With sound play in mercurial ripple across his sentences, a broader-gauge framework of schematic echo is regularly the most notable mark of his intricately linked storylines. And none more obviously than American novelist Richard Powers, whose sense of phrasal patterning–not just within sentences, but among them, chapters apart–amounts to the very poetry of his fiction. Any novelist who titles a book The Echo Maker (2006) would in part be naming his own procedures at one level or another. Lyric recurs to its own phonetic beat and measure the novel returns at less regular intervals to its themes, and sometimes to the wording that works them up in the first place, which may thus chime in service to this texturing of recognition. Beyond and including end rhyme and meter, close recurrence is the spine and flexion of lyric verse motif the normal engine of narrative. To keep order, remain true to form, poetry may often decide to rhyme to keep house, long prose must at least repeat, with a harmonizing difference each time around. And density is partly a matter of harmonic intervals, whether narrow or many pages wide. With the novel as much as any genre, literary intensity is often a function of verbal density, generated under the shaping force of style or form.
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