Alain Corbin - A History of Silence

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Slightly disappointing

I thought A History Of Silence was OK, but I expected more.  The book is a good idea and has a few nice illustrations, but it is essentially a large collection of quotations with only a little in the way of commentary.  Especially from a history professor, a greater degree of analysis and tracing of ideas would have made this a much richer book.

In his introduction…sorry, his Prelude, Corbin asserts that, "History has too often claimed to explain.  When it tackles the world of emotions, it must also and primarily make people feel."  Well, perhaps.  And even if true, I'm afraid Corbin didn't really do that for me.  There is a huge range of loosely grouped quotations about various aspects of silence, but presented in a way which, to me at least, was not so much about "making people feel" as showing how erudite the author is.  For example, on p.27 he paraphrases and quotes Saint-Exupery (a superlative writer who has often made me feel a great deal) on the silence of the desert: "When an aircraft flew over, the engine made a 'dense, all-engulfing sound behind which the landscape [streamed] by in silence, like a film '.  In the experience of this airman, the deepest silence was that of the telephone line signalling the loss of an aeroplane and its pilot."  Now, both elements of that are touching and thought-provoking, but the complete non-sequitur and lack of context of the telephone line robs it of almost all of Saint-Exupery's original power, I think.

When Corbin does analyse, it's by no means always credible, either.  On p.67, for example, talking of the present day: "A raised voice in a train is now seen as an irritant because travellers prefer peace and quiet.  This was not so right up to the middle of the twentieth century, when conversation in compartments seemed normal, even a sign of good manners.  Similarly, silence during a flight is welcome and breaking it can be seen as discourteous.  The same is true of the cinema."  Surely, few people object to normal conversations between neighbouring passengers; what is objectionable is the inconsiderate yelling into phones of people with no awareness of their immediate surroundings, but again Corbin fails to analyse or take context into account.  And bracketing the cinema with this is fatuous: we go to the cinema specifically to watch a film so it *is* discourteous to prevent others concentrating on or hearing that film.  It is wholly different from sitting on a train, where there is no common point of attention.

I could go on, but this review is already too long.  In summary, this is quite an interesting collection of quotations about silence, but little more.  As such, it's OK, but I can only give it a very qualified recommendation.