Ed Park’s Times essay and blog follow-up about the joys of the super-long sentence are bouncing around my head along with Jonathan Callahan’s Collagist piece on translation, Kafka, Bernhard, and syntax (h/t HTMLGiant):
if you’re anything like me, it’s almost always some quality of the prose that hauls you into a work of fiction—of any length—and keeps you reading beyond the first paragraph or so
Callahan goes on to distinguish between word choice and the ability to
work innumerable effects through the patterns and shapes, not of single words or phrases, but of whole clauses, the makeup of the sentences those words and phrases are fused together to form…
…I’ve read authors whose command of the phrase seems preternaturally acute yet who can’t seem to write sentences that “click,” and I’ve decided not to bother with books loaded with little lexical miracles […] the master of syntax may not stun you with his phrasings (a car may merely “swerve” into the next lane, rather than, say, “shark” in, to borrow an image from the opening page of Money by Martin Amis), but there’s something else happening…
The “perfect” word, in drawing too much attention to itself, can shatter a story’s spell, tripping us up (maybe this is one aspect people dislike in what gets labeled ‘MFA fiction’). I have to pause to decipher what aspects of sharks Amis wants us to apply to the car, only to arrive back at an image for which English has several perfectly adequate, un-cliche words. Compare that to getting lost in the relatively simple diction but wonderfully fluid thought processes of sentences like this from Faulkner’s “The Bear”:
and it was in McCaslin’s eyes too, he had only to look at McCaslin’s eyes and it was there, that summer twilight seven years ago, almost a week after they had returned from the camp before he discovered that Sam Fathers had told McCaslin: an old bear, fierce and ruthless not just to stay alive but ruthless with the fierce pride of liberty and freedom, jealous and proud enough of liberty and freedom to see it threatened not with fear not even alarm but almost with joy, seeming deliberately to put it into jeopardy in order to savor it and keep his old strong bones and flesh supple and quick to defend and preserve it; an old man, son of a Negro slave and an Indian king, inheritor on the one hand of the long chronicle of a people who had learned humility through suffering and learned pride through the endurance which survived the suffering, and on the other side the chronicle of a people even longer in the land than the first, yet who now existed there only in the solitary brotherhood of an old and childless Negro’s alien blood and the wild and invincible spirit of an old bear; a boy who wished to learn humility and pride in order to become skillful and worthy in the woods but found himself becoming so skillful so fast that he feared he would never become worthy because he had not learned humility and pride though he had tried, until one day an old man who could not have defined either led him as though by the hand to where an old bear and a little mongrel dog showed him that, by possessing one thing other, he would possess them both; and a little dog, nameless and mongrel and many-fathered, grown yet weighing less than six pounds, who couldn’t be dangerous because there was nothing anywhere much smaller, not fierce because that would have been called just noise, not humble because it was already too near the ground to genuflect, and not proud because it would not have been close enough for anyone to discern what was casting that shadow, and which didn’t even know it was not going to heaven since they had already decided it had no immortal soul, so that all it could be was brave even though they would probably call that too just noise.
It’s difficult for me to imagine planning a sentence like that, though I’m sure Faulkner worked it over. It’s fearless, and knows exactly what it’s talking about (and it’s completely, wonderfully exhausting to read).
![Sunny Scarborough: Swimmers after emerging from their bathing huts, the men in one-piece bathing costumes and the women in rather more (Daily Mail)
Anyone in love with Downton Abbey, have you checked out Juliet Nicholson’s The Perfect Summer: England in 1911, Just Before the Storm? Great fun, dishy and informative (for example, Maggie Smith the Dowager Countess would have likely known what a weekend was but disdained the term, preferring instead a ‘Friday to Monday,’ avoiding the nasssty implication that one had a week to end. One was simply coming down from London for a few days). [Times review | first chapter]](http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lfj8cfBbOI1qa0rqvo1_500.jpg)
