“Silence – A Fable” di Edgar Allan Poe

La lotta fra scrittura del visibile e scrittura dell’udibile

Abstract

There is no doubt that Poe's writing bears the traces of an excessive compulsion for repetition. The essay analyses "Silence," a short 'fable' written in 1833-35, in which the over-recurrence of repetition mirrors pain, anxiety, awe, and death by dramatizing the conflict between representational and metanarrative concerns. The split between the descriptive and the narrative modes is traced back to the opposition between sight and hearing—an opposition that results in near silence.