JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 283 из 359The tale eventually narrows down to the struggle for a single soul, that of Jim Nightshade. To call it an allegory would be wrong, but to call it a moral horror tale-much in the manner of those E.C.
horror tales which foreran it-would be exactly right. In effect, what happens to Jim and Will is not so much different from Pinocchio's scary encounter on Pleasure Island, where boys who indulge their baser desires ( smoking cigars and shooting snooker, for instance) are turned into donkeys. Bradbury in writing here of carnal enticements-not just sexual carnality, but carnality in its broadest forms and manifestations-the pleasures of the flesh run as wild as the tattooed illustrations which cover Mr. Dark's body.*
*The one reference to sexual carnality here occurs during the business of the Theater, which Bradbury declined to discuss in his letter to me, although I asked him if he would be so kind as to elaborate a bit. It remains one of the book's most tantalizing episodes. Jim and Will discover the Theater, Bradbury says, on the upper floor of a house "while they were monkey-climbing for the sourest apples." Bradbury tells us that looking into the Theater changed everything, including the taste of the fruit, and while I have a tendency to bolt at the first stench of graduate-school analysis like a horse smelling good water polluted with alkali, the apple-and-Eden metaphor here is too strong to be denied. What exactly is going on in this second- or third-floor room, this "Theater" that changed the taste of the apples, that so fascinates Jim of the dark name and his friend, whose Christian name is so associated with our supposed ability (our supposed Christian ability) to consciously command goodness in any given situation? Bradbury suggests that the Theater is one room in a whorehouse. The people inside are naked; they "let fall clothes to the rug, stood raw and animalcrazy, naked, like shivering horses . . ." If so, it is the book's most telling foreshadowing of the carnal deviation from the norm which so strongly attracts Jim Nightshade as he stands on the threshold of adolescence.
What saves Bradbury's novel from being merely a "nightmarish allegory" or a simplistic fairy story is its grasp of story and style. Bradbury's style, so attractive to me as an adolescent, now seems a bit oversweet. But it still wields a considerable power. Here is one of the passages which seems oversweet to me- And Will? Why, he's the last peach, high on a summer tree. Some boys walk by and you cry, seeing them. They feel good, they look good, they are good.
horror tales which foreran it-would be exactly right. In effect, what happens to Jim and Will is not so much different from Pinocchio's scary encounter on Pleasure Island, where boys who indulge their baser desires ( smoking cigars and shooting snooker, for instance) are turned into donkeys. Bradbury in writing here of carnal enticements-not just sexual carnality, but carnality in its broadest forms and manifestations-the pleasures of the flesh run as wild as the tattooed illustrations which cover Mr. Dark's body.*
*The one reference to sexual carnality here occurs during the business of the Theater, which Bradbury declined to discuss in his letter to me, although I asked him if he would be so kind as to elaborate a bit. It remains one of the book's most tantalizing episodes. Jim and Will discover the Theater, Bradbury says, on the upper floor of a house "while they were monkey-climbing for the sourest apples." Bradbury tells us that looking into the Theater changed everything, including the taste of the fruit, and while I have a tendency to bolt at the first stench of graduate-school analysis like a horse smelling good water polluted with alkali, the apple-and-Eden metaphor here is too strong to be denied. What exactly is going on in this second- or third-floor room, this "Theater" that changed the taste of the apples, that so fascinates Jim of the dark name and his friend, whose Christian name is so associated with our supposed ability (our supposed Christian ability) to consciously command goodness in any given situation? Bradbury suggests that the Theater is one room in a whorehouse. The people inside are naked; they "let fall clothes to the rug, stood raw and animalcrazy, naked, like shivering horses . . ." If so, it is the book's most telling foreshadowing of the carnal deviation from the norm which so strongly attracts Jim Nightshade as he stands on the threshold of adolescence.
What saves Bradbury's novel from being merely a "nightmarish allegory" or a simplistic fairy story is its grasp of story and style. Bradbury's style, so attractive to me as an adolescent, now seems a bit oversweet. But it still wields a considerable power. Here is one of the passages which seems oversweet to me- And Will? Why, he's the last peach, high on a summer tree. Some boys walk by and you cry, seeing them. They feel good, they look good, they are good.