Making Silence Speak.
Adventures in dynamite style.
French newspaper Le Matin used to print brief daily news written anonymously by Félix Fénéon. Asked later to compile his journalism in a single volume, Fénéon refused, remarking “I aspire only to silence”. But this might mean more if you consider his unique prose style. None longer than three lines, his “fillers” as he called them, are masterclasses of minimalism. The condensed intensity of the prose is often unnerving, sort of funny, sort of horrific.
"If my candidate loses, I will kill myself," M. Bellavoine, of Fresquienne, Seine-Inferieure, had declared. He killed himself.
M Colombe of Rouen killed himself with a bullet yesterday. His wife had shot 3 of them at him in March and their divorce was imminent.
Comedy and horror both have to happen within the audience. You can’t explain. They have to build it around themselves. You have to let them own it.
Initially an anarchist (he was tried following a bomb attack in Paris in 1894 but not convicted, possibly mistakenly) Fénéon was best known as a gallerist and art collector. He championed Georges Seurat and the other Neo-Impressionists (a term he invented). In painting, as in writing, Fénéon understood how a vast image is constructed through the relationship of tiny discontinuous points.
Canadian poet Anne Carson allows herself more than three lines but her work contains a similarly luminous restraint. (Incidentally Seurat was wrong in his belief that his technique allowed for greater luminosity through the juxtaposition of pigments, or rather, he was wrong in thinking this belief scientifically accurate.) This is Carson dreaming of Tom Stoppard.
However, what I really want you to read with your one free article in the London Review of Books is her piece “On Snow”. I love how her writing allows layer of meaning to build like snow drifts on the specific words she choses until, in the final lines, she can say almost nothing with devastating impact. It’s not what she writes, it’s not even what she doesn’t, as with Fénéon, the skill is that the powerful part is the part Carson makes you write for yourself.
Carson is a Greek scholar and “On Snow”, like much of her writing, is notable for a concern with translation. The author is in the work as a reader and she presents reading as translation, as an active participation in the act of creation. This aspect of her work challenges some of the basic assumptions of New Criticism, a literary movement which did much to reshape 20th Century poetry. Much like Neo-Impressionism it hoped to bring scientific rigour to art. Relying on close reading, New Criticism insisted that all the meaning of a poem was within the text, free from the history of the author or prejudices of the audience.
Like Neo-Impressionism, New Criticism sought to use relationships within an artwork to create meaning. It’s impact surprisingly runs to James Jesus Angleton the lugubrious head of CIA Counterintelligence from 1954 to 1974. He turned to the principles of New Criticism and the technique of close reading, to help navigate the shadows of the cold war, to let the facts speak for themselves. Tiny discontinuous data points from which shone a luminous truth, the Monster Plot, the idea that the western allies were subject to a vast KGB infiltration.
A quote from Thomas Powers’ fiery rebuttal of claims that Angleton was behind the assassination of JFK (he wasn’t).
When he wanted someone to understand the Monster Plot … Angleton would schedule time for ‘the briefing’ … He walked him through it, one bit at a time, in a performance that took a big part of several days. No notes, just talk…Angleton peering … through his huge horn-rimmed glasses and saying: ‘Now do you see it?’
“Now do you see it?” This is the central question of this dynamite style that seeks not to persuade but to convince. Telling stories in this way flatters the audience, elevating them, allowing them to be initiated into the truth by making the final connection for themselves. A good conspiracy theory, for instance how the Jack The Ripper murders were actually the youthful crimes of the painter Walter Sickert (another whose work would be collected by Fénéon) relies not on the provision of proof but the power of allegation.
Angleton left the CIA in such an introspective tangle that his replacement eventually suggested the Yale man himself had been the KGB mole, an allegation of which he was cleared. Angleton’s “Now do you see it?” comes to us now as “You have to see it for yourself?” a line I kept hitting like a dead end when I used to argue online with adherents to the QAnon conspiracy cult. Whilst fun at first, eventually they would refuse to engage with my dull rational arguing, instead just laying out their facts like Angleton might have; the Bidens, the Clintons, the “pizza” - it wasn’t their job to convince me, they can shine the light but you have to see it for yourself.
In this formulation it’s a line that goes back to Morpheus in The Matrix. “You have to see it for yourself” is the liturgy of the Red Pill. That’s how powerful this way of telling stories is, be it the things Carson doesn’t say or the things Angleton couldn’t, this is the loud silence I think Fénéon aspired to.
Right now this moment is, I think, your last chance to sign up for my autumn screenwriting course happening in London and on zoom which, alongside much more, makes space for Fénéon and what he can teach about one-act story telling.