Quote:
Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze
Famously (and perhaps notoriously), Harold Bloom disagreed:
What's happening is part of a phenomenon I wrote about a couple of years ago when I was asked to comment on Rowling. I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs." I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.
Imagine what he might have thought about repetition in Lord Dunsany (would he have considered "the fields we know" to be a cliche?)! |
As a man in his sixties who was very surprised to find that he really enjoyed the HP books, I was prompted to look for the only example of Rowling stretching legs rather than walking. And what I found, early in the first chapter of HP1, was that the person who thinks he will stretch his legs is HP's overweight uncle, Vernon Dursley. It's not the narrator: instead it's effectively a bit of internal monologue:
"Mr. Dursley, however, had a perfectly normal, owl-free morning. He yelled at five different people. He made several important telephone calls and shouted a bit more. He was in a very good mood until lunchtime, when he thought he’d stretch his legs and walk across the road to buy himself a bun from the bakery."
Rowling is trying to show a Mr Dursley who thinks entirely in clichés, and in my view, and in that context, the phrase is more than acceptable, it's appropriate.
But what do I know: I'm just a reader. I have finished Proust, though (and enjoyed it).