Page 222 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes 5. Silencing and Inherent Silence
In the act of speaking for the other, providing it with a voice, we silence it. As long as we keep
on speaking for it, we won't get to hear what it has to say for itself- and indeed, that may be
exactly why we are speaking in the first place. Said says, "There were-and are-cultures and
nations whose location is in the East, and their lives, histories and customs have a brute
reality obviously greater than anything that could be said about them in the West". Similarly,
our discourse about childhood often replaces and even prevents our real perception of the
brute realities of childhood.
For instance: we produce a children's literature that is almost totally silent on the subject of
sexuality, presumably in order to allow ourselves to believe that children truly are as innocent
as we claim- that their lives are devoid of sexuality. In doing so, however, we make it difficult
for children to speak to us about their sexual concerns: our silence on the subject clearly
asserts that we have no wish to hear about it, that we think children with such concerns are
abnormal. And if we convince ourselves that they are abnormal, then we render ourselves
unable to hear what children are saying even if they do attempt to speak about such matters.
The final result of the silencing of the other is that we actually do make it incomprehensible
to us. According to Said, The relationship between Orientalist and Orient was essentially
hermeneutical: standing before a distant, barely intelligible civilization or cultural monument,
the Orientalist scholar reduced the obscurity by translating, sympathetically portraying,
inwardly grasping the hard to reach object. Yet the Orientalist remained outside the Orient,
which, however much it was made to appear intelligible, remained beyond the Occident. This
cultural, temporal, and geographical distance was expressed in metaphors of depth, secrecy,
and sexual promise: phrases like "the veils of an Eastern bride" or "the inscrutable Orient"
passed into the common language. In other words, the more we say about what we understand,
the more we understand that we can't understand. The more we claim to know about childhood,
the more we find ourselves insisting on its mysterious otherness-its silence about itself-and
the more we feel the need to observe yet more, interprete yet further: to say yet more, and
thus, create much more silence for us to worry about and speak about. The adult observation
of childhood as an other that does not observe itself is always doomed to fail to understand,
and thus, doomed to continue replicating itself forever-or at least until it stops assuming its
subject is indeed other. But as long as the study of childhood makes that assumption, it can
continue to be a necessary (and dare I suggest, profitable?) pursuit of adults.
6. Inherent Danger
Our eternal desire and failure to understand the other confirms something else alsoÂ-its
paradoxical attraaiveness and danger to us. That paradox clearly relates to "femaleness"Â-it is
the essence of our traditional discourse about women. Said speaks of "the motif of the Orient
as insinuating danger. Rationality is undermined by Eastern excesses, those mysteriously
attractive opposites to what seem to be normal values" . It is because Europeans find themselves
attraaed to those "excesses" of Orientals that they work to blot them out; they must try to
make Orientals more like themselves in order to prevent Orientals from making Europeans
more like them, and therefore weakening Europeans.
The parallels in our attitudes to childhood are obvious. What we chose to understand as
childlike irrationality or lawlessness or carelessness is attraaively lax, a temptation to be less
responsible, less mature, less adult. If adults have a secret desire to act childishly, and if that
dangerous desire is engendered by the childish actions of children, then we must protect
ourselves and our world by making children less childish. Our domination of children is for
our own good as well as theirs.
7. The Stability of the Other
We have just seen how the mere faa of our speaking for what we see as a speechless group
merely confirms its continuing silence-merely confirms that it always has been and always
will be other than our speaking selves. One of the essential qualities of Orientalism is its
insistence across centuries that there is such a thing as "an Oriental mind," a set of basic

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