Manifesto for Silence: Confronting the Politics and Culture of Noise
Stuart Sim Edinburgh University Press, 224pp, £14.99
"Noise annoys," sang Mancunian punk band the Buzzcocks, in a manner guaranteed to make the writer and academic Stuart Sim reach for his earplugs. Sim, a professor of English at the University of Sunderland, has set out a "manifesto for silence" to remind us of the value of quietude in an increasingly noisy world, where amplified rock music is just another tinnitus-giver to rank alongside low-flying aircraft, police helicopters, ambulance sirens, high-speed train warnings and surround-sound television speakers.
The novelist Andrew Martin has written eloquently of the scourge of the Heathrow flight-path, the noise from which blights much of London and the Thames Valley. Added to that, in my East End neighbourhood, is the noise from London City Airport, the A12 and the A13. It's stressful and maddening. Soon I'll be moving, unlike the many thousands around me who have fewer choices to play with. The world's population is rushing to live in cities to escape the other, more pressing, scourges of poverty, disease and abuse.
Shanghai's physical expansion is currently being fuelled by 24-hour construction, while New York, once the city that never slept, has introduced its first ever campaign to combat excess noise. With gambolling American optimism, they've called it Operation Silent Night. The day you turn New York silent is the day you turn it into another city entirely.
But where, exactly, does sound - a sign of vitality, communication and comfort - become noise? In focusing on silence as a positive and principled action, something you do to stand up to those who are foisting noise upon you, Sim's manifesto has a strangely depressing effect. Reading it feels less like a hymn to solitude and centredness than one to solipsism and self-centredness.
The book begins lucidly by outlining countless instances of deliberate - or, at the very least, thoughtless - noise creation, which, in any society concerned with preserving the mental well-being of its citizens, should be curtailed by law. The effects of noise on psychological health are so well documented that it can be used as an instrument of torture and of civilian oppression: "For many of us . . . loud, unsought noise is mental torture, and prolonged exposure to it makes rational thought and behaviour increasingly difficult to sustain."
There's no doubt that here Sim has a point, and that there is a strong case for defending the right to be quiet. We are able to make better choices in peace. There is something especially noxious about the incessant white noise - a sort of culture-slurry of loud music, flash imagery and wild sloganning - that is deployed by advertisers, supermarket owners and pub-chain marketeers to drown out independent thought and to confuse us into spending more money.
Yet, despite the planes and the roads and the all-night Tescos, I've been woken up in the night more times by ear-splitting birdsong than by parties so far this summer. Blackbirds don't give a tinker's cuss that I need to sleep for eight hours solid. Does that mean we should ban birds? Not if the assumptions Sim makes about the meanings of "silence", "noise" and "sound" are anything to go by. Sim is silent, inaptly enough, on the issue of whether natural sounds constitute "noise". He doesn't comment on the fact that we tend not to describe waves crashing, or thunder clapping, as "noise", even though they can overwhelm and distress us as much as man-made sounds can.
Despite invoking the Quakers' silent communion and Buddhists' creed of mindfulness, Sim's appeals to our humanity lean on a desire to acknowledge how terrible, rather than how wonderful, it all is. Silence is honesty, suggests Sim, but like reality, humankind can't handle too much of that. Beckett and Pinter use silence to acknowledge our painful aloneness. Quakers give thanks, in silence, to a silent deity. On earth, with each other, we dance and sing to show how much we love life: whether we annoy other people as we do so depends on our willingness to consider and include - or permit to exclude - others.
Barbara Ehrenreich's recent "history of collective joy", Dancing in the Streets, would have little to go on if our urges had historically been less towards rampant celebration and more towards silent contemplation. Beckett, on the other hand, said: "If you really get down to the disaster, the slightest eloquence becomes unbearable. Whatever is said is so far from the experience." Call me shallow, but my first reaction to that is to ditch Godot and watch the Muppets instead.
"A defence of silence is a defence of the human," concludes Sim, following an almost impenetrable study of silence in art, literature and philosophy that seems calculated to alienate the general reader. While I agree wholeheartedly with this statement, there's a sense of human warmth and roundedness missing from this book that, ultimately, cancels out its own argument - leaving not silence, but a void.
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