I am once again teaching Gertrude Stein in Paris. Struck anew by the modernity of her sentences (of Ezra Pound: “She said he was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not”), I ran across this recent essay on the sentences of Rebecca Solnit. Solnit is by now a well-known feminist political writer, who originated, for many, the term mansplaining. But Neiman Storyboard’s analysis focuses not on her political views but on the length and shape of her sentences.
I’m increasingly aware of the steady march toward shorter sentences. Writing fiction, I find myself knocking out what 30 years ago would have been a semicolon and replacing it with a period. Then I knock out a comma followed by and and replace them both with a period. I entertain fragments. Words. You get the idea.
The only long sentences we’ve been looking at recently have been the word salads composed by Donald Trump. Like Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Joyce’s Ulysses, these aren’t really sentences but conglomerations of words -- self-interrupting, running on, creating collage more than idea. You don’t read them so much as you read through them.
A sentence, we’re often told, conveys an idea. Often, though, it also conveys , or creates, an emotion. T.S. Eliot, speaking of poetry, calls this the objective correlative: the creation in the listener, not of understanding the encounter you are writing about, but of the feelings you experienced in the original encounter. In Solnit’s 88-word sentence opening her recent essay on presidential impeachment, the Neiman critic observes, “the effect … is to make me feel overwhelmed and crazed – manic – just as the news does today.”
Such sentence writing comes with risk. I sometimes give writing students the opening pages of Flaubert’s chapter on Yonville-L’Abbaye, in Madame Bovary, and ask them to respond to the description of the village. Trying to be respectful of the great French writer, they proffer weak, strained comments on how complete and detailed Flaubert’s word picture is. Finally, I ask them if they did not feel a little bored by descriptions like this one:
At the foot of the hill beyond the bridge begins a roadway, planted with young aspens, that leads in a straight line to the first houses in the place. These, fenced in by hedges, are in the middle of courtyards full of straggling buildings, wine-presses, cart-sheds and distilleries scattered under thick trees, with ladders, poles, or scythes hung on to the branches. The thatched roofs, like fur caps drawn over eyes, reach down over about a third of the low windows, whose coarse convex glasses have knots in the middle like the bottoms of bottles. Against the plaster wall diagonally crossed by black joists, a meagre pear-tree sometimes leans and the ground-floors have at their door a small swing-gate to keep out the chicks that come pilfering crumbs of bread steeped in cider on the threshold. But the courtyards grow narrower, the houses closer together, and the fences disappear; a bundle of ferns swings under a window from the end of a broomstick; there is a blacksmith’s forge and then a wheelwright’s, with two or three new carts outside that partly block the way.
Yes! cry the students. We were bored out of our minds!
Then, I say, you have some idea of what drove Emma Bovary to adultery and suicide.
Nieman focuses on the opener of Solnit’s essay, but its second sentence is even more striking:
The commission of a crime is not normally the coverup for another crime, but if they keep them coming, it’s hard to keep your eye on any one or keep track of them all, or so it seemed on that day last week when the president had tweeted out some white supremacist bullshit about South African land expropriation, which maybe distracted people from the fact that about 36 hours earlier his fixer and lawyer had named him as a co-conspirator in a felony; it was one of hundreds of racist dogwhistles and shouts he’d broadcast while some people waited for evidence that he had said the n-word as though his constant insults to black people from Maxine Waters to LeBron James to Congressman and civil rights hero John Lewis and his attacks on Latinos and immigrants and voting rights were not enough, for it was also a day that the White House had, with a tweet, turned the murder of a young white woman into an attack on undocumented immigrants even though the alleged murderer’s immigration status was unclear and there had been a more recent and more spectacular murder by a native-born straight white man, who killed his pregnant wife and daughters and dumped the little girls’ bodies in oil tanks belonging to his employer, Anandarko Petroleum, that no one made into an indictment of that murderer’s category, because collective punishment is never for straight white men (and should not be for anybody).
This is, I would argue, a sentence, unlike Molly’s soliloquy or the oft-quoted word salads. The point Solnit is making, about the way distraction works as coverup for certain crimes whereas attention turns other crimes into broad indictments of whole groups, requires both evidence and comparison. True, one might argue that in a paragraph (which the sentence constitutes), such an argument could be made using several sentences cheek by jowl. But as the Neiman piece points out, the rush of the one long sentence echoes the very rush of news that distracts and confuses us; by being chary with her periods, Solnit demonstrates how “the news emanating from the White House never stops.”
Other writers use the long sentence to other useful effects. The Nieman piece cites Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tim O’Brien, and Ken Fuson, but one could just as easily cite Stein. While “Alice” begins her “autobiography” with “I was born in San Francisco, California,” by the end of the book she is writing like this:
[Hemingway] came to the house about ten o’clock in the morning and he stayed, he stayed for lunch, he stayed all afternoon, he stayed for dinner and he stayed until about ten o’clock at night and then all of a sudden he announced that his wife was enceinte and then with great bitterness, and I, I am too young to be a father.
Hemingway himself, supposedly the godfather of today’s short, terse sentences, often wrote long:
I told her about watching the bull, not the horse, when the bulls charged the picadors, and got her to watch the picador place the point of his pic so that she saw what it was all about, so that it became more something that was going on with a definite end, and less of a spectacle with unexplained horrors.
What we too often forget, in the move toward concision and clarity that has affected so much contemporary writing, is that sentences have effects. Words are never transparent. Read short sentences and you breathe often. Shorter sentences? Hyperventilation. But when you begin a longer sentence, sensing that a larger idea will get its play, much in the way that George Eliot once wrote, in Silas Marner, a sentence that my seventh-grade geeky self took seven blackboards to diagram, your breathing mellows and goes deeper, as if you’re plunging into dark water, and just as your lungs begin to press against your ribs, you let the air in them pull you back up, until you see the world above the surface in a whole new way.
