JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 312 из 359Some of this is a failure on the writer's part to visualize well and completely; his or her own mind's eye seems blearedhalf-shut. More of it is a simple failure of that most basic writer's tool, the working vocabulary. If you're writing a haunted-house story and you don't know the difference between a gable and a gambrel, a cupola and a turret, paneling and wainscotting, you, sir or madam, are in trouble.
Now don't get me wrong here; I thought Edwin Newman's book on the degeneration of the English language was moderately entertaining but also often tiresome and amazingly prissy, the book of a man who would like to put language inside a hermetically sealed bell-jar (like a carefully groomed corpse inside a glass coffin) instead of sending it out into the streets to jive with the people. But language has its own point and reason for being. Parapsychologists may argue over extrasensory perception; psychologists and neurologists may claim there is no such thing; but those who love books and love the language know that the printed word really is a kind of telepathy. In most cases the writer does her or his work silently, couching thoughts in symbols composed of letters in groups set off one from the next by white space, and in most cases the reader does her or his work silently, reading the symbols and reintegrating them as thoughts and images. Louis Zukofsky, the poet (A, among other books), claimed that even the look of words on the page-the indents, the punctuation, the place on the line where the paragraph ends-has its own story to tell. "Prose," Zukofsky said, "is poetry.” It's probably true that the writer's thoughts and the reader's thoughts never tally exactly, that the image the writer sees and the image the reader sees are never 100 percent the same. We are, after all, not angels but were made a little less than the angels, and our language is maddeningly hobbled, a fact to which any poet or novelist will attest. There is no creative writer, I think, who has not suffered that frustrating crash off the walls which stand at the limits of language, who has not cursed the word that just doesn't exist. Emotions such as grief and romantic love are particularly hard to deal with, but even such a simple operation as starting up a car with a manual transmission and driving it to the end of the block can present nearly insurmountable problems if you try to write the process down instead of simply doing it. And if you don't believe this is so, write down such instructions and try them on a nondriving friend . . . but check your auto insurance policy first.
Now don't get me wrong here; I thought Edwin Newman's book on the degeneration of the English language was moderately entertaining but also often tiresome and amazingly prissy, the book of a man who would like to put language inside a hermetically sealed bell-jar (like a carefully groomed corpse inside a glass coffin) instead of sending it out into the streets to jive with the people. But language has its own point and reason for being. Parapsychologists may argue over extrasensory perception; psychologists and neurologists may claim there is no such thing; but those who love books and love the language know that the printed word really is a kind of telepathy. In most cases the writer does her or his work silently, couching thoughts in symbols composed of letters in groups set off one from the next by white space, and in most cases the reader does her or his work silently, reading the symbols and reintegrating them as thoughts and images. Louis Zukofsky, the poet (A, among other books), claimed that even the look of words on the page-the indents, the punctuation, the place on the line where the paragraph ends-has its own story to tell. "Prose," Zukofsky said, "is poetry.” It's probably true that the writer's thoughts and the reader's thoughts never tally exactly, that the image the writer sees and the image the reader sees are never 100 percent the same. We are, after all, not angels but were made a little less than the angels, and our language is maddeningly hobbled, a fact to which any poet or novelist will attest. There is no creative writer, I think, who has not suffered that frustrating crash off the walls which stand at the limits of language, who has not cursed the word that just doesn't exist. Emotions such as grief and romantic love are particularly hard to deal with, but even such a simple operation as starting up a car with a manual transmission and driving it to the end of the block can present nearly insurmountable problems if you try to write the process down instead of simply doing it. And if you don't believe this is so, write down such instructions and try them on a nondriving friend . . . but check your auto insurance policy first.