So sad as silence: Modernity and the unspeakable (William Faulkner, Andre Schwarz-Bart, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Guadeloupe, Wilson Harris)

“Nothing is so sad as silence,” remarked Rabbi Leo Baeck, the eminent German Jewish leader who was deported to Terezìn in 1943. This survivor's statement provides a point of entry into a study of the relationship between literature and the unspeakable, and of the sadness that is an ineluctable element of life after catastrophe. This dissertation, So Sad as Silence: Modernity and the Unspeakable, focuses on silences generated by modern politics of terror and domination, and investigates the necessity and impossibility of artistic expression in relation to extreme experience.; In exploring the central place of racial terror within Enlightenment modernity, I take as my point of theoretical departure contemporary sociological debates on the relationship between rationality and racial terror. However, I am not merely concerned with the understanding to be gained from interdisciplinary investigations; I also consider the urgent necessity for intradisciplinary conversations regarding the often silenced importance of the notion of race and the fact of racial terror to traditional areas of intellectual inquiry.; The present study grounds itself in close readings of three literary texts: William Faulkner's A Fable, André and Simone Schwarz-Bart's Un Plat de Porc aux Bananes Vertes, and Wilson Harris's Jonestown. All three novels address what André Schwarz-Bart has called “the delicate articulation between slavery and the concentrationary theme,” as well as the connection between these catastrophes and the history of Enlightenment. I argue that these novels provide a point of departure for mapping a theoretical and historical relationship between discourses on anti-black racism in the West and those concerning modern European anti-Semitism. In addition, I suggest that an interrogation of the critical silences surrounding these novels has much to teach us about the national, ethnic and regional divisions that structure the field of literary criticism and can illuminate the racialized grounds of the organization of knowledge in the modern university. Finally, I consider what narrative forms are appropriate to the memorialization of ineffable violence and suffering, and the ethics of methods of placing different histories of terror alongside one another.