2012 Bulwer-Lytton Laureates

By Rod Dreher • August 15, 2012, 8:37 PM

Oh day of days! The 2012 Bulwer-Lytton winners have been announced. You know this contest: it seeks entries for the worst original fiction sentence of the year, and is named after the 19th century novelist responsible for “It was a dark and stormy night…”.

The 2012 overall winner is Cathy Bryant of Manchester, England, who wrote:

As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if so, his soul needed regrouting.

I loved this winner in the Fantasy category, by David Lippmann of Austin, Texas:

The brazen walls of the ancient city of Khoresand, situated where the mighty desert of Sind meets the endless Hyrkanean steppe, are guarded by day by the four valiant knights Sir Malin the Mighty, Sir Welkin the Wake, Sir Darien the Doughty, and Sir Yrien the Yare, all clad in armor of beaten gold, and at night the walls are guarded by Sir Arden the Ardent, Sir Fier the Fearless, Sir Cyril the Courageous, and Sir Damien the Dauntless, all clad in armor of burnished argent, but nothing much ever happens.

All winners here. Well worth a look, for hathos reasons. This prose makes my inner Leonard Pinth-Garnell tremble tumescently.

Posted in Hathos. Tagged Bulwer-Lytton.

17 Responses to 2012 Bulwer-Lytton Laureates

K. W. Jeter says:

August 16, 2012 at 12:55 am

Actually, Mr. Dreher, Bulwer-Lytton was a fine writer; he’s responsible for “The pen is mightier than the sword,” which IMO is the single best piece of figurative language in English. I’ve never met anyone who didn’t instantly comprehend what it means. If not everything he wrote was to that standard, it’s likely because of the furious pace at which he and most other writers of that period worked in order to put food on the table. What the gibing academics who attached his name to their precious little contest apparently fail to understand is that Bulwer-Lytton’s PAUL CLIFFORD, from which the “dark and stormy night” opening line comes, is actually a satirical novel; there’s one scene in which our Candide-like hero is instructed in the art of making a living from literary criticism that’s still hilarious. One of the things that Bulwer-Lytton pokes fun at is overheated, melodramatic prose, such as the
novel’s own opening lines — so when people use that passage to damn him as a bad writer, all they’re really indicating is that they either haven’t read the book, or anything else by Bulwer-Lytton, or they’re just too thickheaded to have gotten the joke. The man was a hardworking writer who produced some pretty good stuff; I can’t see where it’s fair or charitable, especially in the Christian sense, to join in deriding him, running down his reputation, etc., either out of ignorance or disdain for a prose style that is now out of fashion. I’d like to think you’re a better man than that.
TWylite says:

August 16, 2012 at 1:15 am

There is a “Symphonic Black Metal” band from England called “Bal-Sagoth”. Besides having a band name that sounds like a condition for which you would consult a urologist, they have the most awesomely awful song titles that are just like the Fantasy Category winning sentence. Here’s the peak of their form:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfire_Burning_Upon_the_Ice-Veiled_Throne_of_Ultima_Thule

No one has ever actually heard this band, because they die before they finish reading the song titles. I’m still only halfway past the second one of this album, and don’t expect to live past track 6.
William Burns says:

August 16, 2012 at 5:27 am

Why is “It was a dark and stormy night” considered to be such a terrible opening? Seems perfectly fine to me.
Lasker says:

August 16, 2012 at 10:13 am

Of course the submissions are funny, but I don’t see why they would inspire hatred – surely you are aware that the excerpts are not from actual works of fiction but are composed specially for the competition?
Erin Manning says:

August 16, 2012 at 10:46 am

William Burns: the actual sentence in question is: “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 housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

K.W. Jeter, I appreciate the quirks of the Victorian novelist as well as anybody, and think that the Bulwer-Lytton contest could just as easily have been named after Dickens (heresy, I know, but has anyone actually *noticed* some of the writing in, say, “Bleak House?” Not all Dickens is “A Tale of Two Cities,” that is). Yet as someone for whom the temptation to draft gnarled and knotty sentences the meaning of which is often lost in the unusual syntax and occasionally inappropriately emphatic turns of phrase presents a constant if sometimes unexpectedly rewarding hazard of alleged literary composition, I can appreciate that B-L was a fine writer indeed, and yet smile enough at the famous Snoopy parodies and the earnest attempt by undergraduates to emulate B-L’s style in the way in which we are assured is the sincerest form of flattery both of which realities ultimately led to the creation of this fun and lighthearted contest by Professor Scott Rice at San Jose State University, as is explained in detail at the contest’s website, to appreciate that no insult is truly intended to the memory of the man who gave us “The Last Days of Pompeii” among other literary gems.
Kirt Higdon says:

August 16, 2012 at 11:51 am

My all time favorite winner from 1984 –

“The lovely woman-child Kaa was mercilessly chained to the cruel post of the warrior-chief Beastx, with his barbarous tribe now stacking wood at her nubile feet, when the strong, clear voice of the poetic and heroic Handsomas roared, “Flick your Bic, crisp that chick, and you’ll feel my steel through your last meal.”
Dave Dutcher says:

August 16, 2012 at 12:30 pm

It can’t be truly bad if it’s written to be bad. This is the secret of kitsch, that it has to be done in earnest and entirely seriously for it to truly be awful and yet magnetic at the same time.

I’d also agree with K.W. and say that a generation who thinks this writer is awesome isn’t all that fit to throw stones:

“When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.”

Not only is it bad, it isn’t even good grammar. Either use “Whenever” or “he reached” to maintain the tenses. But Cormac McCarthy is widely popular, and this first line is from his book The Road.

B.D. Meyers takes him down and other modern writers in his article and later book, “A Reader’s Manifesto,” found at http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/07/a-reader-apos-s-manifesto/2270/

The worst bad writing, he would say, consists in the writer trying to be writerly. You can find some really howlers in that article.
William Burns says:

August 16, 2012 at 12:37 pm

Erin,

Still not that bad, showing a vivid sense of place and occasion even if the sentence is a bit overly complex.
K. W. Jeter says:

August 16, 2012 at 12:54 pm

Erin Manning –

Sorry, but you’re off base. First, the contest entries don’t “emulate” Bulwer-Lytton’s prose; they’re just a bunch of bad puns, for the most part.

And second, I’ve looked at the contest’s website. There’s nothing there about no insult being “truly intended” toward Bulwer-Lytton’s memory. And besides, even if the insult is just done in passing, as an off-handed sort of thing — that’s somehow better in your opinion?
Erin Manning says:

August 16, 2012 at 1:45 pm

“The worst bad writing, he would say, consists in the writer trying to be writerly. You can find some really howlers in that article.”

Dave, the old Catholic school writing series I used in high school said much the same thing! There was a whole section on “fine writing” which contained the invaluable advice to writers: if you start admiring something you’ve written as being truly good and wonderful and of superb literary quality–strike it out. And don’t look back.
Rod Dreher says:

August 16, 2012 at 1:52 pm

if you start admiring something you’ve written as being truly good and wonderful and of superb literary quality–strike it out. And don’t look back.

That’s really true. The editor of my forthcoming book really saved me from this sort of thing. Erin, you saw the earliest version of my book, and the final one. I don’t recommend going back and seeing what got taken out, but boy, there were some ghastly writerly bits that my editor demanded be amputated. Bless him.
Erin Manning says:

August 16, 2012 at 5:11 pm

K.W. Jeter, Bulwer-Lytton has presumably passed on to his eternal reward, from whence (let us piously hope!) he may look quite kindly down upon the foibles of us earthly humans.

Besides, have you seen the Hemmingway contest stuff? I admit to holding another heretical literary view, in that I think that Hemingway’s a vastly overrated writer, but I have to ask whether the jocular nod to Bulwer-Lytton is actually worse than the deadly-serious Hemingway affair, in which would-be Ernest writers end up damming him with faint prose.

I think we will have to agree to disagree; as someone with the mildest of literary aspirations (children’s fiction is what I hope to perpetrate, and quite soon), I would be wildly elated to find out that schoolchildren someday participated in some contest or other to imitate my stuff, even if they did so in a spirit of gentle malice or mockery. Better to fall with a noticeable “thud” than to disappear without a sound beneath layers of treacle, after all.
Erin Manning says:

August 16, 2012 at 5:13 pm

Rod, I did notice a couple of those places you mention, though I wasn’t specially looking. But where most of us have to stifle our inner fine writer, you mainly had to stifle your inner essayist, who, after all, has an impeccable voice in his own environment.
William Burns says:

August 16, 2012 at 5:20 pm

I have to disagree with the “murder your darlings” approach. It has led to the blandness of most modern American prose. Give me Edward Gibbon anyday!
Erin Manning says:

August 16, 2012 at 7:11 pm

William, I think (if you’ll pardon the reference from somebody who actually doesn’t listen to country music) that it’s more a matter of knowing when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.

Like all writing for emphasis, fine writing is best used sparingly, and when it really transmits the emotional impact or visual reality or deeper truth the writer absolutely needs to convey. The mistake of most writers is to pepper that stuff in so much that it becomes like an overdose of exclamation points in a teen girl’s texting archive; and since we rarely see the full extent of our own attempts to manipulate the reader and force his response, we need editors to keep us honest.
William Burns says:

August 16, 2012 at 8:23 pm

Erin,

I agree that fine writing, like anything else, can be done to excess. However, I think that most writing today (that gets published) is less marked by an overabundance of fine writing, than by a kind of deliberate blandness. What writer today does one think of as having a distinctive style?
Erin Manning says:

August 16, 2012 at 11:58 pm

Well…our host, for one. So much so that when a “quotation” marking in a recent post got left off, at least one reader was confused at Rod’s sudden switch in writing style.

But I hear you on the “deliberate blandness” thing. That, to me, is one of the chief errors of the Age of Hemingway. Leaving aside the question as to whether his style is actually good or not, there is the question as to whether his style is so superior that all budding writers should strive to imitate it. The sad truth is that we’ve had at least two generations of writers raised to fear the adjective, scorn the adverb, shun the parenthetical, sneer at the poetic, and minus the metaphor to a degree that doesn’t merely restrict “fine” writing, but that ends up celebrating mediocrity.

We have conditioned people, and especially would-be writers, to believe that this:

“The sun was hot. The cat slept. ‘I’m late,’ she said.”

is automatically aesthetically superior to this:

“Visible waves of heat rose from the cracked walkway that terminated in a set of porch steps which were clearly an unfortunate afterthought to the building’s construction. Stepping carefully over a melted orange tabby at the top of the stairs, Abby said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m running really late.’ Whether she was speaking to the cat or to the scrubby indiscriminate maple at the end of the walkway was a question only answered for certain when she turned her head enough for her phone earpiece to be visible.”

and the question as to whether the first or second example is better writing depends entirely on what it is that the writer is attempting to convey.