On Looking Funny
Above all, Wodehouse is known for inventing wildly creative, truly unprecedented imagery. How does one even introduce a literary feat of such electricity as the Wodehousian image? Novelist Tom Sharpe was getting the fork pretty close to the socket in Plum, a BBC documentary on Wodehouse, when he said that “you can never write a simile in a comic novel without being aware that it’s been done better…I mean, Wodehouse more or less killed them.”
Aside from an otherworldly writing routine and an exceedingly powerful imagination, Wodehouse had a masterful command of what has been defined as The Four Master Tropes. These Master Tropes have been deemed as playing the central role in the organization of entire systems of thought and therefore much of the literary sense. They are metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. And, the long and short of the matter is that these tropes divide language, and therefore its product, imagery, into two corresponding parts: what is literally said and what is meant. For the purposes of imagery, we shall endeavor upon three of these four.
Let us start with the two that you do not know. What are metonymy and synecdoche? Simply, synecdoche is a construction in which the writer creates an image that substitutes a part for a whole or whole for a part. This can be understood through common cliches, such as when we call a smart person a “brain,” or a substitute on the football field “fresh legs.” For metonymy, perhaps it is best to refer directly to Wodehouse.
In Young Men in Spats, Wodehouse begins each story as a retrospective yarn. The book begins with “It was the hour of the morning snifter, and a little group of Eggs and Beans and Crumpets had assembled in the smoking room of the Drones Club to do a bit of inhaling.” Whereupon a “glassy-eyed silence…was broken by one of the Crumpets…then a Bean spoke…” then, an “Egg wistfully” sighed. In his short story “The Smile that Wins,” from the collection Mulliner Nights, Wodehouse employs the same tactic, referring to the patrons “in the bar-parlor of the Angler’s Rest” this time not as each element of the full English Breakfast, rather as the adult beverage of his choice. The conversation plays out with this general sentiment: “…said a Pint of Stout, vehemently…insisted a Whisky Sour…demanded a Mild and Bitter.” This is metonymy: a kind of substitution of the name of an attribute or an adjunct for the name of the thing meant.
Needless to say, Eggs, Beans, and Crumpets do not allude only to a full English breakfast—the Pint of Stout, Whisky Sour, and Mild and Bitter not only to poison picked; the discrete elements of the ample breakfast and sundry beverages are the literal image, but the implied association is the appearance of someone, or “type” of person, who might likely enjoy that element of breakfast or that breed of tipple, and, in this way, embody what the each element of food or drink might represent—and perhaps even look like it. And that’s dashed close to anthropomorphism.
In Leave it to Psmith, Psmith’s use of this tactic, whenever describing an event to which he endeavored to bring great weight, was frequent. The husband after being frustrated by a controlling wife: “…a deep masculine silence fell.” A perfectly lazy, midsummer’s dream of an afternoon on the estate: “Blandings Castle dozed in the midsummer heat…” and, as a magnanimous king, “Silence reigned.” Then, at night, “the smooth terrace slept under the stars,” during which the burglary of Lady Constance’s pearl necklace was taking place. Having hid the necklace in a flowerpot to be later retrieved in safety, Eve, the heroine of this novel, now looks upon a flowerpot bereft of that same necklace, and “the flower-pot seemed the leer up at her in mockery.”
At the risk of patronizing readers, I shall now note that similes are a sub-species of metaphor. Similes make implicit comparisons by designating the language of something to something else and use words like, as if, and as though; and one may achieve the same effect through submerged similes, which omit these words through originally fashioned comparative language. And the complete substitution of a word, image, or idea for another, based on an implied resemblance or analogy, is a metaphor.
Metaphors can help one see the unseeable, speak with the unknowable, and make sense of pure shadow. Unlike its cousin, the pun, metaphor is neither an immediate plea to reason nor a result of calculation; metaphor takes counsel from the eternal architypes, summoning the intuition to experience a genuine likeness as if by intravenous. These express comparisons aid one to see everything as a reminder of something else and how the particular characterizes the universal. Indeed, like dreams, metaphors leave impressions of truths that awake the unconscious in a subtly profound way. And, through the employment of surprising juxtapositions of hitherto seemingly unrelated things, the metaphor and the joke have always been firm psychological friends.
As a fact, each and every time one encounters any of Wodehouse’s hundreds of catalysts for comparison, which occur on nearly every page, one witnesses an image blowing out the other side that tests the limits of one’s VO2 Max. One could analyze the Wodehousian Image to death, but this method of analysis on the humorous image, though aboveboard enough, often lobs something of a wet sock into the proceedings. Too much theory to the imagination is like putting one’s lips to the garden hose on a hot day and never taking them off. It kills what was a good thing. Indeed, what is needed is a church of examples, and I, for one, believe it to be better form to take them in and grease up the hassock for genuflection.
Images
Piccadilly Jim : “Mr Pett, on his side, receiving her cold glance squarely between the eyes, felt as if he were being disemboweled by a clumsy amateur.”
“Fate”: “…said Mavis, in a voice which would have left an Eskimo slapping his ribs and calling for the steam-heat…”
Ukridge : “He resembled a minor prophet who has been hit behind the ear with a stuffed eel-skin.”
Ukridge : To hear this dignitary addressed—and in a shout at that—as “old horse” affected me with much the same sense of imminent chaos as would afflict a devout young curate if he saw his bishop slapped on the back.
“Bill The Bloodhound”: If you would have asked him (sic) he would have said that he was a Scotch business man. As a matter of fact, he looked far more like a motor-car coming through a haystack.
“Bill The Bloodhound”: That is to say, he felt like a cat which has strayed into a strange, hostile back-yard.
Leave It to Psmith : “drooping like a wet sock, as was his habit when he had nothing to prop his spine against…”
Joy in the Morning : “She came leaping towards me, like Lady Macbeth coming to get first-hand news from the guest room.”
The Luck of the Bodkins : “Reggie looked like a member of the Black Hand trying to plot assassinations while hampered by a painful gumboil.”
Jeeves in the Offing : “When she spoke, it was with the mildness of a cushat dove addressing another cushat dove from whom it was hoping to borrow money.
“Jeeves and the Impending Doom”: The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say ‘When!’
