The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (22 page)

In good prose, rhythm never stumbles, slips into accidental doggerel, or works against the meaning of the sentence. Consider the following sentence permutations. (For my convenience, assume that the ice has been established by context and may be omitted when we like.)

Rhythmically, item 1 seems not entirely satisfactory. The final phrase, “panting and trembling,” comes as a kind of afterthought—we don’t feel propelled into it by all that has gone before—and its faint echo of the earlier rhythm, “thrashed and squealed,” feels slightly awkward. Item 2 is worse: The echo of “thrashing and squealing” is now much too obvious, giving the sentence an offensive clunky symmetry. Item 3 is better. The echoing phrases have been brought together in the same part of the sentence, allowing the close of the sentence to smooth out and run free; and by dropping the word “and” from the phrase “panting and trembling,” the rhythm of this segment is slowed down (“panting, trembling”) and the echo is to some extent suppressed. And 4 is better yet. Slowed by the phrase “panting, trembling,” the sentence winds down, like the pig, in the word “helpless.” Sound now echoes sense.

By keeping out a careful ear for rhythm, the writer can control the emotion of his sentences with considerable subtlety. In
my novel
Grendel
, I wanted to establish the emotion and character of the central-character monster in his first utterance. After some brooding and fiddling, I wrote:

Part of the effect, if the sentence works, is of course the choice of words. It would be different if I’d written, “The old cow sits …” But part of it is the handling of stresses. The opening juxtaposed stresses, intensified by near rhyme, give appropriate harshness; the alliteration of an essentially nasty sound (“
s
tands,” “
s
tupidly”) maintains this quality; and the rhythmic hesitation of the long syllable at the end of the first phrase

followed by the tumble into difficult-to-manage supernumerary unstressed syllables

gives a suggestion—I hope—of the monster’s clumsiness of thought and gait. (We scan the words, I think, as

rather than as dactylic and amphibrachic. Thus “tri” functions—or would in metrical verse—as a rider, and, given our habits of expectation in strongly rhythmic prose as in verse, the syllables fall clumsily.)

The good writer works out his rhythms by ear; he usually has no need of the paraphernalia I’ve invoked here for purposes of discussion. Yet occasionally it proves helpful to scan a line with metrical analysis marks, as an aid to determining where some new, strong beat should be inserted, or some pair of unstressed
syllables suppressed or added. Turning sentences around, trying various combinations of the fundamental elements, will prove invaluable in the end, not just because it leads to better sentences but also because over the years it teaches certain basic ways of fixing rhythm that will work again on other, superficially quite dissimilar sentences. I don’t know, myself—and I suspect most writers would say the same—what it is that I do, what formulas I use for switching bad sentences around to make better ones; but I do it all the time, less laboriously every year, trying to creep up on the best ways of getting things said. One thing that may be helpful to notice is the kinds of changes that push unstressed syllables up to stress. Take the first phrase of the nursery rhyme “Taffy Was a Welshman.” Rhythmically the poem can legitimately be viewed in two ways, either as regular metrical verse or as “old native meter,” derivative from the Old English alliterative line. In the former case the line has six beats, in the latter only four. I will treat the line here as old native meter. Watch the permutations pushing unstressed syllables to stress, or, as Hopkins would say, “springing” the verse.

Notice the difference of energy in the various rhythmic permutations, though behind all the jazzing the (imaginary) drumbeat is the same.

What has already been said on the subject of point of view need not be repeated here. In contemporary writing one may do anything one pleases with point of view, as long as it works. As long as the flavor of the writing is at once contemporary (as a John Salt painting or a George Segal sculpture simply could not come from any other time), one need not send signals to the reader that one may do peculiar things—sudden shifts of any kind. That is part of the built-in expectation and pleasure of “contemporary” or at-once-recognizably-innovative art. But in every age, including our own, some literature—often the best, since as a rule one cannot simultaneously invent wildly and think deeply—some literature uses traditional methods, and here a certain correctness is beyond dismissal. Some discussion of point of view is therefore necessary.

It is often said, mainly by non-writers, that the first-person point of view (the “I” point of view, as in “then I saw the jug”) is the most natural. This is doubtful. The third-person point of view (“Then she saw the jug”) is more common in both folk and sophisticated narrative. No fairy tales are told in the first person; also no jokes. First person allows the writer to write as he talks, and this may be an advantage for intelligent people who have interesting speech patterns and come from a culture with a highly developed oral tradition, such as American blacks, Jews, and southern or down-east Yankee yarn-spinners; but first person does not force the writer to recognize that written speech has to make up for the loss of facial expression, gesture, and the like, and the usual result is not good writing but only writing less noticeably bad.

Once first-person narrative has been mastered—by some standard of mastery—the writer is encouraged to write in the third person subjective, a point of view in which all the “I”s are changed to “he”s or “she”s and emphasis is placed on the character’s thoughts, so that “Then she saw the jug” becomes, “Was
that a
jug
she saw?” or “A jug! she thought.” This point of view (style, in a sense) goes for deep consciousness, in the hope that the thoughts and feelings of the character will become the immediate (unmediated) thoughts and feelings of the reader. The effect is something like:

The third-person-subjective point of view has its uses, but it also has severe limits, so that something is wrong when it becomes the dominant point of view in fiction, as it has been for years in the United States. In addition to defects mentioned already (
Chapter 3
), it locks the reader inside the character’s mind (even more so than Henry James’ “center of consciousness,” where we have an interpreting narrator), however limited that mind may be, so that when the character’s judgments are mistaken or inadequate, the reader’s more correct judgments must come from a cool withdrawal. When the fiction is judgmental, and for some reason much third-person-subjective fiction is, the writer commits himself to nothing except by irony; he merely exposes the stupidities of mankind; and except insofar as he misses the point, the reader stands apart from the action of the story, watching it critically, like a grumpy old man at a party. One can of course get the same misanthropic effect by means of other techniques; for instance, by use of the crabby omniscient narrator of Katherine Anne Porter’s fiction or the darkly ironic voice sometimes favored by Melville, as in
The Confidence Man
. And on the other hand it is of course possible for a writer using the third-person-subjective point of view to
enjoy and admire his characters; to write, that is, about someone he considers at least in some measure a hero. But even when the fiction is benevolent, the third-person-subjective point of view can achieve little grandeur. It thrives on intimacy and something like gossip. It peeks through a keyhole, never walks through an open field.