Oct 31 2008
Words words words!
You can probably tell, from my various posts about language books, that I’m into words in a seriously major way. I read them, I write them, I’m fascinated by them. As I read, they sink into my brain, and as I write, I look for the best ones, to express what I want to say.
The two things are like a big feedback loop: as I read the marvelous ways that people express things, I learn new ways to say things myself. Sometimes I run into books that force me to flee to a dictionary, because there are words there that I’ve never seen before, and I love it! Whether or not I love the story in other ways, I love it for making me expand my vocabulary.
The two writers who spring to mind when I think of that phenomenon are Mervyn Peake and Stephen R. Donaldson. Peake wrote the Gormenghast books, while Donaldson has written, among other things, the eight (so far) Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.
Peake didn’t make me run to the dictionary quite as much as Donaldson (though there were times…), but the way he used language enthralled me. Take this paragraph, for example:
Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping earth, each one half way over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.
Still gives me goosebumps now. And even in that paragraph I’d have had to look up the word “circumfusion.” (Which means, by the way, pouring or diffusing around, or spreading.)
In Donaldson’s books, I sought the dictionary at various times to look up words like orison (a prayer; related to “oration” and “oratorio”), inchoate (imperfectly formed or developed), and chiaroscuro (the arrangement of light and dark parts in a work of art).
I can forgive a lot of other flaws in a piece of writing if it intrigues me enough to make me run to the dictionary and learn new words. I’ve been a reader for long enough, now, that it doesn’t happen very much any more. In fact, it’s so rare that the last time it happened in a big way was in fact with Peake and Donaldson, when I was in my late twenties. I’ve gotten only the occasional flicker since then.
This is why I reread their books once in a while, all these years later. To remind me of the wonder of words.
The joy of discovering new words!
I read Peake when I was 16-17 (I was nearly through the first volume when my 17th birthday came round), and I was amazed at the denseness, the richness of the language. Reading those pages was like being smothered in the most intricate, enveloping folds of ornate, even baroque silks & brocades. And of course the characters, and Peake’s illustrations, only added to the sensation. Very seldom have I come across such a fully-realized, unique, individual literary universe as Gormenghast. He engaged all the senses, and his use of language evoked the spirit of the place perfectly: immense, terribly old, grotesque, claustrophobic, weighted with ritual & history & memory.
I have got to go back & reread it soon.
That was why I never did like “Titus Alone,” the third book. It just seemed so…thin…compared to the first two. When I go back to reread, I generally just read “Titus Groan” and “Gormenghast,” and don’t often even try to read the third book.
That seems to be the consensus — although from what I’ve read, Peake expected to write several more volumes about Titus, without ever returning to Gormenghast. Whether that would have worked or not, it’s hard to say — but Gormenghast itself is such a main character in thosoe first two columes, it’s difficult to see the story continuing without it.
In any case, the brain disease that was destroying his ability to create while writng “Titus Alone” robbed us of the chance to find out either way. The fact that he continued to work on it, even while aware that he was dying & his mind was fading, is downright heroic. And I do get glimpse of what he intended with “Titus Alone” — I think he counted on the shock of such a different setting making the reader break out of the intricate, encompassing, but always fascinating confines of Gormenghast, just as Titus had …
For a similar jolt, try reading M. John Harrison’s “The Pastel City.” It stands on its own as a wonderful short novel of a dying, baroque far future — but the subsequent novels & short stories in the series go in some very strange, upsetting directions, with the express purpose of distancing the reader from the Romantic gloom & glamor of the original novel. (Also note how Harrison anticipates the lightsaber several years before “Star Wars” came along.)