Consonants and Consonance in Prose Style

Dickens knew that his novels’ chapters would be read aloud as they were released one by one. unfolding over months, sometimes years, like TV series today, A frustrated actor himself, he imagined family figures hamming it up as they read the latest episode to a fireside audience in ritual gatherings. And so Dickens wrote to be read aloud,

 Dickens recognized that consonants provide the key to a reader’s masterful delivery. To facilitate speech, the consonants must proceed comfortably from one to another, flowing conveniently for enunciation, momentum or emphasis. Consonants provide the force of projection; used incorrectly they can trip up and hobble a speaker.

  Dickens’ solution was to exploit how certain consonants are related according to where they form in the mouth. L’s and T’s for example proceed from the tip of the tongue against the hard palate, as do D’s and N’s, which touch closer to the teeth. Consider the word “tenderly” as it explodes and then rolls with the tongue tip. And when the tongue tip softens with an ‘S,’ not quite touching the palate, observe how nicely it leads to its tipster relatives (like the song title “Stella by Starlight”). And don’t leave out “Th” from the tongue-tip family (“All through dinner…” a typical Dickens sentence launcher).

  This practical use of neighboring consonants, whether for rhythm, momentum or effect, is recognized as a literary device called consonance. It’s technically a special form of alliteration which goes beyond mere repetition of a single letter, and in my opinion, is a more effective and subtle alliteration in both prose and poetry.

 Another neighborhood of consonants (or consonance) resides on the lips (linguists refer to labial consonants). When lips touch, soft M’s interchange with semi-explosive B’s and explosive P’s (as in “member” or “bumpy”), or V”s interchange with F’s (“fourscore and seven years ago” – notice how the S reverses positions with the labials, a cross-switching called chiasmus [kī-AZ-mis] by rhetoricians). Now check out how Renaissance poet Edmund Spenser in his typical style plays with lips and tongue tip in this line from his epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590) — never mind the archaic spelling, just savor the sound and its movements:

That troublous dreame ‘gan freshly tosse his braine,
With bowers, and beds, and ladies dear delight;

 When the lips don’t touch we get whispery W’s rolling into R’s, as in “willowy reeds.” And look at the lip play in Spenser’s “bowers and beds.”

 Now here’s Melville putting it all together in the preacher’s sermon on Jonah from Moby Dick:

As we have seen, God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down to living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore him along into the midst of the seas, where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and weeds were wrapped about his head, and all the watery world bowled over him.
                                      Chapter 9: The Sermon

 But who’s going to be reading us aloud? Everyone actually. It’s been found that even speed-readers subvocalize the words they read, hearing them in their minds.

 Try thinking of combinations of consonance yourself — it’s easier than you’d expect. When you start with a word and seek another word with similar consonants you’ll discover how quickly the mind obliges — I believe we have an innate linguistic mechanism that drives this. You’ll find that by hitching a ride on a consonance family your inborn poet will prompt you with sonorous and meaningful words as you compose, opening fresh ideas as well. So awareness of consonance not only enhances your prose but can speed up your word choices and creativity. As you pay more attention to it in your writing and reading, you’ll be using it more automatically.

 Beware, some writers who are rightly considered great have never developed this faculty, seemingly tone-deaf despite their genius. But you can’t go wrong with Melville and Dickens, Shakespeare, dramatist/critic George Bernard Shaw, poets Spenser or Dylan Thomas, or great orators like Churchill and Lincoln whose writings resound like their speeches. And check out the essays of novelists Robert Louis Stevenson and Edith Wharton. Essayists from the Victorian Period have especially gifted ears — William Froude, Walter Pater, John Ruskin and Thomas Carlisle for starters. Lastly don’t skip the young Renaissance poet Sir Philip Sidney, who by age 25 wrote what might be England’s first novel, The Arcadia, deploying a playful sonorous prose not only worthy of a poet but a model of satire.