Forum / A stale device?

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  Mark Budman

  Aug 12, 05:13pm

  I think that giving the name, rank and serial number of the protagonist in the first sentence has become a very stale device. OK, no serial number, just the name. I know it's convenient, and it has been done successfully before, but that doesn't make it any more stale. Thoughts?

• 
  Joani Reese

  Aug 12, 05:45pm

  As with almost every trope, it depends on the context. For example, what if the plot revolved around the emotional underpinnings of the protagonist's name? I.e., "Candy hated her name, and she hated her mother for branding her with it..."

• 
  James Lloyd Davis

  Aug 12, 08:15pm

  I will take that as a challenge to provide, in my next flash fiction, the name, rank, and serial number of the protagonist. Better yet, the first words of the first sentence will contain this information.

  Why?

  Because it sounded like a rule. I must break it ...

• 
  Foster Trecost

  Aug 12, 08:16pm

  For longer works, I agree with you. For shorter works such as flash fiction, I think leading with a name is fine, but to be honest, what does a name add to a short piece? Something for me to think about.

• 
  Susan Tepper

  Aug 12, 09:57pm

  I don't think there are any hard and fast rules on this. A good writer can make just about anything work. Alice Munro is said to break every "so called rule" and she is one our best working writers today.

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  Randal Houle

  Aug 13, 04:09am

  My name is Randal Houle, citizen (maybe even rank citizen) serial number 54839.

  I like that we're talking about this. Sometimes not knowing is so much better than knowing. :)

• 
  W.F. Lantry

  Aug 13, 06:31am

  Call me Ishmael. ;)

• 
  Joani Reese

  Aug 13, 12:40pm

  Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

• 
  Bill Yarrow

  Aug 13, 12:48pm

  What makes something stale? Success.

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  Susan Tepper

  Aug 13, 01:57pm

  Give me stale success over ripe nothingness any day..

• 
  Susan Tepper

  Aug 13, 02:15pm

  "Lady Gaga carefully places a bag on the dry cleaner's counter as if it contains a garment made of Swarovski crystals."

  Duh. Am I missing something here in this forum posting?

• 
  James Lloyd Davis

  Aug 13, 02:26pm

  < equally confused. Success makes something stale? Obviously missing the broader implications on that.

• 
  stephen hastings-king

  Aug 13, 04:19pm

  analogy time!

  1-4-5 chord progressions are pretty stale. they're everywhere. but people still like em tho. i'm glad that people like them and that others like playing them because people like them.

  there are still other people who are not interested by that sequence or by traditional closed voicings of them or by the kind of music that never shuts up, so they do other things.

  a peaceful co-existence obtains amongst the strata. some of those strata are not bothered with any of that pesky money business. or with being known outside some underground. and each underground has cliches of its own. so i dont know.

  repetition of the same thing in the same way makes things stale. but they're also the basis for dominant ideologies. because people also like to inhabit what gets repeated all the time in the same way. go figure.

• 
  MaryAnne Kolton

  Aug 14, 02:48am

  James Lloyd Davis arrived at the party one hour late wearing only a sky blue bath sheet wrapped around his torso. The guests who yelled "Surprise!" upon his entrance were quite a bit more surprised than he was.

• 
  David Ackley

  Aug 14, 05:18pm

  As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from an uneasy sleep he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

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  Susan Tepper

  Aug 14, 11:19pm

  Cockroach, baby. Eck!

• 
  Foster Trecost

  Aug 15, 02:37pm

  I no longer feel so bad about opening my story with a name - in fact, I feel pretty good about it now.

• 
  James Lloyd Davis

  Aug 15, 03:35pm

  If it's good enough for Kafka ...

• 
  Susan Tepper

  Aug 16, 04:21pm

  Boy do I love that Kafka... How about The Warden of the Tomb for some light reading..

• 
  stephen hastings-king

  Aug 16, 07:04pm

  it's surprising to see implied that the interesting part of the first sentence in the metamorphosis is the name gregor samsa.

• 
  Joani Reese

  Aug 16, 11:26pm

  Stephen-- Whatever can you mean? There's something more compelling than Mr. Samsa's name in that opening sentence?

• 
  David Ackley

  Aug 17, 12:36am

  From the responses above, it's hard to find the implication that the name is what's interesting in the sentence, Stephen. I quoted it as a well-known example of what we'd been discussing. In other instances
  ( Joseph K-- e.g.) Kafka goes for partial anonymity. Just why Kafka chose to name the character in this instance is a good question, I think.

• 
  Bill Yarrow

  Aug 17, 01:05am

  Samsa=Kafka. A's identical. S's and K's in same positions. "The Metamorphosis" (aka "A Bug's Life") written ten years before Joseph K shows up in "The Trial." Why the switch? An attempt at a slightly, very slightly, less obvious autobiographical disguise.

• 
  stephen hastings-king

  Aug 17, 02:59pm

  david---i wasn't talking about the sentence in itself. more about the position it occupies in the thread and the role it appeared to me to play in it. i just thought it peculiar.

  for what it's worth, i don't particularly like using proper names at all. they have a lot of weight and that weight does particular kinds of work that doesn't interest me at this point. they anchor things in an entirely fictional concreteness, one that's at cross-purposes with the basic characteristics of sentences themselves, which in written form is the organization of categories or generalities. it's been interesting working a space that tries to play with the relation of the general to the particular, figuring out what opens it up and what shuts it down. but this is about the functions of using proper names in general, not so much in using them in one's opening line. and my position is shaped by a particular conceptual game--it may well be that when i shift into another, the relation to using proper names will change. but i've learned a lot from not using them. that'll likely stick around.

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  David Ackley

  Aug 17, 06:06pm

  Stephen's point that names " anchor things in an entirely fictional concreteness " is closer to my way of thinking than the autobiographical referencing, Bill, which I take to be a given with Kafka's work in general. To me "Gregor Samsa" signals the meticulously detailed and stifling psychological and social reality( leaving aside the bug thing for a moment) of "Metamorphisis." It's been a while since I re-read "The Trial" so I may be wrong, but the memory is of a work more distanced, abstracted and dealing more with cool types than the sweating, anxious, immediate people of Metamorphisis. If that's right, then Joseph K is something like the type petitioner/victim than the more physically present and individual bug/man "Gregor Samsa."

• 
  David Ackley

  Aug 19, 12:34pm

  Damn, killed another thread.

• 
  James Lloyd Davis

  Aug 19, 05:09pm

  It wasn't you, David, but Kafka.

  "Kafka did it."

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  stephen hastings-king

  Aug 19, 06:57pm

  kafka was a notorious party-pooper.

• 
  James Lloyd Davis

  Aug 19, 10:01pm

  Kafka wrote the screenplay for the "Autobiography of David Mamet."

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