JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 284 из 359Oh, they're not above peeing off a bridge, or stealing an occasional dime-store pencil-sharpener; it's not that. It's just, you know, seeing them pass, that's how they'll be all their life; they'll get hit, hurt, cut, bruised, and always wonder why, why does it happen? -and one that seems just right: The wails of a lifetime were gathered in [that trainwhistle] from other nights in other slumbering years; the howls of moon-dreamed dogs, the sleep of river-cold winds through January porch screens which stopped the blood, a thousand fire-sirens weeping, or worse! the outgone shreds of breath, the protests of a billion people dead or dying, not wanting to be dead, their groans, their sighing, burst over the earth!
Man, that's a train whistle! I want to tell you!
More clearly than any other book discussed here, Something Wicked This Way Comes reflects the differences between the Apollonian life and the Dionysian. Bradbury's carnival, which creeps inside the town limits and sets up shop in a meadow at three o'clock in the morning ( Fitzgerald's dark night of the soul, if you like), is a symbol of everything that is abnormal, mutated, monstrous . . . Dionysian. I've always wondered if the appeal of the vampire myth for children doesn't lie partly in the simple fact that vampires get to sleep all day and stay up all night ( vampires never have to miss Creature Features at midnight because of school the next day). Similarly, we know that part of this carnival's attraction for Jim and Will (sure, Will feels its pull too, although not as strongly as his friend Jim feels it; even Will's father is not entirely immune from its deadly siren song) is that there will be no set bedtimes, no rules and regulations, no dull and boring small town day after day, no "eat your broccoli, think of the people starving in China," no school. The carnival is chaos, it is the taboo land made magically portable, traveling from place to place and even from time to time with its freight of freaks and its glamorous attractions.
The boys (sure, Jim too) represent just the opposite. They are normal, not mutated, not monstrous. They live their lives by the rules of the sunlit world, Will willingly, Jim impatiently.
Which is exactly why the carnival wants them. The essence of evil, Bradbury suggests, is its need to compromise and corrupt that delicate passage from innocence to experience that all children must make. In the rigid moral world of Bradbury's fiction, the freaks who populate the carnival have taken on the outward shapes of their inward vices. Mr.
Man, that's a train whistle! I want to tell you!
More clearly than any other book discussed here, Something Wicked This Way Comes reflects the differences between the Apollonian life and the Dionysian. Bradbury's carnival, which creeps inside the town limits and sets up shop in a meadow at three o'clock in the morning ( Fitzgerald's dark night of the soul, if you like), is a symbol of everything that is abnormal, mutated, monstrous . . . Dionysian. I've always wondered if the appeal of the vampire myth for children doesn't lie partly in the simple fact that vampires get to sleep all day and stay up all night ( vampires never have to miss Creature Features at midnight because of school the next day). Similarly, we know that part of this carnival's attraction for Jim and Will (sure, Will feels its pull too, although not as strongly as his friend Jim feels it; even Will's father is not entirely immune from its deadly siren song) is that there will be no set bedtimes, no rules and regulations, no dull and boring small town day after day, no "eat your broccoli, think of the people starving in China," no school. The carnival is chaos, it is the taboo land made magically portable, traveling from place to place and even from time to time with its freight of freaks and its glamorous attractions.
The boys (sure, Jim too) represent just the opposite. They are normal, not mutated, not monstrous. They live their lives by the rules of the sunlit world, Will willingly, Jim impatiently.
Which is exactly why the carnival wants them. The essence of evil, Bradbury suggests, is its need to compromise and corrupt that delicate passage from innocence to experience that all children must make. In the rigid moral world of Bradbury's fiction, the freaks who populate the carnival have taken on the outward shapes of their inward vices. Mr.