Narrative Silence in America's Stories
Margaret Reid | Department of English and American Literature and Language Harvard University
Abstract
In the historical event of the American Revolution, as well as in certain central texts of the American literary imagination, a tension between the power of a community to define itself through language and the resistance of experiential history to such enclosure is represented through a particular form of narrative silence. This narrative form may first suggest repression and the failures of memory. But the American imagination has used narrative silence as a way of representing events that lie outside of the known and planned, in order to preserve the residual life of experience and so to bear witness to the imagina-tion's dependence on the whole of history. In this essay, I argue that this narrative form reveals a central paradox of the American cultural imagination: This imagination successfully encodes its story of community exactly insofar as it creates a place—in language and in thought—for the safely silent acknowl-edgement of the power of experiential knowledge and untold secrets. (Culture studies; literary criticism)