Read How to Write a Sentence Online
Authors: Stanley Fish
How to Write a Sentence (12 page)
I lingered round them, under that benign sky, watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
The four verbs that describe Lockwood’s posture—“lingered,” “watched,” “listened,” “wondered”—have the effect of stilling action and presenting a mental state that is without perturbation or movement. No straight-line motion of either body or mind, just a gentle musing that mirrors the gentle fluctuations of nature—the fluttering moths, the soft winds that breathe rather than blow, the grass that is slightly ruffled but not really disturbed, all under a calm (“benign”) sky. When the sentence finally moves forward with the report of what Lockwood is wondering, it names for a second everything it has excluded—unquietness—but its point is that, at least in this moment, unquietness will not even be imagined for those who, after a lifetime of agitation, slumber. “[S]leepers in that quiet earth” puts the seal on the cessation of activity, and presents us with a sense of resolution that feels like a benediction.
Benediction is what George Eliot reads over the life of her heroine Dorothea Brooke in the last sentence of
Middlemarch
(1900). Dorothea’s “finely-touched spirit” produced benign effects in the world, but not “widely visible” ones:
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Eliot wrote in a Protestant tradition that privileges the interior action of faith over the performance of great deeds. The idea (Eliot would have encountered it in the poetry of Milton, especially
Paradise Regained
) is that right being—the state of a well-ordered soul—is itself an action. Dorothea’s being, we are told, is the source of her effect. It is an effect that is said to be “diffusive”; that is, it spreads everywhere, a statement that at first seems hyperbolic, until it is glossed in a way that generalizes Dorothea’s example to the point of universalizing it. The gloss begins by assuming what it does not pause to argue for: “Good” in the world is growing, and then it attributes that good and its growth not only to Dorothea (a single attribution would have been implausible) but to all the Dorotheas of whom we necessarily know nothing. The phrase “unhistoric acts” tells it all: acts that are not played out on the world’s stage, acts that are interior, acts that will go unrecorded. How could such acts be efficacious? What is their medium? The answer is that you and I are; we are invited by the sentence to consult our own lives and then to inventory everything in them that is “not so ill,” and finally to acknowledge that the good we have experienced and perhaps practice is “half owing” to those many who, although hidden from view, live “faithfully,” that is, with a resolution always to be true to an internal code of values, and infect the world with a virtue that is contagious. “[H]alf owing” leaves room for individual efforts; even if the presence of a Dorothea touches and awakens us, we must still do our part, although that part may be as theatrically modest as the part she provides. And if we do our part, our reward will be as Dorothea’s—to rest in “unvisited tombs,” a phrase that might in some other sentence have the sound of melancholy and failure, but here rings with quiet triumph. Faithful souls need no external signs of their worth to validate them; visits would be superfluous; persons of Dorothea’s “finely-touched spirit”—and oh, how wonderful to be one—need neither tombs nor visitors. They are their own monuments, as is this quietly thrilling sentence.
I do not mean to suggest that the only last sentences worth paying attention to bring either dissolution, the effacing of difference, or the “peace which passeth understanding.” Some last sentences refuse both these positive and negative resolutions and keep their tensions and tumults alive till the end. Here is the last sentence of E. M. Forster’s
A Passage to India
(1924). Fielding, an Englishman with “a belief in education,” has just said to Dr. Aziz (they are both on horseback), “Why can’t we be friends now? It’s what I want. It’s what you want.” Aziz does not reply, but the whole world does:
But the horses didn’t want it—they swerved apart, the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file, the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath, they didn’t want it, and they said in their hundred voices, “No, not yet,” and the sky said, “No, not there.”
Nature’s indifference to man is a prime trope of pastoral poetry; the seasons unfold, plants and flowers live and bloom again; the sun shines on fresh meadows, but men and women (the words are the Greek poet Moschus’s, in his lament for Bion), “once we have died, in hollow earth we sleep, gone down into silence, a right long and endless and unawakening sleep.” In Forster’s sentence, however, nature is an active participant in the political world and signifies her preferences in unmistakable and myriad ways: by the movement of the horses; by a landscape that will not allow the two would-be friends to ride side by side (the participle “sending up rocks” suggest that the narrow pass the rocks create is being formed right now, in the sentence); by inanimate features of a cultural landscape that insists on its own hegemony and will not give up anything (palaces, jails, guesthouses); by signs (birds and carrion); and, as if these “hundred voices” saying, “No, not yet,” were insufficiently loud and clear, by the overarching sky itself, whose voice is even more emphatically negative: “No, not there.” This is an overdetermined no if there ever was one. The sentence could have gone on forever and the chorus of nays would only have been augmented, never softened. This is a last sentence that lets no one off its hook.
The peace that eludes Dr. Aziz and Fielding, the peace Dorothea has earned, the peace Cathy and Heathcliff may enjoy in their shared grave, comes to Faulkner’s Benjy as the surrey he is riding in goes clip-clop at a steady pace. Here is the last sentence of
The Sound and the Fury
(1929):
The broken flower drooped over Ben’s fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and façade flowed smoothly once more from left to right, post and tree, window and doorway and signboard each in its ordered place.
The serenity Benjy achieves depends on a regularity of sound and motion that quiets the thoughts he can’t quite have. Although the sentence describes a scene of which he is the centerpiece, he, as an active consciousness, is absent from it. The drooping flower has more agency than he does. The connective “and” promises a reaction to the flower, but none comes, just the report of Benjy’s empty eyes. He becomes an object in the landscape; the blueness of his eyes merging with post, tree, window, and doorway, all flowing together in a cinematic moment gloriously without content, but full of order, not the order of man’s plans, but the order of things; formalism triumphant in the stilling of mind.
As we near the end of our time together, let’s look back and see where we’ve been and how far we’ve come. I began with a tendentious thesis: in learning how to write sentences, it is best to begin with forms and pay no attention to content. A sentence, I declared, is a structure of logical relationships; the relationships are finite and learnable; the contents that can find expression in the structures formed by the relationships are infinite and incapable of being catalogued. So it follows, I argued, that content will be a distraction and that the skill of writing well-formed, clear, and tightly organized sentences will be acquired by focusing on forms. I explained that what I meant by “forms” is not the list of parts of speech or kinds of clauses or grammatical errors found in many textbooks, but the logical forms that link actor, action, and the object of action in a way that make available simple and complicated predications. It is a matter, I said, of practice, of becoming so familiar with the tools in advance of any particular use of them that when an occasion of use turns up, you and they will be ready. I then came up with a few exercises (there are many more) that would help.
The next step was to introduce the notion of styles, arrangements of formal features designed to produce a certain effect and project a certain vision of the world. These are also innumerable, but three, I observed, are general enough to serve as teachable examples: the subordinating style, which ranks, orders, and sequences things, events, and persons in a way that strongly suggests a world where control is the imperative and everything is in its proper place; the additive style, which gives the impression of speech and writing just haphazardly tumbling out of the mouth or the thoughts of a writer who is not worrying about getting every particular just right; and the satiric style (more a thematic than a formal category), employed as a weapon by writers who want to harpoon persons, parties, or society as a whole. I illustrated these stylistic categories with sentences written by master writers who were of course trying to say something important with them, but my reading of their prose emphasized the formal resources they were deploying in ways that might be imitated by anyone willing to work at it. I hazarded some imitations myself, noting always that they were imitations of formal devices and were therefore uninteresting or even puerile in content.
And, finally, I acknowledged that in the end, content must take center stage, for the expression of content is what writing is for; and I turned my attention to sentences that could not be regarded as stand-alone monuments, because in order to read them, never mind analyze them, it was necessary to take account of the substantive concerns that led to their being written. First and last sentences, I observed, are obvious instances; a first sentence is the preface to something, to a set of propositions or to an unfolding idea, to a meditation on the complexity of life or to a political statement (or to a thousand other things); and a last sentence is the conclusion or coda to that same something; and so to talk about first and last sentences is to talk about the role they play in a structure of content, and that is the way I have talked about them in the previous two sections. I passed from a focus on craft to a focus on meaning, from analyzing sentences to reading them. The idea was that if you know how sentences are put together in the abstract—as formal devices for delivering a nonformal payoff—you will be that much better able to engage with them, to take their measure in full, to receive what they have to give. Hence the formula “sentence craft equals sentence comprehension equals sentence appreciation.”
But in reading over the pages I have written, I have become aware that they have been staging a drama or a contest between what we might call the instrumental view of language—language as the disposable vehicle of a subject matter it serves—and a view of language as a formal system that refuses to efface itself before the demands of content and instead claims generative and determining powers; meanings serve it and not the other way around; it is its own subject matter. Almost without my knowing it, the unfolding of my argument mirrored the struggle between these two views. In the opening chapters, I concentrated on language’s forms, but matters of substance kept seeping in; in the later chapters, I surrendered to content, but my analyses always wanted to return to form. In this final section I will bring the two strains of the book together by looking at sentences whose content is their form—sentences self-conscious about their own composition, sentences that meditate on their own limitations, sentences that burst their limitations, sentences that invite and resist interrogation, sentences that proclaim their power, sentences that withhold their power, sentences that are great in part because they are so determinedly self-reflexive and aspire to the condition of pure objects.
First a sentence from Philip Sidney’s
An Apology for Poetry
(1595) that at once tells us what a sentence can do and does it:
Who readeth Aeneas carrying old Anchises on his back that wisheth not it were his fortune to perform so excellent an act?
The sentence is about the effects of reading it. The main effect is produced by the speed of the first three words. By writing “Who” instead of “He who” and by leaving out the preposition (either “of ” or “about”) between “readeth” and “Aeneas,” Sidney delivers us to the main image of his sentence—Aeneas carrying his elderly father to Sicily after the defeat of Troy—by what feels almost like fuel injection. Usually, “readeth” would be a verb signifying distance, but the sentence rushes past the word and inserts us directly (or so it seems) into the scene. Then the sentence slows down in preparation for a reflection on the experience it has delivered. “[T]hat wisheth not it were,” in contrast to what precedes it, is labored, convoluted, and indirect. The prose seems to stand between us and the wish whose negation it negates. And then it opens up again, to name that wish—“to perform so excellent an act”—a wish the reader has already realized insofar as he has been moved by the experience of reading the sentence, of performing it, to admire; and if admiration, can emulation be far behind?
The idea—the core idea of humanism—is that the act of reading about great deeds will lead you to imitate them, a sequence the young John Milton experiences when he reads Dante and Petrarch, finds himself moved by them to “more love of virtue,” and comes to see that before he can presume to write of virtuous things, he must himself be virtuous:
He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true Poem; that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honourablest things; not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men, or famous cities, unless he have in himself the experience and practice of all that which is praise-worthy.
(
An Apology
, 1641)
This sentence, a mini-essay on the relation between ethics and aesthetics, enacts what it describes. It argues implicitly against the commonsense assumption that the craft of writing is one thing, the moral worth of the writer another. Milton insists that the two are one, and that without the latter, the former is impossible. The somewhat clotted opening of the sentence—“He who would not be”—holds us up until the sentence opens up with the word “hope” and the briskly audacious, smoothly flowing declaration that if you want to write a good poem about good things, you must yourself be the thing you write about, “a true Poem.” The question raised—what exactly is a true poem?—is acknowledged by Milton when he promises, with the professorial “that is,” a clarifying definition. But by the logic of his message, no definition will be sufficient, because the state of true poem-hood cannot be described from the outside. It is a feature of one’s inside, and if it isn’t, no amount of words will explain it. So what follows the “that is” is a series of words and phrases that are themselves in need of an explanation no discursive elaboration could possibly provide. The words “composition” and “pattern” nicely join the perspectives of writing craft and moral probity: what you can compose depends on what you are composed of. The words that follow—“best” and “honourablest”—raise the same questions as “true Poem”: What exactly is the best and the most honorable? And a bit later, what is heroic? Again, the answer will be found, if it is found, “within himself”; that is where the “experience and practice of all that which is praise-worthy” reside. The objects of the sentence’s high praise—heroic men, good poems, honorable deeds—never acquire explicit and visible shape in the course of its unfolding, for if they did, the sentence—itself a true poem because of its reticence—would betray itself. The sentence refuses to give up its contents.
If deeds are good and praiseworthy by virtue (literally) of the spirit from which they issue and not by virtue of the figure they cut in the world, one performs them because one must (they well up, as Milton says in the same piece, “unbidden”), and not in anticipation of the effects they may or may not produce. In 1660, on the eve of the Restoration and the dashing of his political hopes, Milton himself performs such a deed when he writes a one-hundred-page tract knowing in advance that it is likely to fall on deaf ears:
Thus much I should perhaps have said though I were sure I should have spoken only to trees and stones, and had none to cry to, but with the Prophet
O earth, earth, earth!
to tell the very soil itself what her perverse inhabitants are deaf to.
(
The Readie and Easie Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth
)
Behind this relatively brief sentence are echoes of at least five myths and Bible passages, with allusions to: (1) Orpheus, whose singing was so beautiful that stones hurled at him by his enemies refused to hit him; (2) Midas, whose wife or hairdresser (depending on which version you read) tried to keep secret the truth about his ass’s ears by whispering it into the bulrushes only to find that the winds spread it everywhere; (3) Jason and Cadmus, each of whom, in different mythological traditions, is said to have sown dragon’s teeth from which sprang up armed men whose threat was then diminished by a stone thrown into their midst; (4) Ezekiel, the hero who at God’s command prophesied over a valley of dry bones as winds breathed life into them and made them into “an exceeding great army” (Ezekiel 37:10); and (5) Jeremiah 22, in which God cries, “O earth, earth, earth, hear the Word of the Lord,” and warns that “if ye will not hear these words . . . this house shall be a desolation.” So, in sum and in the background: a truth that will eventually be heard despite efforts to suppress it; a poet-singer who is the medium of a reviving and enlivening spirit; legions who will someday spring up; a God who punishes the wicked and rewards the righteous in his own good time, maybe (for how can we know?). The “maybe” part is represented in the sentence by an artfully placed “perhaps”—“Thus much I should perhaps have said”—an adverb that acknowledges the uncertain status of his own performance. Does he speak without concern either for the audience or for the effect his words may or may not have? Or does he even now, as what he calls the “good old cause” seems to be expiring, harbor the hope that his words will be the seeds that, when sown, will spring up into an “exceeding great army”? The hesitation conveyed by “perhaps” hangs over what follows it. “[T]hough I were sure” doesn’t tell us whether he is sure or not. When he joins the Prophet in crying “earth, earth, earth,” is he saying that only the earth will listen and of course it does not; or is he appropriating to himself the Spirit that speaks through Jeremiah and prophesies the destruction of his enemies? Is the deafness of earth’s inhabitants dispositive? Does it signal the end of reformation’s story? Or is it merely one more instance, in a very long history, of the obdurateness of those who resist God’s word (as conveyed by his anointed servant, by his Orpheus) and are doomed to be cast aside when the truth they cannot hear is unmistakably revealed? The power of the sentence inheres in its refusal to resolve this basic ambiguity. It is at once relentless in its judgments and (properly) tentative about when and whether those judgments will be realized. Another sentence that knows the truth, but will not deliver it up.
The first sentence of Francis Bacon’s essay “Of Truth” (1625) also hoards the truth but disguises the deed by shifting blame for it to a surrogate:
What is Truth?
said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.
The sentence distances itself from its content twice, first by attributing to Pilate the question it seemed to ask, and then by attributing to him the action it performs. Pilate will not stay for an answer to the posed question, but neither will the sentence, which transfers its reticence/indifference to him. The key and damning word is “jesting.” Pilate has been interrogating Jesus, who has told him, “Everyone that is of the truth heareth my voice.” It is then that Pilate asks, “What is truth?” ( John 18:38), and immediately goes out to speak to the Jews who had brought Jesus to him. In short, he makes a philosophical quip about truth—who can know what the truth is?—and walks away, not recognizing that the Truth stands before him in the person of the man he has been asked to judge and condemn. The irony is that he will not stay for an answer he didn’t even have to seek. There it is, in plain sight (like the letter in Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”), in the flesh, as directly visible as you might like, but wholly invisible to darkened eyes. The joke’s on him and also on any reader who expected an answer the sentence withholds.
The idea of a truth that is at once plainly accessible and wholly hidden is central to religious thought. A sentence from John Donne’s
Devotions
(1624) is a veritable dissertation on it and a rhetorical tour de force to boot:
My God, my God, thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God, a God that wouldst be understood literally and according to the plain sense of all thou sayest, but thou art also (Lord, I intend it to thy glory, and let no profane misinterpreter abuse it to thy diminution), thou art a figurative, a metaphorical God too, a God in whose words there is such a height of figures, such voyages, such peregrinations to fetch remote and precious metaphors, such extensions, such spreadings, such curtains of allegories, such third heavens of hyperboles, so harmonious elocutions, so retired and so reserved expressions, so commanding persuasions, so persuading commandments, such sinews even in thy milk, and such things in thy words, as all profane authors seem of the seed of the serpent that creeps, thou art the Dove that flies.