Silent Man Research Articles

Editor's Column

Editor's Column

Continual Conversation with a Silent Man or Waiting for Stevens

Continual Conversation with a Silent Man or Waiting for Stevens Tony Sharpe This is the last day of a certain yearBeyond which there is nothing left of time.It comes to this and the imagination’s life. Setting: “Fernando’s Hideaway,” a bar in space Characters: Interlocutor (I), “Wallace Stevens” (WS), sitting side-by-side on barstools, facing the mirror behind the bar Performance Note: This is intended for a solo performer. A gesture is therefore needed to signify the silent responses made by “WS” (for whom an empty seat should be provided). Similarly, some gesture—such as “scare-quotes” fingers— should signify when “WS” actually speaks. When “I” returns to the stage to ventriloquize the final pronouncement of “WS,” “I” should sit in the latter’s seat. I: So, beers are on you tonight, huh, Wally? (punches him playfully on arm) WS: -------------------------------------------------------- I: Jest kidding—tho’, speaking as a native of poverty myself, I’m not sure how much Meursault or Johannisberger I’ll be knocking back in this here oddly glacial hostelry, beyond the last thought at the utmost crown of night. A really icy Elysée it seems to me, by no means as congenial and folksy as your Canoe Club was back home in Hartford, but in most ways even more exclusive, and certainly more apocalyptic. We do not talk poetry here, out on the edge of space. WS: -------------------------------------------------------- I: Whilst one may observe there’s a fire burning in that trompe l’oeuil hearth, crude foyer, its arctic effulgence emits only frigid brilliances. And out of [End Page 268] the window I see how the planets gather like leaves that strow the brooks in Vallombrosa, blown like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing. It ain’t no crisp café in here, fer sure; but I sort of like its bronze decor and the palm tree with a fire-fangled bird in it, and isn’t that gal over there your old flame Stella Pallor? WS: -------------------------------------------------------- I: We’ll get round to girl talk—by which of course I mean boy talk about girls—maybe later. Stella doesn’t look too well, it’s true, but then none of us does, existing here in the stale grandeur of annihilation, so to speak— and who doesn’t speak so? For it is with a strange malice that we distort the world: malice in wonderland, really, shouldn’t we admit that? We dislike the world because we do . . . Your old flame: out of all the bars in all the galaxies she walks into this one, in the wee small hours of the morning. But, talking of wee, which way’s the restroom? And why do Americans call it that, anyway—it’s not as if you’d find armchairs to relax in or somewhere to put your feet up, fer Pete’s sake. Rest, rest, perturbèd bladder: I need to euphemate. WS: -------------------------------------------------------- I: You’re telling me it’s out of order? Ideas of disorder, irritating minor ideas, pour forth in this last-chance saloon; ideas, however, always trump bric-a-brac. Absent thee from facilities awhile . . . or maybe that’s not what you meant by “piss off.” I know I’m babbling a bit to fill the void, but you’ll get chattier later, I feel sure. I feel afraid. But if it is the accent of deviation in the living thing that is its life preserved, can we contrariwise deduce that the impulse to submission in the dying thing is its death accomplished, the convergence not too steep to follow downward to darkness, that surrenders difference in the conformism of death and its totalitarian gerund: Nox est perpetua una dormienda? Death is absolute and without memorial, difference disappears. WS: -------------------------------------------------------- I: As I’m sure you recall, Catullus wrote that, trying to get his girl into bed. Grrreat chat-up line! Una Dormienda sounds like she might well be some sort of Spanish dancer, she and Stella could maybe snap their castanets in a fandango, don’t you think, accompanied on his blue guitar by who else but Ramon Fernandez? And yet, sometimes, the Hispanic note in what you wrote leads on to severance: to some...

Albert Camus’s L’Étranger and “Les Muets”: Violence and Reconciliation between Arab and Pied-Noir

Abstract Contrary to the interpretations of Edward Said and other influential critics, this essay argues that Albert Camus, in his great novel L’Etranger, numerous journalistic essays over two decades, and an often overlooked short story, “Les Muets” (The Silent Men), sympathized with Arab grievances. He favored reconciliation based on equality and reciprocity between Algerian Muslims (predominantly Arabs but including a Kabylian Berber minority, whose suffering he described with great pathos) and pieds-noirs (European colonists).

“The silent man”: From Lochner to Hammer v. Dagenhart , a reevaluation of justice William R. Day

Journal of Supreme Court HistoryVolume 40, Issue 1 p. 38-54 Article “The silent man”: From Lochner to Hammer v. Dagenhart, a reevaluation of justice William R. Day Jesse Bair, Jesse BairSearch for more papers by this author Jesse Bair, Jesse BairSearch for more papers by this author First published: 01 March 2015 https://doi.org/10.1111/jsch.12063Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume40, Issue1March 2015Pages 38-54 RelatedInformation

Paideia as Metanoia: Transformative Insights from the Monastic Tradition

Silent men were observed about the country, or discovered in the forest, digging, clearing and building; and other silent men, not seen, were sitting in the cold cloister, tiring their eyes and keeping their attention on the stretch, while they painfully copied and recopied the manuscripts which they had saved. There was no one who contended or cried out, or drew attention to what was going on, but by degrees the woody swamp became a hermitage, a religious house, a farm, an abbey, a village, a seminary, a school of learning and a city. — John Henry Newman, The Mission of the Benedictine Order Among the many privileges of her posterity, Rome tends to enjoy a larger space on the metaphorical palate of cultural critics during perceived times of crisis. Narratives comparing her decline to contemporary conditions often bring along an homage to Benedict of Nursia, in many ways the founder of Western Christian monasticism. Newman’s image of “silent men” often rallies would-be cultural preservers toward nostalgic hibernation in response to some imminent and inevitable cataclysm. The trope has recently been taken up in reference to the plights of higher and secondary education. Thomas Benton’s op-ed in The Chronicle of Higher Education encourages us to “get medieval on education,” forsaking an academy marked by tenure-track cuts and diminishing humanities enrollment in favor of small institutions where faculty poverty is at least intentional. 1 In Septmeber 2015, the Archbishop of Canterbury instituted a “gap year” program of monastic living for high school graduates seeking shelter from a chaotic modern world. 2 For those not ready to retreat into the cloister, a new PBS documentary, The Rule, holds up a New Jersey Benedictine high school as a potential model for urban education. 3 In the last decade, particular elements of the Benedictine educational tradition have garnered interest outside the monastery. In an increasingly instrumental environment, intentionally nonpragmatic and nonpositivistic approaches hold an understandable appeal. Among philosophers of education, Angelo Caranfa, Kevin Gary, and Samuel Rocha have recently provided accounts of the potential educational value of both monastic silence and literary modalities. 4 In light of the 2015 Philosophy of Education Society conference theme, I would like to further this discussion by examining how principles of monastic learning might inform a poetic and transformative educational vision. As a particular appropriation of Platonic paideia, monastic education carries specific ontological, anthropological, and linguistic considerations. When enacted in practice, these positions yield a literacy model that can be described as metanoia, or “turning toward.” In this model, readers “turn toward” and encounter an Other in the form of textual expression and are transformed through what monastics considered an organic “digestion” of the Other’s mind. 5 This essay seeks to contribute to the current literature by advancing metanoia as a notional framework and by drawing on the work of Ivan Illich as well as Raymond Studzinski’s recent phenomenological analysis of monastic lectio. After proposing a narrative of continuity between Platonic

“The Silent Man”: From Lochner to Hammer v. Dagenhart, A Reevaluation of Justice William R. Day

“The Silent Man”: From Lochner to Hammer v. Dagenhart, A Reevaluation of Justice William R. Day

“An adventure in music I’ll never forget”: Opera, Queerness, and the Hard-Boiled Style in James M. Cain’s Serenade

THE SINGING MAN OCCUPIES an unusual position in Depression-era America. An iconic figure who stands at a key juncture in the formation of American masculinity, the man who sings also marks a pivotal site of its destabilization. The act of singing undermines conventional understandings of maleness in its dominant American form: to burst into song is to contradict the ethos of the strong and silent man, a figure epitomized by such figures as the cowboy, the gangster, or the hard-boiled detective. And yet, the same period (the 1930s) that sees the formation of some of these classic American characters also finds a competing trajectory of American masculinity. In certain cases, the strong, silent man becomes the singing man and thus subverts the very role that he ostensibly occupies. James M. Cain's 1937 novel Serenade offers an especially intriguing manifestation of this phenomenon. Usually considered among the works of hard-boiled American fiction produced in the period, Serenade departs dramatically from the conventions of its genre by having at its centre a protagonist, John Howard Sharp, who is both a prototypical tough-guy and, bizarrely, a down-and-out opera singer who loses his singing voice as a result of a homoerotic attraction to his gay conductor and mentor Winston Hawes. Serenade has been described by Steve Erickson as lurid ... verging on tabloid-phantasmagoric (14), and Greg Forter has noted the sheer homophobic idiocy of its quasi-theory of the relationship between voice and sexuality (287). It is my contention, however, that (for these very reasons) Serenade provides a stimulating point of departure for a discussion of masculinity in 1930s America and in particular the position that singing occupies in its formation. role as an opera singer marks an obvious transgression of the laconic tough-guy mould; as Paul Skenazy observes, opera--is as far from the hard-boiled genre as one can imagine (51). More than this, though, conviction that opera should be free of all signs of queerness puts the novel in obvious tension with opera's transgressive history. By attempting to impose a radical hetero-aesthetic on a genre such as opera, Serenade dramatizes the gesture of overcoming that underlies the ethos of the strong, silent man (that is, overcoming of weakness, of ambiguous sexuality) and in doing so draws attention to the precarious constructedness of that figure. Serenade tracks the efforts of John Howard Sharp to overcome what is framed in the novel as an artistically debilitating homoerotic attraction. We first meet him in Mexico City, after he has flopped in performance at the opera house and is trying to gain the affections of a Mexican prostitute, Juana, in an effort to overcome his sense of failure. Juana performs the special function in the novel of being able to identify the repressed truth of homoerotic impulses: 'I know when you sing,' she tells him. She is, in her own words, a dumb muchacha who cannot read or write but who understands men. 'These man who love other man,' she tells Sharp, 'can do much ... But no can sing.' They '[h]ave no toro in high voice, no grrr that frighten little muchacha, make heart beat fast. Sound like old woman, like cow, like priest' (142). Thus, when Sharp serenades her with Carmen, she is able to detect, with the intuition of a primitive, a priestly quality in his voice, and so she abruptly dismisses him. As Megan E. Abbot observes, Sharp's voice betrays his desire, though not through what he says but through how his voice sounds (66). The emasculating effects of his homoerotic impulses mark him audibly; Juana can, in effect, hear that he is attracted to another man. This is the essence of the theory of the relationship between voice and sexuality that is advanced in the novel. Homoerotic desire, the logic goes, even at the level of thought, corrupts masculinity, which in turn weakens the male singing voice. …

Hopkins's Silent Men

The contention of this article is that there has been a major oversight in the critical literature on the representations of the male body in Gerard Hopkins's poems. We have not seen that the men and the boys in these poems are subject to a rule of silence: they must not speak; or, if they do speak, they must be silenced. This article not only substantiates this contention, but reads the silence of the male body within its explicatory contexts: not only theological, but also political and sexual. Yet the article also argues that the privileged theological context of this silence is contradictory in questions that are central to Hopkins's thought.

The Silent Man's Voice in "The Statue of Liberty"

The Silent Man’s Voice in “The Statue of Liberty” Claude Julien (bio) “Stories are like onions. You peel one skin and another grins up at you.” John Edgar Wideman, Fatheralong (61) “The Statue of Liberty” is a programmatic title. Give the reader only that to go by and an icon of America’s self-congratulation may offer itself. Add the author’s name or, if you are first approaching his work, his picture on the back cover and that initial program may be redirected into the consciousness that the statue’s torch also casts shadows onto this ideal world, perhaps, to some extent, points them out. But such a program is only in the mind, and a different strain rises from the page as the story creates its own path away from prefabricated guesses. Put in a few words, “The Statue of Liberty” deals with American fantasies of interracial sex. John Wideman does not treat this theme in the hilarious manner of Cecil D. Brown’s The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger. Nor is there any sardonic signifying such as in Hal Bennett’s Lord of the Dark Places or Melvin Van Peebles’ film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Those fictions bear the stamp of the Blaxploitation era. “The Statue of Liberty” is more intemporal. There is humor in it but contained by the grave and sedate tone it assumes to present its concern for the black man’s status. This essay will try to delve into the textual strategy of a story that opens like a bland narration and builds its way to an unwritten question, yet one repeated three times (perhaps once for each shadow of a character) in the shape of the “Y” pattern the three chairs have been disposed in on the unfinished patio. The Statue of Liberty is an infrequent visitor in John Wideman’s fiction. However, it does come up in Philadelphia Fire as “the bitch wit the torch” (80) and much more signally in a passage of Hurry Home 1 that must be brought up here if only because it happens to associate the statue with sex. Cecil Braithwaite’s departure for Europe tests the reader’s need to cast anchor in the referential world while a merciless poetic logic sweeps his mind out to sea, the way Cecil is put afloat when the land leaves the ship. The young traveler’s qualms (“do all journeys commence with such questioning, such tumult and confusion”), the text’s teeming “formless profusion” and the taunting “significance to be deciphered” come together in a passage that globally offers itself as a trope for Cecil’s existential anguish. The text erases punctuation, plays upon the signified and the signifier, jumbles the metaphorical and the metonymic, blurs the [End Page 740] realistic bearings that stabilize reading such as when “Handle with care, with fragility. Made in Japan. Maid in Germany. Union maid” leads, through an allusion to Wallace Stevens twenty lines or so further down, to “the tall lady with an upraised ice cream cone toasting the emperor.” Hurry Home’s derision of the symbolic torch lighting the way to the gate of freedom happens to be ushered in by the embrace, the passionate-sex-on-the-deck-before-departure (but who knows, as the liner already is on its way to the open sea?) of an anonymous couple. Cecil is confused, out of place, whatever he may think to the contrary. He is an educated young man whose head has been crammed full of literary knowledge (even some Old English) not necessarily relevant to the life opening before him as a black lawyer. T.S. Eliot’s foggy dangerous world of “The Dry Salvages” is present through the tolling harbor buoys defining the navigable channel. But so is Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” through the allusion to geological times. As Jacqueline Berben suggests in her unpublished dissertation (221–23), there are other leads to grasp at to reconstruct the racial overtones Cecil’s existential anguish carries. The rusty knell of the buoys doubles into bell boys, and the horn’s shriek “Bee Ohh” suggests B.O., the 1950s body odor advertisement for...

A piece of my mind. The silent man.

A piece of my mind. The silent man.

Crane's Coxcomb

Crane's Coxcomb George Monteiro (bio) Not even Conrad, who observed that Stephen Crane was "the only impressionist and only an impressionist" (Stallman, Letters 155) (later explaining that his "impressionism of phrase went really deeper than the surface" [192]), perceived the extent to which Crane was taken with the uncanny ways in which personal impressions determine behavior. For as Crane saw it, impressionism—that notso-beautiful necessity of perception—was all but inevitable.1 "I understand that a man is born into the world with his own pair of eyes, and he is not at all responsible for his vision," he wrote in answer to a question; "he is merely responsible for his quality of personal honesty" (Stallman, Letters 110). The difficulty with that, he found, was that in keeping close to one's personal honesty (his "supreme ambition") one incurred vexing consequences, for personal honesty to one's impressions insures neither the discovery of truth nor the continuance of personal safety. This idea permeates much of his fiction, notably so the best of his Western stories, wherein Crane turns familiar materials away from a focus on the already stereotypical Western hero to the more interestingly vulnerable, impressionistic outsider who, rather than embodying them, carries around the shining and not-so-shining codes of the West as the intrusive, insistent, [End Page 295] potentially implosive baggage of his emotional life. Perhaps Crane's richest treatment of this occurs in the early Western tale "The Blue Hotel," the chronicle of a loner moving toward self-destruction.2 The Swede's sense of reality in "The Blue Hotel" derives, in the words of the "little silent man from the East" (143), from impressions culled from Western "dime-novels" (152). Indeed, the Swede—possessed—thinks that in Fort Romper "he's right out in the middle" of his dime-novel West, with "shootin' and stabbin' and all" (152). "He thinks," concludes the Easterner, "he's right in the middle of hell" (152). The Swede "knows" that Fort Romper equals West and that West is synonymous with violence, that he is a "Stranger" (as Scully, the hotelkeeper, will later type him), and that as a "Stranger" he is marked to suffer violent pain. When the sources of the Swede's fears become known, the hotelkeeper tries to rout them by denying that Fort Romper is the wild West. "Why, man, we're goin' to have a line of ilictric street-cars in this town next spring," he boasts; "there's a new railroad goin' to be built down from Broken Arm to here. Not to mintion the four churches and the smashin' big brick school-house. Then there's the big factory, too. Why, in two years Romper'll be a met-tro-pol-is" (149-150). These are the signs of civilization. Scully's own Palace Hotel offers evidence that even before the arrival of electric cars and factories, Fort Romper is already a civilized place. It is a refuge for visitors and strangers in which, as Scully maintains, every guest is safe. Collaring potential customers at the railroad station, Scully offers to every one of them, including the "shaky and quick-eyed Swede" (143), the sacred privileges to be enjoyed under his roof. The classical virtue of hospitality having surfaced in Fort Romper, Scully would set up as an avatar of the model hotelkeeper, circa 1895: "The proprietor [of a hotel] has 'all sorts and conditions of men' to deal with; he must know human nature in its varied phases; and he must solve race and class problems with delicate tact. He must have a fair knowledge and conception of trade, and of everything that meets and supplements the wants and desires of mankind" (Hitchcock 155). Scully, who thinks he knows human nature, has an entrepreneurial eye for color: The Palace Hotel at Fort Romper was painted a light blue, a shade that is on the legs of a kind of heron, causing the bird to declare its position against any background. The Palace Hotel, then, was always screaming and howling in a way that made the dazzling winter landscape of Nebraska seem only a gray swampish hush. It stood alone on...

Menas and the Editors: A Folio Script Unscripted

I N THE FOLIO SCRIPT OF ANTHONIE, AND CLEOPATRA, the brief sixth scene (designated Act II, scene i by later editors) begins with this direction: Enter Pompey, Menecrates, and Menas, in warlike manner. Pompey and Menecrates carry on a conversation while Menas remains silent-obstinately and mysteriously silent, for Pompey in three of his seven speeches speaks directly to him by name while never naming Menecrates at all. This is not, however, the script of the play as most of us know it. In the six modern texts most commonly used by students, teachers, scholars, theatre companies, and the general reader a new character appears: he is still called Menas but is now cooperatively sociable, having appropriated most of the speeches that the Folio assigns to Menecrates. Meanwhile, the mysteriously, obstinately, fascinatingly silent man of the Folio has disappeared. So, of course, has the very talkative Menecrates, and the Pompey who in the Folio is caught between them.1 There is no legitimate authority of any kind to support this alteration of the only authoritative script of the play that we possess. That the treatment of the scene in modern editions represents adherence to an editorial tradition going back to the eighteenth century is true, that it is a triumph of common sense is clear (for Menas, more important than Menecrates, who never appears again,

The Garden in the Mill: The Slovak Immigrant's View of Work

My grandfather, a Slovak immigrant, was a silent man. Curiosity about his versatility as a worker and the Slovak appetite for work led me to as many stories of men like him as I could find in mainstream American literature. Slovak voices are not heard except as they are indistinguishably blended in an Eastern European chorus in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Sinclair presents Slovaks as a new immigrant group which must endure as other groups have:

The fortunes of Charles W. Abel of Kwato 1891–1930∗

(1982). The fortunes of Charles W. Abel of Kwato 1891–1930. The Journal of Pacific History: Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 195-217.

Three Meetings With Grin

I shall Start with the second. The twenties. A House of the Arts had opened. It was in the former mansion of a rich man, Eliseev, on the corner of the Nevsky and the Moika. Writers, poets, painters assembled under a single roof. N. Tikhonov, V. Rozhdestvenskii, O. Forsh, Al. Sandler, Mikh, Slonimskii — I cannot remember them all — occupied small rooms opening onto a long hallway. A tall man in a tunic, stooped, with prominent cheekbones and uncommonly serious eyes, came to live in one of those rooms: Aleksandr Grin. I had known Grin earlier. Our first meeting occurred when I was still a boy. I had seen that silent man in the apartment of Kalistrat Faleevich Zhakov, a Zyrianian [Komi]. A literary circle attended by young and not so young writers met at Zhakov's. I was the youngest, then a student in the local high school. At that time Grin was in hiding and lived under another name, which I do not remember because it was so long ago. He had a very poor room on Vasil'evksii Island, the greatest merit of which was that its windows faced the Neva.

The silent men at Upper Clyde

THE MANAGEMENT at the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders' Clydebank Division wear white safety helmets and grey suits and eat their meals in a bright white canteen with waitress service. The labour force in the yard do not always wear their safety helmets, their overalls are uniformly filthy and they queue for meals in their grey, greasy canteen or struggle to get served in D. J. Connoly's bar across the road.

The Same Enemies: Notes On Certain Similarities Between Yeats And Strindberg

THE ONLY KNOWN MEETING BETWEEN August Strindberg and William Butler Yeats is recorded by the latter artist in "The Trembling of the Veil." He writes, "I am sitting in a cafe with two French Americans, a German poet Douchenday, and a silent man whom I discover to be Strindberg, and who is looking for the philosopher's stone." Thirty years later Yeats had reason to recall this brief meeting. When the Irish poet-playwright was in Strindberg's native Sweden to receive the Nobel Prize, he was handed a pamphlet defending Strindberg and attacking the Swedish Academy.

Coals of Fire: Sign of Repentance or Revenge?

Anyone who has studied Rom. xii. 20 is aware that it is a notorious crux interpretum. The strategy of dealing with one's enemy is clear: . Difficult as it is for the Christian to adapt his life to this admonition anticipations of such a noble approach are not lacking in ancient literature. The wise man according to early Egyptian religion conquers by mastering his emotions. The prudent way is to avoid a conflict, for the situation may imply complications which one cannot foresee. It is the silent man who conquers and who is pre-eminently the successful man according to Egyptian religion. In the strict sense this is not a parallel to Paul's words in Romans, but it is clear evidence that religion early moved beyond the talion principle in discussing the question of dealing with one's enemy.

Strong silent man

Journal Article Strong silent man Get access H.A., Jr. H.A., Jr. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume CXCVI, Issue aug18, 18 August 1951, Page 369, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/CXCVI.aug18.369i Published: 18 August 1951

Community Development in the Southwest as Influenced by the Boulder Canyon Project

T HE semi-arid Southwest, with its constantly changing atmospheric colorings and its rugged topography, its mesa slopes, beautiful valleys, and coastal plains, and its deep-cut canyons exposing the rocks of all ages, is quite as distinctive as any section of the earth, not excluding Spain and Italy; and, it seems, is destined to become a center of culture and of economic activity. Little wonder that the Indian of this section was notably a silent man, eloquent, and true to the Great Spirit that controlled his emotions. During the period of occupancy of this territory by the aborigines, followed by the Spanish rule with its missions and romance, and later by the more hardy pioneers from the north under the rule of our own country, the more populous communities were to be found, until recently, in the valleys along the natural water courses. Their wants were quite fully supplied by the uses made of the water and other natural resources found within close range of their settlements. Until the city of Los Angeles reached a population of one hundred and sixty thousand, its water supply was readily and amply provided from the Los Angeles River watershed. Then it became evident to men of vision that an additional and much larger water supply must be brought in from some distant source, as otherwise the city's growth would be limited to a population of possibly five hundred thousand people. IMPORTANCE OF ELECTRIC POWER