ABSTRACT
This chapter sketches out elements of several theories relating to language, desire and subjectivity that will prove particularly enlightening when applied to the texts in question. It looks at the concept of the semiotic chora, as set out in Julia Kristeva's Revolution in Poetic Language, and its related precedents as found in the psychoanalytic theories of the Freudian id and the Lacanian Real. The chapter describes four elements of the Kristevan concept in turn, highlighting relevant interplay with the works of Italo Svevo, Giorgio Pressburger, and Giuliana Morandini. These elements include silence, feminine, drives as motor, and the presence of the repressed. There was already an intimate link posited between silence and illness in the idea that non-voice was a precursor to death, a disruption of order, and a sign of the failure of the logos. Forms of silence construct their own synthetic metastructure beyond the bounds of the textual realm of the printed page.
