Building Great Sentences (19 page)

In Praise of Parallels

I call attention to these discussions of parallelism because they are so restrained, while parallelism is obviously a wonderful tool for focusing attention, emphasizing organization, and providing sheer verbal pleasure in our writing. At what point, I wonder, did this most memorable of rhetorical strategies fall on hard times? And if the broad concept of parallelism is now viewed in such restrained, if not cautionary, terms, what of the more intense rhetorical protocols of balance?

Fortunately, I'm not alone in championing parallelism and balance as a great potential strength in writing. Virginia Tufte devotes a chapter to parallelism in her
Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style
. She prefaces her chapter with a cheering quotation from Richard D. Altick:

The matching of phrase against phrase, clause against clause, lends an unmistakable eloquence to prose. That, indeed, is one of the principal glories of the King James Bible. . . . And, to some extent in reminiscence and imitation of the Bible, English prose all the way down to our time has tended toward balanced structure for the sake of contrast or antithesis or climax.

“Parallelism,” Tufte quite reasonably explains, “is saying like things in like ways. It is accomplished by repetition of words and syntactic structures in planned symmetrical arrangements and, if not overdone, has a place in day-to-day writing.” Tufte acknowledges what most writing guidebooks fail to say: that deliberately faulty parallelism, the frustration of our expectation that a structure will be repeated, can actually sometimes be seen as a syntactic
strength
, rather than a weakness or an error, offering as an example a sentence from Steinbeck's
Sweet Thursday
: “Here was himself, young, good-looking, snappy dresser, and making dough,” and she notes that the repetition called for to achieve parallelism can sometimes be understood through ellipsis, as in a sentence from Bradford Smith: “For love is stronger than hate, and peace than war.”

I do wonder when parallelism and balance fell on hard times in the teaching of writing, and while I can't pinpoint a date for that, I think I can offer an explanation tied to and possibly stuck in history. The problem is that the great majority of examples of sustained parallelism and extended balance in almost every writing guidebook are taken from Samuel Johnson and John Lyly. Lyly was a Renaissance writer, very successful in his time, who lived during the last fifty years of the sixteenth century and is best known for his
Euphues, The Anatomy of Wit
(1578) and
Euphues and His England
(1580). Samuel Johnson, who has achieved celebrity single-name status as Dr. Johnson, lived in and wrote across much of the eighteenth century, and while he authored a prodigious number of works, he's perhaps best known for his
Dictionary of the English Language
(1755) and his three-volume
Lives of the Most Eminent Poets
(1781).

More on Dr. Johnson shortly, but it's useful to note the extremes to which Lyly took parallelism. And a little Lyly goes a long way. Here's a brief excerpt from his dedication of
Euphues
to his patron, Sir William West. Lyly is making the case for the essential honesty of his depiction of the youth Euphues:

Whereby I gather that in all perfect works as well the fault as the face is to be shown. The fairest leopard is set down with his spots, the sweetest rose with his prickles, the finest velvet with his brack. Seeing then that in every counterfeit as well the blemish as the beauty is coloured I hope I shall not incur the displeasure of the wise in that in the discourse of Euphues I have as well touched the vanities of his love as the virtue of his life.

So patterned and so mannered, paralleled and balanced was the prose in Lyly's
Euphues
that it has given us the rhetorical term
euphuism
. Terming euphuism “the rhetorical prose style par excellence,” Richard Lanham explains in his
Handlist of Rhetorical Terms
that it “emphasizes the figures of words that create balance, and makes frequent use of antithesis, paradox, repetitive patterns with single words, sound-plays of various sorts, amplification of every kind, sententiae and especially the ‘unnatural natural history' or simile from traditional natural history.” Somewhat discouragingly, Lanham adds: “Lyly's style has been studied largely to be deplored.”

However, Lyly's excesses should not discourage us from occasional excursions along the continuum of parallelism as long as we remember to stop short of the extreme parallelism he practiced. But we have been discouraged by writing text after writing text from playing with balance and parallelism, and there are few contemporary and effective examples of these forms for us to follow. As we've seen, balance and parallelism are often discussed as if they were interchangeable terms, and in a sense they are. However, I'm going to reserve
parallelism
to describe similarities that are maintained in prose beyond the duple sound and sense of balance, which focuses our eyes and our ears on pairs of things. My reasons for trying to maintain this distinction will, I hope, become more evident when, in the next chapter, I consider serial constructions, generally identified by their division of the world into threes, but sometimes extending parallel constructions to catalogs of four or even more terms. For now, I want to discuss the pleasures and rewards of balance first as a formal sentence syntax and then as a form or rhythm that can appear within or among sentences whenever there is some pairing, whether of sound, vowels and consonants, words of the same length or syllable count, phrases of the same construction, words or phrases linked by conjunctions, concepts that are similar or antithetical, or any use of language that foregrounds two of anything. Balanced form can range from the obvious syntactic pairing of chiasmus (“When the going gets tough, the tough get going”) to more subtle oppositional pairing (“Against the iceberg of her smile I sailed the Titanic of my hopes”).

The Balanced Sentence and Balances Within the Sentence

Let's start with balanced sentences, as they constitute a codified syntax just as surely as do cumulative and suspensive sentences. A formally balanced sentence hinges in the middle, usually split by a semicolon, the second half of the sentence paralleling the first half, but changing one or two key words or altering word order. In this sense, the second half of the sentence can be thought of as a kind of mirror image of the first half. One of the best-known examples of the balanced sentence comes from John F. Kennedy's inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Kennedy, or his speechwriters, had an ear for parallelism as well as for balance, as we can see in another less memorable, but equally well-crafted excerpt from his inaugural address:

All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.

Winston Churchill would certainly have to be acknowledged a modern master of balance. I've previously mentioned his classically balanced dismissal of socialism—“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” A more effective way of stressing his point is hard to imagine, since his balanced sentence also gains emphasis from the fact that it is highly suspensive, delaying completion of his message until the final word.

Churchill was also fond of smaller balanced forms, particularly when speaking of language: “Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all,” he said. He liked to pair words: “Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in the mind.” And his speeches are peppered with prefab balanced pairings such as black and blue, brass and bluff, facts and figures, forgive and forget, hemmed and hawed, by hook or crook, life and limb, live and learn, rough and ready, part and parcel, thick and thin, wear and tear, and so on.

Balanced sentences really call attention to themselves and stick in the mind, drawing their power from the tension set up between repetition and variation. Since the real power of the balanced sentence comes only at its end, it can be thought of as another form of periodic sentence, perhaps the most intense form. In an odd way, the balanced sentence also works generatively or heuristically, as does the cumulative, since you can set the balance in motion without really knowing where you want the sentence to go. For instance, after the initial clause “those who talk when you wish them to listen are bores,” you can insert a semicolon, then switch terms and continue, “those who listen when you wish them to talk are . . .”—and you can choose almost any word to fill in that final blank. Indeed, this fill-in-the-blank phenomenon suggests that the form of the balanced sentence may be more memorable than the meaning conveyed by and through that form—like having a humongous stretch limo drive up and deliver a perfectly nondescript rider. I can only remember part of the balance of Barry Goldwater's famous/infamous battle cry of 1964: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” I can always remember the balance between extremism and moderation and between vice and virtue, but for the life of me I never can remember that this sentence balances liberty against justice, two terms usually paired, as in “with liberty and justice for all.”

While the most rhetorically polished balanced sentences do tend to be divided by a semicolon, the balanced sentence does not demand a semicolon, as is the case with the chiasmic “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” Another example of balance without the semicolon would be Fitzgerald's “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”

Apart from its aphoristic nature—anyone who wants to start a bumper sticker business had better know how to construct balances!—the balanced sentence offers an obvious advantage to any writer who must compare two subjects. Such a comparison can be made by treating first one subject and then the other, through splitting the comparison into two halves, each half focusing on one of the subjects; by alternating paragraphs, each paragraph focusing on one of the subjects; or sentence by sentence, with each balanced sentence matching the two subjects on a point-by-point basis. This kind of comparison or contrast can really profit from the use of balanced sentences: balance is the specific syntactic tool ready-made for comparisons.

Dr. Samuel Johnson—for better or for worse—is probably the greatest master of the balanced form, as we can see in his comparison of Dryden with Pope:

Pope had perhaps the judgment of Dryden; but Dryden certainly wanted the diligence of Pope. In acquired knowledge the superiority must be allowed to Dryden, whose education was more scholastick, and who before he became an author had been allowed more time for study, with better means of information. His mind has a larger range, and he collects his images and illustrations from a more extensive circumference of science. Dryden knew more of man in his general nature, and Pope in his local manners. . . . There is more dignity in the knowledge of Dryden, and more certainty in that of Pope.

The style of Dryden is capricious and varied, that of Pope is cautious and uniform; Dryden obeys the motions of his own mind; Pope constrains his mind to his own rules of composition. Dryden is sometimes vehement and rapid; Pope is always smooth, uniform, and gentle. Dryden's page is a natural field, rising into inequalities, and diversified by the varied exuberance of abundant vegetation; Pope's is a velvet lawn, shaven by the scythe, and levelled by the roller.

Of genius, that power which constitutes a poet; that quality without which judgement is cold and knowledge is inert; that energy which collects, combines, amplifies, and animates—the superiority must, with some hesitation, be allowed to Dryden. . . . Dryden's performances were always hasty, either excited by some external occasion, or extorted by domestick necessity; he composed without consideration, and published without correction. What his mind could supply at call, or gather in one excursion, was all that he sought, and all that he gave. The dilatory caution of Pope enabled him to condense his sentiments, to multiply his images, and to accumulate all that study might produce, or chance might supply. If the flights of Dryden therefore are higher, Pope continues longer on the wing. If of Dryden's fire the blaze is brighter, of Pope's the heat is more regular and constant. Dryden often surpasses expectation, and Pope never falls below it. Dryden is read with frequent astonishment, and Pope with perpetual delight.

Even if you read the above passage so quickly that you don't get much of its meaning, you'll notice that it has a distinct rhythm or cadence—it sounds balanced, alternating between similar sounds or beats as well as between Pope and Dryden.

Johnson's comparison, then, displays a second kind or degree of balance, that of smaller forms within the sentence, and of those forms between and among sentences. Anytime that a sentence, part of a sentence, or groups of sentences make us aware of pairs of things—whether objects, sounds, words, or syntactic structures—it reveals some degree of balanced form. This kind of balance can take almost any shape or form, can appear at almost any time. It may come from the insinuating insistence of alliteration, assonance, or consonance or from the pronounced parallelism of phrases and modifiers, metaphors, and the larger syntax of the sentence. Balance may even come from a conceptual dualism—a thought that focuses our thinking, inexorably, on two subjects, entities, ideas, images—as in “She starved so that he could eat,” or in Shelley's aphorism, “Imagination means individuation.” Dr. Johnson's comparison of the two poets contains almost all of these forms of balance.