Murphy, Macherey

This week's continued reading on structuralism was harder to grasp first time around, than last weeks. Macherey's "Theory on Literary Production" immediately dove into implicit versus explicit. By the end of the reading I began to consider implicit and unspoken as synonyms. And at the same time I began to consider explicit and spoken as synonyms. To paraphrase Macherey, the book "is not self-sufficient, it is accompanied by a certain absence, and without it, would not exist." There seems to be very specific rules on what should be considered planned silence, and unconscious silence by the writer. Macherey goes on to write,"The silence gives it life." This idea that without saying everything there is to say, and without going into specific detail on every subject addressed in the book, there is an entire unwritten, important part of the story that is being told.
Previously I mentioned the word "unconscious", which is what Freud named the "absence of certain words". Macherey elaborates on this idea to say that "silence reveals speech, unless it is the speech that reveals the silence." This phrase alone could be studied and analyzed for weeks on end. To me the main point of it is that there is no way to have a writing that includes one, without the other. Together, the spoken and unspoken, create a structure that is legible and coherent for the reader.
The most perplexing part of the reading for me was relating to "The Two Questions". After reviewing this section I am at the same place I started. Reading a work involves questioning, evaluating, and critiquing it, to better understand its argument. The details of what question should be asked when is hard to grasp.