Producing Tone

The great Austrian poet Rilke was a friend of the great French sculptor Rodin, each making symbols in different media, Rilke in words and Rodin in bronze. Poets and sculptors and artists of every kind are often lonely figures, sensing themselves isolated and the heart of their work not understood. Rodin, though, believed that Rilke succeeded in comprehending his vision, and Rilke wrote down his reflections in a short essay entitled simply Auguste Rodin.

Rilke’s German essay was translated by Jessie Lemont and Hans Trausil and published in 1919, and there is something to be learned about the idea of literary tone from the diction and sentence structure these sensitive translators chose. Literary tone refers to the impression, the style, the inherent character of speech which a piece of writing produces in the reader, the way a writer comes across, the mood in which one speaks about the subject at hand. Adjectives that answer the tone of a work might be serious, impersonal, distant, diplomatic, convivial, friendly, lighthearted, along with many others which could describe the emotional posture or attitude a writer holds in relation to a topic.

The tone of a work strikes us, but it is not a transitive phenomenon without a cause. Tone is produced in language (though we should more properly say reproduced), just as a musician produces a certain tone in a particular manner on an instrument. We can point to something that accounts for the effect a musical or literary tone is having on us as listener or reader. It may be the position of forearm and wrist by which a pianist strikes a note, or it may be the vocabulary and sentence design by which a writer molds a linguistic form to convey a thought. Such technicalities create qualities, and the aggregate of those qualities accounts for the impressing tone.

To illustrate this idea, here is the second paragraph of Rilke’s essay as translated by Lemont and Trausil. It comprises only two sentences, but the second makes up over three-quarters of the paragraph. That in itself could be enough to suggest to us that something serious, profound even, is trying to be communicated, some idea that will require our sustained attention to comprehend, just as the language likewise will. Form, in other words, is mirroring its idea:

Rodin’s message and its significance are little understood by the many men who gathered about him. It would be a long and weary task to enlighten them; nor is this necessary, for they assembled about the name, not about the work,—a work that has grown far beyond this name’s sound and limitations, and that has become nameless as a plain is nameless or a sea that has a name but on the map, in books, and to men, but which is, in reality, but distance, movement and depth.

That second sentence is difficult, no doubt, but its density compels us to slow down, to deepen our understanding of Rodin as we parse such involved grammar and rhetoric. There is the dash in place of a period and new sentence in order not to interrupt the development of the idea of work. There is the deliberate ambiguity between the noun name (meaning the sculptor’s proper name, or reputation) and the adjective nameless in order to imply that the meaning of Rodin’s work was not merely idiosyncratic but universal. And there is the triple use of the word but as the paragraph finishes to heighten the idea of contrast we normally associate with that word when it is a conjunction, although here the first and third instances are adverbs—a less frequent use of the word which contributes to the distinguished tone of Rilke’s essay. What is distinguished, whether in language or marble, is uncommon, often difficult, and very likely misunderstood.

Tone, as this example illustrates, is then the impression we feel in discerning an author’s relationship to the subject, and that tone or quality or characteristic has its productive source in the craftsmanship of a particular art. As the poet and critic T. S. Eliot said in his essay on William Blake, it is the “peculiar honesty” of a work that accounts for its evident mastery, and “this honesty never exists without great technical accomplishment.” Reason enough, perhaps, that we too should aim to understand the form of what we read and write as thoroughly as we can.

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