ABSTRACT
The art of silence intensifies and perhaps exaggerates the inclination of much literary and visual art to be static and still. This exaggeration is especially obvious in those works of James Agee, Walker Evans, and Edward Hopper wherein transitory and functional things like overalls, automobiles, and stores are represented as though they were timeless icons. The physical silence, the simple absence of noise and motion, becomes a metaphysical silence. In some works of fiction, like A Death in the Family, the characters themselves reach this consciousness, and in some works of visual art, like Evans' street scenes, the observer attains the perception, even as he may realize that the ephemeral subject of the photographs would logically rule out any relation to the eternal. The photographs of Evans and the paintings of Edward Hopper represent not just a logical but an inevitable elaboration of the imagination of the silent objects that these crucial fictional experiences so emphatically detail.
