15/11/2016 0 Comments Wodehousian panacea“What ho!" I said.
"What ho!" said Motty. "What ho! What ho!" "What ho! What ho! What ho!" After that it seemed rather difficult to go on with the conversation.” The above is an extract from the book, “My Man Jeeves” by the inimitable PG Wodehouse, arguably the finest writer in English language since Shakespeare, and certainly a lot more comprehensible to the contemporary reader than Shakespeare. No admirer of any author would even begin to think of terming the author’s plots as silly, but with Wodehouse, silliness was the premise on which he created his magic. And, he wove his stories around this silliness in a manner that found few challengers in English literature to hold up the candle to him for over one hundred years now. Reading Wodehouse is an act that is so vastly different from reading any other author of any genre in literature – classic or kitsch. For one, nobody reads a Wodehouse novel with the slightest intention of discovering what happens next. Nobody ever wants to rush to the last page of the novel to learn how the script did eventually unfold. Instead, one just reads the lines slowly, letting the beauty of the language and the humour of the composition soak in. It is like sitting happily out in the garden on a cold winter afternoon and allowing the mildly balmy sunlight to caress with its warmth. Wodehousian magic is entirely, and entirely, about language. It is about beautifully crafted similes that seem quite impossible to even imagine until one actually reads them in the pages of any of the ninety-four books that he authored. A spontaneous guffaw is always the result. It is about the perfectly constructed sentence. It is about the beauty of the language rather than the plausibility of the plot. It is about perfectly mature adult readers becoming addicted to descriptions of outrageously silly situations which harridan aunts and bumbling nephews find themselves in. Now, if the afore quoted extract from “My Man Jeeves” sounds silly because of the repetitive use of a rather meaningless phrase “What ho”, the one quoted below from “Right Ho! Jeeves” (my all-time favourite Wodehouse book) conveys the comic “What ho” scenario in a differently crafted version. It is a conversation between Bertram Wooster and Gussie Fink-Nottle, the latter an avid watcher of newts (of all things in the world!). Bertie, of course, requires no introduction. Gussie : “… Colour does make a difference. Look at newts. During the courting season the male newt is brilliantly coloured. It helps him a lot.” Bertie : “But you aren’t a male newt.” Gussie : “I wish I were. Do you know how a male newt proposes, Bertie? He just stands in front of the female newt vibrating his tail and bending his body in a semicircle. I could do that on my head. No, you wouldn’t find me grousing if I were a male newt.” Bertie : “But if you were a male newt, Madeline Bassett wouldn’t look at you. Not with the eyes of love, I mean." Gussie : “She would if she were a female newt." Bertie : “But she isn’t a female newt” Gussie : "No, but suppose she was.” Bertie : "Well, if she was, you wouldn’t be in love with her.” Gussie : “Yes, I would, if I were a male newt.” A slight throbbing about the temples told me that this discussion had reached saturation point. No other author I have read had the ability to marry the magic of language with the inconsequence of plots like Wodehouse. And, to be able to do it with such finesse for 75 years of non-stop writing was not just remarkable, but clearly something that lay in the domain of the genius. In health and illness, in times good and bad, in moments of happiness and in the throes of depression, in summer and in winter … Wodehouse is my panacea.
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