The Questionable Power of Language

I don't normally talk about writing. I think about it all the time. It's always on the back burner and pops up to the foreground probably more often than any employer would like. But I feel that talking about it is not doing it. I'd rather do it.

But a phrase came out of a recent workshop that stuck with me. In a critique of a story, one of the members said, "The story is the language [of the story]."

I think this is fiction writing's equivalent to Marshall McLuhan's, "The medium is the message." Which, I think, is an updated representation of Antonin Artaud's "Theater of Images".

Certainly, prose is the road on which a story rides. It is the enabling technology by which a story is represented to the reader. The prose must be strong enough to carry what the author wants to communicate to the reader: theme, characters, morality, whatever. But to make the prose the sole representation of that information puts more weight on language than it can bear.

Language is a coded medium. That is to say, unlike pictures or recordings, language does not directly convey imagery to the recipient; languages symbolizes it. Not to say that pictures and film and music and other things don't carry symbolic information. Of course, they do. But a picture is not a word and can never be a word. Therefore, language must cause the reader (or hearer) to create the image for themselves. Prose is the code but, like all good codes, the recipient must carry enough information to decode it.

For my own part, I can admire beautiful prose but often I also find it annoying. When I read a work of fiction, I'm interested in the characters, the plot, the narrative-- all those intangible things I must create from the coded medium of a story. One of the reasons protestant churches are often so plain is to not present a distraction from the goal: to become one with God. Similarly, admiring the fresco of the prose shouldn't interfere with my engagement with the divine within. To put it a different way: I love the sound and texture of Yoyo Ma's cello playing but where would he be without Bach?

Prose is also part fashion. We're in a nihilistic, post-modern period now. We don't read much. Many writers are not being read outside of academia: William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway , Zora Neale Hearst, and my favorite, John Dos Passos. Especially, John Dos Passos. Much of the material of Faulkner and Hemingway is at least still in print-- though without college courses and the resultant post-college culture, I think they would fade. Black Studies, thankfully, keeps Hearst's material alive. It's discouraging to consider list of works Dos Passos wrote and what's now available.

But what does keep them alive in the culture is not their fantastic prose but the stories that fantastic prose conveyed.