Alain Corbin -The Tactics of Silence

 The Tactics of Silence

Let us now leave the silence intended to aid meditation and inner reflection to focus on the role of silence in social relations, on its advantages and disadvantages, its relationship to the shaping of the self-image and its contribution to the search for distinction; in a word, on the tactics advised by the moralists and, more generally, by all who have reflected on the benefits and harms of silence in a non-solitary life.

The art of keeping quiet had been the subject of many works and had given rise to numerous aphorisms by the end of the sixteenth century. True, spirituality was often an element in these. The muteness of Jesus in the Gospels posits silence in society as a virtue; thus Ignatius Loyola proposed an art of saying nothing modelled on the silence of Christ. In 1862, you could still read in the Dictionnaire de théologie morale that silence should, above all, be regarded as a virtue: it implied speaking only to the purpose, ‘little rather than much, because it is difficult to speak much without blurting things out and sinning’, and ‘the sin is mortal because you are unable to keep a secret and you say things prejudicial to others’.1Antiquity provided examples of significant silences. Solomon, in the book of Proverbs (17:28), tells us that ‘he that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding’. Ajax, in Erebus, responds with a tragic silence when Ulysses speaks of their quarrel over who should inherit the armour of Achilles, which had led to his suicide. Dido, in the same place, answers Aeneas with a silence of terrifying power. And silence had been abundantly praised by the Stoics.

Aristotle believed that silence always brought its own reward. Seneca made it a virtue of the wise. Publilius Syrus produced many maxims on the subject. According to him, ‘you should remain silent, or your words should be more valuable than your silence’. Dionysius Cato said: ‘There is no danger in keeping quiet, there may be in speaking.’

In the early modern period, the opinion that you risked less by saying nothing than by speaking was constantly reiterated. It derived from the model of the courtier. The conviction that speech was risky was in accord with the precepts that regulated court society. Thus, the great texts which, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, dealt with the art of maintaining silence illustrate the civilizing process described by Norbert Elias. They were all of a piece with the internalization of norms that characterized it.

It was the Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia (The Courtier’s Oracle or The Art of Worldly Wisdom) of Baltasar Gracián rather than the more famous Book of the Courtier of Baldesar Castiglione that was the matrix for the art of remaining silent. Nevertheless, Castiglione touched on the subject here and there in his book. He advised the courtier never to talk too much. It was dangerous rashly to embark on a conversation without being asked in the presence of a great prince. The grandee might well, in such a situation, refuse to answer so as to shame the one who had spoken out of turn. He would thus show himself to be the master of silence. The courtier should always think before saying what came into his head. Those who let their ‘loquacity . . . go beyond bounds’ become ‘silly and pointless’. Before breaking a silence it was wise to pay heed to the place where you were, the occasion and the necessary modesty. During the course of the conversation, you should now and again fall silent so as to allow the other to speak and ‘reflect in order to reply’.2The Courtier’s Oracle, by the Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián, was written in 1647 and had been translated into several European languages, including English and French, by the end of the seventeenth century. Gracián reflected at greater length on the tactics of silence, which he called the ‘holy of holies of worldly wisdom’, that is, moderation and discretion. The wise man should know how to exercise self-control. Here, Gracián was influenced by Seneca and Tacitus as well as by the Spanish maxims then much in vogue. When you met someone you didn’t know, you should first test the ground. You should never talk about yourself and you should never complain. Above all, it was unbecoming to speak because you liked the sound of your own voice.3To talk, that is, to form a relationship with someone, was an art, ‘a school of knowledge and good manners’; it was how a man showed his worth.4 ‘He who is quick to speak is always on the point of being conquered and convinced.’ Gracián went further: ‘The things you want to say ought not to be said; and the things that are good to say are not good to do.’5 The man of discretion should keep quiet when there was danger in speaking the truth.

True, ignorance frequently took refuge in the sanctuary of silence; the ‘defective’ found it advantageous to keep quiet because silence ‘presented him as a man of mystery’. Another good reason to avoid talking was that the heart without a secret was ‘an open letter’. Gracián went so far as to say: ‘You should speak as if you were dictating your last will and testament.’6 His book was contemporary with a series of treatises on the art of saying nothing which appeared between 1630 and 1684 and were aimed at forming the honnête homme or ‘gentleman’. Yet, writes Marc Fumaroli, his manual remained throughout Europe the undisputed classic of the best education. The wise man kept sufficiently aloof to satisfy the requirement to preserve an element of silence with regard to himself, while also avoiding the ridiculousness of pontificating. The art of saying nothing was also, says Fumaroli, a way of keeping others in suspense and of manipulating the elements of ‘appetite, curiosity, and surprise’.7 That said, the art of prudentia was, as a tactic, far from easy.

Many moralists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries followed in this tradition. At this period conversation acquired huge importance. It involved alternating contemplative silence and wide-ranging conversation, without, as Montesquieu wrote, doing much listening. La Rochefoucauld observed that ‘silence is the safest option for he who mistrusts himself’. He notes that people spoke little when not driven to speak by vanity. ‘It requires great skill to speak, but no less to say nothing’, and he distinguished three types of silence: eloquent, mocking and respectful. At all events, it was better to listen and never to force yourself to speak. It was important for coquettes and the old, in particular, to keep quiet, given their tendency to chatter thoughtlessly.8 According to Mme de Sablé: ‘Speaking too much is such a major fault that, when it comes to conversation, while what is good is brief, it is doubly good, and you gain by brevity what is often lost by garrulity’; and, she added, ‘to be able to discover the inner self of another and conceal your own is the mark of a superior mind’.9M. de Moncade opined that ‘if people only said useful things, there would be deep silence in the world’.10 La Bruyère noted that those who engaged in games of chance maintained ‘an absolute silence’ together with a level of attention of which they would have been incapable in other circumstances.11 Dufresny described with amusement the introduction of a newcomer to the court: ‘He did nothing and said nothing. He was a wise man, they said. In fact, there was wisdom in his modesty and in his silence; because if he had done something or said something, they would have known he was only a fool.’12The year 1771 saw the appearance of L’Art de se taire, by the Abbé Dinouart, a book destined for a large readership. In it, the author recapitulated with clarity, force and in detail all that had gone before. His main message was that ‘men are never more in possession of themselves than when in silence’.13 Given the attention it attracted, I shall look at his treatise in some detail. Dinouart distinguished eleven types of silence: prudent, artful, complaisant, spiritual and stupid, not forgetting the silences which were a mark of approval, of disdain, of humour, of caprice and of political acumen. His aim was to compose a treatise of Christian civility, which distinguished him from his predecessors. Further, he hoped to extend prudentia beyond the court to the world of Parisian salons and men of letters, in order to counteract the philosophical spirit, rationalism and materialism. He repeated an old opinion, found in the Télémaque of Fénelon, to the effect that the art of good government entailed maintaining silence. The sovereign, more than anyone, was never more in possession of himself than in silence.

Commenting on Dinouart’s treatise, Antoine de Baecque adds the link that it establishes between silence and a rhetoric of the body. To be silent, in society, went together with measured gestures, a reserved manner, a certain facial expression and the art of the minimal which constituted this rhetoric. Émile Moulin, writing in 1885, said that, in society, when a man said nothing, his silence would have no value or expression without its natural and indispensable auxiliaries, that is, physiognomy, attitude, bearing and gaze.14 To return to Dinouart, he urged that one should hold one’s tongue as a Christian, as a man of the world, as a politician and as a strategist, which, writes Antoine de Baecque, was effectively a return to the civility of the gentleman as propounded in the preceding century. Some of the abbé’s aphorisms sum up his strategy: ‘one should cease to remain silent only when one has something to say which is more valuable than silence’; ‘one only ever knows how to speak well if one has previously learned to remain silent’; ‘the wise man has an expressive silence’.15 By contrast, the mass of the people, ‘gross and stupid’, do not know how to keep quiet. This is due to their want of education, their insolence and their superstition. As for silence in literature, many authors would have done well to be inspired by it and to have published nothing.

That said, wrote Émile Moulin, it can happen in society that silence is not a tactical move but simply the consequence of a trait of character, namely, ‘taciturnity’. Molière has a character say of the Diafoirus son: ‘You would see him, never saying a word.’ Émile Moulin offered a whole spectrum of individuals who were permanently silent. Ahasuerus, according to Racine’s Esther, was mute; William of Orange was surnamed the Silent. To which should be added the timid who lacked self-confidence. This led Moulin to present a series of silences which are not quite tactics and which do not correspond to the list established by Dinouart: the silences of ‘inertia’, of ‘sangfroid’, of ‘incredulity’, of ‘doubt’, of ‘irony’ and of ‘bearing’ (adopted by those who don’t understand what is going on), and not forgetting the ‘silence of delicacy’, silence in the presence of the old, and the silences of ‘respectful reserve’, of politeness, of resignation and of ‘dolorous sympathy’.16In the nineteenth century, Senancour’s Obermann criticizes those ‘conversations which multiply words and do not deal with things’.17 The eponymous hero of Benjamin Constant’s novel, Adolphe, living in Göttingen and desperately bored, doomed by his shyness to silence, sometimes feels the urge to talk, but is held back by his disappointment with the society in which he moves, where a contemptuous silence replaces mockery.18On 23 September 1854, Eugène Delacroix expounded at length in his Journal on the advantages of opting to remain silent in conversation and in ‘other human relationships’. His psychological analysis added depth to the earlier precepts. Unfortunately, he wrote, ‘nothing is harder than such restraint for men who are dominated by their imagination. Men with subtle minds who are quick to see every side of a question find it hard to refrain from expressing what they think.’ Nevertheless, ‘everything is to be gained by listening. You know what you wish to say to the other man, your mind is full of it, but you cannot know what he has to say to you . . . but how is it possible to resist giving a favourable idea of one’s mind to a man who seems surprised and pleased to hear what one is saying?’ And, ‘fools are more easily carried away by the empty pleasure of listening to their own voices . . . they are less interested in informing their readers than in dazzling them with their brilliance.’19 (...)

from:A History of Silence

From the Renaissance to the Present Day

Alain Corbin

Translated by Jean Birrell