"Atmosphere.In.Weird.Fiction" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Clark Ashton)

Roderick Usher receives his guest;

The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The windows
were long, narrow and pointed, and at so vast a distance from the black
oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within. Feeble gleams
of encrimsonod light made their way through the trellised panes, and
served to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects
around; the eyes, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles
of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling. Dark
draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniture was profuse,
comfortless, antique and tattered. Many books and musical instruments
lay scattered about, but failed to lend any vitality to the scene. I
felt I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep and
irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all.


Note here the carefully built impression of spaciousness combined with gloom and
confinement, of lifeless and uncomforting luxury. Through the choice and
emphasis of material details, an air of spiritual oppression is created, and the
idea of a mysterious and monstrous unity between the building and its
hypochondriacal owner is cautiously foreshadowed. I have italicized two
sentences in which I seem to find a very subtle congruity between the actual
sound of the words and their sense. In the first, the frequent repetition of the
consonants r, s, fs and t somehow emphasizes the image of "profuse" furniture;
and the sharp dentals and sibilants add to the impression of things time- eaten
and "comfortless." In the last sentence, the repeated letters, n, r, d, l, m,
and v, are all of a heavy or deep-sounding character, giving, with the long,
close and sonorous vowels, a hollow and funeral clang that echoes the meaning.
Here, too, the very movement of the sentence is like the dropping of a pall.

From certain of Poe's tales and prose-poems, such as The Masque of the
Red Death, Silence and Shadow, one can select even more obvious and overt
effects of atmospheric color supplemented by sound and rhythm. For illustration,
I shall quote a single sentence from the prose-poem, Silence, and leave its
analysis to the reader: "And overhead, with a rustling and loud noise, the grey
clouds rush westwardly forever, until they roll, a cataract, over the fiery wall
of the horizon."

From such instances as these, it will be seen how large a portion of the
atmospheric elements in writing can sometimes be contributed by the mere sound
of words apart from their meaning. The values implied are vaguely akin to those
of music; and it should be obvious that really fine prose cannot be written
without an ear for pitch, tone, movement and cadence.

[Originally from: Amateur Correspondent , November-December 1937. This version
from: Planets and Dimensions, Ed. Charles K Wolfe. Mirage Press 1973.]