The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (14 page)

Long Prose Rhythms

Stress-units are the smallest elements of prose rhythm, and the most purely physical. The frequency of stressed syllables and the handling of the beat so that it’s neither jerky nor monotonous are essential elements of the character of the prose sentence.

Thus the sentence itself, as I tried to show in my analyses of passages above, is a rhythmic but never regularly rhythmic element of prose.

Other elements of prose rhythm are vastly longer and larger, and far more elusive.

Rhythm is repetition. In a prose narrative, which must “move” with the events it tells, what can be repeated without losing the narrative impulse? What events can recur (of course with variations) to form the long rhythmic patterns of narrative?

Recurrent events in a narrative have to do with sound (the words, phrases, sentences) and they have to do with meaning (the content of the words—images, described actions, moods, themes).

There is repetition, much more repetition, even in very sophisticated narrative, than one might expect.

Repetition of Words or Phrases

Virginia Woolf’s novel
Between the Acts
offers a simple, straightforward example of the repetition of a phrase throughout a long narrative. An amateur pageant is being performed outdoors, with some recorded music, and the old phonograph hidden in the bushes keeps going “Chuff . . . chuff . . . chuff. . . .” The chuffing of the phonograph, varied slightly in the wording, recurs as a refrain throughout a whole section of the book. It seems insignificant, but it’s so effective that when the phonograph stops, you miss it—in a sense, a whole new rhythm is set up by the lack of that repetition.

Another kind of repetition is a characteristic phrase, a character tag; in
David Copperfield
, for instance, Mr. Micawber’s ever-hopeful “in case anything turns up.” Having a character say the same thing often enough that you come to wait for it can be a mechanically humorous contrivance; but Dickens is not a mechanical writer, and when the Micawbers are on the brink of ruin, the repetition darkens humor into irony, sympathy, and pain. Fiction can take a trivial event or even a single word and repeat it in different contexts, changing and deepening its meaning every time, and intensifying the structure of the narrative.

This is worth thinking about. In school we got red circles on our paper for saying “repetition” four times in one paragraph. We’re taught to avoid unintentional repetition of words or phrases. So we may have come to feel distrust or disdain for repetition as a device. But the power of deliberate repetition in a narrative is both great and legitimate.

Repetition of Images, Actions, Moods, and Themes

The next essay in this book is a study of the rhythmic structures in a chapter of Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings
. It continues the investigation of what these rhythmic structures may be and do. To sum it up very
briefly: I found that many of the events and scenes, though each is vivid and particular, repeat or will be repeated by other events and images within the chapter and throughout the book, relating all the parts of the story by alluding back to or foreshadowing events, scenes, images, movements, relations, acts, responses, moods. Every part of the chapter is part of the pattern of the whole chapter, and the greater whole, the book, is immensely self-referential, largely through semirepetition, variations on the same themes.

I think this is how a well-written narrative works—through endlessly complex rhythmic correspondences. Its coherence is established by inner references and backward-looking or forward-looking semirepetitions. If they are pure repetitions, adding no new vision or emotion, the story loses narrative drive (pure repetition is better suited to ritual than to narrative). If the rhythms become predictable, the coherence of the story is mechanical. But if the repetitions vary, echoing and foreshadowing others with continuous and developing invention, the narration has the forward movement we look for in a story, while maintaining the complexity and integrity proper to a living creature or a work of art: a
rhythmic
integrity, a deep beat to which the whole thing moves.

1
. I want to thank Dell Hymes for giving me the whole idea of reading prose this way—though of course he bears no responsibility for my extensions and misuses. His work with the written version of oral narrative is stunning in its revelation of complex, conscious, formal pattern in Native American narratives long considered “artless,” “primitive,” etc.

RHYTHMIC PATTERN IN
THE LORD OF THE RINGS

This piece, growing out of my attempts to study and consider the rhythms of prose and written for my own amusement, happily found a home in Karen Haber’s anthology of writing on Tolkien
, Meditations on Middle Earth,
published in 2001. I have added a brief note about the film version of the first book of the Trilogy, released late in the same year.

Since I had three children, I’ve read Tolkien’s Trilogy aloud three times. It’s a wonderful book to read aloud or (consensus by the children) listen to. Even when the sentences are long, their flow is perfectly clear, and follows the breath; punctuation comes just where you need to pause; the cadences are graceful and inevitable. Like Dickens and Virginia Woolf, Tolkien must have heard what he wrote. The narrative prose of such novelists is like poetry in that it wants the living voice to speak it, to find its full beauty and power, its subtle music, its rhythmic vitality.

Woolf’s vigorous, highly characteristic sentence rhythms are surely and exclusively prose: I don’t think she ever uses a regular beat. Dickens and Tolkien both occasionally drop into metrics. Dickens’s prose in moments of high emotional intensity tends to become iambic, and can even be scanned: “It is a far, far better thing that I do/than I have ever done.” The hoity-toity may sneer, but this iambic beat is tremendously effective—particularly when the metric regularity goes unnoticed as
such. If Dickens recognised it, it didn’t bother him. Like most really great artists, he’d use any trick that worked.

Woolf and Dickens wrote no poetry. Tolkien wrote a great deal, mostly narratives and “lays,” often in forms taken from the subjects of his scholarly interest. His verse often shows extraordinary intricacy of meter, alliteration, and rhyme, yet is easy and fluent, sometimes excessively so. His prose narratives are frequently interspersed with poems, and once at least in the Trilogy he quietly slips from prose into verse without signalling it typographically. Tom Bombadil, in
The Fellowship of the Ring
, speaks metrically. His name is a drumbeat, and his meter is made up of free, galloping dactyls and trochees, with tremendous forward impetus: Tum tata Tum tata, Tum ta Tum ta. . . . “You let them out again, Old Man Willow! What be you a-thinking of? You should not be waking. Eat earth! Dig deep! Drink water! Go to sleep! Bombadil is talking!” Usually Tom’s speech is printed without line breaks, so unwary or careless silent readers may miss the beat until they
see
it as verse—as song, actually, for when his speech is printed as verse Tom is singing.

As Tom is a cheerfully archetypal fellow, profoundly in touch with, indeed representing the great, natural rhythms of day and night, season, growth and death, it’s appropriate that he should talk in rhythm, that his speech should sing itself. And, rather charmingly, it’s an infectious beat; it echoes in Goldberry’s speech, and Frodo picks it up. “Goldberry!” he cries as they are leaving. “My fair lady, clad all in silver green! We have never said farewell to her, nor seen her since that evening!”

If there are other metric passages in the Trilogy, I’ve missed them. The speech of the elves and noble folk such as Aragorn has a dignified, often stately gait, but not a regular stress-beat. I suspected King Théoden of iambics, but he only drops into them occasionally, as all measured English speech does. The narrative moves in balanced cadences in passages of epic action, with a majestic sweep reminiscent of epic poetry, but it remains pure prose. Tolkien’s ear was too good
and too highly trained in prosody to let him drop into meter unknowingly.

Stress-units—metric feet—are the smallest elements of rhythm in literature, and in prose probably the only quantifiable ones. A while ago I got interested in the ratio of stresses to syllables in prose, and did some counting.

In poetry, by and large, one syllable out of every two or three has a beat on it: Tum ta Tum ta ta Tum Tum ta, and so on. . . . In narrative prose, that ratio goes down to one beat in two to four: ta Tum tatty Tum ta Tum tatatty, and so on. . . . In discursive and technical writing the ratio of unstressed syllables goes higher; textbook prose tends to hobble along clogged by a superfluity of egregiously unnecessary and understressed polysyllables.

Tolkien’s prose runs to the normal narrative ratio of one stress every two to four syllables. In passages of intense action and feeling the ratio may get pretty close to 50 percent, like poetry, but still, except for Tom, it is irregular, it can’t be scanned.

Stress-beat in prose is fairly easy to identify and count, though I doubt any two readers of a prose passage would mark the stresses in exactly the same places. Other elements of rhythm in narrative are less physical and far more difficult to quantify, having to do not with an audible repetition, but with the pattern of the narrative itself. These elements are longer, larger, and very much more elusive.

Rhythm is repetition. Poetry can repeat anything—a stress-pattern, a phoneme, a rhyme, a word, a line, a stanza. Its formality gives it endless liberty to establish rhythmic structure.

What is repeatable in narrative prose? In oral narrative, which generally maintains many formal elements, rhythmic structure may be established by the repetition of certain key words, and by grouping events into similar, accumulative semirepetitions: think of “The Three Bears” or “The Three Little Pigs.” European story uses triads; Native American story is more likely to do things in fours. Each repetition both builds the foundation of the climactic event, and advances the story.

Story moves, and normally it moves forward. Silent reading doesn’t need repetitive cues to keep the teller and the hearers oriented, and people can read much faster than they speak. So people accustomed to silent reading generally expect narrative to move along pretty steadily, without formalities and repetitions. Increasingly, during the past century, readers have been encouraged to look at a story as a road we’re driving, well paved and graded and without detours, on which we go as fast as we possibly can, with no changes of pace and certainly no stops, till we get to—well—to the end, and stop.

“There and Back Again”: in Bilbo’s title for
The Hobbit
, Tolkien has already told us the larger shape of his narrative, the direction of his road.

The rhythm that shapes and directs his narrative is noticeable, was noticeable to me, because it is very strong and very simple, as simple as a rhythm can be: two beats. Stress, release. Inbreath, outbreath. A heartbeat. A walking gait—but on so vast a scale, so capable of endlessly complex and subtle variation, that it carries the whole enormous narrative straight through from beginning to end, from There to Back Again, without faltering. The fact is, we
walk
from the Shire to the Mountain of Doom with Frodo and Sam. One, two, left, right, on foot, all the way. And back.

What are the elements that establish this long-distance walking pace? What elements recur, are repeated with variations, to form the rhythms of prose? Those that I am aware of are: Words and phrases. Images. Actions. Moods. Themes.

Words and phrases, repeated, are easy to identify. But Tolkien is not, after all, telling his story aloud; writing prose for silent, and sophisticated, readers, he doesn’t use key words and stock phrases as storytellers do. Such repetitions would be tedious and faux-naive. I have not located any “refrains” in the Trilogy.

As for imagery, actions, moods, and themes, I find myself unable to separate them usefully. In a profoundly conceived, craftily written
novel such as
The Lord of the Rings
, all these elements work together indissolubly, simultaneously. When I tried to analyse them out I just unraveled the tapestry and was left with a lot of threads, but no picture. So I settled for bunching them all together. I noted every repetition of any image, action, mood, or theme without trying to identify it as anything other than a repetition.

I was working from my impression that a dark event in the story was likely to be followed by a brighter one (or vice versa); that when the characters had exerted terrible effort, they then got to have a rest; that each action brought a reaction, never predictable in nature, because Tolkien’s imagination is inexhaustible, but more or less predictable in kind, like day following night, and winter after fall.

This “trochaic” alternation of stress and relief is of course a basic device of narrative, from folktales to
War and Peace;
but Tolkien’s reliance on it is striking. It is one of the things that make his narrative technique unusual for the mid–twentieth century. Unrelieved psychological or emotional stress or tension, and a narrative pace racing without a break from start to climax, characterise much of the fiction of the time. To readers with such expectations, Tolkien’s plodding stress/relief pattern seemed and seems simplistic, primitive. To others it may seem a remarkably simple, subtle technique of keeping the reader going on a long and ceaselessly rewarding journey.

I wanted to see if I could locate the devices by which Tolkien establishes this master rhythm in the Trilogy; but the idea of working with the whole immense saga was terrifying. Perhaps some day I or a braver reader can identify the larger patterns of repetition and alternation throughout the narrative. I narrowed my scope to one chapter, the eighth of volume 1, “Fog on the Barrow Downs”: some fourteen pages, chosen almost arbitrarily, though I did want a selection with some traveling in it, journey being such a large component of the story. I went through the chapter noting every major image, event, and feeling-tone and particularly noting recurrences or strong similarity of
words, phrases, scenes, actions, feelings, and images. Very soon, sooner than I expected, repetitions began to emerge, including a positive/negative binary pattern of alternation or reversal.