What Can't Be Said Can Be Written: The Representation of Silence in Herta Müller's Visual Texts

Abstract

What is going on? How can silence be said, and be a source of meaning? Silence is defined as a complete absence of sound, an absence of information, or even a temporal limitation of speech. Silence is not a failure of language to communicate. When people get short of words, feelings, safe space, or even want to flee from punishment, they choose to keep silent. Yet, silence could be a smart tactic to cross borders, to personify agony, and to engage others’ imagination. Silence can open up new contexts and reveal hidden feelings in an unprecedented manner. The oeuvre of the Romanian writer Herta Muller exemplifies the absence of sound and even the absence of life itself. Muller manages to break through the formal constraints of language in a significant and artistic manner. She has a peculiar and creative way of describing her world. Her creativity is not limited to language as she always questions the power of language to express thoughts and feelings. Language could be a space where Muller can bend words, forms, colors, and shapes. In her collage poetry, Muller can defamiliarize language in an unconventional manner. She uses a unique art form, the art of cut-ups that makes the words and images speak for themselves. Faced with physical threat and psychological repression of the oppressive and dictatorial regime of Nicolae Ceausescu, Muller resorted to silence to say what can’t be said. This paper aims at highlighting the art of collage as a tool used by Herta Muller to express silently incongruent images and texts to express fear and oppression. It will scrutinize the authenticity of the collage poetry of Herta Muller and how her rich and colorful images helped her to gain a foothold in the new setting. It also attempts to elucidate the difference between the silence of language and the silence of things.