Stories about the untellable. Silence, speech and body in contemporary literature and music

The paper analyses contemporary texts the messages of which are kept in silence. Here the so-called “untellable” contents are defined analogically as in Jurij Lotman’s concept of “mi-nus devices”, which he introduced in a study on missing accents in poetry. At the level of textual semantics, missing information has to be highlighted differently, provided with some examples. A special attention is paid to feelings and psychosomatic reactions which often hint at the silenced information or hidden messages which, in their turn, provoke a change of meaning in a text. These are uneasiness caused by strong feelings of love, emotional pain after rejection, shyness or embarrassment in relationships, and consternation facing the de-portations in the context of the Romani genocide. Instead of naming these emotions, the texts describe in great detail the protagonist’s perception of their own body, outlining the emotionality of the situation. Wittgenstein related his well-known proposition to remain silent about what is ‘untellable’ to his less prominent assumptions according to which what can be told can be expressed clearly, and that there are unutterable contents intelligible without words. Through these reflections, he approaches to the more difficult philosophic problems of love and death in the same way as the texts interpreted in this paper do. The chosen literary examples open up similar categories with the help of minus devices on the semantic level: they illustrate how overwhelming emotions may be mimetically represented through emphasised speechlessness, and how emphasised silences can reveal crucial inter-personal or political contexts.