Friday, September 5, 2008

Not just in the writing.

A very short sentence in Macherey’s “A Theory of Literary Production” really said a lot to me. “Silence as the source of expression” (17). We spent a lot of time in class discussing how language and literary works can express and say so much without directly saying it, like the really effective example of Hemingway’s “A Short Story”. But to me another really easy way of understanding the concept is to look at how not only how do we write indirectly, but how many times a day does someone speak indirectly?

I think that if you looked at how much is said (silently) in a conversation, it makes clear that the same is occurring in any literary piece you may read. If your friend asks you in a certain disheartened tone, “do you want to drive tonight”, you will most likely pick up on the fact that they don’t want to be the one to have to drive. Or when you watch a speech, and the orator pauses for effect, your mind and your body can feel the weight of the pause, usually you lean in, ready, because that silence says “listen, anticipate, let what I just said, or what I am about to say sink in, because it’s important”. The silence is a sign we have adapted to as a culture, and your brain follows accordingly.

In literary works the same thing is occurring. You grasp and connect to what you read by what you already know, “to know the work, we must move outside it” (20). Like it was said in class, understanding is based on previous experience and that is how you formulate and react to the world around you. These readings were emphasizing the incredibility of language and how it can do this, but I find the incredible part lies not in how things are written, but how the mind can decode these arbitrary words, not only to understand what they mean to society, but what isn’t being said about them means too.

Casey 9/4

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