Novelistic language

A few highlights from James Wood’s chapter on language in How Fiction Works . Early on, he mentions the “old modernist hope” that prose can be “as well written as poetry.” This will require readers and novelists to develop what Nietzsche called a “third ear”: “We have to read musically, testing the precision and rhythm of a sentence, listening for the almost inaudible rustle of historical association clinging to the hems of modern words, attending to patterns, repetitions, echoes, deciding why a metaphor is successful and another is not, judging how the perfect placement of the right verb or adjective seals a sentence with mathematical finality.”

He cites Lawrence’s description of King Victor Emmanuel’s “little short legs,” insisting that the phrase is not redundant: “say it aloud a few times, and it suddenly seems inevitable. We need the two words, because they sound farcical together. And short does not mean the same as little: the two words enjoy each other’s company; and the ‘little short legs’ is more original than ‘short little legs’ because it is jumpier, is more absurd, forcing us to stumble slightly – stumble short-leggedly – over the unexpected rhythm.”

A sentence from Madame Bovary describes Charles’s delight in getting Emma pregnant: “L’idee d’avoir engendre le delectait.” The translation of Geoffrey Wall (“The thought of having impregnated her was delectable to him”) is “good, but pity the poor translator. For the English is a wan cousin of the French. Say the French aloud, as Flaubert would have done, and you encounter four ‘ay’ sounds in three of the words: ‘l’id ee , engend re , d e lect ait .’ An English translation that tried to mimic the untranslatable music of the French . . . would sound like bad hip-hop: ‘The notion of procreation was a delectation.’”

I was happy to see Austen’s phrase about Mrs Elton’s “apparatus of happiness,” with this fine analysis: “Suggestive of technical efficiency, [apparatus] belongs to a scientific register that puts it at odds with ‘of happiness.’ An apparatus of happiness sounds more like an inverted torture machine than a bonnet and basket, and it promises a kind of doggedness, a persistence, that fits Mrs Elton’s character, and which makes the heart sink.” The effect of changes of register and diction is a central theme of Wood’s chapter.