Practices of silence: Self-documentation and narrative limits in a Romanian catholic priest’s twentieth-century archive

Abstract

This study examines how unspoken elements are given meaning in a specific case study and how they shape our understanding of everyday life as it is documented and narrated in the context of dictatorship and personal relationships. The investigation focuses not on what the documents say, but on what they conceal. Based on a corpus of over 2,400 documents – including carbon copies of letters, notes, and other paper-based documents – the study investigates how silence and reticence are embedded in everyday writing practices under conditions of censorship, surveillance, and personal constraint. The archive reveals that silence operates on multiple levels. In this study, we do not view silence as deficiency, but rather as a form of expression that is culturally shaped by the environment. Politically, it is shaped by self-censorship and the avoidance of sensitive topics or names. Personally, it appears in the suppression of emotions, indirect expressions of affection or allegorical writing in correspondence. Interpretation of the texts shows that omitted or concealed elements are often just as revealing as those that are written down. The fragile boundary between writing and its narrative limits is central to understanding not only the personal history of the main protagonist, but the broader conditions of writing under authoritarian rule. His documents speak not just through what they say, but through what they choose not to say – leaving traces of silence as durable as ink.