A Deep Dive into the Prose of Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
(This blog post was originally posted to the /r/Fantasy subreddit as part of a series)
Below are some of my thoughts about the prose techniques used by Mervyn Peake in the opening of Titus Groan.
The sample, and some preliminary thoughts.
Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping earth, each one half way over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.
What stands out to me?
Right off the bat, a few things leap out at me. There is a fair use of figuratives, longer sentences divided into clauses (some parenthetical), some personification in particular, and some interesting word choices. Specifically, many of the word choices come in contrasting or unusual pairs (eg ‘chill intimacy’, a pairing of opposites).
A closer inspection reveals moderate use of alliteration (which, going forward, I won’t distinguish from assonance. The repetition of sounds will just be called alliteration to keep it easy.)
In contrast with a lot of ‘minimalist’ authors, whose prose is best appreciated for its invisible craft, this sample seems to show a prose style that incorporates a fair amount of visible techniques. I will go over a few elements of visible and invisible craft over the following sections, and we shall see what interesting things we can learn about this excerpt!
Figurative techniques: Metaphor, Simile, Personification.
Metaphor and its cousins are some of the most potent tools in a prose writer’s arsenal. By taking two unrelated objects or concepts and directly comparing them, one can often achieve a more vivid effect than is otherwise possible.
Their use can be a double-edged sword since they are so visible. Good ones and bad ones both tend to stick out.
Some quick definitions:
- Metaphor: Directly comparing two things, usually with a ‘be’ verb. Eg. ‘He was a strong bull.’
- Simile: Directly comparing two things with a ‘like’ or ‘as’. Eg. ‘He was strong like a bull.’
- Personification: A particular metaphor that gives an animal or inanimate object human qualities. Eg. ‘The wind wrapped icy hands around her throat.’
Now, to run the numbers for the Gormenghast passage.
“Swarmed like an epidemic”
“like limpets to a rock”
“like a mutilated finger …”
“They sprawled over the sloping earth”
“each one half way over its neighbour”
“held back by the castle ramparts”
“laid hold on the great walls”
“pointed blasphemously at heaven”
“owls made of it an echoing throat”
“by day it stood voiceless.”
“Time-eaten buttresses”
(Simile 3, personification 9)
Twelve uses of figurative language in all.
That’s pretty dense for a passage that is six sentences long. The main culprit here is the sentence beginning ’They sprawled’ which has a metaphor or simile in each clause.
In particular, the most-used technique at a count of 9 was personification. They are first used to give life to the descriptions of the hovels surrounding the castle, later to compare the tower with a mutilated finger, and lastly to make it into an ‘echoing throat’ that is silent by day.
If it isn’t clear from a glance, Mervyn Peake’s aim here may just have been to give the reader a mental image of a dilapidated, almost diseased Castle Gormenghast. It certainly works for me.
For our purposes, I think it gives us a good look at how figurative techniques like simile, metaphor, and personification can be used to make things more vivid. So far, this section has been nothing you wouldn’t see in a Grade 10 English class. Let’s try and have a bit of a deeper discussion, then.
Why might an author, specifically, choose to use figuratives? On the other hand, what stops them from using them all the time?
Well, they are visible to the reader. A great metaphor will delight the reader. A terrible one will disgust them. There is no quicker journey to being labelled a ‘purple prose’ writer than the shortcut through Terrible Metaphor Lane.
So why take the risk?
Here are a few of my thoughts. I’ve done my best to learn a lot about these topics, but at the end of the day, its just opinion and perspective.
One reason that figurative language is alluring is because it is (or can be) very compact. Writers love compact writing. It can take a lot of words to say: “He had a squashed face with a little nose, floppy jowls and mean, watery eyes.” When you can instead say: “He looked like a bulldog.” There’s nothing stopping you from doing a combined approach, but with the simile example here, you can see how three descriptive phrases can be condensed into one.
Another reason is due to my favourite subject (I have a hundred favourite subjects): cognitive psychology! Hooray!
Let’s rewind to the start of a scenario: a writer sitting in front of a blank page.
Their task is to describe a cave, and make it vivid to the reader. This writer might have a mistaken idea of vividness and go off on the wrong track.
Let’s say they describe the exact dimensions of the cave. Then they describe the precise geological make-up of the cave, the humidity and temperature, and the presence of nitrogen/oxygen/ other gases.
That kind of thing is not vivid, because it is not how the human mind works. We cannot easily imagine a thing that is given in blueprint form. Mental pictures are built up in the reader’s mind by summoning up existing concepts and sensory memories.
I have no idea how to imagine the humidity and temperature of a cave when it’s given in numbers. Not vividly, anyway.
But if the writer uses metaphors, then it’s possible for the reader to use something they have already encountered to make it feel real. The human mind categorizes things as schema. A schema is much more experience-based and observation-based than a strict set of geometric measurements. When a human brain thinks of ‘tree’, it is not necessarily thinking of how trees are biologically defined. The brain takes a shortcut right to the ‘schema’ of a tree, which is defined in the brain as ‘all those times I saw a tree-looking thing.’
So a writer wanting to make an imaginary thing they are describing feel more vivid, it makes the most sense to access the schemas in the mind of the reader, as opposed to writing a set of instructions for how to ‘build’ the shape of the object. Since schemas are experience-based, this also means that in comparing and contrasting familiar things, writers can access all the associations that are common to those schemas. These associations can be emotional, cultural, or even meta-textual.
Because of this, figuratives often give reader a mental image as well as emotional information, which is perhaps even more crucial. In the Gormenghast example, the figuratives were used to create a sense of dilapidation and disease. When describing a cave, the intended emotional atmosphere will largely dictate the kind of simile used.
A spooky or thrilling cave might have stalactites and stalagmites that look ‘like the fangs of a beast.’ A mysterious cave might be ‘black as the dark side of the moon.’ A cave used as a sanctuary might be ‘like a hidden fortress.’ Do forgive these terrible examples, they’re just for illustration.
There are other reasons to opt for using simile & metaphor, but these are some that I think are important considerations.
So, in terms of the ‘Gormenghast’ passage, what can we learn about the liberal usage of figuratives? For me, the primary advantage they give is a strong, well-reinforced sense of atmosphere. Mervyn Peake succeeds in summoning images to my mind—mutilated finger, hovels crowding around like an epidemic, an echoing throat of a tower—and in doing so opens the book with a vivid portrait of Castle Gormenghast, as well as firmly setting a tone.
Rhetorical Devices
I will keep this section shorter because, while there may be devices I can’t spot, they don’t seem to be something Mervyn Peake does very often in this passage.
The most visible and obvious one, for me, is the final sentence. Two balanced clauses separated by a semi-colon, structured in parallel. The parallel here is ‘soft’ rather than ‘hard’, which I’ll explain here.
A hard usage of parallelism looks like: “He was a small boy, she was a big girl.” In this case the grammar is identical in both phrases, going [Article, verb, article, adjective, noun].
The sentence in question: “At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.”
So we get the grammatical parallelism of ‘at night / by day’ and the conceptual contrast of night and day. We also get the conceptual contrast of ‘echoing throat’ and ‘voiceless’, but beyond that the structure is only loosely mirrored. For one thing, in the first half, the tower is acted upon by the owls. In the second half, the tower is the active subject which ‘stood voiceless’ and ‘cast its long shadow.’
Nonetheless, soft as the parallel is, it still achieves the job of the technique, which is to balance and directly compare contrasting elements.
Peake could have easily said “Owls made lots of noise there, but only at night.” He didn’t, thankfully, even though what I wrote conveys mostly the same information. Contrasting opposing elements is often best done with some sort of framework or deliberate aim.
Like earlier, with similes that are vivid because they compare like things, contrasting elements (night / day; echoing throat / voiceless) are more vivid when they are juxtaposed. The human brain likes contrasts, both in senses and concepts. One reason is that contrasts make things clearer. Another is that, perhaps because they are easier to see and imagine, or perhaps for other reasons, they resonate more emotionally. Whatever the nitty-gritty cognitive reason for it, authors often use contrasts, masterful authors use it constantly.
For those interested in numbers, that’s 1 rhetorical device over 6 sentences.
Diction
Diction, the practice of choosing certain words, can be exhausting to analyse if you look at every single word. For the purposes of this post, I’ll simply pick out ‘notable’ word choices and give some thoughts about them. What constitutes notable is a bit subjective here.
- Circumfusion – uncommon word choice
- Chill intimacy – contrasting pair
- Black ivy – uncommon pairing
‘Circumfusion’ is defined as ‘Surrounded or poured around, as with liquid’, which is an interesting choice. In itself, it is a quite metaphorical way to talk about the cluster of dwellings around the castle. As the user who submitted this sample noted, it’s a strange but extremely appropriate and vivid word choice.
‘Chill intimacy’ strikes me as an effective example of juxtaposition. I’m sure there is a proper, probably Greek, term for this technique, but I’ll put it under ‘diction’ for simplicity.
‘Black ivy’ – this reminds me of a piece of writing advice I came across. It said that when using a modifier (adjective, adverb, etc), it should always be an unexpected word. Ivy, usually being green, is rendered just a little bit unexpected when described as black. It adds nicely to the atmosphere, and it is a good reminder to not always include descriptions that are strictly appropriate and expected, but to think outside the box from time to time.
Rhythm
This section, too, will be brief, because I spent too much time on similes earlier.
Rhythm can be analysed broadly, in terms of how sentences (or phrases / clauses) vary in length, or in terms of how particular alliterations and metrical tools are used. I will opt for briefly analysing this passage by the former, with the intention of doing a much more nitty-gritty analysis of a passage in the future.
One notable thing that Peake does is make use of parenthetical commas, that is, the tendency to make a pause within a sentence with a short phrase that could be put into brackets and / or removed without changing the sentence’s fundamental meaning.
Here is the passage broken down into words per sentence:
- 42 / 39 / 17 / 32 / 24 / 20
This reveals that the sentences cluster around two lengths – around forty, and around twenty words apiece. With this in mind, the pattern of the six sentences can be written as long / long / short / medium / short / short.
This pattern doesn’t reveal much in and of itself, except that we can say that the lengths definitely do vary, and that they start out generally longer and finish a bit shorter.
Looking at these and thinking about the publication date, I think we would have a more fruitful picture of the rhythms here if we split the passage up by periods AND commas. I’ll call these chunks ‘phrases’ (even though linguistically a ‘phrase’ is a very particular thing). Here is how the count of phrases comes out. I shall mark ‘parentheticals’ with a P.
- 1 / 2P / 7 / 32 / 6 / 8 / 6 / 11 / 8 / 2 / 3P / 11 / 9 / 6 / 5 / 1P / 4P / 7 / 2 / 5P / 17 / 10 / 10
My classifications of the parentheticals may be off, but even so, I think we have a clearer picture now of how the rhythms of this passage work on a macro scale.
The modern style of writing heavily advocates for shorter, simpler sentences. Titus Groan, being published in the '40s, is written in an older style. However, in terms of varying patterns of rhythm, the passage obeys the same laws as modern prose. Instead of following the ‘sentence variation’ paradigm, it follows a ‘phrase variation’ paradigm.
What stands out to me about this pattern is that the reader is given time to rest in the middle of a lot of the longer sentences. What might have seemed like a daunting 39 word sentence in the previous analysis is now more clearly seen as a few shorter phrases strung together. A lot of these longer sentences feature phrases that have 5 or fewer words, making them very manageable indeed.
I think modern readers who are perhaps wary of older books might be able to find pleasure in these older styles with a small shift in thinking. See the comma as a pause, the short phrases between the commas as time to rest. There is no need to separate every individual thought and description into shorter and shorter sentences—so long as the author knows how to give the reader time to rest along the way. It's not all about resting, mind you, but the rests in a sentence or passage are often a good place to start when feeling out rhythms.
Again, there is so much more to be said about rhythm, but I will leave it there for the purposes of this post. I hope to address rhythm more thoroughly in future posts.
Conclusion
Thank you so much for taking the time to read this.
I am hoping that, in future, these posts can be a chance for me to dive even deeper. I will possibly try to string together analyses of passages that share common features, or perhaps that contrast very clearly with each other. I don’t think I’ll analyse every single passage under the same criteria. Some, for example, won’t use similes, but will use rhythmic devices. Others might be very heavy on rhetorical devices, and so on. There will certainly be other techniques and aspects of craft that I haven’t even thought of yet!
I have used this as an introduction and a chance to feel out the different ways of looking at these techniques. I hope I have done a good job of balancing the numbers side with the less tangible qualities of the prose. In future I would like to keep the same balance between them, but perhaps dig deeper on BOTH fronts, rather than leaning too far one way or the other.
To those of you who are interested, who wish to tune in next time, I hope that by digging deeper and deeper into samples of prose, we can heighten our enjoyment of reading. I am always willing to receive more samples, or take suggestions for other techniques to examine.
Did you want to see more numerical approaches, or less? Did I miss any metaphors or rhetorical devices? Let me know!
Until next time!
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No memories.
No identity.
Nowhere to hide.
Advisors insist he is the King of Ur-Atha, enemies call him a despot.
Which is he—a tyrant, or an imposter?