The Wrong Word

That day it was really very hot and humid.

Eric Ambler: The Light Of Day (1962)

describing June 15th in Athens Greece

I have lived in Athens, Greece a large part of my life. Mid June may be hot, and every ten years perhaps even very hot. But it is never humid. In fact, the opposite is true. Visitors are advised to have products that humidify their throats and lips. So while reading the book, a single word was enough for me to stop and think. At that place, in chapter one, the author had lost me. The Light Of Day is one of Eric Ambler's better books. It has won a Gold Dagger Award and it was made into the 1964 heist film Topkapi. And Mr Ambler is perhaps my favourite author. Still with one wrong word he had lost me.

In everyday life, many impossible things actually happen and when we read our newspaper we scarcely doubt that they did. In a novel we know we are reading fiction, and because we know, we must be convinced every moment that what we are told can actually happen. If the author has built his characters from real people he has met, if his characters move in an environment we think is real, if he entertains us sufficiently we forget we are reading fiction and slip into his world. But he must get all the details of the world he has built perfectly right. Remember the word humid--all it takes is one wrong word to stop reading, think, and shut the book.

Literature and Experience

There are three basic uses of language:

(a) To communicate practical and scientific information,

(b) To persuade, as in advertising and propaganda, and

(c) To communicate experience.

Each particular use of language is a combination of these three items.

When language is primarily used to communicate experience, we call it literature.

Experience may be transmitted to us through science and through literature and these two methods are not rival but complimentary. If we are to understand something fully, we really need both. To explain what I mean let me repeat the example given in Laurence Perrine's wonderful book on poetry Sound and Sense.

Let's say you wish to learn about the eagle. You open up an encyclopedia and you see what it looks like, you find out what it eats, how it hunts, how it raises its young. You may also look it up on You Tube and see how it moves. But do you know anything about the soul of an eagle? What about its power and lonely majesty in the wild grandeur of its surroundings? Now read the short poem below: