Unlucky Jim

How would you describe the sensation of waking up in the 
morning, badly hung over?



Oh, shut up. I don't care how you would describe it. It was 
a rhetorical question. I'm more interested in how Kingsley 
Amis described it, in the novel Lucky Jim;




"Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before 
he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious 
wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible 
ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up
like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the 
morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking 
at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to 
move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made
the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been 
used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and 
then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow 
been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten 
up by secret police. He felt bad."




What I find interesting here is the way the author repeatedly
changes strategy in the course of just one paragraph. He 
starts out "literary", playing with metaphors (the touches of
humor here are the only things separating it from the worst 
excesses of wannabe "artistic" writers), which culminates in 
an awkward, perplexing image involving a crab. The next 
couple sentences give a mostly straightforward description of
what the character is feeling. Then, the comic aspects of the 
situation, which had been hinted at for most of the paragraph,
are given center stage, with excellent result. Finally, the 
paragraph ends with an understatement so anticlimactic as to 
be truly stunning.



9-21-01