Chapter one focuses primarily on the sonnets of Charlotte Smith, with attention to her use of personifications to convey the gendered
wordlessness of grief.
Rather than becoming a loquacious representative of the Irish past, she becomes a powerless speaker who shares the
wordlessness of figures like those in Virgil's Underworld.
If
wordlessness seems an appropriate response to Warm Broad Glow, it is because the sculpture cannot be made to mean something definitive about race or language, about the current backlash against identity politics, or about the legacy of neon art in the wake of Dan Flavin and Bruce Nauman.
Quiet returned to the bakery, though by this point all sense of calm had evaporated and been replaced by a grim
wordlessness.
Music with its characteristic
wordlessness is perhaps a particularly good medium to hint at the ineffable.
The following lines from "Bitterness" epitomize the poet's pessimistic attitude toward life: "Both words/And
wordlessness have/Given the lie to truth.
Through its very
wordlessness, this implicit communication excludes any third party.
Music, on the other hand, is able to illuminate the heroine's complicated position: silenced (as can be demonstrated by the
wordlessness of the tune) yet not stifled, still looking for ways to break free.
And then I found this from John Berger in his book called And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos: "Once one lived in a seamless experience of
wordlessness.
Appropriately last, her essay notes that Gordimer was in New York in 1991 promoting Jump when she received word about the Nobel Prize and points out that its stories about white South Africans caught at the end of the interregnum "often end up in a place of
wordlessness, the silences which settle at the end[s] of pieces.
