The Voice That Thunders, page 5
Today I want to discuss written language, as an art rather than as a science; and for the purpose of the discussion I shall take “art” to mean the fabrication whereby a reality may be the more clearly revealed and defined.
A prime material of art is paradox, in that paradox links two valid yet mutually exclusive systems that we need if we are to comprehend any reality; paradox links intuition and analytical thought. Paradox, the integration of the non-rational and logic, engages both emotion and intellect without committing outrage on either; and, for me, literature is justified only so long as it keeps a sense of paradox central to its form. Therefore I speak for imaginative writing, not for the didactic. When language serves dogma, then literature, denied the paradox, is lost. The steam-engine was a necessary part of one human being’s development. If it had been quashed by dogma, the school would have survived; but would the boy? So it is if language is deemed to be the master of literature.
Two questions the writer has to answer before he can write are: What is the story and what words can tell it? The answers are the matter of my argument, and in order to achieve what the answers require, the writer must employ and combine two human qualities not commonly used together in harmony: a sense of the numinous, and a rational mind.
The revelation and definition of a reality by art is an act of translation. It is translation, by the agency of the writer and the instrument of story, across the gap between the reality and the reader.
The story is the medium through which the writer interprets the reality; but it is not the reality itself The story is a symbol, which makes a unity of the elements, hitherto seen as separate, that combine uniquely in the writer’s vision.
The words are the language: the means by which the story is made plain; and, unless the language is apt, the story will not translate, for the final translator is not the writer but the reader. To read also is to create.
Language shifts continually; it changes through space and through time. The problem is more easily understood when the language has to translate over chasms of space and time, for then the gap between story and reader, which is always present, is plainer to see. Eric James made me aware of the challenge when he said, “For each generation, the Iliad must be told anew.”
That is the opening of the Iliad as Homer told it. Clearly, we have to find other words. Here are some:
The Wrath of Peleus’ Son, the direful Spring
Of all the Grecian Woes, o Goddess, sing!
That Wrath which hurl’d to Pluto’s gloomy Reign
The Souls of mighty Chiefs untimely slain;
Whose Limbs unbury’d on the naked Shore
Devouring Dogs and hungry Vultures tore.
Since Great Achilles and Atrides strove,
Such was the Sov’reign Doom, and such the Will of Jove.
Thus Alexander Pope in the year 1715.
There we have an example of a generation’s voice. But Pope exemplifies another theme of my argument: the duty of translation.
The more I contemplate the enormity of translation, the more I want to find some dark hole in which to die: or the more I marvel at the ingenuity of language. In this instance, the questions are: What is the essence of Homer? What is the unique, unmistakable genius, as opposed to the mechanical transposition of words? Words are more than the stuffing of a dictionary. They evoke mood as well as dispense fact,
My impression, when reading Plato, is that of drinking cold, fresh water. To me, Aeschylus is blood and darkness. And Homer is leather, oak, the secrets of the smith; Man; God; Fury; above all, magic and wonder in the world of Chaos and the logic of Dream. I see little of that in Pope’s immaculate couplets. His Iliad is the Iliad Homer might have written if he had been an English eighteenth-century gentleman of polite society. That is not quite the same as giving a generation its voice. The difference is important. Pope’s duty was to translate to polite society of the eighteenth-century the heart and mind of Homer; and that he did not do. Instead, the Greek poet was dressed as an Englishman. I sometimes wonder what would have been the result if John Clare could have taken on the task.
Homer raises another issue that Pope illustrates by his failure. What is the writer to do when the text is not a written one? For where Pope wrote, Homer sang. His was an oral art, in which memory and improvisation were talents that are not used by the deliberate, self-examining, word-by-word progress of ink over paper. The word in the air is not the same word on the page. The storyteller meets the same problem now in a different guise: in the writing of dialogue, which is never mere transcription of a tape recording. This was brought home to me when I adapted my novel, Red Shift, for film. When the book was published, a frequent critical reaction was that it was not prose but a script. However, in the adaptation most of the dialogue had to be rewritten. What did several unnoticed jobs in the book, would not work for the camera.
So the chasm between literate Pope and preliterate Homer is valuable because we can see it. But the chasm is always there for every writer, too wide, and the translator’s bridge too slender.
For the translator, the storyteller, there are the questions: what is the story and what words can tell it? We must add a question for ourselves: what does the story require of the teller? That is: what skills has the writer to deploy?
Since the purpose of language is to communicate, the writer must at least start from a shared ground with the reader. The place for worthwhile experiment to begin is in the middle of the mainstream. Linguistic and cultural crafts must be not so much simplified thereby as embraced. It is not enough to know. It is not enough to feel. The disciplines of heart and head, emotion and intellect, must run true together: the heart, to remain open to the potential of our humanity; the head to control, select, focus and give form to the expression of that potential. A third necessity is that the writer should have authority: not the authority of a reputation, but the authority of experience. Without that experience, judgment is suspect, the necessary iconoclasm a mischief. In order to control the vision, the gift, the work, or whatever term we care to use, the writer is required to harness an untrammelled receptivity to a strict intellectual vigour. It is not necesary to be able to analyse what one is doing, as I am attempting now. Indeed, for some it may be inhibiting; but for others, such analysis is a positive knowledge, leading to a refinement of technique and thereby achievement.
Already we have a picture of a dynamic union of opposites: heart and head, emotion and intellect: not the one subservient to the other, but the two integrated. It is the tension of the paradox, and the paradox must be active within the writer. Yet when I look around I do not see it; and so, you may take this as a Black Paper of culture. I do fear for the decadent generation. I am not simply being middle aged. I am not blind to, or rejecting, new values. I am crying out against loss.
Let me make the questions personal: what is my story and what words can tell it? The words for me must be English words; and a strength of English is its ability to draw for enrichment on both Germanic and Romance vocabularies. The English themselves have no clear view of this. We tend to assume (because they come late in our infant learning) that words of Romance origin are intrinsically superior to those of Germanic. Certainly, when I look at my own Primary School essays, it is the use of the Romance word that has won for me the teacher’s approving tick. But, in evolved English, the assumption is wrong. The two roots have become responsible for separate tasks.
We use the Germanic when we want to be direct, close, honest: such words as “love”, “warm” “come”, “go”, “hate”, “thank”, “fear”. The Romance words are used when we want to keep feeling at a distance, so that we may articulate with precision: “amity”, “exacerbate”, “propinquity”, “evacuate”, “obloquy”, “gratitude”, “presentiment”. Romance, with its distancing effect and polysyllabic intricacies, can also conceal, so that the result is not ambivalence but opacity. Extreme cases are to be found in political and military gobbledygook, when Madison Avenue gets into bed with Death: Thus death itself is a “zero survivability situation”, explosion is “energetic disassembly”; and we do not see human flesh in “maximise harrassment and interdiction” or “terminate with extreme prejudice”.
Romance is rodent, nibbled on the lips. Germanic is resonant, from the belly. It is also simple, and, through its simplicity, ambivalent: once more the paradox.
A more general aspect of English is that vowels may be seen to represent emotion and consonants to represent thought. We are able to communicate our feelings in speech without a written statement when the vowels are omitted. The head defines the heart, and together they make the word.
A large vocabulary is another characteristic of English. English contains some 490,000 words, plus another 300,000 technical terms: more than three-quarters of a million fragments of Babel. Studies show that no one uses more than 60,000 words; that is, the most fluent English speakers use less than an eighth of the language. My own vocabulary is about 40,000 words: 7 per cent of what is available to me.
British children by the age of five use about 2,000 words; by the age of nine, 6,000 (or 8,000, if encouraged to read). By the age of twelve, the child will have a vocabulary of 12,000 words; which is that of half the adult population of all ages. 12,000 words: 2.4 per cent of the language is spoken by 75 per cent of the population. They are rough figures, but even an approximation does not hide the discrepancy.
The purpose of language is to communicate. How can I, with a vocabulary three times bigger than that of three-quarters of my fellows, choose the words that we have in common? The question is unreal. I pose it in order to draw attention to the nature of imaginative writing. My experience over twenty-seven years is that richness of content varies inversely with complexity of language. The more simply I write, the more I can say. The more open the prose as the result of clarity, the more room there is for you the reader to bring something of yourself to the act of translating the story from my subjectivity to your own. It is here that reading becomes a creative act. The reason why I have no dilemma over choosing the one shared word in three is that the vocabulary I use in writing is almost identical to the 12,000 words of childhood and of most adults. They are the words of conversation rather than of intellectual debate; concrete rather than abstract; Germanic rather than Romance.
Through a preference for the simple and the ambivalent and the clear, the relatively sophisticated mind arrives at a choice of vocabulary that coincides with that of the relatively less sophisticated mind. It is in the deployment of the word that the difference and the sophistication lie. And, by deployment, by cunning, I am able to choose words in addition that are not shared and to place them without confusion and with implicit meaning, so that they are scarcely noticed, but the reader is enriched. It is a beauty of English. Yet I could be critical. English, for all its power, has mislaid its soul. English, despite my fluency, is not my own.
To make sense of what I mean, here is a little of my background, which is a background still common to many children in Britain today. I come from a line of working-class rural craftsmen in Cheshire, and was the first to benefit from the Education Act of 1944, which enabled me to go to the school with the highest academic standards in the country, and from there to Oxford University. Manchester Grammar School had at that time no English department. English, as a main subject, was for the few who could not master the literature of a foreign tongue. My ability lay in Latin and Greek. When I came to peer at English from the disdainful heights of the Acropolis, I saw only a verbal pulp. No writing, after The Tempest, had much to say to me. I was not surprised. Modern English, I would have said if I had thought about it, was a partial creole of Latin, and little more. My true discovery of English began some time after I had started to write.
I was reading, voluntarily, the text of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and I wondered why there were so many footnotes. My grandfather was an unlettered smith, but he would have not needed all these footnotes if a native speaker had read the poem to him aloud.
– a little on a lande · a lawe as hit were;
A balg berg bi a bonke · the brimme besyde,
Bi a fors of a flode · that ferked there.
This was no Latin creole. This was what I knew as “talking broad’. I had had my mouth washed out with carbolic soap for speaking that way when I was five years old. The Hopi, and other peoples, report the same treatment today.
Hit hade a hole on the ende · and on ayther syde,
And overgrowen with gresse · in glodes aywhere,
And al was holwe inwith · nobbut a cave,
Or a crevisse of an old cragge, · . . .
Every generation needs its voice, but here was I, at home in the fourteenth century, and finding the English of later centuries comparatively alien, unrewarding.
“Yon’s a grand bit of stuff,” my father said when I read a passage to him, which he understood completely. “I recollect as Ozzie Leah were just the same.” “And that’s what all our clothing coupons went on, to get you your school uniform?” said my mother. Something had gone wrong. “Is there any more?” said my father.
I realised that I had been taught (if only by default) to suppress, and even to deride, my primary native tongue. Standard Received English had been imposed on me, and I had clung to it, so that I could be educated and could use that education. Gain had been bought with loss.
This sense of loss, I found later, had been expressed, albeit patronisingly, long before I could feel sorry for myself. Roger Wilbraham, a landed gentleman, read a paper before the Society of Antiquaries on 8 May 1817, in which he made a plea for what he called Provincial Glossaries. He said:
“‘Provincial Glossaries’, accompanied by an explanation of the sense in which each of them still continues to be used in the districts to which they belong, would be of essential service in explaining many obscure terms in our early poets, the true meaning of which, although it may have puzzled and bewildered the most acute and learned of our Commentators, would perhaps be perfectly intelligible to a Cheshire clown.”
Wilbraham was not wrong.
“And I shal stonde him a strok stif on this flet;
Elles thou wil dight me the dom. to dele him an other, barlay,
And yet gif him respite,
A twelmonith and a day;”
In my copy of the text there is a note on the word “barlay”: “an exclamation of obscure origin and meaning.” But, where I live, it would take only one school playtime for that exclamation to lose all obscurity and to have a precise meaning, unless you wanted another black eye. It is a truce word among local children even now.
Years after my surprised reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Professor Ralph Elliott, Master of University House at the Australian National University, told me that I could be the first writer in 600 years to emerge from the same linguistic stock as the Gawain poet and to draw on the same landscape for its expression. Then I felt humbled, and, above all, responsible; responsible for both my dialects, and for their feeding. I saw, too, why little after The Tempest in English literature had said anything to me. It was an aspect of the Age of Reason that had committed the nuisance, and the nuisance was not only linguistic but social.
When the English, through Puritanism, tried to clarify their theology, they demystified the Church, and also cut themselves off from their national psyche; and a culture that wounds its psyche is in danger. The English disintegrated heart from head, and set about building a new order from materials foreign in space and time: the Classical Mediterranean. But, at the same time, they instinctively tried to grab back the supernatural. The supernatural was forbidden. It did not exist. That is the tension within Hamlet: “If only the silly boy hadn’t gone on the battlements, none of this need have happened.”
Just as I would claim that the English language benefits from the fact of having both Romance and Germanic roots, so I would claim that all language is fed from the roots that are social. But those roots were incidentally denied us by the sweep of the Puritan revolution. No distinction was made. Our folk memory was dubbed a heresy. The Ancient World was the pattern for men of letters, and the written word spoke in terms of that pattern. Education in the Humanities was education in Latin and Greek. English style came from the library, not from the land; and the effect, despite the Romantic Movement, has continued to this day.
Yet many British children share the experience of being born into one dialect and growing into another, and, since the Education Act of 1944, we have had an increased flow of ability from the working class into the Arts. The result has been singularly depressing. We discovered our riches, so long abused, and we abused them further by reacting against the precepts of discipline inherent in Classical Art as mindlessly as the Puritan revolution had suppressed our dreams.
Generally speaking, among the newly educated, the historical inability of the working class to invest time and effort without an immediate return has joined with the historical opportunism of the middle class and has produced a disdain for controlled and structured form. Excellence is not pursued. We are in a phase without direction, the heart ruling the head. It is most noticeable in theatre and in television, where surface brilliance is mistaken for substance, and verbal maundering is held to be reality. These are the wages of universal partial education. Now, to be cultured, it is enough to be vulgar. We are still reduced.
More sinister, this obscenity is creeping into all fields of expression by its gaining the trappings of propriety. The worst vandalisms are given the imprimatur of “Political Correctness”. I know nothing of this phenomenon’s rectitude, nor of its gubernation, but I see it more as “Ignorance and Uglification of English”.
The whole rationale of what was happening to a great culture, which I have done no more than touch on here, was laid before me when I read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The irony was savage. I had been educated to articulate what that education had cost. But I was fortunate. I had a lifeline. I could get back.
