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truepenny"Somehow" is the weaseliest of weasel words.
The Turkey City Lexicon categorizes it under Fuzz: An element of motivation the author was too lazy to supply. The word "somehow" is a useful tip-off to fuzzy areas of a story. "Somehow she had forgotten to bring her gun."
And it isn't necessarily just motivations that "somehow" can be substituted for. It can also stand in for feats the author doesn't know how the character could have pulled off: "Somehow Superman freed himself from the kryptonite handcuffs." Or for secondary characters and antagonists doing three-quarters of the author's work for them while conveniently off-stage: "Somehow the Balrog had heard about Gandalf's weakness for chocolate liqueurs." And so on.
Moreover, "somehow" isn't limited to fiction. The book I'm currently reading, Angus Fletcher's Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Cornell UP, 1964), has this shining example in the middle of Fletcher's trying to explain why he can claim genre fiction (mysteries, westerns, and science fiction) as allegorical without having to do all the tiresome, degrading work of, you know, proving it: "But somehow the literal surface suggests a peculiar doubleness of intention" (7). "Somehow" here translates to "because I said so."
Which is its real meaning in fiction as well.
The Turkey City Lexicon categorizes it under Fuzz: An element of motivation the author was too lazy to supply. The word "somehow" is a useful tip-off to fuzzy areas of a story. "Somehow she had forgotten to bring her gun."
And it isn't necessarily just motivations that "somehow" can be substituted for. It can also stand in for feats the author doesn't know how the character could have pulled off: "Somehow Superman freed himself from the kryptonite handcuffs." Or for secondary characters and antagonists doing three-quarters of the author's work for them while conveniently off-stage: "Somehow the Balrog had heard about Gandalf's weakness for chocolate liqueurs." And so on.
Moreover, "somehow" isn't limited to fiction. The book I'm currently reading, Angus Fletcher's Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Cornell UP, 1964), has this shining example in the middle of Fletcher's trying to explain why he can claim genre fiction (mysteries, westerns, and science fiction) as allegorical without having to do all the tiresome, degrading work of, you know, proving it: "But somehow the literal surface suggests a peculiar doubleness of intention" (7). "Somehow" here translates to "because I said so."
Which is its real meaning in fiction as well.
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Date: 2006-06-07 07:53 pm (UTC)[ Which amuses me most because of how many people assume it's Spock to Kirk, when in fact it was Beckett to Joyce. ]
Epiphanies are damned hard, because while there is an underlying mental process, it's not something I'm used to thinking of as consciously accessible, and also because it happens so much faster than one can describe it - in terms of a set of things suddenly falling into a new pattern, for example.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-07 11:52 pm (UTC)Took me twenty years to learn to do it, too, and I still blow it a lot.
Linear thinkers are weird.