Some observations on prose technique
I was rereading one of my favorite action sequences in fantasy, the mantichore battle in E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, and was struck by some of the technical devices in it. Here’s the passage:
Lord Juss leaned out, holding by the rock with his right hand, scanning the wall beside and above them. An instant he hung so, then drew back. His square jaw was set, and his teeth glinted under his dark mustachios something fiercely, like a thunder-beam betwixt the sky and the dark sea, on a night of thunder. His nostrils widened, as of a war-horse at the call of battle; his eyes were like the violet levin-brand, and all his body hardened like a bowstring drawn as he grasped his sharp sword and pulled it forth grating and singing from its sheath.
Brandoch Daha sprang afoot and drew his sword, Zeldornius’s loom. “What stirreth?” he cried. “Thou look’st ghastly. That look thou hadst when thou tookest the helm and our prow swung westward toward Kartadza Sound, and the fate of Demonland and all the world beside hung in thy hand for wail or bliss.”
“There’s little sword-room,” said Juss. And again he looked forth eastward and upward along the cliff. Brandoch Daha looked over his shoulder. Mivarsh took his bow and set an arrow on the string.
“It hath scented us down the wind,” said Brandoch Daha.
Small time there was to ponder. Swinging from hold to hold across the dizzy precipice, as an ape swingeth from bough to bough, the beast drew near. The shape of it was as a lion, but bigger and taller, the colour a dull red, and it had prickles lancing out behind, as of a porcupine; its face a man’s face, if aught so hideous might be conceived of human kind, with staring eyeballs, low wrinkled brow, elephant ears, some wispy mangy likeness of a lion’s mane, huge bony chaps, brown blood-stained gubber-tushes grinning betwixt bristly lips. Straight for the ledge it made, and as they braced them to receive it, with a great swing heaved a man’s height above them and leaped down upon their ledge from aloft betwixt Juss and Brandoch Daha ere they were well aware of its changed course. Brandoch Daha smote at it a great swashing blow and cut off its scorpion tail; but it clawed Juss’s shoulder, smote down Mivarsh, and charged like a lion upon Brandoch Daha, who, missing his footing on the narrow edge of rock, fell backwards a great fall, clear of the cliff, down to the snow an hundred feet beneath them.
As it craned over, minded to follow and make an end of him, Juss smote it in the hinder parts and on the ham, shearing away the flesh from the thigh bone, and his sword came with a clank against the brazen claws of its foot. So with a horrid bellow it turned on Juss, rearing like a horse; and it was three heads greater than a tall man in stature when it reared aloft, and the breadth of its chest like the chest of a bear. The stench of its breath choked Juss’s mouth and his senses sickened, but he slashed it athwart the belly, a great round-armed blow, cutting open its belly so that the guts fell out. Again he hewed at it, but missed, and his sword came against the rock, and was shivered into pieces. So when that noisome vermin fell forward on him roaring like a thousand lions, Juss grappled with it, running in beneath its body and clasping it and thrusting his arms into its inward parts, to rip out its vitals if so he might. So close he grappled it that it might not reach him with its murthering teeth, but its claws sliced off the flesh from his left knee downward to the ankle bone, and it fell on him and crushed him on the rock, breaking in the bones of his breast. And Juss, for all his bitter pain and torment, and for all he was well nigh stifled by the sore stink of the creature’s breath and the stink of its blood and puddings blubbering about his face and breast, yet by his great strength wrastled with that fell and filthy man-eater. And ever he thrust his right hand, armed with the hilt and stump of his broken sword, yet deeper into its belly until he searched out its heart and did his will upon it, slicing the heart asunder like a lemon and severing and tearing all the great vessels about the heart until the blood gushed about him like a spring. And like a caterpillar the beast curled up and straightened out in its death spasms, and it rolled and fell from the ledge, a great fall, and lay by Brandoch Daha, the foulest beside the fairest of all earthly beings, reddening the pure snow with its blood. And the spines that grew on the hinder parts of the beast went out and in like the sting of a new-dead wasp that goes out and in continually. It fell not clean to the snow, as by the care of heaven was fallen Brandoch Daha, but smote an edge of rock near the bottom, and that strook out its brains. There it lay in its blood, gaping to the sky.
First of all, I’d never fully noticed the sheer amount of alliteration and assonance in Eddison’s prose. You could almost convert parts of this passage wholesale into alliterative verse in the old Germanic tradition. (I’ve seen Eddison’s style called “neo-Elizabethan”; that’s true of the Zimiamvia trilogy, but the Worm is closer in its tone to Icelandic or Anglo-Saxon literature, of which Eddison was an accomplished scholar. C. S. Lewis favored the earlier book for this reason, preferring its stark Northernness to the voluptuous courtly style of Zimiamvia.) Look at the phrase
brown blood-stained gubber-tushes grinning betwixt bristly lips
Initial Bs and B-clusters are all over this entire passage, but here, in combination with Gs, they give the mantichore a kind of monstrous homeliness - you think of Beasts and oGres and Ghouls and other BoGeymen. And how consonant-heavy this description is (something a like a 2.5:1 consonant-vowel ratio) - you can hardly open your lips yourself for all the short U and I sounds sandwiched between clumsy consonant clusters. And at the end of it, just so that no aesthetic sense is left unsatisfied, the two words bristLy Lips briefly re-mount the L horse that he’s been riding since the middle of the sentence and returns to in the next. (The “riding” metaphor, by the way, is from an essay by Robert Louis Stevenson on stylistic devices and assonance, whose title I forget.)
There are times when you actually hear the sounds of the battle in the prose: his sword Came with a CLanK aGainst the brazen Claws of its foot, and later his sword Came aGainst the roCK. When the beast falls on Juss you can hear it roar: with a hoRRid bellow it tuRned on Juss, ReaRing like a hoRse; and later the noisome veRmin fell foRwaRd on him RoaRing. And say blood and puddings blubbering out loud (again that combination of short U-sounds enclosed between heavy voiced stops) and you too will feel like you’re being smothered in gooey bubbling mantichore-gore.
Then there is the rhythm of it. Look how action is conveyed by sequences of stressed monosyllabic words placed close together:
the BEAST DREW NEAR
with a GREAT SWING HEAVED a MAN’S HEIGHT aBOVE them and LEAPED DOWN
its CLAWS SLICED OFF the FLESH from his LEFT KNEE
it ROLLED and FELL from the LEDGE, a GREAT FALL
At times the formal effects are so bold that they put you in mind of Gerard Manley Hopkins, or for that matter of Oulipo:
…and the breadth of its chest like the chest of a bear. The stench of its breath…
has a regularity that many poets might shrink from. Six anapestic feet (if you count a beat at the sentence break), the stress of each on a word whose center is an E-sound while the consonants around it are rearranged in various permutations (BR-DTH, B-R, BR-TH; CH-ST, ST-NCH).
Once the danger is over and the monster is dead, we need a little rest as well as a formal wrapping-up of these two long action-packed paragraphs, and we get it: a little ten-word closing sentence with its stresses nicely spaced out and full of comfortable, open diphthongs. There it lay in its blood, gaping to the sky. (This final static picture, by the way, is masterly in itself, at once zooming in on the end result of the scene, the monster slain, and situating it in the most cosmic of frameworks.)
So much for prosody. On the storytelling level, Eddison is an equal virtuoso (and in many different styles; his lesser-known novel Styrbiorn the Strong is told in a voice as laconic and close-lipped as this one is florid, and is immensely moving for it). The trick that caught my eye in this passage is a fairly common one you might call “effect before cause”. That is, when something big happens you describe your characters’ responses to it before telling the reader what the event actually is. So at the beginning of the scene, although we know there are mantichores in these mountains, and although every word of the prose shouts War starting from the description of Juss in the third sentence, we are not told what stirreth (as Brandoch Daha puts it) until five paragraphs in, when the reactions of every character have been described. How much less effective and suspenseful this scene would have been had Eddison told us first that “the beast was drawing near”, and then gone on to describe what Juss and the others were doing about it. This way we’re hooked from the start, and just as importantly, once the beast does appear the way is clear for immediate action, without the need for any discursive or dialogic interruptions.
Good storytellers do this all the time. Here’s an example from Stevenson’s Kidnapped, when the narrator is climbing up a dark tower in his shady uncle’s house:
The house of Shaws stood some five full stories high, not counting lofts. Well, as I advanced, it seemed to me that the stair grew airier and a thought more lightsome; and I was wondering what might be the cause of this change, when a second blink of the summer lightning came and went. If I did not cry out, it was because fear had me by the throat; and if I did not fall, it was more by Heaven’s mercy than my own strength. It was not only that the flash shone in on every side through breaches in the wall, so that I seemed to be clambering aloft upon an open scaffold, but the same passing brightness showed me the steps were of unequal length, and that one of my feet rested that moment within two inches of the well.
First the narrator’s terror, then the explanation for it. Here’s another example, this time in a single sentence - George Macdonald’s narrator in Phantastes looking into a weirdly numinous cupboard in the house of a strange faceless woman:
All at once, with such a shiver as when one is suddenly conscious of the presence of another in a room where he has, for hours, considered himself alone, I saw that the seemingly luminous extremity was a sky, as of night, beheld through the long perspective of a narrow, dark passage, through what, or built of what, I could not tell.
In these cases (though not in the Eddison scene), I think this technique is effective because it’s so phenomenologically accurate. When something gives you a start, you cry out before you know exactly what has frightened you. You shiver before you can put words on the source of your horror. Emotions and sensations precede their causes - if not in the objective world, then in our consciousness. And this faithfulness to the order of experience is why George Macdonald is also right when, for once, he puts cause before effect at the end of the same scene in Phantastes, in one of the most chilling sentences in the book:
Here, for the first time, she lifted her head, and looked full at me: her mouth was full of long, white, shining teeth, and I knew that I was in the house of the ogre.
This is a logical inference, and has the appropriate structure. He could have followed my effects-first rule, and written,
Here, for the first time, she lifted her head and looked full at me, and I knew that I was in the house of the ogre: for her mouth was full of long, white, shining teeth.
But that would have necessarily been a post-factum reconstruction, not an account of the experience as it actually unfolded. Macdonald is tracing the motions of his character’s mind, while Eddison prefers a camera’s-eye view; both approaches have their proper techniques.