Schroder: A Novel by Gaige Amity

Author:Gaige, Amity [Gaige, Amity]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction / Family Life, Fiction / Literary
ISBN: 9781455512140
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2013-02-05T08:00:00+00:00

SILENCE THEORY

It occurs to me that I haven’t really mentioned my research here in the body of my text. I don’t want to burden the prospective listener with subjects too esoteric, but on the other hand, it seems that my not mentioning my research belies some form of embarrassment? And given that I woke up today regretting yesterday’s confessions (see here, re: Delaware Bay) and am now practically impaired with bitterness that a) I felt such tender things about you, Laura, in the first place and b) I then immortalized them by writing them down, I think now would be a good time to change the subject. Let’s not forget that my audience here is diverse. I’ve got a legal obligation to humanize myself. For my own defense. Other people might want to know, how did I contribute to society? What did I care about?

I care about pauses. Actually, I collect pauses. Back in the year 1990, fresh out of Mune, after studying many of the most significant moments in human history, I thought it might be cool to collect all those moments—literary, cultural, political—when something was not said or not done. Hesitations, standstills, lulls, ellipses. All kinds of inactivity. I called it “Pausology: An Experimental Encyclopedia.” The work stemmed from my longtime interest in the concept of “eventlessness” (which I would define as moments in history when nothing was happening, producing a significant insignificance).

At first I thought I was doing something groundbreaking. I was writing antihistory. History’s negative. Then I realized the obvious, that the material I was trying to collect was totally undocumented. One summer I hired a research assistant through my old prof at Mune, and we spent most of the summer just trying to figure out how to begin. After Meadow was born, I had to adjust my ambitions and reckon with the fact that there was no way that my encyclopedia would ever be “complete.” And after a while, looking over the bits and pieces of promising chapterlets and indexes, I thought, well it could make for an interesting coffee table book. I don’t know. People kept asking me, “How’s the book? Making progress on that book?” The truth is, I had told too many people about it to stop.11

For all of his brilliant writing, playwright and unofficial pausologist Harold Pinter loved moments in which the characters did not speak, leaving us now with plays chock-full of excruciating or “pregnant” pauses. Although Pinter later came to repudiate his famous pauses, he happily wrote 140 of them into Betrayal and 224 into The Homecoming, which, if faithfully acted, led to some satirically long, theater-clearing performances that will fuel bad undergraduate repertoires for generations to come. I’d like to draw a connection here between dramatic pauses and marital pauses. Both dramatic and marital pauses vary in duration; the shortest, or most minor, are easily ignorable (“…”) but do signal some form of inner struggle; other beats are longer and more loaded with effortful suppression or confusion (pause),

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