The next great American novel

A couple of days ago, I ran across (again) a book called It was a dark and stormy night: The best (?) from the Bulwer-Lytton contest (Scott Rice, compiler, 1984), which is actually the first of five “dark and stormy” compilations, as the Bulwer-Lytton contest is held annually and thus continually creates new entries. The title, immortalized by Snoopy in the “Peanuts” comic strip, is the first line of Paul Clifford, one of the more than 150 books (most of them pot-boiler novels) written by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), and is taken as exemplifying a particularly bad opening sentence for a book (to begin with, nights are dark by definition, so the word is redundant). The contestants are invited to “compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels” (or the worst of all possible opening sentences). Hence, obviously, the question mark after “best” in the subtitle—i.e., the best of the worst.

The entries are, of course, parody, but the subject of bad writing is interesting in itself. Generally, there are two sorts of bad writing: that written by bad writers who think they’re writing well (among whom we assume Bulwer-Lytton himself falls), and that written, like the contest entries, by writers, arguably more or less good, who are deliberately trying to write badly. Moreover, the whole question of value judgments embroils one in the murky swamps of literary criticism and tastes, in which it is instructive to learn that B-L himself was very popular in his heyday and therefore evidently not then considered a bad writer, or at least not by the literary rabble who themselves had bad taste in reading. (See, the style is treacherously easy to fall into inadvertently if you’re not careful, which I almost never am.)

It is surprisingly difficult to write badly well; it takes a certain sort of good writer—a parodist, obviously, but good parody is itself surprisingly difficult. (Incidentally, my favorite “newspaper” is The Onion. For the cognoscenti, nuff said.) Parodic opening sentences may be one feat, but entire novels written in parody are quite another. A Google search shows that there are actually quite a number of them, parodying various genres of “serious” writing. Perhaps the easiest to parody is the romance novel, which for most people of any taste is almost a self-parody to begin with.

So, why am I mentioning all this? Because, as the preternaturally prescient of those among my readers have doubtless surmised by now (I love doing this), the next great American novel will be written by none other than le grande moi. And by what appellation will this monumental epic of love and adventure and silliness be identified? A search of the Library of Congress database reveals, to my astonished surprise, that they have no publication on file entitled Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana. How could such an obvious title have escaped exploitation for yea e’er so long? The line has been attributed originally to that great master of comedy, Groucho Marx, and has long been one of my favorites. Naturally it has nothing whatever to do with the subject of my masterpiece, whatever that may be. After all, to begin with, writers are supposed to write about what they know from experience, and I have had practically no experience in either love or adventure, though a great deal in silliness. But I should probably count myself among the first class of bad writers, i.e., those who think they’re writing well, and now I must try to carve my niche among the second class by writing badly deliberately rather than carelessly.

Ah, the throes of creative agony! Oh, the agony of creative throes!! Alas, the agonizing throe-ups of creativity!!! And what stunning cast of dramatis personae will populate this dazzling saga? Well, I’m thinking of people with names like Shirley Knott, Lance Boyle, a cook named Jasmine Rice (who, while working in the kitchen, sings things like “I lost my sugar in Salt Lake City, But my pepper grinder still does the doo-wah-ditty”), a priest named Benedict Q. Vainete, another religious named Gloria Pottrie, an unpleasant character named Dick Head—you get the drift. Talk about being done before. Robert Anton Wilson’s Schrödinger’s cat trilogy has Justin Case, Bertha van Ation, Juan Tootrego, Benny “Eggs” Benedict, Markoff Chaney (a pun on an obscure mathematical term), and Marvin Gardens (one of the spaces on the Monopoly game board). “Click and Clack,” the Car Talk guys, give “official staff” credits to literally hundreds of puns names (www.cartalk.com/content/about/credits/credits.html) which are doubtless copyrighted; I hope I’m not infringing on any of them, but I haven’t read through the whole list.

And when, you ask (indeed, you must be earnestly searching for an answer to the longing query), will the breathless throngs be blessed with the first of lo! many installments in this avidly anticipated tale of passion and action? Ah, the muses must whisper their inspired counsels into my shell-pink otic aperture, or implant them directly by telepathy into the convoluted mush of my prefrontal lobes, before first I lay finger upon my Macintosh keyboard to bring this soul-stirring saga to fruition. Short answer: probably a few weeks. I may, in fact, devote a separate blog to it. Not sure how to do that in Blogger. Watch for it.

It was a stark and dormant blight . . . It was a quark-informing flight . . .