Essays: Great Sentences

I.

  

Stanley Fish has recently published a book on sentences.  It is short. It is concise. It simply says what linguists (some, at any rate) affirm. We, you and me, live inside sentences. Periodically in this blog I will quote sentences that are worth reading. Some are from famous writers and others will be from student essays. And occasionally there will be some laughably bad ones too.

Near the opening of "Dirt Music" the Australian writer Tim Winton has this to say about the internet.

Still, you had to admit that it was nice to be without a body for a while; there was an addictive thrill in being of no age, no gender, with no past. It was an infinite sequence of opening portals, of menus and corridors that let you into brief painless encounters, where what passed for life was a listless kind of browsing. World with consequence, amen. And in it she felt light as an angel.

This starts as the good old "let’s" let's everyone know how empty living in the web can be but the last sentence picks up the prayerful word "amen" and flips the direction we thought we were heading into. And it starts with And. ('And then went down to the ships’ for all you Poundians who remember the opening line to his Cantos) Disembodied heaven perhaps. Or a panacea for the aleuthia of being. The sounds get us close to poetry. It is a beautiful transition and a set of sentences that leads us forward and past the easy condemnation into transcendence. Quickly too. Not easy though, for the writer to do or for us to follow. Jump cuts are a part of our discourse today. We have learned from film.

II.

From: "On the golden porch"

"And Vassily Mikhailovich, his heart contracting with hope, watched the meek Isolde, chilled to the bone, to an icy crunch, wander through the black crowd and drop inside the gates and run her finger along the long, empty counters, looking to see if anything tasty was left.”

The translation is great. The long slow sentence takes us on a journey that mimics Isolde’s heroic quest for something good. That is showing not telling. Great book. Great sentence.

Here is what the New York Times says about the book on the back covee: "The blazing vitality of Ms. Tolstaya’s prose imagination, the high spirited playfulness…place her in that uniquely Russian line of satirists and surrealists that stretches from Gogol through Bulgakov”.  Oh come on. What the hell is blazing vitality anyway? It may be hotter than hell but at any rate it is a vague cliché. And then the hyperbole of putting her book up on the shelf with Gogol. Really? I disagree at any rate. And there are plenty of other surrealists outside of Russian who are part of the line that is drawn so firmly here. There is the magical realism of the Latin Boom.  Or how about the Washington Post back cover blurb?: "Tolstya achieves perfection of tale and telling” Really? Perfection. How is it the reviewers feel compelled to so overstate their praise that people like me (and I may be the only one who feels this way, but this is second grade stuff) feel insulted. Perfection, Sorry, wrong universe. Remember perfection is for those metaphysicians who even believe in such things as perfection. Did anyone ever say that mankind has some flaws built in? I think I recall a couple of books. What was it again, oh yeah, the bible. If you write with such blatant hyperbole you will lose me right off. Not only lose me but get me heap scorn, at least mentally, because you were too lazy to write a sentence that speaks from a less over baked creation that the sugary sweet glaze of abstractions. If you are praising a book for its use of detail and plot then don’t undercut your reliability with a laughably bad overstatement.  I am purposely being hard here as no one has looked at this review in years I am willing to bet and no one has opened the page to this great novel in a while (or almost no one, Steven Johnson convinced me with his meme about the long tale that there is always someone somewhere reading even the most obscure book somewhere across the globe). Don’t make the same mistake. If you undercut yourself with impossible praise or vague abstractions you will lose me and then I probably won’t even read the book. The book, in this case, is you.

But see, here is where things get complicated. I am about to contradict myself and say I am a dope for saying what I have just said. (And this dialectical turn is something I steal regularly from Slavoj Zizek,  a mad (in several senses of this word)  genius who and  the ability to stretch an insight out into a book length discourse (those of you have ever attended one of his lectures or read one of his books might be willing to back me up).  The hyperbole posted on the backs of books is purposeful not because it is great writing. Far from it. The overblown praise is there to get you and me to stop in our tracks and say "I need to read this book."

But after a number of years since the book was published it is clear the author of this Russian novel is no Tolstoy or Gogol. Virtually no one has ever heard of her. Clearly it is not one of the greatest books in Russian literature. In other words, because the reviewer wants people to read the book, he or she deliberately overpraises it in a sentence or two knowing that it will fit perfectly (yes I am being tongue in cheek) on the back of the book so browsers will see it and start to read inside the covers where the surrealist magic and wonderful images are. So actually this kind of writing is perfect for what it is trying to do. Sell books. But you are not a book and you should not try to market yourself. Instead you should try to stay on the ground instead of rising toward some pearly gates. Unless you have had a halo since birth.

But the real lesson is that different modes of writing work well for different audiences and different purposes. The style of this entry is high modernist. Which, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, is fine if you are a high modernist, but if not, not. Some of you will hate the style. Some will find the challenge interesting. Some will have quit after a sentence. I raise this issue as I am still in the process of deciding what is the best advice to give to students applying to colleges and universities. Would high modernist work? Post-Modernist? Or is the safe bet of standard prose the way to go?

I am not sure and want some of the readers out there  to post comments. This is, I hope, a discussion with lots of room for disagreement and there will not be, unlike many of the guidebooks on writing out there, a right way to approach an essay for everyone.