P.G.Wodehouse and Cliches
Comic Phrase-Making by the Creator of Jeeves and Wooster
Despite Wodehouse’s frequent use of stock characters and plots, he practically never falls into cliché on the verbal level. Indeed one of his favourite techniques is to take a familiar saying and revitalise it by employing it in an unusual way, such as Bertie Wooster’s memorably triumphant “And if that doesn’t leave me without a stain on my character, I don’t know what it does leave me without a stain on!” or the description of Steeple Bumpleigh as a place where “you couldn’t have thrown a brick without hitting a honey-suckle-covered cottage, or beaning an apple-cheeked villager” (Joy in the Morning).
The technique can be even subtler, as when he yokes together two words which suggest different tones. When beginning his description of the village mentioned above, he calls it a “picturesque settlement”. One might expect an English country village to be described as “picturesque”, but the more technical-sounding term “settlement” calls attention to the phrase, and ironises it.
Sometimes the narrator himself calls highlights a phrase: again, as part of the description of Steeple Bumpleigh, Wooster says “It lay embowered, if that’s the word I want, in the midst of smiling fields and leafy woods...” By jerking us out of the saccharine language of the description, Wodehouse enables us to laugh at the terms he is using, whilst winnowing out the facts behind those terms, and being informed by them. There is also a sly admission in the use of these “picturesque” terms, which sound like a bad novel, that we are reading a piece of fiction, and not a description of a real place. Whilst Bertie is using terms he seems to have picked up some extremely dubious literature, Wooster is chuckling over his head at the spectacle of a fictional character using unrealistic clichés to describe a place which isn’t real itself.
Wodehouse can call the reader’s attention to a phrase simply by altering the pace, so that words which would usually just slip by the reader stand out. For example this exchange from Uncle Fred Flits By, about the sugar-throwing in the smoking room of the Drones Club:
“Young blood, eh?”
“That’s right. Young blood.”
“And animal spirits.”
“And animal, as you say, spirits,” agreed the Crumpet, “We get a fairish amount of those here.”
Repeating “animal spirits” and splitting the words up gives an unwonted gravitas to the phrase which somehow makes a joke out of a passing remark. Once again Wodehouse has turned a tired cliché back into a functional piece of language.
