Building Great Sentences (18 page)

Balanced Sentences and Balanced Forms

M
any novels have striking first lines, but when I ask my students for favorites most of them invariably cite “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” that supremely balanced sentence that begins
A Tale of Two Cities
. Dickens made that opening so memorable by exploiting in just a few words almost all the strategies of syntactic balance: “It was the” before the comma is mirrored by “it was the” after the comma, and the fact that each clause starts with the same words exploits the classical rhetorical trope of anaphora. The first clause ends with “times,” as does the second clause, exploiting the classical rhetorical trope of epistrophe, and that both first and last words of these two clauses are the same makes it an example of yet another rhetorical trope, symploce. The only difference between the first clause and the second clause is that the word
best
before the comma is changed to
worst
after the comma, creating a simple but effective antithesis. It's hard to imagine a more perfectly balanced sentence!

What my students invariably do not remember is that “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” is
not
the first sentence of
A Tale of Two Cities
but is instead only the first of a string of balanced clauses and conceptual balances that combine to form a first sentence that keeps on going for 118 words:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

And Dickens doesn't stop there, following this superbly balanced long sentence with even more balances:

There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.

One can almost imagine Dickens performing these sentences, emphasizing their on the one hand/on the other hand structure with the regularity of a metronome: this/that, this/that, this/that. What makes this famous opening of Dickens's novel so memorable is variously referred to as its balanced form or its extended parallelism. These two concepts exist in a kind of chicken-and-egg relationship: either balance is the heart of parallelism or parallelism is the heart of balance.

Balance and Parallel Construction in the Hands of a Modern Master

My colleague Garrett Stewart is both a student of Dickens and, like Dickens, a master of parallel prose constructions and balanced forms. Here's one of Garrett's magnificently crafted sentences: “Science fiction in the cinema often turns out to be, turns round to be, the fictional or fictive science of the cinema itself, the future feats it may achieve scanned in line with the technical feat that conceives them right now and before our eyes.” I love this sentence because it succinctly captures a crucial truth about the relationship of the subject matter of SF film to the production technologies that make that subject matter come alive on the screen. I also love the sentence because of its masterful exploitation of balanced form. With that somewhat gratuitous but marvelous-sounding “turns round to be” that follows the initial “turns out to be,” Garrett signals the reader that this sentence will do more than present propositional content. Indeed, it paves the way for a cascade of balances: “Science fiction in the cinema” is soon balanced against the “fictional or fictive science of the cinema itself,” and that pairing of “fictional or fictive” intensifies even further the sentence's commitment to balance; “future feats” that the cinema may depict are balanced by “the technical feat that conceives them,” and the time, “right now,” is balanced by the place, “before our eyes.” While this sentence gives voice to a critical insight, that insight is made more powerful by a voice that insistently draws authority from the duple rhythms of balanced form.

Balance and Parallelism: “For the Snark
Was
a Boojum, You See”

Garrett's sentence may lack some of the dramatic force of Dickens's “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” but it's an even better example of what we variously refer to as parallelism or as balanced form. There's not a lot to be gained by insisting on the difference between these two terms, but balanced form can be thought of as a particular subset of parallelism that draws attention to binary pairings and binary oppositions. And as we'll see in the next chapter, parallelism can be extended to create three-part serial constructions or parallels with even more constituent parts. In some ways, the attempt to distinguish between balance and parallelism reminds me of the futile attempt to distinguish between a “Snark” and a “Boojum” in Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem “The Hunting of the Snark,” where it turns out “the Snark
was
a Boojum.”

Edward Everett Hale Jr., descendant of American patriot Nathan Hale and son of the famous orator Edward Everett Hale (author of the short story “The Man Without a Country”), drew a distinction between balance and parallelism in his
Constructive Rhetoric
, published in 1896. Offering as an example of balance the sentence “His ambition impelled him in one direction, but his diffidence dragged him in the other,” Hale explained: “In its arrangement of clauses balance resembles parallel construction, but parallel construction usually arranges several clauses as if side by side, connected by the punctuation, while a balance, as it were, hangs two clauses one on each side of a conjunction or its equivalent.”

His enthusiasm for balance obviously waning, Hale concludes that “the balanced sentence has its advantages, but in spite of them all it is not much used at the present.”

Hale's view, however, may have been more accurate in 1896 than it would be today, since the intervening years have seen Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, and even Barry Goldwater reintroduce balance to public discourse, to considerable effect. Few of us will ever forget JFK's “Ask not what your country can do for you” line in his inaugural address, and while it did not lead to his inauguration, Barry Goldwater's “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue” is also well remembered, if somewhat balefully.

Writing specifically about Samuel Johnson, W. K. Wimsatt Jr. offers a further distinction between balance and parallelism. Wimsatt refers to Johnson's
parallelism of meaning
as opposed to his
parallelism of sound
. He adds that references to cadence and to rhythm generally have more to do with balance than with parallelism, and concludes that, “We may begin to form an opinion of Johnson's parallelism when we consider that of sound as auxiliary to, and made significant by, that of meaning.” While some discussions treat parallelism and balance as the same thing, others insist that these terms refer to distinct phenomena.

Most writing texts today focus on parallelism, balance having apparently fallen out of favor as too arbitrary or too artificial a writing trope, its masters John Lyly and Samuel Johnson having also fallen a bit out of favor for prose styles that force all experience into neatly ordered binary structures. We get a pretty good idea of this technique in Dr. Johnson's celebrated pronouncement in
The Rambler
:

We are all prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure.

The Power and Pleasure of Parallelism

I tell my students that parallelism is the foundation that underlies both the double beats of balance and the three-part rhythms of serial construction. Parallelism largely accounts for the ebb-and-flow rhythm of the cumulative sentence. Some coordinate cumulative sentences foreground parallelism, as we can see in a sentence such as “The movie was a terrible disappointment, its plot ridiculous, its dialogue insulting, its acting amateurish, and even its cinematography substandard.” Similarly: “This was the moment he had been so eagerly awaiting, the moment when he could step out from under the shadow of his more famous brother, the moment when he could finally show the world his own talent, the moment when all of his planning and preparation would finally pay off.”

Indeed, parallelism contributes to the power of the cumulative syntax even when the parallels are less obvious, as when the final word or phrase of a base clause is matched by starting the next modifying level with a similar kind of word, adjective leading to adjective, adverb to adverb, noun to noun, as we can see in a sentence such as “His coat was tattered, frayed from daily wear” or “I returned to my studies with new dedication, concentration replacing my previous carelessness” or “She wanted to be loved, to be respected.” The parallelism somewhat camouflaged in these examples is made obvious if the final word of the base clause is simply repeated as the first word of the cumulative modifying phrase: “His coat was tattered, tattered beyond all hope of repair.”

These quite modest examples of parallelism in cumulative syntax can easily be heightened and extended to produce sentences with phrases as elaborately parallel as these:

(1) Thomas Berger is an American novelist whose career defies easy description,

(2) his twenty-three novels arguably representing twenty-three different novel forms,

(2) his subjects ranging from the Old West to Arthurian England to a robotic artificial woman,

(2) his highly praised Reinhart series featuring a single protagonist but following that protagonist's misadventures in four novels of distinctly different styles,

(2) his reputation well established as one of our best- known and most celebrated “neglected” authors.

An even more pronounced example would be this:

(1) The concepts of metempsychosis and parallax account for almost all of the structure and style of Joyce's
Ulysses
,

(2) metempsychosis, best described as reincarnation, providing both the tie to earlier narratives such as the
Odyssey
and the rationale for the way words and themes are continuously “reborn” in the text,

(3) popping up again and again,

(2) parallax, best described as the alternation of point of view, providing both the explanation of Leopold Bloom's dominant characteristic and the rationale for the way Joyce's great novel shifts prose style from chapter to chapter,

(3) challenging us again and again to learn a new way to read.

Parallelism also figures prominently in a number of the patterns that produce suspensive sentences. Any sentence that opens with a cascade of conditionals, whether “if” phrases, “because” phrases, or “even”
or “when” phrases, or that opens with a string of infinitive phrases serving as an extended subject may display as much parallelism as suspensiveness. Parallelism, like suspensiveness, is always a matter of degree, ranging from the most minute parallels of syllable count and sound, through parallels of length and parts of speech, to conceptual parallels so broad or abstract as to initially escape our notice.

To me, parallelism is the starting point for both powerful and playful prose, but most writing texts present parallelism in terms of rules of correctness—as something we must get right or certainly should never get wrong—as opposed to something we should celebrate. For example, Professor Strunk informs his readers that they should “express coordinate ideas in similar form,” explaining that the principle of parallel construction “requires that expressions similar in content and function be outwardly similar.” While Strunk cites the Beatitudes (“Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth”) as an illustration of the “virtue of parallel construction,” he is actually more interested in having his students avoid the vice of failing to maintain parallelism.

When Strunk notes that the sentence “Formerly, science was taught by the textbook method, while now the laboratory method is employed” fails to maintain the parallelism reflected in the sentence “Formerly, science was taught by the textbook method; now it is taught by the laboratory method,” he only makes the somewhat tepid claim that in the latter version “the writer has at least made a choice and abided by it.” The majority of his discussion of parallelism is devoted to suggesting how to avoid failures of parallelism in the use of prepositions and correlatives such as both/and, not only/but also, and so on. My trusty old
Harbrace College Handbook
is slightly more enthusiastic about parallelism, citing linguist Simeon Potter's view that “balanced sentences” (note that interchangeability of terms I previously mentioned) satisfy “a profound human desire for equipoise and symmetry.” The
Handbook
follows that provocative claim with only the pedestrian advice: “Use parallel form, especially with coordinating conjunctions, in order to express your ideas simply and logically.” It does go on to instruct that to create parallel structure, the writer should “balance a word with a word, a phrase with a phrase, a clause with a clause, a sentence with a sentence,” followed by examples of awkward failures of parallelism and their improved parallel versions, once again placing more emphasis on error avoidance than on the rhetorical benefits of parallelism.