The Empty Chair and the Silent Voice

Symbols of Loss, Grief — and Hope?

Since Obama’s State of the Union speech, one detail has resounded more loudly than any of his spirited words: the empty chair next to the First Lady, left vacant in tribute to the victims of gun violence.

This enduring symbol recently returned to American public consciousness in the wake of Clint Eastwood’s memorable encounter with the absent Obama at the Republican National Convention in 2012. On one level, its reappearance on January 12 could be seen as an effort by the White House to reclaim its symbolism. But while the empty chair can be turned to any number of immediate political ends, the significance of its vacancy has a much longer history.

The absence framed and signified by the empty seat is traditionally associated with the dead, as in the 1861 Civil War song “The Vacant Chair,” composed in memory of Massachusetts 18-year-old John William Grout, who died at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff. Picturing the grief suffered by Grout’s family as they gather round the Thanksgiving table, the song’s haunting first and final stanzas summon up a space of absence that encircles their act of remembrance, proclaiming:

We shall meet, but we shall miss him.
There will be one vacant chair.
We shall linger to caress him,
When we breathe our evening prayer.

As a device for expressing loss that echoes a lament for victims of violence, the empty seat also forms a powerful visual counterpart to a crucial moment in Obama’s January 5 speech on gun control legislation. Many have commented on the moving (or, for some, manipulative) sight of the President’s tears. But arguably, it was the halting silence that accompanied them while Obama struggled to control his emotions that offered the more harrowing expression of grief and frustration, especially since it issued from such a celebrated orator.

The ancients had a specific term for this kind of rhetorical silence: aposiopesis (in Greek) or reticentia (in Latin). In his Institutes of Oratory, Quintilian describes such sudden interruptions of the flow of speech as a means of “testifying something of passion or anger … or anxiety and conscious hesitation,” a device for magnifying the significance of what goes unspoken (9.2.54).

As the Greek rhetorician Alexander observes, the logos of the unsaid has the effect of intensifying “what is known, or what is shameful” (Walz, Rhetores Graeci vol.8, p. 450) — in effect, the long saga of gun crime, failed legislation, and political frustration that lay in the uncomfortable pause on January 5 between Obama’s roll-call of school shootings and his unvarnished admission that “every time I think about those kids, it gets me mad.”

Amidst the flow of oratory that courses through political life both ancient and modern, the impact of aposiopesis lies in its departure from the norm. Like the empty chair, it constitutes a framed absence that is powerful not only for its element of surprise, but also for the unexpected imaginative input it requires from the audience. Turning us from passive listeners into active participants, aposiopesis demands that we make the speaker’s silence speak for ourselves.

To explain these devices in rhetorical terms might seem to impute a lack of sincerity, reinforcing the charge of “crocodile tears” brought against Obama. But as Quintilian was well aware, it is precisely when our powers of expression overtly reach their limits that they can be most persuasive. To clarify this point, Quintilian turns (as rhetorical treatises often do) to a visual exemplum, citing a famous departure from the norm in a mythological scene by the Classical Greek painter Timanthes:

It represented the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and the artist had depicted an expression of grief on the face of Calchas and of still greater grief on that of Ulysses, while he had given Menelaus an agony of sorrow beyond which his art could not go. Having exhausted his powers of emotional expression he was at a loss to portray the father’s face as it deserved, and solved the problem by veiling his head and leaving his sorrow to the imagination of the spectator (2.13.13).

Like the empty chair, the veiled face of Agamemnon both portrays and conceals a sorrow that defies representation. As a technical device, it exposes the limits of artistic skill and the innovation that can paradoxically emerge at the boundaries of the conceivable.

The choice of myth here strikes close to home: as a visual narrative, Timanthes’ painting communicates the impossibility of adequately conveying the intensity of a parent’s grief. In this particular case, the father’s unseen face gives form to the anguish that accompanies the death of a child at the seemingly arbitrary demands of a system that the law dare not challenge. Agamemnon must sacrifice his own offspring in order to demonstrate a piety that confounds all rational underpinnings of family and society. The limits of human expression run up against the diktats of an order that must obeyed, requiring consent to a death that will lead not only to ten years of war at Troy, but also to the collateral deaths of countless other innocents — not to mention that of Agamemnon himself.

In such cases, absence, silence, and concealment make space for us to imagine the worst — to fill the void with our raging lamentations for the dead and our anxieties for the living. Yet, as Quintilian points out, it is in diverging from the rhetorical norm that speech — in effectively renouncing its power — can be most effective. “Rules,” he points out, “are rarely of such a kind that their validity cannot be shaken and overthrown in some particular or other”, and it would be foolish for young men “to ascribe a talismanic value to the arbitrary decrees of theorists” (2.13.14–15). Fittingly, Obama’s moment of aposiopesis was accompanied by a declaration of legal maneuvers designed to bypass the political gridlock triggered by the NRA (with all its adherence to the talismanic language of the Second Amendment).

If Quintilian offers us a positive take on the limits of expression, then antiquity also offers us an alternative response to the absence that is made present by the empty chair. Framed absences were as telling in the visual language of mourning in Greco-Roman culture as they are today — think, for example, of the unfinished portrait faces we find on many Roman sarcophagi, which can be explained away in practical terms (lack of funds, absent relatives), but which nevertheless offer a compellingly blank space onto which mourners might project the living visages of their absent loved ones.

The empty chair is more commonly found within the context of cult, where it is deployed to frame a space for the divine. In Near Eastern tradition, empty thrones are often associated with the goddess Astarte; in his treatise On the Syrian Goddess, Lucian mentions an empty throne reserved for the Sun (34), while in Greece they are most often found at sites devoted to Zeus. Rather than materializing the absence of the dead, such objects suggest a potential presence, signifying expectation by creating a form of “empty-space aniconism” (to borrow a term from Tryggve Mettinger).

Like Agamemnon’s veiled face, the empty throne acknowledges the difficulty (or inappropriateness) of giving form to the unrepresentable through mortal strategies of representation — hence its association by some scholars with the Holy of Holies in the Jewish Temple, which may have served as a special throne for the invisible God. In the Greek ritual of theoxenia, the Roman tradition of the lectisternium, and the early Christian hetoimasia (“preparation”), the setting out of couches, thrones, and tables for the gods provides an important cultic context for the visualization of divine presence. Understood in theological terms, the empty seat thus issues an invitation, creating the conditions for contact and communication between the mortal and the immortal — for epiphanies, benefactions, and answered prayers.

Many have seen Obama’s empty chair as a means of conveying his commitment to increased gun control without dwelling on the formidable challenges he faces. Like his resounding silence on January 5, its visual prominence on January 12 could be understood as a sign of frustrated exasperation as well as a means of honoring the dead — a pointed gesture towards the limits of presidential power in the face of Republican stonewalling.

As the song of “The Vacant Chair” reminds us, faith in redemption can provide solace in the face of ineffable and unrepresentable absence. Looking to antiquity, however, we might ask whether silence and inaction need be our most persuasive responses to tragic loss. Can we look past the “talismanic value” of our hallowed texts? Guided by the gods of our better nature, might we turn from mourning to anticipation?

Verity Platt is an Associate Professor of Classics and History of Art at Cornell University, and a Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.