The Dark Matter of Words: Absence, Unknowing, and Emptiness in Literature

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SIU Press, 1998 - 206 pages

Timothy Walsh's study of the function and significance of absence in literature demonstrates its centrality in terms of both literary technique and philosophical consequence.

Textual gaps, narrative lacunae, and strategic vagueness, together with the uncertainties that such devices inevitably generate, have been essential elements of literature from Lao-Tzu to Lawrence, from Chaucer to Faulkner and beyond. Walsh finds that poststructural approaches to indeterminacy tend to overlook the specific and productive roles that absence and uncertainty often play within the overall design of a work. The aesthetic generation of uncertainty, he demonstrates, is not a roadblock on the path to meaning or a sign of some radical and suppressed internal contradiction; rather, it is as basic an artistic aim as the desire to evoke sympathy, laughter, or outrage.

Coining the phrase "structured absence" to explain a central tenet in his discussion of the "mechanics" of uncertainty, Walsh analyzes various literary devices and tropes involved in generating a felt sense of absence and a purposeful uncertainty. Structured absences, he demonstrates, combine to form intricate patterns and networks, which explains how the dynamic potential of uncertainty can increase exponentially through a deft orchestration of absence.

Walsh argues that the use of absence in works of art--of silence, shadow, blankness, and void--is a principal means by which the inherent biological limitations of human consciousness and of human language are encoded in aesthetic constructs. Because of the limitations of our senses and because we often are more attuned to what lies beyond the threshold of perceptual limits, the lacunae in artistic works represent attempts to replicate the real and inescapable limits of human experience.

 

Contents

An Aesthetics of Absence
1
Seeing What Isnt There
3
Orchestras of Shadow
14
The Roar on the Other Side of Silence
37
The Wordless Blank and the Gift of Tongues
39
The PrisonHouse of Language
47
Language as Gesture
62
Patrolling the Misty Frontier
71
Malcolm Mooneys Land
80
A Mechanics of Uncertainty
85
For the Snark Was a Boojum You See
87
Uncertainty vs Indeterminacy
93
Absence and Structured Absence
104
The Dark Matter of Words and Worlds
169
Works Cited
191
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About the author (1998)

Timothy Walsh is a senior advisor at the Cross-College Advising Service at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His poems, short stories, and essays have appeared in numerous literary magazines.

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