"I love words these days for what they don't say. As with the net, the spaces in the story give it its form." (Beverley Farmer).
There are a variety of different form and narrative structures in the short stories, "Trees Can Speak", "The Persimmon Tree" and "A Double Because its Snowing." All of these are modernist stories with a one sided perspective of reality. The stories also tend to have a prescence of the unsaid in their narration, which make the stories very powerful.
We definintely see this idea of Beverley Farmer in the onset of "Trees Can Speak." The storekeeper says, "This man never speaks." 1 The movements of the man and the expressions on his face are the only clues the narrator has to understanding him. However, there is something more powerful about a man who does not speak. Its leaves people guessing and not having all the answer laid out in front of them. It allows them to get spiritually closer to the person, like the narrator who is focusing on the mans every movement and facial expression. It is also much more personal and half of the time, the narrator does not even realize the man is not talking. At one point the narrator even says, "His expression changed to one of decision and I answered the unspoken intention as if it had been conveyed to me in words." 2 This just shows that not speaking can be just as powerful if not more powerful than speaking itself. In this short story, I feel the narrator has a closer connection with this man throughout the story than he would have if the man could speak. Speaking can take away the peacefullness and serenity and can sometimes give away too much. The man can still decipher the mysterious mans moods and needs most of the time, so there is no justifiable point in him speaking. Ben Okri sums this up well. He states, "moods are stories unsaid, condensed in the air, untold. In other words, moods are the presence of hidden imaginal processes.
