Searching for Stories

How can we contrive to make silence speak? For it is reticent: by its very nature it embodies no inclination to narrate itself. The story of silence, especially silence in language learning, has somehow to be coaxed out of its dwelling place and tricked into relating. Or – and here we come to another paradox – into a kind of not-relating: this project is, in fact, the search for a story not told, at least not told consciously, a story of what Phillips (1999: 42) has called the 'inarticulate self before language ... the passionate life without words'. To recast Phillips' assertion, that words are more than a substitute for wordlessness (1999: 43), in the context of silence within language is to propose that 'Words are not merely an explanation of silence; they are something else entirely'. The same can arguably be said for the spaces between the words: they are not just empty spaces. How, then, can we find a way to make words, and the spaces between them, tell the story of silence?