Adam Small
SILENCE is sound etiquette, I have noted, as one (for instance) stands admiringly in awe before a great work of art; or perhaps as one is faced by death. Today I explore the concept of silence a little further, focusing on writing of George Steiner’s.
In Language and Silence, in the penetrating chapter “The Hollow Miracle”, Steiner sketches how “silence” befell the German language the way it was used – misused – by the Nazis.
“But let us keep one fact clearly in mind”, says Steiner, “the German language was (itself) not innocent of the horrors of Nazism.” The matter is complex, if only for an existing view that a language as such is not oppressive, and that only people who use the language can oppress. Steiner does not subscribe to this. Does Steiner give Hitler too much credit for insight? Hitler, he writes, “heard inside his native tongue the latent hysteria, the confusion, the quality of hypnotic trance”. (This thinking of Steiner’s is so challenging, it must not be dismissed.)
The quotation must be run a little longer: “(Hitler) sensed in German another music than that of Goethe, Heine and Mann; a rasping cadence, half nebulous jargon, half obscenity. And instead of turning away in nauseated disbelief, the German people gave massive echo to the man’s bellowing.
“It bellowed back out of a million throats and smashed-down boots. A Hitler would have found reservoirs of venom and moral illiteracy in any language.” Language, says Steiner, “in which one can write a Horst Wessel Lied, is ready to give hell a native tongue”. Apart from the profundity of the writing, the bitterness of it is evident. A number of challenging ideas are advanced here:
First – a very bold proposition – Steiner is suggesting that a language runs down (since whenever): it wears out and falls in disarray (out of which it has to be lifted again, over long years, to regain a vigour it once had). This is the situation a Hitler latches on to, and exploits.
In their everyday exchanges, the speakers of the language aren’t aware of this. Only the few – the perceptive artists – see and sense this but, sadly, they cannot, alone, shoulder the burden of turning the twirling ship around: “Brecht, Kafka and Thomas Mann did not succeed in mastering their own culture, imposing on it the humane sobriety of their talent.”
This means that, in the short term, the dangerous political riff-raff of the spirit take over.
Secondly, the great artists will surface again, but only after a dire price had been paid, and levels of immense sadness and sorrow plumbed…
(If Steiner is right, in a similar – if lesser – way, we have experienced this under apartheid, with its man of the historical moment, Verwoerd.)
Steiner’s third suggestion is that the political leadership during such times can be imaged as eddying, meeting in a fountain-head – a single personage who clothes himself in garments of dominance, literally too: cap, boots, jacket, riding-type trousers – rounding it all off with a salute, a kind of caption to it all, such as “Heil Hitler!” It would be utterly laughable, if not for its deeply tragic consequence.
No purpose is served to try reminding such people of their fragile humanness: the fact, for instance, that they have to change their underclothing sometimes! These blind beings simply live right over anything like this, for they alone live, and only their will matters. (Blind beings? We are speaking, rather, of carriers of evil, of the “evil spirits in the air” – of the Devil himself.)
In some quarters, it seems, there is an insistence on silence for the sake of silence, like in Eckhart Tolle’s Stillness Speaks. But, much as even the Buddha might sit in his wisdom, contemplating, he has to eat and drink: which means food has to be procured, and the (loud) marketplace to be sought out!
The unrealistic expectations of a Tolle, which elude the outcome he himself desires, easily lead to an open passage for evil…
One cannot practise silence when what is called for is protest. I return to my sentiment that NP van Wyk Louw was right to consider that “Revolt is as necessary for a people as is loyalty. It is not even fatal if a rebellion fails! What is truly calamitous, is that an entire generation should pass without protest”. This is the most meaningful assessment of the import of protest in our literature.
Against the background of Van Wyk Louw’s calm insight, we now read Steiner’s more cheering judgement that, when all is said, “it does not mean that the German genius (today) is mute”. He believes there is “a brilliant new (modern) musical life… a surge of activity in mathematics and the natural sciences”. But these, he maintains, are languages, other than language – “purer perhaps, less sullied with past implications”. But, he believes, this is “not (yet) language. And so far, in history, it is (only) language that has been the vessel of human grace, and the prime carrier of civilisation”.
Steiner leaves me wondering: is he not seeing “language” as something abstractly pure? Surely all the voices we hear around us every day – musical, scientific, visually artistic, the shouts of encouragement by supporters to their teams at sports events – come and belong together in the concept, without denigrating it. Our post-Hitler time, therefore, is not as bleak as Steiner fears. Today, fifty years after, his doubt might have abated and, indeed, his bitterness.
Silence is an idea to be dwelt on seriously. Though not to be absolutised, it has been a gift to us “since ages past”. Psalm 30, filled with wisdom, implies that absolute silence would make it impossible to praise anything, including God. Verse 1, after all, is written “to extol” God; verse 12, “that my glory may sing praise to God, and I may not be silent”; and the beautiful verse 11 reminds us of the wonder of coming out of silence, and turning our “mourning into dancing”!
But the innermost core of silence remains our guide to how silence is to be suspended. Steiner is right: only when silence is embraced is there true language, but, we must add, inclusive of all the other “speaking” constituents of language, music, mathematics, the crying of a baby, the cheering of the crowd at a sportsfield, the weeping at a funeral, the joyous laughter at a wedding…
On the wall of my room, a print of a painting of Jesus appearing before the High Priest Caiaphas (Matthew 26:62-63) underscores Steiner’s complexity of thought. The High Priest beseeches Jesus with a raised forefinger in line with the flame of the candle: it was still before dawn, “Have you no answer to give to the accusation against you?”
The accusation was that Jesus had said He was “able to tear down God’s Temple, and three days later build it up again”. Caiaphas, exasperated, questioned Jesus: “In the name of the living God. I now put you to oath. Tell us, are you the Messiah, the Son of God?”
Jesus remained unmoved – in an act of satirically searing sarcasm, more incisive than mere silence.