Building Great Sentences (20 page)

Critics felt that extreme reliance on balanced form actually distorted the representation of reality by forcing all description and explanation into arbitrary binaries.

The question we aspiring students of the sentence must answer for ourselves before we decide whether in-your-face balance will be a feature in our own syntactic arsenal is simply this: does Dr. Johnson's prose strike us as impressive or obsessive, well crafted to positive effect or overdone to the point of putting readers off? The problem with balance, like the problem with any syntax pushed too hard, is that it levels reality, forcing everything into binary agreement or opposition. As William Hazlitt summed up his criticism of an overzealous use of balanced form, “The words are not fitted to the things, but the things to the words.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, who, it should be remembered, was himself known for his use of balanced form, accused Johnson of writing in “Johnsonese,” a style that he called “systematically vicious,” and famously opined in a sentence that is itself a masterpiece of balance:

His constant practice of padding out a sentence with useless epithets, till it became as stiff as the bust of an exquisite; his antithetical forms of expression, constantly employed even where there is no opposition in the ideas expressed; his big words wasted on little things; his harsh inversions, so widely different from those graceful and easy inversions which give variety, spirit, and sweetness to the expression of our great old writers—all these peculiarities have been imitated by his admirers, and parodied by his assailants, till the public has become sick of the subject.

What's missing so far in these criticisms of balance is the fact that they are so much fun for the writer to construct and for the reader to recognize. Matthew Clark touches on this underreported aspect in his book
A Matter of Style: On Writing and Technique
, where he recognizes that “for modern tastes,” the example of sustained balance and parallelism “may be excessive,” but notes that “there is a great vigor and pleasure in the writing.” In the writing of William Gass, we find an even more effective brief for the use of balance, as Gass goes for balances at every opportunity, seemingly delighting in the rhythm. America has no more innovative a prose stylist than Gass and it is his example, not Dr. Johnson's, that I follow when I champion the use of balanced forms in effective writing.

The Breathtaking Balancing Acts of William Gass

In his novels such as
The Tunnel
,
Omensetter's Luck
, and
Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife
, in his short fiction collection
In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
, but particularly in his collections of essays—among them
On Being Blue
,
The World Within the Word
,
Fiction and the Figures of Life
,
Habitations of the Word
, and
A Temple of Texts
—Gass does more breathtaking things with sentences, gets more energy and excitement from his prose than does any other living American writer. Even wrenched from the contexts that give them so much added impact, his sentences stand as monuments to his mastery of language—and to his fascination with balance. Here are just a few examples, starting with his description of Malcolm Lowry's
Under the Volcano
:

There is a cantina at every corner of the Consul's world. Sin and innocence, guilt and salvation, shape Lowry's private square of opposition, and if sanctuary and special knowledge are its gifts in one guise, and gaiety and relaxation its gifts in another, catercorner from church and gym are brothel and prison.

This on Samuel Beckett:

He writes equally well in two languages: Nitty and Gritty. He is a minimalist because he compresses, and puts everything in by leaving most of it out. Joyce wished to rescue the world by getting it back into his book: Beckett wishes to save our souls by purging us—impossibly—of matter.

And this on Jorge Luis Borges:

Borges is a fine poet, too, but he revolutionized our conception of both the story and the essay by blending and bewildering them. He will not be forgiven or forgotten for that.

In a fitting close to our consideration of balance, here's Gass on Dr. Johnson in the company of other noteworthy preface writers:

In the preface to his
Dictionary
, Dr. Johnson whines (another persistent feature of the genre)—“It is the fate of those who toil at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good: to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward”—a whine, yes, but how perfectly composed.

The exuberance of Gass's prose, its playful power, can remind us of how tame most prose has become in an era where writing instruction has worked to make us embarrassed by anything that calls attention to language
as language
, insisting instead that language be a completely transparent window through which we view all that is
not
language. I readily agree that not all writing should be a kind of stained-glass window, calling attention to its crafted beauty, but the language we choose and the way we organize it into sentences is part of reality and not something we should try to hide. We do need clear panes of glass for some purposes and situations, but we also need stained-glass windows, which help us to celebrate the diversity and fecundity of prose style.

Next Steps

One of my teachers in grad school was fond of scoffing at the injunction that we not compare unlike things since that would be as unhelpful or unfair as comparing apples and oranges. “Nonsense,” he would say. “Which would make a better artificial eyeball for a giant—an apple or an orange?” “Which would be easier to make into clothes—apples or oranges?” “Which looks better in candlelight—an apple or an orange?” And so on. I use his unforgettable lesson to structure what always turns out to be one of my students' favorite and most engaging assignments—an assignment that gives them a chance to demonstrate their command of balanced forms and balanced sentences. Here it is: Let's try a holistic approach to balanced sentences and balanced form, going for the whole enchilada. None of this five balanced sentences and five sentences containing some kind of balanced form—let's go for the blowout. What I want is roughly a page in which you tackle what is popularly dismissed as the toughest comparison task of all: comparing apples and oranges. And your comparison should contain a veritable two-ring circus of balanced sentences and balanced forms—like Dr. Johnson's comparison of Pope and Dryden, only better!

The Rhythm of Threes

B
alance is the rhythm of twos, series is the rhythm of threes, and parallel serial constructions echo, invoke, and build upon our penchant for measuring, describing, and constructing reality in units of threes. Balance and three-part serials are syntactic patterns that can be thought of as sentence forms, but these rhythms appear more frequently as sound, image, and conceptual patterns
within
cumulative and suspensive sentences. These rhythms are deeply embedded in our understanding of the world and are powerful tools for the writer, both singly and in contrapuntal combinations, such as two three-part serials balanced against each other or three balanced forms in a series. I'll try to cover all of these possibilities in this chapter.

I introduce my students to the rhythm of serial constructions with a couple of extended contemplations of the form:

When I begin to write, I rarely have a destination in mind for each sentence, much less a plan for marching the steps of the sentence according to some specific cadence, but somewhere after my first word it must occur to me that I haven't said exactly what I wanted to say, haven't gotten the words quite right, haven't painted the picture for my reader that I see so clearly—or, as I suspect is more often the case, haven't clearly painted the picture that still remains stubbornly fuzzy to my straining imagination. In these cases, I usually try again, but something about two efforts at getting the words right often feels incomplete, unsatisfying, awkward, so I run through my options, searching for the third word, third phrase, third sound that will release me from the apparent need to sound more reasonable, ordinary, and understandable, that will free me from the compulsion to offer a reasonable sample, and that will let me start a new sentence in which, against all odds, I just might say exactly what I want to say, might get the words precisely right, might paint the masterpiece of my dreams, or, failing that, might content myself with the belligerence of the balance, the sprawl of the catalog, or any prose rhythm that startles the eye and ear, some rude reggae in place of the waltz.

Whenever I write serial constructions it's a little bit like taking a long plane flight with a couple of connections, a couple of stops that actually help me reach my destination, a couple of brief layovers during which I can rethink my itinerary, remind myself of what remains to be done, and redouble my efforts to ensure that the trip accomplishes its purpose, gets me where I need to go, or at least provides the satisfying illusion that I'm going somewhere. This analogy doesn't bear too much scrutiny, however, since my reasons for taking plane flights are almost always generated from without, required by some clear need to get to a specific destination, driven by events to which I may choose to respond or not, but which I never completely control. Writing a series, on the other hand, simply seems to come out of the blue, an opportunity that just presents itself as my sentence unfolds, generated from somewhere within my understanding of syntactic options, required by some amorphous sense that three tries are better than one, driven only by some internal metronome that is deaf to the appeal of a waltz, but that longs for the rhythm of threes in my writing—the narrative rhythm of beginning, middle, and end; the progressive rhythm of going, going, gone; the conceptual rhythm of a world that conforms itself to the debater's confidently raised three fingers, the syllogism's three parts, the three elements themselves: earth, fire, and water.

As we see, three phrases of parallel construction, three-part predicates, three attempts to say exactly the right thing all invoke serial form. A series, however, is more than just a list with three or more items in it: at the heart of this form is a kind of unity, progression, or intensification. What distinguishes the series is that its elements build on each other, add to each other's impact, restate and refine each other's information. For example, can we imagine a more effective explanation than Nabokov's three-part-series reasons for granting interviews only in writing: “I think like a genius. I write like a distinguished author. I speak like a child.” Or the series may mark a temporal progression, establish a chronology, outline a process. As Caesar put it in perhaps the most famous three-part series we have:
Veni, vidi, vici
. (I came, I saw, I conquered.)

Serial Constructions and Three-Part Series

The most pronounced serial construction has three parts, although a series can be extended beyond three elements (or reduced to two). Winston Weathers, in a pioneering essay, “The Rhetoric of the Series,” notes that the writer can “write the two-part series and create an aura of certainty, confidence, didacticism, and dogmatism” or “write the three-part series and create the effect of the normal, the reasonable, the believable, and the logical” or “write the four-or-more-part series and suggest the human, emotional, diffuse, and inexplicable.” Weathers sees the choice a writer makes between creating the two-beat rhythm of balance or the three-beat rhythm of three-part parallel series as a choice between the “authoritarian” implications of balance, with its overtones of “finality and totality,” or a sense of “massive, abrupt, and final summary” and the “aura of the true and believable sample” offered by the three-part series. To him, and I certainly agree, the series, in going one step beyond the binary oppositions of balance, achieves the rhetorical effect of “something more reasonable, ordinary, and more truly representative,” and he clinches his argument with the balanced claim that the series has “the touch of the common and understandable.”

Tellingly, Weathers himself employs balanced form to describe the series and three-part serial constructions to describe balance. As the example of his own prose suggests, the ties among kinds of serial constructions are quite complex, since one three-part series balances quite effectively against another. A three-part series may be composed of three two-part balances, and the four-part series can easily be shaped to lend its catalog to either two- or three-part rhythm. Furthermore, serial constructions invite asyndeton (the omitting of conjunctions) or polysyndeton (the foregrounded, excessive use of conjunctions). “I came, I saw, I conquered” could have been said “I came and I saw and I conquered,” which would be polysyndeton, or “I came, saw, conquered,” asyndeton. Sounds to me like Caesar got it right, even if he did crib the general form from the ending of Aristotle's
Rhetoric.

Primary Rhetorical Figures That Use Serial Constructions

Asyndeton seems to suggest simultaneity and speed (Aristotle suggested it had the added effect of seeming “to say many things at the same time”), while polysyndeton seems to suggest distinct stages or differences and deliberate intensity. “He has had his intuition, he has made his discovery, he is eager to explore it, to reveal it, to fix it down.” “It was a hot day and the sky was very bright and blue and the road was white and dusty,” the last example from Hemingway.

Another rhetorical device invited by serial construction is anaphora—beginning each element in the series with the same word or words. William Hazlitt employed anaphora in his complaint about Samuel Johnson's writing: “The reason why I object to Dr. Johnson's style is, that there is no discrimination, no selection, no variety in it.” Art critic Louis Kronenberger famously invoked anaphora in his complaint about the utilitarian view of art in America: “Art, for most Americans, is a very queer fish—it can't be reasoned with, it can't be bribed, it can't be doped out or duplicated; above all, it can't be cashed in on.” Of course, the opposite of anaphora is epistrophe—ending each item in a series with the same word or words. George Santayana offers an example of epistrophe to damn with faint praise: “To the good American many subjects are sacred: sex is sacred, women are sacred, children are sacred, business is sacred, America is sacred, Masonic lodges and college clubs are sacred.” “Raphael paints wisdom; Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakespeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it,” this last one from Emerson. Combine anaphora and epistrophe and you get symploce: “I was born an American; I will live an American; I shall die an American,” that from Daniel Webster.

Just as is the case with balance, three-part serials can be overdone. However, modern readers probably have a much greater tolerance for pronounced serial constructions than they have for pronounced balance, and the three-part series does not seem as tied to the rhetoric of earlier centuries as does balance. In a word, it sounds more
reasonable
.

Triple-Threat and Triple-Crown Writers

Just as Dr. Johnson is the exemplum par excellence of balance, Francis Bacon is the triple-crown winner of the three-part serial form, with his essay “Of Studies” containing possibly the most intense example we have of sustained serial construction:

Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight is in privateness and retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability, is in the judgement and disposition of business. For expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come best from those that are learned. To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgement wholly by their rules, is the humour of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience. . . . Crafty men contemn studies; simple men admire them; and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them and above them, won by observation. Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. . . . Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Consider the following triple-threat paragraph by Carl Klaus, my colleague at Iowa and, along with novelist Thomas Berger, one of my two great mentors in matters having to do with prose style:

I am fascinated by parallel series, I spend hours probing their mysteries, I worship their ideal form. I look for them in my reading, I strive for them in my writing, I contrive them even when I am talking. So obsessed am I by them that my thoughts are forever upon them, whether I am brushing my teeth, washing my car, hoeing my garden, eating my dinner, tying my shoes, grooming my dog, myself, or my fly line. So Bacon is my master, my idol, my bane. I study him, I imitate him, I envy him. I require my students to read him, to analyze him, to emulate him. I ask no more of them than of myself, no less of them than they are capable, as much of them as they can produce and the language will bear. I wonder how this obsession will end—in mastery, in mockery, or in madness. I cannot predict, but I know I cannot continue as I am at present—working to create, laboring to contrive, struggling to perfect the Baconian style. Doing so has led me to defy my master, to mar his masterpieces, to mend his mastery. Thus, I am committed to a single form, one style, the syntax of a perfect series, hoping to excel him and so to be free of him forever.

I should take just a moment here to recommend to you the remarkable range of nonfiction essays and contemplations of Carl Klaus. Carl has written and edited prolifically in the fields of writing and stylistic theory, and his work on composition and prose style has shaped much of my thinking and that of writing teachers across the nation. Of particular value are
Elements of Writing
, coauthored with Robert Scholes;
Style in English Prose
; the award-winning
Courses for Change in Writing
, coauthored with Nancy Jones; and
In Depth: Essayists for Our Time
, coauthored with Chris Anderson and Rebecca Faery.
The Made-Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay
is an intriguing contemplation of the essay that also contains much wisdom about the purpose of sentences, and
Essayists on the Essay: Four Centuries of Commentary
, coauthored with Ned Stuckey-French, is a treasure trove of thoughts about and examples of fine essays.

Basic Patterns for Three-Part Serials

More to the point in our discussion of forms of balance and three-part serials, from Carl Klaus's handouts in his own prose style classes we learn that the basic patterns for serial construction can be categorized in terms of the following.

Phrasal Series

The lake is crystal clear, dead calm, and freezing cold.

Aerobic exercise helps one lose weight safely, improve muscle tone, and reduce stress.

Rain drips through the trees, in no hurry to meet the earth, trickles down the trunk, seeps into the ground, percolates down, and reaches its goal to merge with the aquifer.

Clausal or Elliptical Series

Hearing their parents' car drive up, one teen hid the Jack Daniel's, another turned off the X-rated movie, and a third shooed their friends out the back door.

Traditional classrooms can foster boredom; televised classes, isolation; correspondence classes, guilt.

Assume nothing, appropriate nothing, assign, ascribe, associate nothing, repeat not a word until you ascertain the truth of it for yourself.

And then those rhetorical tropes, several of which we have already noted. (The following descriptions are from Klaus, with a few additions and comments from me.)

Schemes of Omission

Asyndeton
: to omit the conjunctions that usually link the final items in a series of coordinate words, phrases, or clauses—“I came, I saw, I conquered.” “He was ten inches long, thin as a curve, a muscled ribbon, brown as fruitwood, soft-furred, alert,” that from Annie Dillard. Aristotle ends his
Rhetoric
with the confident asyndeton: “I have done. You have heard me. The facts are before you. I ask for your judgment.”