Functions of the Rhetoric of Silence in Contemporary Spanish Literature

Abstract

can exist without speech, but speech cannot exist without silence.' Silence precedes utterance and follows it, functioning in myriad ways to complement speech and facilitate its comprehension. Without intervals of silence between them, words become an undifferentiated mass. The space between printed words graphically recognizes those minimal silences which separate the spoken word, conferring and maintaining individuality. Gonzalo Torrente Ballester takes note of this function of the printed space signifying silence and its power to modify meaning in a section of La saga/fuga de J.B. devoted to poems composed in an artificial language consisting of seemingly random syllables, assembled and reassembled by changing the relative position of the intervals of silence. A graphic illustration appears below, where the protagonist observes that the verse formed by the syllables