In a Parallel Universe, Dickens Lays Down the Beat
Parallelism in prose. (The title was inspired by a footnote, which is not how these things work.)
The central section (everything about Dickens) is new, but I’ve also reworked sections from an older essay, Your Foundation for Style. Quoted works are from Gene Wolfe, Ross MacDonald, Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and Stephanie Meyer.
In one of the footnotes, I mention hearing Dickens’s words as if spoken by a rapper, and that resulted in the title and that resulted in a search that brought me to Rap Battles: Mark Twain vs. Charles Dickens. I’ve got to tell you, though, this essay has nothing to do with rap.
In a Parallel Universe, Dickens Lays Down the Beat
Parallelism is about comparison and contrast. Parallelism is about emphasis, balance, and rhythm. That explanation is its own example as one phrase parallels the others, because, fundamentally, parallelism is about structural repetition.
We have books here bound in the hides of echidnes, krakens, and beasts so long extinct that those whose studies they are, are for the most part of the opinion that no trace of them survives unfossilized. We have books bound wholly in metals of unknown alloy, and books whose bindings are covered with thickset gems. We have books cased in perfumed woods shipped across the inconceivable gulf between creations—books doubly precious because no one on Urth can read them.
The Book of the New Sun — Gene Wolfe
Literary parallelism uses similar structures within a sentence, paragraph, and ever larger passages to create patterns that aid in creating meaning and the aesthetics of readability. We have books here bound in hides… We have books bound wholly in metals… We have books cased in perfumed woods…
But I remembered how it felt to be a thief. It felt like living in a room without any windows. Then it felt like living in a room without any walls.
Find a Victim — Ross MacDonald
Parallelism in Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities is a classic, but Dickens was paid by the word. In the third chapter of the second book, that fact results in some of his least popular prose. You may disagree with the critics of this passage, but if we adopt their opinion, then this becomes an opportunity not only to study parallelism but also restraint. We can learn how variation in construction and complexity brings key passages into focus.
A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life’s end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?
A Tale of Two Cities, Book 2, Chapter 3 — Charles Dickens
The paragraph overwhelms. In an attempt to lighten the reader’s burden, I take on the role of editor:
Within every great city at night, each darkly clustered house encloses secrets. The human creature is a profound mystery, and every beating heart holds in its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it: a locked book barely read and a treasure in deep water, now hidden beneath a silty gloom. My friend is dead…
I stop. Dickens is unhappy with my efforts, for he employed techniques which I’ve trimmed away. We need a readable paragraph, but one that retains that Dickensian style. For that, we must return to a technique used repeated throughout this paragraph and determine how best to make Dickens’s own work shine.
The passage has a number of parallel constructions.
No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved… No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water…
It was appointed… It was appointed….
In construction if not exact repetition, the paragraph began with another example: A wonderful fact to reflect upon… A solemn consideration…
The technique is sound, but the repeated use is too much. I suggest to Mr. Dickens that we focus on the structures important to his book-and-water metaphors.
Within every great city at night, each darkly clustered house encloses secrets. The human creature is a profound mystery, and every beating heart holds in its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore.
Allowed focus, the beauty of Dicken’s language reveals itself.
Dickens continues with another use of parallelism: my friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead…
Again, I suggest to him that it’s too much. Keep the focus on the metaphors, and grant us something different here: my friend, my neighbour, the darling of my soul is dead…
This simplicity gives the reader’s mind an opportunity to transition and prepare for the complex thought to come:
My friend, my neighbour, the darling of my soul is dead; the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret was always in that individuality, and I shall carry it in mine to my life’s end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?
Reality Check
This is an exercise in technique and restraint. I may never improve upon the master’s writing,1 but its beauty was lost to me an an inscrutable paragraph. Any technique can become too much, and here we had four examples of parallelism in a row, of which we’ve kept two, allowing the mind to understand what we’ve deemed important.
Dickens loved parallelism, and while we’ve seen the failure of excess, there are famous examples of its success. We remember the opening sentence / paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities because of its parallel structures (which imply an equality between statements) and its content (which are polar opposites). The power is undeniable.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Forms of Parallelism
The opening of Two Cities focuses on a form of parallelism known as anaphora, in which the beginning of a phrase is repeated, but there are also examples of epistrophe2 where the ending of a phrase is repeated. The dual examples exist in it was the best of times, it was the worst of times and in we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.
However, parallelism exists outside of either of these forms, and in that sense becomes less a tool and more the fundamental fabric of good writing. We see it in the need for verb tenses to match when we are writing, typing, scribbling down our thoughts for others to read. Every teacher has encountered and despaired of non-parallel structures. They transform a potential readable text into something jarring, like potholes in a freshly paved street.
If the above image from Notes doesn’t display, it’s a dog pillow with writing that reads: bark, woof, wag, bone, fetch. As EJ Trask points out, either the list breaks parallel structure of that pillow is NSFW.
Other Forms of Repetition
Many ways exist for a writer to build with repetition, and the easiest to pull off is direct repetition with little to no synonyms involved. Such a repetition is loud and may be used alone in concise language where is can have the stage to itself. We see this with a passage from Faulkner:
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.
The Sound and The Fury — William Faulkner
Equivalent repetition is softer when successful. In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf presents us with a cascade of ideas around a shared theme, intermixed with and transitioning into direct repetition.
…her old emotion…cold with excitement…a kind of ecstasy…the old feeling…and feeling as…That was her feeling—Othello’s feeling, and she felt it…as Shakespeare meant Othello to feel it…
No, the words meant absolutely nothing to her now. She could not even get an echo of her old emotion. But she could remember going cold with excitement, and doing her hair in a kind of ecstasy (now the old feeling began to come back to her, as she took out her hairpins, laid them on the dressing-table, began to do her hair), with the rooks flaunting up and down in the pink evening light, and dressing, and going downstairs, and feeling as she crossed the hall “if it were now to die ‘twere now to be most happy.” That was her feeling—Othello’s feeling, and she felt it, she was convinced, as strongly as Shakespeare meant Othello to feel it, all because she was coming down to dinner in a white frock to meet Sally Seton!
Mrs. Dalloway — Virginia Woolf
But all techniques can be overdone, and we see equivalent repetition stretched beyond breaking in a paragraph from that overly maligned young-adult novel about vampires.
He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, incandescent chest, his scintillating arms bare. His glistening, pale lavender lids were shut, though of course he didn’t sleep. A perfect statue, carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble, glittering like crystal.
Twilight by Stephanie Meyer
I’ve written about this passage before and for the same reason: incandescent; scintillating; glistening; glittering. As we compare Woolf and Meyer, I’m challenged to understand why one works and the other doesn’t, and I’ll suggest the difference is variation. Meyer’s paragraph describes a character and uses equivalent adjectives to do it, and that gives us nothing else to focus on but the many, many ways his skin can be said to sparkle. Woolf gives us more, both with the depth of ideas conveyed in repetition but also in the breadth of style on display. Variation in sentence structure, in types of repetition, and in thought, all leading to the paragraph’s climactic idea.
I once asked how famous authors might have written this paragraph of Meyer’s. That essay has been behind a paywall for over a year, but I’ve made it free for those of you who wish read it. One author I didn’t include was Dickens, and I’ll close with how his love for parallelism might inspire a rewrite of Twilight.
He lay perfectly still in the grass. He lay perfectly still in the sun, his shirt open and his arms bare; glistening, pale lavender lids sleeplessly shut against the light, inscrutably shut against the rapture his perfect stature, carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble, glittering like crystal, awakened within me.
— Thaddeus Thomas
I chose the paragraph from Dickens because it simply overwhelmed me, but in the process of writing this essay, I’ve found my way into its language. I hear it spoken as if by a rapper, freestyling on the street, and now that I’m there, it’s glorious.
Epistrophe is also known as antistrophe.