Experiments in style: Inappropriate epithets

An indelible implementation

Greetings!

One of the things I’ve been trying out is reworking a piece of text into a completely different style. A full exposition and explanation are given here:

Experimenting with styles

For today’s experiment I applied various adjectives, most of which are strange in that context. Why? Read on to find out.

First, though, here is the original text on which these experiments or transformations are based:

The original (template) text

In the middle of the night, I woke up (if you can call being semi-conscious being awake), walked purposefully towards the door to go to the bathroom — and almost knocked myself out.

The reason was that in the twin states of entire darkness and semi-somnambulance I was facing in a different direction from the one I thought I was facing. As a result, instead of walking through the door, I tried to walk through the wall.

The next few days brought nausea and headaches. After much prevarication I went to Accident and Emergency, where I waited petrified among people for whom “social distancing” means not quite touching you, and who wore their masks as a chin-warmer.

An hour and a half later I emerged into the twilight, secure in the knowledge that I had nothing more serious than mild concussion. I failed to do much writing, but I was pleased to have read a further 17% of my book.

Inappropiate epithets

In the indecent middle of the iridescent night, I left my impervious bed to answer the inevitable call of nature. Being so tired as to find myself imitating an inebriated state, I found myself headfirst against an imperious wall instead of the inviting door. An insipid headache, accompanied by an insistent nausea, grasped me, leaving me incapable of impactful writing (or, indeed, any writing). After some intrafamilial  discussion I went to the hospital, where the ineluctable waiting room held ineducable people who isometrically decried both social distancing and mask-wearing. After the usual irrational wait, an itinerant nurse invited me into an indecisive room, where she declared me to be relatively unscathed. She advised an injudicious easing up. As I said, I wrote nothing, but read almost a fifth of an inhospitable tome.

Some notes

Sometimes Borges uses an adjective that seems so inappropriate that it makes me sit up and wonder why that particular descriptor. Knowing that Borges wasn’t illiterate, and assuming the translation was accurate, this is quite a useful device because it makes the reader think about how the apparently wrong word could in fact be the most apt imaginable.

Thus I thought it might be interesting to apply adjectives almost randomly to the ‘Bang on the head’ story to see what happens. For instance, I think describing a consultation room in a hospital as “indecisive” is, bizarrely, quite apt, or could be in some circumstances.

Bear in mind that this was an exercise in the spirit of the Oulipo, a movement that prizes the use of constraints in the pursuit of what it calls “potential literature”. The constraints in this case were:

• The story itself. In these experiments I keep as closely as possible to the main points of the story, or what we might call the key components of the narrative arc.

• The use of adjectives, preferably inapproriately applied.

• The selection of adjectives from the ‘i’ section of the dictionary.

The dictionaries I used were the Oxford Concise Dictionary, and The The Dictionary of Diseased English¹ by Kenneth Hudson.

I hope you enjoyed this version. If you’d like to dig deeper, I often write an ‘Experiments in style extra’ post to explain how a version came about, or how I did it. That’s for paid subscribers.

If you’re new to the series, you can see the index of my experiments here: Index.

As always, I’d love to hear your comments.

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