James Joyce's Silences ed. by Jolanta Wawrzycka and Serenella Zanotti

Abstract

Reviewed by: James Joyce's Silences ed. by Jolanta Wawrzycka and Serenella Zanotti Omer Kazmi (bio) James Joyce's Silences, edited by Jolanta Wawrzycka and Serenella Zanotti . London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2018. xiv + 255 pp. $114.00. And in the naked light I sawTen thousand people, maybe morePeople talking without speakingPeople hearing without listeningPeople writing songs that voices never shareNo one daredDisturb the sound of silence 1 Talking about silence is a difficult thing to do, mostly because silence is pregnant with meaning. The absence of noise can signify so much, especially if silence is restricted to what is not said, as opposed to the absence of noise altogether. This can be troubling for the critic, for silence presents so many possibilities that it is difficult to proceed. The lines above from Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel capture an interesting element of silence—or the absence of noise. That is, action still can occur without sound ("people talking without speaking"). This is significant for Joyce criticism, especially in Jolanta Wawrzycka and Serenella Zanotti's edited collection, James Joyce's [End Page 203] Silences. The book attempts to capture the different valences of silence and how those valences appear and work in Joyce. The text is helpfully divided into four sections or parts: part 1 discusses "The Language of Silence" (13-77); 2 reflects "The Aesthetics of Silence" (79-119); 3 concerns "Writing Silence" (121-68); and 4 talks about "Translating Silence" (169-229). There is also a coda that brings the discussion back to modernism and how it deals with silence, especially since there has been so much work done on Joyce, modernism, and noise (233-46). While some long-time Joyceans provide major insight in how to proceed in analyzing and understanding silence in Joyce, the book cannot escape the difficulty that silence poses for meaning; the result is a rather difficult text to understand. With that said, the book is helpful and useful as a starting point in an area that cannot easily provide answers, and it has much value for those interested in how Joyce uses—and does not use—noise. Fritz Senn's essay "Active Silences" begins the collection (13-31), and he helpfully divides silence into two parts: "1) the absence of noise … 2) the absence of speech when speech is expected, or as a lull in conversation" (13). He proceeds to tackle silence in many of Joyce's works, focusing primarily on Ulysses with some attention to Dubliners. Senn adroitly notes key areas of Joyce's work where silence appears, but he cannot ultimately escape the problem of silence. As he admits in the essay, "[s]ilence of course is a normal occurrence and deserves mention only when it is consciously experienced" (20). And that is the fundamental problem that makes Senn's essay hard to grasp in itself: if silence is a "normal occurrence" and must be "consciously experienced," then how can one provide significance to Joyce's uses of silence? Why are we not relegating this to Joyce's ability to capture modern experience or to Joyce's need to provide more meaning to noise by the absence of it? Laura Pelaschiar's essay seems to answer the question with this statement: "[i]n literature, a masterful control of the challenging rhetoric of silence is an undisputable sign of greatness" (33). Her text contains an interesting examination of how silence is particularly part of "the feminine sphere which 'speaks' through silence and which is characterized, both passively and actively, by wordlessness or by its predictable and negative opposite, excess of speech" (35). By placing silence into a feminine sphere, and looking deeply into how "The Sisters" and other stories in Dubliners use silence, 2 Pelaschiar presents a strong argument about what silence can symbolize in Joyce. This is especially enlightening when she presents the 1904 version of "The Sisters" where more was said; 3 Joyce's revision removed much of what was originally discussed in the story, allowing the reader a better grasp of why Joyce chose silence. Pelaschiar cannot do this with all the stories in Dubliners, however, and silence changes meaning when [End Page...