The responsibility of the adjective

I have an injured thumb today that might prevent me from writing a lot, but I had to put down these thoughts before they died out completely.

My friend and I were having this discussion the other day about prose and how it differs from poetry. I claimed that poetry, if written truthfully, is immune to criticism. You cannot call a poem 'less beautiful' than another one, at least not objectively (I assume that all criticism is objective). One poem may be more interesting to you than another one, but that is more a reflection of your individuality than the poem itself. This is, of course, assuming that the poem is not 'forced', and written truthfully and spontaneously. There are countless badly written poems out there, all of them the result of not having anything to write about. The 'poet', in this case, wrote the poem because he was in love with the idea of his having written a poem, not because he had anything to say.

Prose, on the other hand, is different, because in a sense everything is forced. The author cannot employ the language of everyday life to communicate his thoughts, and he has to think of newer and better ways to describe the same things. This is also what sets apart one author from another, and the good ones from the bad; the ability to put one's own spin on commonplace situations.

For example - Zadie Smith, in this beautiful article, says in one passage -

In each of my novels somebody "rummages in their purse" for something because I was too lazy and thoughtless and unawake to separate "purse" from its old, persistent friend "rummage". To rummage through a purse is to sleepwalk through a sentence - a small enough betrayal of self, but a betrayal all the same.

The first thing that strikes the author when he has to portray someone looking through their belongings is the phrase 'rummaged through purse'. The phrase is spontaneous, and not very helpful. "Everyone rummages through their purses, Ms.Smith," the editor might say. "What makes your rummage-er different?"

Even less helpful is the adjective 'beautiful', which I don't think any writer in his sane mind would use while describing a beautiful thing. The problem is that the reader doesn't know what to think when someone calls something beautiful. There are too many associations with the word - my campus is beautiful, my car is beautiful, my laptop is beautiful, my guitar is beautiful - which one of these do you mean, budding writer?

Which brings me to my point - the responsibility of the adjective. Adjectives were incorporated into languages when people needed to describe things to each other. What is wrong with this motorbike? It's dirty, clean it. How does the water taste? It tastes salty, drink it. How goes your practice? Crappy, I want to quit. And so on.

I imagine adjectives worked quite well in the beginning, when people were getting used to them. It empowered the literary bourgeois and enabled them to describe things and people and events with ease and eliminated the need to think up of similes or metaphors. It was, I imagine, like giving a car to a person who previously went around on foot, or like giving tractors to a farmer who previously plowed his fields on bull-back - liberating, but also lethargy inspiring. It is no coincidence that Zadie Smith calls this lazy writing.

So now the adjective, after years of being taken for granted by everyone and his dog, has been stripped of any power that it may have had before. Adjectives are now just words, meaningless and empty as shells, and cannot be used for much more than light chitchat.

The onus, therefore, has fallen back on the simile and the metaphor. In order to communicate his thoughts, the author has to liken them to something else. "You lie like a mattress," Neal Stephenson might say. "Thoughts arrive like butterflies," Eddie Vedder might say. In this way, individuality is preserved, and prose is rescued from a prosaic death.

And I argue that it will remain so. Similes and metaphors, unlike adjectives, are a faithful reflection of the writer's thoughts, spontaneous or otherwise; it is inconceivable that they will fail us like adjectives have. Consider the following passage, written some seventy years ago by F.Scott Fitzgerald, reproduced verbatim from another blog (which I shall not name).

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rose-coloured space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end, The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up towards the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The simile and the metaphor, dear reader, will be alive long after we are all dead and buried.