ogingat:

nostalgebraist:

What I mean is that it is possible to expand the definition of “cliche” so far that one is no longer comfortable saying anything in an ordinary way.  This results in artificially “innovative” prose, where conventional turns of phrase are neurotically avoided even if their replacements aren’t any more informative or aesthetically worthwhile.

Here is a passage from page 2 of Busy Monsters:

From Gillian’s pictures and videos I knew this vulgarian was a colossus of a gent whose voice and testicular presence could hush the human flotsam in any riled-up room.  Furthermore, he had a face so uglified by his parents’ DNA that it recalled a clay-shaping exercise gone heinously wrong.  Left eye like the oblong knot in a plank of pine.  The kind of guy who eats a tomato like an apple.  A disposition downright redneck.  I’ve known fevered men like Marvin: they get a certain idea in their noggins or, worse yet, a funny feeling in their hearts, and nothing on earth can deter them from their channel.  They go agog with havoc, get off on outlawry.

This strikes me as bad writing, and in particular it makes me feel like the writer is straining desperately to say absolutely everything in a novel, eye-popping, exciting! new! way! even at the cost of texture, cadence, readability, etc.  It isn’t quite right to say that the problem with this passage is that it “isn’t cliched enough,” but I do think the problem with it is that the author is trying too hard to avoid cliche and overshooting the mark.  (If there were such a thing as “not cliched enough,” this would be it.)

Compare this to the famous opening paragraph of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle:

My name is Mary Catherine Blackwood.  I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance.  I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both of my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had.  I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise.  I like my sister Constance, and Richard Platagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cap mushroom.  Everyone else in my family is dead.

I think this is a great opening – immediately establishes a distinctive voice, engages the reader by immediately raising a number of questions, has an understated and charming sense of humor, flows in a natural and enjoyable way (compare to Giraldi’s awkward stop-and-go crashing about), etc.  But this is all a function of the way the passage works at the sentence-and-above level; you can’t pick out individual word or phrase choices and say “sick phrasing, bro!” the way you can with Giraldi (”testicular presence,” “hush the human flotsam,” ”uglified,” “a disposition downright redneck” … )  There aren’t any of those kind of flashy bits that stick out from the page like little jewels.  There’s just a paragraph of good writing.

Of course, it would be strange to call the Jackson passage “cliched,” since it surely isn’t.  But it has the kind of superficial mundanity that people like Giraldi avoid at all costs.  And yet it’s good, where Giraldi isn’t.

I don’t think either of those are great. In particular, the second one doesn’t have a “distinctive” voice at all, and it’s difficult for me to see how the “control” is “deft”. Easy to deftly do nothing. But let’s compare like to like. Busy Monsters (which I’ve never read) starts out like this: “Stunned by love and some would say stupid from too much sex, I decided I had to drive down South to kill a man.” Isn’t that a neat little sentence? Don’t you think it establishes a distinctive voice? No big words or anything!

By the way, I know a guy who talks almost exactly like that other excerpt you posted and was immediately struck by the similarity. Maybe you don’t know a guy like this, but there’s a certain kind of folksy American twang that also involves big words thrown in at inopportune moments, and he’s getting it quite right. There is a real literary tradition of allowing yourself to write like a stupid hick who speaks in beautiful bullshit, by the way, maybe exemplified best by A Confederacy of Dunces. Of course it might not be purposeful, but whenever something is written first-personally, I find it’s best to start from the assumption that the voice is constructed, if not contrived, and possibly referential in some way.

As for the Jackson bit, it’s clearly meant to be exciting and eye-popping in its own way. The superficial mundanity - not just superficial, I don’t think! - just lulls you in for the reveal at the end of the paragraph. Real screamer tactic; I’m not a fan at all.

The problem here is that selective quotation isn’t a good tool for what I’m trying to show, but there’s no way to do more besides just saying “read the book.”  Merricat Blackwood’s voice is very distinctive (and this is one of the features of the book most commonly remarked upon in reviews and the like), but I know that from reading 200 pages of that voice, not one paragraph.  Plenty of features of the voice are apparent in the paragraph I quoted – I would say there’s a lot more going on there than just a setup for a reveal – but that may be mostly clear in retrospect.  For a discussion of Merricat’s voice and some of the interesting features of the first paragraph, I recommend this review.

(I apologize if you’ve read the book – I’m inferring from the phrasing of your post that you haven’t but I could be misreading)

Maybe I shouldn’t have quoted to begin with, or should only have quoted Giraldi.  My point is that the small-scale elements in Giraldi are so flashy that it makes it hard for him to control the effects on larger scales; every phrase he writes is remarkable, every paragraph a muddled mess.  But of course that is my own judgment, and taste varies.  (Busy Monsters didn’t get very good reviews, but at the very least I’m sure Giraldi himself wouldn’t endorse these judgments of his writing, so there’s at least one person who likes this stuff.)

I’ve read A Confederacy of Dunces but TBH I don’t see the connection at all.  Toole’s prose is much, much less flashy, and the sections “written by” Ignatius are flashy but in a very different way, much more parodic of the character rather than aiming straightforwardly for greatness the way Giraldi does.

(via ogingat-deactivated20150801)