I really loved reading through Allen’s discussion of silence and “the omnipresence of noise,”
and how she finds the author grappling with these contradictions of silence as both a
mechanism of oppression and of resistance, and of the contradictions encountered
in the translation of silence, which is at once something universal, and also it seems
the most personal, like the most subjective part of a particular language, or a
particular utterance.
It reminded me a lot of what we talked about in a class I took on
Postcolonial Realism last semester – we did the Achebe-Conrad pairing
as expected (Things Fall Apart and Heart of Darkness, respectively) and
one of the things we ran through were how they approached this silence-noise contradiction
– I remember Achebe having these few great lines about a silence “intensified by the
universal shrill of a thousand insects” – and it was good to have the piece of
background Allen brings in about the trend towards treating silence and
noise as a post-war phenomena because the books from Achebe and Conrad
were not precisely post-war books, but books on a similar kind of trauma – where silence,
understood in its contradiction, quilts together/secures the narrative of a trauma.
I can’t entirely place the conclusion that proceeds from this, I just hope
Allen talks about silence on Friday.
--Jonika
I'm not sure if the problem is local to my computer, but in my view, 70% of the text runs off the screen, so I am reposting this as a comment in case that somehow helps with formatting:
ReplyDeleteI really loved reading through Allen’s discussion of silence and “the omnipresence of noise,” and how she finds the author grappling with these contradictions of silence as both a mechanism of oppression and of resistance, and of the contradictions encountered in the translation of silence, which is at once something universal, and also it seems the most personal, like the most subjective part of a particular language, or a particular utterance.
It reminded me a lot of what we talked about in a class I took on Postcolonial Realism last semester – we did the Achebe-Conrad pairing as expected (Things Fall Apart and Heart of Darkness, respectively) and one of the things we ran through were how they approached this silence-noise contradiction – I remember Achebe having these few great lines about a silence “intensified by the universal shrill of a thousand insects” – and it was good to have the piece of background Allen brings in about the trend towards treating silence and noise as a post-war phenomena because the books from Achebe and Conrad were not precisely post-war books, but books on a similar kind of trauma – where silence, understood in its contradiction, quilts together/secures the narrative of a trauma.
I can’t entirely place the conclusion that proceeds from this, I just hope Allen talks about silence on Friday.