Certainly people do not seem less interested in success and its accoutrements now than formerly. Summer homes, European travel, BMWs — the locations, place names and name brands may change, but such items do not seem less in demand today than a decade or two years ago. What has happened is that people cannot own up to their dreams, as easily and openly as once they could, lest they be thought pushing, acquisitive, vulgar. Instead we are treated to fine pjaarisaicalspectacles, which now more than ever seem in ample supply: the revolutionary lawyer quartered in the $250,000 Manhattan condominium; the critic of American materialism with a Southampton summer home; the publisher of radical books who takes his meals in three-star restaurants; the journalist advocating participatory democracy in all phases of life, whose own children are enrolled in private schools. For such people and many more perhaps not so egregious, the proper formulation is, «Succeed at all costs but refrain from appearing ambitious».
The attacks on ambition are many and come from various angles; its public defenders are few and unimpressive, where they are not extremely unattractive. As a result, the support for ambition as a healthy impulse, a quality to be admired and inculcated in die young, is probably lower than it has ever been in the United States. This does not mean that ambition is at an end, that people no longer feel its stirrings and promptings, but only that, no longer openly honored, it is less often openly professed. Consequences follow from this, of course, some of which are that ambition is driven underground, or made sly, or perverse. It can also be forced into vulgarity, as witness the blatant pratings of its contemporary promoters. Such, then, is the way things stand: on die left angry critics, on the right obtuse supporters, and in the middle, as usual, the majority of earnest people trying to get on in life.
Many people are naturally distrustful of ambition, feeling that it represents something intractable in human nature. Thus John Dean entitled his book about his involvement in the Watergate affair during the Nixon administration Blind Ambition, as if ambition were to blame for his ignoble actions, and not the constellation of qualities that make up his rather shabby character. Ambition, it must once again be underscored, is morally a two-sided street. Place next to John Dean Andrew Carnegie, who, among other philanthropic acts, bought the library of Lord Acton, at a time when Acton was in financial distress, and assigned its custodianship to Acton, who never was told who his benefactor was. Need much more be said on the subject than that, important though ambition is, there are some things that one must not sacrifice to it?
But going at things the other way, sacrificing ambition so as to guard against its potential excesses, is to go at things wrongly. To discourage ambition is to discourage dreams of grandeur and greatness. All men and women are born, live, suffer, and die; what distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, whether they be dreams about worldly or unworldly things, and what we do to make them come about.
It may seem an exaggeration to say that ambition is the linchpin of society, holding many of its disparate elements together, but it is not an exaggeration by much. Remove ambition and the essential elements of society seem to fly apart. Ambition, as opposed to mere fantasizing about desires, implies work and discipline to achieve goals, personal and social, of a kind society cannot survive without. Ambition is intimately connected with family, for men and women not only work partly for their families; husbands and wives are often ambitious for each other, but harbor some of their most ardent ambitions for their children. Yet to have a family nowadays — with birth control readily available, and inflation a good economic argument against having children — is nearly an expression of ambition in itself. Finally, though ambition was once the domain chiefly of monarchs and aristocrats, it has, in more recent times, increasingly become the domain of the middle classes. Ambition and futurity—a sense of building for tomorrow — are inextricable. Working, saving, planning — these, the daily aspects of ambition — have always been the distinguishing marks of a rising middle class. The attack against ambition is not incidentally an attack on the middle class and what it stands for. Like it or not, the middle class has done much of society’s work in America; and it, the middle class, has from the beginning run on ambition.
It is not difficult to imagine a world shorn of ambition. It would probably be a kinder world: without demands, without abrasions, without disappointments. People would have time for reflection. Such work as they did would not be for themselves but for the collectivity. Competition would never enter in. Conflict would be eliminated, tension become a thing of the past. The stress of creation would be at an end. Art would no longer be troubling, but purely celebratory in its functions. The family would become superfluous as a social unit, with all its former power for bringing about neurosis drained away. Longevity would be increased, for fewer people would die of heart attack or stroke caused by tumultuous endeavor. Anxiety would be extinct. Time would stretch on and on, with ambition long departed from the human heart.
Ah, how unrelievedly boring life would be!
There is a strong view that holds that success is a myth, and ambition therefore a sham. Does this mean that success does not really exist? That achievement is at bottom empty? That the efforts of men and women are of no significance alongside the force of movements and events? Now not all success, obviously, is worth esteeming, nor all ambition worth cultivating. Which are and which are not is something one soon enough learns on one’s own. But even the most cynical secretly admit that success exists; that achievement counts for a great deal; and that the true myth is that the actions of men and women are useless. To believe otherwise is to take on a point of view that is likely to be deranging. It is, in its implications, to remove all motive for competence, interest in attainment, and regard for posterity.
We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, the country of our birth or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing . We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time or conditions of our death. But within all this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we shall live: courageously or in cowardice, honorably or dishonorably, with purpose or in drift. We decide what is important and what is trivial in life. We decide that what makes us significant is either what we do or what we refuse to do. But no matter how indifferent the universe may be to our choices and decisions, these choices and decisions are ours to make. We decide. We choose. And as we decide and choose, so are our lives formed. In the end, forming our own destiny is what ambition is about.
Exploring Ideas and Questions for Discussion
1. What is the most characteristic sentence pattern for essays (simple or composite in structure, affirmative or interrogative in communicative purpose, short or lengthy sentences)? Why?
2. Explain the meaning of the contrast of a simple sentence to a group of lengthy composite sentences. Find examples of such patterns and interptrete them in both essays.
3. Find examples of syntactic repetition (parallel constructions) in essays. Expand on their semantic role in expressing the main idea.
4. Find examples of intensification synonyms (groups of synonyms with the connotation of intensity in their structure) and comment on their semantic function.
5. Find as many as possible emphatic constructions, characterise their types and specify their semantic role in the expression of the author’s idea.
6. In what way is the essayist’s idiosyncrasy expressed?
Особенности синтаксического ритма эссе
Жанр эссе с трудом поддается определению. Рассуждение на определенную тему — вот, пожалуй, и все, что выражает сущность любого эссе. Но насколько разным может быть это рассуждение — и воспоминания из далекого детства, и попытка классификации какого-либо явления, и просто эмоциональный рассказ о случае из жизни, может быть, с оттенком назидательности. Сегодня этот жанр является довольно популярным, вы можете найти эссе на самые разнообразные темы в любом англоязычном журнале.
Известный американский эссеист Эдвард Хоугленд, рассуждая об истории и отличиях эссе от журнальной и газетной статьи, короткого рассказа, автобиографии, характеризует эссе как разговор человека с человеком, «разговор ума с умом» (mind speaking to mind), в котором особенно ярко проявляется индивидуальность, оригинальность, идиосинкразия (греч. idios (своеобразный) + synkrasis (смешение)) автора (3).
Нашей задачей является попытка выявления лексико-грамматических особенностей литературного жанра эссе. Кажется, что основное его своеобразие заключается в синтаксических особенностях, особом синтаксическом ритме, который, с одной стороны, индивидуален для авторского рассуждения, и, с другой стороны, является характерным для большинства эссе. «Разговор человека с человеком» всегда характеризуется манерой общения. Как же общаются с читателями эссеисты?
Исследование особенностей синтаксиса современного эссе показало, что его тексты изобилуют чертами, специфическими для публичной речи — различными видами эмфатических конструкций, вопросительными предложениями (риторическими вопросами), параллельными конструкциями, многочисленными повторениями. Экспрессивность языка эссе достигается также употреблением сравнительных конструкций, метафор, эпитетов. Использование всех указанных лексико-синтаксических средств направлено на повышение выразительности стиля эссе, на привлечение читательского внимания к точке зрения автора на ту или иную тему.
Так, эссе У. Ф. Томпсона «Why Don’t the Scientists Admit They’re Human?» (4) читается на одном дыхании благодаря множеству вопросов, на которые сам автор весьма выразительно отвечает, и риторических вопросов, на которые ответ не требуется. Не будет преувеличением сказать, что почти каждый абзац эссе содержит вопрос, являющийся его семантическим центром, т.е. выражающий ключевую идею абзаца. Само эссе начинается с вопроса: «Did you ever read a scientific paper that begins, «For no good reason at all I had a hunch that…» or «I was just fooling around one day when…?» No, sir! Далее вопросы следуют один за другим, помогая разворачивать перед читателем образ рассуждения писателя:
…how are we to divine that in a vast majority of moments when he is not writing the scientist is a genial, sensible, rather humble man? (3-й абзац, всего в эссе 21 абзац).
Is it any wonder that in the popular literature the scientist often appears as a hybrid superman-spoiled child? (4)
Dare the local schoolteacher depart from the stereotype imposed by tradition? (6)
Did Fleming report anything that happened according to plan? (7)
What was the mold and how did it kill? (8)
What kept them (planets) in place? Why didn’t they fall out of the sky? (11)
How many men would have considered the possibility of an apple falling up into the tree? (12)
Еще одним приемом автора является применение усилительных конструкций с употреблением вспомогательных глаголов, позволяющих ярче подчеркнуть ту или иную идею. Часто такое усиление комбинируется с изменением обычного места обстоятельства частотности действия — оно выдвигается на первое место в предложении:
Seldom does a trace of anything haphazard, anything human, appear in published reports of research experiments.
This paragraph is far from a literary masterpiece, but it does illustrate a straightforwardness which is infrequently present in scientific writing.
Эссе Томпсона об ученых практически все написано сложными предложениями. На их фоне контрастное употребление серии простых предложений или одного простого предложения служит еще одним синтаксическим фактором выделения авторской мысли. Посмотрим, как это происходит в двенадцатом абзаце эссе:
How many men would have considerded the possibility of an apple falling up into the tree? Newton did because he was not trying to predict anything. He was just wondering. His mind was ready for the unpredictable. Unpredictability is part of the essential nature of research. If you don’t have unpredictable things, you don’t have research. Scientists tend to forget this when writing their cut and dry reports for the technical journals, but history is filled with examples of it.
Употребление параллельных конструкций — еще один вид усиления авторской мысли, они как бы выполняют функцию синонимов, обрисовывая разные грани описываемого явления. У Томпсона параллельно употребляются как придаточные, так и простые предложения:
No, I mean the man who doesn’t conform, who doesn’t always think the way most of us are thinking, who doesn’t always act the way most of us are acting.
This imaginary person does not quite belong to the same species as other human beings; he lives in a different world; he thinks in a different way.
Если у Томпсона синтаксические параллелизмы встречаются лишь изредка, то у Джудит Вьорст в эссе «Friends, Good Friends — and Such Good Friends» они являются ключевыми, могут занимать целые абзацы. Они — главный привлекающий внимание элемент, с одной стороны, а с другой — основное детализирующее, описательное средство (5).
We all have a friend who knew us when… our family lived in that three-room flat in Brooklyn, when our dad was out of work for seven months, when our brother Allie got in that fight where they hah to call the police, when our sister married the endodontist from Yonkers and when, the morning after we lost our virginity, she was the first, the only, we told.
В эссе, занимающем около трех страниц, насчитывается девять параллельных конструкций, большая часть которых растягивается на целый абзац. Некоторые параллелизмы содержат в себе градацию — постепенное увеличение описываемого качества. Как раз такой прием интенсификации содержит в себе один из заключительных абзацев эссе: