The Silence Room
Feb. 5th, 2009 08:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustI've been reading Sean O'Brien's short story collection, The Silence Room. The stories are fine, which is to say that some are better than others, and that I like some of them very much indeed: The Cricket Match at Green Lock, a ghost story for an English summer, say, and In the Duchy, a - well, I don't know quite what it is; a fragment of a dream travelogue, perhaps. But I really love the title. The Silence Room is a collection of spooky stories, and where are ghosts and other menacing inhumans more likely to manifest than in a room full of silence?
The bit that really appeals to me, though, is that this very evocative title is also the entirely matter of fact designation of a real room. Several of the stories in the collection were written for Phantoms at the Phil, a regular event at which Sean O'Brien, Gail-Nina Anderson and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
desperance read ghost stories, written for the occasion - and naturally the stories have a tendency to reflect the setting in which they are read, Newcastle's Literary and Philosophical Society. The Lit & Phil is a very comfortable library, and members are not made to feel awkward if they meet a friend there and fall into conversation. Those who prefer to work in silence need only go downstairs to the room where talking is banned - to the Silence Room.
It's not exactly an everyday phrase, then, more a piece of jargon, a group of words which are used so frequently in a technical sense that those who use the expression completely lose any sense of the individual words as meaning something. It has become opaque, and the author's magic trick is to attach it to a narrative which suddenly shines a light through it, makes the individual components live again. I am particularly fond of titles which do this: Truffaut's film about making a film, for example, La Nuit américaine (the English title, Day for Night refers to the same technical trick, filming night scenes in daylight, but 'American Night' conjures up so much Hollywood glamour that something is lost in the translation).
I've been thinking about this post for a couple of days, and examples have been drifting in and out of my mind. Now that I come to write it, of course, the only one I can remember is a title without a work. So if anyone out there needs a title for anything, may I recommend 'Persistence of Vision'?
The bit that really appeals to me, though, is that this very evocative title is also the entirely matter of fact designation of a real room. Several of the stories in the collection were written for Phantoms at the Phil, a regular event at which Sean O'Brien, Gail-Nina Anderson and
desperance read ghost stories, written for the occasion - and naturally the stories have a tendency to reflect the setting in which they are read, Newcastle's Literary and Philosophical Society. The Lit & Phil is a very comfortable library, and members are not made to feel awkward if they meet a friend there and fall into conversation. Those who prefer to work in silence need only go downstairs to the room where talking is banned - to the Silence Room.It's not exactly an everyday phrase, then, more a piece of jargon, a group of words which are used so frequently in a technical sense that those who use the expression completely lose any sense of the individual words as meaning something. It has become opaque, and the author's magic trick is to attach it to a narrative which suddenly shines a light through it, makes the individual components live again. I am particularly fond of titles which do this: Truffaut's film about making a film, for example, La Nuit américaine (the English title, Day for Night refers to the same technical trick, filming night scenes in daylight, but 'American Night' conjures up so much Hollywood glamour that something is lost in the translation).
I've been thinking about this post for a couple of days, and examples have been drifting in and out of my mind. Now that I come to write it, of course, the only one I can remember is a title without a work. So if anyone out there needs a title for anything, may I recommend 'Persistence of Vision'?
