ARCHITECTONICS OF THE SILENCE IN VERCORS’ NOVEL “THE SILENCE OF THE SEA”
Authors:   National Pedagogical Dragomanov University, Pakhareva Tatyana A. 
Published: December 2022

Vercors’ novel “The Silence of the Sea” is one of the French Resistance defining texts, and, at the same time, the part of silence texts’ circle in world literature that constitute a powerful paradigm. It starts from the traditions of hesychasm and ends up with the avant-garde which conceptualizes silence in a wide variety of ways. Therefore, silence as a key concept of Vercors’ text attracts attention of researchers and is usually considered as a semiotic complex which a researcher has to decipher and identify its meaning-making functions. But the very architectonical structure of the text of silence as the “surface of the sea”, hiding a turbulent raging life, has not yet been sufficiently understood, including the approaches to the meaning structuring logic and the text construction logic. Both were influential at the time of writing the novel. Thus, the purpose of this research is to identify the general logical-structural model of the “surface of the sea” metaphor realization at the architectonical level of Vercors’ novel, taking into account the contexts of interwar period literature and Vercors’ individual creativity. The film adaptation of the novel created by J.P. Melville in close collaboration with Vercors is also included in the study of “architectonics of silence” in the story. The combination of the structural-semiotic, contextual, and holistic methods during the story analysis allowed us to come to the conclusion that compositionally the “silence of the sea”, which corresponds to the “surface/depth” structure, is implemented in Vercors’ story in a similar way to L. Wittgenstein’s “Logical-philosophical Treatise” (as a compositional principle by which text and non-textual elements are combined). In particular, it is demonstrated that Wittgenstein makes the transition from the sphere of words to the ethical sphere of action which is marked by silence. Both through the last aphorism of the treatise and through its epigraph, create a compositional ring or, on the contrary, a structure open in both directions beyond text. It was also found that the epigraph to “The Silence of the Sea” and the last episodes of the story implement a transition similar to Wittgenstein’s treatise: creating a sphere of silence as an act not only within the artistic world of the story and, accordingly, in the lives of its characters, but also at the level of story architecture and at the levels of “text as an act” event integral creation in the extratextual space of existence. The dual structure of “surface/depth” was also revealed as a principle of using actual (autobiographical and historical) material in the story. It was also traced how this structure is implemented in the narrative sphere of “The Silence of the Sea”. The “surface/depth” principle was also revealed in the work of autointertext: the implicit and explicit connections between the text of the story and the context of the graphic work of J. Brüller (Verkore), in particular, the series of engravings “Silence”, as well as the film adaptation of J.-P. Melville. Analysis of the cinematic poetic means of reproducing the “surface/depth” structure in the film “The Silence of the Sea” made it possible to clarify the dramaturgy of artistic world verbal and musical components interaction in the book and the film, as directions of Franco-German cultural communication, as well as those types of art that determine the national identity of the heroes. It was separately considered how the film brings to the “surface” of the text Werner von Ebrennack’s fate motif, implicitly rooted in the story, as an individual embodiment of the fate of German romanticism – from Hegel and the sublime national-cultural mythology of the romantics to Nietzsche and Wagner, and later – German Expressionist cinema – and the death of romanticism, distorted and destroyed by Nazism, in the logic of the “death of the gods.” Conclusion. As a result of the analysis, the original assumption was confirmed: not only the titular metaphor “silence of the sea” refers to the dramatic verbal and non-verbal dialogue between the characters of Verkor’s story, but it also reproduces its leading principle of meaning construction and text structure, according to which the “surface/depth” structure is realized on the following levels: 1) architectonics as the value structure of the work, in which the problematics of speech/silence as an ethical act is particularly relevant, 2) composition of the text (text and non-textual elements – epigraph, title – in their functional relationship; correlations between the compositional elements of the work – primarily , between the beginning and the end), 3) narrative and figurative structures. Reference to Brüller (Verkor) graphics from the cycle “Silence” and adaptation of “Silence of the Sea” created by J.-P. Melville with the participation of Verkor demonstrated that the interaction of the story with its auto-intertextual environment is also built according to the “surface/depth” principle, when visual (graphic and cinematographic) images reveal meanings hidden in the subtext of the story.