The History of Sound: Stories

In “The Silver Clip,” the first-person narrator discovers Art as a Form of Expression and Communication during his unplanned stay at his grandmother’s house on Nantucket. As a burgeoning painter just out of art school, the narrator spends his time working on his artwork alone at the island house. This self-imposed retreat grants him inadvertent access to stories and lives he wouldn’t have encountered otherwise—particularly via his artistic discoveries. The vial in the fireplace, his visit to the museum, and his evening painting Mallory Dart’s portrait offer him access to a once irretrievable artistic past. At the same time, the narrator’s removed tone and hesitant manner throughout the story imply that he is intimidated by these encounters with artistic history. He is still finding his own artistic voice and regards his island discoveries—which are all symbols of the past—as threats to his developing identity.

The narrator’s experience at Mallory’s house conveys the entanglement of artistic voices, practices, and figures over time. The house itself resembles a museum. The “front hallway” is lined with “plain geometric paintings of ships” and portraits of long-dead sailors; the “floorboards [creak] under [their] footsteps,” and the rooms are filled with “dusty books and threadbare old rugs” (62). These images evoke notions of the past in memoriam. The same is true of the William Snow painting that particularly moves the narrator, a direct recall to the preceding short story “Edwin Chase of Nantucket” that creates an overt narrative thread between the two stories; centuries later, the narrator is encountering the work of Will, a budding painter who left his work behind for a friend while passing through Nantucket.

In the context of “The Silver Clip,” Will’s painting symbolizes the re-emergence of the past within the present, connecting to the theme of The Clarifying Power of History. Further, Mallory gives the painting to the narrator, a gesture that sustains the narrator’s connection to Nantucket’s history despite his seeming aversion to it. This aversion dictates the narrative mood in the scene where the narrator paints Mallory. He is disconcerted by Mallory’s insistence that he paint her and even more so when she ends the session. His edgy demeanor suggests that he doesn’t know how to pick up where the late Tim left off on painting his wife. He feels intimidated and immobilized by the ghosts of his artistic predecessors, who are particularly alive in Tim’s studio. At the same time, the narrator ends up hanging the songbird painting in his studio years later, a gesture that conveys the narrator’s longing to be a part of artistic history. He has learned that art can communicate messages from beyond, and preserving the painting is his way of attaching himself to this history.