This is frighteningly true: "Novelists can't resist including a dog barking in the distance. I've seen it happen across the spectrum-Jackie Collins, William Faulkner, and Chuck Palahniuk..... Most authors, however, employ the trope as a narrative rest stop, an innocuous way to fill space and time; since the bark is hollow, a reader can read anything into it, or nothing at all."
Thursday, June 17, 2010
33
Somewhere a dog barked, on the wine-dark sea.
WALRUSES barking, though, and you know you're in Louisiana, waiting to fill up.
A seal barked at me on the beach in Malibu.
My best friend's dog sounds like a seal when he barks.
I have a friend who sounds like a seal when she laughs.
I bet this article would have been much harder to write before the advent of eBooks. All he had to do was run a search for "dog" or "bark".
And yet the dog with the shifty eyes is rarely used.
Nor is anyone ever like, "Somewhere in the distance, a cat cried, softly." Which to me seems racist.
@Moff:
From a distance, cats sound like babies. Anytime a character hears a baby crying, imagine it's actually a cat and maybe that evens the cliche-sound-effect odds.
i believe the ambient cat noise of choice is the sound of screeching alleysex
At our house, the ambient cat noise of choice is apparently NOT SHUTTING THE HELL UP WHEN SOMEONE IS TRYING TO WORK.
@City: The big difference I have found between babies and cats is that I guess you're not "allowed" to leave a baby alone for the weekend with a gravity feeder.
@Moff:
Child Protective Services can be soooo humorless.
Who knew the Cheerios wouldn't last through the whole 3-day weekend?
@City: Who knew you were supposed to put Cheerios in it? I probably wouldn't eat Hill's Science, but it's not like babies have discerning palates.
@Miles: That is also the weekend activity of choice!
@Moff: Next time, put an electric bark collar on your child to mute any protest, and CPS will never know.
I bet this has something to do with the number of dogs in the world and their tendency to bark. Are there also a lot of books where there exists a Moon of Earth? Do characters in books have a tendency to get it on, go to war, and/or sometimes remember things? Somebody ask Slate!
What is actually interesting is every appearance of a dog or cat on film includes an auditory clue, a canned dog or cat whimper or mew. Like a four-legged Wilhelm-scream. You can usually see their lips don't move. Once you hear it you can never unhear it.
Maybe all the movie star dogs are ventriloquists. Dogtriloquists.
Whatever the ostensible reason, the vague dog bark is testimony to the author's immersion in his/her writing. "I hear this, I can't be bothered, I am working so hard, I am, dad, really, and now I've just typed it, because I am so aware of myself, doing this."
Whereas, when I write this comment all I can think is "Somewhere, the dog barfed, and it will fall to me to clean it up."
It was a dark and barky night...
It is really a trope stolen from the blues. Because in blues songs there is always a lot of hounds howling and dogs barking. "Stagger Lee" starts out with a bulldog's bark; Howlin' Wolf's (see!) version of Willie Dixon's "Little Red Rooster" has "dogs begin to bark, hounds begin to howl" and it always portends evil or bad stuff afoot.
I would like to hear a blues song about a pack of evil Chihuahuas who roam the neighborhood.
Hmmm. I never thought of that. Did you just make that up, Books?
@STC: The Chihuahuas part? Pine Katz told me a story that inspired it.
In the ouevre of Jackie Collins, you can silence the barking dog by having another pitcher of daiquiris sent to the pool.
I think you mean "Lousy novels with barking dogs."
I, on the other hand, like to mix it up:
"Sir Henry Baskerville stood at the gate to his ancestral home and gazed out at the bleak expanse of the Great Grimpen Moor, said to be the haunt of a monstrous hound of hell. Somewhere, in the distance, a turkey gobbled."
"The sad braying of a donkey pierced the night."
No, that was the Webutante Ball.
Ha! to both of you.
A dog barks, sometimes. Mentally you are picturing a dog, but I have not told you what kind of dog it is.
Reminds me of when we were kids, and one night my sister said, "I hear a white dog barking."
From the conclusion of At Swim-Two-Birds: "When a dog barks late at night and then retires again to bed, he punctuates and gives majesty to the serial enigma of the dark, laying it more evenly and heavily upon the fabric of the mind. Sweeny in the trees hears the sad baying as he sits listening on the branch, a huddle between the earth and heaven; and he hears also the answering mastiff that is counting the watches in the next parish".
Even in 1939, Flann O'Brien knew the score.
Let's try it.
Somewhere, in the distance, a fish swam around in, like, a circle, and then some bubbles... hmmm, no.
Somewhere, in the distance, a bird was flying, as birds so often do, and... crap.
Somewhere, in the distance, a hamster, a tiger and a giraffe walked into a bar... haha... shit.
Somewhere, in the distance, a squirrel... chased a nut... damnit!
Let's not throw the words "Chuck Palahniuk" and "Novelist" into the same blurb. It makes people draw connections that shouldn't really be drawn.