Word power

Literary theory teaches that reality outstrips language. Not so, says Craig Raine - the best writers can describe anything

Word power


Consider the word houyhnhnms for a moment. It is a word that is never typed or written other than anxiously. Its orthography resists complacency. It opposes the virtual invisibility that overtakes the familiar.

Which is just as well, because this one word, on its own, demonstrates the power of language to equal the actual world.


Then we consider Swift's brilliant one-word encapsulation of the shuddering breath in a horse's nostrils. Or mkgnao - Joyce's more accurate word for the approximate and conventional miaow. Both words are triumphs of mimesis. Of course, you might object that neither of these words is words. Mkgnao is not a proper word, runs the objection. To which there is an answer: it is now. And so are Joyce's two sharply observed and minutely differentiated alternatives: mrkgnao and mrkrgnao. Each of which is friendlier. Language is not limited to the hobbled, hideous, trammelled practice of the average theoretician. Or even the average writer.

Another objection might be that houyhnhnms isn't exact. It is a bold equivalent. It is essentially metaphoric. The answer is the same: a natural resource of language, metaphor doesn't preclude accuracy and exactness. We know the difference between a good, accurate metaphor and a bad, inexact metaphor: the good metaphor's equivalence is incontestable. Joyce's Sllt convinces us: this is the noise the machine makes.

Let me make a parallel with dialect in literature. In an early chapter of The Bostonians, Henry James considers Ransom's Southern dialect and announces that it is not in his power by any combination of words to render Ransom's speech. In a sense, this represents a defeat for language - except that really it is only a local defeat for James's language. Kipling, though less intelligent than James, is a greater writer - at any rate, a writer more interested in capturing externals by means of words.

This is Kipling in Something of Myself: "It was necessary that every word should tell, carry, weigh, taste and, if need were, smell." Once raised to this standard - a high standard - language is likely to succeed in precise ways. Conrad is often cited by literary theoreticians as a writer who mistrusts language. As proof, they invariably cite this passage from Under Western Eyes: "The epigrammatic saying that speech has been given us for the purpose of concealing our thoughts came into his mind." In fact, this statement is a tribute to language's subtlety, not its limitations. And one should bear in mind Conrad's fervent credo in the preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus": "My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel - it is, before all, to make you see ... "

In "The First Letter" in Kipling's Just So Stories, Tegumai says to his daughter (who has written the first letter, in pictures): "It is a great invention, and some day men will call it writing. At present it is only pictures, and, as we have seen to-day, pictures are not always properly understood. But a time will come, O Babe of Tegumai, when we shall make letters - all twenty-six of 'em, - and when we shall be able to read as well as to write, and then we shall always say exactly what we mean without mistakes."

Kipling's way with words is exact and economical. James's reality is internal - the accurate accountancy of mental events. (James's expansive, wordy prose is mildly ironised in "The Elephant's Child". James appears there as the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake, telling the elephant's child that the crocodile "will permanently vitiate your future career".) Unsurprisingly, Kipling assesses the problem of dialect more shrewdly than James. In a letter of 1893, to a tyro writer, Kipling advises: "The dialect is unnecessarily misspelled. All you have to do is to give the reader a notion of the dialect. If he knows it he will read in the rest. If he does not no amount of commas and elisions will help him." He is, of course, right. Think of trying to pronounce a foreign word from its phonetic rendition in a phrase book. Exact, but unintelligible unless you already know what it sounds like.

Debra Gillett, an actress friend, was in Gorky's Vassa, translated by Tanya Alexander and Tim Suter. Even though, as our friend explained, the actors had a pronunciation chart, which they sedulously consulted, nearly all the Russian names were mispronounced by the cast. After the dress rehearsal, Mrs Alexander tried to correct the errors, but by then it was too late. The mispronunciation was unbudgeably there - in the vocal chords, the lips, the teeth and the tongues of the cast.

Dickens's renditions of Yorkshire in Nicholas Nickleby are brilliant, subtle even - to those who know the dialect. For others they are unreadable. "Hoold 'em toight, while ar coot treaces. Hang on tiv 'em sumhoo. Well deane, my lod." Or: "Hold them tight while I cut the traces. Hang on to them somehow. Well done, my lad." As it happens, I was educated in Yorkshire, so I can understand that "by, me lugs uz card terday", means "well, my ears are cold today". Or that "give us yer gowk" means "will you give me your apple core".

The isle is full of noises, says Caliban, by way of challenge. It is also full of sights. The writer's job is to use words so skilfully that what is out there - actual, but actually unseen - should be seen, fixed and preserved. Great literature allows us to quote reality. This is Seamus Heaney on the noise and feel of a spade hitting an obstacle: "The plate scrabs field-stones / and a tremor blunts in the shaft / at small come-uppances meeting / the driven edge." This is Kipling on the noise of the bell at Kyoto in Japan: "A knuckle rapped lightly on the lip of the bell - it was not more than five feet from the ground - made the great monster breathe heavily."

The real ringing is the result of a battering ram. But Kipling's evocation exposes the thinness of the given, automatic, reflexive word "ringing". His prose demonstrates vividly the power of considered alternatives: "The boom of the smitten bronze was swallowed up by the earth below and the hillside behind, so that its volume was not proportionate to the size of the bell, exactly as the men had said. An English ringer would have made thrice as much of it. But then he would have lost the crawling jar that ran through the rock-stone and pine for twenty yards round, that beat through the body of the listener and died away under his feet like the shock of a distant blasting." Crawling jar. Great literature makes reality portable. Words are a handle.

In Kipling's collected travel writings, the two volumes of From Sea to Sea , there are many modest disclaimers. On page 401: "the defilement of the pen"; "it's all beautiful and it can't be described". On page 373: "these be only feeble words." On page 328: "alas for the incompleteness of the written word." On page 106: "You will understand that these foolish tales are introduced in order to cover the fact that this pen cannot describe the glories of the Upper Geyser basin." On page 111: "neither pen nor brush could ever portray its splendours adequately." On page 317: "but all the telling you in print will never make you understand the exquisite finish ... " Faced with this anthology of reservations, any literary theoretician would claim support for the idea that language is intrinsically and inevitably inadequate to reality.

However, this last disclaimer is succeeded by this passage describing a Japanese shop, a structure so delicate "you could kick [it] in with your foot and pound [it] to matchwood with your fists." What can one say to the simplicity of Kipling's essentialism? The language isn't at all bravura, but everything is there. And that includes emptiness.

As you will discover when you read the passage, the essential thing for Kipling to describe is invisible - positive emptiness, artistic emptiness, aesthetically chosen emptiness.

It also includes the absence of imperfections: "Behold a bunnia's shop. He sells rice and chillies and dried fish and wooden scoops made of bamboo. The front of his shop is very solid. It is made of half-inch battens nailed side by side. Not one of the battens is broken; and each one is foursquare perfectly. Feeling ashamed of himself for this surly barring up of his house, he fills one-half the frontage with oiled paper stretched upon quarter-inch framing. Not a single square of oil paper has a hole in it, and not one of the squares, which in more uncivilised countries would hold a pane of glass if strong enough, is out of line."

The shopkeeper himself is an arrangement of clean colours: "And the bunnia, clothed in a blue dressing-gown, with thick white stockings on his feet, sits behind, not among his wares, on a pale gold-coloured mat of soft rice straw bound with black list at the edges. This mat is two inches thick, three feet wide and six long ... By the bunnia's side is a pouch of green leather tied with a red silk cord, holding tobacco fine cut as cotton. He fills a long black and red lacquered pipe, lights it at the charcoal of the brazier, takes two whiffs, and the pipe is empty. Still there is no speck on the mat."

This inherent artistry, extending even to smoking, is shown by Kipling to be a conscious exercise of taste: "A room floored with pale gold and roofed with panels of grained cedar. There is nothing in the room save a blood-red blanket laid out smoothly as a sheet of paper. Beyond the room is a passage of polished wood, so polished that it gives back the reflections of the white paper wall. At the end of the passage and clearly visible to this unique bunnia is a dwarfed pine two feet high in a green glazed pot, and by its side is a branch of azalea, blood-red as the blanket, set in a pale grey crackle-pot. The bunnia has put it there for his own pleasure, for the delight of his eyes, because he loves it."

The bunnia understands the poetry of arrangement. Or should that be, the arrangement of poetry? Kipling's description can also be used to account for the way space works in poetry - to isolate and highlight the individual word or the single cadence. There are, of course, larger formal satisfactions - the shape of a whole poem - which readers for content, consumers of ideas, will inevitably miss. But poetry should always provide these local intensities as well. A musical analogy: Anton Webern's Five Pieces for Orchestra, Opus 10, which takes about four minutes to play. The fourth piece is six bars long and lasts less that 25 seconds. Webern apparently told his teacher Schoenberg that he was composing "a kind of symphony. I mean a series of pieces belonging to each other." Actually, to my ear, the music is neither symphonic nor related. The sound episodes are too short for "episode" to be the right word, with its connotation of continuity. The music is more like fireworks.

Or one sip of a great wine.

Then a sip of another.

Space is a simple way of isolating each phrase.

All good poetry is Japanese in the speed at which it must be read. Poetry is slow and separate and significant. A creative director at Davidson Pearce, an advertising agency, once solemnly informed me that poetry was diametrically opposed to advertising. I contradicted him. Poetry and advertising share a method - the minimum words for the maximum impact. Less is more.

You may think that Robert Frost's colloquial pentameter subverts this notion. It does. This is how his "New Hampshire" garrulously begins: "I met a lady from the South who said / (You won't believe she said it, but she said it)." But it is precisely this subversion that provides the axiomatic intensity. Nothing is more gripping than sabotage. And Frost's relaxed speech patterns are densely focused speech acts: in that "New Hampshire" quotation, the three apparently carelessly repeated "saids" are also an act of lingering, of insisting on the presence of the speaking voice.

The line is central to poetry - a basic act of isolation, of focus, of pause, of the part asserting its equality to the whole. In poetry there is overall effect, but there are local decisions of equal importance - without which there is no overall effect. Aesthetic decisions - word arrangements, beauties, calculated uglinesses - are imperatives which have to be attended to.

Kipling's From Sea to Sea tells the legend of a Japanese emperor at the Nikko river, trying to compose the scene, feeling it lacked "a dash of colour". First, he tries "a little child in a blue and white dressing gown under the awful trees". Interrupted in his aesthetic pursuits by a beggar, the king absent-mindedly sweeps off the beggar's head with his sword. The blood spilt solves the problem and the king orders a vermilion lacquer bridge to be built. It is a purely aesthetic decision - emphasised by the king's instruction that no one is to step on this red bridge and that another utilitarian grey bridge should be built for his subjects. The imperious amoral aesthetic instinct here - displayed so candidly by Kipling - reminds me of the Jewish painter in the Lodz ghetto who could not help relishing the restricted palette of his bleak landscape and surroundings.

The aesthetic instinct is autonomous and imperious. It is also curious and tasteless. Let me explain that last adjective "tasteless": in the interests of aesthetic taste (that vermilion bridge), conventional taste, that is to say, "good" taste, with its moral dimension, has to be set aside. At least initially.

As a small child Kipling was brought up by his Indian ayah. The family house in Bombay was near the burning ghats where the dead bodies were incinerated. Vultures flapped and lolloped on the look-out for tidbits. So, one day, a child's hand was found in the family garden. The young Rudyard was forbidden by his mother to mention it. "I wanted to see that hand," he writes in his autobiography, Something of Myself.

The impulse here is cognate with Kipling's strange injunction in From Sea to Sea: "When you come to Japan, look at Farsari's hara-kiri pictures and his photos of the last crucifixion (twenty years ago) in Japan." The aesthetic cannot really afford to be squeamish. Of course, the moral will always make itself felt. Here Kipling concedes that there is "a strain of bloodthirstiness in their [Japanese] compositions". And he knows their "grim fidelity" will "make you uncomfortable".

But the same element exists in his own writing and in the writing of any good writer. Graham Greene vulgarised the idea, typically, with his insistence that every writer has a chip of ice in his heart. Which carries the suggestion of coldness. Whereas the truth is not coldness, but accuracy and inclusiveness.

The moral is always tempted to censor, occlude, to prefer what ought to be the case to what actually is the case. All good writers are Nietzschean in that sense. This is Kipling again, in Something of Myself : "(Also, by pure luck, I had sight of the first sickening uprush and vomit of iridescent coal-dusted water into the hold of a ship, a crippled iron hulk, sinking at her moorings.)" Not a thought for the owners, the loss, the insurance. "By pure luck ... " The true morality of art is its accuracy.