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So, for a project I'm reading a lot of Wodehouse. I'd read a lot of it before, but this time more analytically. An interesting thing is just how much he gets away with by being slow and funny. There's a scene in one of his books where Bertie is grumpy, then finds a rubber duckie. There's a whole paragraph by Bertie describing how to operate the duck. Seems like a complete throwaway gag, and an excellent one, BUT the real trick is he did a bit-flip on Bertie, who goes from sad to happy.

I think what was likely going on is that for plot purposes he needed Bertie's mood to change. In most authors' hands, and even Wodehouse's in most cases, the move here is to rejigger prior plots to arrive at the correct mental state. But because Wodehouse is so funny and clever, he's able to essentially just assert the mood change, and you don't even notice. In fact, you'd like to read more.

I think one of the keys with Wodehouse is that his characters are much more like punch cards than people. Like, for a given character their personality, motives, and the state of their relationships to the other characters could be listed with complete thoroughness on a postcard. They are uncomplex. What scenes do is they alter a number of states on each character, e.g. who they're in love with, are they in a good mood, etc.

Zach Weinersmith

And so the game is just a rich and surprising set of flips in state, over and over and over, with greater urgency and seemingly less chance of happy resolution, until by some scheme everything is saved at the last second. The reason he gets away with such a complex abstracted notion of plot is that the scenes themselves can be quite slow, e.g. a person will pause to explain everything so far, or a piece of dialog will be ultra-repetitive, or a person will sit and play with a duck for no reason.

Anyway this all relates to a project that'll probably appear... Winter 2025ish? Assuming AI has let us survive.

@ZachWeinersmith You've piqued my interest, never picked him up but in my youth I did enjoy the TV series with Fry & Laurie.

@ZachWeinersmith I knew nothing of Wodehouse until now. His Wikipedia entry (especially around World War 2) is quite the trip! Interested to find out later what you’ve been working on, and to check out some of Wodehouse’s work.

@ZachWeinersmith I've been re-reading Wodehouse too, trying to figure out why he's so pleasurable. His plot and characters are so silly and slapdash, I assumed his prose was the same.
In review, every sentence has purpose. The start of Blandings Castle stories (3rd person) build characters and set the stage with amazing speed and nuance. Every other page is a metaphor both funny and informative. And as Wodehouse himself said, he doesn't waste words on Thomas Hardy length descriptions.