Even As We Speak
“Ideally, I think, any kind of sentence, at any level of ambition, should obey the rule of never needing to be read again to get the sense. If it can obey that rule – which is the rule of speech – then it is more likely to invite being read again to get more of its meaning. But there is still a difference between prose written to be read and prose written to be read out. Prose designed in the first instance to be spoken will tend to be much more linear in construction, and thus susceptible to – ...because more tolerant of – rhetorical tricks. For the pieces reproduced in this section, I don’t claim the title of oratory, but I do hope to avoid the accusation of rhetoric. One of them is a television script, on the subject of Hamlet, whose hero warned about the negative effects of sawing the air with one’s hand. It is a piece I might have reproduced earlier, but thought to leave aside because at the time I still believed there were no exceptions to the rule that words written to pictures could not survive being melted out of the amalgam.MoreLess
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