Le Guin 4.1: Repetition for Fun and Profit
Continuing this series of exercises and discussions from Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft…
Chapter 4 is dedicated to repetition, which is, like long sentences, one of those bugbears or perhaps shibboleths of second-rate writers and writing teachers. As Le Guin puts it,
[To] make a rule “never use the same word twice in one paragraph,” or to state flatly that repetition is to be avoided, is to throw away one of the most valuable tools of narrative prose. Repetition of words, of phrases, of images; repetition of things said; near-repetition of events; echoes, reflections, variations: from the grandmother telling a folktale to the most sophisticated novelist, all narrators use these devices, and the skillful use of them is a very great part of the power of prose. (STC 53-54)
I must say that I find her choice of an example unhelpful. She presents a mythological narrative, “The Thunder Badger,” which is a Paiute tale told during the sacred winter season. To be sure, there is a lot of repetition here, and it’s certainly effective, but Native American (North or South) myth isn’t a wonderful example of the sort of prose that would-be novelists or short-story writers can usually adapt effectively. (A lovely contrary example proving the point is a good deal of the work of Joseph Bruchac, an Abenaki storyteller and novelist who makes wonderful use of such material.)
Le Guin does mention the repetitive structures adopted by Kipling in the Just So Stories, but again, these are very particular, intended to be read aloud. I think that the combination of Kipling and the Paiute material tends to suggest—though this is clearly not Le Guin’s intent—that repetition is mostly about orality, about the sound of prose.
Just to remind you, I’ve already given one excellent example of repetition in the work of John Crowley:
She was not much in his mind as he walked, though for sure she hadn’t been far from it often in the last nearly two years he had loved her; the room he had met her in was one he looked into with the mind’s eye often, sometimes with the trepidation he had felt then, but often nowadays with a grateful happiness; looked in to see George Mouse showing him from afar a glass, a pipe, and his two tall cousins: she, and her shy sister behind her.
It was in the Mouse townhouse, last tenanted house on the block, in the library on the third floor, the one whose mullioned windows were patched with cardboard and whose dark rug was worn white in pathways between door, bar and windows. It was that very room. (John Crowley, Little, Big)
Note once again the rhythmic pattern: “The room he had met her in was”; “It was … in the library”; “It was that very room.” Again, “… was one he looked into… looked in to see….” Smoky’s mind circles around this room, this moment, this place and time—and it’s set up with “She was not much in his mind.” She’s not in his mind concretely, perhaps, but actually there’s almost nothing in his mind that isn’t her. Sure, Crowley says Smoky “loved her,” but it’s this repetition, this pattern of images, that tells us what this means for him.
(Brief aside: if you’re under the impression that “show don’t tell” means something dramatically other than this, you’ve got it wrong. This is exactly what it means.)
Le Guin goes on to describe a couple of modes of repetition that aren’t quite like this, ones that stretch across much longer spans of prose.
First, there is the humorous repetition, the pat phrase or expression that seems incidental the first time and much later comes to seem inevitable. She mentions Mr. Micawber, in David Copperfield, whose expression “Something is certain to turn up” becomes a kind of leitmotif of his genial incompetence. As she puts it, “every time Mr. Micawber says it, it means more. It gathers weight. The darkness underneath the funniness grows always a little darker” (STC 55). Another example is Barry Hughart’s The Bridge of Birds; Hughart is hardly in Dickens’s class as a writer, and wouldn’t I think claim to be, but in that book (as with Mr. Micawber) we get this constant looping of events and people. The first time it happens it’s vaguely ironic, a funny coincidence, but then it happens again, and again, and again, until when something goes sharply wrong for the protagonists we wait, poised, knowing that something has just come back around… again! It’s a very, very funny book, which I highly recommend. (The sequels are also good, but a fair proportion of the real belly laughs depend on Sinological in-jokes, so your mileage may vary.) This is also one of the fundamental comic tropes of true farce, and as such in narrative prose it is perhaps most masterfully handled by P. G. Wodehouse.
Second, there is what Le Guin calls structural repetition, in which the repetition is a matter of “the similarity of the events in a story, happenings that echo one another” (STC 55). As she says, it’s difficult to describe or talk about in a small space: it can take a whole novel to achieve this. She gives the example of Jane Eyre, in which the first chapter is echoed subtly throughout the long novel. I suppose it doesn’t count, because the events don’t so much echo as get retold from various perspectives, but The Sound and the Fury is all about this device.
I’ll note, however, that this kind of thing can also be funny, and it doesn’t always have to be subtle. Michael Frayn’s farce masterpiece “Noises Off” is founded almost entirely on structural repetition. In Act 1, we see a scene from a very bad farce performed—with stops and starts, because we’re in rehearsal—by actors who don’t always get along, who aren’t particularly talented, and so forth. It’s funny for all kinds of reasons. Importantly, by the end of Act 1 we know this scene almost too well (Frayn knows what he’s doing: we laugh throughout). In Act 2, we’re backstage: the show is running, it’s still bad, and the simmering tensions among the cast have come to the boil. Instead of silly farce things happening onstage and people popping in and out of bedroom doors and all that, we’re focused on silly farce things happening backstage and people popping on and off from the onstage side. We now know the scene cold, so we start giggling when we realize that X is going to rush in over there carrying a bottle, and that means that Y is heading toward that location because he’s a drunk and wants the bottle, but now… and so on. Finally Act 3, from the front again. The play is (mysteriously) a success, the actors hate each other, and they’re sabotaging each other with devices that we understand immediately but the audience (presumably) doesn’t.
If you haven’t seen “Noises Off,” get thee to a local theater production (best), or YouTube (problematic, because you often can’t hear the lines clearly), or the Hollywood film. The film, by the way, has a dream cast, and Frayn wrote the script, but it just doesn’t work—which is almost tragic. But it’s still pretty funny.
Anyway, enough about repetition in general. It’s now time to look (next week) at Le Guin’s exercises for studying this subtle, intricate skill.