Resonance

An Element of Fiction

Resonance, as a fictional element, might even be harder than Tone to pin down, but I think of it in terms of echo. Of lingering Tone. Of whispering impression. Of poetry. Of what moves the subliminal in the reader. Of what isn’t said outright but still resonates in the reader.

Magic would be a nice word.

John Gardner thinks of perfect fiction as that where resonance stands out as the final effect: “Every character is sufficiently vivid and interesting for his function; every scene is just long enough, just rich enough; every metaphor is polished; no symbol stands out crudely from its matrix of events, yet no resonance goes completely unheard, too slyly muffled by the literal. Though we read the work again and again, we can never seem to get to the bottom of it.”

Flannery O’Connor thought about resonance as well. “When one Southern character speaks, regardless of his station in life, an echo of all Southern life is heard.”

Jacques Barzun puts it beautifully, “I side with those who maintain that not poetry alone but even the flattest of flat prose consists of words plus echoes. Some of these echoes are fixed (and recognized) in idioms, cliches, and dead metaphors; others exist more vagrantly, in literature, in capricious habit, sometimes in mere sounds.”

William Zinsser agrees, “Good writers of prose must be part poet, always listening to what they write.”

John Gardner elaborates, “In the essayist’s style we might write, for instance, ‘The man in the doorway was large and apparently ill at ease — so large that he had to stoop a little and draw in his elbows.’ The poetic style can run harder at its effects: ‘He filled the doorway, awkward as a horse.’ Both styles, needless to say, can be of use. One builds its world up slowly and completely, as Tolstoy does in Anna Karenina, where very few metaphors or similes appear; the other lights up its imaginary world by lightning flashes.

“Every word, even the dullest and most frivolous, makes waves, calls up dark, half-unconscious associations which poetic context can illuminate.

“If the first time our hero meets a given character it occurs in a graveyard, the character’s next appearance will carry with it some residue of the graveyard setting.”

Ursula Le Guin observes, “The first chapters of many great novels bring in an amazing amount of material that will be, in one way or another, with variations, repeated throughout.”

Ayn Rand also elaborates very nicely, “The purpose of metaphors, or comparisons, is epistemological. If I describe a spread of snow and I say, ‘The snow was white like sugar,’ the comparison conveys a sensory focus on the whiteness of the snow. It is more colorful than merely saying ‘The snow was white.’ If I describe sugar, I can do it in reverse: ‘The sugar in the bowl was white like snow.’ This conveys a better impression of sugar than if I merely said: ‘The sugar was white…The operative principle here is that of abstraction. If you describe only one object, in concrete terms, it is difficult to convey a sensuous impression: you tell about the object, but you do not show it. The introduction of another concrete with the same attribute makes the two together give a clear sensuous image — it isolates the attribute by making the reader’s mind form an abstraction. The reader’s lightning-like visualization of the whiteness of snow and the whiteness of sugar makes that whiteness stand out in his mind as if he had seen it.” Ayn Rand

T.S. Eliot puts it this wonderful way, “What I call the ‘auditory imagination’ is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and obliterated and the trite, the current, and the new and surprising, the most ancient and the most civilized mentality.”

William Sloan observes that “No scene can be put into a novel, and read by the reader, without coloring the reader’s mind from that point on to the end; all the preceding scenes are the parents and ancestors of the next one. The experience of fiction is accumulative as well as sequential.”

As for Philip Gerard, “A certain image or idea informs a scene: The memory of it colors the meaning of the scene, gives it force, spins it with irony.

“Every literal action should be ballasted with an underlying resonance that plays upon memories of other moments in the novel. Just below the surface of the plot, triggered by the images of what is actually happening at the moment, the reader should feel a resonance like overtones in music, a sympathetic vibration of themes. The same chord struck in different octaves, in major and minor keys, echoing through memory, calling up associations of other incidents earlier in the novel.

“That’s what narrative is: a chain of deliberate memories.”

How about Virginia Woolf’s wonderful comments, “The sea is to be heard all through it… I hope to have kept the sound of the sea and the birds, dawn and garden subconsciously present, during their work underground. Between the sentences, apart from the story, a little shape of some kind builds itself up.”

And that is what resonates.

© Wolfstuff