And then she started smiling again, not a mocking smile, not as if she were enjoying herself, but a terminal smile, a knotted smile somewhere between a sensation of beauty and misery, though not beauty and misery per se, but Little Beauty and Little Misery, paradoxical dwarves, travelling and inapprehensible dwarves.
"Mexican Manifesto," by Robert Bolaño (translated from Spanish by Laura Healy)
The many shapes and forms of a sentence keep me endlessly fascinated. It's only recently in my writing life that I've fallen in love with the correlative conjunction. You’ve seen it, you’ve used it: "both…and," "either…or," "neither…nor," and the one used here: "not… but." William Faulkner loved the "not…but" structure and in this sentence, Bolano uses it not once but twice. It's a beautiful scaffolding to unveil a comparison.
My adoration for the correlative conjunction increases because of its elegant rhythm. The elements of this construction are usually parallel: similar in length and grammatical form. Parallelism, writes Richard D. Altick, in Preface to Critical Reading, lends an "unmistakable eloquence to prose."
Interestingly, Bolano disrupts the parallelism in his sentence by using a “not…not…but” structure, with the second “not” departing from parallelism’s eloquence.
-not a mocking smile (not + indefinite article, adjective, noun)
-not as if she were enjoying herself (not + subordinate conjunction, subject, verb predicate)
-but a terminal smile (not + indefinite article, adjective, noun)
The destruction of the parallelism makes sense because this is not an elegant moment in the story. The insertion of "not as if she were enjoying herself" separates the two parallel phrases, creating a jarring rhythm.
Bolano continues to focus on the character’s smile, adding specificity and returning to parallelism with “a knotted smile” and adding epistrophe. He uses antithesis or contrast: "a sensation of beauty and misery." Then he again invokes the "not… but" pairing to usher in a wildly playful metaphor, comparing the smile to two dwarves, Little Beauty and Little Misery.
Your Turn
Open with a base clause, a subject and a verb.
Add your first "not" to describe something in the base clause. Bolano focused on her smile.
Add a second "not," and do not use parallelism. Now add "but" and return to parallelism, repeating the grammatical structure of your first "not" phrase.
Add another modifying phrase that continues the parallelism (a knotted smile); and a modifying phrase that includes contrast or antithesis.
Now add one more “not…but” conjunction and create a metaphor. Your story might not need the wildness that Bolano introduces in his story.
Try it!
There's more to say about this sentence. What else do you see?
What do you think about the metaphor and the movement to Little Beauty and Little Misery?
About Me
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. In each of these classes, we spend 10 to 15 weeks drenched in the beauty of sentences, reading them and writing them. It’s such a pleasure! I’ve watched my writing and my students’ writing blossom with this practice of paying close attention to the sentence.
Please visit my website to find all of my books: ninaschuyler.com (including “How to Write Stunning Sentences” and “Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal).
I’m thrilled my new novel Afterword was chosen by Alta Journal as a top read for May! Bay City News, too, awarded it this honor.
Preorder links:
Readings:
On May 20th, Saturday, at 11:00 am I’ll be at Book Passage, Corte Madera, in conversation with Jasmin Darsnik, author of The Bohemians.
On May 31, 7:00 pm, I’ll be at Green Apple Books on 9th Avenue, in conversation with Katie Flynn, author of The Companions.
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Wow! A whole class in substack form. I'm so grateful to have found you and plan to work through the sentence exercises one by one. If I'm feeling courageous maybe I'll post my attempts. Do I dare?
There are so many things to love about this sentence. I am especially struck by the polarities of beauty and misery, which seem to be the DNA of the life force (or farce). The dance between those two keeps the aspidistra moving through the sky, inviting mysterious smiles to appear, as if out of nowhere. (And thank you for reminding me to read Bolano!)