This chapter is narrated in the first person and present tense by its title character. Thus, Rance does not afterwards tell someone else what has happened. Instead, we are told what is happening as it happens as if by Rance himself at the time, which is impossible. Does anyone think like this, i.e., maintain a non-stop internal narration of his own immediate experiences?:
"Light bounces off white sands on the left, under brushy bluffs, in a blaze that hurts my eyes." (p. 69)
Like any good Andersonian narrator, Rance addresses no less than four of the senses:
"Air and ground are warming fast, but coolness blows off the sea, smells of salt and kelp and distance. The breakers boom that we're going to meet. A gull makes a thin jeering overhead." (p. 70)
Warmth and coolness;
blowing wind, presumably felt;
smells;
sounds of booming and jeering.
We have had a smell of distance before.
Rance refers to "...wander-footed Ogier the Dane..." (p. 74)
Like Wanda Tamberly, he quotes Kipling's "excellent loneliness." (p. 77)
More multiple senses:
"As the wetness steams off me, I feel salt crusts itchily forming, I taste them on my lips. Light flames." (p. 78)
Rance inwardly addresses the ship that he imagines building. Do his thoughts have the rhythm of blank verse?
"I have been in the yards and shops,
"To pick your timbers balk by balk
"And select each plank that shall be yours;
"In northern forests I have seen
"The trees for your masts which I will fell,
"Trim, season, and shape myself;
"A sailmaker it is not given me to be,
"But I know a master of the craft
"- The last of the black arts - to whom
"I will entrust the suiting of you..."
etc (p. 74)
I am not sure about this but the rhythm is odd for prose.
(The shark fin image is relevant.)
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
While it might be impossible or at least highly unlikely that anyone would narrate to himself the events of a day as we see Larry Rance doing, I think it artistically necessary, from a literary POV. That is, Anderson had to write the Larry Rance chapter that way if he was going to present the events of this chapter as Rance saw them, in an unspoken way.
And I noticed the reference to Holger Danske!
Ad astra! Sean
Poul notes elsewhere that in oral poetry the great epics tend to grow by accretion -- other stories/characters get shoehorned in. Thus Oiger/Holger ending up at Charlemagne's court, or all the stories that got set in the reign of Hrolf Kraki
A process that we appreciate in popular fiction like when Wonder Woman cameos in a Superman-Batman film.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Two examples I've thought of being BEOWULF and THE SONG OF ROLAND. Both of which I read with pleasure.
Ad astra! Sean
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