Silence In The Land Of Logos

In ancient Greece, the spoken word connoted power, whether in the free speech accorded to citizens or in the voice of the poet, whose song was thought to know no earthly bounds. But how did silence fit into the mental framework of a society that valued speech so highly?

Arguing that the notion of silence is not a universal given but is rather situated in a complex network of associations and values, Montiglio (Sylvia Montiglio, author of Silence in the Land of Logos) seeks to establish general principles for understanding silence through analyses of cultural practices, including religion, literature, and law.

Unlike the silence of a Christian before an ineffable God, which signifies the uselessness of words, silence in Greek religion paradoxically expresses the power of logos--for example, during prayer and sacrifice, it serves as a shield against words that could offend the gods. Montiglio goes on to explore silence in the world of the epic hero, where words are equated with action and their absence signals paralysis or tension in power relationships. Her other examples include oratory, a practice in which citizens must balance their words with silence in very complex ways in order to show that they do not abuse their right to speak. Inquiries into lyric poetry, drama, medical writings, and historiography round out this unprecedented study, revealing silence as a force in

its own right.

The functions and meaning of silence in classical Greece is a problem especially serious for a student of silence because, the Spartans, and not the Athenians, were famous for their silent behavior. Moreover, in the case of Greek literature the "tyranny of the genres" limits the free expression of the individual...It is wrong to generalize the expereince of religious silence across time, space, and different ritual practices....draw a contrast between a notion of the ineffable, in keeping with the worshipper's presence before an ineffable God (as in Christianity), and that of a taboo or interdiction, which aptly defines the experience of religious silence in most Greek rituals.

The untiring voice of the hero to the equally untiring voice of the poet, who claims to be the enemy of silence as much as he claims to be the builder of memory and glory. Taking Pindar as the main focus of analysis...the opposition between silence and the voice as a poetic medium, and in particular, the ways in which silence, the ultimate threat for the poet's voice in an aural culture, is appropriated by this same voice as a tool for its own creative activity.

The very existence in Greece of a "code of silence" that involves the body and pervades cultural manifestations as diverse as religious rituals, Homeric epic, drama, and medical texts, points to a shared tendency to associate an absence of words with specific gestures and postures; an association, in turn which suggests that for the Greeks silence was a highly formalized behavior, much more so than it is for us.

Have blessed days ahead BLOGGERS! God Bless!

Yours,

Ophelia

sources:

Silence in the Land of Logos by Silvia Montiglo published by Princeton University Press.

IMAGES:

image 1 - a witness of time by mark.os on flickr

image 2 - by pantherinia_hd on flickr

image 3 - by Daniel Schwabe on flickr

image 4 - by spyros_tav_"smile...on flickr

image5 - by Darrell Godliman on flickr

Wuthering Heights Revisited

"The undisputable genius and greatest writer of the three Bronte sisters was Emily Bronte. She published only one novel, WUTHERING HEIGHTS, under the pseudonym of Ellis Bell. Wuthering Heights is the story of doomed love and revenge. Her novel was widely criticized by the Victorian critics for being so rustic and savage. As a young reader, I was enthralled by this novel even until now. Emily Bronte will always be on top of my list as a genius writer combined with her talent for mysticism and the spiritual." (Ophelia)

The moors that Emily Bronte described in Wuthering Heights

"It is not simply in contrast to its origins that Wuthering Heights strikes us as so unique, so unanticipated. This great novel, though not inordinately long, and, contrary to general assumption, not inordinately complicated, manages to be a number of things: a romance that brilliantly challenges the basic presumptions of the "romantic"; a "gothic" that evolves—with an absolutely inevitable grace—into its temperamental opposite; a parable of innocence and loss, and childhood's necessary defeat; and a work of consummate skill on its primary level, that is, the level of language.

Top Withens believed to be the setting of Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights is erected upon not only the accumulated tensions and part-formed characters of adolescent fantasy (adumbrated in the Gondal sagas) but upon the very theme of adolescent, or even childish, or infantile, fantasy. In the famous and unfailingly moving early scene in which Catherine Earnshaw tries to get into Lockwood's chamber (more specifically her old oak-paneled bed, in which, nearly a quarter of a century earlier, she and the child Heathcliff customarily slept together), it is significant that she identifies herself as Catherine Linton though she is in fact a child; and that she informs Lockwood that she had lost her way on the moor, for twenty years.

Top Withens from the South

As Catherine Linton, married, and even pregnant, she has never been anything other than a child: this is the pathos of her situation, and not the fact that she wrongly, or even rightly, chose to marry Edgar Linton over Heathcliff. Brontë's emotions are clearly caught up with these child's predilections, as the evidence of her poetry reveals, but the greatness of her genius as a novelist allows her a magnanimity, an imaginative elasticity, that challenges the very premises (which aspire to philosophical detachment) of the Romantic exaltation of the child and childhood's innocence.

Top Withens from the North

So famous are certain speeches in Wuthering Heights proclaiming Catherine's bond with Heathcliff ("Nelly, I am Heathcliff—he's always, always in my mind"), and Heathcliff's with Catherine (Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!") that they scarcely require reference, at any length: the peculiarity in the lovers' feeling for each other being their intense and unshakable identification, which is an identification with the moors, and with Nature itself, that seems to preclude any human, let alone sexual" bond. They do not behave like adulterous lovers, but speak freely of their relationship before Catherine's husband, Edgar; and they embrace, desperately and fatally, in the presence of the ubiquitous and somewhat voyeuristic Mrs. Dean.

Approach to Top Withens

So intense an identification between lover and beloved has nothing to do with the dramatic relationship of opposites, who yearn to come together in order to be complete: it is the at-one-ness of the mystic with his God, the peaceful solitude of the unborn babe in the womb. That Heathcliff's prolonged love for the dead Catherine shades by degrees into actual madness is signaled by his breakdown at the novel's conclusion, when the "monomania" for his idol becomes a monomania for death. She, the beloved, implored to return to haunt him, has returned in a terrifying and malevolent way, and will not give him peace. ". . . For what is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped in the flags! In every cloud, in every tree-filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object by day—I am surrounded with her image! The most ordinary faces of men and women—my own features—mock me with a resemblance." So Heathcliff tries to explain the frightening "change" that is upon him, when he sees that he and Catherine have been duplicated, in a sense, and supplanted, by the second Catherine and young Hareton. The old energies of the child's untrammeled life have passed over into the ghoulish energies of death, to which Heathcliff succumbs by degrees. "I have to remind myself to breathe—almost to remind my heart to beat!" Heathcliff, that most physical of beings, declares. "And it is like bending back a stiff spring; it is by compulsion that I do the slightest act not prompted by one thought, and by compulsion, that I notice anything alive, or dead, which is not associated with one universal idea.... I am swallowed up in the anticipation of its fulfillment."

Top Withens in 1920's

"Realism," the artfully fractured chronology begins to sort itself out, as if we are waking rapidly from a dream, and the present time of September 1802 is the authentic present, for both the diarist Lockwood and the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights. Mysteries are gradually dispelled; we have gained a more certain footing; as Lockwood makes his way to the Heights, he notes that "all that remained of day was a beamless, amber light along the west; but I could see every pebble on the path, and every blade of grass by that splendid moon." The shift from the gothic sensibility has been prepared from the very first, by Brontë's systematically detailed settings, which are rendered in careful prose by the narrators Lockwood and Mrs. Dean—the only characters we might reasonably expect to see the Heights, the Grange, and the moors. The romantic lovers consume themselves in feeling; they feel deeply enough but their feeling relates only to themselves, and excludes the rest of the world. But the narrators, and, through them, the reader, are privileged to see. (It is significant that the ghost-lovers of the older generation walk the moors on rainy nights, and that the lovers of the new generation walk by moonlight.)

It is this fidelity to the observed physical world, and Brontë's own inward applause, that makes the metamorphosis of the dark tale into its opposite so plausible, as well as so ceremonially appropriate. Though the grave is misjudged by certain persons as a place of fulfillment, the world is not after all phantasmal: it is by daylight that love survives. Long misread as a poetic and metaphysical work given a sort of sickly, fevered radiance by way of the "narrowness" of Emily Brontë's imagination, Wuthering Heights can be more accurately be seen as a work of mature and astonishing magnitude. The poetic and the "prosaic" are in exquisite harmony; the metaphysical is balanced by the physical. An anomaly, a sport, a freak in its own time, it can be seen by us, in ours, as brilliantly of that time—and contemporaneous with our own.

Wuthering Heights, as if for the first time in human history, that one generation will not be doomed to repeat the tragic errors of its parents. Suddenly, childhood is past; it retreats to a darkly romantic and altogether poignant legend, a "fiction" of surpassing beauty but belonging to a remote time.

Have blessed days ahead Bloggers!

Yours Truly,

Ophelia

Source: The Magnanimity of Wuthering Heights by Joyce Carol Oates