SILENCE. (FW65, No. 34 - III.3, 500-531)

On p.501 comes what, to me, the more I think about it, is a profound and even disturbing silence. Mamalujo has been interrogating/interviewing Yawn from beyond, and all the voices speaking through him. The voices grew more crowded, shouting over each other and not making much sense (like a more out-of-control version of the end of I.8). Then, whitespace and the all-caps message:

SILENCE.

This is like the period of silence in the annals read in I.1, although there the gap in the record was stated to be "Silent." by the tour-guide-historian-narrator. The records and the scribe taking them down stopped; perhaps, as FW interpreters like to think, this corresponds to a gap of the ages in history, a space between the epochs, when things are about to start again, after the Viconian notion of cyclical history. Maybe so. 

It is different in III.3, however. We have here 

SILENCE.

This states directly what was in the hearing of Mamalujo: nothing, no more voice speaking or responding, after so many.

If we can picture the séance (John Bishop's word for what is happening in III.3) of Mamlujo as an archaeological excavation, and Yawn as the stratified remains of generations (eons) of human settlements which are the events and characters of FW, the silence would be the virgin soil you reach, beneath and before the first human traces. Or, if a radio telescope, it is the cosmic background radiation, or maybe the darkness preceding the Big Bang. Maybe we can think of it narratologically as a slowing down of the narration to a crawl, going so slowly in fact that it can't even capture the thoughts and actions of its human subjects and longer. The storytelling tool, the lens of observation, has been overcalibrated, is too fine-grained to let anything pass through and be observed and told about.

I feel like I am reading through the text into the pages themselves and down through the back cover to let the light (or darkness) in.

To bring us a little closer to the reading, what I find to be the disturbing part of this is the way that the text of FW itself (it is implied here) knows its own limits, that the voices brought together into the interviewer's hearing, which theoretically can pick up any figure whatsoever in the book's universe, emerge out of darkness and, it is implied, return to it. 

This is, in fact, how I read the book's final and first sentence. While I think that the common wisdom about them/it is basically right (that they are two halves of the same sentence, implying that the book never ends), what comes after the last "the" is silence  in the first analysis, even if you immediately turn back to page 3. The sentence is unfinished, and this is made noticeable by ending with the one word in English which is the most demanding in its need to be followed and fulfilled by something, whose very existence is to assert the existence of what follows. The silence couldn't be more noticeable.

[FW 501]