A merry March the 1st to all. I hope everyone is enjoying the icy remnants of winter, or at least not slipping and falling all over the place as you attempt to go outside. I've decided to talk about hooptedoodle. What is hooptedoodle you ask? Good question. Here is the passage from "Sweet Tuesday" by Steinbeck:
No,” said Mack. “Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. The guy’s writing it, give him a chance to do a little hooptedoodle. Spin up some pretty words maybe, or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up in the story. So if the guy that’s writing it wants hooptedoodle, he ought to put it right at first. Then I can skip it if I want to, or maybe go back to it after I know how the story come out.”
From this small passage, I concluded that hooptedoodle is all the fancy things that writers use that readers don't need, or fluff. My first thought was of a story I began in high school. It was about something really outlandish (like a girl traveling to another dimension or something) and I had seven pages just on the girls thoughts about leaving somewhere she had always known (her dimension?) when ultimately I could have said "she missed home ferociously." Was it good writing? I think so, and so did my friends, but ultimately, it had nothing to do with the story. That is hooptedoodle. The long introductory chapters at the beginning of novels that don't make it into the movie adaptions: those are hooptedoodle. All that nice explanation on hobbits and their life is hooptedoodle in Lord of the Rings. If any of you have read the book Bitterblue by Kristen Cashore, every time Bitterblue thinks about her mother or how she feels about her love interest is hooptedoodle. It is something you read and want to skip because the story was good, but it turned into nothing but fluff-vomit (that's what I call it.).
Obviously authors like Steinbeck have a different kind of hooptedoodle, probably conductive to their thoughts and feelings while writing the story, but ultimately not conductive to the story itself. I think Steinbeck's are his explanations of things we already understand, like Chapter 14. Thankfully, Steinbeck doesn't have too large a concentration of hooptedoodle all in one big chapter by itself, like I did, but he has it sprinkled about the novel. Is Chapter 14 a big one? Yes. Is it seven pages of unnecessary fluffiness? No. I feel like Steinbeck's hooptedoodle is what Booth was talking about in Chapter 4(?) about leaving some explanations up to the reader to figure out. Steinbeck can be very obvious at points about what he is saying, especially in the interchapters. I like that he gives the readers a chance to catch on to what he is saying, but he gets more and more obvious as the novel continues.
How do you guys feel about hooptedoodle? Where in this novel and in other novels have you seen it and what does it do to the book as a whole?
Good observations Evelyn. Hooptedoodle can get in the way sometimes of the actual story and can be more fluff then the story needs. When this happens the reader will skip it, like Steinbeck would. I believe it does help give the story to have more style and gives an image to the story
ReplyDeleteI'm curious about this final statement: "I like that he gives the readers a chance to catch on to what he is saying, but he gets more and more obvious as the novel continues." So, what's your evaluation, in the end? Are the hooptedoodle chapters (which aren't nearly as playful in Grapes as the name might otherwise imply, invented as it was for a much less serious book) too obvious? Is it justified? Does it weaken the novel?
ReplyDeleteI love your definition of hooptedoodle and that you put it into your own words. I don't know if the intercalary chapters are unnecessary, to me they were a very big help in reaffirming my thoughts of the books. I don't think they were unnecessary but a reader would have been able to understand the book even without those chapters.
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