Having saved it from meltdown, brought it back to life, cultivated it, savored it, stroked it, fed it, worried over it, been endlessly startled by it and euphorically entertained, I’d clearly forged a deep reciprocal bond.
“Reciprocity,”’ by Aaron Shurin from the essay collection, King of Shadows
I love all the things you can do with a sentence. Let Shurin’s sentence float around in your brain for a moment. What do you feel? What does it stir up? With that long list of modifiers—there are nine of them!—I feel the narrator’s commitment, maybe obsession, and most definitely care. (In the essay, the narrator is taking care of a very demanding flower garden).
Imagine if it had read like this: Having saved it from meltdown, brought it back to life, I’d clearly forged a deep reciprocal bond.
It’s not so emotional anymore. It’s contained, restrained. A level-headed narrator, (maybe an accountant) prudent and practical.
Winston Weathers in his essay, “The Rhetoric of the Series,” says when you start stringing together more than three things, you’re leaving the realm of reasonable, of the logical. More than three things suggest the emotional, diffuse, and inexplicable. It gestures to, in my opinion, the part of being human that isn’t so rational; the part that says, I’ve got to do this and I’m doing it!
The Making
This is a left-branching sentence. That means all the modifiers come to the left of the base clause. Here, the base clause (also called the kernel or independent clause) is “I’d clearly forged a deep reciprocal bond.”
With a left-branching sentence, you build suspense as the reader waits for the base clause. The reader wonders: where is this leading? What’s going to happen? I better keep reading.
Shurin uses present participial phrases to create his string of modifiers. How do you make a present participial? Just take a verb and add an –ing. Here they are functioning as adjectives modifying the subject, “I.”
Really, all of the phrases begin with “having”-- “Having saved it from meltdown, [having] brought it back to life, [having] cultivated it, [having] savored it, [having] stroked it… “
But Shurin creates a faster rhythm by leaving out “having.” The technique is called ellipsis.
One more thing: Do you hear the repetition of “it”? In the first two phrases, it’s a little hidden, but then it becomes like a resounding repetitive note. That’s called epistrophe, the repetition of the same word or words at the end of successive phrases, clauses, or sentences.
The effect is to give emphasis to whatever is being repeated. The repetition makes the words memorable and, depending on the word, creates more emotion.
Such as Robert Penn Warren’s sentence from Flood: A Romance of Our Time:
The big sycamore by the creek was gone. The willow tangle was gone. The little enclave of untrodden bluegrass was gone.
Time to leave the realm of the reasonable.
Let me know how it goes!
Loving the series, Nina! I'm like a giddy schoolgirl, the bespectacled, bucktoothed nerd everyone snickers about behind her back, who got a second chance to attend all the Style in Fiction classes I missed <3
Having discovered it in a roundabout way, grasped it in hope, feared it, fought through it, tested my limits at it, invested in it, centered my life around it, become often obsessed with it and fervently faithful, I’d fitfully discovered my final commitment.