The Powers and Pitfalls of Repetition in Novels
What makes big choices dull and small ones powerful?
A Page at a Time: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, or The Reading of a Daunting Classic
Progress: Days 62, Pages 325
This week of reading Moby-Dick was the one that almost broke me. But I’ve scraped through a chapter a day like a harpoon on a ship deck. Melville is neither a motif or an anti-motif kind of writer. Whales and whaling—Moby Dick himself included—are not so much a motif of the novel as a subject, one which Melville commits doggedly to attacking from every possible angle. Neither is Melville an anti-motif writer, even a big happening like the first whale hunt that takes place in these last few chapters—a big exciting kind of scene—is followed by an even longer chapter discussing how whale meat is best cooked and eaten.
A Great Sentence
“Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by the horrors of a half known life.”—Moby-Dick pg. 299
Thursday Writing Advice: Small Things Over Time Become Bigger, Big Things Over Time Become Smaller
On Tuesday, we reviewed a mean profile of a popular fantasy writer and asked the question what is good writing? I made the argument that good writing, especially in novels, goes beyond the sentence level and more equal weight should be given to the cumulative effect of sentences and ideas together—storytelling. But there are ways other that storytelling that collective choices in a book can make a sum greater than the parts.
One such cumulative choice is repetition, or what’s known in high school English class as a motif. The book that always comes to mind as an exemplar of a motif for me is a classic high school book, but one that I thankfully didn’t read until I was out of school. “So it goes” in Slaughterhouse-Five is both an extremely in-your-face example of repetition and one that doesn’t suffer for wearing bells every time it finds itself on the page. It’s the three word refrain added after every time someone dies in the novel. What works for me about the choice is the simplicity of the phrase and the way that it builds over time. As a reader you start anticipating the phase and filling it in yourself. The refrain then begins to take on a new life as the story goes on as a sort of punctuation mark, making you notice each death with a little more consciousness. Usually, we are taught to prize originality and think of profundity as a prerequisite for uniqueness, but I always think back to “so it goes” as an example of how three simple words can cumulatively have a large and profound effect given the space of a novel. It’s important to remember that not all motifs are effective, sometimes small phrases repeated can just read as annoying verbal ticks or heavy-handed symbolism (a lot of eye, hair, and clothing color choices fall under this category). But when done correctly, almost nothing matches the impact of taking a seemingly innocuous phrase or idea and growing it in the mind of the reader until it is both memorable and says something new.
Conversely, there is something I’ve begun to think of as sort of an anti-motif (maybe there’s an actual term for this--please fill me in, English majors). I read a debut novel recently—that will remain unnamed for reasons that will become obvious—and it struck me before I finally gave up that every moment and scene in the novel in the first 60 pages was a Big Moment. Characters were horribly injured, major emotional confrontations happened, and profound, once-in-a-lifetime scenes were witnessed. What made this book in particular interesting is that it was a literary novel and not a telenovela as the previous sentence may have led you to believe; the book was quite well-written on the line level. Despite the high level of the writing, however, the novel didn’t really work for the precise reason that every movement was aiming for high impact. The cumulative effect of so many big things happening—images, events, feelings—was that together they were rather dull and unmoving because they lacked the small, mundane moments of character building and context that link together to make extraordinary happenings more meaningful. This is probably why I am not a big reader of action-filled military thrillers. Reading about explosion after explosion or bullets narrowly dodged should be exhilarating because of the stakes and scale involved, but in the end this largeness reveals itself as hollow when close calls keep happening and enemies are shot down again and again. So it goes.