The Republic of Letters

Abstract

Silence is polysemous. It is filled with meaning. The silences, the voids, the enigmatic utterances within the conversation are also significant parts of the communicative act. Silence contains a paradox in its term in that it synchronously distinguishes the very content that it disguises. Many parallel processes can be employed to unravel the hidden meaning of what is spoken in relation to what is left unspoken. The multi-layered, nonverbal expression of silence is capable of evoking the unspoken. The fluid quality of silence sets us free from the cage of the words and takes us on a journey to the depth of the psyche. For many years Iranian writers have been writing under the imposition of numerous silences. The ancestral restrictions placed upon verbal expression, and censorship have muted many literary voices to the point that silence itself has become a significant constituent of their language. In poetry and prose, the incorporated silences in the form of various literary devices carry their veiled messages. Ambiguous indirect communication, the centrality of silence, the profusion of negatives, the lapses and the voids, are the prevalent qualities of the Persian literary tradition. Silence, like an orifice, punctures the coherence of the language to set the space for a contemplative field in which a reader and a writer engage in a wordless conversation. In order to understand the cultural vocabulary of the Iranian writers, it is necessary to be able to read such qualities and to grasp the explosive force and the vitality lying beneath them. Through the architecture of a void, this thesis traces the silences that are resonating in the city. By defining a spatial territory for the absent it ideologically addresses an existing urban fabric. The Republic of letters investigates the sympotomology of such silences to present a psychological archeology of the contemporary Iranian culture.