AND IN THIS CORNER, REPRESENTING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE....

As its title suggests, Tom Stoppard's 1982 play The Real Thing concerns that which is authentic or true, that which is mere semblance or illusion, and the gray area in between. (If you've seen the film Shakespeare in Love, which Stoppard wrote with Marc Norman, you'll already have witnessed his obsession with the tension between art/artifice and reality; it merges playfully throughout the movie, from the gender-switching heroine all the way to the question of whether Christopher Marlowe really conceived Shakespeare's plays.)

As writers long before Stoppard have recognized (I'm thinking of George Orwell here, but there are myriads of examples), language can be force for both truth and falsehood, so it's not surprising that The Real Thing speaks directly on that theme, as well as expressing it indirectly through a series of literary tricks, deceptions, and double entendres. At one point Henry, the playwright protagonist, says the following about Brodie, a anti-nuclear protester:

He's a lout with language....Words don't deserve that kind of malarkey. They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good anymore, and Brodie knocks their corners off. I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.

So much of that passage resonates for me (and all of it, of course, is beautifully written). I particularly love the image of words getting their "corners knocked off," and the insistence that their precise use is not mere pedantry but rather a way of building "bridges across incomprehension and chaos." It's a worthwhile reminder that as writers, the power of our work necessarily rests on the precision and power with which we use words, and language generally. It's tempting to be careless with our word choice or unconscious about our diction. But great writers don't work that way. They use words as precisely as, say, Mozart uses musical notes: so that each and every one rings true.

Click here for an nice interview from the British Guardian in which Stoppard discusses this and other issues.