“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.”
I sure hope so. I finished Absalom, Absalom and felt underwhelmed by any modern literature I’ve read since. This was the gold standard. Cormac McCarthy couldn’t even touch it (and to be fair, neither could Faulkner himself after he wrote it).
It’s been almost 3 years since I’ve read this book and nothing has surpassed it. Moby Dick and Blood Meridian came close. Paradise Lost might be a contender but I’m just at the beginning. Even still, I’m more likely to buy a new book that attempts this complex and ornate style even if it falters, than I am to check out yet another author satisfied with the drab minimalism that has become the standard (if not the firm hard rule) today.
I will read anyone's work if the writer is doing interesting things with the sentence and does not shy away from the long sentence. The long invariably complex sentence is a container for so much music--for rhythm and sound, for mimicking the mind, for all sorts of style techniques.
This was once power in fresh paint, this figurehead: a wooden woman almost alive, who plowed the ship forward through storm and calm, who was wood but to each man aboard an idealized and worshiped specter, who now was stiff and still, not as if she was an avatar of good fortune, but as if held prisoner in a museum, longing for sea air.
I love the tension of withholding, even for a little bit, what "this" is. It's intriguing because the "this" gained power in fresh paint. Then we learn it's a figurehead, then we learn more: a wooden woman. "Almost alive" is also tension-creating. Might she become alive? How? She held significance for the sailors (great variation in the relative clauses) and by the end, with "longing for the sea," I feel she is alive in some way.
Thank you Nina, you and David have seen so much more than I thought I wrote. I hope that is a good thing. I was focused on a figurehead, now resting in a museum, with a past life at sea.
Hild was the Battle Maid, he had carved: the memorial stone who was not inert at all but a living being carved with words spelled in secret letters and pictures of Shipmaster Gevehard’s ship, the Sun overhead, and the waters beneath them looping like a sea serpent; who was meant to guarantee the men’s safe passage over dangerous waters, but the red memorial stone may not have done what he intended, the ships may have either sunk or broken into splinters on the rocks, Hild might have been derelict her duty, may have outlived the men, but still be sitting on the shores of the Merchant sea proud as if she had successfully brought their ships home, the same as all stones will do.
So good! By lingering here through the relative clauses and the conjunctions, you foreground Hild. She becomes significant and memorable. I love the transformation, "a living being carved with words." More detail comes in with "red memorial stone." Tension and possible conflict are introduced with the fact that Hild might have been derelict. Will there be consequences? For the record, I had no trouble navigating this winding path, labyrinth sentence.
Yes! I just read this in Garth Greenwell's new book, "Small Rain," which I think is relevant to this discussion about the long sentence:
"Whole strata of reality are lost to us at the speed at which we live, our ability to perceive them is lost, and maybe that's the value of poetry (or the long sentence, which makes the reader slow down a bit--my addition here), there are aspects of the world that are only visible at the frequence of certain poems (and maybe the longish sentence too).
I haven't read Faulkner but have read Krasznahorkai and Fosse and can even become addicted to the rhythm of their endless sentences. The first times I picked up books by both authors, I put them down after reading about 2 pages but, determined to give them another try, I was carried away by their stories.
I just now read several pages of Absolom, Absolum on Amazon and became drawn in. Now I'll have to buy the book!
I have yet to read the authors you mention, but now I will! I'm endlessly curious about all the ways a writer can write a sentence. They feel alive to me. One subscriber noted that these types of sentences feel like winding staircases or paths in the woods.
For me, they feel like riding a galloping horse, so in that sense they don't slow me down, but carry me forward. Allss By the Fire by Fosse is a short read. The Melancholy of Resistance by Krasznahorkai might be one of his best (?). I thought of sending you a Krasznahorkai sentence but since they never come to a full stop that creates a problem. A review of his most recent novel: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/12/books/review/krasznahorkai-herscht-07769.html
Hello Nina, I'm beginning to love your difficult and challenging sentences.
I took a rather boring first paragraph of mine, which is this:
She looks at me without seeing. I am about to speak to her but her look stops me in my tracks. Empty eyes, unseeing, something on her mind that doesn’t include me. I walk on, looking around the room, trying to see someone I know. I keep glancing at her. Who is she? Why is she so familiar?
and then turned it into this:
She looks at me without seeing, this woman who seems so familiar: this woman who only misses the smirk that I remember, who now stands in this room, who doesn’t register her surroundings or the people around her but she is there, if barely present, empty eyes not registering anyone, preoccupied but unable to express her anguish, as if it were an urgent necessity.
In the second version, there is a heightened emotion, as David noted. I feel the narrator’s anxiety regarding this encounter because of the repetition “this woman who..” and the way the long sentence builds to the end. Because of the repetition the anchor, the fulcrum is this woman. I don’t feel the same intensity in the first version
What a difference! The new version is much more gripping. I love smirk, register, and anguish. It’s interesting, how changing the form and syntax also changed the vocabulary.
From his perch at the kitchen sink washing dishes for the third time that evening Cooper gazed upon his six-year-old child with a perturbing mix of affection and disdain, this child who could already inscribe or recite the entirety of the Cyrillic alphabet from memory and who spent most of his free time drawing or painting letters as characters straight out of Dickens or Mervyn Peake but who also evinced little or no interest in getting along with anyone else his age and who could not be bothered to use the bathroom when nature called; and Cooper found himself once again consumed with regret for not sticking with his original, well-thought-through position regarding the utter futility of reproduction, for having changed his mind at the last possible moment and reversing course but now it was too late, there was no method for sending the kid back to wherever he’d come from, and this recognition poured through his soul as successive waves of despair: until the moment the dishes were done and the child looked up from his doodling and requested to hear music, meaning his anachronistic favorites from the mid-1970s (a now-unfashionable time when music and the way it could make you feel was quite possibly the most important thing), and the moment the boy heard the initial chords of “Miracles” he threw his uncapped markers to the floor and began to swirl into a Tasmanian whirlwind of dance that also involved the spinning of every towel and blanket in the house into the air and thence onto the floor, and Cooper watching him felt his regret dissolve into some other feeling, his hopelessness sucked from his being straight across an ocean of space and time, shattered and deposited in a million sparkling pieces along an unknown shore.
First, I could follow this precisely. I was never lost, never wondering what is the subject of this sentence again? Kudos!! It's interesting because the "who," which refers to the child, serves as an anchor that I hold on to, swinging along until I get to the "but who" and the sentence turns and all the brilliance disappears. We feel Cooper's burden, which moves the sentence into regret and a sense of possibly unwinding or reversing life. Now here, this is what the sentence is mimetic of--at least for me. That life is propulsion, like this long sentence, that has swept up Cooper and is carrying him along, and there is no going back, no sending the child "back to where he came from." No, the syntactical structure mirrors this exactly. He is flung into it and forward. And by the end, with the child dancing, Cooper's regret and hopelessness are sucked away into the whirlwind.
Hi David, this is so beautiful. It flows effortlessly, just like his thoughts. There is so much vivid imagery I feel like I have watched a short film, not read a sentence. It slowed my reading so that I took in every word to hold onto the meaning and the images. I'm curious, is it part of something larger?
Also, any manner in which I can express my enormous gratitude for the people involved in Jefferson Airplane and Starship, I will take. They saved my life more than once!
Oh yes, I started college in 1967 in San Francisco Bay Area. I can remember time and place of my first hearing of so many of their songs, it was a soundtrack. also Big Brother and Janis Joplin.
And The Grateful Dead? So much great music. I especially love the Airplane’s version of “Wooden Ships,” from Volunteers. So haunting; such soaring harmonic vocals.
Do readers who are initially averse to the complex sentences of Faulkner ever come around? And is it worth the effort? I recently bought an anthology of Faulkner at a secondhand store and am considering whether or not to plunge in. Like your students, Nina, I find sentences like the one featured today hard. I could of taken that think Faulkner with me to the cafe today but instead I´m sitting here with a Patricia Cornwell thriller. Tomorrow -- who knows?
It's a good question and I can only answer it for myself. I recently wrote a short story about a woman full of uncertainty and I wanted to capture her mind, and the only way to do it was through nonlinear sentences. She'd move forward in her thinking, then dart to a question or an aside or a caveat, then backward into the past. Was it as intricate as Faulkner's? No, but his sentences provided a blueprint to create such a nonlinear cerebral path.
Thanks. On my computer there are no three dots. Perhaps I´m not set up right? Below my post there is a place to hit like, a place to reply, and a place to share -- but no three dots.
Nice sentence! But not what you'd want to see in an owners manual ... ;-)
Brilliant!
“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.”
I sure hope so. I finished Absalom, Absalom and felt underwhelmed by any modern literature I’ve read since. This was the gold standard. Cormac McCarthy couldn’t even touch it (and to be fair, neither could Faulkner himself after he wrote it).
It’s been almost 3 years since I’ve read this book and nothing has surpassed it. Moby Dick and Blood Meridian came close. Paradise Lost might be a contender but I’m just at the beginning. Even still, I’m more likely to buy a new book that attempts this complex and ornate style even if it falters, than I am to check out yet another author satisfied with the drab minimalism that has become the standard (if not the firm hard rule) today.
I will read anyone's work if the writer is doing interesting things with the sentence and does not shy away from the long sentence. The long invariably complex sentence is a container for so much music--for rhythm and sound, for mimicking the mind, for all sorts of style techniques.
Give me another word to describe that sentence……hmm all over the place….on a mountain going around endless curves of verbs?^^
This was once power in fresh paint, this figurehead: a wooden woman almost alive, who plowed the ship forward through storm and calm, who was wood but to each man aboard an idealized and worshiped specter, who now was stiff and still, not as if she was an avatar of good fortune, but as if held prisoner in a museum, longing for sea air.
I love the tension of withholding, even for a little bit, what "this" is. It's intriguing because the "this" gained power in fresh paint. Then we learn it's a figurehead, then we learn more: a wooden woman. "Almost alive" is also tension-creating. Might she become alive? How? She held significance for the sailors (great variation in the relative clauses) and by the end, with "longing for the sea," I feel she is alive in some way.
Thank you Nina, you and David have seen so much more than I thought I wrote. I hope that is a good thing. I was focused on a figurehead, now resting in a museum, with a past life at sea.
That’s so lovely! And I like the underlying metaphors.
Thank you, David. Now that you have mentioned it, I do see a metaphor for a real woman which hadn't been intended, but I like the surprise.
Yes, something about the way we treat one another…
Hild was the Battle Maid, he had carved: the memorial stone who was not inert at all but a living being carved with words spelled in secret letters and pictures of Shipmaster Gevehard’s ship, the Sun overhead, and the waters beneath them looping like a sea serpent; who was meant to guarantee the men’s safe passage over dangerous waters, but the red memorial stone may not have done what he intended, the ships may have either sunk or broken into splinters on the rocks, Hild might have been derelict her duty, may have outlived the men, but still be sitting on the shores of the Merchant sea proud as if she had successfully brought their ships home, the same as all stones will do.
So good! By lingering here through the relative clauses and the conjunctions, you foreground Hild. She becomes significant and memorable. I love the transformation, "a living being carved with words." More detail comes in with "red memorial stone." Tension and possible conflict are introduced with the fact that Hild might have been derelict. Will there be consequences? For the record, I had no trouble navigating this winding path, labyrinth sentence.
Thank you. I'm daring myself to write these longer sentences and hoping the reader can make sense of them.
Yes! I just read this in Garth Greenwell's new book, "Small Rain," which I think is relevant to this discussion about the long sentence:
"Whole strata of reality are lost to us at the speed at which we live, our ability to perceive them is lost, and maybe that's the value of poetry (or the long sentence, which makes the reader slow down a bit--my addition here), there are aspects of the world that are only visible at the frequence of certain poems (and maybe the longish sentence too).
I haven't read Faulkner but have read Krasznahorkai and Fosse and can even become addicted to the rhythm of their endless sentences. The first times I picked up books by both authors, I put them down after reading about 2 pages but, determined to give them another try, I was carried away by their stories.
I just now read several pages of Absolom, Absolum on Amazon and became drawn in. Now I'll have to buy the book!
I have yet to read the authors you mention, but now I will! I'm endlessly curious about all the ways a writer can write a sentence. They feel alive to me. One subscriber noted that these types of sentences feel like winding staircases or paths in the woods.
For me, they feel like riding a galloping horse, so in that sense they don't slow me down, but carry me forward. Allss By the Fire by Fosse is a short read. The Melancholy of Resistance by Krasznahorkai might be one of his best (?). I thought of sending you a Krasznahorkai sentence but since they never come to a full stop that creates a problem. A review of his most recent novel: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/12/books/review/krasznahorkai-herscht-07769.html
Thank you!
Hello Nina, I'm beginning to love your difficult and challenging sentences.
I took a rather boring first paragraph of mine, which is this:
She looks at me without seeing. I am about to speak to her but her look stops me in my tracks. Empty eyes, unseeing, something on her mind that doesn’t include me. I walk on, looking around the room, trying to see someone I know. I keep glancing at her. Who is she? Why is she so familiar?
and then turned it into this:
She looks at me without seeing, this woman who seems so familiar: this woman who only misses the smirk that I remember, who now stands in this room, who doesn’t register her surroundings or the people around her but she is there, if barely present, empty eyes not registering anyone, preoccupied but unable to express her anguish, as if it were an urgent necessity.
Does that work better???
In the second version, there is a heightened emotion, as David noted. I feel the narrator’s anxiety regarding this encounter because of the repetition “this woman who..” and the way the long sentence builds to the end. Because of the repetition the anchor, the fulcrum is this woman. I don’t feel the same intensity in the first version
Thank you Nina!
What a difference! The new version is much more gripping. I love smirk, register, and anguish. It’s interesting, how changing the form and syntax also changed the vocabulary.
Thank you so much David!
yes
From his perch at the kitchen sink washing dishes for the third time that evening Cooper gazed upon his six-year-old child with a perturbing mix of affection and disdain, this child who could already inscribe or recite the entirety of the Cyrillic alphabet from memory and who spent most of his free time drawing or painting letters as characters straight out of Dickens or Mervyn Peake but who also evinced little or no interest in getting along with anyone else his age and who could not be bothered to use the bathroom when nature called; and Cooper found himself once again consumed with regret for not sticking with his original, well-thought-through position regarding the utter futility of reproduction, for having changed his mind at the last possible moment and reversing course but now it was too late, there was no method for sending the kid back to wherever he’d come from, and this recognition poured through his soul as successive waves of despair: until the moment the dishes were done and the child looked up from his doodling and requested to hear music, meaning his anachronistic favorites from the mid-1970s (a now-unfashionable time when music and the way it could make you feel was quite possibly the most important thing), and the moment the boy heard the initial chords of “Miracles” he threw his uncapped markers to the floor and began to swirl into a Tasmanian whirlwind of dance that also involved the spinning of every towel and blanket in the house into the air and thence onto the floor, and Cooper watching him felt his regret dissolve into some other feeling, his hopelessness sucked from his being straight across an ocean of space and time, shattered and deposited in a million sparkling pieces along an unknown shore.
First, I could follow this precisely. I was never lost, never wondering what is the subject of this sentence again? Kudos!! It's interesting because the "who," which refers to the child, serves as an anchor that I hold on to, swinging along until I get to the "but who" and the sentence turns and all the brilliance disappears. We feel Cooper's burden, which moves the sentence into regret and a sense of possibly unwinding or reversing life. Now here, this is what the sentence is mimetic of--at least for me. That life is propulsion, like this long sentence, that has swept up Cooper and is carrying him along, and there is no going back, no sending the child "back to where he came from." No, the syntactical structure mirrors this exactly. He is flung into it and forward. And by the end, with the child dancing, Cooper's regret and hopelessness are sucked away into the whirlwind.
Thank you, Nina. I think I learned a lot from writing this. And from the way Faulkner wrote, which is also a whirlwind.
Hi David, this is so beautiful. It flows effortlessly, just like his thoughts. There is so much vivid imagery I feel like I have watched a short film, not read a sentence. It slowed my reading so that I took in every word to hold onto the meaning and the images. I'm curious, is it part of something larger?
Also, any manner in which I can express my enormous gratitude for the people involved in Jefferson Airplane and Starship, I will take. They saved my life more than once!
Oh yes, I started college in 1967 in San Francisco Bay Area. I can remember time and place of my first hearing of so many of their songs, it was a soundtrack. also Big Brother and Janis Joplin.
And The Grateful Dead? So much great music. I especially love the Airplane’s version of “Wooden Ships,” from Volunteers. So haunting; such soaring harmonic vocals.
Thank you so much, Leslie. It could be part of a larger effort: thank you for that question / suggestion!
The Niagara Falls of sentences.
Do readers who are initially averse to the complex sentences of Faulkner ever come around? And is it worth the effort? I recently bought an anthology of Faulkner at a secondhand store and am considering whether or not to plunge in. Like your students, Nina, I find sentences like the one featured today hard. I could of taken that think Faulkner with me to the cafe today but instead I´m sitting here with a Patricia Cornwell thriller. Tomorrow -- who knows?
You have to let Faulkner’s prose sift your soul like the poetry it is.
The word "think" above should of been "thick." (Unfortunately, I´m not sure how to edit here on Substack.) Freudian slip?
It's a good question and I can only answer it for myself. I recently wrote a short story about a woman full of uncertainty and I wanted to capture her mind, and the only way to do it was through nonlinear sentences. She'd move forward in her thinking, then dart to a question or an aside or a caveat, then backward into the past. Was it as intricate as Faulkner's? No, but his sentences provided a blueprint to create such a nonlinear cerebral path.
you can edit by clicking on the three little dots on the right in the Like, Reply line.
Thanks. On my computer there are no three dots. Perhaps I´m not set up right? Below my post there is a place to hit like, a place to reply, and a place to share -- but no three dots.
Look at the far right. Like these ...
Nice to hear from you^^