On Writing: Language

 The following is from LitHub's David Milch on Language and Obscenity in Deadwood :

The language, it seemed to me, had to serve two functions. The first was to beat down the viewers’ preexisting expectation that any law would be obeyed, sentences so soaked with obscenity as to bleach out the expectation that civility could be expected to govern in any given scene. To ask the viewer to live in that emotional environment with the characters, that was the first part of it.

The second part was that I wanted to show how words generated meaning not because of any intrinsic quality but because of the context of emotional association in which they were expressed. The meaning would come from the community we build around and through the words. As the series unfolds, I wanted to show language complicating itself as one of the alternatives to statute, that people come to govern their own behavior as much through language as through law.

"Emotional environment" seems to me to be the purpose of dialog, maybe also narrative prose. I find something potent in that formulation, but even more potent I think is that we build a community with our words. I do not think this idea ever crossed my mind. Certainly not explicitly, and I need to think about whether I have this idea implicitly.

sch 9/28/22