The City is smart at this: smelling and good and looking raunchy; sending secret messages disguised as public signs: this way, open here, danger to let colored only single men on sale woman wanted private room stop dog on premises absolutely no money down fresh chicken free delivery fast.
Jazz, by Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison was one of the great stylists of all time. In one of her lectures, she said, "We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives." She attended to language, she cared for it, knew its power. She also said about language "Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable."
Easy to find stunning sentences in her work; easy to find sentences saturated in style.
Here, the City is alive, thinking, opinionated. I love personification. My first reaction is always surprise: what I thought of as inanimate is animated. What else is alive that I have overlooked? I think my affection for it has to do with our long history of assigning consciousness exclusively to humans. It's always felt stingy to me, and recent research suggests we may have been ungenerous.
Morrison reminds me in this sentence that punctuation is style. There are colons and semicolons. At first, she uses commas to separate the city's public signs—this way, open here. Quickly the commas disappear, and I feel as if I'm moving fast down the bustling city street, passing by the flashes of signs.
The Making
This is a right-branching, cumulative sentence with the base clause at the beginning.
After the base clause—The City is smart at this-- modifiers primarily refer back to the opening clause, making specific what the city is smart at doing. Then comes a colon, connecting the base clause to what comes after it. A colon is used after a statement (such as a base clause) or to introduce a quote, an example, or an explanation.
Now think of three words that describe something in the base clause. Here Morrison used "smelling and good and looking raunchy." She also used polysyndeton, the overuse of conjunctions, to create rhythm and a distinction between each word. The lack of parallelism disrupts and creates a more chaotic rhythm. (with parallelism it would have read: smelling good and looking raunchy).
Use a semicolon to continue the modifiers that refer back to the base clause. A semicolon provides a pause, longer than a comma, but not as long as a full-stop period.
Then use a colon. Here the list of modifiers changes, referring not to the base clause but something in the list of modifiers directly preceding it. In Morrison's sentence, the colon sets up the list of public signs. As the city sends its secret messages, as the people hurry and bustle along, the commas fall out of the sentence to create speed. There is an onslaught of public signs. (She also deftly wove in the time period, which in her novel, Jazz, is 1920s New York City).
Music drifts in almost unnoticed, but it's there, making a melody.
There's alliteration. The "s" sound: City/smart/smelling/sending/secret/signs/single/sale/stop.
By accentuating this sound, which is the first letter of the subject of the sentence, the reader is reminded, perhaps subconsciously, that the sentence is about the city.
There's the "f" sound: fresh/free/fast.
And so much assonance! city/this; good/looking; smelling/sending/secret/messages; disguised/signs/private; way/danger/sale; stop/on; absolutely/no; chicken/delivery.
Give it a try!
What do you see in this sentence?
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That sentence leaves me breathless, as I guess is the intention. The pace of the city is overpowering, and I can't help but read more into that long list of 'signs'. The lack of commas forces my thinking to combine them into a closer connection, a sort of 'sentence' within the sentence. I mean, read together, they tell some kind of sordid story of men, women, money and dare I say exploitation? Am I reading too much into it?
I've had a try, and I've added a second, shorter sentence to give context, to show the character's situation and motives - probably revealing that the first sentence, by itself, is lacking, but so be it. Here it is:
She was adept at this game: listening and genial and accepting their secrets without judgement; prising open their fears, their regrets, their agonised confessions: it only happened once, he doesn’t know, I’ve got no-one to turn to, I resist wish hope wonder manage cope survive drown. There were stories here.