Nevergirl’s

I was stupefied when a friend told me a person we both know dislikes adjectives and finds people who use them pretentious, even cruel. I can’t give you a verbatim quote because I didn’t come by the information first-hand. I didn’t know if it was written or spoken. Just the same, I felt compelled to write this post and defend adjectives, not just because I use them (and I do – a lot!) or like them but because they are indispensable.

Adjectives are a part of speech for a reason – they are necessary. Try writing a novel without adjectives and you’ll see soon enough how impossible that is. Even Ernest Hemmingway who wrote with no frills used adjectives. But what of the authors who used adjectives frequently and consistently? On the one end of the time spectrum, you have Shakespeare; on the other, you have Nick Joaquin. Were they pretentious? Cruel to their readers? Did they use adjectives to torture their audience or brag of how expansive their vocabulary is? No. They used adjectives as a literary device and to great effect. They used adjectives frequently and beautifully because they have absolute mastery of the language. They used adjectives to place you at the time and place the story was written, to make the tale so real for you you could almost hear the beating of the old man’s heart in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart.

It’s true that minimalism works both in architecture and in literature. And when someone uses minimalism superbly, pares words to the barest minimum so you focus on the story rather than the language, I feel dazed, awed. Then again, I feel the same way, too, when I read novels written in a language as exquisite as the plot. You see, it’s not just the storyteller or the story that matters; it’s how the story is told, too. Tony Morrison writes lyrically. There is music in her sentences, poetry in her paragraphs. Her novels are not solely for the eyes; they are also for the ears and the heart. She wrote this of another woman yet she might as well have been describing herself: “Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old.” Now, let’s try removing the two adjectives in the sentence: crooked and aimless. “Her mind traveled streets and goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old.” Does the sentence leave you with the same idea? Yes. Does it make the same impact? No. It lacks cadence; it doesn’t spark the imagination. What street? What goat path? The sentence does not leave you with much visual; it doesn’t put you there. In the case of Murray Feiss lighting, leave out Murray Feiss and you will end up asking, “What lighting?”

Now, that is not to say you should put an adjective before every noun. That’s a very simplistic interpretation of my meaning. You put it where it feels right, where it does much good – and I tell you, adjectives can do a lot of good. Many of the best opening lines of novels are replete with adjectives and repetitions.

1. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. – George Orwell, 1984

2. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. – Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

3. Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. – Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

4. I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. – Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

5. What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings? – Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things

6. High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. – David Lodge, Changing Places

7. It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. – Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford

8. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. – J.D Salinger, Catcher in the Rye

9. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. – William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

10. As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. – Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

And what of Nick Joaquin’s wildly descriptive, unapologetically lengthy opening first sentence in May Day Eve – all 440 words of it? “The old people had ordered that the dancing should stop at ten o’clock but it was almost midnight before the carriages came filing up the departing guests, while the girls who were staying were promptly herded upstairs to the bedrooms, the young men gathering around to wish them a good night and lamenting their ascent with mock signs and moaning, proclaiming themselves disconsolate but straightway going off to finish the punch and the brandy though they were quite drunk already and simply bursting with wild spirits, merriment, arrogance and audacity, for they were young bucks newly arrived from Europe; the ball had been in their honor; and they had waltzed and polka-ed and bragged and swaggered and flirted all night and where in no mood to sleep yet–no, caramba, not on this moist tropic eve! not on this mystic May eve! –with the night still young and so seductive that it was madness not to go out, not to go forth—and serenade the neighbors! cried one; and swim in the Pasid! cried another; and gather fireflies! cried a third—whereupon there arose a great clamor for coats and capes, for hats and canes, and they were a couple of street-lamps flickered and a last carriage rattled away upon the cobbles while the blind black houses muttered hush-hush, their tile roofs looming like sinister chessboards against a wile sky murky with clouds, save where an evil young moon prowled about in a corner or where a murderous wind whirled, whistling and whining, smelling now of the sea and now of the summer orchards and wafting unbearable childhood fragrances or ripe guavas to the young men trooping so uproariously down the street that the girls who were desiring upstairs in the bedrooms catered screaming to the windows, crowded giggling at the windows, but were soon sighing amorously over those young men bawling below; over those wicked young men and their handsome apparel, their proud flashing eyes, and their elegant mustaches so black and vivid in the moonlight that the girls were quite ravished with love, and began crying to one another how carefree were men but how awful to be a girl and what a horrid, horrid world it was, till old Anastasia plucked them off by the ear or the pigtail and chases them off to bed—while from up the street came the clackety-clack of the watchman’s boots on the cobble and the clang-clang of his lantern against his knee, and the mighty roll of his great voice booming through the night, “Guardia serno-o-o! A las doce han dado-o-o.”

So there, I rest my case. Adjectives are not cruel and pretentious, though they could be in the hands of an overly enthusiastic writer. If you call them that simply because they get in the way of your comprehension, then maybe it’s not them, it’s you. Time to learn something new, honey. Get a dictionary or (perhaps even and) a thesaurus. It doesn’t hurt to learn a new word every day.

Posted Annoyances, Gripevine |