In the beginning were words - by Bill Kirton

At one point in Alan Bennett’s play, Habeas Corpus, the housekeeper, Mrs Swabb, bows deeply and says, ‘Sir Percy. Could I crave a boon?’ It’s a priceless moment, created by that wonderful archaism and it’s one I’m repeating here as I crave both a boon and your indulgence. Why? Because the paragraph that follows this one may well try your patience and, probably from the very first word, get you clicking the exit button. In fact, it may alienate several followers of this splendid and ever-stimulating Authors Electric blog for good. Please, though, try to resist the urge, read it and then I’ll explain why I risked stretching your tolerance through such flippancy. It’s a spoof opening to a supposed review of a non-existent book called Ambiguity and Gastronomy in Tennyson’s 'In Memoriam'. If the book had ever existed, it would have been written by Professor V. Nonchalant. (If any such person exists, I apologise unreservedly for hi-jacking his/her name.) Here, then, is how my review of his/her book would have started had such a thing existed:

Teleological inadequacy in the quest for meta-fictional catharsis is a trope too frequently associated with linguistic excess. In his previous studies of root vegetables in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his monograph entitled Descartes and the Bay Leaf, Professor Nonchalant posited the extensory variability of post-cultural deviance in the seventeenth century’s sporadic yet transitional dalliance with anarchic conceptualisations of disassociated herbivorous phenomena. Here, he extends his exegetical analysis of textual malfunctions to encompass the twin themes of literacy and indigestion, arguing persuasively that the Victorians’ semi-precocious insistence on the iconography of laissez-faire nutritional expediency both complemented and contradicted their equally fervent adherence to the vertiginous monotony of the iambic pentameter. That, in simplistic terms, is the point de départ of this 642 page study.

If you’re still reading, thanks for your persistence and good will. The paragraph, of course, means absolutely nothing. It’s unadulterated garbage masquerading as learning. In a moment, I’ll get to why I’ve quoted it here but first, why write it at all? Well, I contribute book reviews to the excellent booksquawk.com and, when it celebrated the arrival of its 25,000th visitor, I suggested one way to mark the occasion would be for all its regular contributors to send in a parody of the opening paragraph of the worst type of reviewing they could think of – not nasty or vicious stuff, simply something typical of the most pretentious or plain silly garbage. The idea was just to have a bit of fun.

So I wrote the above as an example and posted it to the group. But here’s the interesting thing. Two of the other contributors – both friends and excellent writers – knew that it was only a parody and therefore not supposed to make sense but they tried to read it as if it did, and one of them said ‘my brain couldn't HELP trying to make sense of what you wrote...and it *almost* did’, a fact which she said was sort of frightening.  So it brings us back to another aspect of the power of words. If we see them laid out in seemingly normal structures, we want to unlock what they’re saying. The tendency is to assume that they ‘mean’ something so we do what they implicitly ask and try to give them that meaning. And if we can’t, we think it’s our fault.

But what if I hadn’t confessed that the paragraph was just crap? I’d (deservedly) have suffered the same fate as a lecturer in my novel Shadow Selves, which is set in an academic institution. I wrote of him:

Early on, he’d learned that students and colleagues alike could be kept at bay by words. The longer the words and the more intricate their context, the greater the security they provided. No one was ever willing to admit they didn’t understand anything and Christie moved through his days pushing before him a bow wave of verbal pretence and leaving in his wake students who either worried about their own intellectual inadequacy or dismissed him as a wanker.

And all because of words. They’re powerful,  they shape our experience and they’re the only things that try to fix meaning in the accidental chaos of the world we live in. My old mate Sisyphus had his rock; we have words. Let’s respect them.

Learn more about Bill Kirton's books (the ones that make very good sense) here.