This was the mother, the dead sister Ellen: this Niobe without tears who had conceived to the demon in a kind of nightmare, who even while alive had moved but without life and grieved but without weeping, who now had an air of tranquil and unwitting desolation, not as if she had either outlived the others or had died first, but as if she had never lived at all.
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Another Faulkner novel spilling with stunning sentences, sentences that spiral and pool and spool like none other. Today’s sentence contains style and syntactical techniques that are emblematic of his writing.
When I teach Faulkner, students invariably say that his sentences are too long and hard to read. Or: I get lost, and the long sentences are old-fashioned. My argument is that what has gone out of fashion can be revived, and the reception is often a keen interest in the author’s writing style. Accolades follow, a sense of novelty (despite the lineage). I’m thinking of the clause-laden sentences by Garth Greenwell and Nicole Krauss or the conjunction-heavy sentences of Cormac McCarthy.
What’s the effect of this kind of sentence? One answer, especially for this novel, is that the linear, traditional sentence—subject with verb predicate—does not capture the sense of the past invading, interrupting, or disrupting the present. This sentence, which rejects the linear flow, mimics this novel’s subject matter: the past is everpresent. It’s a theme found throughout his work. Faulkner wrote in his novel Requiem for a Nun, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
This sentence is right-branching, opening with the base clause, “This was the mother.” The sentence lingers here by adding an appositive, which renames or adds more information: “the dead sister Ellen.”
After the colon, Faulkner adds more description of Ellen with another appositive: “this Niobe without tears.” Faulkner injects Greek mythology by comparing Ellen to Niobe, the daughter of Tantalus and wife of Amphion, whose children are slain by the gods. As she weeps, she’s turned into stone, from which the tears continue to fall. With one word, the novel has an aura of myth. Ellen is worse off than Niobe, succumbing to numbness because she’s unable to cry.
Three relative clauses follow, beginning with “who,” further fleshing out Ellen. Each of these clauses uses the past perfect verb tense, weaving in the past:
1. who had conceived to the demon in a kind of nightmare
2. who even while alive had moved but without life and grieved but without weeping
3. who now had an air of tranquil and unwitting desolation
The three relative clauses have different rhythms and syntactical structures. The second one, for instance, uses two verbs, “had moved/(had) grieved) and anaphora and balance/parallelism with the refrains, “but without life,” “but without weeping.” The third one invokes balance, pairing two noun phrases that describe Ellen’s state of being: “tranquil and unwitting desolation.”
In his oeuvre (not just here but in his short stories and other novels), Faulkner likes the correlative conjunction “not/but.” It’s like a room that can hold other syntactical structures. In this sentence, within the not/but room, Faulkner folds in the following:
Not
1. Subordinate conjunction: “as if” which is followed by the subject “she” and the verb “had”
In this subordinate clause, he nests another correlative conjunction: either/or:
a. “had either outlived the others or had died first
When we come to the second prong of the correlative conjunction, “but,” he includes another second subordinate clause:
But
1. Subordinate conjunction: “as if” followed by a subject and verb predicate: “she had never lived at all.”
This architecture is packed with details and information. It makes the reader slow down, and maybe, these fast-flowing days, that’s exactly what’s needed.
Your Turn
Open with a base clause. Use a linking verb and add another description of the subject.
Add a colon and another description of the subject. Do you want to invoke a myth?
Now, you’ll write three relative clauses beginning with “who.” Like Faulkner, you can use the past tense or past perfect to inject the past into the present. Try to vary these clauses in terms of length and style techniques.
Use the not/but structure. You’ll first nest a subordinate clause, and within that clause, use another coordinative conjunction, either/or. After “but,” follow with a second subordinate clause.
How did it go?
What else do you see?
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I’ve taught “Style in Fiction,” “Word for Word,” and “Cultivating Your Prose” at the University of San Francisco and Stanford Continuing Studies since 2007.
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Nice sentence! But not what you'd want to see in an owners manual ... ;-)
Brilliant!