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History and “the art of reading”: silence and incomplete reading.(Herbert-Norwid)
Abstract
This article discusses Norwid’s conception of silence, encompassing its two aspects: an understanding of silence (1) as inherent to human speech, culture, and history, a strongly influential, unspoken thought (implicature), and (2) as the effect of the prohibition of “being uttered” (censorship). Upon this view, the discovery of moments of silence is tantamount to the art of reading, seen as a path to gaining self-awareness, both on an individual and national level, which reveals its identity potential particularly strongly in situations of crisis (e.g. enslavement). The validity of this concept is analysed on the example of two works addressing imperial themes – Norwid’s Quidam and Herbert’s Przemiany Liwiusza [Transformations of Livy]. These works are juxtaposed based on the principle of “mediated parallelism”, i.e. independently discussed in relation to Milczenie [Silence] as the theoretical basis of Norwid’s reflection, the subject of which is, inter alia, the complex relationship of silence and parabolisation, expressed by ironic diction.
Keywords:
Cyprian Norwid, Zbigniew Herbert, silence, concealment, parable, irony, imperiumDetails
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
