On
Craftsmanship:
The Only Surviving Recording of
Virginia Woolf’s Voice
BBC London,
1937
Words, English words, are
full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out
and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields,
for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them
today — that they are so stored with other meanings, with other memories, that they have
contracted so many famous marriages in the past. The splendid word “incarnadine,” for
example — who can use it without remembering also “multitudinous seas”? In the
old days, of course, when English was a new language, writers could invent new
words and use them. Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new words — they
spring to the lips whenever we see a new sight or feel a new sensation — but we
cannot use them because the English language is old. You cannot use a brand new word in
an old language because of the very obvious yet always mysterious fact that a word is
not a single and separate entity, but part of other words. It is not a word
indeed until it is part of a sentence. Words belong to each other, although, of
course, only a great writer knows that the word “incarnadine” belongs to
“multitudinous seas.” To combine new words with old words is fatal to the
constitution of the sentence. In order to use new words properly you would have
to invent a new language; and that, though no doubt we shall come to it, is not
at the moment our business. Our business is to see what we can do with the
English language as it is. How can we combine the old words in new orders so
that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth?
That is the question.
And the person who could
answer that question would deserve whatever crown of glory the world has to
offer. Think what it would mean if you could teach, if you could learn, the art
of writing. Why, every book, every newspaper would tell the truth or create
beauty. But there is, it would appear, some obstacle in the way, some hindrance
to the teaching of words. For though at this moment at least a hundred
professors are lecturing upon the literature of the past, at least a thousand
critics are reviewing the literature of the present, and hundreds upon hundreds
of young men and women are passing examinations in English literature with the
utmost credit, still — do we write better, do we read better than we read and
wrote four hundred years ago when we were unlectured, uncriticized, untaught?
Is our Modern Georgian literature a patch on the Elizabethan? Where then are we to lay
the blame? Not on our professors; not on our reviewers, not on our writers; but
on words. It is words that are to blame. They are the wildest, freest, most
irresponsible, most unteachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them
and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words
do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. If you want proof of this,
consider how often in moments of emotion when we most need words, we find none.
Yet there is the dictionary; there at our disposal are some half-a-million
words all in alphabetical order. But can we use them? No, because words do not
live in dictionaries, they live in the mind. Look once more at the dictionary.
There beyond a doubt lie plays more splendid than ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA; poems
more lovely than the Ode to a Nightingale; novels beside which Pride
and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings of
amateurs. It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in
the right order. But we can't do it because they do not live in dictionaries;
they live in the mind. And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely,
much as human beings live, by ranging hither and thither, by falling in love,
and mating together. It is true that they are much less bound by ceremony and
convention than we are. Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry
French words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy.
Indeed, the less we enquire into the past of our dear Mother English the better
it will be for that lady’s reputation. For she has gone a-roving, a-roving fair
maid.
Thus to lay down any laws
for such irreclaimable vagabonds is worse than useless. A few trifling rules of
grammar and spelling are all the constraint we can put on them. All we can say
about them, as we peer at them over the edge of that deep, dark and only
fitfully illuminated cavern in which they live — the mind — all we can say
about them is that they seem to like people to think and to feel before they
use them, but to think and to feel not about them, but about something
different. They are highly sensitive, easily made self-conscious. They do not
like to have their purity or their impurity discussed. If you start a Society
for Pure English, they will show their resentment by starting another for
impure English — hence the unnatural violence of much modern speech; it is a
protest against the puritans. They are highly democratic, too; they believe
that one word is as good as another; uneducated words are as good as educated
words, uncultivated words as cultivated words, there are no ranks or titles in
their society. Nor do they like being lifted out on the point of a pen and
examined separately. They hang together, in sentences, in paragraphs, sometimes
for whole pages at a time. They hate being useful; they hate making money; they
hate being lectured about in public. In short, they hate anything that stamps
them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature
to change.
Perhaps that is their most striking peculiarity — their need of change.
It is because the truth they try to catch is many-sided, and they convey it by
being themselves many-sided, flashing first this way, then that. Thus they mean one
thing to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible
to one generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this
complexity (...) that they survive. Perhaps then one reason why we have no great
poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse words their liberty.
We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the meaning which makes
us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination. (...)"
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário