Silence in Holiday

In the Holiday, I was interested in the ways in which silence and speech define and reinforce communal boundaries and the boundaries of the individual. First of all, this is the first time we've read a Porter story in the first-person: a hint at the importance of the ability to speak, and to tell one's narrative, an ability which Ottilie conspicuosly lacks. The narrator is able to reinforce her place in the narrative, and by proxy, her place in the family. She uses the act of narration to maintain the distance of an observer, and specifically celebrates her semi-solitary state, occassioned, tellingly, by the language barrier.
There is a great silence from our narrator on the subject of her past--we are conspicously never told why she has come to the farm, but we do understand that some great, personal pain has occasioned her need for a solitary holiday, where none of her present connections can trace her. It seems strange that someone who wished to be left alone would seek out lodgings in a house full of strangers. However, Porter’s narrator makes clear that she appreciates her sense of distance from the family’s daily communications: they “were not talking to me and did not expect me to answer” (413). She finds explicit comfort in this niche, remarking that “it was good not to have to understand what they were saying. I loved the silence which means freedom from the constant pressure of other minds and other opinions and other feelings” (413). Usually, language acts as a social lubricant, but here, it anchors the narrator firmly in her social role as outsider. (Interestingly, she gradually transcends this barrier and becomes part of the family circle not through communication, but through a shared communal physicality: she begins helping Hatsy in the garden, and during the flood, she helps save a drowning lamb and sweeps broken glass in the kitchen. )

I think a deep concern in the story is whether language can actually create real bonds between humans—whether it can truly allow them to communicate their deepest selves—or whether another mysterious, extra-lingual factor must be at work. Of note is the lack of dialogue in the story, including unquoted thought dialogue: much of the narrator’s delivery is reportage of her immediate, physical world—the descriptions of trees, the landscape, fireflies, etc. These descriptions of nature—though they come to us directly from the narrator herself, have less quality of reflection, thought and language, and more the quality of physical impressions (supposedly, though artificially, unmediated by language within the necessary context of a piece of literature). In fact, the narrator initially compares her inability to understand the language of her hosts to the “music” of the sounds in the natural world. She “could be moved and touched but not troubled by [German], as by the crying of frogs or the wind in the trees.

At the beginning of the story, the narrator believes that silence will bring her to her consummate, individual self: she remarks that the linguistic barrier which initially leaves her in such pleasing silence will allow her the “freedom to fold up in quiet and go back to my own center” (413). Her linguistic isolation as an individual is contrasted to the communal physicality at dinner. The family is tied by language, certainly, but also more emphatically by “the enormous energy” and “animal force that was like a bodily presence itself in the rooms” (416). The emphasis on shared familial features (blond hair, blue eyes, high cheek-bones) posits a very physical interpretation of communal (Porter even uses the word “tribal”) bond. They communicate as a family as much through shared physical characteristics and shared physical labour as much as through common language. (And while they are brought together as a family in shared German
conversation, they are also bonded by shared, emotional silence—inarticulate, shared weeping—at the death of the mother).


I am interested in the role of Ottilie as a crux between physical and linguistic communication, and as a crux between the individual and the communal. She shares the physical traits of the family, but they have been marred by childhood disease. Yet her inability to communicate seems to place her apart—she is, in parallel to the narrator, linguistically isolated. She, however, does find her place in her family through a fixed, physical role as a producer of tangible foodstuffs. The narrator writes that, in her lonely silence, Ottilie “seemed to [her] the only individual in the house” (417).
Remarkably, she notes that even she herself “felt divided into many fragments,” but her following descriptions of fragmentalization are all implicitly physical in nature: she had “left or lost a part of myself in every place I had travelled, in every life mine had touched, and…in every death…that had carried into the grave some part of my living cells” (417). The narrator seeks the silence of the linguistically isolated individual, because her unavoidable physical presence in the human drama has caused her so much pain. Yet in Ottilie, she finds an object of pity for her inability to communicate, at the same time she herself sets about gradually creating physical bonds with the family through aforementioned housework.
Ottilie’s isolation upsets the narrator, who feels uncomfortably about the servant/daughter’s seeming neglect. She is frustrated that “nothing could make her seem real, or in any way connected with the life around her” (425). It is only when she feels Ottilie’s actual skin under her belt that she realizes the woman is a real, physical object. Paradoxically, she had realized in her previous encounter with Ottilie (in which she is shown the photograph), that Ottilie has a real, interior consciousness of her own identity—in short, that she is real in the sense that she has a mind. But strangely, here in the carriage, the narrator only realizes Ottilie’s reality by dint of her physical presence.
When the narrator here realizes that Ottilie’s emotions are not necessarily connected to having been left behind her mother’s funeral procession, the narrator has a jarring realization of her ultimate inability to communicate with Ottilie—to have a mental communion on any level, even an extra-lingual one. By this unexpected “ironical mistake,” we see the intrenched tension between the individual and the communal—a connection that perhaps cannot be breached by an outsider, either by acquisition of shared language, shared physicality, or shared silence.