This conference was organised by ERCLA research centre with the support
of the British Council, the Scientific Committee and Doctoral School
IV of Paris IV-Sorbonne.
A selection of papers was published in
Voices
and Silence in the Contemporary Novel in English. Newcastle-upon-Tyne
: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. 290p.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-1247-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1247-4
Price UK : £39.99
Price US : $59.99
http://www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/Voices-and-Silence-in-the-Contemporary-Novel-in-English1-4438-1247-1.htm
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Friday 14 December 2007
Paris IV Sorbonne. 1 rue Victor Cousin, 75005 Paris
8h45-12h30 Salle du CIO, Galerie Claude Bernard, ground floor.
Chair : Vanessa Guignery (Paris IV)
8h45 Welcome
9h Laurence Tatarian (Bordeaux 3): Graham Swift's vocal silences
9h30 Isabelle Roblin (Université du Littoral-Côte d'Opale):
Graham Swift's Tomorrow: once more upon the breach...
10h00 Hélène Fau (Metz) : Making the voice wordless
in A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro
10h30 Coffee break
Chair : Isabelle Roblin (Université du Littoral-Côte
d'Opale) et Hélène Fau (Metz)
11h00 Annette Kern-Stähler (Münster, Germany): Jackie Kay,
Why don't you stop talking?
11h30 Cécile Léonard (Orléans): Salman Rushdie's
Art of Sentencing the Excess
12h Elsa Sacksick (Cergy-Pontoise): Cries and Whispers (Salman Rushdie/Arundhati
Roy)
12h30-14h30: Lunch break
14h30-18h00 English Department, Salle Louis Bonnerot, G Stairs,
2nd floor.
Chair: Didier Girard (Perpignan)
14h30 Tetyana Lunyova (Poltava State Pedagogical University, Ukraine):
The Told, the Written, and the Unuttered: on the Representation of
speech in the novel Music and Silence by Rose Tremain
15h00 Monica Girard (Nancy): Breaking the Silence in Lionel Shriver's
We Need to Talk About Kevin
15h30 Judith Munat (Pisa, Italy): Silence in contemporary African
fiction
16h00 Coffee break
Chair : Elisabeth Angel-Perez (Paris IV)
16h30 Sonia Saubion (Montpellier III) : From Logorrhoea to Silence
in John Fowles's The Collector
17h00 Judith Misrahi-Barak (Montpellier III) : Ryhaan Shah's Silent
Screams of A Silent Life
17h30 Christina Mesa (Stanford University, USA): Still Life and Performance
Art: The Erotics of Silence and Excess in Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy
and Zadie Smith's On Beauty.
Saturday 15 December 2007
9h00-12h30 Maison de la recherche, 28 rue Serpente, Salle D323,
3rd floor.
Chair: Benjamine Toussaint (Paris IV-Sorbonne)
9h00 Geneviève Ducros (Bordeaux II) : 'The silent ghostly I-figure
in Coetzee's Boyhood : Scenes from Provincial Life and the
grotesque writing of an unnameable secret.'
9h30 Bozena Kucala (Poland): Resisting history, resisting story:
J.M. Coetzee's The Life and Times of Michael K
10h00 Nicole Terrien (Rouen) : So many Silent Voices, which are mine?
(Jenny Diski)
10h30 Break
Chair: Nicole Terrien (Rouen)
11h00 Benjamine Toussaint (Paris IV-Sorbonne) : The narrator's voice
lost and found in Ronald Frame's The Lantern Bearers
11h30 Ingrid Bertrand (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium): Filling in what
was Left out: Voices and Silences of Biblical Women (Michèle
Roberts, Margaret Atwood)
12h00 Eleftheria Kavazi (Oxford): Voicing Silence and Silencing the
Voices: The Interplay of Verbosity and Absence of Speech in Samuel
Beckett's Drama
12h30-14h30: Lunch break
14h30-18h00 Milne Edwards lecture room, B stairs, 3rd floor, 1
rue Victor Cousin
Chair : François Gallix (Paris IV)
14h30 Paulina Kupisz (Warsaw, Poland): Giving voice to silence: A.S.Byatt's
Possession.
15h00 Ben Winsworth (Orléans): Passing Over in Silence: Towards
Quietism in Graham Swift's Shuttlecock
15h30 Pascale Tollance (Lille 3) : " You cross a line "
: Reticence and Excess in Graham Swift's The Light of Day
16h00 Break
16h30 Didier Girard (Perpignan): Radical No-Saying : PAradoxes of
the Will/Self
17h00 Reading and discussion with Will SELF
18h30 Cocktail
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The objective of this international conference was to examine the
opposed processes at work in expressing silence and excessive speech
in contemporary novels in English. It visiedt the whole spectrum ranging
from verbal overflow to aphasia, from effusiveness to muteness. The
body of works under consideration included contemporary novels published
between 1950 and the present day, in Great Britain and in the countries
of the former Commonwealth ("New Literatures").
The conference aimed at studying the processes involved in the purification
and the contamination of silence by analysing ellipses in the narratives
as well as typographical blanks. This kind of literary reticence,
which can take on extreme expressions such as Rimbaud's poetic silence,
is certainly part of a deliberate strategy aimed at distancing oneself
from painful subjects, and it also reveals the difficulties involved
in the process of anamnesis, in the exhumation of the past, be it
private or public, and in any attempt to reveal, expose, or explore
the realm of the intimate. Hesitations, incomplete writings, fragmented
stories, displacement or avoidance strategies, delaying tactics and
aposiopeses are all ways of subverting reality and turning it into
something more acceptable and bearable. It then falls to the reader
to be especially penetrating and clear-sighted so as to fill in the
narrator's embarrassed silences, to complete the stories contained
within the suspension marks which fissure a text, and also to recover
the truths and dramas hiding between the lines and the aposiopeses.
As Jean-Michel Maulpoix says about poetry in Du Lyrisme (2000),
"Silence is a moment, a boundary and a certain quality of speech"
(142). In La Parole singulière (1990), Laurent Jenny
emphasises that "all voices are laced with silence" (142),
and that all voices are built upon silence and prolong it: "There
is no such thing as a voice that is not laced with silence, from which
it proceeds and which it extends. Every utterance vibrates to the
dull beat of the unspoken which also gives it its rhythm" (164).
It is possibly in these occurrences of silence that the narrative
voice can best be heard, and it is the task of the reader to lend
a particularly attentive ear, to decipher the silences and to "hear
the inaudible" (17) to quote from Louis Marin's La Voix excommuniée
(1981). Particular attention was therefore paid to novels in which
both occurrences of silence and gaps in the narratives reveal more
than they hide, as well as to first person narrators torn between
a desire to indulge in wordy confessions and a powerful reluctance
to reveal everything (Kasuo Ishiguro, Graham Swift, J.M. Coetzee …).
Strategies of emphasis, extreme speech or proliferation of words,
were also studied by analysing the stylistic devices associated with
them. Continuous flows of words were scrutinized so as to determine
both what they reveal and what they hide. The idiosyncrasies of narrators
suffering from acute logorrhoea such as Saleem Sinai, the narrator
from Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, were examined, as
will the repetitions and ramblings of certain characters, such as
those in Graham Swift's novels from Waterland to Tomorrow,
his most recent published work. It was also interesting to investigate
whether extreme speech in novels, especially in the case of the new
literatures, can be traced to ancient oral traditions, to the spoken
transmission of knowledge in ancestral societies. Polyphony also received
special attention in novels where numerous voices meet, blend together
or clash. Bewitching and hypnotic voices, based on repetition and
redundancy, will be analysed in order to demonstrate the process of
vocal domination at work. Finally, extreme verbosity in confessional
writings was studied, with particular attention being paid to the
way in which excess in language can work as a smokescreen to confuse
or hide an issue. Examining verbose narrators and speakers necessarily
led us to consider the implication of the reader or the implied reader,
because the loquacious "need to be stimulated by the conviction
that they are listened to", or read, as stated by the narrator
of Louis-René des Forêts's Bavard (148).
We confronted these two apparently opposed dimensions in narratives
in order to examine what each reveals, and also to determine what
they might have in common. In certain conditions, could excessive
speech (repeating what has already been seen and said) amount to an
indirect form of silence, and could some occurrences of silence be
said to be more powerful and meaningful than explicit statements?
It was interesting to show that some authors, such as Graham Swift
in Tomorrow, use both strategies. The exploration of silence
and verbosity may also lead to researching the genesis of the narratives:
the various drafts before the finished text, the deletions, erasures,
crossing-outs, additions and alterations. Similarly, authors' declarations
and writings on the subject of their own creative process sometimes
help to discover the reasons behind the decision to add to or delete
from a fictional text and can even account for instances of auto-censorship.
Our guest speaker was Will SELF.
