March 12, 2008
Are banana skins actually slippery?
I was peeling a banana the other day when this question struck me with moderate force. Prima facie, the thing didn't look particularly slippery at all. So I dropped it on my kitchen floor and poked it around a bit with my foot: i.e. I tested the question as rigorously as I could without getting potassium all over my crib. My controversial finding: if anything, the banana peel provides a little bit of extra traction between foot and floor. Personally, if I should ever happen to find myself sprinting along some slick surface, I can think of at least a dozen common household objects – a CD, a playing card, the plastic wrap from a box of aspirin – that I would far less rather step on than a banana peel. Even if we confine ourselves to the arena of fruit, I'd rather step on a banana peel than, say, a bunch of grapes. Let me come right out and say it: I submit that a banana peel is not even as slippery as the peeled banana itself.
So how did the banana peel become a byword for slipperiness? At what actual moment was the cliché born? My theory is that it happened on the set of a silent movie. An object was required for some roly-poly character actor to slip over on. Given the fucked-up picture quality of those early silents, this object had to be instantly recognizable in shape. The skin of a tomato? Unquestionably hazardous, but not a visual peel. A pile of hot vomit? Supremely slippery, but incompatible with Twenties mores. Ditto a mound of dogshit. Hence the banana skin: innocent, visually distinctive, transcendent of linguistic and cultural divides – but not, when you get down to it, really that slippery at all. I suppose I could do a little research to back myself up on this, but it's way too good a theory to endanger with facts.
Stephen King revisited
I hope I didn't sound like a snob when I knocked Stephen King the other day. I tried to make it clear that I had nothing against him, only against the over-rating of his stuff. But still, I feel a need to back myself up. So in an heroic effort to be fair to the man, I have bought and read a copy of his latest, Duma Key, and I'm ready to give it a proper hearing.
Let's start with the plusses. King's prose is far from barbaric. These days that is no mean achievement. The competent use of English, even among people who call themselves writers, is now pretty much the exception rather than the rule. King's prose is always correct. Sometimes it's better than that: at one point, evoking a still body of water, he has tiny waves moving across the surface "like respiration." That's good highbrow stuff. Also he is good at dialogue, in the sense that his characters speak the way real people do. Sometimes what they have to say is wince-making - I'll get to that in a moment - but he does have a good ear for speech patterns. Again, this is not to be sneezed at. I can think of a lot of writers, including literary ones, who don't have that knack.
On this preliminary evidence alone, I have no quarrel with those who would place King at or near the pinnacle of popular writing. Some popular writers are better than others, and King is clearly one of the better ones. Consider, for purposes of comparison and rib-tickling amusement, the first sentence of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code:"Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery." I suppose if you read nothing but newspapers, your ear would detect nothing risible in Brown's method of telling you that the character in question is a renowned curator. But to the seasoned ear, the phrase sets something of a world record: four words in and you already know you've wasted your money on a piece of irony-starved hackwork. You know at once the kind of cardboardy mind you're about to spend 500 pages in the company of, assuming that you can bring yourself to go on. Watching an anti-talent like Brown at work, we can put our finger on at least one property of good writing: it gets information across in a subtle, natural, inconspicuous way. King has the ability to do this. I'm pretty confident he would never perpetrate such an amateurish cadence anywhere, let alone in a book's very first sentence.
Even so, I'm not about to join the ranks of those who deem him a "master craftsman." There's a scene in Duma Key in which the narrator, whose name is Freemantle, meets the book's other main character, whose name is Wireman. Freemantle has already built up our expectations by telling us how important Wireman's going to be, quoting examples of his folk wisdom, etc. In other words, King has set himself a daunting technical task: he has to make Wireman live up to the advance hype. He has to make the scene, and the character, super-vivid. Here's how he goes about it. He has the protagonist venture a quip - a pretty lame one, in my view. And Wireman laughs so hard that - wait for it - he breaks the chair he's sitting on. Then Freemantle, joining the laughter, falls out of his chair too. The scene rings horribly false: how often, in the real world, does the venturing of even a good witticism result in the disintegration of furniture? In a tight place, King has fallen back on the conventions of bad fiction. If we're going to hold him to the highest literary standards, we have to admit that this is pretty embarrassing stuff.
Great writers don't just write competent sentences. They take language to the next level: they create effects with it. Think of Raymond Chandler: his prose is not merely adequate, error-free. It creates an atmosphere; it helps define the character of Marlowe. King is simply not equipped to take that next step. When he tries, as in the above scene, his writing gets noticeably worse than it is the rest of the time. Far from seeing the scene or character more vividly, we suddenly see the creator's hand all over the place, working way too hard for effect and making a hash of things. (A parallel: in The Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris tries to make Hannibal Lecter extra-vivid by breaking suddenly into the present tense when describing him: "Doctor Lecter has six fingers," and so on. These moments are some of the only false notes in the book.)
Another thing about Raymond Chandler: his books are relatively brief. Duma Key is a long, long book, and not a great deal happens in it. The action has a meandering, flaccid, first-draft feel. So much of it is inessential. One wishes that King had taken a step or two back from it, looked at the big picture, and set about removing some of the extraneous material.
But what is the big picture? What is the extraneous stuff extraneous to? These questions take us to the heart of what separates literature from popular fiction. Because the truth is, Duma Key has no point. It has no thrust, no gist. It's all just story. If King has any purpose, any world view, any hard-won insights, any quarrel with the moron-riddled fabric of society, anything even mildly urgent to communicate, I certainly can't sense it. (Yes, he takes a couple of isolated jabs at George W. Bush; but it would take a brave critic to claim that the book is any kind of political document.) I've heard it suggested on the net that this is King's "divorce novel." In the limited sense that two characters in it happen to get divorced, this is true. But the novel is not about divorce. It's about a divorced guy with one arm who paints magical pictures that summon up ghouls, ghost ships, walking sand-monsters, etc. This is where the critical over-rating of King starts to irk me. There are, it is true, "literary" writers with less talent for dialogue or storytelling than King. But give them this much credit: if they attempt to write a novel about divorce, it will at least be about divorce. You might not want to read it, but it will be an honourable attempt to engage with reality. King is forever veering away from reality and into the territory of the non-existent: ghosts, telepathy, gore-streaked apparitions, etc. It's scandalous that he can keep doing this and still have certain gullible critics putting it about that he's a serious writer. The truth is, the supernatural world does not exist. It's silly subject matter, and it leads to silly writing. Like this:
"I think that Perse has a ship of her own, and once she was free of the water and completely welded to Elizabeth Eastlake's powerful child's mind, she was able to call it."
"A ship of the dead," Wireman said. His face was childlike with fear and wonder.
Or this:
"Elizabeth was just a kid. And Perse ... Perse had been asleep for a long time. Sleeping under the sand, full fathom five."
"Very poetic," Jack said, "but I don't exactly know what you're talking about."
This second exchange is telling. The response of Jack - "very poetic" - demonstrates that even King knows that this is overblown shite. Unlike Dan Brown, he does have an ear for the ridiculous. He knows better, in a sense. He can hear that guff is being talked. But he writes the stuff anyway.
My theory, for what it's worth, is that King could have been a much better writer if his mind wasn't filled, at a formative stage, by too much pulp. If he'd read better writers growing up, if he'd had better models, then his talents, which certainly exist, could have been put to far better use. As it is, he seems to be trapped inside the conventions of gothic pulp. And that's a fatal limitation.
Running out of moves
This website will soon be three years old. If I'm Homer Simpson, and if this site is my attempt to jump Springfield Gorge on a skateboard, I'd say we're nearing the critical mid-point of the leap. The initial momentum is fading, and the far lip of the gorge begins to look ... as if it's rising. As if it might be unattainable. We might still make it: but we must seriously begin to entertain that possibility that we won't.
Let's be clear about the aim of this site. The aim is to get A Dancing Bear published, in the conventional, people-reaching, forest-raping, money-making kind of way. The fact that by making the thing freely available online I have reached quite a lot of intelligent readers along the way has been an excellent consolation. Their feedback has allowed me to persuade myself, now and again, that I might not have put all my money on the wrong horse. I honestly wish I could be satisfied with that. But man does not live by feedback alone. I think I'll know success when I see it: and I haven't seen anything like it yet.
Am I being too harsh? Things have happened in the past three years - slowly. Word has kind of spread. Developments have sort of occurred. Kind readers have pointed me in very useful new directions: thanks to them, the book now has a healthy second life as an audio book at PODIOBOOKS.COM; and a fledgling existence as a LULU-PUBLISHED PAPERBACK.
But it's not enough. It's a trickle of dominos falling here and there, so slowly that you can hear each individual clack. What we really need is something seismic. In other words, we still need precisely what we needed at the beginning. We need a miracle. What form will the miracle take? I prefer, these days, not to imagine specific scenarios, lest I jinx them out of the realm of possibility. But the general idea is this: the book needs to find its way into the hands of an opinion-maker with a brain. Somebody with a bit of influence needs to find it, read it, like it, recommend it. A couple of times this has, believe it or not, been reasonably close to happening: but each time, thanks to the vagaries of fortune and/or the actions of an unscrupulous asshole, these opportunities have turned to dust. Can you believe in bad luck without also believing in good luck? I don't know. Haggard persistence strikes me as the only thing worth believing in. You may eventually get your stroke of good luck, or you may not; the only certainty is that you won't if you're not still around to receive it.
On Stephen King: why drag Dickens into it?
The jacket of Stephen King's new novel, Duma Key, is wreathed with two critical endorsements, both of which compare him to Charles Dickens. One comes from the Guardian, the other from The Times. Both, I submit, are nonsense. They illustrate a tendency that Martin Amis identified in The War Against Cliché: the tendency of certain critics to celebrate works of popular fiction as art, as a roundabout way of sticking it to far better contemporary writers, like Amis himself, whom these critics don't have the stomach or patience for, or whom they deem to be poor "storytellers". At the very least, such verdicts suggest that we're fast running out of critics who can distinguish between journeyman tale-spinning and built-to-last literary art.
I should stress that I have nothing against King's books. I enjoyed them when I was growing up. But in the years since, I've read a lot of other much better books; I've seen what actual masters of prose and dialogue and evocation can do; and I can see how limited King's work is by comparison. It was King himself who once confessed that his books were "the literary equivalent of a burger with fries." This is an excellent metaphor. There's nothing wrong with his books; they satisfy a lot of people; but it would take an unusually shameless philistine, or someone who ate nothing but burgers and fries all the time, to cite a Happy Meal as a helping of haute cuisine.
As for the comparison to Dickens in particular, I have to admit that I'm no raving fan of Dickens's prose. He got paid by the word, and it shows. But his books have several obvious virtues. For one thing, they're still being read 150 years after he wrote them. Can any serious person honestly imagine that the reader of 2158 will be reading Stephen King? That age will have its own Stephen Kings, and it's hard to see why readers will have any need for 150-year-old books about killer cars or dogs or trucks. I can't prove that they won't, but the idea that they will seems to me self-evidently absurd.
Another thing about Dickens. He was engaged with social reality, in a way that King patently isn't. There's always the moment in a King book where the supernatural intervenes. This is invariably the moment where I lose interest. Because the supernatural world doesn't exist, and I find it boring and childish to pretend that it does. You might object that Dickens used supernatural tropes - in A Christmas Carol, for example. But if Dickens's ghost story was just a ghost story, instead of a potent metaphor for a reality we can all recognise, it would have stopped resonating long ago. I suppose there will always be people ready to claim that Christine, say, is a highbrow metaphor for the rampant onrush of technology. And of course I entirely respect their views. (I use the word "respect" here in its modern sense - i.e. I don't respect their views at all.)
One final difference between King and Dickens. This one is the most glaringly obvious to my eye. Dickens, say whatever else you like about him, had an uncanny ability to draw vivid characters. Uriah Heep, Scrooge, Fagin, Little Nell. Even if you haven't read the novels they come from, you know the names. Name one King character who is spoken of in the same way - or at all. Off the top of my head I can think of only one King character - and only because he was portrayed by Jack Nicholson carrying a big axe. This has always struck me as the most obvious hallmark of non-literary fiction. It's flat, unvivid: nothing rises off the page. No characters, no phrases, no atmosphere. Nothing lodges in the memory.
I could go on, and maybe I will at some later date. But I have no particular wish to put the boot into King. I like him. I don't begrudge him his success. He makes people happy; he delivers the goods. It's just that the goods are not quite as good as some people want to claim, and to suggest that he is anywhere near as good as it gets is an act of critical irresponsibility.
Infrequently Asked Questions
1.1. Do you make any money from this site?
Does a polar bear shit in the woods?
1.2. Why do you bother?
Because if I stopped, nobody would notice.
1.3. Are you working on a new novel?
This is like asking the inventor of New Coke if he's working on a new beverage, or asking Count Zeppelin if he's working on a new type of incredibly flammable aircraft.
1.4. Why don't they make security cameras that are actually capable of recording clear images of criminals' faces?
Ask Dan Brown - he gets paid more.
1.5. Why are you constantly giving shit to Dan Brown?
Because praise of the unworthy is robbery of the deserving. The moment Dan restores the cosmic balance by transferring the bulk of his literary earnings to my bank account, I will desist.
1.6. Who's your favourite Allman brother?
Duane