The Trope of Death - or how to make silence hearable (original) (raw)
In der Strasenmitte die feuchten Spuren zahlloser Fuse, Spuren, die man hier hat ruhenlassen (so hat man sich die Graber erspart), an den Randern sind sie schon halb verdunstet. (...) Sind die Scharen die Trager jener Spuren (...), die Veranlasser, die uns mir ihren zerquetschtem Leben bis heute festliche Anlasse liefern? Sie sind so grundlich verschwunden, als waren ihre Hinterlassenschaften Fossilien in Stein, Urwesen, deren Bewegungen vor Jahrtausenden verwischt worden sind(...). Sogar die Negative dieser Wesen sind vernichtet, und die Negative ihrer Namen im Tausendgrunde-Buch (warum wir standig und daher nie an sie denken) dazu. Die Kinder der Toten (The Children of the Dead) 1995, page 163 In Elfriede Jelinek's writings the Shoah is recollected by a representation of "the tone of calmness, of the noise of silence and of the sound of forgetting, as Jens Birkemeyer states". (Birkmeyer, 303) Equally, Evelyn Annus defines Elfriede Jelineks literary work as an attempt...
Sign up for access to the world's latest research.
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Related papers
Academia Letters, 2021
Before I stumbled on the inspiration that gave birth to this write-up, I had always consciously avoided joining in any debate that had to do with the Nigerian polity. I believed that doing so was pointless since ours is a country where the craziest and the creepiest of things happens everyday. So I thought it's worthless catching some nasty headache for the sake of the country that has refused to be serious for once. For me, Nigeria is an eerily unbelievable country where sanity is far from making sense. But sometimes, I get pricked by this bizarre amalgam called Nigeria. In my silence (before I broke it recently), I had always respected the contributions of those who never get tired of talking about this country despite its daily dose of madness. However, I personally don't agree with them on certain grounds but I sincerely respect them for always trying to cope with this madness. About two years ago, I finally decided to break my silence because of two incidents. The first one is the piece that Dr M.A. Lateef of the Faculty of Law, Obafemi Awolowo University wrote about the perennial fuel scarcity and how he refused to buy at inflated price despite the hurl of insults from the petrol attendant. His courage to confront injustice in a country where doing so makes you a non-conformist really shocked me and amazed me at the same time. The second incident took place on the pages of Random Blues by Niyi Osundare, where I had quite a long quizzical dialogue with the following gripping lines. Silence is serpent With a fatal fang Bring the wand, bring the word Let's hit its head with a vocal bang In the lines above I encountered the much talked about power of poetry, which got me overwhelmed and hit me with so much urgency that struck me with the ideas embodied by
I speak of the poetry or even mantra of that place where words and silence coincide and co-exist; the intrinsic silence of words, silence from words." (Gualtieri, 1993:180) In most dictionaries, silence is often defined in negative terms, being likened to an absence from speech or noise as if it were a background from which sound is detached: but just as matter cannot exist without void, sound cannot exist without silence. We begin this study with the general hypothesis that the sensibility to perceive silence, in the theatre of the 20 th century, cannot be separated from the ability to perceive sound and music. To our knowledge, there are no known texts , either on this subject or on that of the function of sound in the mise en scène, in existence and a few recent theories have proved to be unsatisfactory in relation to the substantial difficulty of putting this whole field of study into perspective. 1. What we are dealing with is, in fact, the definition and outlining of the complex network of relationships upon which the constructive matrix of silence is inscribed in the work of many directors of the 20 th century.
Silence as the positive mortality
In Schürmann's Broken Hegemonies, the author finds the term "tragic double bind" has a linguistic asymmetry. In the tendency of natal construction for universalization, the language is the co-conspirator of epochal hegemonic fantasms. The author contends a lack of Schürmann's transgressive language of the hegemonic fantasms and thus we are barred from "speaking" such a phenomenon. This lack of mortal language is the pathogen that both Dannies Schmidt and Peg Birmingham criticized. The author by saving Schürmann from such criticism, going back to Heidegger and Heidegger's Hölderlin, directly addresses the "saying" of the undertow of being. Such a language of mortality is a linguistic un-arche as the silence that calls for positive mortality to keep the silence and invites further, but more faithful, natal constructions.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.