Quiet in time and narrative

This chapter discusses the subjective depictions of temporality portrayed in the fiction of Marilynne Robinson and Paul Harding. Examining the discrepancy between the prize-winning success of quiet fiction and critical surprise at the trend’s existence, it suggests, first, that quiet fiction meets four key criteria and, second, that a quiet novel where very little happens is otherwise liberated from the linear representation of time.

Introduction

Marilynne Robinson’s epistolary novel Gilead (2004) opens in a moment of quiet. The text is a letter from the elderly Reverend John Ames to his six-year-old son, Robby, for whom Ames is writing a personal history and ‘begats’.1 Robinson’s prose slows when Ames’ final illness develops and it pauses when he pauses. Yet despite the primacy of the Reverend’s voice, the novel begins with Ames’ silence. ‘You reached up’, he writes at the end of the first page, addressing the young son sitting on his lap, ‘and put your fingers on my lips and gave me that look […] a kind of furious pride, very passionate and stern’ (...

The novel of ‘(dis)quiet’

This chapter asks what happens to ‘the quiet novel’ in the noisy environment of the city. Through a discussion of two strikingly similar debut novels by Teju Cole and Ben Lerner, this chapter first examines historical and cultural notions of urban noise and, second, asks how Cole and Lerner integrate the din of the city into the body of their quiet texts. In this, the chapter asks what kinds of information can be read as quiet and what exactly determines a novel’s volume.

The quiet novel

This chapter maps the neglected history of quiet fictions and speculates about the potentiality of quiet as a literary aesthetic. It argues that the introvert was a disruptive presence in many nineteenth-century American texts, including those by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville where quiet is associated with a failure to speak or an absence of mind. In the early twentieth century, quiet protagonists were integral to the ‘novel of consciousness’ favoured by many writers including Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust who equated quietness of character with a rich and dramatic internal life. Yet, as the century developed, quiet became marginalised within a Western culture that seemed increasingly defined by its noise and sources of overstimulation. This chapter therefore concludes with a discussion of quiet’s potentiality as both an aesthetic and as a mode of engagement with contemporary fiction.

Conclusion

This book has argued that ‘quiet’ is a literary aesthetic, used frequently in contemporary American fiction to privilege reflection and contemplation as a way of engaging with the present. Tracing a long history of quiet in Anglo-American literature and focusing more specifically on American works published since 2000, I have argued that the contemporary American novel is quiet when its narrative is focalised through the mind of a quiet character and set in a quiet location where the protagonist has the time and space to reflect on their present moment. In many ways, New York City is a fitting location in which to end this study. In ...

‘9/11’ and the noise of contemporary fiction

This chapter engages with the problem of ‘event’ as a noisy narrative device and discusses the opposition of quiet texts to narratives written in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, an event that heralded to many the beginning of a noisy century. Exploring the dynamic between loud and quiet modes of writing, this chapter argues that noise is often favoured in situations that seem to be unprecedented and that the residual association of quiet with silence is, then, an important factor in the former’s continued association with inaction.

The quiet novel of cognition

This chapter argues that cognitive fictions expand the focus of the quiet novel, uncovering the complex and often discordant recesses of human consciousness and challenging the traditional division between what is internally and externally felt. This chapter connects the discussion of a quiet aesthetic with early twenty-first century debates about the place of cognitive approaches within literary studies. Indeed, the novel of cognition also recalls the modernist ‘stream’ or ‘novel of consciousness’ whose rich and ambiguous history overlaps with the quiet novels discussed throughout this study.