Writing towards absence with Herzog, Barthes and Calvino

• Main Author: Pang, Jeannette Ru Yan
• Other Authors: Neil Murphy
• Format: Thesis-Master by Research
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2020
• Subjects: Humanities::Literature
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/140130
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Increasingly, we find works whose constructions consist of the negative. A turn away from the material to immaterial, form to formlessness, presence to absence, reflects uneasiness with language, certainty and meaning. We begin to find new vocabularies and modalities of absence that sets up a subject field deserving of its own investigation. This thesis makes a case for absence as a purposeful conduct of writing, which is to say the formalistic and thematic progressions of each work take place or are displaced on to a site in the negative. The films and texts explored in this thesis finds resonance by virtue of their acknowledgement of the absence and silence of writing. We find this resonance articulated through fragments, brevity as form, self-conscious narratives, and self-effacing gestures – features, as I will demonstrate, consolidate a poetics of absence. Its work consists of creating states of absent presences that open to spectral doubles, uncanny encounters and impossible journeys. What underlies these extensions is the logic of the trace, the non-origin, that operates through circulation and postponement. In dialogue with a critical trajectory of silence as an aesthetic, the most prominent voices of which being Ihab Hassan and Susan Sontag, and a tradition of ghosts illustrated by Alice Rayner, this thesis seeks to extend this poetics across other genres where we find a pursuit and writing of absence. This will be explored in relation to Werner Herzog’s documentary film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Roland Barthes’s non-fiction work Empire of Signs, and Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities – works which show how reflecting absence itself speaks to memory, loss and death.