It started with three words. “I am pregnant.” And then a long silence. A beginning ended before it even started. Other words followed. “I don’t want it.” Then silence once more. 

For the longest time, I was preoccupied with silence. With how words become elusive and cannot convey reality. This does not happen in books. There, I (the reader) was able to know everything about the characters, but the latter were never able to fully comprehend the other. This especially piqued my interest. 

In modernism, the characters never seem truly knowledgeable about one another. Their whole lives are spent in parentheses. They found themselves in the impossibility of verbalising their real thoughts and feelings and withholding their true selves from the scrutiny of others’ gaze. When viewed from afar, their lives were but a series of misunderstandings, silences, and secrets taken to the grave. Their self was revealed through inner words, their thoughts exposed using the stream of consciousness. For the modernists, the true self is therefore locked into the depths of the mind.

I was eleven years old when I discovered the truth. My father passed away a year prior. We hadn’t held contact for another six. By searching for a silly diploma, I stumbled upon my parents’ divorce papers. Curiosity won, even though I felt at a loss. You never know when your life is about to change profoundly. At that young age, I wasn’t able to understand most of the terminology used in those papers. But one thing was clear. My father only asked for the custody of my brother. He wanted him, and only him. Not me.

My mother found me on the living room floor, staring at that piece of paper. She wasn’t angry with me, quite the contrary. She did what my father was never able to. She broke the silence. And told me about his reaction to the news about her pregnancy, how he did not want me, not because he loved me any less, but because he was older and was more preoccupied that other parents might mock him for having another child at that age.

With that piece of paper still in hand, I asked her about the divorce and the custody battle. She once again explained. At that time, I was 5, and my brother was 12. And my father argued that he could take better care of the older sibling. I had heard this before. It didn’t mean it affected me less.

To the Lighthouse changed my vision of the world. In this novel, the family’s dynamic reflects exactly how little we know about the other, as “individuals from the same family, who spend their lives together, behave as though in fact they were moving in entirely different orbits.” (Pavel 2013: 279)

Virginia Woolf, in her essays, argues about the previous method of writing novels, explaining how unnatural it is to create a character with a predetermined fate. The main purpose of the novel shouldn’t be to present a teleological action, told by an exterior voice. The writer should instead attempt to present events as they unfold, to convey human life in all its complexity. 

Then she proceeds to ask the reader rhetorical questions such as “Is life like this? Must novels be like this?” (106), concluding that, for those authors who comply with these restrictive rules, “life escapes; and perhaps without life nothing else is worthwhile” (105).

The main focus in this novel is the inner world of the characters, a world that, against the reader’s expectations, is not exactly liberating. In her works, “each person is a prisoner of his or her perceptions, managing to grasp – very intensely – only a small section of the shared world.” (Pavel 2013: 280). In this novel, the action becomes redundant. The main point is the family dynamic, the unkept promises that lead to growing resentment, and unspoken words. After all,

I related to another character, the young painter Lily Briscoe. I felt her closer than any other character, mainly because she struggles between being silent and speaking up.

She is representative of Woolf’s style. Lily’s stream of consciousness reflects the way our own mind functions, how we struggle to find an order amidst the ocean of contradictory thoughts that threaten to swallow us. She states clearly that “to follow her thought was like following a voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one’s pencil, and the voice was her own voice saying without prompting undeniable, everlasting, contradictory things” (Woolf 1930: 43). She has beliefs that are contradicted by her own self, one moment after the other. She is aware of the inability to understand the other’s inner world, as her identity is duplicitous: “How then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were?” (83). And she struggles with the authority of Mrs. Ramsay, feeling empty and directionless after her death.

For Lily, Mrs. Ramsay represented that voice that guided her, which cannot be contradicted. Lily complied with her will, without uttering a word of protest, even though, deep inside, she did not agree with the older woman’s beliefs. Everything changes after Mrs. Ramsay’s death.

Without being shadowed by her presence, at first Lily feels an oppressive confusion,  unable to perceive this new reality. Given that “much of Virginia Woolf’s narration can be seen as the ground on which the interplay of presence and absence takes place” (Laurence 1991: 46), once again, silence and speaking are intertwined, bound together in a contradictory manner, from which silence prevails: “What does it mean then, what can it all mean? Lily Briscoe asked herself, wondering whether, since she had been left alone […] For really, what did she feel, come back after all these years, and Mrs. Ramsay dead? Nothing, nothing, nothing that she could express at all” (Woolf 1930: 225).

Lily never exposes her inner world. Instead, she puts her feelings in parentheses, represented by her painting, the one she was never able to finish while Mrs. Ramsay was still alive. Young and easily influenced, she was more focused on the outside commentaries than her inner voice. After Mrs. Ramsay’s death, she is able to break the silence by exposing her thoughts. In that scene, the outside fades

In the end, Lily concludes that “I have had my vision” (320). I realized that all of us need to have our vision, that specific moment in which silence is broken, and we can find some parts of ourselves that we didn’t know existed.

When I was 18, I returned to my father’s house, sold a very long time ago to a man I didn’t know. Both my brother and I watched the house from the main road, him – with nostalgia, I – with numbness. My early childhood remains a blur, only bits of pieces scattered around my memory, but refusing to get out front. We visited his grave when my brother suggested we should take a look at our previous home. That was when we met with some neighbors I struggled to recognize after 13 years of absence.

The silence imposed by my father was broken once again. Our neighbors recalled parts of our childhood as I smiled politely, because my memory had erased almost everything. Right across the street, my neighbor had a niece, ten months younger than me. I was told then that, after we left, my father used to wait for her to return from kindergarten, to hold her tight and stroke her hair. “I’m sure he was longing for you,” she told me, while I felt number than ever. Another part of our story was revealed on an empty street, far too late. When I was deprived of the chance to speak with him. Silence prevailed.

As I advanced with my studies, another literary period that, for me, put things into perspective was postmodernism. It is a period in which any kind of silence of used: from the intertextuality (as the writers complicate subjects and motifs from their previous masters – I think about the relationship between Cărtărescu’s Gemenii and Woolf’s Orlando, for example), to the silence present in language. When conventions become a playfield, and the narrator does not provide us with clear answers, “of this we can be certain: the forms of silence engage one another, and silence itself suddenly turns into speech” (Hassan 1982: 8). According to Ihab Hassan:

Last, but not least, “literature strives for silence by accepting chance and improvisation; its principle becomes indeterminacy. By refusing order, order imposed or discovered, this kind of literature refuses purpose” (10).

Silence is embodied in narration. The reader immerses in a universe in which omniscience and knowledge are just constructions which can easily be deconstructed. This is the case of The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

From our mandatory syllabus, this novel stood up to me. And it took me a while to understand the reason why. For the longest part of the story, we believe that we are reading a classic story, with characters that are morally grey or dreadful, with a chronological order of the events and a narrator who knows everything about his characters. Then chapter 13 comes and, after addressing some rhetorical questions, the narrator replies that he is powerless in this story. He is not the keeper of the truth and “this story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind. If I have pretended until now to know my characters’ minds and innermost thoughts” (Fowles 1969: 85). And that “creates a particular effect, as if certain things were impossible to figure out, as if mystery were shadowing what is not meant to be mysterious, as if mystery were part of life and consciously part of fiction” (Barral 2011: 11).

The story becomes merely a convention and, for the characters to start living, they must be independent from the author, as “a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world.” (Fowles 1969: 86) Like Fowles states “It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live” (86).

The novel is full of contradictions. Most of the time, the narrator states that he ordered his characters to be in a certain place, and they evidently disobeyed him. Most of the characters, like Sarah, by far the most elusive one, have “a story written in silence, absence, and shadows” (Tarbox 1996: 100). We are not given a clear answer, we no longer have the access to the characters’ inner world even from our privileged position as readers, always oscillating “between revelation and silence” (Barral 2011:19).

This novel is liberating in a way not many books are. It reveals that there are parts of the story covered in silence, never to be broken. It proves that no one is ever able to know everything. Silence is engraved in every sentence.

I believe that my story is just like that.

I tried the narrator’s game. I created a fictional world in which I talk to my father. I ask him the burning questions that arose after years of silence. But I can’t even look at him. His features are blurred, as if my foggy memory refuses to remember. His mouth is never open. Just like Sarah, he has a life independent from mine, and I am never able to find his story, to find the reason behind some words thrown carelessly in my childhood home or in a court of law. My first 5 years of life are marked by an absence, a void, a truth never disclosed to me. Not entirely, at the very least.