PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This chapter models a method for reading written silence as a masquerade. As I propose here, in order to recognise and then to attempt to record it as wordless yet addressed to an audience, written silence, as communication and as a replete yet inaccessible vessel of signification is ultimately always an act of proximation. This entails a semantic labour in deferral that contains in it an urgent, wistful desire for the return of the word (to the page or the mouth) and the restoration of the sound (to the dialog or the composition)—at best an embodied acknowledgment on the page, a visualisation. In the present essay, I examine literature’s attempt to carry out the fraught project of documenting the auditory absence that silence poses as against and within the literary presence that literature imagines itself to be. In order to undertake an inquiry into the ways literature not only traffics in but also verbalises and validates silence, I turn in this chapter to “A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease,” a short story by Jonathan Safran Foer, published in 2002. In my reading, Foer’s multimodal world of fiction abounds with attempts at identifying and then visualising silence—indeed at capturing it through both “logos” (the word) and “logo” (as it embodies logos’ absence or, when the word is present, exposes its inadequacy).