For several years, I’ve been teaching a course at Bennington College called “Through Syntax to Style.” It’s (hold on) a grammar course. That’s right. I know: college students? Still, here the point is not to teach old-style grammar with diagramming (everyone asks), for the Bennington students are generally well-prepared syntactically; the point is to demonstrate that becoming more conscious of lots of different grammatical structures will allow a writer to make better choices when writing anything. So in the next few weeks I’m going to present a couple of blog entries showing what these students can do. (I’m also asserting copyright in their names!)
The course is seven weeks long, meeting twice a week. During the first two classes we discuss sentence boundaries – i. e., fragments and run-ons. Where can a sentence end? How can a writer legally join them together? If a sentence ends too soon, it’s a fragment. If it doesn’t stop in time, it turns into a run-on. Both are BAD.
So for the first assignment, after the first class about fragments, a student must write a “Hemingway Shorty.” An H.S. is a 200-250-word narrative (or description or argument or whatever); it may contain NO sentence longer than ten words. Remember Hemingway, master of the short sentences! I want you to begin with this one, by Sabina Young. As you read it, be ready for a reveal, and try to remember where in the essay you figured out what Sabina is up to:
It happened when I was six. Our first grade teacher left the room. She came back with a smile. Her eyes were red and round. She took us to the cafeteria. Nobody told us anything. All we saw were tears pouring out of frantic eyes. I held Lillian’s hand. A boy pointed out the window. There were large flurries of snow. An older girl pointed out it was September. But, I was too young to question it. The sky looked dark through chained windows. Suddenly, people filled the cafeteria. Lillian’s dad, who was wearing a mask, grabbed her away. I asked him what was going on. He said nothing. My dad tapped my shoulder, telling me we were leaving. I whined. I didn’t want to leave. We were supposed to get homework for the first time. I climbed on his shoulders. I expected to feel the chill from the snow. The warmth caught me by surprise. There wasn’t any snow at all. It was really pieces of paper falling from the sky. I bounced on my father’s shoulders and laughed. It was all so silly. When we got home, he brought me to the roof. My mother was there taking pictures. Paper was still falling like confetti. There were plumes of smoke in the distance. I asked my father what was happening. He told me they were burning. I was happy to finally have an answer.
© Sabina Young, 2014
The brilliance for me of this essay is the way Sabina uses the constraint of the short sentence assignment to replicate the voice of the speaker: that little girl faced with the inexplicable (still so, in some ways) events of that September 11.
The next class discusses the various ways to combine short sentences into longer ones. Essentially there are two: first, one may reduce some of them to subordinate clauses or phrases – in short, fragments – and join these to a main clause; or one may join the independent clauses together with a coordinating conjunction or a semicolon. Slapping together independent clauses without one of those two mechanisms results in a comma splice or, if there is no punctuation at all, a run-on. Both of these errors are reprehensible.
So the next assignment is called a “Faulkner Shorty,” and it is quite an obvious shift: rewrite your Hemingway Shorty into ONE coherent sentence, containing no comma splices or run-ons. It’s a killer, this assignment. Controlling such a long sentence is very hard, sometimes requiring the paragraphing of a single sentence! The writer must decide which independent clauses to retain, and which to reduce to subordinate clauses and phrases. And for those who did a great job with the H.S., it’s even harder, for what made that essay so good often doesn’t work with the long sentence. Sabina, for example, lost the power of her 9/11 piece when she turned into a Faulkner, for she no longer sounded like that little girl. (It was still an excellent job, however.) Here is a very successful F.S., by Mai Tran:
Let’s talk about the war
As our truck is heading back to the city, I lie down on the truck bed, open and unarmored, with my back up against the cold steel, and my arms clutching the AK-47, imagining the growing distance between us and the battlefield, where everything is dead and infected, where I saw more dead bodies than I can count, where I lost one too many comrades; they die, and I live, because that is the way of war; I close my eyes, pretending to sleep, and maybe I am sleeping, since at war it’s hard to tell, with the dirt and the sweat clogging the inner corners of my eyes; in my sleep I dream about Hanoi, the city I can no longer recall vividly, so I settle for the imagination, with fragments of images, shards of memories, like a broken picture; back home no one talks about life and death, because no one knows what the war can do to people; my city remains unaffected, and at dawn paperboys roam the unawakened streets, and I can see from the headlines that our armies are conquering—choppers shot down and blown up, compounds ambushed and seized, soldiers escaped and survived—but those things are simply too good to be true, and at that moment I wake up finding myself gasping for breath in the sulfurated air; looking ahead I see the silhouette of Hanoi blackened against the blue sky, but looking back I see nothing but thousands of soldiers entombed, and I have come to realize the fine line we are crossing between the two.
© Mai Tran, 2014
Mai is Vietnamese, and her grandfather was a soldier for the ARVN, the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam, which fought with Americans in that long sad war. She imagines the voice of an old soldier like her grandfather, seeing the ghosts in the mist.
Finally, here is a pair of shorties that work – together and separately – a kind of magic. The author, Andrea Tapia, is Ecuadorian and, like Mai, shows great skill with a second language. Her topic is not evident at first, but eventually it comes clear. First, her Hemingway Shorty:
Thursday
You could not have done this. In fact, you were the opposite of Hemingway.
This one time I decided I could not read you. I remember running out of breath with your sentences. One breath could not contain everything you had to say. My mind refused to be transported to those convoluted worlds. Turning pages became frightening. I never knew what to expect. More names, places and characters emerged within seconds. I kept putting the book down. You never succumbed to simplicity.
I told my literature teacher I could not handle it. I could not handle pronouncing all those names. Love and demons kept pacing back and forth. Each one of them brought their own story. You created space for all. Their hair color, their childhood memories: nothing was missing. You were the perfect curator of details. Fiction became reality through the magic of their intricate lives. But I was probably too young to understand that. Or perhaps I gave up too early. I was disappointed in myself then and still am. I never got through all those pages.
And now I want to write and think about you. I want to honor the writer I could not read. I do. I want to go back and hold that book again. I want to hold, squeeze it, and go to Cartagena. I want to go to Macondo. I might find you there. And you will say that phrase out loud. You will say it again with absolute conviction. “I think Thursdays are not even good for dying.”
©Andrea Tapia, 2014
Andrea wrote this piece only a few days after the death of her subject, the Colombian author of magical realism, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. While I was waiting for her Faulknerian version, I wondered how she would treat her opening, which obviously would no longer be appropriate in a long, long sentence. I was delighted by what she wrote:
Thursday
You could have done this in the blink of an eye; you were the opposite of Hemingway, as I realized that one time when I decided I could not read you anymore, running out of breath with each sentence—for one breath could not contain everything you had to say—and my mind refused to be transported to those convoluted worlds; turning pages became frightening since I never knew what to expect—more names, places and characters emerging within seconds— so I kept putting the book down; you never succumbed to simplicity and I told my literature teacher I could not handle you, could not handle pronouncing all those names while love and demons kept pacing back and forth, as each one of them brought his or her own story; you created space for all of them—their hair color, their childhood memories; nothing was missing because you were the perfect curator of details, and fiction became reality through the magic of their intricate lives, but I was probably too young to understand that, or perhaps I gave up too early, and I was disappointed in myself and still am since I never got through all those pages, and now, I want to write about you—even after considering you a writer I could not read— yes, I do; I want to go back and hold that book again and I want to hold it, squeeze it, and go to Cartagena and to Macondo since I might find you there, and you might tell me again: “I think Thursdays are never useful, not even for dying.”
©Andrea Tapia, 2014
I love both of these pieces, and I bet both Hemingway and Faulkner would have loved them both also, though each might have picked his own style as the more magical. Personally I could not choose.
©May, 2014
Leave a Reply