Using Language

Tonight I attended a lecture by Carol Mason who is the author of six books and a professor at the prestigious Brown University. She is currently working on a project called Bay of Angels, which is a collection of short stories and essays. She read us an essay called “Intercession of Angels”, where her reading of the story came to life. The language she used really gave the audience a sense of the characters, and the setting. I had not been read to in a long time, but I felt like I was in elementary school again and closed my eyes and just tried to picture the story. The story was about the thoughts a women named Ava had while she was in bed at the hospital waiting for. Ava’s husband was reading to her the book of saints as she was hallucinating from the drugs she was on. She was seeing weird things like her heart swinging on a pendulum to and away from God. Despite weird scenes like this, the language the author used allowed me to visualize what she was saying.

Carol Mason talked to the audience about language and where she gets her notion of language from. She said that her notion of language is charm, prayer, chant and all these come from the church. This church talk has greatly influenced her works and helps her create the vivid images and scenes that helped me create a picture in my mind of what was happening. This reminded me of Shakespeare and his play “Twelfth Night”. Shakespeare clearly uses language very carefully and switches in and out of poetic language and more common talk depending on which character is talking to who.

The play “Twelfth Night” is meant to be performed and not just read, so when I read it, I try to picture it as well. Shakespeare uses language that helps me do this. Mason said that in poetry, beauty is compulsive. I feel Shakespeare tries to capture this by making his poems within the text very compulsive. In the play Shakespeare often uses different language to distinguish status between characters. When people are speaking in more poetic form, for example when the Duke is talking or someone is talking to him, I know that this conversation is very courteous and has less actual substance. In contrast, when someone like the clown is talking to Sir Andrew and Sir Toby, he is not talking as eloquently but more is being said, and being said more bluntly. This allows myself as a reader, and the audience to see which characters are more real compared to those who are fake. It seems that the Duke’s love for Olivia is not truly real and there relationship is of no substance. The Duke may say all these beautiful things of her, but he never does actually see her.

What I got out of the talk was to be more careful to language and author uses, and what does it mean or show. Shakespeare clearly uses it to show a lot of things within and between characters, whereas Mason used it to describe vivid imagery that allows her readers to visualize what they are reading. The reason Shakespeare does not need to do this is because his play was meant to be performed.