Introduction: Omission

Note: For their diligence and critical comments, I would like to thank the editorial team of Symbolism as well as my colleagues at Mainz University who undertook to read and comment on the essays here assembled: Laura Eyselein, Mirjam Haas, Anna Schmitt.

When, in The Journey of William of Rubruck to the Eastern Parts of the World, 1253–55, the Flemish Franciscan decides to omit the description of a particularly impressive aspect of life among the Mongols, it may appear nothing more than a negligible rhetorical flourish:

The matrons make for themselves most beautiful carts, which I am not able to describe unto your majesty […] but by pictures only: for I would right willingly have painted all things for you, had my skill been aught in that art.1

What is here so modestly presented as simply a purported failure of verbal communication is in fact a highly complex operation encompassing the quadruple constellation of writer, reader, form and reality: in describing far-off lands, the writer makes a decision to leave out the description of a particular phenomenon and proceeds to signpost that decision. The reader may pick up on the express signal of the writer’s “I may not describe,” but they will also note the omission based on their knowledge of and expectations vis-à-vis the textual genre they are in the process of reading: the travel account is meant to provide descriptions of exotic locales and extoll their opulence and otherness. The omission of said description is thus a conspicuous maneuver on the part of the writer, and one that, in a final step, jolts the reader’s imagination into action: if words do not suffice to describe the splendor of these carts, it falls upon the reader to imagine their beauty and resplendence. It is this astute use of absences to conjure an imagined reality into a recipient’s mind based on their expectations vis-à-vis artistic form and/or their experience of reality that is here termed ‘omission.’

That the term ‘omission’ is championed in the present volume over the received notion of the ‘gap’ has two (superficially contradictory) reasons. The first is that the notion of gaps in literary texts is founded in a perfectly understandable but ultimately limiting linguistic approach. Given that a text’s constituent parts are signifiers whose relation to the signified is arbitrary, any use of language will implicitly point to an absence, or, as Venuti phrases it: “Because meaning is an effect of relations and differences among signifiers along a potentially endless chain […], it is always differential and deferred, never present as an original unity.”2 It can thus be considered the very nature of verbal constructs to carry within themselves absences, regardless of whether or not these can be read as productive complements to the text itself. While this view of a purely referential use of language is not espoused by Iser, who after all, sees in the language of literature not so much a system to describe what is, as a performative act bringing into existence the objects to which it refers,3 his assumptions are nonetheless founded on the very notion of textual reference or non-reference: in Iser’s view, the language of literature opens up gaps because it is not referential but expressive of an imaginative reality in and of itself that is by necessity incomplete. The idea of a Saussurean approach to artistic expression is simply too narrow if it is to encompass forms such as music, drama, and film. After all, while texts may be reducible to a chain of signifiers intimating the absence of the signified, the onscreen representation of a character or the onstage presence of an actor bend that discussion in a different direction. In this sense, then, Iser’s ‘gap’ may be thought of as too limiting a term in the present discussion.

Its very roots in the logocentric view of texts as Saussurean signifiers, though, means that the received notion of the ‘gap’ is also too unspecific, encompassing as it does all manner of inadvertent leavings-out unavoidable in any verbal rendering of reality. The term ‘omission’ used in these pages has been chosen to demarcate a common artistic phenomenon that is yet specific enough to require differentiation from Iser’s nomenclature: a silence, blank, or absence, introduced, by design, against the recipient’s generic or experiential expectations, frequently symbolic of the tenor of the respective work itself.

The first of these notions is certainly the least fashionable in terms of poststructuralist criticism as it is based on authorial intention. Against this doubt, I would argue that formulating a hypothesis as regards a message’s tenor is one of the most natural aspects of any act of communication. And so, even though such hypotheses may on occasion turn out to be mistaken, their formulation as such is a simple fact of any act of reception. Furthermore, a hypothesis regarding the deliberate design of a work’s use of omission is easily checked against other factors such as that omission’s compatibility with the overall unity of the work, its flagrant disregard for generic expectations, as well as the degree to which attention is drawn to the omission by the work itself. All of these points so central to our understanding of omission can be summed up by the idea of its “radical relativity:”4 an omission becomes detectable in relation to what is present, what has not been omitted; it also becomes conspicuous when measured against the recipient’s expectations. That expectation, something that might be thought of as a passive predisposition, becomes an active constituent element in eliciting meaning from a text, “a peculiar form of action, getting ready, namely, to receive certain kinds of stimuli rather than others.”5 What makes recipients notice such productive leavings-out, then, is not simply a dichotomy of absence/presence located within the respective text or artefact, but a notion on the part of the recipient that “an expectation of presence is frustrated.”6 This sense of an expectation frustrated, likened by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to “that of leaping in the dark from the last step of a stair case, when we had prepared our muscles for a leap of three or four,”7 is such a dynamic generator of affective responses that it is here seen as the major constituent aspect of signification by omission. Be it the recipient’s experience of a given form or genre, or the recipient’s experience of life: when texts or other works of art conspicuously clash with their prior knowledge by omitting a particular aspect, by not saying or not showing that which must reasonably be expected, forcing the recipient to discard previously held interpretive frames, or provoking them into filling the resultant gap with their own imagination, they cajole or bludgeon recipients into an active participation in the creation of meaning.

As a failsafe, so as not exclusively to rely on contextual information and recipients’ prior knowledge, the artefact itself will often go out of its way to signpost the phenomenon of omission. In the case of Rubruck, he explicitly tells the reader that he will not describe the beauty of the Mongolian carts. So in relation to the many other things he does describe in his account, this is the one instance where he refuses to do so. The omission is also flagged up as noteworthy when viewed in relation to readerly expectations: travel accounts describe things. That is their entire raison d’être. The form engenders expectations that are deliberately thwarted by the text itself. But the reader’s active involvement with even as relatively insignificant a passage as that under discussion here does not end with their noticing the omission: in refusing to paint a picture in words of the ladies’ beautiful carts, Rubruck performs a complex maneuver of abrogation and conferral of responsibility. In deserting his duty as a writer, after all, what he is not primarily concerned with is his own technical ability or any extended discourse on the shortcomings of his chosen mode of expression. Instead, by explicitly choosing not to describe the object of his fascination, he leaves it to his readers to imagine it. What has occurred here, then, is a signposted leaving-out that becomes productive in the reader’s mind by challenging them to imagine what is not said. When the writer trusts the omission to convey an idea of beauty or riches more effectively, more efficiently and more eloquently than any attempted description, it is because they trust the reader’s imagination to rush in and fill the gap. Silence, in this instance, has become productive as a kind of hyperbole.

Where the recipient’s imagination is at least conceptually able to react to the work’s prompting and fill the gap, such omissions have a tremendous...