JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 229 из 359Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
I think there are few if any descriptive passages in the English language that are any finer than this; it is the sort of quiet epiphany every writer hopes for: words that somehow transcend words, words which add up to a total greater than the sum of the parts. Analysis of such a paragraph is a mean and shoddy trick, and should almost always be left to college and university professors, those lepidopterists of literature who, when they see a lovely butterfly, feel that they should immediately run into the field with a net, catch it, kill it with a drop of chloroform, and mount it on a white board and put it in a glass case, where it will still be beautiful . . . and just as dead as horseshit.
Having said that, let us analyze this paragraph a bit. I promise not to kill it or mount it, however; I have neither the skill nor the inclination (but show me any graduate thesis in the field of English/ American lit, and I will show you a mess of dead butterflies, most of them killed messily and mounted inexpertly). We'll just stun it for a moment or two and then let it fly on.
All I really want to do is point out how many things this single paragraph does. It begins by suggesting that Hill House is a live organism; tells us that this live organism does not exist under conditions of absolute reality; that because (although here I should add that I may be making an induction Mrs. Jackson did not intend) it does not dream, it is not sane. The paragraph tells us how long its history has been, immediately establishing that historical context that is so important to the haunted-house story, and it concludes by telling us that something walks in the rooms and halls of Hill House. All of this in two sentences.
Jackson introduces an even more unsettling idea by implication. She suggests that Hill House looks all right on the surface. It is not the creepy old Marsten place from 'Salem's Lot with its boarded-up windows, mangy roof, and peeling walls. It's not the tumble-down brooding place at the ends of all those dead-end streets, those places where children throw rocks by daylight and fear to venture after dark. Hill House is looking pretty good. But then, Norman Bates was looking pretty good, too, at least on the surface.
I think there are few if any descriptive passages in the English language that are any finer than this; it is the sort of quiet epiphany every writer hopes for: words that somehow transcend words, words which add up to a total greater than the sum of the parts. Analysis of such a paragraph is a mean and shoddy trick, and should almost always be left to college and university professors, those lepidopterists of literature who, when they see a lovely butterfly, feel that they should immediately run into the field with a net, catch it, kill it with a drop of chloroform, and mount it on a white board and put it in a glass case, where it will still be beautiful . . . and just as dead as horseshit.
Having said that, let us analyze this paragraph a bit. I promise not to kill it or mount it, however; I have neither the skill nor the inclination (but show me any graduate thesis in the field of English/ American lit, and I will show you a mess of dead butterflies, most of them killed messily and mounted inexpertly). We'll just stun it for a moment or two and then let it fly on.
All I really want to do is point out how many things this single paragraph does. It begins by suggesting that Hill House is a live organism; tells us that this live organism does not exist under conditions of absolute reality; that because (although here I should add that I may be making an induction Mrs. Jackson did not intend) it does not dream, it is not sane. The paragraph tells us how long its history has been, immediately establishing that historical context that is so important to the haunted-house story, and it concludes by telling us that something walks in the rooms and halls of Hill House. All of this in two sentences.
Jackson introduces an even more unsettling idea by implication. She suggests that Hill House looks all right on the surface. It is not the creepy old Marsten place from 'Salem's Lot with its boarded-up windows, mangy roof, and peeling walls. It's not the tumble-down brooding place at the ends of all those dead-end streets, those places where children throw rocks by daylight and fear to venture after dark. Hill House is looking pretty good. But then, Norman Bates was looking pretty good, too, at least on the surface.