Life Sentences (42 page)

Stories love morals and here is a big one. Instead of writing “For the improvement of the world depends as much on unhistoric as on historic acts …” she says, rather awkwardly, “the growing good,” and by doing so helps make memorable her conclusion. Having used
good
she must employ
ill
later on. From her particular heroine, Eliot rockets off to “the world”—not just the betterment of a few friends, a bit of England, or the nation as a whole, but that of China and Sioux Falls equally—only to return to “you and me.” Oh, yes, she has as many hedges in her sentence as the fields do in her shire: “partly dependent,” “half owing”; however, the last two clauses carry all before them, grant her heroine and her kind more than half the number “who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

Lying inoffensively quiet yet forcefully present in the paragraph is the sexual story borne along by its imagery and defined by repetition and alliteration—
finely fine full
, for instance. Dorothea, finely touched, gave birth, not to a heroic king, but to many fine and modest offspring. This growing good, we must finally observe, is measured negatively—less ill. Nor will these fine folk be remembered for long. Their deaths shall be as unremarked as their lives.

With sentences set before us that are only partial instances of narrative qualities, let us turn to some more fully fledged, this next a sentence embedded in an article rather than a fiction.

These days this paragraph would not be allowed to pass as a sentence. It would be cut by periods into digestible lengths like poultry, for we have no fewer fools today than those who disgraced former times.

In order to reach the “story” (i.e., gist) of this sentence we have to dispense with the syntactical modifiers. “Pretenders to new inventions have led people to invest in and promote companies at such supporters’ expense only to vanish with the money before the scam is discovered, leaving the investors to quarrel over what little is left.” Clearly, the “gist” could be expressed differently. It is beyond any specific words the way a story is beyond words. Defoe chooses to tell the story by swelling his narration at appropriate moments. It’s like blowing into a balloon. “… [T]hey have raised the fancies of credulous people to such height …” What height? Here is the verbal mimic of it: “… they have formed companies, chose committees, appointed officers, shares, and books, raised great stocks, and cried
up an empty notion to that degree …” The story continues, after the bust comes, with the narrated consequences, naturally brief, since this is a summation sentence: “… they leave the cloud to vanish of itself, and the poor purchasers to quarrel with one another, and go to law about settlements, transferrings, and some bone or other thrown among ’em …” As stories insist, there is a fine moral here, suitable for the sermon already in germ.

My statement of the gist resembles only Defoe’s bare bones, though bones disposed in narrative motion, but it is the flesh that makes the sentence of its time and by this author, that gives it weight and, above all, its energy and sardonic cast of mind. The teller of the tale, the disposer of clauses, is evident at every halt we make for a comma.

In short, neither story (which can be told in many media and in many ways) nor meaning (which can be expressed with similar flexibility) are active elements in literary work. Narration and signification, on the other hand, are fundamental functions.

Here are three sentences each of which is almost wholly consumed by meaning—that is, they are all core. They have no fruit, no flesh. Together they do fit into a story, and together they take on that “tough guy” tone so popular in detective fiction. The effort is inept and halfhearted. “He tried the knob. It turned. He pushed the door. It opened.” Even the improvement achieved by eliminating the careless repetition is negligible.

This is a classic example of the scroll sentence. Its intention is to model a journey. Having fixed the time of departure—“The morning pleasant”—the sentence gets going—“we decamped early”—then throwing its tense into the progressive past it rises over ridges to an elevated rocky region, where a view presents itself that is judged to be that of a dreary wasteland. As if to prove it, there follows a description of the experience, initially of sights, then of sounds: rocks, gravel, sand, a patch here and there of grass, a few pines, oaks, olives, and sideroxylons (a kind of ironwood)—with a breeze, a sand cricket, some frogs whose singing seems to have been borne from the fens by the wind. We came; we saw; we pondered.

This sentence sometimes moves to the beat of its explorers’ encounters, that is, in terms of its denotations; but when depictions are required, it arranges the simultaneously present properties of the view into a serial order, thus ensuring that the final thing the hikers will feel is the breeze, another traveler.

I’ll not go on about the Joseph Conrad sample, in part because so much might be said of this masterful paragraph, formed in the author’s characteristic manner, as to require another paper. Here we have a true narrative time line, also shaped as a climb; that is, a lengthy project has been undertaken that Doña Emilia has overseen by regularly paying it a visit, so she has inspected it at stage l (first frame house), at stage 2 (first wagonload), at stage 3 (first battery), et cetera; but she has concentrated upon commencements, so Conrad has obliged her behavior by placing seven
firsts
in the paragraph, four in its first sentence, three in its second. Consequently, although her actions (and the sentences) move on, she is always at
a beginning. Her verbs also mark the progress of the mine: she is gone, she watches, she hears, she stands; then she sees, she lays, she endows. The narrative moves past the physical process of mining and smelting when the lady’s imagination takes the first ingot, from a warm solidity that weighs upon her hand, all the way to principle, an unlikely place for silver.

Next. Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom have stopped at a cabman’s shelter, a small coffeehouse under the Loop Line Bridge, for a cuppa and a rest on their way home. And the hope that the coffee will sober Stephen up. After an appropriate period of such hospitality, Bloom sees that it is time to leave.