Silence is often speech – quite apart from its tactical use, which I will discuss in the next chapter – but it is a speech that is in competition with that which is spoken aloud. ‘Words stop silence from speaking’, wrote Ionesco in his Fragments of a Journal; ‘The spirit of things is not in words’, said Antonin Artaud.1
‘It is only when life is sluggish within us that we speak’, wrote Maeterlinck, ‘the true life, the only life that leaves a trace behind, is made up of silence alone’; and it is the ‘sombre power’ of silence that fills us with ‘so deep a dread’.2 The language of the soul is silence. This – to which I will return – poses a fundamental problem, says Charles du Bos, that of translating this language using words.
We may believe that speech ‘[comes] forth from the fullness of silence’, and that this gives it its legitimacy, wrote Gabriel Marcel, who also emphasized the ‘supratemporal quality of silence’.3 According to Max Picard, the speech that is born of silence ‘withers when it comes out of silence, out of the fullness of silence’, of which it ‘is only the other side . . . the resonance’. In silence, speech holds its breath and fills once more with original life; ‘there is something silent in every word, as an abiding token of the origin of speech’, and ‘when two people are conversing with one another . . . a third is always present: silence is listening’.4
‘Silence is speech transfigured. No word exists in itself; it exists only through its own silence. There is silence, indivisibly, within the smallest word’, wrote Pierre Emanuel in La Révolution parallèle (The Parallel Revolution).5 Silence, said Jean-Marie Le Clézio, in L’Extase matérielle (The Material Ecstasy), ‘is the supreme outcome of language and consciousness’.6 And Pascal Quignard asserted that ‘language is not our native land. We come from silence, and we were corrupted when we still walked on all fours.’7 This belief validated the attempt to rehabilitate language through silence, as advocated by Wittgenstein, after Thoreau, who believed that to recover possession of our words, hence of our lives, we must pass by way of silence.8
It is the silent speech of God in the Bible that is central to my discussion here. Let us listen to the testimony of those who are convinced, not that God hides and remains silent, but that he speaks above all when he says nothing. ‘Lord, let us never forget that you speak also when you are silent’, wrote Kierkegaard.9 Pierre Coulange has discussed this silent speech of God in a magnificent chapter defining the notion of ‘transcendent silence’, ‘the grandeur of God which is found not in action or in words but simply in his visit, in his flight (vol) if I may so express it’.10 The supreme example is the primordial silence which preceded Creation, because ‘before the fulfilment of this monumental work, it was silence that reigned, an awesome silence which was like a meditation on the unborn world’, when the spirit flew, and darkness and silence enveloped everything.11 The Psalms repeated this silent language of Creation, and Coulange quotes the many instances found throughout the Bible of the speech of a God who hides from view; one such comes in the New Testament, in the episode of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. In the sixteenth century, John of the Cross emphasized the presence of the silent word of God heard in the silent quietude of the dark night.
Many people have experienced silence as speech unuttered. Victor Hugo, in Les Contemplations, said that in Creation ‘everything speaks’: the air, the flower, the blade of grass . . .
De l’astre au ciron, l’immensité s’écoute . . .
Crois-tu que l’eau du fleuve et les arbres des bois
S’ils n’avaient rien à dire élèveraient la voix? . . .
Crois-tu que le tombeau, d’herbe et de nuit vêtu,
Ne soit rien qu’un silence? . . .
Non, tout est une voix et tout est un parfum
Tout dit dans l’infini quelque chose à quelqu’un. . . .12
Nous entendons le bruit du rayon que Dieu lance
La voix de ce que l’homme appelle le silence.13
[From the heavenly bodies to the smallest mite, the immensity listens . . . / Do you think that the waters of the river and the trees of the woods / If they had nothing to say, would raise their voices? . . . / Do you think that the tomb, covered with grass and with night, is only a silence? . . . / No, everything is a voice and everything is a perfume / Everything in infinity says something to someone. . . .
We hear the sound of the beam of light God throws / The voice of what humans calls silence.)
Maeterlinck constantly returns to his fascination with the speech of silence: ‘but from the moment that we have something to say to each other, we are compelled to hold our peace . . . and no sooner do we speak than something warns us that the divine gates are closing. Thus it comes about that we hug silence to us, and are very misers of it.’14 Silence speaks particularly in unhappiness; it is then that it caresses us, and ‘the kisses of the silence of misfortune . . . can never be forgotten’.15 I shall return at some length to the speech of silence in love.
The power of silent speech has often been proclaimed. Language, wrote Merleau-Ponty, ‘lives only from silence; everything we cast to others has germinated in this great mute land which we never leave’.16 And the link between speech and silence has been analysed in many different spheres, including music, oratory, writing, especially poetic, painting and the cinema.
Pascal Quignard, in ‘La dernière leçon de musique de Tch’eng Lien’ (Tch’eng Lien’s Last Music Lesson), has his music master declare, at the end of the day, and after asking his pupil to listen to the slightest sounds – of the wind in the trees, of a paintbrush on silk, of a child peeing onto bricks: ‘I’ve done too much music today. I shall bathe my ears in silence.’ M. de Sainte Colombe, the musician in Tous les matins du monde (All the World’s Mornings), has taken a vow of silence, ‘tomb’ of regrets. Like his friend, the painter Baugin, he believes that to paint is above all to be silent. Painting is produced in silence. In the inner world of music, like painting, any quest ‘can succeed only in the deepest intimacy, in silence’.17
The muta eloquentia of painting has been a particular focus of interest and the subject of much research that I can only summarize here. ‘Images are silent, but they speak in silence’, wrote Max Picard; they ‘remind man of life before the coming of language; they move him with a yearning for that life.’18 Painting, wrote Lessing, is mute poetry. Eugène Delacroix would later observe: ‘Silence is always impressive . . . I confess my preference for the silent arts, those mute things which Poussin used to say that he professed. Words are tactless, they interrupt one’s peace, demand attention . . . painting and sculpture seem more serious: you have to seek them out’; the ‘silent charm’ of painting ‘has the same power, and even seems to increase each time we look at the work’.19
Paul Claudel devoted one of his essays, L’Oeil écoute (The Eye Listens), to this mute eloquence. He discusses Dutch painting, in which he saw the landscapes as ‘sources of silence’. ‘We have there’, he wrote, of a painting of Van de Velde, ‘one of those paintings that one listens to more than one looks at’; and, of a painting by Vermeer, ‘it is full of the silence of the here and now’. The scenes presented by Dutch painting had, he believed, an essential additional element, silence, and this ‘made it possible to apprehend the soul, or at least listen to it’.20
Rembrandt, though he did not invent it, was well aware of the significance of the link between emptiness, pure space and the silence revealed by an object that catches the eye. Silence, in his paintings, is ‘an invitation to remember’. One of the reasons for the fascination exercised in The Night Watch is that it is ‘full of a strange mute noise’. In his Stormy Landscape, Rembrandt caught the moment when, before the thunder and the lightning, the storm was presaged by a ‘thickening of the silence’, such as we have all experienced at the end of a piece of organ music.21
Claudel, contemplating stained-glass windows, adjures the Christian soul, saying: ‘This is your silence.’22 In his Conversations dans le Loir-et-Cher, he was critical of the way pottery is crammed together in museums, when really each item demands to be surrounded by ‘a certain expanse of solitude and silence’.23
Of all the specialists in the history of la Grand Siècle, that is, the French seventeenth century, it is Marc Fumaroli who has discussed in the greatest depth what he has called the ‘school of silence’ that is constituted by the painting of this period. ‘The arts of the silent image speak’, he says, at the end of his discussion of muta eloquentia in the art of Nicolas Poussin, here returning to Delacroix’s reading of this work.24 This is why painters wanted solitude and silence as they worked. According to Fumaroli, the Shroud of Turin is the most powerful representation of ‘the sonority of words unspoken’.25 It is a synthesis of the interior word linked to the divine word; it is the spoken word projected into the sensible world in which what is heard silently risks being devalued. According to Pascal, ‘Christian speech is most vigorous and poignant and closest to its divine source’ when it is ‘faithful to its silence’ and stays in the register of oratio interior. Silence, observes Fumaroli, is not a loss of speech but a retreat by speech into its own original, more resonant, space.26 To paint the silent gestures of heroes then assumes great semantic power. It creates a theatre for the silent speech offered for the contemplation of the viewer. Here we come back to the concentration on internal images proposed, as we have seen, in the ‘spiritual exercises’.
For centuries, and especially in the nineteenth century, the pious images of the mysteries, joyous, sorrowful or glorious, which have supported recitation of the rosary, have been part of this meditative quest bound up with silence. In the seventeenth century, the silent poetry of the images and the talking painting of the discourse consciously echoed each other.27 We need to understand that the people of this period looked at a painting differently from us. They contemplated it with fervour. They hoped for a silent colloquy that would inspire them in their pious practices. Today, we look at a painting with only aesthetic considerations in mind. It is the task of the historian to rediscover the old way of looking, and to explain it. The painting of solitary figures, in particular, created an ‘effect of silence’ which was a compelling invitation to meditation, and Fumaroli has listed and discussed certain paintings that are particularly charged with powerful silent messages.
Huysmans’s character Durtal, who may be seen as the double of the author, thinks that the Flemish painters, preoccupied with their craft and ‘hampered by earthly reminiscences . . . were and remained men’. They lacked that ‘specific culture which is practised only in the silence and peace of the cloister’. Whereas Fra Angelico, by contrast, had the ability to attain ‘the seraphic realm’ in which he moved, he who ‘never opened his eyes, closed in prayer, excepting to paint’, who ‘had never looked out on the world . . . had seen only within himself’.28 This explained the power of the silence in his work.
Yves Bonnefoy has studied the Resurrection of Piero della Francesca with particular attention. This painting, he believes, calls for silence. It demands that you listen to it so as not to lose any of the qualities it accrued during its long gestation. He thought that this painting was different from those which, in the Quattrocento, imposed the silence of perspective, the product of ‘simple relationships between proportions and forms’. By contrast, he suggested, the silence of Piero della Francesca was the silence of ‘the commonplaceness of the world, loud with hustle and bustle, with the reflection of the blue sky in pools of water’.29
The scenes of the Annunciation have often and rightly been seen as dominated by a paradoxical silence. In spite of the words of the Archangel – but were they spoken? – and the brief reply, a deep silence echoes that of the inner soul of Mary. It will only be broken later, by the singing of the Magnificat. From a similar perspective, Marc Fumaroli has discussed with great insight the silences of Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks, for him the supreme masterpiece of Christian art. In the silence of the persons, everything is here ‘foreshadowed, accomplished and contemplated at a distance’: the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Baptism and the Cross.30
A little painting by Raphael, currently in the Louvre, has at some point been given the title Silence of the Virgin. It merits a discussion of the same type as that devoted by Fumaroli to the Virgin of the Rocks. We will return to the Saint Joseph of Georges de La Tour and to the silent depths of the conversation it imposes on the spectator (see illustration). This painter, wrote Fumaroli, is attuned to that French characteristic of never doing too much, the reserve that guarantees intensity and interiority’, a constant feature of ‘Gallican spirituality’.31
Paul Claudel, as we have seen, saw the painting of Rembrandt as a painting of silence. In fact, many artists since might be described as painters of silence, to the point where it becomes difficult to compile a list. I shall try, nevertheless. Vanitas paintings, as noted above, are imbued with a silence that is only deepened by the silence of the still lives they portray; painting, wrote Louis Marin, of ‘the ontology of nothingness’ to be found in the silence of objects. These paintings call for a mute, silent gaze. They invite viewers to pause in their daily activities, to contemplate the end of their life, to anticipate death. At the same time, they raise the spectre of their past life. Let us note, in this connection, the exceptional power of the Memento mori of Philippe de Champaigne, on display in the museum of Le Mans. Mary Magdalene and St Jerome have been the archetypal figures of this painting of the vanities, school of silence.
Many painters of the first half of the nineteenth century conveyed the speech of silence with particular intensity, most notably Caspar David Friedrich. He communicates, says Anouchka Vasak, ‘a mute experience of the horizon’. The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog portrays a whole range of emotions, in the most profound of silences, and this mute speech acts on the spectator. In the words of Vasak, ‘the wanderer, who represents me, also escapes me as something other . . . he shows me that I do not see everything, and that I wish to see, but that to see assumes something left in obscurity.’32 What we perceive in Friedrich’s painting is what we see when we contemplate a landscape in silence. Further, the people he paints communicate their wonder in a mute immobility. They convey a reverence which expresses the religious pathos of the authentic contemplation of nature. Certain pages of the journal of Caspar David Friedrich reveal the need he felt to listen to his inner voice, before exposing in his painting what he had seen in silence and obscurity.
To illustrate my argument by a range of painted silences, I have chosen a number of canvases in the musée d’Orsay, thus dating from the second half of the nineteenth century, which are familiar to everyone: the Angelus of Millet and the meditative silence of pious peasants; the sensual silence of Bouguereau’s The Birth of Venus; the maternal contemplative silence of Berthe Morisot’s The Cradle; the silence of despair and the impossibility of communication of Degas’s L’Absinthe (see illustration); and, finally, another silence of two solitudes, L’Homme et la femme of Pierre Bonnard.
However, it was the symbolists who explored the speech of silence in most depth at this period, and the list of works of theirs that do so is long. Fernand Khnopff painted Silence explicitly: a gloved woman puts a finger to her lips (see illustration). In the paintings of these symbolists, silence was often accompanied by shrouding in a veil or in the darkness of night. It accentuated the detachment of the person who, in contemplation, seeks true reality. Take, for example, the famous painting of Arnold Böcklin (1878), entitled Isle of the Dead. The silence here is suffocating. The rowing boat taking people to the island is itself its prisoner. The painting symbolizes both silence and the irrevocability of death. In Gustave Moreau’s Orpheus at the Tomb of Eurydice, silence is everywhere. ‘The sacred singer is quiet for ever. The great voice of beings and things is extinguished.’33
Other symbolist painters made explicit reference to silence in the title of their works. We may quote, in addition to Khnopff’s pastel on paper, the series by Frantisek Kupka with the title The Voice of Silence (1903). The French painter Maurice Dennis gave the name Silencio to his house overlooking the beach of Trestrignel at Perros-Guirec.
Critics have detected another way of evoking silence in the work of later Surrealists. Thus Magritte’s Empire of Light is above all a painting of deep silence (see illustration). Giulia Latini Mastrangelo has discussed at some length the way silence spreads across numerous canvases of Dali and gives them poignancy. Enigma, dated 1982, shows an ancient statue which heralds an eternal and total silence. When Dali painted At the Seaside (1932), he portrayed a solitary stretch of beach dominated by silence. ‘In this solitude, [Dali] has produced a painting in which the landscape, through silence, communicates with our solitude and our silence.’34 Dali seems here to have been inspired by what was then a very recent poem by García Lorca:
Listen, my child, to the silence.
It’s an undulating silence,
a silence
that brings valleys and echoes down
and bows foreheads
to the ground.35
In our own day, we have all, in the presence of many paintings by Edward Hopper, felt that this artist primarily painted silence, the silence of highways, of streets and of houses, but above all the silence existing between people. I will return to this.
The discussion above, like that of painting as a school of silence, has inevitably been very brief. Many names should be added to those I have mentioned. I should have discussed the silence of objects in the work of Chardin; I should have cited those painters who have been silent in order to hear the slightest vibrations in nature, like those of the Barbizon School, in particular Théodore Rousseau, or those who, like Van Gogh, were able to suggest the silence of empty rooms, and not forgetting those who have portrayed familiar silent situations.
For my own part, I remember an experience which shows how the silence of a place makes it easier to respond to the silence of the paintings. By some happy chance, I found myself alone for an hour in a little room in a museum at Harvard, with a well-known series by Cézanne, portraying apples. By some inexplicable negligence, I was left there, uninterrupted, in absolute solitude and silence, alone in the presence of these paintings. I had often studied them in reproduction, but I felt a silent communication was established which both modified and deepened my appreciation.
The connection between silence and writing has fascinated many authors. The vertigo of the blank page is impregnated with silence, a link between nothingness and creation. At a different level, in the book of Genesis, what precedes Creation is a silent blank page. To write is derisory, said Maurice Blanchot:
a sea wall of paper against an ocean of silence. Silence – it alone has the last word. It alone holds the fragmented sense through the words. And it is towards it, in essence, that we tend . . . we aspire . . . when we write. To remain silent is what we all want, without knowing it, when we write.36
The blank page is the creative space par excellence. This was perceived by François Mauriac, who said: ‘Every great work is born of silence and returns to it . . . just as the Rhône crosses Lake Geneva, so a river of silence crosses the countryside of Combray and the salon of the Guermantes, without merging into it.’37
There are innumerable authors whose writing is a school of silence and teaches the reader to analyse its many forms. I will quote only the fine discussion by Michael O’Dwyer of François Mauriac’s Thérèse Desqueyroux, a veritable initiation into silence for the reader. O’Dwyer identifies no fewer than ten forms of silence linked to speech: silences that convey the annihilation of the subject or the incommunicability between human beings, the silence that delivers the subject to the ‘shadows of their being’, the silence that is an interior voyage, the threatening silence of the other that sends back to nothingness, the silence created in order to resist the racket of the world and, of special relevance to us, the silence of reflection and the silences which suggest the inexpressible. For Mauriac, this human drama was almost always consubstantial with silence. ‘That of a living creature’, he wrote, ‘unfolds almost always and culminates in silence.’38
And, still apropos writing as a school of silence, let us go further back in time and read a few verses of Albert Samain which appear in Au Jardin de l’infante, and which illustrate the observation of Gaston Bachelard: ‘Great waves of silence . . . vibrate in poems.’39
Je rêve de vers doux et d’intimes ramages,
De vers à frôler l’âme ainsi que des plumages,
De vers blonds où le sens fluide se délie
Comme sous l’eau la chevelure d’Ophélie
De vers silencieux et sans rythme et sans trame
Où la rime sans bruit glisse comme une rame.
[I dream of sweet verses and intimate songs, / Of verses that brush against the soul like feathers, / Of light verses where the fluid sense floats free / Like Ophelia’s hair beneath the stream / Of silent verses without rhythm and without system / Where the rhyme slides noiselessly like an oar.]
None of the silences I have discussed in this book are present here. This poem, writes Patrick Laude, is simply a school of silence, the writing of a music of silence which guides us towards ‘withdrawal into the static silence of the substance of the soul’.40
The cinema as a school of silence deserves a series of volumes, so labyrinthine is it. Some specific features noted by the experts suggest a few guidelines. Silence presents directors with a challenge. In effect, writes Nina Nazarova, they are required to represent what is, at first sight, unrepresentable, which belongs to the sphere of the implicit, of insinuation, of innuendo.41 However, painters and playwrights face the same problem.
The silent cinema was able to convey emotions and feelings with great intensity. This is well known and everyone remembers the silent appearances of Dracula or of Frankenstein’s monster in the films of Murnau, or the expressive face of Jeanne de Dreyer as Joan of Arc, not forgetting the wonder of love in the films of Charlie Chaplin. Much has been written about the speaking body in the silent film. The cry of Fay Wray in the hand of King Kong is the most silent in the history of the cinema. It proves that silence, in the silent film, is material, a palpable fact.
Nevertheless, in these films, as has been observed, it is the bodies that speak, more than the silence; and, thanks to the make-up, the exaggerated gestures and all they take from mime, these bodies are extremely expressive. With the arrival of talkies, the bodies were to some degree detached from the speech. Nor should we forget that silent films were usually accompanied by illustrative music and subtitles. This led Paul Vecchiali to claim that the true silences were in the talkies;42 not forgetting that film music is inextricably linked to the silence that governs it.
In fact, cinematographic writing was for a long time of extreme subtlety: the silence of talking films ‘acted as a resonating chamber for everything around it, it was enriched by the fracas which preceded it, by the stridency which succeeded it and by the deeper silence that framed it’; it speaks to us, ‘whether it is soothing or unbearable, dense or barren’.43 It is for the cineaste to make us feel the silence. Alain Mons says that in Antonioni’s Blow-up ‘an imaginary sound of silence is visible’; the ‘choreography of the touchings’ and the tension ‘between the silence and the possible cry’ here feed ‘the noisy silence of the visible’. To which we should add what might appear a detail: the cinema has often revealed the silence of animals, at the same time as their gaze, and shown the ‘silent vitality of animal time’, the silence of a cow staring at you or of a cat that seems to dream, or the intense buzzing of flies.44
That said, films speak increasingly less in this way. The cinematographic writing of silence, I repeat, was of extreme subtlety and the spectator of today has generally ceased to appreciate it.