The rhythms of prose—and repetition is the central means of achieving rhythm—are usually hidden or obscure, not obvious. They may be long and large, involving the whole shape of a story, the whole course of events in a novel: so large they're hard to see, like the shape of the mountains when you're driving on a mountain road. But the mountains are there.
-Ursula K. Le Guin from Steering the Craft
A good novel, Ursula K. Le Guin writes, is one where the rhythms of both language and plot are in harmony. Where, so to speak, the writing speaks the native language of the country of its structure. “The mountains are there,” she says, even if you’re so deep in them you can’t take in their full contours. She’s inspired by Virginia Woolf in this, at least in part, taking the name of her book of essays The Wave in the Mind, from a letter Virginia Woolf wrote in 1926 to Vita Sackville-West. “Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm,” Woolf writes. “A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing […] one has to recapture this, and set this working […] and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it.” It is this wave, Le Guin says, that, once found, you can ride all the way in to the story’s shore.
I’m fascinated by this for two reasons. First of all, it’s hard to do. Finding the rhythm of the language is one thing; it’s something like having a musical ear. You can hear when it’s in tune, and when it isn’t. But how this linguistic rhythm translates into the shape of a whole novel gathering there on the surface of the sea, wave after wave, mountain after mountain, is another thing. Which leads me to my second point of interest— how this metaphor might be taken a step deeper, into something closer to fact. Because what both Le Guin and Woolf are describing — these long rhythms, both tidal and geological— sounds markedly close to the oral tradition of storytelling and, more specifically, myth.