Sentence
The Medium of Literature
New York City, February 2020. My last trip before the pandemic shutdowns. My sister and I decided that in lieu of Christmas presents, we would inaugurate an annual tradition of visiting the city, which is roughly equidistant from our homes, to see a performance, eat good food, and shop. (The tradition is currently on hiatus.) At the wonderful Three Lives & Company bookstore in Greenwich Village, the novel Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman caught my eye. I picked it up and did what I always do with a new book: I read the first few paragraphs. When I do this, I’m not looking for interesting characters or a compelling situation. I want to know how the author writes sentences.
Sentences are how we live inside a novel. Although we’re accustomed to thinking of the medium of the novel as the bound book (even now, and certainly historically), I think that the sentence is the true medium of literature. The sentence is the vessel that carries the meaning and, importantly, the rhythm of the story — it carries us as readers along with it, soothing or uplifting or exciting or terrifying us. A sentence can be long and luxurious, juicy with subordinate clauses like raisins in a cake, unfolding with each new clause as it lifts the reader on a swelling wave of meaning and sets her gently down at the period. It can be short and oppositional: this, not that. It can be zany and bohemian, turning now towards parrots, there towards lampposts, here to the moon, abrupt, sweet, angry.
I didn’t buy Ellman’s novel that day — clocking it at over 1000 pages, it’s a weighty brick to carry on the train. But I filed it in my memory and I’m now reading it. I had no idea what kind of sentence I was getting myself into. The book is primarily one long sentence, a stream-of-consciousness monologue of an Ohio caterer-mother-wife, interrupted sporadically with a spare alternate narrative of a lioness traveling through the state in some indeterminate past. The lioness’ story is told in lush, precisely delineated sentences: “For all of life is really recoil and leap, leap and recoil” (1). Our unnamed narrator, by contrast, speaks in comma-delineated clauses that mostly begin with the phrase “the fact that,” larded with associative lists. For example:
“…the fact that I cannot for the life of me recall what those dark, hard-shelled, spiky, spherical, underwater things are called, the fact that they’re made sort of like an orange, with segments, the fact that I don’t think they’re plants or vegetables, something in between, like a platypus, the fact that they may be some kind of crustacean, the fact that they’re not sea anemones, amenities, anomalies, enemies, anomie, entropy….” (266)
I’m about one-third of the way through the novel right now and truthfully, I’m ambivalent about living in this sentence for 700 more pages. But I’m awed by Ellmann’s boldness and innovation in taking up the gauntlet thrown down by James Joyce. The final chapter of Ulysses consists of a single, unpunctuated sentence from the mind of Molly Bloom, the protagonist’s wife, as she lies in bed. While her husband Leopold has walked through Dublin all day (to summarize the plot reductively!), Molly is bound to her bed and her thoughts. Virginia Woolf wrote Mrs. Dalloway as a riposte to Joyce, with Clarissa traveling through London on foot. Ellmann’s novel amplifies Joyce’s innovation and Woolf’s feminism in the boldness of its sentence, anchored by the complementary narrative of motherhood grounded in the earthy, rhythmic sentences of the lioness’s story.
Ellmann’s main sentence, though, mimics the frenzied anxiety that characterizes modern motherhood. It suggests that the mental life of a mother — a white, middle-class American mother, to be specific — has a periodic, iterative, and ultimately paranoid structure. The same concerns recur, amplified and with growing anxiety. Memory is tinged always with tragedy, as the narrator recalls her mother, now dead after a long illness, and her own abandonment by her first husband. It’s hard not to feel that the lioness’ experience of motherhood is preferable, although at one point she falls off a cliff and nearly starves. From the sentences alone, the lioness’ life feels more restful.
The book reminded me of another novelistic triumph of the sentence, Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, that alternates between uncomfortable and palliative sentences. The novel begins “In Chancery” — that is, in the law courts that will prove so indifferent to justice while setting the plot in motion — with a setting that mutes human presence: “London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall” (7). (I tried to pay homage to Dickens in the first sentence of this post.) Although the opening mentions a character, it already signals that the setting is going to outstrip his importance. “London,” its own sentence, has the brevity of a newspaper dateline. The Lord Chancellor, although the subject of a clause, is governed by a non-finite verb (“sitting” instead of “sits” or “sat”). And following this opening, nonhuman entities quickly overwhelm the syntax:
“Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the fireside of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck.” (7)
The virtuosity is apparent, and so striking that it takes a few readings to appreciate the construction. It is rich in what are called absolute constructions, namely nominative absolutes, where a noun and its descriptor modify the main clause of the sentence: “Fog up the river”; “Fog on the Essex marshes,” and so forth. “Michaelmas term lately over” is another example. But Dickens doesn’t follow these absolutes with traditional main clauses (subject- finite verb-object). Instead, he conjoins several of them, creating a sense of an estranged completeness that persists apart from human activities, preferences, and endeavors. Imagine the difference in tone if Dickens had written, “With fog in the stem and bowl of his pipe, the wrathful skipper sat in his close cabin.” Instead, Dickens’ sentences leave us uneasy and alienated, just as the legal proceedings that follow neglect human relations, aspirations, and desires.
As the novel shifts settings and subplots, the first-person sections spoken in the voice of Esther Summerson, the heroine, offer a sentimental counterpoint to the coldness of Chancery (and the troubled anti-heroine, Lady Dedlock, whose story is told in the third person.) Here is the scene where Esther’s stern but dutiful godmother (and her only guardian) is dying:
“She was laid upon her bed. For more than a week she lay there, little altered outwardly, with her old handsome resolute frown that I knew so well carved upon her face. Many and many a time, in the day and in the night, with my head upon the pillow by her that my whispers might be plainer to her, I kissed her, thanked her, prayed for her, asked her for her blessing and forgiveness, entreated her to give me the least sign that she knew or heard me. No, no, no. Her face was immovable. To the very last, and even afterward, her frown remained unsoftened.” (20)
The sentences are masterful but also conventional. The longest sentence, beginning “Many and many a time,” includes multiple verbs governed by the same subject — “I kissed her, thanked her,” etc. — conveying Esther’s sentimentality win these multiple deathbed entreaties. The godmother’s sternness manifests in the next fragment: “No, no, no”: short and decisive. In the final sentence her frown is the subject, persisting as the reader’s final image of her lifeless body. A kind of reverse Cheshire cat.
Dickens’ variety of sentences is, for me, the best reason to read Bleak House. Not because I want to categorize every sentence with syntactic precision, as I’ve done here, but because it offers a thrilling gourmet menu of language. Living in great sentences is one of the primary joys of reading; cultivating a love of the sentence is, as my metaphor suggests, like cultivating a palate.
In the Poetics, Aristotle famously said that the most important parts of literature, in order, are as follows: plot, character, thought, diction, music, and spectacle. (He was referring specifically to tragic drama, the dominant literary form of ancient Greece.) “Diction,” the closest analogue to the sentence, comes fourth in this list of six. But I’d say that it’s the most important element of literature, certainly of novels. Reading for sentences transcends the suspense of reading for plot, or the attachment of reading for character: an art, and a pleasure.
Citations from these editions:
Lucy Ellman. Ducks, Newburyport. Windsor, Ont.: Biblioasis, 2019. Print. Buy it!
Charles Dickens. Bleak House. New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 2017. E-book.
