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SIRI HUSTVEDT, Pace, Space and the Other in the Making of Fiction

“Now this is very profound, what rhythm is,” Virginia Woolf wrote
to Vita Sackville West in 1926, “and goes far deeper than words. A
sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes
words to fit in, and in writing… one has to recapture this and set this
working (which apparently has nothing to do with words) and then
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it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit in.” Woolf
was working on her novel To the Lighthouse when she wrote her le er,
a profound book about time, among other subjects, but what I am in-
terested in here is how the writer’s comments on rhythm as more fun-
damental than words, as a way to catch the pulsing beat of aliveness,
can help formulate thoughts about embodied experience, the making
of art, and the nature of narrative.
Fiction writers, myself included, worry about rhythm, both the
immediate musical beats of sentences and the broader pace of a work
as a whole—the speeding up and the slowing down of a narration, its
multiple movements from beginning to end. If the rhythm is wrong,
the text is wrong and must be changed. The words must fit the
rhythm. The words I compose must conform to a cadence felt in me
for the work, one that has emotional resonance, one that feels “true.”
Countless writers have evoked walking and running as a motion
akin to writing, an imaginative perambulatory movement in space
from one place to another. And while writers travel, they take in the
sights and sounds and smells of their wri en world. Woolf often com-
posed aloud while walking. In his essay on Dante, Osip Mandalstam
wrote, “Both the Inferno and, in particular, the Purgatorio glorify the
human gait, the measure and rhythm of walking, the footstep and its
form. The step, linked with breathing and saturated with thought,
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Dante understood as the beginning of prosody.” “I think art depends
on rhythms,” wrote Ursula Le Guin, “and body rhythms are what
writers use…” When I am stuck on a passage, I stand up and walk,
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1 Virginia Woolf, Le ers, vol. 3., eds. Nigel Nicholson and Joanne Trautmann
(London: Hogarth Press, 1979), 132-3.
2 Osip Mandalstam, “Conversation about Dante,” in The Complete Critical
Prose and Le ers, ed. Jane Gary Harris, trans. Jane Gary Harris and Constance
Link (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979), 400.

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