Finding a Form (43 page)

In sum, prose has no notes, no scale, no consistency or purity of sound, and only actors roll its
r
’s, prolong its vowels, or pop its
p
’s with any sense of purpose.

Yet no prose can pretend to greatness if its music is not also great; if it does not, indeed, construct a surround of sound to house its meaning the way flesh was once felt to embody the soul, at least till the dismal day of the soul’s eviction and the flesh’s decay.

For prose has a pace; it is dotted with stops and pauses, frequent rests; inflections rise and fall like a low range of hills; certain tones are prolonged; there are patterns of stress and harmonious measures; there is a proper method of pronunciation, even if it is rarely observed; alliteration will trouble the tongue, consonance ease its sounds out, so that any mouth making that music will feel its performance even to the back of the teeth and to the glottal’s stop; mellifluousness is not impossible, and harshness is easy; drum roll and clangor can be confidently called for—lisp, slur, and growl; so there will be a syllabic beat in imitation of the heart, while rhyme will recall a word we passed perhaps too indifferently; vowels will open and consonants close like blooming plants; repetitive schemes will act as refrains, and there will be phrases—little motifs—to return to, like the tonic; clauses will be balanced by other clauses the way a waiter carries trays; parallel lines will nevertheless meet in their common subject; clots of concepts will dissolve and then recombine, so we shall find endless variations on the same theme; a central idea, along with its many modifications, like soloist and chorus, will take their turns until, suddenly, all sing at once the same sound.

Since the music of prose depends upon its performance by a voice, and since, when we read, we have been taught to maintain
a library’s silence, so that not even the lips are allowed to move, most of the music of the word will be that heard only by the head and, dampened by decorum, will be timorous and hesitant. That is the hall, though, the hall of the head, where, if at all, prose (and poetry, too, now) is given its little oral due. There we may say, without allowing its noise to go out of doors, a sentence of Robert South’s, for instance: “This is the doom of fallen man, to labour in the fire, to seek truth
in profundo
, to exhaust his time and impair his health and perhaps to spin out his days, and himself, into one pitiful, controverted conclusion”; holding it all in the hush of our inner life, where every imagined sound we make is gray and no more material than smoke, and where the syllables are shaped so deeply in our throats nothing but a figment emerges, an
eidolon
, a shadow, the secondhand substance of speech.

Nevertheless, we can still follow the form of South’s sentence as we say it to ourselves: “This is the doom of fallen man.…” What is?

“into one pitiful, controverted conclusion.” That is, we return again and again to the infinitive—“to”—as well as to the pileup of “his” and “him,” and if we straighten the prepositions out, all the hidden repeats become evident:

To labour, seek, exhaust, impair, spin out … what? Work, truth, time, health, days, himself. Much of this tune, said sotto voce in any case, doesn’t even get played on any instrument, but lies inside the shadow of the sentence’s sound like still another shadow.

So South’s prose has a shape which its enunciation allows us to perceive. That shape is an imitation of its sense, for the forepart is like the handle of a ladle, the midsections comprise the losses the ladle pours, and the ending is like a splashdown.

In short, one wants South to say: “pour out his days …” “in two one pit eee full, conn trow verr ted conn clue zeeunn …” so as to emphasize the filling of the pit. However, “spin” does anticipate the shroud which will wrap around and signify “the doom of fallen man.”

In short, in this case, and in a manner that Handel, his contemporary, would approve, the sound (by revealing the spindle “to” around which the sentence turns and the action that it represents is wound) certainly enhances the sense.

However, South will not disappoint us, for he plays all the right cards, following our sample with this development: “There was then no pouring, no struggling with memory, no straining for invention.…” We get “pour” after all, and “straining” in addition. The pit is more than full; it runneth over.

Often a little diction and a lot of form will achieve the decided
lilt and accent of a nation or a race. Joyce writes “Irish” throughout
Finnegans Wake
, and Flann O’Brien’s musical arrangements also dance a jig. Here, in O’Brien’s
At Swim-Two-Birds
, Mr. Shanahan is extolling the virtues of his favorite poet, that man of the pick and people, Jem Casey:

Although any “Jem” has to sparkle if we’re to believe in it, and even though his initials, “JC,” are suspicious, I am not going to suggest that “Casey” is a pun on the Knights of Columbus.

The first paragraph rings the changes on “known” and “loved,” while the second proceeds from “know” and “met” to “seen” and
“heard,” in a shuffle of sentences of the simplest kind, full of doubled vowels, repeated phrases, plain talk, and far-from-subtle rhyme, characteristics that lead it to resemble the medieval preacher’s rhythmic prose of persuasion. It is the speech, of course, of the barroom bore and alcoholic hyperbolist, a bit bullyish and know-it-all, even if as empty of idea as a washed glass, out of which O’Brien forms an amusing though powerful song of cultural resentment.

It is sometimes said that just as you cannot walk without stepping on wood, earth, or stone, you cannot write without symbolizing, willy-nilly, a series of clicks, trills, and moans; so there will be music wherever prose goes. This expresses an attitude both too generous and too indifferent to be appropriate. The sentence with which Dreiser begins his novel
The Financier
, “The Philadelphia into which Frank Algernon Cowperwood was born was at his very birth already a city of two hundred and fifty thousand and more,” certainly makes noise enough, and, in addition to the lovely “Philadelphia,” there are “Algernon” and “Cowperwood,” which most people might feel make a mouthful; but the words, here, merely stumble through their recital of facts, happy, their job done, to reach an end, however lame it is. Under different circumstances, the doubling of “was” around “born” might have promised much (as in Joyce’s paradisal phrase “when all that was was fair”); however, here it is simply awkward, and followed unnecessarily by another “birth,” the reason, no doubt, for Dreiser’s mumpering on about the population. After another sentence distinguished only by the ineptness of its enumeration (“It was set with handsome parks, notable buildings, and crowded with historic memories”), the author adds fatuousness to his list of achievements: “Many of the things that we and he knew later were not then in existence—the telegraph, telephone, express company, ocean steamer, or city delivery of mails.” “We and he” do ding-dong all right, but rather tinnily. Then Dreiser suffers a moment of expansiveness (“There were no postage-stamps or registered letters”) before plunging us into a tepid bath of banality whose humor escapes even his unconscious: “The street-car had not arrived, and in its
place were hosts of omnibuses, and for longer travel, the slowly developing railroad system still largely connected with canals.” It makes for a surreal image, though: those stretches of track bridged by boats; an image whose contemplation we may enjoy while waiting for the streetcar to arrive.

“Bath of banality” is a bit sheepish itself, and brings to mind all the complaints about the artificiality of alliteration, the inappropriateness of rhyme in prose, the unpleasant result of pronounced regular rhythms in that workaday place, the lack of high seriousness to be found in all such effects: in short, the belief that “grand” if not “good” writing undercuts its serious and sober message when it plays around with shape and the shape of its sounds; because, while poetry may be permitted to break wind and allow its leaves to waltz upon an anal breeze, prose should never suggest it had eaten beans, but retain the serious, no-nonsense demeanor of the laboring man in
At Swim-Two-Birds
.

Some tunes are rinky-dink indeed, and confined to the carnival, but I get the impression that most of these complaints about the music of prose are simply the fears of lead-eared moralists and message gatherers, who want us to believe that a man like Dreiser, who can’t get through three minutes of high tea without blowing his nose on his sleeve, ought to model our manners for us, and tell us truths as blunt and insensitive, but honest and used, as worn shoes.

What they wish us to forget is another kind of truth: that language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of the sentence, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination too; it is the allocation of the things of the world to their place in the world of the word; it is the configuration of its concepts—not to neglect them—like the stars, which are alleged to determine the fate of we poor creatures who bear their names, suffer their severities, enjoy their presence of mind and the sight of their light in our night … 
all right … all right … okay:
the glow of their light in our darkness.

Let’s remind ourselves of the moment in
Orlando
when the
queen (who has, old as she is, taken Orlando up as if he were a perfumed hanky, held him close to her cleavage, and made plans to house him between the hills of her hope) sees something other than her own ancient figure in her household mirror:

Where shall we begin our praise of this passage, which, in
Orlando
, is merely its norm? And what shall we observe first among its beauties? perhaps, in that simple opening sentence, the way the heavy stresses which fall on “mean-,” “while” (and equally on the comma’s strong pause), “long,” “win-,” “months,” “drew,” and finally “on” again, make those months do just that (the three
on
’s, the many
m
’s and
n
’s don’t hurt, nor does the vowel modulation: een, ile, ong, in, on, ou, on), or the way the river, whose flow was rapid enough reaching “ran,” turns sluggish suddenly in the middle of the guggle in that word. Or maybe we should admire the two
and
’s which breathlessly connect a cold, snowy ground with shadowy rooms and barking stags; and then, with confidently contrasting symmetry, how the three semicolons trepidate crashing, running, lifting, while enclosing their two
and
’s in response. Or should we examine, instead, the complex central image of the figure in the glass, and the way the two clauses beginning with “which” are diabolically placed? or the consequent vibration of the
sentence from the public scene of Orlando in embrace to the queen’s personal shock at what she’s seen out the open door, thanks to her “magic” mirror. Nor should the subtle way, through word order mainly, that Virginia Woolf salts her prose with a sense of the era—her intention quite serious but her touch kept light in order to recall the Elizabethan period without parody—be neglected by our applause.