Le Guin 4.2: Repeating Myself Again

Time to repeat myself! As you know, I’m working through the exercises in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft, and it’s time to look at the first exercises on repetition. The abbreviated instructions:

Part One: Verbal Repetition

Write a paragraph of narrative (150 words) that includes at least three repetitions of a noun, verb, or adjective….

Part Two: Syntactic Repetition

Write a paragraph to a page of narrative (200-400 words) in which you deliberately repeat the syntactical construction, or the exact rhythm, of a phrase or sentence (or more than one) several times. (STC 56)

My immediate thought about Part One is that a single paragraph like this entails a kind of obsessive, hyper-focused attention to some object (noun) or action (verb) or effect (adjective). The way the light passes through a stained-glass window or a gem, say, or exactly how such-and-such a sports person executes a masterful (or awful) act. I’ll choose an object, but as I do so I wonder whether it would write and read fundamentally differently if I had chosen an act….

He scanned along the row. The first big block were all psychology, then abnormal psychology, and he checked again the slip where he’d written the call-number. Yes, the right place. And here they came, little quartos and weighty leather-bound subscription books in multiple volumes, and there it was. He reached up, standing on tippy-toes, and plucked it down.

An ordinary book. Shabby blue cloth cover. Moderate foxing, noted the professional in him. He flipped it open. Plate missing, razored out, probably gone to hang on some wannabe’s wall.

Slowly he drifted toward his cubicle, leafing through. Could this really be the book? Dense text, a few diagrams and tables; he thought probably nobody in this library could have made sense even of the title, much less the crabbed seventeenth-century Latin. But yes, here it was, Chapter Ten—this was indeed the book. The book. The book he’d risked so much to find. One of only two copies extant, a forgotten tome, sitting here on his desk seemingly ordinary. Just a book. He began to read.

Obviously, the magic word here is “book.”

Part Two is tricky for me, because I have to clear my head of John Crowley, which is not something I pretty much ever want to do. I’ll try a mirror-scene, something in which two characters’ underlying relationship—love, hate, whatever—is implied structurally through parallelism rather than stated. What I have in mind is the kind of movie or TV scene in which you have two extraordinarily good actors (and a director who lets them act!) and on the surface, their characters are acting professional or polite or proper, but they know and we know (and presumably the other characters in the movie do not know) that they’re one short step away from murder, or sex, or whatever. Intense, seething stuff.

Phil observed her face, his palm settling on the butt of the pistol in his jacket pocket. The mask had been a mistake; despite his planning, his painstaking attention, the featureless white surface ruined his approach. He needed her now, but his wanting made a crack in the bigger way he needed answers. He drew his hands out again, empty, nearly unable to keep himself from reaching for her.

Joan ignored his hands, her eyes focusing on the frame of the photo on the massive table. She noticed his need, and the feeling brought a thaw to the colder hate that bubbled inside. She sensed the tension behind his mask, covered by that deadpan façade; she ran long fingers across the glass, feeling for a reflected presence. The frame was made of maple; beneath her fingers, those capable instruments, the elegant gold carvings exposed their secrets. A deft twist to a rosette, a gentle push on a curlicue, and the panel opened with a sharp click.

The knife was long and slim and deadly. Her expert eye detected hints of fine Italian craftsmanship, probably Neapolitan, from the period of the Borgia; perhaps this very weapon had delivered the misericorde to some betrayed enemy or ally of Rodrigo himself. She held the blade out quickly, level, almost unable to stop herself from leaping on him.

If I label the sentence patterns, which I have repeated with slavish precision, this goes:

A B C D

A C E-E B X

X X D

Preliminary conclusions: when Le Guin advises that the second exercise isn’t something you want to hurry, she aint’s kidding. That was tricky and exhausting and took a lot of time. You have to set up the repetition, execute it, then die away. Ideally you have to do it, you know, repeatedly. It’s more like composing music than anything else I’ve ever done, and I was a rotten composer.

More broadly, however, I’m not going to pronounce here, because we have two, count ‘em—two, more weeks of repetition. (On second thought, that’s not exactly enticingly phrased!) Next week, there is Le Guin’s Part Three, which is sharply distinct and carefully separated. That exercise is very long, a relatively extended narrative, and won’t leave me space for evaluation. So in the post after that—that’s December 7, if you’re playing along at home—I’ll come back and spend a column evaluating and considering and generally playing “What did you learn, Dorothy?”

As always, thanks for reading!