Suggested topics: theme(s) and structure; importance of the text within the context of the author’s work and time; subject of the enunciation; point of view and effect upon the reader/addressee; rhetoric and linguistic devices and language tropes (descriptive or lyric manner, figures of speech, symbolism, innovation / surprising markers, collocations, or pattern traces within the author’s work); intertextuality with texts studied in this class or others.
from "He would lie in bed" to "attachment to the strange girl"
In this excerpt from “Silence,” a short story by the Filipino-American
writer Carlos Bulosan (1913-195) that was published posthumously, we are led
through a third-person focalization into a moment in the life of an unnamed
solitary life where the possibility of change and release from enclosure is
contemplated. This possibility is arguably symbolized by the presence of “green
curtains hanging on his window,” green being the color of hope, and by the
suggestion of romance with a female character whom the protagonist watches
“reading” and whose dress code the protagonist tries to “match,” indicating an
attempt at communication, dispelling an haunting silence of many years.
The first
part of the excerpt, constituted by short sentences indicating habit
(repetition of “He would”) and succession (suggested by the connectors “Then,”
“and), shows a fastidious routine (“as he had done thousands of mornings
before”). This routine is marked by dysphoric adjectives - “eyes open and withdrawn” – and verbs – for
instance, “fumble in the semidarkness”, “thinking nothing” – that suggest
alienation and impotence.
The
paragraph that starts with an adversative “But now” seems to indicate change,
even if its realization is delayed. Temporal markers are indefinite and not
particularly rigorous: the “five years” of solitude in town seem to confirm an
earlier reference (“now it was five years since he had talked to another human
being”), but we were also told by the incipit
that there previously had been “the silence of other years”. This adds up to a
sense of indefinite time, compounded by indefinite place. Objects seem to be
the only companions of the man but they are not placed anywhere precise (no
names of neighborhoods or towns). Inanimate things, however, are treated as
persons, as shown by the affective use of the verbs “caress” (applied to chair)
and “converse with” (applied to everything in his room). The adversative “But”
is again repeated, followed by the temporal marker “Sunday morning” and we are
then led to the moment of the possibility of change, associating the green
color of curtains to the threshold of the window and to the lawn of a college
(possibly suggesting the mobility of higher education). The spotting of a girl
(who is also nameless and at first only referenced) is signaled with the first
inequivocally positive adjectives of the text: “excited” and “surprised.”
Change is
explicit in the next paragraph and compounded by the replacement of a negative
image with a positive one, which furthermore contains an alliteration in “f”
that reinforces the flow of light (“flood of light flowed warmly”). Next, a
comparison dispels the interior silence (“as if he had heard little foices
inside him”). The light seems to bring in attention to colour (white sweater,
grey skirt, brown hair, green curtains), and the effect is the first and only
utterance marked in direct speech in the text. The protagonist’s exclamation,
however, is ambiguous, since it expresses terror (at the lack of agreement
between the girl’s clothing and the colors of his window) but also an urge to
action.
Finally,
the last part of the excerpt might indicate that this urgency of action is
restorative of the protagonist’s agency (he leaves the house running), although
there is also the negative suggestion that the girl might “give him back his
silence”, leaving the reader undecided about the turn of the narrative.
The story seems to refer to the condition of the immigrant / ex-pat (in fact, we know the empiric author, Carlos Bulosan, came from the Philippines, which at the time was a colony ceded by Spain to the US), and feelings of isolation, confinement, invisibility and incapacity to utter and act, are pervasive. The title "Silence" is as explicit as the "events" in the short story are evasive. We could therefore contrast it with the extolment, by South-Asian author Bharati Mukherjee, later on, of the duality of the colonial writer and the way s/he can cash on it by investing on “maximalist” writing. ("Immigrant Writing", 1988). The unnamed protagonist of "Silence" simply cannot "match" and it seems that, unlike the mild and welcoming Statue of Liberty sang by Emma Lazarus, he cannot even "cry with silent lips."
