Prosody

Literature, like music, is an art of time, or “tempo”: it takes time to read or listen to, and it usually presents events or the development of ideas or the succession of images or all these together in time. The craft of literature, indeed, can be said to be in part the manipulation of a structure in time, and so the simplest element of marking time, rhythm, is therefore of basic importance in both poetry and prose. Prosody, which is the science of versification, has for its subject the materials of poetry and is concerned almost entirely with the laws of meter, or rhythm in the narrowest sense. It deals with the patterning of sound in time; the number, length, accent, and pitch of syllables; and the modifications of rhythm by vowels and consonants. In most poetry, certain basic rhythms are repeated with modifications (that is to say, the poem rhymes or scans or both) but not in all. It most obviously does neither in the case of the “free forms” of modern poetry; but neither does it in the entire poetry of whole cultures. Since lyric poetry is either the actual text of song or else is immediately derived from song, it is regular in structure nearly everywhere in the world, although the elements of patterning that go into producing its rhythm may vary. The most important of these elements in English poetry, for example, have been accent, grouping of syllables (called feet), number of syllables in the line, and rhyme at the end of a line (and sometimes within it). Other elements such as pitch, resonance, repetition of vowels (assonance), repetition of consonants (alliteration), and breath pauses (cadence) have also been of great importance in distinguishing successful poetry from doggerel verse, but on the whole they are not as important as the former, and poets have not always been fully conscious of their use of them. Greek and Latin poetry was consciously patterned on the length of syllables (long or short) rather than on their accent; but all the considerations of “sound” (such as assonance and alliteration) entered into the aesthetically satisfactory structure of a poem. Similarly, both the French and Japanese were content simply to count the syllables in a line—but again, they also looked to all the “sound” elements.

The rhythms of prose are more complicated, though not necessarily more complex, than those of poetry. The rules of prose patterning are less fixed; patterns evolve and shift indefinitely and are seldom repeated except for special emphasis. So the analysis of prose rhythm is more difficult to make than, at least, the superficial analysis of poetry.

Structure

The craft of writing involves more than mere rules of prosody. The work’s structure must be manipulated to attract the reader. First, the literary situation has to be established. The reader must be directly related to the work, placed in it—given enough information on who, what, when, or why—so that the work catches and holds the reader’s attention (or, on the other hand, it must deliberately mystify the reader, to the same end).

Aristotle gave a formula for dramatic structure that can be generalized to apply to most literature: presentation, development, complication, crisis, and resolution. Even lyric poems can possess plot in this sense, but by no means are all literary works so structured, nor does such structure ensure their merit—it can be safely said that westerns, detective stories, and cheap melodramas are more likely to follow strictly the rules of Aristotle’s Poetics than are great novels. Nevertheless, the scheme does provide a norm from which there is infinite variation. Neoclassical dramatists and critics, especially in 17th-century France, derived from Aristotle what they called the unities of time, action, and place. This meant that the action of a play should not spread beyond the events of one day and, best of all, should be confined within the actual time of performance. Nor should the action move about too much from place to place—best only to go from indoors to outdoors and back. There should be only one plot line, which might be relieved by a subplot, usually comic. These three unities—of time, place, and action—do not occur in Aristotle and are certainly not observed in Classical Greek tragedy. They are an invention of Renaissance critics, some of whom went even further, insisting also on what might be called a unity of mood. To this day there are those who, working on this principle, object to Shakespeare’s use of comic relief within the tragic action of his plays—to the porter in Macbeth, for instance, or the gravediggers in Hamlet.

Assiduous critics have found elaborate architectural structures in quite diffuse works—including Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605–15), Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67), Giovanni Giacomo Casanova’s Icosameron (1788; 1928). But their “discoveries” are too often put there after the event. Great early novels such as the Chinese Dream of the Red Chamber (1754; first published in English 1929) and the Japanese Tale of Genji (early 11th century) usually develop organically rather than according to geometrical formulas, one incident or image spinning off another. Probably the most tightly structured work, in the Neoclassicists’ sense, is the Icelandic Njáls saga.

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The 19th century was the golden age of the novel, and most of the more famous examples of the form were systematically plotted, even where the plot structure simply traced the growth in personality of an individual hero or heroine. This kind of novel, of which in their very diverse ways Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (1830) and Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1850) are great examples, is known as Bildungsroman. Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) is as rigorously classicist in form as the 17th-century plays of Racine and Corneille, which were the high point of the French classical theater, although Flaubert obeys laws more complex than those of the Aristotelians. Novels such as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865–69), Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov (1880), and the works of Balzac owe much of their power to their ability to overwhelm the reader with a massive sense of reality. The latter 19th and early 20th centuries witnessed an attack on old forms, but what the new writers evolved was simply a new architecture. A novel such as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), which takes place in a day and an evening, is one of the most highly structured (yet innovative) ever written.

Novelists such as Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, and, in his later period, Henry James developed a multiple-aspect narrative, sometimes by using time shifts and flashbacks and by writing from different points of view, sometimes by using the device (dating back to Classical Greek romances) of having one or more narrators as characters within the story. (This technique, which was first perfected in the verse novels of Robert Browning, in fact reached its most extreme development in the English language in poetry: in Ezra Pound’s Cantos, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, and the many long poems influenced by them.)