The Right to Silence: a Response to Irvin Hunt

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"He said nothing. He simply stood and waited as the rest of them came up to him, while they stopped and looked and understood."1 These lines appear toward the end of David Bradley's 1981 novel, The Chaneysville Incident. They describe a break in action when C. K. Washington, a black man working the Underground Railroad in rural western Pennsylvania, and the band of fugitives he leads realize they are surrounded by slavecatchers closing in fast. The group is about to make a critical decision: whether to give themselves up or to resist being recaptured. This moment of stillness prepares them to choose.

Though C. K. and company are silent here, the lines nonetheless represent speech. They are part of an extended dialogue between John Washington, C. K.'s great-grandson, and his white partner Judith. A lapsed academic historian, John has spent months researching what happened to his ancestor and the people alongside whom he perished. But the paper trail, he comes to grasp, can only reveal a partial truth: the story of progress marching on. And so, when he sits down to recount what happened, John goes against his training and speculates.

Inhabiting C. K.'s perspective, John imagines listening to those lost to the official records of history. One of them, the elder Azacca, draws on the strength of his ancestors to assure C. K. of what must be done. Azacca recounts a lesson imparted by the Great Sky God to Papa Legba, his intermediary with man: "the Stillness That Comes To All, that they called Death, was not an ending of things, but a passing on of spirit, a change of shape, and nothing more." "It came to him then," John says of his great-grandfather, "that there was always escape, always, so long as one did not think too much, so long as one did not calculate too much; so long as one believed."2 This imaginative leap helps John see that what looked like an act of desperation in history's ledger of events was in fact a testament to the fugitives' self-determination. They chose to die together and thereby remain free.

I respond to Irvin Hunt's excellent "The Style of Speculative History" with this extended reflection on The Chaneysville Incident because I understand his argument to align with Bradley's narrative experiment. Irvin is sympathetic to speculative history's effort to undo the epistemic violence encoded in positivist and strictly empirical approaches to the past. The historical record can't tell the story of the marginalized and dispossessed, Irvin summarizes, because its very existence was made possible by their exclusion. But if the response to such exclusion is, as Saidiya Hartman and other speculative historians have advocated, to take the imaginative leap of "critical fabulation," then why, Irvin asks, isn't dialogue, or "imagining the voice of the under-voiced," part of the task? Why not follow the epistemological challenge to the end, so to speak?

Irvin provocatively contends that "silence" is what trips up even the most committed speculative historian. If the goal is to recover the lives of the cast-off and forgotten, those who have been silent for so long, then writing a pause or moment's hesitation into that narrative could be disruptive. For Irvin, though, silence is crucial to speculation as an act of writing. In halting the momentum of dialogue, silence affords a special degree of reflexivity, one where the very imperative to recover confronts the limits of what it can, and can't, know. This suspension in speech, Irvin intuits, opens up narrative possibilities that may be difficult to fathom in the present. As dialogue emerges out of silence, the wager is that the speculative historian will be surprised by what he learned from his characters, and will compose the rest of their story from that standpoint.

Irvin's own experiment in dialogue—between Ms. May and McDuffie—stakes out a speculative history more welcoming of silence. For this reason, it calls to mind the writing of David Bradley more than that of any contemporary critic. Like The Chaneysville Incident, Irvin's dialogue fictionalizes "real-life" referents into a drama of historical recovery and present-day survival. The particularities of the drama, like Bradley's, center on an academic historian who must try to unlearn everything the profession has taught him. And, finally, like the novel, much of this short piece is taken up by narrated silences. To be sure, Irvin's awkward pauses and questions that go nowhere reveal McDuffie to be less sympathetic than C. K., a historical stand-in for John. Yet in the same way that the novel concludes with John giving his voice over to the past, so does Irvin's scenario grant McDuffie a final, almost out-of-body revelation: "I see, I see. To be alive is to thrive. What a ruse to think it was the other way around." It's a silent utterance, we are led to believe, that corrects the previous misunderstandings.

But what to make of Irvin's critique of "free indirect discourse," a restraint on Hartman's style that maintains speculative history's "univocality"? Bradley uses the technique to great effect in John's recovery of C. K.'s voice. Though we don't read the fugitives' speech in quoted dialogue, their voices, and silences, resonate through C. K.'s impressions. In fact, it's precisely in the lull following Azacca's story that C. K. hears the "sharp sobbing sound" of one of the fugitives, a mother, despairing over her lost baby.3 It's this unspoken yet meaningful recognition of loss that hardens the group's resolve to plot their ultimate escape.

What strikes me as the key takeaway of Irvin's experiment, then, isn't so much the need for dialogue in speculative history as the need to narrate silence as a condition of speculation itself. Speculative history can reveal how the historical record silences the lives of the dispossessed. Its style has developed a veritable poetics out of that silencing. But in order for fabulation to really challenge epistemic violence (and not merely poeticize it), that style, Irvin proposes, ought to be more open to silence as a narrative strategy. For Bradley and Irvin, this strategy takes the form of historians who realize how important it is to grant the marginalized the right to silence, even—or especially—in the face of recovery.

Kinohi Nishikawa is Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University. His first book, Street Players: Black Pulp Fiction and the Making of a Literary Underground, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018.