Babilónia : Revista Lusófona de Línguas, Culturas e Tradução nº 10/11 (2011)

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Percorrer Babilónia : Revista Lusófona de Línguas, Culturas e Tradução nº 10/11 (2011) por autor "Becker, Christophe"

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    Laughing in the mechanism : du choix du silence comme élément autobiographique dans le poème ''Agrippa'' de William Gibson (1992)
    (Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2011) Becker, Christophe; Escola de Comunicação, Arquitetura, Artes e Tecnologias da Informação
    Silence is a fundamental component of artistic creation, be it in the musical domain or in the world of cinema. The notion of silence, however, seems to reach a dead end within the field of literature. Gilles Deleuze notes this when referring to “silence within the words,” or the “asyntaxic limit” which is not situated “outside of the language” in Antonin Artaud’s poetry. This particular notion becomes even more problematic when relating to autobiographies which are traditionally informative. Firstly, I examine how the author, through narration of his own life and path, opts for short or long silences in his writing, thus seeming to renounce his primary goal. I then proceed to study American writer William Gibson’s poem, “Agrippa-A Book of the Dead” (1992). Inspired by the discovery of a photo album belonging to his father, the author conjures up memories from his childhood in Virginia. The singularity of “Agrippa” can mostly be found in the mechanisms it sets in motion whilst being read. The poem, only available on disk at first, is being erased by an encryption program or “logic bomb” while being decoded by the computer, meaning it can only be read once and leaving nothing but emptiness, silence at the end. I propose studying “Agrippa,” demonstrating how the progressive disappearance of the text, through William Gibson’s writing technique, has an unprecedented reach. The main objective of this paper is to demonstrate that Gibson uses the poem as a means to prone a literary revolution where art “leaves the framework,” where “the written word leaves the page” in a way that is both tangible and effective, leading the reader to an interrogation which raises aesthetic, philosophical and possible theological issues; for example, Maurice Blanchot claiming that God only communicates “through his silence.”