The Silentiary
- Antonio Di Benedetto's title had me running to the dictionary. From
what I was able to find, silentiary refers to a maker of silence, an
observer of silence or an advocate of silence.
Considering the
barrage of noise raining down on the novel's unnamed
narrator/protagonist, by process of elimination (so much noise he isn't
in a position to make silence or observes silence), he's left with being
an advocate of silence.
Poor guy. On the first page a bus
leaves its motor running right outside his bedroom window. The noise
hardly lets up in the novel's 150 pages - and all the noise drives De
Silentio crazy. Johannes de silentio served as one of Kierkegaard's
pseudonyms and I'll give half his name to our tale's narrator.
Originally published in 1964, The Silentiary easily qualifies as unique and one-of-a-kind. Juan José Saer notes in his essay included in this New York Review Books
edition: "But while certain themes in Di Benedetto's work have an
affinity with those of existentialism - the ghosts of Kierkegaard,
Schopenhauer, and Camus drift along the back of the stage from time to
time - the prose that discreetly distributes them across the page has
neither precursors nor successors."
The author frames his tale
thusly: We're in an unnamed Latin American city in the 1950s. De
Silentio works as a manager's assistant in an office but aspires to be a
writer. As a first step, De Silentio needs to get away from all the
harsh city noise so he can concentrate. Not easy, especially since he
must take into account his mother and his wife. He comes up with
something simple for starters: he'll write a detective novel where he
himself will assume the role of criminal, and, as criminal, he'll plan
the murder of someone he knows.
Again, distinctive storytelling.
The tale heats up halfway in. To share a flavor of what a reader will
encounter, here's a batch of direct quotes along with my comments:
“Noise has become the sign or symbol of all that is now, all that is new, all that possess weight and validity; the rupture.”
The
mushrooming of cities across the globe happened in the first half of
the twentieth century. By the 1950s, many thousands of cars, buses and
trucks came to dominate every aspect of city life. A near intolerable
level of noise and stench and ugliness simply became the given.
“Therefore,
eminent spirits – Kant, Goethe, Lichtenberg, Jean-Paul - have always
shown an extreme dislike to disturbance in any form. Above all have they
been averse to that violent interruption that comes from noise.
Ordinary people are not much put out by anything of the sort.”
De
Silentio quotes German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer here. Sad fact:
Most people don't register noise – motors can rumble, sirens can blare,
music can screech and the general population barely notices. However, De
Silentio possesses a deep artistic sensitivity and, like Norwegian
explorer Ering Kagge, he has a primordial need for silence.
One
of the key themes of existentialism: a sense of alienation from society
and from other people. De Silentio's wife Nina fears silence and
solitude; she clamors to fill her world with sound, especially radio
music. And Nina's fear is an expression of modern culture: silence has
become the dreaded enemy. The last thing people want is to discover or
come in contact with a deeper level of life that opens up via silence
and solitude.
“Like everyone else, we had a television set, though like very few people, we used it with discretion.”
Antonio
Di Benedetto displays keen insight - the 1950s inaugurated the age of
television where television shows became central to the lives of an
entire population. De Silentio wants to write a novel. Fortunately he
and his wife bring a measure of discretion to their TV viewing – without
discretion, the television could remain on and our novelist in the
making could spend years with his ass plopped in front of the boob tube,
his desire to write a novel reduced to a faint memory.
Sidebar:
In all the dozens of existential novels I've read by authors like
Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, André Malraux, Georges Simenon, I can't
recall even the mention of television.
“Machines are useful.
Their noise is not, and still less so when amplified or uncontrolled. At
present, machine noise is neither moderated nor controlled nor
suppressed. It produces the euphoria of power in those who generate it.”
Bullseye,
De Silentio! To inflict your noise on others is a form of aggression
and power. If anybody doubts this, think back to when you were subjected
to the roar of a motorcycle.
There's also a curious philosophic dimension at play. As Esther Allen writes in her Translator's Afterward,
John Cage told Morton Feldmann, his friend a fellow composer, that he
shouldn't complain about the noises in the environment, explaining, in
effect, that he (Morton) wants to impose his thoughts on the outside
world so why shouldn't the outside world have the right to impose itself
on him?
“My novel will have a crime and various suspects, but I
myself, the author, will remain unaware of who the criminal is. That
way the book can be prolonged indefinitely, until the crime it once was
about has been entirely forgotten."
De Silentio goes on to spin other possibilities for his novel. I kept wondering if The Silentiary itself could count as one possible iteration.
Antonio Di Benedetto incorporates several other provocative themes in The Silentiary. I highly recommend picking up a copy. Perhaps you will also be moved to read the author's classic, Zama, likewise available thanks to New York Review Books.
Argentina's Antonio Di Benedetto, 1922-1986
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