Jos Andrs Aldana Santillana

Mtra. Charlotte Broad

The Dangers of a Single Story: Different Perspectives on the Art of Writing and Reading

Anglophone Literatures in the Twentieth Century

The Silence of the Short Story

When we read short stories, we may say that writers construct the story around its silences .

These silences are for the reader to fill , and when he does, the reader will find out the real

goal of the author and become part of the story. Dominic Head talks about the comparison

Mary Pratt does about novel and short story, he summarizes it as: "to some extent, the

moment of truth stands as a model for the short story the way the life stands as a model for

the novel." (5) I recognize the moment of truth as the idea that writers want to issue and

that readers have to be able to decipher inside the story. To understand this better, I will

analyze how in "The Lady in the Looking Glass: A Reflection ," Virginia Woolf deals with

the impossibility of capturing every aspect of a character, together with "The Blank Page"

by Isak Dinesen and the idea of "silence."

In "The Lady in the Looking-Glass: A Reflection", The description of

Isabella Tyson, is constructed by the narrator trough what he sees in the

looking-glass, and because of this, we cannot be sure whether it is

accurate or not. By doing this, Woolf makes us question the fictional

world, Is it possible to cover every single aspect of a character in the

description given by the narrator? This question , I believe, can be

answered with the concept of interpretation , since if the narrator is loyal

to the story, the reader can make up for the parts that are left blank . In

the case of Woolf's short story , we notice the concern of the narrator

when she tries to describe , the most truthfully possible , the character of

Isabella Tyson. The rim of the looking-glass functions as the limit of

reality since the narrator can only see what is inside . First, the narrator

describes Isabella's actions and what is physically visible: "Isabella

Tyson, had gone down the grass path in her thin summer dress , carrying

a basket."(Woolf) But then the narrator starts to deduce other aspects of

her life, her thoughts, her behavior, and her actions outside the looking

glass. But after trying to guess which kind of flower Isabella would pick ,

the narrator realizes how little she knows about her: "The comparison

showed how very little, after all these years, one knew about her; for it

is impossible that any woman of flesh and blood of fifty-five or sixty

should be really a wreath or a tendril." (Woolf)

For me, this is when the reader enters , we as readers must have

our own interpretation of the description . We have to be aware that it is

coming from the mirror and the imagination of the narrator . The narrator
creates her own interpretation of the objects in the room . The letters

that she sees as "tablets graven with eternal truth ," later on we discover

they are just bills, at this moment Woolf drives us to the conclusion that

every aspect of the short story is a construction , which may be far from

"reality." I write reality between quotation marks , since the short story's

reality is again a construction of Woolf's ideas of her time and place .

Woolf plays with the thought of what is reality and how much can a

narration get close to it , given that it is the construction of the

interpretation.

In "The Blank Page," Dinesen discusses the importance of silences .

The narrator in this short story comes from a line of women storytellers .

She begins by telling us "I have told many tales , one more than a

thousand" followed by "I have told stories for two hundred years ,"

(Dinesen) this gives the reader the impression that the stories that the

narrator tells are accurate. Then, her grandmother proceeds to tell the

story of the blank page situated in a convent for sisters in Portugal , in

which the most wonderful linen sheets are made. These sheets are given

to the nobility so they can put them on the beds of the daughters of the

house in the day of their wedding. The next day the Chamberlain would

hang it out from the balcony to pronounce "virginem eam tenemus --

"we declare her to have been a virgin .""(Dinesen) Then the sheets would

be returned to the convent where the part where the stain is , would be

framed with the names of the ladies for everyone to see . This act would

tell the story of the past of the brides, and also "within the faded

markings of the canvases people of some imagination and sensibility

may read all the signs of the zodiac: the Scales , the Scorpion, the Lion,

the Twins. Or they may there find pictures from their own world of ideas:

a rose, a heart, a sword -- or even a heart pierced through with a sword."

At the end, the narrator describes a sheet like no other , since it is

completely blank and has no name. After that, the narrator explains

that:

"It is in front of this piece of pure white linen that the old

princesses of Portugal -- worldly wise, dutiful, long-suffering

queens, wives and mothers -- and their noble old playmates ,

bridesmaids and maids-of-honour have most often stood

still."(woolf)

This sheet is what interests me the most , since it is the

representation of silence. The storyteller has to achieve a silence that

speaks, that makes up for the parts that are purposely untold . In a way,

in Dinesen's short story, we are proven, by not telling us anything about

what happened with the blank page, the loyalty that the narrator

mentions at the beginning of the story when she says: "where the story-

teller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story , there, in the

end, silence will speak." This silence that speaks is the interpretation of

the reader, similar to what we saw in Woolf's short story where the

reader must fill the spaces of the character that the narrator cannot

cover, which can be seen as if the reader created its own character . The

blank page, then, becomes the short story in itself , and that is why the

people that look at it would "sink into deepest thought."

The silence that speaks may seem like a paradox , but by looking

at "The Lady in the Looking Glass: A Reflection" and "The Blank Page" , it

is easier to understand that silence is the component of the short story

that invites the reader to become part of it , since, as we talked at the

beginning of this essay, short stories stand for a moment of truth and

given that the genre in itself does not allow a large amount description ,

the author has to fill it by appealing to the reader's interpretation . Woolf

questions the possibility of reproducing a character from what is in sight ,

almost at the end we find the description:

"Her mind was like her room, in which lights advanced and

retreated, came pirouetting and stepping delicately , spread their

 tails, pecked their way; and then her whole being was suffused ,

like the room again, with a cloud of some profound knowledge ,

some unspoken regret, and then she was full of locked drawers ,

stuffed with letters, like her cabinets. To talk of 'prizing her open'

as if she were an oyster, to use any but the finest and subtlest

and most pliable tools upon her was impious and absurd . One

must imagine - here was she in the looking-glass . It made one

start."(Woolf)

This description seems fairly accurate until Isabella got closer and

the narrator is able to see her in person , and says: "Isabella was

perfectly empty. She had no thoughts. She had no friends. She cared for

nobody."(Woolf) When Isabella is seen without the mirror , the

interpretation stops and "reality" takes over the part of the reader , there

is nothing left to decipher, the silence is gone. This take us back to "The

Blank Page" when the narrator mentions: ""Who then ," she (the narrator)

continues, "tells a finer tale than any of us? Silence does . And where

does one read a deeper tale than upon the most perfectly printed page

of the most precious book? Upon the blank page ." Silence, then, is, as

we have analyzed, the aspect that produces the union between the story

and the reader.

 In conclusion, Woolf and Dinesen create these two metafictions to

approach the topic of short story writing, although one is more focused

on characters and the other on the silences inside short story , it is

important to comprehend them together , since they not only teach us

how to write, but also to understand writing. We as readers should

decipher the silent ideas between the text with our own interpretations

and assemble them in order to grasp what the author is trying to

convey. The best that an author can do is to be honest with the story

and the characters, present them as they needs to be, and let the

reader construct the rest. And this moment, when the reader understand

the silences and creates its own characters , is when the short story

becomes that moment of truth.

Works Cited:

Dinesen, Isak. "The Blank Page". Random House Inc, 1957. WEB

Head, Dominic. The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice . Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1992. PDF.
Woolf, Virginia. "The Lady in the Looking Glass: A Reflection". WEB.