence.
The boy's response to his newfound knowledge is that of a young child, slamming his hands to his ears to protect himself from the truth. ''I know it's too late,' he whispers to himself. 'But go back a few minutes, back into the church and the rain and say nothing. Never say, never say'' (9). He thus holds on to the childish belief that utterance would somehow substantiate a truth that, if left in the realm of the unnamed, will cause no harm.
Bernstein's encyclopaedia may well operate on this same, highly questionable basis.
When the grandfather tells the young narrator the truth of Eddie's execution, the boy immediately realises the devastating impact that such truth would have on his relationship with the rest of his family: 'I left him' he says, 'and went straight home, home, where I could never talk to my father or my mother properly again' (10). As Jane Stafford writes, 'The more terrible the event the more rigid the sanctions against its representation' (11).
The boy's commitment to secrecy alludes to the horrifying yet somehow shameful nature of knowing when it comes to acts of extreme violence. Certainly the humiliation of the boy and the mother in being in possession of such terrible yet degrading knowledge is shared by many victims of - or witnesses to - real atrocity. As the young narrator says of his mother, 'it wasn't just that she was trapped by what had happened. She was trapped by my knowing it. It must be shame, I decided. She's paralysed by shame. "Every time she saw me, she felt exposed, even though I made it clear I would never say anything" (12).
The mother';s silence, escalating from the hush of a shared secret to psychotic periods of wordlessness and finally to the complete silence resulting from a stroke, is attributed to the horror of her family's past yet her slow slide into total silence is paralleled by the demise of her body: 'everything bore down on her,' we are told. 'She got smaller, more intense, her features sealed into no more than two or three expressions' (13). Such physical demise, says Stafford, signifies the 'textualisation of the body as the only available site on which the narrative of terror can be inscribed' (14). As with Simon, the mother becomes the physical embodiment of suffering, unprotected by the traditional aesthetics of the well-crafted novel or any insistence on meaning.
As Laura Tanner argues, violence twists its victims into a state of uncontestable embodiment; into a piece of the human body rather than the word, the physical rather than the semiotic. In presenting the mute body of the victim of atrocity Deane, like Hulme, forces the reader to confront the unadulterated truth of barbarity and the collapse of the human spirit as language subsides beneath the irrefutable weight of the body as the prime evidence of pain and trauma.
In Reading in the Dark this subsidence is made apparent as the main vehicle for truth is slowly moved from language to the physical body. Following the execution more and more characters are rendered speechless through illness, death or madness. The real informer leaves Ireland, the man who carried out Eddie's murder is struck dumb, the grandfather dies, the father, Eddie's brother, becomes increasingly incommunicative and the boy's mother falls deeper and deeper into silence. As Deane's young narrator notes, 'everyone who had been [at the farmhouse the night that Eddie was killed] was dead or in exile or silenced one way or the other' (15).
The mother's eventual lapse into total muteness is a terrible and terrifying metaphor for the silencing of an entire nation in which suspicion and rebellion are bottled up in equal measure. For the young narrator the sudden yet irrevocable silence of his mother is a relief as he willingly takes on the burden of being the only family member cognisant of the truth. As he says, 'I felt it was almost a mercy, when my mother suffered a stroke and lost the power of speech - I would look at her, sealed in her silence, and now she would smile slightly at me and very gently, almost imperceptibly, shake her head. I was to seal it all in too' (16).
Within such silence, truth is unavoidably put at risk. As Graham Huggan says, 'the selective agency of memory is called upon to blur and distort; but it cannot erase' (17), and certainly memory does becomes the precarious medium through which a destructive past can be confronted and creatively transformed. But this very precariousness of memory and the ease with which real events can slip into the half-believed arena of myth or hearsay leaves truth vulnerable to a communal determination to cloak it in silence - to edit it out of our tribal narratives.
In response to what Lawrence Langer describes as 'the aesthetic problem of reconciling normalcy with horror'(18) silence can be seen as one of many alternative, non-verbal codes which allude to a horrifying yet unmodified act of trauma while also subverting those earlier narratives of colonial encounter based on outdated hierarchies of power. Certainly over the past four decades the authority of the speaker has been exposed as standing on a frail, arbitrary and often questionable moral position of cultural monopoly.
Divorced from the normal narrative incursions into interiority characters such as the mother in Reading in the Dark and Simon in the bone people become the silent holders of their tribe's culpability - in these cases the knowledge and enactment of domestic abuse and unjust retribution.
In Huggan's analysis such a silence represents the bonding defiance of a group's refusal to enlist in the articulation of the power group, yet Simon and the mother in Reading in the Dark are denied any such group bonding. While silence may indicate an act of communal disengagement, in these works the mute figures stand alone. In their failure to deflect the violence of society back on to their community they are kept on the margins of social networks and normal human discourse - so central to the form of the novel. They are ignored, avoided or ostracised, locked into their own memories of pain or terror. They are restrained from voicing their experiences even to the reader. They have witnessed the more barbaric side of human behaviour, and they hold this knowledge deep within their scarred or damaged bodies.
In analysing the accounts of disenfranchised peoples, Richard Todd describes the process of 'recovery' by which novelists give voice to the 'dispossessed', while noting that the reader must remember that the author is nevertheless 'inventing that voice' (19). Through using a silent character both Hulme and Deane reject such a process - alerting the reader to trauma without extending the process of invention to a transgressive assumption of voice. In this way they refuse to support the lie of complete non-disclosure while also avoiding the risks inherent in graphic descriptions of the violated. This is not a failure of language - there are words capable of expressing real trauma - but by including silence in their lexicon these writers draw our attention to the seemingly unspeakable nature of such stories, and the ease with which these stories can be left unsaid, while at the same time presenting us with the stories themselves.
In doing so they reveal an awareness of the very real risks of depicting trauma in literature - the risk of trivialising human suffering in the name of art or, worse still, entertainment; the risk of presenting what Susan Sontag calls a 'terrible distinctness' in the artistic portrayal of such 'unnecessary, indecent information' (20); the risk of fuelling an abhorrent fascination with, or a chilling indifference towards, bodily suffering; and the risk of resorting to implausible happy-ever-after outcomes quite at odds with real trauma. As Lawrence Langer asks, 'How should art - how can art - represent inexpressibly inhuman suffering - without doing an injustice to that suffering?'(21).
Again, where art flounders the physicality of the body steps in to fill this very appropriate lacuna. Simon, framed against the window of Kerewin's tower, and the boy's mother in Reading in the Dark, similarly framed by the light of the window at the top of the stairwell, stand as constant if often uncomfortable reminders of the challenges to literary representation when confronting trauma. And it is such reminders that must challenge the deliberate construction of a 'national identity'. Like Bernstein's encyclopaedia such a process is defined by an inevitable process of editing through which those voices that do not fulfil the required brief are left unsaid.
ENDNOTES
1) Michael André Bernstein, The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980) 9.
2) Keri Hulme, the bone people (Wellington: Spiral, 1983).
3) Seamus Deane, Reading in the Dark (London: Cape, 1996).
4) Hulme 234.
5) Kim L. Worthington, Self as Narrative: Subjectivity and Community in Contemporary Fiction. Oxford English Monographs, ed. Christopher Butler and Stephen Gill et al (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996) 260.
6) Graham Huggan, 'Philomela' Retold Story: Silence, Music, and the Post-Colonial Text,' The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 25.1 (1990): 16
7) Susan Najita, Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific: Reading History and Trauma in Contemporary Fiction (NY: Routledge, 2006).
8) Deane 46.
9) Deane 134.
10) Deane 126.
11) Jane Stafford, 'Domestic Terror: Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark,' Terror and Text: Representing Political Violence in Literature and the Visual Arts ed. Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Mark Williams (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2002) 122.
12) Deane 223.
13) Deane 217-18.
14) Stafford 131.
15) Deane 206.
16) Deane 230.
17) Huggan 14.
18) Lawrence L. Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP, 1975) xii.
19) Richard Todd, Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today (London: Bloomsbury, 1996) 198.
20) Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin, 2003) 56.
21) Langer 1.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bernstein, Michael André. The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.
Deane, Seamus. Reading in the Dark. London: Cape, 1996.
Huggan, Graham. "Philomela's Retold Story: Silence, Music, and the Post-Colonial Text." The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 25.1 (1990): 12-23.
Hulme, Keri. The Bone People. Wellington: Spiral, 1983.
Langer, Lawrence L. The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1975.
Najita, Susan. Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific: Reading History and Trauma in Contemporary Fiction. Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures. Vol. 14. NY: Routledge, 2006.
Ondaatje, Michael. Rat Jelly and Other Poems. London: Marion Boyars, 1980.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. NY: Oxford UP, 1985.
Schwab, Gabriele. "Cultural Texts and Endopsychic Scripts." SubStance 30.1&2 (2001): 160-76.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin, 2003.
Stafford, Jane. "Domestic Terror: Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark." Terror and Text: Representing Political Violence in Literature and the Visual Arts. Ed. Gerrit-Jan Berendse and Mark Williams. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2002.
Tanner, Laura. Intimate Violence: Reading Rape and Torture in Twentieth-Century Fiction. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1994.
Todd, Richard. Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today. London: Bloomsbury, 1996.
Worthington, Kim L. Self as Narrative: Subjectivity and Community in Contemporary Fiction. Oxford English Monographs. Ed. Christopher and Stephen Gill et al Butler. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996.
